A thoughtful, artfully written exploration not just about how music works, but how it makes us feel.
A Montreal-based poet digs into our fascination with music and its relation to our search for meaning.
Outside of her poetic output, Waterman has collected a diverse collection of essays about creativity on her blog, The Mindful Bard. Many of these thought exercises and interviews concern music, but in this book, she writes, “they’re better and make more sense.” The most primal narrative thread is the idea of the “soundquest,” which Waterman defines as “a kind of hero’s journey” with more than a little bit of obsession involved. “A soundquest,” she writes, “begins when you hear something mysteriously thrilling, something that drives you to keep tunneling into the genre until you find the quintessence—the performance or the recording representing the culmination of listening pleasure for that genre.” Refreshingly, the author doesn’t limit her illuminating discussions to just Western music, though she does look at Bob Dylan’s influence and the cultural touchstone of Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie.” Physically, intellectually, and spiritually, Waterman travels much further. She analyzes the work of musicians from Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, among many other places, showing what drives these artists to create remarkable music. Waterman also shares the interesting, little-known fact that the mythology of the so-called “dark man at the crossroads” (in America, think Robert Johnson and the devil) reverberates across many cultures: “The crossroads being such a potent symbol of the intersection of the sacred with the profane, the soul standing at that intersection now complete can enter a state of mystical turning that, incorporating all, transcends all.” There’s a patina of New Age–y spirituality to the writing, but Waterman’s insights into the nature of jazz, blues, and other genres, as well as her personal discoveries, are well worth exploring.
A thoughtful, artfully written exploration not just about how music works, but how it makes us feel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77183-500-8
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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