A brave and often successful attempt to capture and display movement and intuition and the unspoken on the printed page.
An experimental dancer/choreographer/performance artist improvises on the nature of story itself in a unique format.
Derived from Jones’ presentations at Princeton University for the Toni Morrison Lectures in 2012, the text is a hybrid. There is some introductory material explaining what follows—material that credits John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1958) for inspiration. (The author returns to consider Cage continually.) The central—and largest section—is a series of 60 single-page narratives, each designed to consume a minute of dance and reading. Jones has used a computer’s random sorting program to arrange the narratives, so readers need to be alert as they move from page to page, for time and location and theme change rapidly, and chronology is an anachronism. In one 10-page segment, we move from a New Mexico mesa, to news about a friend’s death, to acquiring old family photographs, to John Cage’s diary, to a visit to Theresienstadt, to an amateur porn film. Readers become participants, seeking sense, as if looking at an unfamiliar landscape through the windows of a swiftly moving train. Each narrative, however, has an emotional core that readers will feel, sometimes quite powerfully. Another major section is a collection of black-and-white photographs of the performances. We see the performers, an image of time from a digital clock, and the author, seated at a small table, reading his narratives from a loose-leaf binder. The images conclude with a performer lying on the floor, mist swirling around. In the final section, Jones reflects on what he has done, tells how he began as a dancer and choreographer, and returns again to Cage, including a brief transcript of a conversation with Laura Kuhn, the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College.
A brave and often successful attempt to capture and display movement and intuition and the unspoken on the printed page.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0691162706
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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