Books, movies and records of the year

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Honorio
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1953



Movie of 1953 | Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Yasujirô Ozu | Japan | all time #5
"A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu. The film, which follows an aging couple's journey to visit their grown children in bustling postwar Tokyo, surveys the rich and complex world of family life with the director's customary delicacy and incisive perspective on social mores. Featuring lovely performances from Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, Tokyo Story plumbs and deepens the director's recurring theme of generational conflict, creating what is without question one of cinema's mightiest masterpieces." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 1953 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | USA | all time #201
"Augie comes on stage with one of literature's most famous opening lines. "I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted." It's the "Call me Ishmael" of mid-20th-century American fiction. With this teeming book Bellow returned a Dickensian richness to the American novel. As he makes his way to a full brimming consciousness of himself, Augie careens himself through numberless occupations, and countless mentors and exemplars, all the while enchanting us with the slapdash American music of his voice." (Publisher)

Record of 1953 | Hound Dog | Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton | USA | 78 rpm single | all time #616
"Young Caucasian songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote their seminal collaboration Hound Dog for Johnny Otis protégée Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton as a tough down-home blues replete with ribald, double-entendre-laden lyrics that the 300-pound belter bit into with gusto. The Montgomery, AL-born Thornton was born to sing Hound Dog; her gruff, no-nonsense bark was urged forward by Pete Lewis' snapping lead guitar at the August 13, 1952, Los Angeles session. Red-hot bandleader Otis was forced to switch instruments when drummer Leard "K.C." Bell couldn't locate the proper backwoods groove. With Otis behind the traps and the horns laying out, everything came together —even the band's barking to seal the number in genuine canine fashion." (Bill Dahl, All Music)


Books of 1953:
1 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | USA | #201
2 | Nine Stories | J. D. Salinger | USA | #228
3 | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | USA | #245


Movies of 1953:
1 | Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Yasujirô Ozu | Japan | #5
2 | Ugetsu monogatari (Ugetsu monogatari) | Kenji Mizoguchi | Japan | #47
3 | Madame de... (The Earrings of Madame de…) | Max Ophüls | France | #117


Albums of 1953:
1 | Jazz at Massey Hall | Quintet | USA | #736
2 | New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm | Stan Kenton | USA | #2105
3 | Thelonious | Thelonious Monk Trio | USA | #2236


Songs of 1953:
1 | Hound Dog | Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Kansas City Bill & Orch. | USA | #616
2 | Your Cheatin' Heart | Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys | USA | #1001
3 | Money Honey | Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters | USA | #1363


Classical work of 1953 | Simfonija № 10 mi minor (Symphony No. 10 in E minor) | Dmitri Shostakovich | USSR | #96
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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Your Cheatin' Heart is #1001.
Everyone you meet fights a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.
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Honorio
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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Oops! You're right, Henrik. This happens when you overwrite a text, the number assigned (1369) belonged to the song #2 of 1952, Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels." Corrected...
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1954



Movie of 1954 | Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | all time #10
"One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa —featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura— seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 1954 | The Lord of the Rings | J. R. R. Tolkien | UK | all time #68
"The greatest fantasy epic of our time: J.R.R. Tolkien's classic The Lord of the Rings, which begins with The Fellowship of the Ring and continues in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The dark, fearsome Ringwraiths are searching for a Hobbit. Frodo Baggins knows that they are seeking him and the Ring he bears —the Ring of Power that will enable evil Sauron to destroy all that is good in Middle-earth. Now it is up to Frodo and his faithful servant, Sam, with a small band of companions, to carry the Ring to the one place it can be destroyed: Mount Doom, in the very center of Sauron's realm." (Publisher)

Record of 1954 | (We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock | Bill Haley and His Comets | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #81
"There were Rock 'n' Roll songs before Rock Around the Clock, some of higher quality, some with more artistic influence, some not as olden-sounding today. But it was Bill Haley & His Comets' signature song that surrounded the Jericho of staid American taste and sounded the trumpets that brought the walls down. Haley and his boys also paved the way for all the white artists working in the Rock 'n' Roll or R&B genre to become superstars. Moreover, Rock Around the Clock tapped into what was still a relatively new phenomenon —American teenagers as a discreet cultural group with tastes, urges and styles completely different from those of their parents." (Song Mango)


Books of 1954:
1 | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | J. R. R. Tolkien | UK | #68
2 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding | UK | #75
3 | The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens | Wallace Stevens | USA | collection | #153
4 | Lucky Jim | Kingsley Amis | UK | #272


Movies of 1954:
1 | Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | #10
2 | Rear Window | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | UK | #41
3 | La strada (La Strada) | Federico Fellini | Italy | #67


Albums of 1954:
1 | Classics in Jazz | Miles Davis | USA | #371
2 | Clifford Brown and Max Roach | Clifford Brown and Max Roach | USA | #1349
3 | A Night at Birdland, Vol. 1 | Art Blakey Quintet | USA | #2236


Songs of 1954:
1 | (We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock | Bill Haley and His Comets | USA | #81
2 | That's All Right | Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill | USA | #102
3 | Shake, Rattle and Roll | Joe Turner and His Blues Kings | USA | #313
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1953:

Movie Of 1953 - Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
"It's dangerous to start watching Japanese cinema, because the world is so extensive and dazzling you may quickly develop a taste for nothing but Japanese films. Is there a romance more mysterious than Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari? Is there action to surpass Kurosawa's Seven Samurai? And, in terms of family drama, has any film been more moving than Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story? Time and again, Ozu has made films about family, and the shifting structure we refer to as "time and again". Family is less a fixed entity than a kind of weather system that keeps coming back. So children need parents, and need to outlive them. But while the weather will go on, and your children will become parents, so your life will close, and you will not be there to see the way your own children look back as if to say they understand you, too late. Is this tragedy or comedy? Ozu is never quite sure. He seems to wonder whether any progression can amount to tragedy, or whether it is not simply as inevitable as passing time and changing light. This may not sound "entertaining" or active or even interesting, which only means the viewer needs to undergo the gentle process of being helped to see through Ozu's withdrawn but compassionate style. So he watches from the corner of a room at a low level (for Japanese domestic life is often conducted from a sitting position) and he declines to rush in with forgiving, approving, loving close-ups – because he believes people are beyond forgiveness or individual glamour." (David Thomson, The Guardian)

Book Of 1953 - Waiting For Godot (Samuel Beckett, France)
"The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time." (Goodreads)

Album Of 1953 - Jazz At Massey Hall (The Quintet, United States)
"Never mind the apparently similar Diz N Bird at Carnegie Hall (24 minutes of a quintet that adds John Lewis, Al McKibbon, and Joe Harris to the two horns before turning into a big band record) or the hosannahed Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945 (38 Bird-Diz-Roach minutes substituting Parker's studio-favored Al Haig-Curly Russell piano-bass combo). Without question, this is live Bird numero uno even though the setlist belongs to Dizzy, including the inevitable (and dandy) "Salt Peanuts" and "Night in Tunisia." Parker's relaxed, bluesy mood is epitomized by a seriously interactive "All the Things You Are" that shifts bar-by-bar between virtuoso phrases and soulful here's-the-melody before dissolving into a "52nd Street Theme" breakdown. Gillespie is lyrical and incisive, Powell brings his A game, Roach thunders like no post-swing drummer working, and Mingus's bass is the most expressive in classic bebop. O Canada!" (Robert Christgau)

Song Of 1953 - Gee (The Crows, United States)
"The Crows formed in 1951 as a typical street corner doo-wop group and were discovered at Apollo Theater's Wednesday night talent show by talent agent Cliff Martinez, and brought to independent producer George Goldner who had just set up tiny new independent Rama Records label. The Crows were the first group signed and the first to record. The first songs they recorded were as back-up to singer and pianist Viola Watkins. The song "Gee" was the third song recorded during the first recording session, on February 10, 1953. It was put together in a few minutes by group member, William Davis, with Viola Watkins also being credited as co-writer. Watkins also played piano on and co-arranged the song. It has been suggested that the guitar break, based on the traditional Scottish tune "The Campbells Are Coming", may have been played by session guitarist Lloyd "Tiny" Grimes. The song was first released as the B-side of a ballad, "I Love You So". However, radio stations began turning it over and playing "Gee", first in Philadelphia and later in New York and Los Angeles. By January 1954 it had sold 100,000 copies, and by April entered the national R&B and pop charts, rising to # 2 R&B and # 14 pop. Although the song became a huge hit in early 1954, a year after it was recorded, the Crows were a one-hit wonder, as none of the follow-up records released had any chart success. The group broke up a few months after "Gee" dropped off the Hit Parade. The Crows were one of the first doo wop groups and one of the first "bird" groups. "Gee" was one of the first rock and roll hit records. It has also been called the first rock and roll record because it was an original composition and had a quick dance beat." (Wikipedia)

Movies Of 1953:
1. Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu (Japan)
2. Ugetsu monogatari - Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan)
3. Shane - George Stevens (United States)

Books Of 1953:
1. Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett (France)
2. Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin (United States)
3. Junky - William S. Burroughs (United States)

Albums Of 1953:
1. Jazz At Massey Hall - The Quintet (United States)
2. With Clifford Brown - J.J. Johnson (United States)
3. Thelonious Monk Trio - Thelonious Monk (United States)

Songs Of 1953:
1. Gee - The Crows (United States)
2. Crying In The Chapel - The Orioles (United States)
3. Hound Dog - Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1954:

Movie Of 1954 - La Strada (Federico Fellini, Italy)
"A bleak and windswept beach somewhere at the edges of postwar rural Italy. A family in abject poverty scratches out a living at the margins. Sweet and naive Gelsomina is sold by her mother into indentured servitude to the brutal travelling sideshow strongman Zampano, whose sole act is to break a chain he wraps around his chest. Using a whip, as if with a circus animal, he teaches her to play a snare drum and a battered trumpet. They embark on a folktale-like odyssey through a blasted landscape of freighted characters and abstract encounters and symbols. Federico Fellini cast an immensely charismatic Anthony Quinn as the belligerent Zampano and his wife, the delicately clowning Giulietta Masina, as the saintly Gelsomina. Their gestural, expressive acting was more familiar in the silent era than the talkies. The foil for the central pair is “il Matto” – the Fool, a strange, giggling figure and talented high-wire act, speaking bald truths with a mischievous, skewed compassion. With his violin, the Fool (Richard Baseheart) also contributes one of the film’s exquisite musical themes composed by Nino Rota, whose score evokes the folk traditions of the rural poor. Gelsomina imagines a life with the Fool away from the privations of her life with Zampano, but the Fool convinces her to stay with him, despite his selfish brutality, because: “Everything serves a purpose, even the stones." (The Guardian)

Book Of 1954 - Lord Of The Flies (William Golding, United Kingdom)
"At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable tale about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart." (Goodreads)

Album Of 1954 - Clifford Brown And Max Roach (Clifford Brown And Max Roach, United States)
"The announcement that Clifford Brown and Max Roach had begun recording and playing together sent shock waves throughout the jazz community and predictions ran rampant about how the two might shape bop to come. The last duo to really shape the music had begun over ten years earlier, with the relationship between Bird and Diz. This recording was early fruit from a tree that would only live as long as Clifford Brown was around to water it (1956, the year of his tragic auto accident). The result is by far some of the warmest and most sincere bebop performed and committed to tape. Brown's tone is undeniably and characteristically warm, and he keeps the heat on alongside Roach's lilting vamps and pummeling solos. What really keeps this record on the orange side of things (other than the decidedly orange cover) is the solo work of saxophonist Harold Land, who plays part Bird and part Benny Goodman. His tone is as delightful as it gets on the sultry "Delilah" and as bop-expressive as it gets on "The Blues Walk" and "Parisian Thoroughfare," where he and Brownie go head to head blowing expressive runs of sheer New York-style jazz. This collection of songs runs a nice gamut between boplicity and pleasant balladry. It represents bop at its best and is recommended for collectors and casual fans alike." (Sam Samuelson, AllMusic)

Song Of 1954 - (We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock (Bill Haley & His Comets, United States)
"On April 12, 1954— Bill Haley and the Comets recorded “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock.” If rock and roll was a social and cultural revolution, then “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” was its Declaration of Independence. And if Bill Haley was not exactly the revolution’s Thomas Jefferson, it may be fair to call him its John Hancock. The single sold a respectable but underwhelming 75,000 copies in the coming months, and was destined to be forgotten until a 10-year-old kid in Los Angeles flipped “Thirteen Women” and fell in love with the now-famous B-side. That kid, Peter Ford, happened to be the son of actor Glenn Ford, who was slated to star in the upcoming teenage-delinquency drama Blackboard Jungle. Peter turned his father on to “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock,” and soon enough, the song was chosen to play over the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle, which is how it became a pop sensation, selling a million copies in a single month in the spring of 1955." (History.com)

Movies Of 1954:
1. La Strada - Federico Fellini (Italy)
2. Rear Window - Alfred Hitchcock (United States)
3. On The Waterfront - Elia Kazan (United States)

Books Of 1954:
1. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding (United Kingdom)
2. Collected Poems - Arthur Rimbaud (France)
3. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis (United Kingdom)

Albums Of 1954:
1. Clifford Brown And Max Roach - Clifford Brown And Max Roach (United States)
2. A Night At Birdland Vol. 1 - Art Blakey Quintet (United States)
3. California Concerts - Gerry Mulligan (United States)

Songs Of 1954:
1. (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock - Bill Haley & His Comets (United States)
2. I’ve Got A Woman - Ray Charles (United States)
3. Mr. Sandman - The Chordettes (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1955



Book of 1955 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | all time #15
"Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a twelve-year-old girl named Dolores Haze. After its publication, Nabokov's Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious young girl." (Publisher)

Record of 1955 | Tutti-Frutti | Little Richard and His Band | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #30
"Tutti Frutti gave the world the 10 much disputed syllables that are item one on the syllabus of rock'n'roll: "Awopbopaloomopalopbombom!" Even now, 62 years on, that Specialty Records recording of Tutti Frutti still sounds wild to the point of being unhinged. Richard's voice is clearly hitting the red, clipping and distorting; the band sound like they're desperately trying to keep up; his piano sounds like it's playing itself; and punctuating it all are Richard's high whoops, copied incessantly by The Beatles on their early recordings. It's a record so exciting, so primal, that it is both irresistible and insurrectionary. It is the sound of an incomprehensible force." (Michael Hann, Financial Times)

Movie of 1955 | Ordet (Ordet) | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark | all time #33
"'Powerful' doesn't do justice to this 1955 exploration of life, death and faith from Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer. Based on Kaj Munk's 1932 play, Ordet is an austere, realist work on one level as it joins a farming family in their Jutland home over a short but devastating period of time. But, on another level, this is a deeply spiritual, mysterious and wonderfully odd and bold work as Dreyer reaches to the heavens and beyond for answers. Ordet reminds us how in the end we know little about the mysteries of life. Dreyer manages to say all this within the framework of a strange, wondrous and shocking work. Once seen, it's unlikely to leave you." (Dave Calhoun, Time Out)


Books of 1955:
1 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | #15
2 | Poems of Emily Dickinson | Emily Dickinson | UK | collection | #101
3 | Pedro Páramo (Pedro Páramo) | Juan Rulfo | Mexico | #198
4 | The Magician's Nephew | C. S. Lewis | UK | #293


Movies of 1955:
1 | Ordet (Ordet) | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark | #33
2 | The Night of the Hunter | Charles Laughton | USA | #43
3 | Pather Panchali (Pather Panchali) | Satyajit Ray | India | #55


Albums of 1955:
1 | In the Wee Small Hours | Frank Sinatra | USA | #323
2 | Sarah Vaughan | Sarah Vaughan | USA | #1123
3 | Horace Silver Quintet | Horace Silver Quintet | USA | #1921


Songs of 1955:
1 | Tutti-Frutti | Little Richard and His Band | USA | #30
2 | Maybellene | Chuck Berry and His Combo | USA | #126
3 | Mystery Train | Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill | USA | #184


Classical work of 1955 | Ovod: Sjuita iz muzyki k kinofilʹmu (The Gadfly Suite) | Dmitri Shostakovich | USSR | #48
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1955:

Movie Of 1955 - Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
"For the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer—whose 1955 film “Ordet” (“The Word”) I discuss in this clip—existence itself has an element of the miraculous, and the wonder of cinema is the ability to preserve it at all. Perhaps no director has a worldview as deeply philosophical, or an aesthetic as perfectly suited to realize it. The movie for which Dreyer is best known—the 1928 silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”—is one of the most highly inflected movies in the history of cinema, with almost every shot tweaked or twisted, thrust or glided. The expressive effect is so strong that it seems like a kind of modern music, a cinematic counterpart to compositions of the day (such as Bartok’s Third String Quartet or Webern’s Symphony). By the time he made “Ordet,” the modern had become classical, and Dreyer had stripped his style of angular expressivity in favor of a still yet furious clarity that seemed to see through things to reveal their transcendent essence. That achievement is an even greater miracle—and it’s appropriate to the radical Christianity at the heart of this movie." (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)

Book Of 1955 - Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, France)
"Let us now reread the old texts, examining them with a cold eye to determine what they reveal about the #MeToo transgressions of the artistic past. Even the popular entertainments must be probed for common savagery. Molly Ringwald watched her film The Breakfast Club in the company of her young daughter and realized that one scene contains within it a suggestion of offscreen physical harassment. And just like that, the movie—the Citizen Kane of 1980s teen cinema—went whistling down the memory hole, a plaintive echo of its hit song fading to silence as it plummeted: “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Is nothing safe? Perhaps—and at Vegas odds—only Lolita can survive the new cultural revolution. No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book’s publication 60-plus years ago. That’s good for the girls of the world, and it’s good for the novel, too, because Lolita depends on the combination of revulsion and ecstasy that it engenders in its readers. The revulsion is why it endures—long past Story of O or Tropic of Cancer, or any other forbidden text of the past—as a book that shakes its readers, no matter how modern. Lolita will always be both ravishing and shocking, a fire opal dissolving in a ripple-ringed pool." (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic)

Album Of 1955 - In The Wee Small Hours (Frank Sinatra, United States)
"Expanding on the concept of Songs for Young Lovers!, In the Wee Small Hours was a collection of ballads arranged by Nelson Riddle. The first 12" album recorded by Sinatra, Wee Small Hours was more focused and concentrated than his two earlier concept records. It's a blue, melancholy album, built around a spare rhythm section featuring a rhythm guitar, celesta, and Bill Miller's piano, with gently aching strings added every once and a while. Within that melancholy mood is one of Sinatra's most jazz-oriented performances -- he restructures the melody and Miller's playing is bold throughout the record. Where Songs for Young Lovers! emphasized the romantic aspects of the songs, Sinatra sounds like a lonely, broken man on In the Wee Small Hours. Beginning with the newly written title song, the singer goes through a series of standards that are lonely and desolate. In many ways, the album is a personal reflection of the heartbreak of his doomed love affair with actress Ava Gardner, and the standards that he sings form their own story when collected together. Sinatra's voice had deepened and worn to the point where his delivery seems ravished and heartfelt, as if he were living the songs." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic)

Song Of 1955 - Django (The Modern Jazz Quartet, United States)
"Django was sort of an historic recording. There were a lot of divergent points in jazz in 1954, when this was recorded. There was the Cool Jazz movement, and the West Coast sound, which was formal, somewhat European, and very composed music, without a lot of heavy emotion. On the East Coast, you had the hard bop movement, which was this funky, hard-swinging music. And then you had the MJQ somewhere in between. t is an ensemble that is composed of musicians who were strong bebop stalwarts. They came out of the Dizzy Gillespie band, most of them. They are musicians who had a strong sense of the blues, which Milt Jackson can make out of anything. No matter what tune it is, Milt Jackson makes it a blues out of it immediately. There's John Lewis, who was a Dizzy Gillespie pianist, but who went off into this formality, which was in many ways akin to the West Coast musicians, but not it at all. And so, when the MJQ came out with Django, then you got a new look at jazz, which caught on very, very fast in America. It was a very, very popular ensemble, and "Django" was it's biggest hit." (A.B. Spellman, NPR)

Movies Of 1955:
1. Ordet - Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark)
2. The Night Of The Hunter - Charles Laughton (United States)
3. Pather Panchali - Satyajit Ray (India)
4. Rififi - Jules Dassin (France)
5. Bob le flambeur - Jean-Pierre Melville (France)

Books Of 1955:
1. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (France)
2. Poems Of Emily Dickinson - Emily Dickinson (United States)
3. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo (Mexico)
4. Collected Poems - Wallace Stevens (United States)
5. Waiting For The Mahatma - R.K. Narayan (India)

Albums Of 1955:
1. In The Wee Small Hours - Frank Sinatra (United States)
2. Afro-Cuban - Kenny Dorham (United States)
3. Study In Brown - Clifford Brown & Max Roach (United States)
4. Groovin’ High - Dizzy Gillespie (United States)
5. The West Coast Sound - Shelly Manne (United States)

Songs Of 1955:
1. Django - The Modern Jazz Quartet (United States)
2. Maybellene - Chuck Berry (United States)
3. Mystery Train - Elvis Presley (United States)
4. Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley (United States)
5. Why Do Fools Fall In Love - Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1956



Movie of 1956 | The Searchers | John Ford | USA | all time #9
"We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford. Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with its search for order and its need for violence, its spirit of community and its quest for independence." (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

Record of 1956 | Heartbreak Hotel | Elvis Presley | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #17
"Heartbreak Hotel was Elvis Presley's first national hit; it became a signature song for him and a rock & roll standard. It was written by Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton. Durden had seen a newspaper article about a person who had committed suicide, leaving a note that read, "I walk a lonely street," and was inspired to write a song about a hotel that people who have had their hearts broken can check into. Elvis recorded the song in January 10, 1956, with Scotty Moore taking a slashing electric guitar solo and Floyd Cramer playing some bluesy piano. The spare arrangement, which frequently came to a full stop, was dominated by Presley's melodramatic vocal; it was an excellent showcase for the young singer." (William Ruhlmann, All Music)

Book of 1956 | The Last Battle | C. S. Lewis | UK | all time #289
"During the last days of Narnia, the land faces its fiercest challenge —not an invader from without but an enemy from within. Lies and treachery have taken root, and only the king and a small band of loyal followers can prevent the destruction of all they hold dear in this, the magnificent ending to The Chronicles of Narnia. The Last Battle is the seventh and final book in C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series, which has been drawing readers of all ages into a magical land with unforgettable characters for over sixty years." (Publisher)


Books of 1956:
1 | The Last Battle | C. S. Lewis | UK | #289
2 | Kinkaku-ji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) | Yukio Mishima | Japan | #356
3 | Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) | João Guimarães Rosa | Brazil | #423


Movies of 1956:
1 | The Searchers | John Ford | USA | #9
2 | Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped) | Robert Bresson | France | #88
3 | Written on the Wind | Douglas Sirk | USA | Germany | #339


Albums of 1956:
1 | Elvis Presley | Elvis Presley | USA | #122
2 | Songs for Swingin' Lovers! | Frank Sinatra | USA | #321
3 | Ellington at Newport | Duke Ellington | USA | #567


Songs of 1956:
1 | Heartbreak Hotel | Elvis Presley | USA | #17
2 | Hound Dog | Elvis Presley | USA | #73
3 | Blue Suede Shoes | Carl Perkins | USA | #119


Classical works of 1956
1 | Spartak (Spartacus) | Aram Khachaturian | USSR | #26
2 | Candide | Leonard Bernstein | USA | #76
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1956:

Movie Of 1956 - The Searchers (John Ford, United States)
“The Searchers has been more or less officially recognized as a great American classic. But I have to admit that I never really know what that kind of recognition amounts to. The film turns up on many 10-greatest-films-of-all-time lists, including my own. At least two moments from the picture -- John Wayne lifting up Natalie Wood and then cradling her in his arms and the final shot -- are commonly included in clip reels. Film lovers know it by heart. But what about average movie watchers? Is it as well known as It's a Wonderful Life or Casablanca or Breakfast at Tiffany's? What place does John Ford's masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness? As Glenn Frankel puts it in The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, his fascinating new book about the picture and the history behind it, "The Searchers is perhaps the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen." First, apart from being an American epic, The Searchers also is a John Wayne Western; for many, even at this late date in film history, that's still an excuse to ignore it. Secondly, it doesn't go down quite as easily as the pictures mentioned above. Like all great works of art, it's uncomfortable. The core of the movie is deeply painful. Every time I watch it -- and I've seen it many, many times since its first run in 1956 -- it haunts and troubles me. The character of Ethan Edwards is one of the most unsettling in American cinema. In a sense, he's of a piece with Wayne's persona and his body of work with Ford and other directors like Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. It's the greatest performance of a great American actor. (Not everyone shares this opinion. For me, Wayne has only become more impressive over time.)“ (Martin Scorsese)

Book Of 1956 - Howl And Other Poems (Allen Ginsberg, United States)
“The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative fortieth Anniversary Edition. When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao. The two of them were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case went to trial in the municipal court of Judge Clayton Horn. A parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses persuaded the judge that the title poem was indeed not obscene and that it had “redeeming social significance.” Thus was Howl & Other Poems freed to become the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 900,000 copies now in print.” (Goodreads)

Album Of 1956 - Lennie Tristano (Lennie Tristano, United States)
“Lennie Tristano's Atlantic debut was a controversial album at the time of its release. Though Tristano was regarded as a stellar and innovative bebop pianist, he had been absent from recording for six years and had founded a jazz school where he focused instead on teaching. The first four tunes on this set shocked the jazz world at the time of their release (though not critic Barry Ulanov, who was Tristano's greatest champion and wrote the liner notes for the set). The reason was that on those four original tunes -- "Line Up," "Requiem," "Turkish Mambo," and "East Thirty-Second" -- Tristano actually overdubbed piano lines, and sped the tape up and down for effect. While the effect is quite listenable and only jarring in the most splendid sense of the word -- because of the sharp, angular arpeggios and the knotty, involved method of improvising that came directly by improvising against the rhythm section of drummer Jeff Morton and bassist Peter Ind -- it was literally unheard of at the time. The last five tunes on the disc were recorded live with a rhythm section of bassist Gene Ramey and drummer Art Taylor. Lee Konitz plays alto as well. The tunes are all standards, including "These Foolish Things," "Ghost of a Chance," and "All the Things You Are." The performance is flawless, with beautiful interplay between Lee and Lennie and stellar harmonic ideas coming down from the bandstand in a fluid relaxed manner. This is a gorgeous album with a beautiful juxtaposition between its first and second halves, with the rhythmic and intervallic genius of Tristano as an improviser on full display during the first half and the pianist as a supreme lyrical and swinging harmonist during the back half.” (Thom Jurek, AllMusic)

Song Of 1956 - Heartbreak Hotel (Elvis Presley, United States)
"Heartbreak Hotel" is a song recorded by American singer Elvis Presley. It was released as a single on January 27, 1956, Presley's first on his new record label RCA Victor. It was written by Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton. A newspaper article about the suicide of a lonely man who jumped from a hotel window inspired the lyrics. Axton presented the song to Presley in November 1955 at a country music convention in Nashville. Presley agreed to record it, and did so on January 10, 1956, in a session with his band, The Blue Moon Boys, the guitarist Chet Atkins, and the pianist Floyd Cramer. "Heartbreak Hotel" comprises an eight-bar blues progression, with heavy reverberation throughout the track, to imitate the character of Presley's Sun recordings. The single topped Billboard's Top 100 chart for seven weeks, Cashbox's pop singles chart for six weeks, was No. 1 on the Country and Western chart for seventeen weeks and reached No. 3 on the R&B chart, becoming Presley's first million-seller, and one of the best-selling singles of 1956. "Heartbreak Hotel" achieved unheard feats as it reached the top 5 of Country and Western, pop, and Rhythm 'n' Blues charts simultaneously. It would eventually be certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1995 "Heartbreak Hotel" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2004 Rolling Stone magazine named it one of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". That year it was also included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll". A rock and roll standard, since its original release "Heartbreak Hotel" has been covered by several rock and pop acts, including Willie Nelson and Leon Russell.” (Wikipedia)

Movies Of 1956:
1. The Searchers - John Ford (United States)
2. A Man Escaped - Robert Bresson (France)
3. Aparajito - Satyajit Ray (India)
4. The Burmese Harp - Kon Ichikawa (Japan)
5. The Red Balloon - Albert Lamorisse (France)

Books Of 1956:
1. Howl And Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg (United States)
2. Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin (United States)
3. The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima (Japan)
4. The Devil To Pay In The Backlands - Joao Guimaraes Rosa (Brazil)
5. The Field Of Vision - Wright Morris (United States)

Albums Of 1956:
1. Lennie Tristano - Lennie Tristano (United States)
2. Concert By The Sea - Erroll Garner (United States)
3. Blue Serge - Serge Charloff (United States)
4. Cuban Fire! - Stan Kenton (United States)
5. Ellington At Newport - Duke Ellington (United States)

Songs Of 1956:
1. Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley (United States)
2. Be-Bop-A-Lula - Gene Vincent And His Blue Caps (United States)
3. In The Still Of The Night - The Five Satins (United States)
4. The Train Kept A-Rollin’- Johnny Burnette (United States)
5. Smokestack Lightnin’ - Howlin’ Wolf (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1957



Movie of 1957 | Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | all time #58
"The film that catapulted Bergman to the forefront of world cinema is the director's richest, most humane movie. Traveling to receive an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg (masterfully played by the veteran Swedish director Victor Sjöström), is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and accept the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, Wild Strawberries captures a startling voyage of self-discovery and renewed belief in mankind. This masterpiece, full of iconic imagery, is one of Ingmar Bergman's most widely acclaimed and influential films." (The Criterion Collection)

Record of 1957 | That'll Be the Day | The Crickets | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #61
"Buddy Holly and drummer Jerry Allison started playing together as teenagers in a Lubbock, Texas, garage. "We weren't interested in ball games or hot rods, we were interested in playing [music]," Allison recalled. "We thought if you could get a record out, you'd have a hit, you could buy a Cadillac." Their dream came true with this tough-talking twangfest, which Holly and Allison co-wrote after seeing the John Wayne western The Searchers, during which the Duke repeatedly uttered the title phrase. The song became the first of a string of hits that was tragically cut off when Holly died in a plane crash at age 22." (Bud Scoppa, Rolling Stone)

Book of 1957 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | USA | all time #106
"On the Road is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published in 1957. This largely autobiographical work, written as a stream of consciousness and based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America, is often considered the defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was so affected by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion." (Publisher)


Books of 1957:
1 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | USA | #106
2 | Dóktor Zhivágo (Doctor Zhivago) | Boris Pasternak | Italy | USSR | #169
3 | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | USA | #247


Movies of 1957:
1 | Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | #58
2 | Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | #72
3 | Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria) | Federico Fellini | Italy | #187


Albums of 1957:
1 | Here's Little Richard | Little Richard | USA | #390
2 | Saxophone Colossus | Sonny Rollins | USA | #404
3 | The "Chirping" Crickets | The Crickets | USA | #407


Songs of 1957:
1 | That'll Be the Day | The Crickets | USA | #61
2 | Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On | Jerry Lee Lewis | USA | #97
3 | Great Balls of Fire | Jerry Lee Lewis | USA | #124


Classical work of 1957 | West Side Story | Leonard Bernstein | USA | #13

Note:
Love the way the quote about "That'll Be the Day" (record of 1957) references "The Searchers" (movie of 1956), connecting contemporary but different art forms and proving the influences between them.
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1958



Movie of 1958 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | all time #2
"Nowhere else did Hitchcock's perfectionism yield such feverish results, in an eerily perverse exploration of this director's obsessive themes. Way ahead of its time in dreamily suggestive power, Vertigo lures James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, a man terrified of falling, onto the trail of the voluptuous ice blonde who will bring him down. The lure of death, the power of the past, the guilty complicity of a clean-cut hero, the near-fetishistic use of symbol and color: these Hitchcock hallmarks are all mesmerizingly on view. Hitchcock, as he would in Psycho two years later, deliberately violated the conventions of the thriller to heighten tensions and abruptly shift the audience's point of view." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

Record of 1958 | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #6
"Johnny B. Goode is the Horatio Alger story of rock & roll, a message so basic that the song has become the inspiration for every kid who ever wanted to be in a rock & roll band or become a rock & roll star. Written by Chuck Berry, the original version on Chess was also the first session that Berry utilized overdubbing to play the now famous guitar solos, a fairly new idea for rock & roll back in the 1950s. But as rich and full and inspirational as Berry's original was and is, the song is so irreducible in its simple genius that it has become adaptable in a number of cover versions. No matter what course rock music may take in the next decade or two, as long as there are guitar bands and crowds that want to rock and sing along, somebody will be on-stage playing Johnny B. Goode to get a rise out of the crowd." (Cub Koda, All Music)

Book of 1958 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | British Nigeria | all time #71
"A novel of great power that turns the world upside down. The Nigerian novelist Achebe reached back to the early days of his people's encounter with colonialism, the 1890's, though the white man and his religion make an impression upon the story only in its later stages. Here the Africans are center stage, capable all the while of nobility but also cruelty, wisdom and bewilderment. Achebe guides us through the intricacies of Igbo culture, its profound sense of justice, its sometimes murderous rules, its noble and harmful machismo. By the time the British colonial administrator arrives towards the end of the book to dismiss the natives as savages, we know how profoundly mistaken that word is." (Publisher)


Books of 1958:
1 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | British Nigeria | #71
2 | Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) | Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | Italy | #184
3 | Breakfast at Tiffany's | Truman Capote | USA | #436


Movies of 1958:
1 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | #2
2 | Touch of Evil | Orson Welles | USA | #31
3 | Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) | Andrzej Wajda | Poland | #205


Albums of 1958:
1 | Lady in Satin | Billie Holiday with Ray Ellis and His Orchestra | USA | #703
2 | Somethin' Else | Cannonball Adderley | USA | #743
3 | Blue Train | John Coltrane | USA | #763


Songs of 1958:
1 | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | #6
2 | Summertime Blues | Eddie Cochran | USA | #91
3 | Rumble | Link Wray & His Ray Men | USA | #314
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1957:

Movie Of 1957 - Wild Strawberries (Ingar Bergman, Sweden)
“It is said, with some truth, that there are three major film-makers who empty cinemas these days: Bergman, Godard and Chaplin. In Bergman's case, it is almost certainly because the 'gloomy Swede' tag has taken root. There's just enough truth in the travesty to allow one to sympathise. After all, didn't he envisage God as a spider in Through A Glass Darkly? But he also made one of the most subtle of Mozartian romantic comedies in Smiles Of A Summer Night, and Fanny and Alexander, his last major film, could hardly be called depressing. The film I constantly go back to, however, is Wild Strawberries (1957), which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.“ (Derek Malcolm, The Guardian)

Book Of 1957 - On The Road (Jack Kerouac, United States)
“In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example. It also stands alongside the image of Jackson Pollock — in the series of photographs taken of him by Hans Namuth just a few months before Kerouac’s siege of the typewriter — dripping and flinging and flecking paint on a horizontal canvas, fighting and dancing his work into being. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical, which is why some writers feel the need to compensate by racing bulls or whatever, but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter seems like a feat of strength. Most writers merely produce effete works on paper, you might say, but Kerouac went and wrestled with the tree itself. Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.“ (Luc Sante, The New York Times)

Album Of 1957 - Saxophone Colossus (Sonny Rollins, United States)
“Almost as if in answer to the charge that there is a lack of grace and beauty in the work of the New York hard-swingers comes this album in which Rollins displays humor, gentleness, a delicate feeling for beauty in line, and a puckish sense of humor. And all done with the uncompromising swinging that has characterized them all along. The treatment of Moritat, for instance, or Blue Seven, show Rollins in particularly interesting statements and restatements of ideas. The latter tune is an especially compelling work. From the fascinating bass introduction, through the discontinuity of Sonny’s first chorus, the piano solo, the duet between Sonny and Max, on through the rest of the piece till the final fade out—it is all modern jazz of the first rank.” (Ralph J. Gleason, DownBeat)

Song Of 1957 - Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly, United States)
“Peggy Sue" is a rock and roll song written by J. Allison - N. Petty recorded and released as a single by Holly in early July of 1957. The Crickets are not mentioned on label of the single (Coral 9-61885), but band members Joe B. Mauldin (string bass) and Jerry Allison (drums) played on the recording. This recording was also released on Holly's eponymous 1958 album. “Peggy Sue" went to number three on the Billboard Top 100 chart in 1957. It is ranked number 194 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2004 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". In 1999, National Public Radio (NPR) included the song on the NPR 100, a list of the "100 Most Important American Musical Works of the 20th Century".” (Wikipedia)

Movies Of 1957:
1. Wild Strawberries - Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
2. Nights Of Cabiria - Federico Fellini (Italy)
3. 12 Angry Men - Sidney Lumet (United States)
4. The Bridge Over The River Kwai - David Lean (United Kingdom)
5. Sweet Smell Of Success - Alexander Mackendrick (United States)

Books Of 1957:
1. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (United States)
2. The Assistant - Bernard Malamud (United States)
3. Selected Poems Of Gabriela Mistrad - Gabriela Mistrad (Chile)
4. Second Thoughts - Michel Butor (France)
5. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (Italy)

Albums Of 1957:
1. Saxophone Colossus - Sonny Rollins (United States)
2. Miles Ahead - Miles Davis (United States)
3. April In Paris - Count Basie (United States)
4. The Weavers At Carnegie Hall - The Weavers (United States)
5. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section - Art Pepper (United States)

Songs Of 1957:
1. Peggy Sue - Buddy Holly (United States)
2. Blue 7 - Sonny Rollins (United States)
3. Brilliant Corners - Thelonious Monk (United States)
4. Maybe - The Chantels (United States)
5. The Book Of Love - The Monotones (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1958:

Movie Of 1958 - Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
“If you really want to start an argument with a movie critic, ask them what the greatest movie of all time is. Like any “GOAT” debate, you’ll get your standard answers sometimes and your unconventional answers others. The conventional greatest film of all time answer you might remember from that college film class is Citizen Kane. If you took that class a little earlier, you might have been told The Bicycle Thief. If you took that class more recently, however, you might have been told Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece that premiered on May 9th, in San Francisco, the setting of the film itself. If Citizen Kane or The Bicycle Thief bored you, don’t be surprised (like Vertigo star James Stewart, shown above) if the mystery of the greatest film of all time is solved by the twisted tale of Vertigo. What makes Vertigo so good (and maybe great) is the plot, which defies description in many ways. (Don’t worry, no spoilers, either here or in the trailer for the 1996 restored version shown above.) James Stewart plays John “Scottie” Ferguson, who retires from the police force after an accident leaves him with a fear of heights and the titular affliction of vertigo, a false sense of spinning and falling when looking down from those heights. An acquaintance named Gavin Elster hires Scottie, now a private eye, to follow his wife Madeline (played by Kim Novak) and find out why she’s acting so strangely. From there on, you get classic Hitchcock—suspense, mystery, romance, all wrapped around twisted human psychology.“ (Bob Duggan, Big Think)

Book Of 1958 - Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, Nigeria)
“First published in 1958 – the year after Ghana became the first African nation to gain independence, as Britain, France and Belgium started to recognise the end of colonialism in Africa and began their unseemly withdrawal – Chinua Achebe's debut novel concerns itself with the events surrounding the start of this disastrous chapter in African history. Set in the late 19th century, at the height of the "Scramble" for African territories by the great European powers, Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, a proud and highly respected Igbo from Umuofia, somewhere near the Lower Niger. Okonkwo's clan are farmers, their complex society a patriarchal, democratic one. Achebe suggests that village life has not changed substantially in generations. But then the English arrive in their region, with the Bible – rather than the gun – their weapon of choice. As the villagers begin to convert to Christianity, the ties that had ensured the clan's equilibrium come undone. As Okonkwo's friend Obierika explains: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one." Unwilling to adapt, Okonkwo finds himself the protagonist in a modern Greek tragedy. The first part of a trilogy, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to gain worldwide recognition: half a century on, it remains one of the great novels about the colonial era.“ (Phil Mongredien, The Guardian)

Album Of 1958 - Somethin’ Else (Cannonball Adderley, United States)
“Cannonball Adderley gave up his own band in 1957 when he had the opportunity to become a sideman in Miles Davis' epic ensemble with John Coltrane, eventually resulting in some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time (including Milestones and Kind of Blue). Davis returned the favor in March of 1958, appearing as a sideman on Adderley's all-star quintet date for Blue Note, and the resulting session is indeed Somethin' Else. Both horn players are at their peak of lyrical invention, crafting gorgeous, flowing blues lines on the title tune and "One for Daddy-O," as the rhythm team (Hank Jones, Sam Jones, Art Blakey) creates a taut, focused groove (pianist Hank Jones' sly, intuitive orchestrations are studies of harmonic understatement). Adderley's lush, romantic improvisation on "Dancing in the Dark" is worthy of Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges, while the band refurbishes "Autumn Leaves" and "Love for Sale" into cliché-free swingers. And "Alison's Uncle" puts a boppish coda on Somethin' Else, one of the most gloriously laid-back blowing sessions of the hard bop era.” (Rovi Staff, AllMusic)

Song Of 1958 - Summertime Blues (Eddie Cochran, United States)
“Cochran's label tried molding him into a crooning teen idol, but he made his mark with a string of rockabilly ravers written with partner Capehart. Explaining the inspiration for this classic, Capehart said, "There had been a lot of songs about summer, but none about the hardships of summer." With that idea and a guitar lick from Cochran, they knocked out the song in 45 minutes.” (Rolling Stone)

Movies Of 1958:
1. Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock (United States)
2. Ashes And Diamonds - Andrjez Wajda (Poland)
3. Big Deal On Madonna Street - Mario Monicelli (Italy)
4. Touch Of Evil - Orson Welles (United States)
5. Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli (United States)

Books Of 1958:
1. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
2. The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac (United States)
3. Anecdotes Of Destiny - Karen Blixen (Denmark)
4. The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith (United States)
5. The Professional - W.C. Heinz (United States)

Albums Of 1958:
1. Somethin’ Else - Cannonball Adderley (United States)
2. Lady In Satin - Billie Holiday (United States)
3. Dance Mania - Tito Puente (United States)
4. Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley (United States)
5. Newport 1958 - Mahalia Jackson (United States)

Songs Of 1958:
1. Summertime Blues - Eddie Cochran (United States)
2. All I Have To Do Is Dream - The Everly Brothers (United States)
3. La Bamba - Ritchie Valens (United States)
4. My Baby Just Cares For Me - Nina Simone (United States)
5. Rumble - Link Wray & His Wray Men (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1959



Movie of 1959 | Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) | François Truffaut | France | all time #23
"François Truffaut's The 400 Blows is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. The later films have their own merits, and Stolen Kisses is one of Truffaut's best, but The 400 Blows, with all its simplicity and feeling, is in a class by itself. It was Truffaut's first feature, and one of the founding films of the French New Wave. We sense that it was drawn directly out of Truffaut's heart." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Records of 1959:
- Album of 1959 | Kind of Blue | Miles Davis | USA | album (vinyl LP) | all time #35
"Sometimes an album's hype becomes all too stifling. Easy epithets such as "classic," "groundbreaking," and "milestone" are all too lazily tossed around, and in their midst we lose sight of the original material's worth. Thankfully, Kind of Blue comes with no such critical health warning —it is a genre-defining moment in twentieth-century music, period. The five tracks were laid in nine hours over two sessions, a time frame all the more remarkable for the band having never encountered the pieces before —this was a ploy Davis frequently used, feeling that individual artists would consequently focus more on their performances." (Seth Jacobson, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die)
- Song of 1959 | What'd I Say (Parts 1 and 2) | Ray Charles and His Orchestra | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #35
"What’d I Say was created when the singer somehow ran out of material near the end of a gig in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. He began playing a rollicking riff, improvising lyrics over it. Telling his backing singers The Raelettes, "I'm going to fool around and y'all just follow me," Brother Ray delivered an instant classic in the "call and response" style. Perhaps because it was created in a club environment, the lyrics were more lascivious than anything Charles had released until then. The song was long because it had no fixed structure, and Charles, who was blind, could hear and feel the crowd going crazy while he sang it, so why stop?" (Ian McCann, Financial Times)

Book of 1959 | Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) | Günter Grass | West Germany | all time #108
"Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world. "Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos —all with an unforgiving conscience," John Irving." (Publisher)


Books of 1959:
1 | Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) | Günter Grass | West Germany | #108
2 | Henderson the Rain King | Saul Bellow | USA | #172
3 | Hawaii | James A. Michener | USA | #369


Movies of 1959:
1 | Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) | François Truffaut | France | #23
2 | Some Like It Hot | Billy Wilder | USA | #28
3 | Rio Bravo | Howard Hawks | USA | #57


Albums of 1959:
1 | Kind of Blue | Miles Davis | USA | #35
2 | Time Out | The Dave Brubeck Quartet | USA | #347
3 | The Shape of Jazz to Come | Ornette Coleman | USA | #357


Songs of 1959:
1 | What'd I Say (Parts 1 and 2) | Ray Charles and His Orchestra | USA | #35
2 | Shout (Parts 1 and 2) | The Isley Brothers | USA | #504
3 | There Goes My Baby | The Drifters | USA | #528

Note:
First and last tie on Record of the Year (there will be more ties on decade lists). Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is the #35 all-time album and Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" is the #35 song of all time, so they appear tied as Record of the Year.
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

The 1950s



Movie of the 1950s | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1958 | all time #2
"Nowhere else did Hitchcock's perfectionism yield such feverish results, in an eerily perverse exploration of this director's obsessive themes. Way ahead of its time in dreamily suggestive power, Vertigo lures James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, a man terrified of falling, onto the trail of the voluptuous ice blonde who will bring him down. The lure of death, the power of the past, the guilty complicity of a clean-cut hero, the near-fetishistic use of symbol and color: these Hitchcock hallmarks are all mesmerizingly on view. Hitchcock, as he would in Psycho two years later, deliberately violated the conventions of the thriller to heighten tensions and abruptly shift the audience's point of view." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

Record of the 1950s | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 45 rpm single | 1958 | all time #6
"Johnny B. Goode is the Horatio Alger story of rock & roll, a message so basic that the song has become the inspiration for every kid who ever wanted to be in a rock & roll band or become a rock & roll star. Written by Chuck Berry, the original version on Chess was also the first session that Berry utilized overdubbing to play the now famous guitar solos, a fairly new idea for rock & roll back in the 1950s. But as rich and full and inspirational as Berry's original was and is, the song is so irreducible in its simple genius that it has become adaptable in a number of cover versions. No matter what course rock music may take in the next decade or two, as long as there are guitar bands and crowds that want to rock and sing along, somebody will be on-stage playing Johnny B. Goode to get a rise out of the crowd." (Cub Koda, All Music)

Book of the 1950s | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | 1955 | all time #15
"Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a twelve-year-old girl named Dolores Haze. After its publication, Nabokov's Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious young girl." (Publisher)


Books of the 1950s:
1 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | France | USA | 1955 | #15
2 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | USA | 1951 | #20
3 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | USA | 1952 | #36
4 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | USA | 1952 | #64
5 | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | J. R. R. Tolkien | UK | 1954 | #68


Movies of the 1950s:
1 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1958 | #2
2 | Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Yasujirô Ozu | Japan | 1953 | #5
3 | The Searchers | John Ford | USA | 1956 | #9
4 | Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | 1954 | #10
5 | Singin' in the Rain | Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly | USA | 1952 | #12


Albums of the 1950s:
1 | Kind of Blue | Miles Davis | USA | 1959 | #35
2 | Elvis Presley | Elvis Presley | USA | 1956 | #122
3 | Songs for Swingin' Lovers! | Frank Sinatra | USA | 1956 | #321
4 | In the Wee Small Hours | Frank Sinatra | USA | 1955 | #323
5 | Time Out | The Dave Brubeck Quartet | USA | 1959 | #347


Songs of the 1950s:
1 | Johnny B. Goode | Chuck Berry | USA | 1958 | #6
2 | Heartbreak Hotel | Elvis Presley | USA | 1956 | #17
3 | Tutti-Frutti | Little Richard and His Band | USA | 1955 | #30
4 | What'd I Say (Parts 1 and 2) | Ray Charles and His Orchestra | USA | 1959 | #35
5 | That'll Be the Day | The Crickets | USA | 1957 | #61


Classical work of the 1950s:
1 | Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) | Richard Strauss | UK | Germany | 1950 | #11
2 | West Side Story | Leonard Bernstein | USA | 1957 | #13
3 | Spartak (Spartacus) | Aram Khachaturian | USSR | 1956 | #26
4 | Ovod: Sjuita iz muzyki k kinofilʹmu (The Gadfly Suite) | Dmitri Shostakovich | USSR | 1955 | #48
5 | Candide | Leonard Bernstein | USA | 1956 | #76
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

Well damn. I deleted my 1958 draft by accident (lol) but you can see my picks for that year in my 1950s personal list, at least :|

1959:

Movie Of 1959 - The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, France)
“Francois Truffaut’s “400 Blows” is now an official classic of French cinema, but when it had its premiere, at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, it didn’t much look like one. And that was the point. Mr. Truffaut, then just 27, had spent his youth as an extremely combative critic for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, in whose pages he regularly savaged the older, established French filmmakers who represented what was called the “tradition of quality.” (When he used the term, it didn’t sound like a compliment.) So when, thanks to a prosperous father-in-law, he got the chance to direct a feature film, he undoubtedly felt some pressure to put his money where his big critical mouth had been: to show that a thoroughly French movie could be made without beautiful sets and costumes, exquisitely refined Comédie Française-style acting or a high-literary tone. “The 400 Blows” proved it, and in the best possible way. The film was so fluid, so graceful, so apparently natural, that it seemed not to have any agenda at all. It didn’t feel willful; it felt (as revolutions too rarely do) inevitable.“ (Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times)

Book Of 1959 - Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs, United States)
“Poet Anne Waldman says that at the time it was published, Naked Lunch offered a stark contrast to the prevailing vision of reality during the Eisenhower years: “It’s not the woman with her Kelvinator refrigerator, opening the door to show you how crisp the lettuce stays," says Waldman. "It's the 'naked lunch' ... where you see reality clearly, you see the lettuce decomposing." That shocking reality caused a furor when excerpts were published in the University of Chicago's literary magazine in 1958. A Paris pornographer took note and published Naked Lunch in France the following year. Then in 1962, Grove Press issued the first American edition. A year later, a Boston bookstore owner was arrested for selling it. During the obscenity trial, the book was defended by writers Norman Mailer, Ginsberg and John Ciardi. Finally, in 1966, a high court ruled that the book had redeeming social value and was therefore not obscene. Regina Weinreich, who teaches Beat Generation literature at New York's School of Visual Arts, believes the novel represents an alternative way of life, one that focuses on the individual as opposed to the masses. "It cuts through the norms of society — the way that we all have to be polite, the way we all have to follow our institutions, our governments, our addictions," Weinreich explains. "The alternative is to be [an] individual, and to go to those places on our own." (Tom Vitale, NPR)

Album Of 1959 - Kind Of Blue (Miles Davis, United States)
“Undeniably both the most famous and influential of Miles Davis' 120+ releases between his debut release, First Miles in 1945 and his death in the late summer of 1991, Kind of Blue remains the landmark jazz album of all time. Kind of Blue's lineup is one of the most incredible of all time featuring such jazz greats as John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley who work amazingly well together despite their own unique improvisational styles. Together, they're the definitive classic jazz band whose collective greatness will never be matched. This already classic recording will remain the quintessential Miles Davis album; we're just hearing it now as if we were actually in that same room in Columbia's 30th Street Studio on March 2, 1959.“ (Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork)

Song Of 1959 - What’d I Say (Ray Charles, United States)
“The phone call that Ray Charles placed to Atlantic Records in early 1959 went something like this: “I’m playing a song out here on the road, and I don’t know what it is—it’s just a song I made up, but the people are just going wild every time we play it, and I think we ought to record it.” The song Ray Charles was referring to was “What’d I Say,” which went on to become one of the greatest rhythm-and-blues records ever made. Composed spontaneously out of sheer showbiz necessity, “What’d I Say” was laid down on tape on this day in 1959, at the Atlantic Records studios in New York City. The necessity that drove Ray Charles to invent “What’d I Say” was simple: the need to fill time. Ten or 12 minutes before the end of a contractually required four-hour performance at a dance in Pittsburgh one night, Charles and his band ran completely out of songs to play. “So I began noodling—just a little riff that floated into my head,” Charles explained many years later. “One thing led to another and I found myself singing and wanting the girls to repeat after me….Then I could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce.” (History.com)

Movies Of 1959:
1. The 400 Blows - Francois Truffaut (France)
2. North By Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock (United States)
3. Hiroshima mon amour - Alain Resnais (France)
4. Pickpocket - Robert Bresson (France)
5. Kaagaz Ke Phool - Guru Dutt (India)

Books Of 1959:
1. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs (United States)
2. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass (Germany)
3. A Violent Life - Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy)
4. Brown Girl, Brownstones - Paule Marshall (United States)
5. A Separate Peace - John Knowles (United States)

Albums Of 1959:
1. Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis (United States)
2. Time Out - Dave Brubeck Quartet (United States)
3. Mingus Ah Um - Charles Mingus (United States)
4. Porgy And Bess - Miles Davis (United States)
5. Moanin’ In The Moonlight - Howlin’ Wolf (United States)

Songs Of 1959:
1. What’d I Say - Ray Charles (United States)
2. I Only Have Eyes For You - The Flamingos (United States)
3. There Goes My Baby - The Drifters (United States)
4. So What - Miles Davis (United States)
5. Mack The Knife - Bobby Darin (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1950s:

Movie Of The 1950s - Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, United States)
“If you really want to start an argument with a movie critic, ask them what the greatest movie of all time is. Like any “GOAT” debate, you’ll get your standard answers sometimes and your unconventional answers others. The conventional greatest film of all time answer you might remember from that college film class is Citizen Kane. If you took that class a little earlier, you might have been told The Bicycle Thief. If you took that class more recently, however, you might have been told Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece that premiered on May 9th, in San Francisco, the setting of the film itself. If Citizen Kane or The Bicycle Thief bored you, don’t be surprised (like Vertigo star James Stewart, shown above) if the mystery of the greatest film of all time is solved by the twisted tale of Vertigo. What makes Vertigo so good (and maybe great) is the plot, which defies description in many ways. (Don’t worry, no spoilers, either here or in the trailer for the 1996 restored version shown above.) James Stewart plays John “Scottie” Ferguson, who retires from the police force after an accident leaves him with a fear of heights and the titular affliction of vertigo, a false sense of spinning and falling when looking down from those heights. An acquaintance named Gavin Elster hires Scottie, now a private eye, to follow his wife Madeline (played by Kim Novak) and find out why she’s acting so strangely. From there on, you get classic Hitchcock—suspense, mystery, romance, all wrapped around twisted human psychology.“ (Bob Duggan, Big Think)

Book Of The 1950s - Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs, United States)
“Poet Anne Waldman says that at the time it was published, Naked Lunch offered a stark contrast to the prevailing vision of reality during the Eisenhower years: “It’s not the woman with her Kelvinator refrigerator, opening the door to show you how crisp the lettuce stays," says Waldman. "It's the 'naked lunch' ... where you see reality clearly, you see the lettuce decomposing." That shocking reality caused a furor when excerpts were published in the University of Chicago's literary magazine in 1958. A Paris pornographer took note and published Naked Lunch in France the following year. Then in 1962, Grove Press issued the first American edition. A year later, a Boston bookstore owner was arrested for selling it. During the obscenity trial, the book was defended by writers Norman Mailer, Ginsberg and John Ciardi. Finally, in 1966, a high court ruled that the book had redeeming social value and was therefore not obscene. Regina Weinreich, who teaches Beat Generation literature at New York's School of Visual Arts, believes the novel represents an alternative way of life, one that focuses on the individual as opposed to the masses. "It cuts through the norms of society — the way that we all have to be polite, the way we all have to follow our institutions, our governments, our addictions," Weinreich explains. "The alternative is to be [an] individual, and to go to those places on our own." (Tom Vitale, NPR)

Album Of The 1950s - Kind Of Blue (Miles Davis, United States)
“Undeniably both the most famous and influential of Miles Davis' 120+ releases between his debut release, First Miles in 1945 and his death in the late summer of 1991, Kind of Blue remains the landmark jazz album of all time. Kind of Blue's lineup is one of the most incredible of all time featuring such jazz greats as John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley who work amazingly well together despite their own unique improvisational styles. Together, they're the definitive classic jazz band whose collective greatness will never be matched. This already classic recording will remain the quintessential Miles Davis album; we're just hearing it now as if we were actually in that same room in Columbia's 30th Street Studio on March 2, 1959.“ (Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork)

Song Of The 1950s - What’d I Say (Ray Charles, United States)
“The phone call that Ray Charles placed to Atlantic Records in early 1959 went something like this: “I’m playing a song out here on the road, and I don’t know what it is—it’s just a song I made up, but the people are just going wild every time we play it, and I think we ought to record it.” The song Ray Charles was referring to was “What’d I Say,” which went on to become one of the greatest rhythm-and-blues records ever made. Composed spontaneously out of sheer showbiz necessity, “What’d I Say” was laid down on tape on this day in 1959, at the Atlantic Records studios in New York City. The necessity that drove Ray Charles to invent “What’d I Say” was simple: the need to fill time. Ten or 12 minutes before the end of a contractually required four-hour performance at a dance in Pittsburgh one night, Charles and his band ran completely out of songs to play. “So I began noodling—just a little riff that floated into my head,” Charles explained many years later. “One thing led to another and I found myself singing and wanting the girls to repeat after me….Then I could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce.” (History.com)

Movies Of The 1950s:
1. Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock (United States, 1958)
2. The Searchers - John Ford (United States, 1956)
3. The 400 Blows - Francois Truffaut (France, 1959)
4. Ordet - Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark, 1955)
5. Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo, 1953)
6. La Strada - Federico Fellini (Italy, 1954)
7. Rashomon - Akiro Kurosawa (Japan, 1950)
8. North By Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock (United States, 1959)
9. Hiroshima mon amour - Alan Resnais (France, 1959)
10. Ashes And Diamonds - Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 1958)
11. Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder (United States, 1950)
12. Umberto D. - Vittorio De Sica (Italy, 1952)
13. Los Olvidados - Luis Buñuel (Mexico, 1950)
14. Wild Strawberries - Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1957)
15. Ikiru - Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1952)

Books Of The 1950s:
1. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs (United States, 1959)
2. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (France, 1955)
3. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger (United States, 1951)
4. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (United States, 1952)
5. The Old Man And The Sea - Ernest Hemingway (United States, 1952)
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Nigeria, 1958)
7. Howl And Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg (United States, 1956)
8. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (United States, 1957)
9. Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin (United States, 1956)
10. Poems Of Emily Dickinson - Emily Dickinson (United States, 1955)
11. Collected Poems Of Dylan Thomas - Dylan Thomas (United States, 1952)
12. Pedro Peramo - Juan Rulfo (Mexico, 1955)
13. Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett (France, 1953)
14. The Red Grass - Boris Vian (France, 1950)
15. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding (United States, 1954)

Albums Of The 1950s:
1. Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis (United States, 1959)
2. Time Out - Dave Brubeck Quartet (United States, 1959)
3. In The Wee Small Hours - Frank Sinatra (United States, 1955)
4. Mingus Ah Um - Charles Mingus (United States, 1959)
5. The Amazing Bud Powell - Bud Powell (United States, 1952)
6. Lennie Tristano - Lennie Tristano (United States, 1956)
7. Saxophone Colossus - Sonny Rollins (United States, 1957)
8. Somethin’ Else - Cannonball Adderley (United States, 1958)
9. Lady In Satin - Billie Holiday (United States, 1958)
10. Porgy And Bess - Miles Davis (United States, 1959)
11. Charlie Parker With Strings - Charlie Parker (United States, 1950)
12. Anthology Of American Folk Music - Various Artists (United States, 1952)
13. Concert By The Sea - Eroll Garner (United States, 1956)
14. Dance Mania - Tito Puente (United States, 1958)
15. Clifford Brown And Max Roach - Clifford Brown And Max Roach (United States, 1954)
16. Jazz At Massey Hall - The Quintet (United States, 1953)
17. A Night At Birdland Vol. 1 - Art Blakey Quintet (United States, 1954)
18. Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley (United States, 1958)
19. Newport 1958 - Mahalia Jackson (United States, 1958)
20. Blue Serge - Serge Charloff (United States, 1956)
21. Cuban Fire! - Stan Kenton (United States, 1958)
22. Cool Struttin’ - Sonny Clarke (United States, 1958)
23. Jazz In Silhouette - Sun Ra (United States, 1958)
24. Genius Of Modern Music (Volume One) - Thelonious Monk (United States, 1951)
25. Moanin’ In The Moonlight - Howlin’ Wolf (United States, 1959)

Songs Of The 1950s:
1. What’d I Say - Ray Charles (United States, 1959)
2. Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley (United States, 1956)
3. I Only Have Eyes For You - The Flamingos (United States, 1959)
4. There Goes My Baby - The Drifters (United States, 1959)
5. Be-Bop-A-Lula - Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps (United States, 1956)
6. So What - Miles Davis (United States, 1959)
7. Cry - Johnnie Ray (United States, 1951)
8. How High The Moon - Les Paul & Mary Ford (United States, 1951)
9. Gee - The Crows (United States, 1953)
10. Django - The Modern Jazz Quartet (United States, 1955)
11. Maybellene - Chuck Berry (United States, 1955)
12. Mystery Train - Elvis Presley (United States, 1955)
13. In The Still Of The Night - The Five Satins (United States, 1956)
14. Mack The Knife - Bobby Darin (United States, 1959)
15. The Train Kept A-Rollin’ - Johnny Burnette (United States, 1956)
16. Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley (United States, 1955)
17. Why Do Fools Fall In Love - Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers (United States, 1955)
18. Summertime Blues - Eddie Cochran (United States, 1958)
19. Time Out - Dave Brubeck Quartet (United States, 1959)
20. We’re Gonna (Rock Around The Clock) - Bill Haley & His Comets (United States, 1954)
21. All I Have To Do Is Dream - The Everly Brothers (United States, 1958)
22. La Bamba - Ritchie Valens (United States, 1958)
23. Crying In The Chapel - The Orioles (United States, 1953)
24. Rumble - Link Wray & His Wray Men (United States, 1958)
25. Rollin’ Stone - Muddy Waters (United States, 1950)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1960



Movie of 1960 | À bout de souffle (Breathless) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | all time #16
"There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured cinema would never be the same." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 1960 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | USA | all time #44
"'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel — a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, a historical drama of the Great Depression and a sublime example of the Southern writing tradition." (Publisher)

Record of 1960 | Will You Love Me Tomorrow | The Shirelles | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #154
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow by the Shirelles was released in 1960 and went to the top of the US charts early in 1961. It was the first girl group No 1, and one of the first hits by black artists to sell in millions to white kids. And it was almost the perfect pop song. I was 14 when it came out, and Shirley Owens's voice, so powerful yet fragile, so full of yearning, perfectly matched my adolescent moods. In those less permissive days —Lady Chatterley had only just become legal in Britain— we didn't realise the song was about a young girl on the brink of surrendering her virginity, though several US radio stations spotted that right away, and banned it." (Simon Hoggart, The Guardian)


Books of 1960:
1 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | USA | #44
2 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike | USA | #135
3 | Selected Stories of Lu Hsun | Lu Xun | China | collection | #439
4 | The Sot-Weed Factor | John Barth | USA | #518


Movies of 1960:
1 | À bout de souffle (Breathless) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | #16
2 | Psycho | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | #25
3 | La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita) | Federico Fellini | Italy | #29


Albums of 1960:
1 | Giant Steps | John Coltrane | USA | #343
2 | Sketches of Spain | Miles Davis | USA | #393
3 | Muddy Waters at Newport 1960 | Muddy Waters | USA | #748


Songs of 1960:
1 | Will You Love Me Tomorrow | The Shirelles | USA | #154
2 | Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel) | Roy Orbison | USA | #355
3 | Georgia on My Mind | Ray Charles | USA | #419
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1960:

Movie Of 1960 - Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
"Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools. Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.' (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)

Book Of 1960 - To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee, United States)
"To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. Instantly successful, widely read in high schools and middle schools in the United States, it has become a classic of modern American literature winning the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. Historian, J Crespino explains, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism." As a Southern Gothic and Bildungsroman novel, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets. Reaction to the novel varied widely upon publication. Despite the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education, literary analysis of it is sparse. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of To Kill a Mockingbird by several authors and public figures, calls the book "an astonishing phenomenon". In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one "every adult should read before they die"." (Wikipedia)

Album Of 1960 - Sketches Of Spain (Miles Davis, United States)
"Miles had already worked extensively with Gil Evans, dating back to the Birth of the Cool sessions, and later on the full-blown collaborations Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. While it is fair to suggest that either man might have taken the raw material of what became Sketches of Spain and created an interesting, possibly excellent album, it could never have turned out so well without both men’s involvement. To imagine how this album may have sounded had Miles chosen to employ a more traditional jazz approach, consider “Flamenco Sketches”, the sublime tone poem from Kind of Blue. Davis’s interest in Spanish music preceded the recording of “Flamenco Sketches”; indeed, his earlier work with Evans resulted in “Blues for Pablo” (from Miles Ahead). So while this pairing was inspired, it was not unpredictable. Of the many accolades lavished on Sketches of Spain over the years, perhaps the two most prevalent are how well it has aged, and how disarmingly honest it remains. The secret to creating music that stands the test of time is to create timeless music. Simple in theory; near-impossible in practice. What exactly is meant by calling this album honest? Plainly put, Miles seemed incapable of playing false or forced notes, in part because his technique was not impeccable. Critics have long discussed (and debated) how Miles was neither the flashiest nor most proficient trumpeter of his time(s). On the other hand, accepting or embracing this circumstance enabled Davis to play, literally, to his strengths. As a result, he cultivated an approach that relied upon silence as much as sound: Miles took the philosophy of less is more to unprecedented levels. In a sense, he transcended technique, evolving into a directness that achieved an uncommon sensitivity: his solos were ceaselessly expressive, lyrical and filled with concentrated feeling. This facility was perhaps never on more obvious display than it is throughout Sketches of Spain." (Sean Murphy, PopMatters)

Song Of 1960 - Will You Love Me Tomorrow (The Shirelles, United States)
"The way it usually works is that the songwriter comes up with a song and gets the first crack at performing it before other artists come along looking to cover it. In the case of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the whole process was rearranged with fascinating results, mainly due to the unorthodox career trajectory of the great Carole King. n 1960, King was the music-writing half of a budding songwriting team which also included her lyric-writing husband Gerry Goffin. When they got the opportunity to write a song for up-and-coming girl group The Shirelles, they responded with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” a pop masterpiece that topped the charts in 1961, the first #1 in history by a girl group and the first major success for the Goffin/King duo. Goffin’s lyrics deftly touch on the doubt that lurks behind all new romances. As sung by Shirelles’ leader Shirley Owens in unflappable manner, the song doesn’t skimp on the wonder inherent in any fresh coupling. But it’s also unflinchingly realistic about the possibility that the fairy dust will dissolve at dawn. “Can I believe the magic in your sighs?” Owens pointedly asks her paramour. In the bridge, Goffin’s words flow like champagne even as they fear the possible hangover: “Tonight with words unspoken/You’ll say that I’m the only one/But will my heart be broken/When the night meets the morning sun.” King’s melody plays a big role in the overall effect, arching high in the verses and middle eight while accompanied by strings that elegantly trip across the proceedings like moonlight dancers, before coming back down to Earth for the interrogative refrain." (Jim Beviglia, American Songwriter)

Movies Of 1960:
1. Breathless - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
2. Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock (United States)
3. La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini (Italy)
4. L’avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
5. Le Trou - Jacques Becker (France)

Books Of 1960:
1. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (United States)
2. Rabbit, Run - John Updike (United States)
3. Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
4. Palace Of The Peacock - Wilson Harris (United Kingdom)
5. Welcome To Hard Times - E.L. Doctorow (United States)

Albums Of 1960:
1. Sketches Of Spain - Miles Davis (United States)
2. The Incredible Jazz Guitar Of Wes Montgomery - Wes Montgomery (United States)
3. At Last! - Etta James (United States)
4. Joan Baez - Joan Baez (United States)
5. Kontakte - Karlheinz Stockhausen (Germany)

Songs Of 1960:
1. Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles (United States)
2. Spanish Harlem - Ben E. King (United States)
3. Shakin’ All Over - Johnny Kidd And The Pirates (United Kingdom)
4. Walk, Don’t Run - The Ventures (United States)
5. Because They’re Young - Duane Eddy (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1961



Book of 1961 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | USA | all time #29
"Catch-22 is a satirical, historical fiction novel by the American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the latter stages of the Second World War from 1943 onwards, follows Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters. Many events in the book are repeatedly described from differing points of view, so the reader learns more about the event from each iteration. Furthermore, the events are referred to as if the reader already knows all about them. The pacing of Catch-22 is frenetic, its tenor intellectual, and its humor largely absurd, but interspersed with grisly moments of realism." (Publisher)

Movie of 1961 | Viridiana (Viridiana) | Luis Buñuel | Spain | Mexico | all time #64
"Banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican, Luis Buñuel's irreverent vision of life as a beggar's banquet is regarded by many as his masterpiece. In it, novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism. Winner of the Palme d’or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, Viridiana is as audacious today as ever." (The Criterion Collection)

Record of 1961 | Stand By Me | Ben E. King | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #70
"Stand By Me sounds like it wasn't written, that it just always existed — it wasn't heard until Ben E. King released it as a single in the spring of 1961. Of course, that isn't the case. King wrote the song with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and it was released as the follow-up to Spanish Harlem. It had the same elegance, but there was a big difference. It was slower, statelier, anchored by one of the most memorable non-blues walking bass lines in history and King's warm, refined delivery. His performance is surrounded by a superb, subtle arrangement, where the majestic orchestra doesn't sweep in until the bridge where it cleverly disguises a key change." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music)


Books of 1961:
1 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | USA | #29
2 | The Stories of Anton Chekhov | Anton Chekhov | USA | Russia | collection | #32
3 | The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | USA | #127
4 | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | UK | #203


Movies of 1961:
1 | Viridiana (Viridiana) | Luis Buñuel | Spain | Mexico | #64
2 | L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) | Alain Resnais | France | #94
3 | La notte (The Night) | Michelangelo Antonioni | Italy | #237


Albums of 1961:
1 | Sunday at the Village Vanguard | Bill Evans Trio featuring Scott La Faro | USA | #487
2 | Free Jazz | The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet | USA | #547
3 | The Blues and the Abstract Truth | Oliver Nelson | USA | #634


Songs of 1961:
1 | Stand By Me | Ben E. King | USA | #70
2 | Runaway | Del Shannon | USA | #222
3 | Crazy | Patsy Cline | USA | #225
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1962



Movie of 1962 | Lawrence of Arabia | David Lean | UK | all time #36
"Like virtually all Hollywood films, it takes plenty of poetic license —oversimplifying the Middle East campaigns of World War I. As a shining example of a vanished breed of epic filmmaking, though, it can't be beat. The scene most admirers remember best —a near-dead Lawrence reemerging from the desert after risking his life to rescue a fallen comrade— is so long and minimal that no director in the age of Spielberg & Co. would dream of attempting it. In short, they don't make 'em like this one anymore. Viewing it is like taking a time machine to a movie age that was more naive than our own in some ways, more sophisticated and ambitious in others." (David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor)

Book of 1962 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | USA | all time #74
"The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum." (Publisher)

Record of 1962 | Green Onions | Booker T. and The MG's | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #127
"Green Onions is one of the most popular instrumental rock and soul songs ever. Instrumentals were very big in rock music when Green Onions came out, and many stuck to conventional, even boring, major-keyed R&B-based riffs. Green Onions was immediately distinctive and different for its ominous three-note riffs and minor-colored, constant key changes. It was a sweet-sour blend akin to the Green Onions of the title, but very tough and creepy as well, like a hypnotic prelude to a night of prowling for action in dark alleys. Booker T. & the MGs' instrumental talents really asserted themselves on this recording as well, particularly in Booker T. Jones's distinctive choked organ textures and skittering, economic single-note solos." (Richie Unterberger, All Music)


Books of 1962:
1 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | USA | #74
2 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | UK | #119
3 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | UK | #132


Movies of 1962:
1 | Lawrence of Arabia | David Lean | UK | #36
2 | Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) | François Truffaut | France | #84
3 | The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance | John Ford | USA | #90


Albums of 1962:
1 | Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music | Ray Charles | USA | #335
2 | Howlin' Wolf | Howlin' Wolf | USA | #518
3 | Waltz for Debby | Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro, Paul Motian | USA | #733


Songs of 1962:
1 | Green Onions | Booker T. and The MG's | USA | #127
2 | You've Really Got a Hold on Me | The Miracles | USA | #480
3 | The Loco-Motion | Little Eva | USA | #516


Classical work of 1962 | War Requiem | Benjamin Britten | UK | #59
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1961:

Movie Of 1961 - Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, Spain)
"A great many directors, when asked to name their favourite film-maker, invoke the name of Luis Buñuel. It isn't surprising, since he was undoubtedly a genius who had the invaluable capacity to offend and delight at the same time. You could choose any of a dozen of his films as one of the best 100. Viridiana is my choice, since it caused the maximum annoyance to people one is quite glad to see offended. It was made in Spain in 1960 after Franco had told his minister of culture to invite the country's leading film-maker back from exile in Mexico to make whatever film he liked. But once he completed it, Buñuel sensibly decamped, deliberately leaving a few out-takes behind to be instantly burned by the authorities. The film was, of course, banned outright in Spain and the minister reprimanded for passing the script. But it won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, despite protests about it representing Spain and articles in l'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official organ, saying it was an insult not just to Catholicism but to Christianity itself. That was exactly what Buñuel intended. He had long ago lost his faith and Viridiana was the score he had to settle with the Catholic Church, for its support of Franco and what he considered to be many other sins. "I hope I don't go to hell", he once said, "imagine the table talk of all those popes and cardinals"." (Derek Malcolm, The Guardian)

Book Of 1961 - Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, United States)
"When Catch-22 was first released, it wasn't universally well-received. Until then, books about war tended to be serious works, often tragic in tone. Heller's war was a black comedy, filled with orders from above that made no sense and characters who just wanted to stay alive. The novel seemed to offend some reviewers. The New York Times called it an "emotional hodgepodge." But other critics took on the book as a cause. "It seemed to me like the first genuine post-World War II novel," says Robert Brustein, who reviewed Catch-22 for The New Republic. He says he was blown away by the book and the way Heller's depictions of war turned the idea of heroism on its head. "He was using a tone that is not normally used when you talk about war, especially wars fought by Americans," Brustein explains. "The language we use when we refer to our soldiers is 'our brave heroic boys.' We don't use language that indicates they might be insane, and that's what Joe Heller was one of the first brave men to do — and he ran into a firestorm as a result.". The young people who took to the streets to protest the war embraced Catch-22. Heller may have based the novel on his own experiences in World War II, but the voice that emerged captured the tone of a new generation that had lost respect for authority and refused to take anything at face value. But young people in antiwar protests and on college campuses weren't the only ones reading the book. Marc Anderson read Catch-22 while serving in Vietnam. He carried it with him on forays into the jungle and lent it to other soldiers who wanted to know what he was reading. "I would tell people about it and they'd get a kick out of it, and I'd let them have it for a day or two and they'd read sections of it," Anderson recalls. "I think it had a lot of resonance with the Vietnam soldiers because ... they were drafted, they didn't choose to be there. And it was pretty apparent once you'd been there a little while: 'This is silly. We're fighting peasants with BB guns with a 500,000-person army"." (Lynn Neary, NPR)

Album Of 1961 - Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Bill Evans Trio, United States)
"After kicking around as a sideman for the likes of Tony Scott, Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley, and Miles Davis (contributing to the fabulous Kind of Blue with the latter), Evans formed his first and perhaps greatest trio in late 1959 and released five LPs that were to define the art of the trio. Along with Bassist wunderkind Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans perfected his democratic vision of trio cooperation, where all members performed with perfect empathy and telepathy. Three of these five LPs (now two compact discs) detailed this trio's performances one Sunday afternoon in mid-1961 at New York City's fabled Village Vanguard. It is these performances, currently available as Sunday at The Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby that comprise the number one best jazz live recording in this present series. Pure and thoughtful musicality permeates the 20 performances of 12 disparate songs. Evans, LaFaro, and Motian slide over and under one another in a sumptuously alchemic solution, resulting in a single homogenous musical thought expressed in one voice from three distinctive philosophies. Evans is quiet on "My Foolish Heart," angular on the two Miles Davis originals "Solar" and "Milestones" originals, and totally inward on Porgy and Bess ballads "My Man's Gone Now" and "I loves You, Porgy." Scott LaFaro's "Gloria's Step" and "Jade Visions" are crystalline in their brevity and starkness, pulling the trio to the heights of perfect empathetic cooperation. All that remains is the hope that one day Fantasy, Inc. will find the lost sides of that early summer afternoon 40 years ago and release a complete recording as they have done for so many other artists, including Evans. We should honor the quiet genius in these songs." (C. Michael Bailey, All About Jazz)

Song Of 1961 - Stand By Me (Ben E. King, United States)
"Music fans know that there’s much more to King than that one song. They know that he was born Benjamin Earl Nelson in 1938, in North Carolina, and moved to Harlem when he was nine. They know that he came from foundational doo-wop and went on to the Drifters, where he secured that group’s place in music history with “There Goes My Baby,” and then gave voice to the Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman songwriting partnership. Records like “Save the Last Dance for Me" and "This Magic Moment" became sort of the bedrock of East Coast R. & B. as it turned into soul. The work also connected him, at least spiritually, with a generation of rockers—Lou Reed had a longstanding relationship with Pomus, and Led Zeppelin played King’s song "We're Gonna Groove" frequently. His later releases tended toward different orbits—“Supernatural Thing," from 1975, was very much of its time, mid-tempo, Latin-flavored funk; it topped the R. & B. charts in March of that year, and was later covered by Siouxsie and the Banshees. But “Stand by Me” remains King's crowning achievement, one that connected not only with the public but with an exceptionally high number of performers—more than four hundred cover versions have been recorded. John Lennon’s loose, poignant rendition, from 1975, is the most widely known, but everyone from Muhammad Ali (who laid down a remarkably respectable version, in 1963, when he was still Cassius Clay) to Stephen King (his verbose, tongue-in-cheek take appeared in 1999) has tried it. With YouTube and other forms of digital media, the number of times that the song has been paid homage is incalculable. “Stand by Me” has a deeper resonance than most pop songs, which is perhaps why it has such a lasting and universal appeal. The instantly recognizable bass line echoes humanity’s collective heartbeat. The gentle tapping of a triangle at the introduction functions as a reminder to wake up, calling to mind Buddhist chimes. The song cuts across generations as it starts with a childish concern—fear of the dark—and then offers a kind of adult relief two-thirds of the way through, with an uplifting orchestral break. And there’s a twist to the pronouns at the end that essentially says, “If you help me, I’ll help you.”." (John Donohue, The New Yorker)

Movies Of 1961:
1. Viridiana - Luis Bunuel (Spain)
2. Last Year At Marienbad - Alain Resnais (France)
3. Accattone - Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy)
4. La Notte - Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
5. Judgement At Nuremberg - Stanley Kramer (United States)

Books Of 1961:
1. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (United States)
2. The Stories Of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov (Russia)
3. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy (United States)
4. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates (United States)
5. The Soft Machine - William S. Burroughs (United States)

Albums Of 1961:
1. Sunday At The Village Vanguard - Bill Evans Trio (United States)
2. Free Jazz - Ornette Coleman (United States)
3. Two Steps From The Blues - Bobby Bland (United States)
4. Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall - Jimmy Reed (United States)
5. The Blues And The Abstract Truth - Oliver Nelson (United States)

Songs Of 1961:
1. Stand By Me - Ben E. King (United States)
2. Crazy - Patsy Cline (United States)
3. Please Mr. Postman - The Marvelettes (United States)
4. Hit The Road Jack - Ray Charles (United States)
5. Runaway - Del Shannon (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1962:

Movie Of 1962 - Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut, France)
"Jules and Jim, French Jules et Jim, French film, released in 1962, that is the definitive New Wave movie by director François Truffaut. It epitomizes the type of groundbreaking cinema that originated in Europe during the postwar years through the 1960s. The simple tale concerns a love triangle involving three young people in prewar Paris. Jules (played by Oskar Werner) and his best friend Jim (Henri Serre) are hopelessly smitten with Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a free-spirited, beautiful young woman who prides herself on defying society’s idea of conventional behaviour. Although she marries Jules, over the years their love affair expands to include Jim as well—though both men realize soon enough that Catherine is a high-maintenance woman and that she may indeed be quite mad. The film’s performances were acclaimed, and Moreau’s fickle Catherine is a classic New Wave woman—heedless, beautiful, and something of a cipher. The cinematography, employing the jump cuts and freeze frames so integral to 1960s film style, gives Jules and Jim an offbeat style that welcomes repeat viewings." (Lee Pfeiffer, Britannica.com)

Book Of 1962 - A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, United Kingdom)
"A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English. According to Burgess, it was a jeu d'esprit written in just three weeks. In 2005, A Clockwork Orange was included on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The original manuscript of the book has been located at McMaster University's William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada since the institution purchased the documents in 1971. (Wikipedia)

Album Of 1962 - Jazz Samba (Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd, United States)
"Partly because of its Brazilian collaborators and partly because of "The Girl From Ipanema," Getz/Gilberto is nearly always acknowledged as the Stan Getz bossa nova LP. But Jazz Samba is just as crucial and groundbreaking; after all, it came first, and in fact was the first full-fledged bossa nova album ever recorded by American jazz musicians. And it was just as commercially successful, topping the LP charts and producing its own pop chart hit single in "Desafinado." It was the true beginning of the bossa nova craze, and introduced several standards of the genre (including Ary Barroso's "Bahia" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Desafinado" and "Samba de Uma Nota Só" [aka "One Note Samba"]). But above all, Jazz Samba stands on its own artistic merit as a shimmering, graceful collection that's as subtly advanced -- in harmony and rhythm -- as it is beautiful. Getz and his co-billed partner, guitarist Charlie Byrd -- who was actually responsible for bringing bossa nova records to the U.S. and introducing Getz to the style -- have the perfect touch for bossa nova's delicate, airy texture. For his part, Byrd was one of the first American musicians to master bossa nova's difficult, bubbling syncopations, and his solos are light and lilting. Meanwhile, Getz's playing is superb, simultaneously offering a warm, full tone and a cool control of dynamics; plus, Byrd's gently off-kilter harmonies seem to stimulate Getz's melodic inventiveness even more than usual. But beyond technique, Getz intuitively understands the romanticism and the undercurrent of melancholy inherent in the music, and that's what really made Jazz Samba such a revelatory classic. Absolutely essential for any jazz collection." (Steve Huey, AllMusic)

Song Of 1962 - Green Onions (Booker T. & The MG's, United States)
"One Sunday, we were supposed to be working with a singer called Billie Lee Riley, but something hadn’t worked out. He’d packed up and left, so we had the studio to ourselves. We started playing around with a piano groove I’d been performing in the clubs, trying to emulate Ray Charles. It sounded better on the organ, so I kept on playing that. Stax owner Jim Stewart liked what we were doing and wanted to put it out. Then it occurred to him that we needed a flip-side. So I started playing another bluesy riff I had. This was how Green Onions began. That band – Al Jackson on drums, Lewie Steinberg on bass, Steve Cropper on guitar – was a once-in-a-lifetime unit. We clicked because of our devotion to simplicity. The bassline was basic 12-bar blues. Al was a human metronome on the drums. Lewie called this doodling jam Funky Onions, but Jim’s sister said: “We can’t use that word.” To laced-up, deep-south conservative America, it sounded like a cuss word. So we retitled it Green Onions. We were a racially integrated band before civil rights. One white person and three black people – one of whom looked white! Nobody realised this until we started performing in public. We had problems with things like segregated eating, but we survived. Green Onions started the “Memphis soul sound”, that deep organ. Years later, in the 70s, I was sitting in a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and this dude jumped up and started dancing on the table, plates flying. Everyone was laughing, then he just took off. I said: “Who was that guy?” It turned out to be Keith Moon from the Who, paying me a form of tribute. Shortly afterwards, the Who used Green Onions in Quadrophenia, and it became a hit in the UK all over again. It’s still one of my favourite songs. It’s defined my life. But it’s deceptively simple. There’s a magic in there that’s hard to capture. To get it right, I still have to practise." (Booker T. Jones, The Guardian)

Movies Of 1962:
1. Jules et Jim - Francois Truffaut (France)
2. Lawrence Of Arabia - David Lean (United Kingdom)
3. Cleo From 5 To 7 - Agnes Varda (France)
4. La Jetee - Chris Marker (France)
5. Salvatore Giuliano - Francesco Rosi (Italy)

Books Of 1962:
1. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (United Kingdom)
2. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (United States)
3. The Man In The High Castle - Philip K. Dick (United States)
4. The Death Of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)
5. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (United Kingdom)

Albums Of 1962:
1. Jazz Samba - Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd (United States)
2. Waltz For Debby - Bill Evans Trio (United States)
3. Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music - Ray Charles (United States)
4. Green Onions - Booker T. & The MG’s (United States)
5. Peace Be Still - James Cleveland And The Angelic Choir (United States)

Songs Of 1962:
1. Green Onions - Booker T. & The MG’s (United States)
2. Pipeline - The Chantays (United States)
3. He’s A Rebel - The Crystals (United States)
4. Cry To Me - Solomon Burke (United States)
5. Miserlou - Dick Dale (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1963



Movie of 1963 | (8½) | Federico Fellini | Italy | all time #6
"If all you know about this exuberant, self-regarding 1963 film is based on its countless inferior imitations (from Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini's exhilarating, stocktaking original, an expressionist, circuslike comedy about the complex mental and social life of a big-time filmmaker (Marcello Mastroianni) stuck for a subject and the busy world surrounding him. It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did —certainly more fun than anything he made after it." (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)

Record of 1963 | Be My Baby | The Ronettes | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #7
"Be My Baby was a massive influence on both The Beatles and The Beach Boys in terms of its sonic dynamics. Producer Phil Spector (who still earns a fortune in royalties from it each year) multi-layered the instruments and threw in all manner of advanced echo to get the fabled Wall of Sound effect on the track. When drummer Hal Blaine hit the bass drum three times followed by a snap on the snare in Los Angeles's Gold Star Studios in the summer of 1963, he was providing the intro to a song that changed everything. It is perhaps the most important two minutes and 41 seconds in pop music." (Brian Boys, Irish Times)

Book of 1963 | Rayuela (Hopscotch) | Julio Cortázar | Argentina | all time #434
"The story of two young writers whose lives are playing themselves out in Buenos Aires and Paris to the sounds of jazz and brilliant talk, Hopscotch, written in 1963, was the first hypertext novel. Anticipating the age of the web with a non-structure that allows readers to take the chapters in any order they wish, Hopscotch invites them to be the architects of the novel themselves. Soon after publication, the classic work took on a cult status it has never lost, and is celebrated worldwide as one of the greatest landmarks of 20th–Century fiction." (Publisher)


Books of 1963:
1 | Rayuela (Hopscotch) | Julio Cortázar | Argentina | #434
2 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | UK | USA | #450
3 | Where the Wild Things Are | Maurice Sendak | USA | #493


Movies of 1963:
1 | 8½ (8½) | Federico Fellini | Italy | #6
2 | Le mépris (Contempt) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | #39
3 | Il gattopardo (The Leopard) | Luchino Visconti | Italy | #74


Albums of 1963:
1 | 'Live' at the Apollo | James Brown | USA | #44
2 | The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan | Bob Dylan | USA | #166
3 | With the Beatles/Meet the Beatles! | The Beatles | UK | #344


Songs of 1963:
1 | Be My Baby | The Ronettes | USA | #7
2 | Louie Louie | The Kingsmen | USA | #41
3 | I Want to Hold Your Hand | The Beatles | UK | #84
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1963:

Movie Of 1963 - 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, Italy)
“8 1/2" is the best film ever made about filmmaking. It is told from the director's point of view, and its hero, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is clearly intended to represent Fellini. It begins with a nightmare of asphyxiation, and a memorable image in which Guido floats off into the sky, only to be yanked back to earth by a rope pulled by his associates, who are hectoring him to organize his plans for his next movie. Much of the film takes place at a spa near Rome, and at the enormous set Guido has constructed nearby for his next film, a science fiction epic he has lost all interest in. The film weaves in and out of reality and fantasy. Some critics complained that it was impossible to tell what was real and what was taking place only in Guido's head, but I have never had the slightest difficulty, and there is usually a clear turning point as Guido escapes from the uncomfortable present into the accommodating world of his dreams. Sometimes the alternate worlds are pure invention, as in the famous harem scene where Guido rules a house occupied by all of the women in his life--his wife, his mistresses, and even those he has only wanted to sleep with. In other cases, we see real memories that are skewed by imagination. When little Guido joins his schoolmates at the beach to ogle the prostitute Saraghina, she is seen as the towering, overpowering, carnal figure a young adolescent would remember. When he is punished by his priests of his Catholic school, one entire wall is occupied by a giant portrait of Dominic Savio, a symbol of purity in that time and place; the portrait, too large to be real, reflects Guido's guilt that he lacks the young saint's resolve. All of the images (real, remembered, invented) come together into one of the most tightly structured films Fellini made. The screenplay is meticulous in its construction--and yet, because the story is about a confused director who has no idea what he wants to do next, "8 1/2" itself is often described as the flailings of a filmmaker without a plan. "What happens," asks a Web-based critic, "when one of the world's most respected directors runs out of ideas, and not just in a run-of-the-mill kind of way, but whole hog, so far that he actually makes a film about himself not being able to make a film?" But "8 1/2" is not a film about a director out of ideas--it is a film filled to bursting with inspiration. Guido is unable to make a film, but Fellini manifestly is not.“ (Roger Ebert)

Book Of 1963 - The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin, United States)
“The national reckoning that we now know as “The Fire Next Time” begins with Baldwin’s salvation. At 14, he found himself writhing on his church’s floor, experiencing a pain “like one of those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down.” He became a child preacher reveling in his congregation’s exclamatory community (“Amen!” “Yes, Lord!”) until he realized that preaching was his revenge against his stepfather and hell his church’s revenge against the world. When the essay turns to Baldwin’s dinner with Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s castigation of white devils and Elijah’s followers’ affirmations around the table (“Yes, that’s right”) were unnerving because they were familiar. The resemblance leads to Baldwin’s insight that churches, nations and races are fantasies intended to evade death, whereas we should confront “with passion the conundrum of life.” The essay’s final movement confronts our menaced nationhood and reaches such a sustained, high pitch that it feels as if several implicit rules are breaking simultaneously. It’s at around this point that we realize we’ve ascended to this height from the boy on the church floor devastated by biblical floodwaters. Fire comes next. We will achieve our country together, Baldwin concludes, or burn in the apocalypse. If God exists, he is, at the very least, history.” (Kevin Birmingham, The New York Times)

Album Of 1963 - Live At The Apollo (James Brown, United States)
“Soul music wasn’t exactly born on October 24th, 1962, but on that day it took a great leap to becoming the dominant form of African-American popular song. For it was on that autumn Wednesday in New York that organist and compere Fats Gonder asked the Apollo Theater throng if it was “ready for star time,” the star being his boss, “the hardest-working man in show business.” R&B singer, songwriter and bandleader James Brown then proceeded to render a performance that shook the walls of the famed Harlem music hall. And thanks to Brown’s insistence on financing the recording of that show for release, against the doubts of King Records head Syd Nathan, we can all bear witness to an entertainer at the height of his powers — captured so vividly you can almost see him sweat — on what many people still consider the greatest live album ever. (Brown was further vindicated when the LP peaked at Number Two.) The James Brown of Live at the Apollo was an ace balladeer years removed from inventing funk, but what Mr. Dynamite did deliver to the famously tough Apollo fans was a relentless, driven set steeped in the church, the cotton field and the juke joint, pushing his waistband-tight musicians like a drill sergeant. Gospel-soaked vamps such as “Try Me,” “I Don’t Mind” and the ten-minute-plus showstopper “Lost Someone” are testaments to Brown’s ability to wrap sexuality in the Lord’s cloak. And on a cover of the “5” Royales’ “Think,” he jacks up the bpm to speedcore rate and dares the band to keep pace. By the time the fading notes of “Night Train” allow the spent Brown passage offstage, he has transformed a Wednesday into Saturday night and Sunday morning.” (Gaylord Fields, Rolling Stone)

Song Of 1963 - Be My Baby (The Ronettes, United States)
“Forget girl groups for a second. If you were to condense all of pop history to one five-second sound byte -- one snippet for the aliens, the previously deaf, or the avowedly Scrooge-like to turn them into instant converts -- it'd have to be the opening bars of "Be My Baby," a drum intro iconic enough to provide the ultimate through-line in the decades of popular recordings since, so regularly quoted that it's gone past the point of cliché to just being an essential part of the cultural language. It's nothing less than the heartbeat of American pop music, pumping blood and vitality into future generations: Everything from punk to techno to shoegaze to chamber pop to arena rock to Diane Warren owes a percentage of its fundamental DNA to that BOOM. BA-BOOM. CHK!. OK, now remember girl groups again. As elemental as that drum intro (performed by Hal Blaine, produced by Phil Spector) has become, it's just another brick in the Wall of Sound without The Ronettes selling the song to follow. Ronnie Spector's voice -- obviously thin, but still undeniably towering, like Manute Bol -- was the sound of billions of young hopes and dreams, and her note-perfect reading of Greenwich and Barry's greatest composition (with Estelle Bennett and Nedra Talley serving as the perfect background subconscious) grows more epochal in every second. The song is a 2:41-long head rush, a dizzying celebration of life, love and the pursuit of teenage kicks, and if it ever goes out of style, that means we've actually invented something better than pop music. Might take a while still.“ (Andrew Unterberger, Billboard)

Movies Of 1963:
1. 8 1/2 - Federico Fellini (Italy)
2. Contempt - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
3. Barren Lives - Nelson Pereira Dos Santos (Brazil)
4. El Verduga - Luis Garcia Berlanga (Spain)
5. Mothlight - Stan Brakhage (United States)

Books Of 1963:
1. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin (United States)
2. Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar (Argentina)
3. The Time Of The Hero - Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
4. The Poetry Of Luis Cernuda - Luis Cernuda (Spain)
5. The Interrogation - J.M.G. Le Clezio (France)

Albums Of 1963:
1. Live At The Apollo - James Brown (United States)
2. The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady - Charles Mingus (United States)
3. Please Please Me - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Our Man In Paris - Dexter Gordon (United States)
5. Page One - Joe Henderson (United States)

Songs Of 1963:
1. Be My Baby - The Ronettes (United States)
2. She Loves You - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
3. I Want To Hold Your Hand - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Wipe Out - The Surfaris (United States)
5. Surfin’ Bird - The Trashmen (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1964



Record of 1964 | You Really Got Me | The Kinks | UK | 45 rpm single | all time #28
"There are very few records whose influence can be so strongly felt after 55 years as the Kinks' You Really Got Me. It is the song that has been widely touted as the blueprint for hard rock and heavy metal, long before the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin came along. And it is also a number that has been shrouded in rumours and controversy for more than five decades with regard to who actually played what, especially the jarring, distorted two‑chord riff that opens the track and continues behind the lead vocal, and the fierce, deliberately sloppy guitar solo that paved the way for punk rock." (Richard Buskin, Sound on Sound)

Movie of 1964 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | all time #48
"Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries." (Geoff Andrew, Time Out)

Book of 1964 | Herzog | Saul Bellow | USA | all time #266
"In one of his finest achievements, Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him —he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friends— Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart." (Publisher)


Books of 1964:
1 | Herzog | Saul Bellow | USA | #266
2 | Lunch Poems | Frank O'Hara | USA | #575
3 | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | Roald Dahl | USA | UK | #740


Movies of 1964:
1 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | #48
2 | Gertrud (Gertrud) | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark | #87
3 | Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy | #145


Albums of 1964:
1 | A Hard Day's Night | The Beatles | UK | #206
2 | Out to Lunch! | Eric Dolphy | USA | #340
3 | Getz / Gilberto | Stan Getz & João Gilberto featuring Antônio Carlos Jobim | USA | USA/Brazil | #389


Songs of 1964:
1 | You Really Got Me | The Kinks | UK | #28
2 | A Change Is Gonna Come | Sam Cooke | USA | #40
3 | You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' | The Righteous Brothers | USA | #60

Note:
Not the Beatles neither the Stones. The first act that pushed a record of the year ahead of the movie and the book of the year for the very first time was the British band The Kinks with their landmark recording "You Really Got Me."
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1964:

Movie Of 1964 - Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, United Kingdom)
"For those who know Dr. Strangelove well, here’s a fun experiment: Watch it with the sound off, imagining that you’ve never seen it before, and try to determine at which point you’d realize that you’re supposed to be laughing. Stanley Kubrick, collaborating on the script with Terry Southern and Peter George, deliberately warped George’s novel Red Alert (originally titled Two Hours To Doom), turning what had been a deadly serious thriller into a black comedy. Equally inspired was Kubrick’s decision to fashion the movie’s visual scheme as if nothing had been changed at all. Apart from some mugging by George C. Scott (who was famously tricked into giving a much broader performance than he wanted to) and a few especially goofy moments in the last few minutes, Dr. Strangelove looks for all the world as if it’s telling the same sober cautionary tale as does Fail-Safe, the remarkably similar movie that was released just eight months later. Only the dialogue and some new, silly character names openly express the absurdity that Kubrick and company find in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction." (Mike D'Angelo, The A.V. Club)

Book Of 1964 - Last Exit To Brooklyn (Hubert Selby Jr., United States)
"The novel is broken into six parts which act as self-contained vignettes, each prefaced with a biblical quotation. Taken as a whole, it is a compartmentalised study in urban cruelty; New York becomes almost dystopian in the way that it spits out hoodlums and undeserving victims from every street corner. In "The Queen is Dead", a "hip queer" - the transvestite Georgette – is scorned and attacked by both her would-be lover and her brutal brother, and seeks solace in marijuana and Benzedrine. In "Tralala", the prostitute, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the 1989 film, is barely 18, and pays for her risky business by succumbing to extreme sexual violence. The novel's famously idiosyncratic prose - a crudely punctuated, phonetic vernacular - is cut through with a surprising intermittent lyricism, making it clear that Selby has some sympathy for his characters. This saves what could have been a bitterly depressing book from being truly sadistic." (Charlotte Newman, The Guardian)

Album Of 1964 - It's My Way! (Buffy Sainte-Marie, Canada)
"It’s My Way! is the first album by folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. Though the album did not chart it proved influential in the folk community. It is most famous for two widely covered folk standards, "Universal Soldier" and "Cod'ine", as well as "Now That the Buffalo's Gone", a lament about the continued confiscation of Indian lands, as evidenced by the building of the Kinzua Dam in about 1964. The cover features a mouthbow, which was to be a trademark of her sound on her first three albums. Cod'ine was also lyrically altered by Janis Joplin and appears on This is Janis Joplin 1965. In 2016, It's My Way! was inducted by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry. Writing for Allmusic, music critic William Ruhlman gave the album 5 of 5 stars and wrote "This is one of the most scathing topical folk albums ever made... Even decades later, the album's power is moving and disturbing." (Wikipedia)

Song Of 1964 - A Change Is Gonna Come (Sam Cooke, United States)
"Rolling Stone now calls "A Change Is Gonna Come" one of the greatest songs of all time, but in 1964 its political message was a risky maneuver. Cooke had worked hard to be accepted as a crossover artist after building a sizable following on the gospel circuit. And the first thing to know about the song, Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick says, is that it's unlike anything the singer had ever recorded. "His first success came with the song 'You Send Me.' I mean, this was his first crossover number under his own name, and it went to No. 1 on the pop charts, which was just unheard of," Guralnick says. "As he evolved as a pop singer, he brought more and more of his gospel background into his music, as well as his social awareness, which was keen. But really, 'A Change Is Gonna Come' was a real departure for him, in the sense that it was undoubtedly the first time that he addressed social problems in a direct and explicit way." "A Change Is Gonna Come" was released on the album Ain't That Good News in March of 1964. The civil rights movement picked up on it immediately, but most of Cooke's audience did not — mostly because it wasn't selected as one of the first singles and because Cooke only played the song before a live audience once. "It was a complex arrangement with something like 17 strings," Guralnick says. "I think part of him felt, 'I'm not gonna do it if I can't to justice to it.' But the other part was that it had this kind of ominousness about it. "When he first played it for Bobby Womack, who was his protégé, he said, 'What's it sound like?' And Bobby said, 'It sounds like death.' Sam said, 'Man, that's kind of how it sounds like to me. That's why I'm never going to play it in public.' And Bobby sort of rethought it and said, 'Well, it's not like death, but it sounds kind of spooky.'" It was more than spooky. Just before the song was to be released as a single in December of 1964, Sam Cooke would be shot to death at a motel in Los Angeles. Guralnick says "A Change Is Gonna Come" is now much more than a civil rights anthem. It's become a universal message of hope, one that does not age. "Generation after generation has heard the promise of it. It continues to be a song of enormous impact," he says. "We all feel in some way or another that a change is gonna come, and he found that lyric. It was the kind of hook that he always looked for: The phrase that was both familiar but was striking enough that it would have its own originality. And that makes it almost endlessly adaptable to whatever goal, whatever movement is of the moment." (NPR)

Movies Of 1964:
1. Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (United Kingdom)
2. I Am Cuba - Mikhail Kalatozov (USSR)
3. Black God, White Devil - Glauber Rocha (Brazil)
4. Sallah Shabati - Ephraim Kishon (Israel)
5. A Hard Day’s Night - Richard Lester (United Kingdom)

Books Of 1964:
1. Last Exit To Brooklyn - Hubert Selby Jr. (United States)
2. Lunch Poems - Frank O’Hara (United States)
3. Herzog - Saul Bellow (United States)
4. A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe (Japan)
5. Beauty And Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)

Albums Of 1964:
1. It’s My Way! - Buffy Sainte-Marie (Canada)
2. Getz/Gilberto - Stan Getz And Joao Gilberto (United States)
3. A Hard Day’s Night - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Where Did Our Love Go - The Supremes (United States)
5. Jazz pa svenska - Jan Johansson (Sweden)

Songs Of 1964:
1. A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke (United States)
2. Dancing In The Street - Martha And The Vandellas (United States)
3. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ - The Righteous Brothers (United States)
4. Don’t Worry Baby - The Beach Boys (United States)
5. Walk On By - Dionne Warwick (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

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1965



Record of 1965 | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #1
"Released in July of 1965, Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was, in many ways, the dividing line between the past and the future of rock and roll. The lyrics, the mood, the ramshackle rock and roll sound… it was the way forward. Issued as a single and the lead track on the Highway 61 Revisited LP, it ran for a then-unprecedented six minutes. With Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan would make the ultimate 'folk rock' statement, closing one door and opening another at the same time. Poetry was now as much a part of the arsenal for young musicians as the electric guitar. Musically, that crack of the snare drum that sets Like a Rolling Stone in motion is the shot heard round the world. Mike Bloomfield's sharp-as-nails guitar and Al Kooper's hammond organ give the song mighty wings. This is rock and roll as it was meant to be: Raw, literate, exciting, challenging and above all, memorable as hell. It can be said that Like a Rolling Stone was not only the pinnacle of Dylan's career, but it may also have been the crowning achievement of the genre." (Ultimate Classic Rock)

Movie of 1965 | Pierrot le fou (Pierrot le Fou) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | all time #63
"Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, "the last romantic couple." With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le Fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard's last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema." (The Criterion Collection)

Book of 1965 | Dune | Frank Herbert | USA | all time #212
"Frank Herbert's classic masterpiece —a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time— nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the "spice" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for…. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction." (Publisher)


Books of 1965:
1 | Dune | Frank Herbert | USA | #212
2 | The Magus | John Fowles | UK | #788
3 | At Play in the Fields of the Lord | Peter Matthiessen | USA | #1225


Movies of 1965:
1 | Pierrot le fou (Pierrot le Fou) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | #63
2 | Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight) | Orson Welles | Spain | USA | #159
3 | The Sound of Music | Robert Wise | USA | #439


Albums of 1965:
1 | Highway 61 Revisited | Bob Dylan | USA | #11
2 | Rubber Soul | The Beatles | UK | #31
3 | A Love Supreme | John Coltrane | USA | #61


Songs of 1965:
1 | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | #1
2 | (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | #5
3 | My Generation | The Who | UK | #10


Classical work of 1965 | Misa Criolla | Ariel Ramírez | Argentina | #99

Note:
So we have the #1 song of all-time, Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," in a excellent year for songs, with the other 2 songs on the Top 3 ("Satisfaction" and "My Generation") on the Top 10 of all-time.
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

I’m not questioning what’s acclaimed and what’s not, but i’ve never understood the hype behind Highway 61 Revisited and it’s tracks. There are good songs here and there, but I feel like it drags as it progresses, and ultimately ends up becoming a mixed, confusing bag of material. “Like A Rolling Stone” is untouched in it’s influence, and pop music today would probably be different without the track, but how it is history’s most acclaimed recorded song is beyond me. There’s so much music Dylan has made that surpasses the material on that album, and does Highway 61 really cover any ground that it’s predecessor didn’t? Maybe it’ll grow on me in the future, but as of now I don’t get the fuss.

1965:

Movie Of 1965 - Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
“First, a brief preface. Every time I review a film by Jean-Luc Godard, I receive outraged letters from readers who hated it. It is suggested that my reviews and myself join Godard on the trash heap of history; that the customers wuz robbed. A common complaint is that Godard "made no sense." And so on. So let this be a warning: You probably won't like "Pierrot le Fou." One of Godard's films, seen by itself, can be a frustrating and puzzling experience. But when you begin to get into his universe, when you've seen a lot of Godard, you find yourself liking him more and more. One day something clicks, and Godard comes together. And then, perhaps, you decide that if he is not the greatest living director he is certainly the most audacious, the most experimental, the one who understands best how movies work. "Pierrot Le Fou" marked the beginning of Godard's current period. Before it came the black-and-white films -- cool, quick and austere, with an emphasis on interpersonal relationships. After it came the Godard of color, wide screen and an increasing preoccupation with politics, American culture, violence, Vietnam and movies. (All of Godard's films since "Pierrot le Fou" have essentially been movies about themselves -- a statement hard to explain unless you've seen them).” (Roger Ebert)

Book Of 1965 - Stoner (John Williams, United States)
“Stoner” is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby.” I suspect one reason “Gatsby” is a classic is that, despite his delusions and his bad end, we all secretly think Gatsby’s pretty cool. Americans don’t really see him as an anti-hero or a tragic figure—not any more than they see the current breed of charismatic criminals on cable as villains. Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner” ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure. The book is set not in the city of dreams but back in the dusty heartland. It’s ostensibly an academic novel, a genre historically of interest exclusively to academics. Its values seem old-fashioned, prewar (which may be one reason it’s set a generation before it was written), holding up conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward. And its prose, compared to Fitzgerald’s ecstatic art-nouveau lyricism, is austere, restrained, and precise; its polish is the less flashy, more enduring glow of burnished hardwood; its construction is invisibly flawless, like the kind of house they don’t know how to build anymore.” (Tim Kreider, The New Yorker)

Album Of 1965 - A Love Supreme (John Coltrane, United States)
“A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane's musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters to Coltrane's stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison's iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—"a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME"—that carries out the opening movement, "Acknowledgement". By the time the record gets to the closing "Psalm", which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he'd written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane's initial vision. It's as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz. Hearing it now as part of this exhaustive 3xCD set, which gathers every scrap of material recorded during the sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year, you get a clearer sense than ever before of the different forms A Love Supreme might have taken, and how Coltrane's desire to communicate something specific and profound led to its final shape.” (Mark Richardson, Pitchfork)

Song Of 1965 - In My Life (The Beatles, United Kingdom)
“'In My Life" represented a crucial breakthrough for John Lennon — as well as a creative struggle. The song began with a question: During a March 1964 interview with Lennon, journalist Kenneth Allsop asked why he hadn't written more lyrics about his life and experiences. "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs," Lennon said to Rolling Stone in 1970. "I would write [books like] In His Own Write, to express my personal emotions. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market. I didn't consider them to have any depth at all. They were just a joke." Taking Allsop's critique to heart, Lennon wrote a long poem about people and places from his past, touching on Liverpool landmarks like Penny Lane, Strawberry Field and Menlove Avenue. "I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic version of a trip downtown on a bus, naming every sight," he said. When he read the poem later, though, "it was the most boring 'What I Did on My Holidays' song, and it wasn't working. But then I laid back, and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember." (Rolling Stone)

Movies Of 1965:
1. Pierrot le fou - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
2. Loves Of A Blonde - Milos Forman (Czechoslovakia)
3. A Patch Of Blue - Guy Green (United States)
4. Subarnarekha - Ritwik Ghatak (India)
5. Le Bonheur - Agnes Varda (France)

Books Of 1965:
1. Stoner - John Williams (United States)
2. An American Dream - Norman Mailer (United States)
3. The Collected Stories Of Katherine Anne Porter - Katherine Anne Porter (United States)
4. Last Evenings With Teresa - Juan Marsé (Spain)
5. La Chamade - Francoise Sagan (France)

Albums Of 1965:
1. A Love Supreme - John Coltrane (United States)
2. Rubber Soul - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
3. Bringing It All Back Home - Bob Dylan (United States)
4. Otis Blue - Otis Redding (United States)
5. Spiritual Unity - Albert Ayler (United States)
6. Idle Moments - Grant Green (United States)
7. Bert Jansch - Bert Jansch (United Kingdom)
8. Going To A Go-Go - Smokey Robinson And The Miracles (United States)
9. I Ain’t Marching Anymore - Phil Ochs (United States)
10. The Fugs’ First Album - The Fugs (United States)

Songs Of 1965:
1. In My Life - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
2. The Sound Of Silence - Simon And Garfunkel (United States)
3. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Stop! In The Name Of Love - The Supremes (United States)
5. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) - Bob Dylan (United States)
6. Heart Full Of Soul - The Yardbirds (United Kingdom)
7. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
8. California Dreamin’ - The Mamas And The Papas (United States)
9. Pushin’ Too Hard - The Seeds (United States)
10. Lies - The Knickerbockers (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

Sorry, Cold Butterfly, but I agree with the critics on this one. "Like a Rolling Stone" is also my favourite song of all-time. And I also like a lot the album, "Highway 61 Revisited." Sadly I don't have the time right now to elaborate my point...
Anyway here it's another fabulous year, this time for albums...

1966



Record of 1966 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | album (vinyl LP) | all time #1
"Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson's evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a "concept album"; from first cut to last we were treated to an intense, linear personal vision of the vagaries of a love affair and the painful, introverted anxieties that are the wrenching precipitates of the unstable chemistry of any love relationship. This trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain. Nobody was prepared for anything so soulful, so lovely, something one had to think about so much. It is by far the best album Brian has yet delivered, and it paradoxically began the decline in mass popularity that still plagues this band." (Stephen Davis, Rolling Stone, 1972)

Movie of 1966 | Persona (Persona) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | all time #19
"Bergman at his most brilliant as he explores the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown in which she refuses to speak, and the nurse in charge as she recuperates in a country cottage. To comment is to betray the film's extraordinary complexity, but basically it returns to two favourite Bergman themes: the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and the essentially egocentric nature of art. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women merge as one: charlatan or not, the artist can still be understood, and can therefore still understand. Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one." (Tom Milne, Time Out)

Book of 1966 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | UK (Dominica) | all time #183
"Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece." (Publisher)


Books of 1966:
1 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | UK (Dominica) | #183
2 | Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl (Season of Migration to the North) | Tayeb Salih | Sudan | #463
3 | Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Evenings with Teresa) | Juan Marsé | Spain | #630


Movies of 1966:
1 | Persona (Persona) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | #19
2 | Andrey Rublev (Andrei Rublev) | Andrey Tarkovskiy | USSR | #27
3 | Au hasard Balthazar (Au Hasard Balthazar) | Robert Bresson | France | #32


Albums of 1966:
1 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | #1
2 | Revolver | The Beatles | UK | #2
3 | Blonde on Blonde | Bob Dylan | USA | #10


Songs of 1966:
1 | Good Vibrations | The Beach Boys | USA | #4
2 | God Only Knows | The Beach Boys | USA | #20
3 | River Deep — Mountain High | Ike & Tina Turner | USA | #57

Note:
If last year we had we had the #1 song of all-time and the other two songs on the Top 3 on the Top 10 of all-time this year is the time for albums, with the #1 album of all time (The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds"), the #2 (The Beatles' "Revolver") and the #10 (Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde"). No other year will be even close to this outstanding feature on the following years.
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

Understandable, Honorio. On a side note, 1966 is a huge transition year in American popular culture. With European and Japanese cinema making a splash in the States, the dissatisfaction with the grandiosity of early-mid 1960’s American cinema began to show, and by the next year, a new era in Hollywood would begin, inspired by movements such as the French New Wave. Take in for example, the American release of Antonioni’s Blowup during this year, which showed how successful foreign films could be in this market, inspiring mainstream American cinema to trend toward more avant-garde and taboo aesthetics, ushering in timely in the midst of a growing cultural revolution.

The changes that would spearhead the decade were also shown in the music released this year, as well. Up to this point, it had been easy to dismiss Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys as “un-hip” in popular music’s growing maturation, but after Pet Sounds, it established Wilson (for a short them) as pop music’s most foremost innovator. Although Wilson recorded it with the intention of being an American answer to Rubber Soul, it’s scope enabled it to be his 400 Blows, Catcher In The Rye, and Ninth Symphony all at once. Pet Sounds was arguably the first psychedelic album, a work of sonic invention and startling intellect that was absolutely mind-bending and unprecedented upon release, and still is today. There’s been few pop albums since then that have been as emotionally captivating and resonating, with daring textures that were both gorgeous and experimental, but perceptive as well. “Good Vibrations” is another masterpiece of post-war music, a track which transformed the three minute pop song into a work of art, and it’s suite-like structure would end up not just changing pop, but the world as well.

Although there are many Beatles albums that can stake a claim for being their best, for me Revolver will always be their magnum opus. Revolver mixed passionate psychedelic guitar with baroque instrumentation and avant-garde music to create a flawless set of songs, which looking back not only summarizes their career, but is almost a perfect synthesis of Rock music’s history. Overlooked in a year defined by controversy surrounding the band, Revolver still influenced legions of musicians nevertheless. Maybe not more, but just as popular as Jesus :mrgreen:

Groups like The 13th Floor Elevators, The Monks, and The Mothers Of Inventions also released important albums during this year, which in their reinvention and expansion of simple garage rock, ended up directing where rock music would head in the future, with their primitive structures and cynical snarls proving widely influential to genres such as punk and indie. R&B continued to make leaps, with records such as “River Deep - Mountain High”, “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”, And “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” being works of considerate beauty, coated with a pleading, almost apocalyptic sound that would stand the test of time. If pop music has a defining year, 1966 definitely steps up to that role.

1966:

Movie Of 1966 - Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, France)
“Au Hasard Balthazar is often called a difficult film; it is in the sense that Bresson resisted the way movie audiences were conditioned to watch movies. In Balthazar, his “models”—as he preferred to call his often blank-faced non-professional performers—don’t portray characters, but lives, stripped of the momentary and reactive, revealing consistent arcs of tragedy, abuse, unhappiness, and desire in a look or a hand reaching for another hand in the dark. Perhaps most importantly, Bresson never attempts to humanize Balthazar. Blessed with “the salt of wisdom” in a mock baptism at the beginning of the film, he never behaves with anything but an animal’s ignorance, and his bray—never uttered in reaction—has to be the most ear-splitting sound in all of Bresson’s carefully edited soundtracks. What Balthazar experiences of human nature is both pure and limited: the embrace of a lonely young woman, the unprovoked attack of an angry young man, and the work of the farms whose owners worry over money. He is only a donkey, and therefore something much more.” (Ignaity Vishnevetsky, The A.V. Club)

Book Of 1966 - In True Blood (Truman Capote, United States)
“Some of the greatest books on this list are built on narratives that could have been torn from the pages of a newspaper (The Great Gatsby is a good example). In Cold Blood, subtitled “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences”, grandly described by Capote as “a non-fiction novel”, actually began as a New York Times murder story that became transformed into a tale of spine-tingling suspense and extraordinary intuition. It was Capote’s genius to understand that this midwest killing had a mythic quality, and that the sinister murderers opened up the dark underbelly of postwar America. During the early hours of 15 November 1959, in the small prairie community of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of a prosperous farming family, the Clutters, were savagely murdered by shotgun blasts discharged at close quarters into their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and hardly any clues. The local FBI investigator, Alvin Dewey, had never seen a crime so meaningless or “so vicious”, and vowed to hunt down and convict the killers, whatever the cost. More darkly, the backstory to Capote’s book became a private tragedy, etched between the lines of a brilliant quasi-journalistic investigation, that would haunt Capote throughout his writing life.“ (Robert McCrum, The Guardian)

Album Of 1966 - Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys, United States)
"Who's gonna hear this shit?" Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band's resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. "The ears of a dog?" But Love's contempt proved oddly useful: "Ironically," Wilson observed, "Mike's barb inspired the album's title." Barking dogs – Wilson's dog Banana among them, in fact – are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul. With its vivid orchestration, lyrical ambition, elegant pacing and thematic coherence, Pet Sounds invented – and in some sense perfected – the idea that an album could be more than the sum of its parts. When Wilson sang, "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?" on the magnificent opener, he wasn't just imagining a love that could evolve past high school; he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself.“ (Rolling Stone)

Song Of 1966 - Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys, United States)
“It’s such a great opening line: “I, I love the colorful clothes she wears / And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair.” It’s loose and dreamy and lost. The other lyrics, like the bit about the blossom world, are less revelatory, but they all get that same point across. And Carl Wilson, who sang lead on the song because Dennis got sick, delivers them with a confused-but-contented sigh, the sound of a man at a loss to explain his own happiness. “Good Vibrations” was, of course, a vastly important song. It came out after both Pet Sounds and Revolver — as well as all the Phil Spector records that Wilson so admired — so the world was already figuring out that the studio could be an instrument. But it must’ve blown people’s minds to hear that whole idea executed so brilliantly. (Imagine hearing “Good Vibrations” on pop radio for the first time.) It also set a whole new standard for psychedelic pop music, for the way it could conjure whole new colors and shapes. Prog came into existence pretty soon afterward, and “Good Vibrations” probably had something to do with that. It probably had something to do with more and more people using synths on pop songs, too. All this historical importance wouldn’t mean anything if “Good Vibrations” weren’t a good song. But it is. It’s a fucking masterpiece.“ (Tom Breiham, Stereogum)

Movies Of 1966:
1. Au Hasard Balthazar - Robert Bresson (France)
2. Persona - Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
3. Closely Watched Trains - Jiri Menzel (Czechoslovakia)
4. Blowup - Michelangelo Antonioni (United Kingdom)
5. Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR)

Books Of 1966:
1. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote (United States)
2. Season Of Migration To The North - Tayeb Salin (Sudan)
3. The Jewel In The Crown - Paul Scott (United Kingdom)
4. The Last Gentleman - Walker Percy (United States)
5. The Fixer - Bernard Malamud (United States)

Albums Of 1966:
1. Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys (United States)
2. Revolver - The Beatles (United States)
3. The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators - The 13th Floor Elevators (United States)
4. Black Monk Time - The Monks (Germany)
5. Freak Out! - The Mothers Of Invention (United States)
6. Unity - Larry Young (United States)
7. Maiden Voyage - Herbie Hancock (United States)
8. Sunshine Superman - Donovan (United Kingdom)
9. Wild Is The Wind - Nina Simone (United States)
10. Speak No Evil - Wayne Shorter (United States)

Songs Of 1966:
1. Good Vibrations - The Beach Boys (United States)
2. God Only Knows - The Beach Boys (United States)
3. River Deep, Mountain High - Ike & Tina Turner (United States)
4. Reach Out, I’ll Be There - Four Tops (United States)
5. Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
6. Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
7. It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World - James Brown (United States)
8. I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) - The Electric Prunes (United States)
9. Paint It, Black - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
10. Eight Miles High - The Byrds (United States)
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Honorio
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

Very interesting comments about "Pet Sounds" and its time, Cold Butterfly! You're right, during the mid 1960s there was a change of paradigm in the Western World, both socially and artistically. A push of freedom permeated every kind of art, both in form and content. Maybe it began first with literature but, as you point, expanded exponentially in cinema and music during the 1960s decade. A very interesting period indeed.

1967



Record of 1967 | A Day in the Life | The Beatles | UK | album track | all time #3
"A Day in the Life is my idea of a perfect song. It is the epitome of The Beatles' master building, of fitting stone upon stone, each section troweled together with such ingenuity and care that upon completion the whole thing feels seamless, a structure not built at all, but a whole that simply was. It's an elaborate production, filled with sophisticated George Martin and Geoff Emerick musical trickery (distortion, echo, dubbing, reverb). An orchestra plays, and then one singer's voice gives way to another's —John’s worldly reflections transitioning to Paul’s sketch of domestic memoir, and then back again— before orchestral cataclysm and a final resting place. A Day in the Life created the understanding that musicians could be as ambitious about the content of rock songs as other artists were in mediums like literature and painting." (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Atlantic)

Book of 1967 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | all time #9
"The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility —the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth— these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master." (Publisher)

Movie of 1967 | Playtime (Playtime) | Jacques Tati | France | all time #46
"Jacques Tati's gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion." (The Criterion Collection)


Books of 1967:
1 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | #9
2 | Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita) | Mikhail Bulgakov | France | USSR | #117
3 | Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers) | Guillermo Cabrera Infante | Spain | Cuba | #596


Movies of 1967:
1 | Playtime (Playtime) | Jacques Tati | France | #46
2 | Mouchette (Mouchette) | Robert Bresson | France | #168
3 | Belle de jour (Belle de Jour) | Luis Bunuel | France | Mexico | #185


Albums of 1967:
1 | The Velvet Underground & Nico | The Velvet Underground & Nico | USA | #4
2 | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | The Beatles | UK | #5
3 | Are You Experienced | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | UK | USA/UK | #14


Songs of 1967:
1 | A Day in the Life | The Beatles | UK | #3
2 | Respect | Aretha Franklin | USA | #11
3 | Strawberry Fields Forever | The Beatles | UK | #16


Tomorrow I'll be leaving on holidays to Scotland (to visit my daughter that is working there) but I'll try to continue updating the thread with a new year every day, this time from my mobile phone...
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1968



Movie of 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | all time #3
"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. 2001 does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Record of 1968 | I Heard It Through the Grapevine | Marvin Gaye | USA | 45 rpm single | all time #8
"Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine is Motown's greatest record —really, what's better? Even obscured by years of oldies radio overkill and Big Chill nostalgia it retains a hypnotic power unmatched by any of the label's other classics, articulating the turmoil and anguish of a soul torn apart at the seams with a clarity unmatched in the annals of popular music. On its surface a desperate plea to salvage a relationship gone terribly wrong, Grapevine progressively probes much deeper to convey complete emotional free-fall: haunted by lies, taunted by gossip and shattered by loss, Gaye's torment is palpable, and his performance —the signature sophistication and elegance of his voice ravaged by fear and doubt— is devastating." (Jason Ankeny, All Music)

Book of 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C. Clarke | UK | all time #347
"The classic science fiction novel that captures and expands on the vision of Stanley Kubrick's immortal film —and changed the way we look at the stars and ourselves. This allegory about humanity's exploration of the universe —and the universe's reaction to humanity— is a hallmark achievement in storytelling that follows the crew of the spacecraft Discovery as they embark on a mission to Saturn. Their vessel is controlled by HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent supercomputer capable of the highest level of cognitive functioning that rivals —and perhaps threatens— the human mind. Grappling with space exploration, the perils of technology, and the limits of human power, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to be an enduring classic." (Publisher)


Books of 1968:
1 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C. Clarke | UK | #347
2 | La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth) | Manuel Puig | Argentina | #567
3 | Body Rags | Galway Kinnell | USA | #723


Movies of 1968:
1 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | #3
2 | C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) | Sergio Leone | Italy | #65
3 | Rosemary's Baby | Roman Polanski | USA | Poland | #140


Albums of 1968:
1 | The Beatles | The Beatles | UK | #13
2 | Astral Weeks | Van Morrison | USA | UK | #15
3 | Electric Ladyland | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | USA | USA/UK | #26


Songs of 1968:
1 | I Heard It Through the Grapevine | Marvin Gaye | USA | #8
2 | Sympathy for the Devil | The Rolling Stones | UK | #14
3 | (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay | Otis Redding | USA | #22

Note:
The only case of book and movie of the year sharing title and argument. In fact both the book and the film's screenplay were developed concurrently by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick based on previous short stories written by Clarke, especially "The Sentinel" (1951) and "Encounter in the Dawn" (1953). According to Wikipedia, "Clarke and Kubrick worked on the book together, but eventually only Clarke ended up as the official author." The novel was published soon after the film was released.
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

Without a doubt Honorio, although I do suppose that literature was able to push the boundaries of artistic expression earlier, due to decreasing censorship against the median years before. There’s no doubt that the chaos which ravaged the western world in the decade played an important role in the art which was being made around this time.

1967:

Movie Of 1967 - Bonnie And Clyde (Arthur Penn, United States)
“Bonnie and Clyde is a 1967 American biographical crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Also featured were Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons. The screenplay was written by David Newman and Robert Benton. Robert Towne and Beatty provided uncredited contributions to the script; Beatty produced the film. The soundtrack was composed by Charles Strouse. Bonnie and Clyde is considered a landmark film, and is regarded as one of the first films of the New Hollywood era, since it broke many cinematic taboos and was popular with the younger generation. For some members of the counterculture, the film was considered to be a "rallying cry." It’s success prompted other filmmakers to be more open in presenting sex and violence in their films. The film's ending became iconic as "one of the bloodiest death scenes in cinematic history." The film received Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Cinematography (Burnett Guffey). It was among the first 100 films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.” (Wikipedia)

Book Of 1967 - One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Argentina)
“Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad—One Hundred Years of Solitude—a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and the response among Spanish-language readers was akin to Beatlemania: crowds, cameras, exclamation points, a sense of a new era beginning. In 1970 the book appeared in English, followed by a paperback edition with a burning sun on its cover, which became a totem of the decade. By the time García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1982, the novel was considered the Don Quixote of the Global South, proof of Latin-American literary prowess, and the author was “Gabo,” known all over the continent by a single name, like his Cuban friend Fidel. Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time—from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. A scene in the movie Chinatown takes place at a Hollywood hacienda dubbed El Macondo Apartments. Bill Clinton, during his first term as president, made it known that he would like to meet Gabo when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard; they wound up swapping insights about Faulkner over dinner at Bill and Rose Styron’s place. (Carlos Fuentes, Vernon Jordan, and Harvey Weinstein were at the table.) When García Márquez died, in April 2014, Barack Obama joined Clinton in mourning him, calling him “one of my favorites from the time I was young” and mentioning his cherished, inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s the book that redefined not just Latin-American literature but literature, period,”.” (Paul Elie, Vanity Fair)

Album Of 1967 - The Velvet Underground And Nico (The Velvet Underground, United States)
“The album was a slow burner, selling only 30,000 copies in five years, though as Brian Eno famously said, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”. And this is its endurance: as a soundscape, the album’s influence is immeasurably deep and wide, not only on the sensibility and feelings of its public but also on music and musicians. That entwinement of rock and drone – that unique tonality and timbre – flowed into almost all that followed: punk, electronic-wall-of-sound, even avant-garde jazz and contemporary “classical”. In a year that saw the death of Che Guevara, uprising in Mexico and a military coup in Greece – in a world on the eve of the eruptions of 1968 – the album was studiedly apolitical. “It’s all subliminal”, Cale says, “it’s all implication.” Emotions in The Velvet Undergound & Nico are raw and honest, sometimes scalpel-edged, but in an age of idealism, these songs are as far removed from the “summer of love” as you can get. And perhaps, 50 years on, the record is vindicated as such, as we find ourselves not so much in the aura of an “age of Aquarius” as in what Percy Bysshe Shelley described two centuries ago as “an age of despair”. Some people found the album cynical at the time, but the diagonal glance of Cale and Reed saw more accurately into their future – our present – than the lambent gaze of Joan Baez or Grace Slick.“ (Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian)

Song Of 1967 - A Day In the Life (The Beatles, United Kingdom)
"A Day in the Life" is the sound of the Beatles on a historic roll. "It was a peak," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, recalling the Sgt. Pepper period. It's also the ultimate Lennon-McCartney collaboration: "Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on 'A Day in the Life,'" said Lennon. After their August 29th, 1966, concert in San Francisco, the Beatles left live performing for good. Rumors of tension within the group spread as the Beatles released no new music for months. "People in the media sensed that there was too much of a lull," Paul McCartney said later, "which created a vacuum, so they could bitch about us now. They'd say, 'Oh, they've dried up,' but we knew we hadn't." With Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles created an album of psychedelic visions; coming at the end, "A Day in the Life" sounds like the whole world falling apart. Lennon sings about death and dread in his most spectral vocal, treated with what he called his "Elvis echo" — a voice, as producer George Martin said in 1992, "which sends shivers down the spine." (Rolling Stone)

Movies Of 1967:
1. Bonnie And Clyde - Arthur Penn (United States)
2. Belle De Jour - Luis Bunuel (France)
3. The Graduate - Mike Nichols (United States)
4. Mouchette - Robert Bresson (France)
5. Terra em Transe - Glauber Rocha (Brazil)

Books Of 1967:
1. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Argentina)
2.The Confessions Of Nat Turner - William Styron (United States)
3.Three Trapped Tigers - Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba)
4.The Joke - Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia)
5.The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton (United States)

Albums Of 1967:
1. The Velvet Underground And Nico - The Velvet Underground (United States)
2. The Doors - The Doors (United States)
3. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Forever Changes - Love (United States)
5. Are You Experienced? - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
6. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You - Aretha Franklin (United States)
7. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn - Pink Floyd (United Kingdom)
8. The Who Sell Out - The Who (United Kingdom)
9. Younger Than Yesterday - The Byrds (United States)
10. Safe As Milk - Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band (United States)

Songs Of 1967:
1. A Day In The Life - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
2. Respect - Aretha Franklin (United States)
3. Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
4. Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks (United Kingdom)
5. Light My Fire - The Doors (United States)
6. I Can See For Miles - The Who (United Kingdom)
7. Purple Haze - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
8. I Am The Walrus - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
9. Itchycoo Park - Small Faces (United Kingdom)
10. The Letter - The Box Tops (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1968:

Movie Of 1968 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, United Kingdom)
“Mr. Kubrick’s movie, “2001, A Space Odyssey,” finally debuted, late and over budget in April 1968, to baffled film critics and long lines of young people. John Lennon said he went to see it every week. It was the top-grossing movie of the year and is now a perennial on critics’ lists of the most important movies of all time, often the first movie scientists mention if you ask them about sci-fi they have enjoyed. The movie, written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (whose books and stories the movie was based on), and directed by Kubrick, is a multisensory ode to cosmic mystery, fate and the future. Long stretches happen with no explication or action except the zero-gravity ballets of spaceships immaculately imagined. The movie broke with many of the conventions of the time, like mood music to tell you what to feel and think. “2001” left you alone in space with your thoughts. One revelation is how haphazardly the movie was made. Nevermind the special effects and the model spaceships, Kubrick and Clarke were making up much of the story as they went along. Up until the very end, Mr. Benson tells us, they were struggling with how to portray the alien being responsible for the monoliths, until they realized it couldn’t be done. We don’t know what is out there. It would be hubris to even try to imagine.“ (Dennis Overbye, The New York Times)

Book Of 1968 - The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Ayi Kwei Armah, Ghana)
“In the groping stretch between colonialism and a strong national identity one of the natural attitudes is a sour malaise. This young Ghanian author has caught the vanishing ends of two worlds in a bitter, acerbic novel of one man's spiritual trials in a new West African nation. The exploitative, crushing rule of the white colonists is ever a fresh memory--the house on the hill from which little African boys were routed by dogs and weapons. Just as oppressive, however, are the new rulers of the country--""black (men) trying at all points to be the dark ghost of Europeans,"" men whose flight away from blackness into whiteness can only mean that their power comes from ""white masters."" The anonymous narrator, a railroad clerk, sadly contemplates the materialistic yearnings of his wife and his termagant mother-in-law. Yet he will not accept bribes, be overpowered by a former friend, now a Westernized official--Koomson, of the glittering wife, the appliance-filled apartment. But the regime is overthrown, and the man helps Koomson escape. The bitter knowledge of his teacher (symbolically, truthfully, ""the naked man""), and his own awareness of a constricting future lead to the tired hope that the Beautyful Ones will come hereafter. A strong, tight, efficient novel--urgent and relevant.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Album Of 1968 - The Beatles (The Beatles, United Kingdom)
“The Beatles” is as much a concept album as “Sgt. Pepper,” and the concept is, again, right in the title: a top-to-bottom reinvention of the band as pure abstraction, the two discs, like stone tablets, delivering a new order. (“By packaging 30 new songs in a plain white jacket, so sparsely decorated as to suggest censorship,” Richard Goldstein wrote in his New York Times review, “the Beatles ask us to drop our preconceptions about their ‘evolution’ and to hark back.”) The songs progress through a spectral, mystical, and romantic dimension, the soundscape itself becoming fluid and associative. The Beatles’ ability to conjure orchestras and horns and sound effects and choirs out of thin air imbues the tracks with a dream logic. The juxtaposition of order and disorder, of the ragged and the smooth, of the sublime and the mundane, of the meticulously arranged and the carelessly misplayed, provides what the critic John Harris called “the sense of a world moving beyond rational explanation.” The music seemed to absorb the panic and violence of 1968, the “year of the barricades.” As the Sunday Times critic commented, “Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order; and that is the world, and that is what the Beatles are on about: created by, creating for, their age.” (Jordan Orlando, The New Yorker)

Song Of 1968 - (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay (Otis Redding, United States)
“The song was an experiment: It wasn't R&B, it wasn't rock, it wasn't folk. At least one executive at Redding's label, Stax, didn't get it. "Al Bell heard it being recorded that day and said, 'I don't know if we can ever release this song,' " Ribowsky says. They left the recording incomplete that winter. Then, tragedy struck: Redding died in a plane crash on Dec. 10, 1967. While the music world mourned, Stax began planning. "Let's face it: When a rock 'n' roller dies, you need a song to come out immediately to cash in on this. That's just the way the business is," Ribowsky says. "Steve Cropper, who wrote [the song] with him and produced it — great guitar player — said, 'Let's do this song.' " Cropper sent back a completed version within a week. It didn't take at first. "Jerry Wexler up in New York at Atlantic, the overlords of Stax, said, 'No, we can't release this. His vocal is too recessed. It needs to be remixed," Ribowsky says. "Cropper said, 'OK, I'll change it: I'll overdub it, I'll do this, I'll do that' — [and] didn't change it whatsoever. Sent it back to Wexler, who said, 'Oh yeah, this sounds a lot better now.' " "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" went on to win Otis Redding two posthumous Grammys and sell millions of copies, becoming his signature song and his biggest hit.“ (David Greene And Phil Harrell, NPR)

Movies Of 1968:
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick (United Kingdom)
2. Memories Of Underdevelopment - Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba)
3. If... - Lindsay Anderson (United Kingdom)
4. Rosemary’s Baby - Roman Polanski (United States)
5. Teorema - Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy)

Books Of 1968:
1. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born - Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana)
2. Lost In The Funhouse - John Barth (United States)
3. In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan (United States)
4. Up - Ronald Sukenick (United States)
5. Betrayed By Rita Hayworth - Manuel Puig (Argentina)

Albums Of 1968:
1. The Beatles - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
2. Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes (Brazil)
3. The Notorious Byrd Brothers - The Byrds (United States)
4. Electric Ladyland - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
5. Lady Soul - Aretha Franklin (United States)
6. Gris-Gris - Dr. John (United States)
7. We’re Only In It For The Money - The Mothers Of Invention (United States)
8. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter - The Incredible String Band (United Kingdom)
9. Beggars Banquet - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
10. The Marble Index - Nico (United States)

Songs Of 1968:
1. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding (United States)
2. I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye (United States)
3. All Along The Watchtower - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
4. Sympathy For The Devil - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
5. White Room - Cream (United Kingdom)
6. Everyday People - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
7. Bonnie & Clyde - Serge Gainsbourg & Bridgette Bardot (France)
8. Dark Star - Grateful Dead (United States)
9. Son Of A Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield (United Kingdom)
10. Time Of The Season - The Zombies (United Kingdom)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1969



Record of 1969 | Abbey Road | The Beatles | UK | album (vinyl LP) | all time #20
"No, it's not as poppy and fun as A Hard Day's Night. Sure, there might be a stronger tune on The Beatles. And yes, you can argue that Harrison's best work is actually While My Guitar Gently Weeps (no, it's not). But there isn't a collective work by The Beatles, and probably any act out there, that is this perfect, this cohesive, and this iconic and lasting. How many times have we heard Sun King today in any indie act's debut? Where would shoegaze be without I Want You (She's So Heavy)? How many secret tracks do we find on a weekly basis? Like it or not, scoff or smile, Abbey Road is hands down the greatest piece of musical work on this godforsaken planet, and you know what, it actually makes us look like decent human beings. Hey, in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take. Or, wait…" (Michael Roffman, Consequence of Sound)

Movie of 1969 | The Wild Bunch | Sam Peckinpah | USA | all time #66
"Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous glory. By 1969, when the film was made, the western was experiencing its last burst as well, and in retrospect Peckinpah's film seems a eulogy for the genre (there is even a dispassionate audience —Robert Ryan's watchful Pinkerton man— built into the film). The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling." (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

Book of 1969 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | USA | all time #104
"Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut's writing —the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit— that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it." (Publisher)


Books of 1969:
1 | Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | USA | #104
2 | The Poetry of Robert Frost | Robert Frost | USA | collection | #155
3 | Portnoy's Complaint | Philip Roth | USA | #418
4 | The Godfather | Mario Puzo | USA | #530


Movies of 1969:
1 | The Wild Bunch | Sam Peckinpah | USA | #66
2 | Kes | Ken Loach | UK | #196
3 | Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) | Sergei Parajanov | USSR | #233


Albums of 1969:
1 | Abbey Road | The Beatles | UK | #20
2 | Let It Bleed | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | #41
3 | The Band | The Band | USA | USA/Canada | #57


Songs of 1969:
1 | Gimmie Shelter | The Rolling Stones | UK | #33
2 | I Want You Back | The Jackson 5 | USA | #47
3 | Whole Lotta Love | Led Zeppelin | USA | UK | #48
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1969:

Movie Of 1969 - Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, United States)
“As is often the case with pop touchstones, the experience of watching Easy Rider from start to finish is very different from receiving the movie—as so many have—in pieces. In clip-packages meant to encapsulate what “the ’60s” were all about, Easy Rider is a distilled expression of counterculture cool, with a long-haired Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper roaring through middle America on souped-up choppers, while Steppenwolf blares on the soundtrack. According to the legend, the film represents a victory for the hippies over the establishment squares still controlling the media in 1969. Its massive box office success sent studios scrambling to find any pot-smoking freak who could tap into the lucrative youth market—which quickly led to American cinema having its own belated “New Wave” in the early ’70s, over a decade after the French broke that ground. Easy Rider also boosted charismatic bit-player Jack Nicholson, who steals the picture during his roughly 20 minutes of screen time and then capitalized on his elevated profile to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world.“ (Noel Murray, The A.V. Club)

Book Of 1969 - Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, United States)
“There are novels so potent, and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close. Had Russell Hoban written no books before Riddley Walker, and no books after it, his reputation today would be exactly the same. Should William S. Burroughs, post–Naked Lunch, or Joseph Heller, with the last line of Catch-22 on the page (“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”), have tossed their typewriters out of the window? Probably. And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46, with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five. “I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served,” he mused horticulturally to a Playboy interviewer in 1973. “Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. And that was the end of it.” (James Parker, The Atlantic)

Album Of 1969 - Abbey Road (The Beatles, United Kingdom)
“The last Beatles album to be recorded (although Let It Be was the last to be released), Abbey Road was a fitting swan song for the group, echoing some of the faux-conceptual forms of Sgt. Pepper, but featuring stronger compositions and more rock-oriented ensemble work. The group was still pushing forward in all facets of its art, whether devising some of the greatest harmonies to be heard on any rock record (especially on "Because"), constructing a medley of songs/vignettes that covered much of side two, adding subtle touches of Moog synthesizer, or crafting furious guitar-heavy rock ("The End," "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," "Come Together"). George Harrison also blossomed into a major songwriter, contributing the buoyant "Here Comes the Sun" and the supremely melodic ballad "Something," the latter of which became the first Harrison-penned Beatles hit. Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed.” (Richie Unterberger, AllMusic)

Song Of 1969 - Gimme Shelter (The Rolling Stones, United Kingdom)
“In the original version that begins Let It Bleed, the Latin groove sets the pace and, as Jagger says, a "rock thing starts" with Keith Richards layering guitars throughout. Jagger coos in a high falsetto before he pronounces, "Oh, a storm is threatening." Then a soul singer comes in with that memorable refrain. "When we got to Los Angeles and we were mixing it, we thought, 'Well, it'd be great to have a woman come and do the rape/murder verse,' or chorus, or whatever you want to call it," Jagger says. "We randomly phoned up this poor lady [Merry Clayton] in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing. She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It's not the sort of lyric you give everyone — 'Rape, murder / It's just a shot away' — but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record. She joins the chorus. It's been a great live song ever since.". “Gimme Shelter" is downright apocalyptic, and a product of its time that still speaks to us today.” (NPR)

Movies Of 1969:
1. Easy Rider - Dennis Hopper (United States)
2. The Wild Bunch - Sam Peckinpah (United States)
3. Midnight Cowboy - John Schlesinger (United States)
4. Z - Costa-Gavras (Algeria)
5. Antonio das Mortes - Glauber Rocha (Brazil)

Books Of 1969:
1. Slaugterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (United States)
2. Portnoy’s Complaint - Phillip Roth (United States)
3. Nog - Rudy Wurlitzer (United States)
4. The Poems Of Robert Frost - Robert Frost (United States)
5. The Godfather - Mario Puzo (United States)

Albums Of 1969:
1. Abbey Road - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
2. Hot Buttered Soul - Issac Hayes (United States)
3. In A Silent Way - Miles Davis (United States)
4. Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
5. The Stooges - The Stooges (United States)
6. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (United States)
7. Extrapolation - John McLaughlin (United Kingdom)
8. Stand! - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
9. Live/Dead - Grateful Dead (United States)
10. Happy Trails - Quicksilver Messenger Service (United States)

Songs Of 1969:
1. Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
2.I Want You Back - The Jackson 5 (United States)
3. Suspicious Minds - Elvis Presley (United States)
4. Something - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
5. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
6. Many Rivers To Cross - Jimmy Cliff (Jamaica)
7. I Wanna Be Your Dog - The Stooges (United States)
8. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills & Nash (United States)
9. Here Comes The Sun - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
10. In The Court Of The Crimson King - King Crimson (United Kingdom)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

The 1960s



Records of the 1960s:
- Album of the 1960s | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | album (vinyl LP) | 1966 | all time #1
"Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson's evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a "concept album"; from first cut to last we were treated to an intense, linear personal vision of the vagaries of a love affair and the painful, introverted anxieties that are the wrenching precipitates of the unstable chemistry of any love relationship. This trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain. Nobody was prepared for anything so soulful, so lovely, something one had to think about so much. It is by far the best album Brian has yet delivered, and it paradoxically began the decline in mass popularity that still plagues this band." (Stephen Davis, Rolling Stone, 1972)
- Song of the 1960s | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 45 rpm single | 1965 | all time #1
"Released in July of 1965, Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was, in many ways, the dividing line between the past and the future of rock and roll. The lyrics, the mood, the ramshackle rock and roll sound… it was the way forward. Issued as a single and the lead track on the Highway 61 Revisited LP, it ran for a then-unprecedented six minutes. With Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan would make the ultimate 'folk rock' statement, closing one door and opening another at the same time. Poetry was now as much a part of the arsenal for young musicians as the electric guitar. Musically, that crack of the snare drum that sets Like a Rolling Stone in motion is the shot heard round the world. Mike Bloomfield's sharp-as-nails guitar and Al Kooper's hammond organ give the song mighty wings. This is rock and roll as it was meant to be: Raw, literate, exciting, challenging and above all, memorable as hell. It can be said that Like a Rolling Stone was not only the pinnacle of Dylan's career, but it may also have been the crowning achievement of the genre." (Ultimate Classic Rock)

Movie of the 1960s | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1968 | all time #3
"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. 2001 does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Book of the 1960s | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | 1967 | all time #9
"The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility —the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth— these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master." (Publisher)


Books of the 1960s:
1 | Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) | Gabriel García Márquez | Argentina | Colombia | 1967 | #9
2 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | USA | 1961 | #29
3 | The Stories of Anton Chekhov | Anton Chekhov | USA | Russia | 1961 | collection | #32
4 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | USA | 1960 | #44
5 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | USA | 1962 | #74
6 | Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death | Kurt Vonnegut | USA | 1969 | #104


Movies of the 1960s:
1 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | 1968 | #3
2 | 8½ (8½) | Federico Fellini | Italy | 1963 | #6
3 | À bout de souffle (Breathless) | Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1960 | #16
4 | Persona (Persona) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | 1966 | #19
5 | Psycho | Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 1960 | #25


Albums of the 1960s:
1 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966 | #1
2 | Revolver | The Beatles | UK | 1966 | #2
3 | The Velvet Underground & Nico | The Velvet Underground & Nico | USA | 1967 | #4
4 | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | The Beatles | UK | 1967 | #5
5 | Blonde on Blonde | Bob Dylan | USA | 1966 |#10


Songs of the 1960s:
1 | Like a Rolling Stone | Bob Dylan | USA | 1965 | #1
2 | A Day in the Life | The Beatles | UK | 1967 | #3
3 | Good Vibrations | The Beach Boys | USA | 1966 | #4
4 | (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction | The Rolling Stones | USA | UK | 1965 | #5
5 | Be My Baby | The Ronettes | USA | 1963 | #7


Classical works of the 1960s:
1 | War Requiem | Benjamin Britten | UK | 1962 | #59
2 | Misa Criolla | Ariel Ramírez | Argentina | 1965 |#99
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1960s:

Movie Of The 1960s - Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
"Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools. Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)

Book Of The 1960s - One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Argentina)
“Gabriel García Márquez began writing Cien Años de Soledad—One Hundred Years of Solitude—a half-century ago, finishing in late 1966. The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and the response among Spanish-language readers was akin to Beatlemania: crowds, cameras, exclamation points, a sense of a new era beginning. In 1970 the book appeared in English, followed by a paperback edition with a burning sun on its cover, which became a totem of the decade. By the time García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1982, the novel was considered the Don Quixote of the Global South, proof of Latin-American literary prowess, and the author was “Gabo,” known all over the continent by a single name, like his Cuban friend Fidel. Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time—from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. A scene in the movie Chinatown takes place at a Hollywood hacienda dubbed El Macondo Apartments. Bill Clinton, during his first term as president, made it known that he would like to meet Gabo when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard; they wound up swapping insights about Faulkner over dinner at Bill and Rose Styron’s place. (Carlos Fuentes, Vernon Jordan, and Harvey Weinstein were at the table.) When García Márquez died, in April 2014, Barack Obama joined Clinton in mourning him, calling him “one of my favorites from the time I was young” and mentioning his cherished, inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s the book that redefined not just Latin-American literature but literature, period,”.” (Paul Elie, Vanity Fair)

Album Of The 1960s - Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys, United States)
"Who's gonna hear this shit?" Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band's resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. "The ears of a dog?" But Love's contempt proved oddly useful: "Ironically," Wilson observed, "Mike's barb inspired the album's title." Barking dogs – Wilson's dog Banana among them, in fact – are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul. With its vivid orchestration, lyrical ambition, elegant pacing and thematic coherence, Pet Sounds invented – and in some sense perfected – the idea that an album could be more than the sum of its parts. When Wilson sang, "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?" on the magnificent opener, he wasn't just imagining a love that could evolve past high school; he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself.“ (Rolling Stone)

Song Of The 1960s - A Day In The Life (The Beatles, United Kingdom)
"A Day in the Life" is the sound of the Beatles on a historic roll. "It was a peak," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, recalling the Sgt. Pepper period. It's also the ultimate Lennon-McCartney collaboration: "Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on 'A Day in the Life,'" said Lennon. After their August 29th, 1966, concert in San Francisco, the Beatles left live performing for good. Rumors of tension within the group spread as the Beatles released no new music for months. "People in the media sensed that there was too much of a lull," Paul McCartney said later, "which created a vacuum, so they could bitch about us now. They'd say, 'Oh, they've dried up,' but we knew we hadn't." With Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles created an album of psychedelic visions; coming at the end, "A Day in the Life" sounds like the whole world falling apart. Lennon sings about death and dread in his most spectral vocal, treated with what he called his "Elvis echo" — a voice, as producer George Martin said in 1992, "which sends shivers down the spine." (Rolling Stone)

Movies Of The 1960s:
1. Breathless - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick (United Kingdom)
3. Au Hasard Balthazar - Robert Bresson (France)
4. 8 1/2 - Federico Fellini (Italy)
5. Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (United Kingdom)
6. Persona - Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
7. Closely Watched Trains - Jiri Menzel (Czechoslovakia)
8. Psycho - Alfred Hitchcock (United States)
9. La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini (Italy)
10. L’avventura - Michaelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
11. Pierrot Le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
12. Contempt - Jean-Luc Godard (France)
13. Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR)
14. Easy Rider - Dennis Hopper (United States)
15. Bonnie And Clyde - Arthur Penn (United States)

Books Of The 1960s:
1. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Argentina)
2. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (United States)
3. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (United Kingdom)
4. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (United States)
5. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (United States)
6. Last Exit To Brooklyn - Hubert Selby Jr. (United States)
7. Lunch Poems - Frank O’Hara (United States)
8. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (United States)
9. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin (United States)
10. The Stories Of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov (Russia)
11. Stoner - John Williams (United States)
12. In True Blood - Truman Capote (United States)
13. Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar (Argentina)
14. Rabbit, Run - John Updike (United States)
15. Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)

Albums Of The 1960s:
1. Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys (United States)
2. Revolver - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
3. The Velvet Underground And Nico - The Velvet Underground (United States)
4. The Doors - The Doors (United States)
5. Abbey Road - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
6. Hot Buttered Soul - Issac Hayes (United States)
7. In A Silent Way - Miles Davis (United States)
8. The Beatles - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
9. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
10. Forever Changes - Love (United States)
11. Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
12. The Stooges - The Stooges (United States)
13. Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes (Brazil)
14. The Notorious Byrd Brothers - The Byrds (United States)
15. Electric Ladyland - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
16. A Love Supreme - John Coltrane (United States)
17. Lady Soul - Aretha Franklin (United States)
18. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (United States)
19. Extrapolation - John McLaughlin (United Kingdom)
20. The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators - The 13th Floor Elevators (United States)
21. Sketches Of Spain - Miles Davis (United States)
22. Are You Experienced? - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
23. Black Monk Time - The Monks (Germany)
24. Live At The Apollo - James Brown (United States)
25. Stand! - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
26. Sunday At The Village Vanguard - Bill Evans Trio (United States)
27. Freak Out! - The Mothers Of Invention (United States)
28. Jazz Samba - Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd (United States)
29. Rubber Soul - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
30. Bringing It All Back Home - Bob Dylan (United States)
31. Otis Blue - Otis Redding (United States)
32. Live/Dead - Grateful Dead (United States)
33. Happy Trails - Quicksilver Messenger Service (United States)
34. Free Jazz - Ornette Coleman (United States)
35. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You - Aretha Franklin (United States)
36. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn - Pink Floyd (United Kingdom)
37. Gris-Gris - Dr. John (United States)
38. It’s My Way! - Buffy Saint-Marie (Canada)
39. Trout Mask Replica - Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (United States)
40. The Who Sell Out - The Who (United Kingdom)
41. Spiritual Unity - Albert Ayler Trio (United States)
42. We’re Only In It For The Money - The Mothers Of Invention (United States)
43. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter - The Incredible String Band (United Kingdom)
44. Beggars Banquet - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
45. The Gilded Palace Of Sin - The Flying Burrito Brothers (United States)
46. The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady - Charles Mingus (United States)
47. Unity - Larry Young (United States)
48. Please Please Me - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
49. Sunshine Superman - Donovan (United Kingdom)
50. Maiden Voyage - Herbie Hancock (United States)

Songs Of The 1960s:
1. A Day In The Life - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
2. Good Vibrations - The Beach Boys (United States)
3. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding (United States)
4. God Only Knows - The Beach Boys (United States)
5. I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye (United States)
6. Respect - Aretha Franklin (United States)
7. Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
8. Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks (United Kingdom)
9. Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
10. River Deep, Mountain High - Ike & Tina Turner (United States)
11. Reach Out, I’ll Be There - Four Tops (United States)
12. Light My Fire - The Doors (United States)
13. I Can See For Miles - The Who (United Kingdom)
14. Be My Baby - The Ronettes (United States)
15. All Along The Watchtower - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
16. Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
17. Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
18. It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World - James Brown (United States)
19. A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke (United States)
20. I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) - The Electric Prunes (United States)
21. In My Life - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
22. Dancing In The Street - Martha And The Vandellas (United States)
23. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ - The Righteous Brothers (United States)
24. Don’t Worry Baby - The Beach Boys (United States)
25. The Sound Of Silence - Simon And Garfunkel (United States)
26. Paint It, Black - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
27. Stand By Me - Ben E. King (United States)
28. Eight Miles High - The Byrds (United States)
29. Green Onions - Booker T. & The MG’s (United States)
30. You’re Gonna Miss Me - The 13th Floor Elevators (United States)
31. Purple Haze - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (United Kingdom)
32. Norwegian Wood (The Bird Has Flown) - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
33. She Loves You - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
34. Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles (United States)
35. Walk On By - Dionne Warwick (United States)
36. She’s Not There - The Zombies (United Kingdom)
37. My Girl - The Temptations (United States)
38. Stop! In The Name Of Love - The Supremes (United States)
39. White Room - Cream (United Kingdom)
40. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) - Bob Dylan (United States)
41. Heart Full Of Soul - The Yardbirds (United Kingdom)
42. I Want You Back - The Jackson 5 (United States)
43. Suspicious Minds - Elvis Presley (United States)
44. Spanish Harlem - Ben E. King (United States)
45. I Am The Walrus - The Beatles (United Kingdom)
46. Crazy - Patsy Cline (United States)
47. Please Mr. Postman - The Marvelettes (United States)
48. Itchycoo Park - Small Faces (United Kingdom)
49. Hit The Road Jack - Ray Charles (United States)
50. Psychotic Reaction - Count Five (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1970



Record of 1970 | After the Gold Rush | Neil Young | USA | Canada | album (vinyl LP) | all time #53
"Since coming to California from his native Toronto, Neil Young had joined Buffalo Springfield and seen the band break up; teamed with Crosby, Stills and Nash for the massive Déjà Vu album; and released a few discs of his own. The mysterious, elusive After the Gold Rush represents the morning after the mayhem, both personal and cultural — the sound of Young waking up with a post-'60s hangover, catching his breath, and trying to sort through the wreckage. The cryptic title song and "Southern Man" are the tracks familiar to casual fans, but only Neil Young could have written the chilling "Don't Let It Bring You Down" or the homespun "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" — much less both on the same album." (Alan Light, TIME)

Movie of 1970 | Il conformista (The Conformist) | Bernardo Bertolucci | Italy | all time #83
"The Conformist, still a testimony to the erstwhile panache of international cinema, is Bertolucci's masterpiece —made when he was all of 29. Fleshing out novelist Alberto Moravia's shadow-box between political compliance and personal shame, Bertolucci created the most arresting mise-en-scène ever concocted for any movie, set entirely in rainy city afternoons and indigo evenings. Overt and covert narratives aside, The Conformist is also an orgasm of coolness, ravishing compositions, camera gymnastics (the frame virtually squirms around, like Marcello), and atmospheric resonance. The actors vogue, Vittorio Storaro's lens makes every street and room baroque, the Roman streets burn with gaslight, the dancehall bursts, the unforgettable Alpine roads lead to death and catastrophe." (Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice)

Book of 1970 | Time and Again | Jack Finney | USA | all time #528
"When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his twentieth-century existence and step into New York City in January 1882. Aside from his thirst for experience, he has good reason to return to the past —his friend Kate has a curious, half-burned letter dated from that year, and he wants to trace the mystery. But when Si begins to fall in love with a woman he meets in the past, he will be forced to choose between two worlds —forever. Praised as "pure New York fun" by Alice Hoffman, Time and Again is admired for its rich, painstakingly researched descriptions of life in New York City more than a century ago, and for the swift adventure at its core." (Publisher)


Books of 1970:
1 | Time and Again | Jack Finney | USA | #528
2 | Selected Poems | Pablo Neruda | UK | Chile | collection | #587
3 | Fifth Business | Robertson Davies | Canada | #604
4 | Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl) | Uwe Johnson | West Germany | #648


Movies of 1970:
1 | Il conformista (The Conformist) | Bernardo Bertolucci | Italy | #83
2 | Performance | Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell | UK | #204
3 | Husbands | John Cassavetes | USA | #280


Albums of 1970:
1 | After the Gold Rush | Neil Young | USA | Canada | #53
2 | John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band | John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band | UK | #71
3 | Bitches Brew | Miles Davis | USA | #82


Songs of 1970:
1 | Layla | Derek and The Dominos | USA | UK/USA | #66
2 | Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine (Parts 1 & 2) | James Brown | USA | #105
3 | Paranoid | Black Sabbath | UK | #116
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Honorio
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1971



Record of 1971 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | album (vinyl LP) | all time #7
"It was a record that spoke about the state of the nation, about the war in Vietnam. The album was the voice of youth at the time, the early Seventies, saying leave us alone, we don't want all that craziness — give us something positive. It's a timeless record — Marvin's masterpiece. It helped that he could call on such a great team —they used to say you could record "Mary Had a Little Lamb" at Motown and have a hit because the producers, arrangers and musicians there were so fabulous; people like James Jamerson, the bassist— these are the all-time greats. But Marvin co-wrote the songs and he was all over the record: dictating the way it should sound, whispering in the ear of the guitarist, telling him how to play something. He made very tasteful use of the arrangements." (George Benson, The Observer)

Movie of 1971 | A Clockwork Orange | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | all time #79
"One of the great criticisms heaped against A Clockwork Orange is that Stanley Kubrick glorifies a certain kind of amoral violence, presenting it to the viewer in a spectacular, operatic, colorful, and exquisitely photographed manner. Malcolm McDowell, at the top of his game as Alex the thug, gleefully narrates his way through the ultra-violence his character commits in the first third of the movie. It's Kubrick's most prescient work, more astute and unsparing than any of his other films (and he had more where that came from) in putting the bleakest parts of human behavior under the microscope and laughing in disgust. It was made right after his other high watermark, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as he returns to Earth from his mind-blowing brush with the cosmic, it's a sort of sequel about our planet rotting away from the inside." (Jeremiah Kipp, Slant Magazine)

Book of 1971 | Rabbit Redux | John Updike | USA | all time #221
"In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower's becalmed America has become 1969's lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe. "A superb performance, all grace and dazzle, a brilliant portrait of middle America." (Life)" (Publisher)


Books of 1971:
1 | The Complete Stories | Franz Kafka | USA | Czechoslovakia | collection | #51
2 | The Complete Stories | Flannery O'Connor | USA | collection | #102
3 | Rabbit Redux | John Updike | USA | #221
4 | Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | USA | #845
5 | Ávgust Četýrnadcatogo (August 1914) | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | USSR | #882


Movies of 1971:
1 | A Clockwork Orange | Stanley Kubrick | UK | USA | #79
2 | Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) | Luchino Visconti | Italy | #182
3 | McCabe & Mrs. Miller | Robert Altman | USA | #225


Albums of 1971:
1 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | #7
2 | Led Zeppelin IV | Led Zeppelin | UK | #28
3 | Who's Next | The Who | USA | UK | #32


Songs of 1971:
1 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | USA | #9
2 | Stairway to Heaven | Led Zeppelin | UK | #21
3 | Imagine | John Lennon | USA | UK | #23

Note:
This year was the second year in which the song of the year came from the album of the year (we will have 11 more cases) and it was the first case of the title track of the album of the year became song of the year (we will have two more cases, both on the 1970s decade).
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1972



Movie of 1972 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | all time #7
"The Godfather is just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be. The 1972 best picture Oscar-winner is a great pulp drama co-authored for the screen by Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo. And all the while, we think we're watching a Mafia crime story but we're actually watching one of the great American family melodramas. As for the storytelling, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass. The casting is nothing to sneeze at either with Marlon Brando delivering one of the signature performances of his career (he, too, won an Oscar) and the very young Al Pacino seizing his screen destiny. So many great roles and characters in this movie and then there's that eternally haunting Nino Rota score." (Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle)

Record of 1972 | Exile on Main St. | The Rolling Stones | UK | album (double vinyl LP) | all time #9
"Whether Exile on Main Street is the best rock 'n' roll album of all time is open to debate, but its status as the greatest rock 'n' roll rock 'n' roll album ever made should forever go unchallenged. Famously recorded by The Rolling Stones and whoever else was hanging out in the basement of Keith Richards' 16-room mansion in southern France over the course of a sweltering summer in 1971, Exile was created amid a never-ending drug-and-booze-addled house party that somehow enhanced rather than diminished the band's creative process. Even more incredibly, the most focused and lucid Stone at the time was none other than Richards, who piloted the sessions and made his obsession with gritty American roots music the record's dominant aesthetic." (Steven Hyden, AV Club)

Book of 1972 | Watership Down | Richard Adams | UK | all time #341
"This stirring tale of courage and survival against the odds has become one of the best-loved animal adventures of all time. "We've got to go away before it's too late." Fiver could sense danger. Something terrible was going to happen to the warren - he felt sure of it. So did his brother Hazel, for Fiver's sixth sense was never wrong. They had to leave immediately, and they had to persuade the other rabbits to join them. And so begins a long and perilous journey of a small band of rabbits in search of a safe home. Fiver's vision finally leads them to Watership Down, but here they face their most difficult challenge of all… "Watership Down is an epic journey, a stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival against the odds." (Life)" (Publisher)


Books of 1972:
1 | Watership Down | Richard Adams | UK | #341
2 | Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) | Italo Calvino | Italy | #525
3 | The Manticore | Robertson Davies | Canada | #605


Movies of 1972:
1 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | #7
2 | Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God) | Werner Herzog | West Germany | #98
3 | Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers) | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | #156


Albums of 1972:
1 | Exile on Main St. | The Rolling Stones | UK | #9
2 | The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars | David Bowie | UK | #16
3 | Transformer | Lou Reed | USA | #84


Songs of 1972:
1 | Superstition | Stevie Wonder | USA | #34
2 | Walk on the Wild Side | Lou Reed | USA | #52
3 | Virginia Plain | Roxy Music | UK | #165
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1970:

Movie Of 1970 - Husbands (John Cassavetes, United States)
“Always ballsy, often brilliant, sometimes exasperating, John Cassavetes' 1970 picture Husbands is now on rerelease. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes himself play Archie, Harry and Gus respectively, three middle-aged married friends who experience a kind of three-way midlife breakdown when their best buddy dies. A brilliant opening sequence of still shots shows the four musketeers goofing around by the pool with their wives and kids, flexing their muscles, Mr Universe-style, an ironic demonstration of power and strength. After the funeral, they go on a monumental 48-hour drinking spree in Manhattan to anaesthetise their grief and fear. After Harry has a fight with his wife and mother-in-law on returning home still drunk, the three then head off for an impulsive break in London – of all the dreary and unpromising places. This is so they can … what? Have a rest? Have the last bachelor party before the grave? Perhaps nothing in the movie matches the opening 20 minutes in Manhattan, when the guys begin drinking and, like John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, play a little consolatory basketball. Some scenes are outrageously extended, with some hardcore improv material and head-butting male display, and there is a whole lot of Acting with a capital A. The scenes in which the guys hang out in hotel rooms with the British women they have picked up are almost exotically contrived, like a trip to another planet, but with the snappiest of lines. "Diana and I were just discussing …" says Harry, blearily tailing off. "Disgusting?" interrupts Archie drolly. "… discussing how amazing the world is!" What texture and flavour this movie has. Cassavetes' film-making style seems as alien to modern Hollywood as silent cinema. The director's own heyday coincided with the arrival of younger New Yorkers Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen; Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 60. If he were still alive, might he be making movies such as Hugo and To Rome With Love? Who knows? Husbands is something to be savoured.” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Book Of 1970 - The Obsecene Bird Of Night (Jose Donoso, Chile)
“The Obscene Bird of Night” is a dense and energetic book, full of terrible risk‐taking, populated with legendary saints and witches, mad old crones and a whole estate‐full of freaks and monsters, and narrated by a disturbed deaf‐mute, many times disguised. The story line is like great puzzle with everything in it from burlesque to romance, magic to murder, often bizarre, yet always—for Donoso is himself possessed by an astonishingly agile imagination—invested with a vibrant, almost tan gible reality. Even the very setting is a kind of maze‐within‐a‐maze, yet as vivid in its details as the hairs on old crone's chin. As the bulldog‐faced dwarf Em peratriz says one day to her tall, handsome patr6n, Don Jeronimo Az coitia: “Humberto had no talent for simplicity. He felt the need to twist normal things around, a kind of convulsion to take revenge and de stroy, and he complicated and de formed his original project so much that it's as if he'd lost himself for ever in the labyrinth he invented as he went along that was filled with darkness and terrors more real than himself and his other characters, al ways nebulous, fluctuating, never real human beings, always disguises, actors, dissolving greasepaint.. yes, his obsessions and his hatreds were more important than the reality he needed to deny.” (Robert Coover, The New York Times Book Review)

Album Of 1970 - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (John Lennon, United Kingdom)
“In 1969, on the "Get Back" single, the Beatles announced a retreat from the orchestrated intricacy of the grand statement that was Sgt. Pepper. In April 1970, beating Lennon's solo debut by eight months on the calendar and five places on the charts, Sgt. Pepper mastermind Paul unveiled his home-overdubbed one-man-band lark, McCartney. But Plastic Ono Band was the shocker. Its harmonic surface uningratiating, its rhythms simple to the point of crudity, its tempos too deliberate even when they sped up a little, this wasn't just spare--it was stark, somber, almost a "primal scream," as the Arthur Janov therapy John and Yoko Ono had just undergone was called. Beginning and ending with songs about Lennon's dead mother and spiked with scary ululations in the middle, it was as grim as Black Sabbath, just then making their own post-'60s dent. Unsurprisingly, Lennon did grim smarter than Black Sabbath. The historic scale and analytic detail of "Working Class Hero," "I Found Out," and "Isolation" have always been rare virtues in political pop, and the patterns of oppression they lay out have only gotten worse since. Because the existential anxieties of "Hold On" and "God" are thought through, they're more harrowing than the usual adolescent angst-mongering, too. And as you listen deeper you realize that the music isn't stark at all. While canning his customary furbelows, coproducer Phil Spector works to make this de facto manifesto grand in its spareness. Every note reverberates. The drums Ringo Starr pounds seem funereal, just as the piano Lennon pounds seems orchestral. And left out in the open, without protective harmonies or racket, Lennon's singing takes on an expressive specificity that anyone in search of the century's great vocal performances would be foolish to overlook.“ (Robert Christgau, Rolling Stone)

Song Of 1970 - Layla (Derek And The Dominoes, United States)
“By the time “Layla” eventually became a hit in December 1972, two years after its first release, Eric Clapton was past caring. He’d formed Derek And The Dominos with Carl Radle (bass), Jim Gordon (drums) and Bobby Whitlock (keyboards), from Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, the band he joined after Blind Faith split, in early 1970. But the Dominos imploded in spectacular fashion in 1971, and Clapton all but retreated from the world for three years, doing nothing much beyond sitting around at home, taking heroin and building model airplanes. Truth is, the fans didn’t get “Layla”. For those who’d revered Clapton as “God” with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Cream, his desire to be “one of the boys” with the Dominos, and his preference for tightly structured songs rather than long blues-rock jams, just didn’t compute. In America, the Dominos’ only studio album, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, stalled at No 16. In Britain, the record didn’t even make the charts first time round. “Layla”, of course, was Clapton’s declaration of love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend, neighbour and former Beatle George Harrison. In fact, the album is littered with songs about Boyd – “I Am Yours”, “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad” and a cover of “Have You Ever Loved A Woman?” – but it’s “Layla” itself that is by far Clapton’s most eloquent and inspired statement of his love. Clapton got his girl and there’s no doubt that “Layla” helped his case. But pretty much everyone else involved with the record got burned, bad. Within a year of its recording, Duane Allman – who came up with the song’s stunning guitar riff – was dead, followed by Carl Radle, whose kidneys gave up in 1980. After murdering his mother in 1983, drummer Jim Gordon was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent two decades in a mental hospital. Boyd finally left Harrison in ’74, only for her and Clapton to separate in ’86.” (Uncut)

Movies Of 1970:
1. Husbands - John Cassavetes (United States)
2. The Comformist - Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy)
3. Five Easy Pieces - Bob Rafelson (United States)
4. Wanda - Barbara Loden (United States)
5. Gimme Shelter - Albert And David Maysles / Charlotte Zwerin (United States)

Books Of 1970:
1. The Obscene Bird Of Night - Jose Donoso (Chile)
2. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (United States)
3. The Sound Of The Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)
4. Sexual Perversity In Chicago - David Mamet (United States)
5. A Maze Of Death - Phillip K. Dick (United States)

Albums Of 1970:
1. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon (United Kingdom)
2. Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (United States)
3. Fun House - The Stooges (United States)
4. Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs - Derek And The Dominoes (United States)
5. Abraxas - Santana (United States)
6. Moondance - Van Morrison (United Kingdom)
7. Workingman’s Dead - Grateful Dead (United States)
8. Comme a la Radio - Brigitte Fontaine & Art Ensemble Of Chicago (France)
9. Deja Vu - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (United States)
10. All Things Must Pass - George Harrison (United Kingdom)

Songs Of 1970:
1. Layla - Derek And The Dominoes (United States)
2. War - Edwin Starr (United States)
3. Band Of Gold - Freda Payne (United States)
4. Lola - The Kinks (United Kingdom)
5. Working Class Hero - John Lennon (United Kingdom)
6. Pressure Drop - Toots And The Maytals (Jamaica)
7. Moondance - Van Morrison (United Kingdom)
8. War Pigs - Black Sabbath (United Kingdom)
9. Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (United States)
10. All Right Now - Free (United Kingdom)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1971:

Movie Of 1971 - A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, United Kingdom)
“I drove to Cornwall and spent a couple of weeks travelling around and walking on moors. The film was a huge hit. The intelligent newspapers would write editorials about it, not only reviews. It was bigger than just a movie, because everyone latched on to the issue of gangs and violence in society. After a year or so, Stanley and his family got some death-threat letters, and the police advised him to withdraw the film – which he did, but only in the UK. Everyone who’d wanted to see it had seen it by then. I’d asked for $100,000 and 2.5% of the box office, which is what I’d got paid on my previous film. Stanley told me Warner had refused the 2.5%. But when I was invited to meet the studio heads, they said: “You’re going to be a very rich young man on the 2.5% we gave Stanley for you.” I knew he would never pay me. It was a terrible way to treat me after I’d given so much of myself, but I got over it. Doing this film has put me in movie history. Every new generation rediscovers it – not because of the violence, which is old hat compared to today, but the psychological violence. That debate, about a man’s freedom of choice, is still current.“ (Malcolm McDowell)

Book Of 1971 - Double Or Nothing (Raymond Federman, United States)
Raymond Federman’s experimental novel Double or Nothing is subtitled a “real fictitious discourse.” An example of what Federman calls “surfiction” (a fiction on the fictions of life), Double or Nothing uses typographical experimentation and metafictional play to work through autobiographical trauma. The novel’s non-beginning outlines a complexly stratified literary discourse. By locking himself up in a room for a year, an “inventor” plans on writing a novel about the arrival of a Jewish immigrant “protagonist” in America. A “recorder” takes note of everything the inventor does and thinks while making preparations on the day before moving into the room, while a “supervisor” stands over and beyond the entire text. As the novel progresses, these four discursive levels/characters - protagonist, inventor, recorder, supervisor - begin to “converge or merge,” to collapse into one another, often within a single sentence as it shifts point of view from “I” to “he” to “we.” The inventor spends most of his time obsessively calculating the cost of a year’s worth of different basic goods – noodles, toothpaste, cigarettes, toilet paper – while the recorder faithfully keeps track of “everything [the inventor] was doing, saying, thinking, planning, calculating, organizing, inventing, composing, anticipating, projecting, writing, etc.” (The Voice Imitator)

Album Of 1971 - What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye, United States)
“Much has been made of What's Going On's political bent, and it's true that the music was partially inspired by Marvin's brother Frankie, who had come back from a three-year tour of Vietnam, along with troublingly violent episodes like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kent State shootings that saw four students killed by national guardsmen. Songs like peace-espousing title track and "What's Happening Brother", which finds Gaye expressing a war veteran's helplessness upon returning home, show Marvin's dismay toward his country and government. But this album isn't just a protest time capsule. Far from it. Gaye's disappointment isn't just societal, it's personal as well. During this period, the singer had lost his duet partner and dear friend, Tammi Terrell, and his marriage to Gordy's sister Anna was violently breaking down, and he was being tailed by the IRS for unpaid back taxes. His resulting depression is evident throughout; What's Going On isn't a fiery album filled with timely sloganeering. Part of its long-lasting appeal involves an element of true-to-life resignation. "Who's willing to try to save a world/ That's destined to die," he sings on "Save the Children", pinpointing an American melancholia-- a mix of world-saving power and funereal inevitability-- that endures today.” (Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork)

Song Of 1971 - What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye, United States)
“The completed track was resisted by Motown chief Berry Gordy — less because of its lyrical content than its sound, far removed from Gaye’s signature romantic fare. “Berry actually thought it was a cool record. He just couldn’t see Marvin restarting his career,” says Bob Olhsson, one of several engineers on the project. “If anything, Berry was hesitant about it because he was such a jazz lover. It’s almost like, if he liked something too much, he was afraid of it from a commercial point of view.”. At the urging of other Motown execs, “What’s Going On” was pressed in a small run. The reaction from radio stations and record stores was fast and overwhelming, and a wider release was rushed out. “Within a week or two, it’s in the top five, and we get this phone call: ‘Where’s the album?!’” says Olhsson. “Well, the album hadn’t even been written, much less recorded. And then it turned into all hands on deck.”. A month of frantic work ensued, with sessions at both of Motown’s Detroit studios. By spring, the “What’s Going On” album was on its way to record racks — and to a pedestal among the all-time greats.” (Detroit Free Press)

Movies Of 1971:
1. A Clockwork Orange - Stanley Kubrick (United Kingdom)
2. The French Connection - William Friedkin (United States)
3. The Last Picture Show - Peter Bogdanovich (United States)
4. W.R.: Mysteries Of The Organism - Dusan Makavejev (Yugoslavia)
5. Dirty Harry - Don Siegel (United States)

Books Of 1971:
1. Double Or Nothing - Raymond Federman (United States)
2. The Complete Stories Of Frank Kafka - Frank Kafka (United States)
3. In A Free State - V.S. Naipaul (United Kingdom)
4. A Time Of Changes - Robert Silverberg (United States)
5. Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor (United Kingdom)

Albums Of 1971:
1. What’s Going On - Marvin Gaye (United States)
2. There’s A Riot Goin’ On - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
3. Maggot Brain - Funkadelic (United States)
4. The Inner Mounting Flame - The Mahavishnu Orchestra (United States)
5. Tago Mago - Can (Germany)
6. Blue - Joni Mitchell (United States)
7. Electric Warrior - T. Rex (United Kingdom)
8. Sticky Fingers - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
9. Tapestry - Carole King (United States)
10. Who’s Next - The Who (United Kingdom)

Songs Of 1971:
1. What’s Going On - Marvin Gaye (United States)
2. Let’s Stay Together - Al Green (United States)
3. Family Affair - Sly And The Family Stone (United States)
4. It’s Too Late - Carole King (United States)
5. Ain’t No Sunshine - Bill Withers (United States)
6. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) - Marvin Gaye (United States)
7. L.A. Woman - The Doors (United States)
8. Get It On - T. Rex (United Kingdom)
9. Theme From Shaft - Issac Hayes (United States)
10. Surf’s Up - The Beach Boys (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1972:

Movie Of 1972 - The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, United States)
“It was the first event movie of the 70s, the one multitudes queued up to see, the one whose dialogue, characters and imagery instantly became ingrained in the collective consciousness. It made stars of Pacino and Caan, won Oscars for Picture, Screenplay and Brando, in a triumphant comeback. Shortly after its premiere in 1972 Variety reported, "The Godfather is an historic smash of unprecedented proportions". At the time the director, Francis Ford Coppola, was holed up in a hotel writing the screenplay for The Great Gatsby, a job he took to relieve his financial problems because he believed in his movie. He had only been given the film after a lengthy wish-list of veterans including Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann and Franklin Schaffner turned it down. He perked up when Frank Capra wrote to him, claiming it was, " Out of this world. I cheered inwardly at scene after scene”. People are still cheering scene after scene in one of the greatest American films ever made, and committing chunks of dialogue to memory — like the goons in TV's The Sopranos who adore Godfather impersonations and businessmen like Tom Hanks' bookseller in You've Got Mail who explains to Meg Ryan that The Godfather is the font of all wisdom for the modern man.” (Angie Errigo, Empire)

Book Of 1972 - Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino, Italy)
“Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities might be labeled travelogue. It was, in fact, the traveler in me that first fell under its spell. The places Calvino describes, though, don't exist on any map. Technically, this is a novel, a work of fiction, but one without any storyline. The only characters are an aging Kublai Khan and a young-ish Marco Polo. They're sitting in a garden, where the Venetian explorer is regaling the Mongol ruler with tales of the cities he has seen journeying to the far reaches of Khan's vast empire. Each short chapter describes a different city, 55 in all. These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come; Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and Argia, a city with earth instead of air. At some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Calvino's cities — like all cities, really — are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought experiment, or, as Polo tells Khan at one point, "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours." (Eric Weiner, NPR)

Album Of 1972 - Return To Forever (Chick Corea, United States)
“The legendary first lineup of Chick Corea's fusion band Return to Forever debuted on this classic album (titled after the group but credited to Corea), featuring Joe Farrell on soprano sax and flute, the Brazilian team of vocalist Flora Purim and drummer/percussionist Airto Moreira, and electric bass whiz Stanley Clarke. It wasn't actually released in the U.S. until 1975, which was why the group's second album, Light as a Feather, initially made the Return to Forever name. Nonetheless, Return to Forever is every bit as classic, using a similar blend of spacy electric-piano fusion and Brazilian and Latin rhythms. It's all very warm, light, and airy, like a soft breeze on a tropical beach -- hardly the sort of firebrand approach to fusion that Miles Davis, Tony Williams, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra were exploring, and far less rooted in funk or rock. Corea also bathes the album in an undertone of trippy mysticism, not only in the (admittedly dated) lyrics, but in his cosmic keyboard wanderings, which remain melodic and accessible through most of the record. There's one genuine pop song in the groovy samba "What Game Shall We Play Today," and while "Sometime Ago" has similar elements, it's part of an ambitious side-long medley that features a stream-of-consciousness intro and a jubilant, Spanish/Mexican-style closing section called "La Fiesta," complete with castanets and flamenco modes.” (Steve Huey, AllMusic)

Song Of 1972 - Superstition (Stevie Wonder, United States)
“Superstition” came out after Wonder had spent much of 1972 on tour with the Rolling Stones. (The Stones had opened for Wonder back in 1964, when he was a child phenom and they’d only just arrived on the scene.) And maybe it’s not an accident that Wonder came up with the riff with Beck in mind. It’s a huge, nasty stomper of a song, one that has as much in common with the Stones or Led Zeppelin as it does with Wonder’s Motown contemporaries. And yet “Superstition” is still a soul song, with its perfectly timed horn stabs and its squechy low end. Wonder sings hard on it, too, hitting pinched and churchy high notes that swoop in over the churn he’s generated. The lyrics are gnomic opacities: “13-month-old baby broke the looking glass / Seven years of bad luck / The good things in your past.” But there’s a concrete meaning to the song. Wonder is singing about how we shouldn’t believe passed-down wisdom: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer / Superstition ain’t the way.” Maybe that’s an oblique critique of racism, or conservative policy, or any other handed-down hang-up. But Wonder was already singing in riddles. And ultimately, the lyrics mattered a whole lot less than that earthshaking groove.“ (Tom Breihan, Stereogum)

Movies Of 1972:
1. The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola (United States)
2. Aguirre, The Wrath Of The God - Werner Herzog (West Germany)
3. Last Tango In Paris - Bernardo Bertolucci (United States)
4. Cries And Whispers - Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
5. Cabaret - Bob Fosse (United States)

Books Of 1972:
1. Invisible Cities - Ítalo Calvino (Italy)
2. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke (Austria)
3. The Poetry Of Erza Pound - Erza Pound (United States)
4. Mumbo Jumbo - Ishmael Reed (United States)
5. All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers - Larry McMurtry (United States)

Albums Of 1972:
1. Return To Forever - Chick Corea (United States)
2. Talking Book - Stevie Wonder (United States)
3. Something/Anything? - Todd Rundgren (United States)
4. Superfly - Curtis Mayfield (United States)
5. The Harder They Come - Various Artists (Jamaica)
6. Neu! - Neu (Germany)
7. #1 Record - Big Star (United States)
8. Spring - American Spring (United States)
9. Pink Moon - Nick Drake (United Kingdom)
10. I Sing The Body Electric - Weather Report (United States)

Songs Of 1972:
1. Superstition - Stevie Wonder (United States)
2. Papa Was A Rolling Stone - The Temptations (United States)
3. Hello It’s Me - Todd Rundgren (United States)
4. Walk On The Wild Side - Lou Reed (United States)
5. The Harder They Come - Jimmy Cliff (Jamaica)
6. Do It Again - Steely Dan (United States)
7. All The Young Dudes - Mott The Hoople (United Kingdom)
8. Love Train - The O’Jays (United States)
9. School’s Out - Alice Cooper (United States)
10. Tumbling Dice - The Rolling Stones (United Kingdom)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1973



Record of 1973 | The Dark Side of the Moon | Pink Floyd | UK | album (vinyl LP) | all time #19
"Syd Barrett's descent into insanity and departure from the group informed just about everything they wrote about in some form or another. On Dark Side of the Moon, it's most glaring on the penultimate song “Brain Damage”, which explores the feeling of isolation and disconnect from society, as well as the fear of insanity. In fact, in its purest form, Dark Side of the Moon is an album about fear: the fear of death, the fear of hypocrisy, the fear losing one's self, and the fear of insanity. It's also the album where Pink Floyd learned how to write a single that didn't sacrifice their artistic ideals. Take "Time" as an example, a track that relays the fear of mortality and monotony over music so damn compelling that it doubles as something to be analyzed and something to be experienced." (Kyle Kersey, SoundBlab)

Movie of 1973 | Amarcord (Amarcord) | Federico Fellini | Italy | all time #70
"If ever there was a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and joy, by a filmmaker at the heedless height of his powers, that movie is Federico Fellini's Amarcord. The title means "I remember" in the dialect of Rimini, the seaside town of his youth, but these are memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling. Here he gathers the legends of his youth, where all of the characters are at once larger and smaller than life — flamboyant players on their own stages. All of his films are autobiographical in one way or another —feeding off of his life, his fantasies, his earlier films— and from them a composite figure takes shape. Amarcord is Fellini's final great film." (Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert.com)

Book of 1973 | Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | USA | all time #304
""A screaming comes across the sky…" A few months after the Germans' secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000, through a wildly comic extravaganza that has been hailed in The New Republic as "the most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." (Publisher)


Books of 1973:
1 | Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | USA | #304
2 | Crash | J. G. Ballard | UK | #376
3 | Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | USA | #455


Movies of 1973:
1 | Amarcord (Amarcord) | Federico Fellini | Italy | all time #70
2 | La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore) | Jean Eustache | France | #108
3 | El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) | Víctor Erice | Spain | #113


Albums of 1973:
1 | The Dark Side of the Moon | Pink Floyd | UK | #19
2 | Innervisions | Stevie Wonder | USA | #46
3 | Raw Power | Iggy and The Stooges | USA | #99


Songs of 1973:
1 | Search and Destroy | Iggy and The Stooges | USA | #180
2 | Living for the City | Stevie Wonder | USA | #260
3 | Free Bird | Lynyrd Skynyrd | USA | #275
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Honorio
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Honorio »

1974



Movie of 1974 | The Godfather: Part II | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | all time #22
"Coppola's superior sequel to his own very fine Mafia epic extends the original film's timeframe both backwards (to Vito Corleone's arrival and struggles to get by in New York at the start of the 20th century) and forwards (to his son Michael's ruthless protection of his own power as capo during a post-war period of expanded influence into Vegas, Cuba and elsewhere). The performances, Gordon Willis' memorably gloomy camerawork, the stately pace and the sheer scale of the story's sweep render everything engrossing and so, well, plausible that our ideas of organised crime in America will forever be marked by this movie." (Geoff Andrew, Time Out)

Record of 1974 | No Woman, No Cry | Bob Marley & The Wailers | Jamaica | album track | all time #132
"Bob Marley was a man of peace and despite the cool embrace of sadness in No Woman No Cry there is an overwhelming positive message within. It is not just in the repetition in where Marley flatly states "everything's going to be alright," but also in every verse. For in every verse there is this constant remembrance of community; the good people we meet; the making of fire lights; the cooking of cornmeal porridge and the sharing thereof. It is a beautiful sentiment, that together, with cooperation and friendship the only natural outcome is a great future. It is both incredibly uplifting and optimistic." (King of Braves, Music in Review)

Book of 1974 | The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara | USA | all time #265
"In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war. The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, is unique, sweeping, unforgettable — a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny." (Publisher)


Books of 1974:
1 | The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara | USA | #265
2 | La storia (History) | Elsa Morante | Italy | #361
3 | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | John le Carré | UK | #620


Movies of 1974:
1 | The Godfather: Part II | Francis Ford Coppola | USA | #22
2 | Chinatown | Roman Polanski | USA | Poland | #50
3 | A Woman Under the Influence | John Cassavetes | USA | #97


Albums of 1974:
1 | Natty Dread | Bob Marley & The Wailers | Jamaica | #162
2 | Grievous Angel | Gram Parsons | USA | #210
3 | Court and Spark | Joni Mitchell | USA | Canada | #213


Songs of 1974:
1 | No Woman, No Cry | Bob Marley & The Wailers | Jamaica | #132
2 | Autobahn | Kraftwerk | West Germany | #190
3 | Sweet Home Alabama | Lynyrd Skynyrd | USA | #285
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1973:

Movie Of 1973 - Badlands (Terrence Malick, United States)
"Starring 31-year-old Martin Sheen as the Starkweather figure Kit Carruthers, a genial psychopath with good manners, black-and-white cowboy boots and a carefully maintained movie star pompadour, and 24-year-old Sissy Spacek as the Fugate stand-in Holly Sargis – the two of whom meet cute when Kit's garbageman spots Holly twirling a cheerleader's baton on her front lawn – Badlands established a tone of calculated dissociation from the outset. While Holly's strangely poetic, teen-romantic narration ("Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land") describes a world of swooning innocence and longing, the movie shows us something else: a place where untethered souls drift dangerously from one incident of spasmodic violence to the next, where the ravishing and indifferent vastness of the Colorado landscape stands in chilling contrast to the acts perpetrated by the puny figures that cross it in a dust-churning stolen Caddy. Even the music functions to complicate easy response: In what other movie would the music of Erik Satie seem so appropriate for a mid-western murder spree, or Nat King Cole sound so lovely as a soundtrack for a post-homicidal twirl in the headlights? Although audiences were well-conditioned to the lovers-on-the-lam scenario, a road movie subgenre that dated back at least to Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once and ignited a countercultural sensation just seven years previously with Bonnie and Clyde, Malick's version was something new and possibly even more unsettling." (Geoff Pevere, The Globe And Mail)

Book Of 1973 - Breakfast Of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut, United States)
"You have to hand it to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In his eighth novel, "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday," he performs considerable complex magic. He makes pornography seem like any old plumbing, violence like lovemaking, innocence like evil, and guilt like child's play. He wheels out all the latest fashionable complaints about America--her racism, her gift for destroying language, her technological greed and selfishness--and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful, and lovable, all at the same time. He draws pictures, for God's sake--simple, rough, yet surprisingly seductive sketches of everything from Volkswagens to electric chairs. He weaves into his plot a dozen or so glorious synopses of Vonnegut stories one almost wishes were fleshed out into whole books. He very nearly levitates. Yet--astonishingly--this fiction is also a factual announcement of his intention to give up fiction. And what mars the book is that one believes the fiction, but not the facts. Up to a certain point, it is easy to accept what is going on in this "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." It's amusing and charming, yet oddly frightening, to watch Kilgore Trout--the undiscovered science-fiction writer who has kept popping up in Mr. Vonnegut's previous works--hitchhiking across America to a Festival of the Arts in Midland City, where he has been invited through the lone intervention of that benign-evil millionaire, Eliot Rosewater." (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times)

Album Of 1973 - Innervisions (Stevie Wonder, United States)
"The themes are simple. Life is tough but life is beautiful; find your own way, but make sure you're not simply playing the fool and kidding yourself. He gently chides the escapism of drugs ("Too High"), as well as the "Misstra Know-It-All"s who wear their ignorance like a shield. He saves his blessings for those who maintain a reverie of the world as it should be, as it inevitably is, the "Higher Ground" which must never be lost sight of or denied. It's interesting to note here that in the song Wonder directs at the "Jesus Children of America" (adding transcendental meditators and junkies into the spiritual mix), he merely asks them not to "tell lies." Later, in "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing": "Everybody needs a change/A chance to check out the new/But you're the only one to see/The changes you take yourself through.". In this sense -- and it's to his credit that Wonder's preoccupations with such siddharthic messages never slide into the blandly predictable -- Stevie functions a bit like Curtis Mayfield, aware of his role as a musical and spiritual leader, in that order, but hardly to the point of shrillness. His concern with the real world is all-encompassing, a fact which his blindness has apparently complemented rather than denied. "I'm not one who makes believe," he sings in "Visions"; "I know that leaves are green," Even when his characters run into crippling obstacles -- the young Mississippi boy who's spent his life "Living for the City," only to arrive at Port Authority and be unjustly thrown in the slammer -- he never loses that basic optimism, the ability to once again rise and return to the fray. Musically, this philosophy is blended into nine songs whose depth and range of technical judgement is flawless. Though Stevie plays most everything on the album, instrumentation is held to a careful minimum, centered around electric piano, guitars, a roundhouse rhythm section and a discrete, unobtrusive use of synthesizers." (Lenny Kaye, Rolling Stone)

Song Of 1973 - Living For The CIty (Stevie Wonder, United States)
"Having spent a mere seconds in Manhattan, our hero is approached by someone who hurriedly offers him five dollars to carry a package across the street. Before our man can process what’s going on, the police have descended on him—doesn’t seem to matter that he’s not the guy they were after. Splice in a judge’s imperious voice: completely innocent, he’s sentenced to ten years in prison. Our protagonist is still in disbelief as he’s forced into his cell, the door closing on him as the correctional officer calls him a nigger. Then the verse picks up again, charging to its conclusion, Wonder’s voice full of snarl and flame. This last part of the interlude seems to have stuck with us most, and understandably so: rapid, unjust incarceration with an n-bomb cherry on top. The barking dog protects its home. “Get in that cell, nigger” has taken on a life of its own, having been sampled by Public Enemy, Slick Rick, Eazy-E, Ice Cube. But the end of the interlude, for all of its catastrophe, obscures an important moment at the beginning. What happened to the protagonist could have happened—and without a doubt did happen—in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Wonder’s own Detroit, and so on. So why is “Living for the City” set in New York? What in particular makes it a New York song? The skyline. The lyrics, granted, have nothing to say about the Gotham horizon. But of the few sentences spoken by Wonder’s character, the longest is entirely concerned with the skyline: “Wow! New York! Just like I pictured it: skyscrapers and everything!”. His exclamation is in the same key as “New York, New York,” “On Broadway,” “Empire State of Mind” … and it may just have been the worst thing he could have said. Say you were to advise a visiting friend of a list of all the things not to say on a crowded street in the middle of New York—especially seventies-era New York. If this isn’t near the top of your list, you are a bad friend. There’s nothing wrong with awe, of course, until it makes you as a target. And given that Wonder clearly wanted the fall of his main character to be swift, dizzying, and brutal, the skyline was perfect. Just by being there, it starts the action." (Rowan Ricardo Phillips, The Paris Review)

Movies Of 1973:
1. Badlands - Terrence Malik (United States)
2. Mean Streets - Martin Scorsese (United States)
3. Amarcord - Federico Fellini (Italy)
4. The Mother And The Whore - Jean Eustache (France)
5. American Graffiti - George Lucas (United States)

Books Of 1973:
1. Breakfast Of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (United States)
2. Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown (United States)
3. Sula - Toni Morrison (United States)
4. The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis (United Kingdom)
5. Crash - J.G. Ballard (United Kingdom)

Albums Of 1973:
1. Innervisions - Stevie Wonder (United States)
2. The Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd (United Kingdom)
3. Raw Power - The Stooges (United States)
4. Catch A Fire - Bob Marley And The Wailers (Jamaica)
5. Let’s Get It On - Marvin Gaye (United States)
6. Call Me - Al Green (United States)
7. Head Hunters - Herbie Hancock (United States)
8. Paris 1919 - John Cale (United States)
9. Funky Kingston - Toots And The Maytals (Jamaica)
10. Space Ritual - Hawkind (United Kingdom)

Songs Of 1973:
1. Living For The City - Stevie Wonder (United States)
2. Let’s Get It On - Marvin Gaye (United States)
3. Search And Destroy - The Stooges (United States)
4. I Can’t Stand The Rain - Ann Peebles (United States)
5. Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder (United States)
6. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John (United Kingdom)
7. Midnight Train To Georgia - Gladys Knight & The Pips (United States)
8. Paris 1919 - John Cale (United States)
9. Band On The Run - Paul McCartney & Wings (United Kingdom)
10. Chameleon - Herbie Hancock (United States)
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Re: Books, movies and records of the year

Post by Cold Butterfly »

1974:

Movie Of 1974 - The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, United States)
“The devolution of Michael Corleone is counterpointed by flashbacks to the youth and young manhood of his father, Vito (Robert De Niro). These scenes, taking place in Sicily and old New York, follow the conventional pattern of a young man on the rise and show the Mafia code being burned into the Corleone blood. No false romanticism conceals the necessity of using murder to do business. Such events as Vito’s murder of the minor-league New York godfather have their barbarism somewhat softened as Coppola adopts Vito’s point of view and follows him as he climbs rooftops to ambush the man and successfully escapes. It is a built-in reality that we tend to identify with a film’s POV. Here the murder becomes another rung on Vito’s ladder to success. To be sure, the life of young Vito helps to explain the forming of the adult Don Corleone, and to establish in the film the Sicilian code of omerta. As Michael changes, we see why he feels that he must. He must play the game by its rules. But I am not sure the flashbacks strengthen the film. I would have appreciated separate films about young Vito and the evolution of Michael. Never mind. What we have are two compelling narratives, two superb lead performances and lasting images. There is even a parallel between the deaths of two elderly dons. Revenge must be obtained. Coppola is at the top of his form in both films, and if I disapprove of the morality of the central characters, well, so do we all. We agree people should not kill one another, but that doesn’t explain why these films are seen again and again, entering a small worldwide canon of films just about everyone seems to have seen. They are grippingly written, directed with confidence and artistry, photographed by Gordon Willis (“The Master of Darkness”) in rich, warm, tones. The acting in both films is definitive. We can name the characters in a lot of films (Harry Lime, Scarlett O’Hara, Travis Bickle, Charles Foster Kane) but from how many films do we remember the names of six or more characters? Brando, Pacino, De Niro, Duvall, Cazale, Caan, Diane Keaton, Lee Strasberg, Talia Shire, Michael V. Gazzo and others are well-cast, well-used, gifted and correct for their roles.” (Roger Ebert)

Book Of 1974 - The Conservationist (Nadine Gordimer, South Africa)
“Ms. Gordimer's protagonist is Mehring, an iron executive who buys the 400-acre spread 45 minutes from his office because the ramshackle farmhouse is convenient for rendezvous with his mistress. And its losses are tax deductible. Mehring is a loner who jets off on business trips to Europe and Japan between weekends on the farm monitoring his corn crops and the health of his newborn calves. He believes all is well only when his crops, employees and loved ones perform the duties they are assigned. "No farm is beautiful unless it's productive," he tells his mistress, Antonia, before he buys the overgrown stretch of cow pasture and cornfields. What the "The Conservationist" shows as well as any of Ms. Gordimer's 15 novels is how her pen punctured apartheid's hypocrisy. Her relatively liberal white peers were beneficiaries of a society built on cruelty—as was she. Characters like Mehring reflect a degree of guilt she shared in being part of the system. Skewering him was an act of literary self-flagellation. When it awarded her the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, the Swedish Academy said: "Gordimer takes the question of the justification of the privileges of white people—even benevolent white people—to its extreme.". Four decades after the publication of "The Conservationist," apartheid is a dark chapter of history. South Africa's black majority has been in charge since Nelson Mandela brought the African National Congress—of which Ms. Gordimer was a member—to power in 1994. But Ms. Gordimer's portrait of South Africa's racial fault lines hasn't lost its resonance. Like the gulf separating Mehring and his farm workers, South Africa's postcard vistas loom over a society still defined by the divisions between whites and blacks.“ (Patrick McGroarty, The Wall Street Journal)

Album Of 1974 - Inspiration Information (Shuggie Otis, United States)
“Ignored upon its release in 1974 and celebrated upon its reissue in 2001, Shuggie Otis' fourth and last album Inspiration Information exists out of time -- a record that was of its time, but didn't belong of it; a record that was idiosyncratic but not necessarily visionary. It was psychedelic soul that was released far too late to be part of any zeitgeist and it was buried at the time. Yet no matter what Luaka Bop's grand poobah David Byrne claims on the sticker -- he says Shuggie's "trippy R&B jams are equal to Marvin's and Curtis', but somehow more contemporary sounding...closer to D'Angelo meets DJ Shadow" -- this isn't revolutionary. It can occasionally sound modern, such as on the rolling head trip "XL-30," but only because it's the kind of groove Shadow would sample and build on; the slow, liquid instrumental head trips sound the same way. Perhaps that's why it can seem more contemporary -- contemporary ears are more attuned to these relaxed, warmly trippy soundscapes. Otis crafted all of this essentially alone, playing each instrument himself, and it's quite clearly a reflection of his inner psyche, and no matter how much it floats and skates upon its own sound, it's a welcoming, inviting sound. But, no matter how much the partisans claim -- and their effusive praise is plastered all over the liner notes, with Sean O'Hagan claiming that it shocks you out of a rut, Stereolab's Tim Gane says it is "almost like a new style of music that could've developed but never did" -- this isn't revolutionary, even if it's delightfully idiosyncratic. So, don't fall for the hyperbole. This isn't an album that knocks your head off -- it's subtle, intricate music that's equal parts head music and elegant funk, a record that slowly works its way under your skin.” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic)

Song Of 1974 - September Gurls (Big Star, United States)
“While the Radio City album was originally mastered on December 3, 1973, the 'September Gurls' single was mastered more than seven months later, on July 26, 1974, and John Fry was among the people who had high expectations for the song. "I loved it," he says. "It was just two minutes and 41 seconds long — can you believe that? — and I said to myself 'This is really going to work for radio.' To me, it still holds up today and I still enjoy listening to it — among a lot of other things, we [Ardent Studios] have it on our music-on-hold on the phone and it sounds pretty good on there. However, if somebody had told me in 1973 or 1974 that anybody was going to be interested in this more than 30 years later, I would have just said 'You're crazy. That's never going to happen.”. "A few years went by and I thought nobody knew anything about this music, but then all of a sudden in the late '70s there was all this interest and a call for it to be reissued, for the shelved third album to be issued, and after that it took on a life of its own and it's still going on today. All of which goes to show that you can be right in the middle of something special and, more often than not, you don't realise it until later." (Richard Buskin, Sound Of Sound)

Movies Of 1974:
1. The Godfather Part II - Francis Ford Coppola (United States)
2. Chinatown - Roman Polanski (United States)
3. A Woman Under The Influence - John Cassavetes (United States)
4. Alice In The Cities - Win Wenders (West Germany)
5. The Conversation - Francis Ford Coppola (United States)

Books Of 1974:
1. The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
2. Second-Class Citizen - Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria)
3. The Hair Of Harold Roux - Thomas Williams (United States)
4. The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin (United States)
5. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge (United Kingdom)

Albums Of 1974:
1. Inspiration Information - Shuggie Otis (United States)
2. Natty Dread - Bob Marley And The Wailers (Jamaica)
3. Radio City - Big Star (United States)
4. Pretzel Logic - Steely Dan (United States)
5. Fulfillingness’ First Finale - Stevie Wonder (United States)
6. Nightbirds - LaBelle (United States)
7. Meet The Residents - The Residents (United States)
8. Court And Spark - Joni Mitchell (United States)
9. AWB - Average White Band (United Kingdom)
10. Interstellar Space - John Coltrane (United States)

Songs Of 1974:
1. September Gurls - Big Star (United States)
2. Rikki Don’t Lose That Number - Steely Dan (United States)
3. Summer Madness - Kool & The Gang (United States)
4. Rock Your Baby - George McCrae (United States)
5. Help Me - Joni Mitchell (United States)
6. Take Me To The River - Al Green (United States)
7. Lady Marmalade - LaBelle (United States)
8. You Haven’t Done Nothin’ - Stevie Wonder (United States)
9. Pick Up The Pieces - Average White Band (United Kingdom)
10. Rednecks - Randy Newman (United States)
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