1. dog eared books

    A little while ago, Pierre sent me an image of a project he thought about for quite sometimes. The idea complements the republishing process of R-Echos and is based on sharing quotes from the books we read.

    http://dogeared-books.electronest.com/
    the rule is quite simple:

    for each quote we like, we make a corner in the book; after a few pages, at the end of the capter, when we finish the book, or stop reading it – we scan the pages and retype the quote (ideally we would use OCR)

    After a while we will end up with a very nice collections of cornered pages, and also a database of our favourites bits and pieces from the books we read and which have no search functionality – it is a kind of personal Google Books as well.

    * You will notice there are Amazon ads – for a reason: ideally, i would like this experiment to be self sustainable, and the sharing of books could pay for buying the next ones. So if you enjoy the project and find a few books you would like to buy – please use our links, we asked Amazon to pay us in books :)



  2. links for 2008-04-11



  3. links for 2008-04-10



  4. links for 2008-03-20



  5. links for 2008-02-08

    links_2008_0208-picture1.png

    From LSO’s Chronicle

    Russian 20th-century music is inseparable from history. As film composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev both got used to the idea of providing accompaniments to images of great moments from their country’s past. But few have chronicled their own times as relentlessly as Shostakovich.

    Variously fêted and reviled by the Soviet authorities, and constantly treading a fine line between triumph and disaster – sometimes even between life and death – his desire to compose never wavered, and thus it is that the late symphonies featured in this series offer an image of the postwar decades in music of unfailingly intense expression, from the ‘optimistic tragedy’ of the Tenth to the descriptive power of the Eleventh, and the dark contemplations of the Fourteenth to the quirky irony of the Fifteenth. Yet out of necessity Shostakovich’s is also an art rich in ambiguity, its surface messages often seemingly undermined by steely irony and double meaning.

    Three decades after his death these great works still have the power both to fascinate and to reach deep into our hearts and minds.

    From Wikipedia: Shostakovich’s page:

    After a period influenced by Prokofiev and Stravinsky (Symphony No. 1), Shostakovich switched to modernism (Symphony No. 2 and The Nose) before developing a hybrid of styles with Lady Macbeth and the state-suppressed Fourth Symphony. This hybrid style ranged from the neo-classical (with Stravinskian influences) to the post-romantic music (with Mahlerian influences). His tonality involved much use of modality and some astringent neo-classical harmonies à la Hindemith and Prokofiev. His music frequently includes sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque.