Portugal: Music from the Edge of Europe Madredeus et al.

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Today's sound

 

Elf Power - A Dream in Sound
Elf Power's debut, When the Red King Comes, was a clever send up of prog-rock bands who took J.R.R. Tolkien a bit too seriously. On A Dream In Sound, they continue to refine their low-fi meets psychedelic meets new alt-rock sound, and the results are like nothing you've ever heard.

Pizzicato Five - Playboy and Playgirl
Pizzicato 5 defies all attempts at categorization or convention. This Japanese outfit does trippy - retro electronica that somehow transcends lounge, trip-hop, and commercial quirkiness, forming its own parallel dimension of sound and style. Standouts: "La Depression" - "Rolls Royce" - "Week-End".

Pixies - Doolittle

           Prince - Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic

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Classic rock, prog rock

 

Tom Petty - Into the Great Wide Open

         Tom Petty - Echo
The first song from Echo downloaded on MP3 became a smash hit all over the world. Now you can hear what the fuss was all about with this hard-rocking new release from Tom and the boys. Take off your shoes, crack open a cold one and groove to soon-to-be-classic tracks like "Room at the Top," "Swingin" and "Won't Last Long."

Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother
Atom Heart Mother is a great, complex work, which includes a very long piece for several voices. This album has a quite "baroque" character. However, you can hear out of it the incomparable style of P.F. Atom Heart Mother calls images of alienation, of a multitude of faces and shapes, of killing machines, but also of joy.

Pink Floyd - Ummagumma
The double album Ummagumma is a masterpiece of experimentation. It contains "Astronomy Domine" - originally from Floyd's debut The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn -, as well as "Careful With That Axe Eugene" and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun". The mystical-sounding title Ummagumma turned out to be an euphemism for "sex".

Popol Vuh - In the Gardens of Pharao / Aguirre

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Jazz

                     Charlie Parker with Strings: The Master Takes

           Charlie Parker - Bird Is Free

 

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Bestsellers

       PRETTY THINGS, a novel by Susan Compo

         The Poisonwood Bible  by Barbara Kingsolver

         The Plato Papers: A Profecy  by Peter Ackroid At the turn of the thirty-eighth century, London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers public lectures on the long, tumultuous history of what is now a tranquil city. Plato focuses particularly on the Age of Mouldwarp, which spanned from a.d. 1500 until 2300, when the sun disappeared and the planet was held in darkness. Plato presents what is known about that period from archaeological evidence. [Hardcover, 160 pages]

James Patterson - Cradle and All: A Novel

 

 

Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Thomas Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. His other books include The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, Dance for the Dead, and Vanishing Act.

 

"Jane Whitefield usually makes people disappear (The Face-Changers, 1998, etc.), but this time it's money: mob money that prompts Cosa Nostra to chase Native American Jane all over the country in a terrifically plotted nail-biter. When trying to explain her remarkable talent for aiding clients to elude the ill-disposed, Jane often credits her Senecan forebears, so many of them expert trackers (and un-trackers)." (From Kirkus Reviews) Blood Money, the fifth Whitefield book, is the best tale of a wonderfully unique series.

 

      Jerome Gold - The Prisoner's Son

A sci-fi masterpiece.

 

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
A well described slice of western country life. The vulnerability of Ike and Bobby Guthrie and Victoria Roubideaux; the decency of the McPheron brothers and Maggie Jones; and Tom Guthrie, whose life seems to be slipping out of control just as he's challenged to hold it together--these are characters you hope for and hope with. The Plainsong orchestrated by Kent Haruf (The Tie That Binds) is a melody of the connections that draw us together for the right reasons, even when life seems poised against us.

Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) Payback

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said "screw you, buddy", yanked his Chevy back in to the stream of traffic and roared on down to the tollbooths. Parker spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked accross the George Washington bridge...

Donald E. Westlake - Pity Him Afterwards

 

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Best books of the 20th Century 

Sylvia Plath 

Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia PLATH by Paul Alexander
Based on exhaustive interviews and extensive archival research, Rough Magic probes the events of Plath's life in a biography that stands alone in its compassionate view of this fiercely talented, deeply troubled artist. 36 photos.

     "An Illuminating Portal Into The Life Of A Tortured Soul."

                        Other books on / by Sylvia Plath:

Anne Stevenson - Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath

Janet Malcolm - The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

                                 The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

          C.D. Payne - Youth in Revolt - The Journals of Nick Twisp I have recommended this book to many friends, and no one has been disappointed.
Mr. Payne has written an extremely funny and amusing novel. 14 yrs. old Nick Twisp
goes through many zany and crazy adventures just to win his love over. He's the Holden
Caulfield of the 90's.
                                                   The Home Page of "Nick Twisp"

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               PLEXUS by Henry Miller

 

 

              Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket.
The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again.

Top Non-Fiction   

      The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert A. Caro

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Movies

  The Prince of Egypt

Director: Brenda Chapman, Simon Wells, Steve Hickner
Executive Producer: Jeffrey Katzenberg
Edition Details: VHS
NTSC format (for use in US and Canada only)
Color, Animated, Closed-captioned, NTSC

"Animated retelling of the story of Moses features some of the most spectacular animation in the history of the medium, dramatic staging, and an ambitious song score by Stephen Schwartz..."

(Leonard Maltin)

Born a slave and set adrift in the river, Moses (voiced by Val Kilmer) is raised as the son of Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart) and is a fitting rival for his stepbrother Rameses (Ralph Fiennes). When he learns of his roots--in a knockout sequence in which hieroglyphics come alive--he flees to the desert, where he finds his roots and heeds God's calling to free the slaves from Egypt.
One of the most enjoyable animations ever made. Not for little children!

 

                                                         Oscar Winners

 

franc'O'brain & Transputer Qasar. 2002.
Email: francobrain@angelfire.com.
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