Posts for 'Music' Category

Titles in Today's Superstars: Entertainment were selected by a survey of kids and -- of the 24 books produced as a result Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana makes the cut of popularity. 

For a Grade 3 reading level, this 6 1/2" x 9" reinforced hardcover features "Fact File" sidebars that divulge a smidgen of little-known or fun-filled details about the teen star in each of its five chapters.

At the end, there is a time line of career and personal milestones, and a glossary.  Words in the glossary appear in bold type the first type they are used in the text.  It's never too early for your youngster to learn the meaning of "tabloids."

The Best of Both Worlds begins with the premiere of her concert film, "Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus - Best of Both Worlds Concert: The 3-D Movie."

It marked the height of celebrity following the successful tour and two albums that had been number-one hits.

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There will never be another period like the late ‘60s. Against a background of political upheaval, a social movement emerged that espoused peace, love, understanding, and even new forms of consciousness.

Moreover, the music of the era was a central component of that movement, with rock and roll evolving as an art form and becoming the medium through which such Utopian ideals were expressed. Many believed the world could be made over into something just this side of heaven.

Photographer Elliott Landy captures the spirit of those times perfectly in this wonderful book. As the original Woodstock Festival’s official photographer, Landy shot the iconic images that first spring to mind when one thinks of that seminal event.

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Thousands of promoters, performing musicians, composers and writers, teachers and parents, administrators, classical music organisations and businesses choose the British and International Music Yearbook to advertise and promote their services and skills.With over 650 pages of listings and publicity material, it is the most comprehensive classified directory of the UK classical music industry and the essential reference tool for anyone working in the field.

Artists and agents: contact details for over 2000 choirs, orchestras (for the first time including non-professional and training orchestras), opera companies and ensembles, over 3000 individual performers working in the UK, not to mention hundreds of composers and artist agents.Education: schools, colleges, universities and specialist courses, plus NEW for 2009, overseas music colleges.Events and promotion: worldwide festivals, summer schools and competitions, concert venues, plus details of music clubs and concert promoters throughout the UK.Instrument services: instrument manufacturers (including early music instrument specialists), accessory manufacturers and distributors, instrument and other equipment hire.

Marketing services: everything from PR and fundraising experts to promotional photographers and web designers.

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Best Song: Kings of Leon “Sex On Fire”
After the release of “Because of the Times,” I couldn’t help but miss the garage rock sound of their first two albums. The first single off their fourth album, “Only By the Night,” holds the promise of grungier, grittier songs to come. Caleb Followill returns with the pained, passionate vocals for which he is known, and is accompanied by the Southern rock guitar riffs the band does best.

Best Album: Coldplay “Viva La Vida (or Death and All His Friends)”
With this album, the band departed from Chris Martin’s falsetto and slow, pensive ballads, and tried something different. “Violet Hill” is a contemporary media commentary, while the title track sounds like a revolution. The band made boastful claims this album was their attempt at the best of all time, and the effort was a valiant one, however, unfulfilled.

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Claire Kelly and her friend Dominique Gaucher love to sing. They've been choir buddies for the last three years in the Choeur de Montréal, a youth choir presided over by Montreal's best known choir master, Iwan Edwards.

Both girls love music. They feel transported when the ensemble works together and it sounds just great.

They're also excellent students.Gaucher, 14, is about to enter Secondary 3. She has an 87 per cent average; her favourite subjects are history and gym and she's an avid basketball player.

Kelly, 13, who has just completed Secondary 1, has an 86 average in math and science. She is on a scholarship at Trafalgar School after scoring in the 95th percentile in the math entrance exam.Gaucher can't read music but has a good ear. She's able to remember the 20-odd songs of the chorale's repertoire each season.

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The latest trends can change at the drop of a hat-- or in some cases, a hit. While some literary genres are mainstays of the industry, a great number of them float in and out of the fickle publishing world like so many loose pages.

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The MC5 didn't birth punk rock. Neither did the Velvet Underground or Television. Actually, it was never born. It was an N.Y.C. art-rock abortion that was rescued by thousands of pissed-off kids who raised it from the gutter and threw it onstage to be a bloody antidote to vapid pop culture.

A lot of books attempt to capture the essence of that late-'70s/early-'90s golden age, to varying degrees of success. Some have focused on specific parts: the clothes, the attitude, the fallen wasted. But most try to apply the top down approach that yields the biblical recitations of Stooges-begat-Ramones-begat-Sex Pistols, etc.

Pretty Vacant: A History of UK Punk attempts to chronicle the heyday of the Sex Pistols/Clash explosion that changed British music. Punk 365 is a photographic assault on the history of punk in general, spanning from 1966-1993.

Pretty Vacant: A History of UK Punk

If you're going to start out with a title like A History of UK Punk, you've got to deliver more than a Sex Pistols setlist. Instead, this 289-page historical blowjob on Malcolm McLaren namedrops a few bands and devotes a whopping five pages to the Clash.

Too much of the book relies on author Phil Strongman's anecdotal descriptions of who-knew-who, venue lists, and Pistols gossip.

About the impact of the Pistols' fashion sense: "A boy could wear a battered pair of old, narrow Levis and be cool, a girl could, if she dared, wear a black T-shirt over stockings and suspenders and be high chic."

And there's this expansive conclusion: "...McLaren's personal magic brought the Pistols together and, crucially, kept them there long enough to spark an entire genre..."

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For the last week reporters, pundits, bloggers and political operatives have turned all their forensic powers on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s so-called crying moment — the moment in a New Hampshire cafe when her eyes welled with tears in response to some innocuous personal questions from an audience member: “How do you do it?,” “How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?” That moment is credited with helping Mrs. Clinton stage a remarkable comeback in the New Hampshire primary, with galvanizing the sympathy of female voters and with revealing the candidate’s human side.

Skip to next paragraphThe 24/7 replaying of that moment on cable television also reminds us how relentlessly Mrs. Clinton has been dissected, deconstructed and decoded over the years: by now her marriage, her hair, her pantsuits, her voice and her laugh have been more minutely anatomized than her voting record on Iraq, her (mis-)handling of health care during her husband’s administration or her stands on Iran, Social Security and immigration. This willful focus on the personal is underscored by “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary,” an intriguing but highly uneven anthology of reflections about Mrs. Clinton by a spectrum of well-known female writers.

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This edition of the free bulletin, World Wide Work, is published by the American Labor Education Center, an independent nonprofit founded in 1979.

WORLD WIDE WORK
Powell’s the unionized alternative to Amazon.com for buying and selling books online, has just reached a new four-year contract with its employees and their union, ILWU Local 5. The agreement provides an immediate 8.8 percent pay increase plus additional increases each year, increased health care coverage for preventive procedures, and more promotional opportunities.

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