This week musician and activist Fred Ho will be celebrated at events featuring both signings of the new University of Illinois Press book Yellow Power Yellow Soul and also some screenings of the new documentary Diary of the Dragon: The (R)Evolution of Fred Ho.
Here’s a preview of the film:
If you’re looking for something to do in Chicago this month, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has an exhibit called SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City which roughly coincides with our publication of the book by the same name, edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s online mini-exhibit has information about Midwestern towns featured in the exhibit (and in the book): Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Peoria.
On a related note, the CAF also posts time-lapsed videos of exhibit change overs, including the SynergiCity installation. You’ll have to create your own background music.
From Urbana-Champaign’s local newspaper, The News-Gazette:
Legislation that would set up task forces at each of Illinois’ nine public universities to establish policies for open access to research articles published by faculty members and researchers was approved Tuesday by the Senate Higher Education Committee. It now moves to the Senate floor.
Fifty years ago today Martin Luther King Jr. completed his open letter from Birmingham Jail.
David Levering Lewis, writes in his book King: A Biography (recently released in a new third edition):
“Every nation has its stockpile of rhetorical memorabilia, addresses, and documents which enshrine by their passionate sincerity and eloquence a moment of curtain call in the drama of its people’s maturity. Washington’s farewell address, the Webster-Hayne debates, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the inauguration speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy—these are milestones in the republic’s growth. To this stockpile must be added Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail…’”
The manifesto of civil disobedience that King penned from his jail cell (after an arrest during a non-violent public protest of segregationist laws) is being celebrated worldwide on this anniversary.
King’s letter includes his now-famous statement “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Filmmaker Philip Kaufman will be honored with the Founder’s Directing Award by the San Francisco Film Society.
Annette Insdorf will lead a Q&A with director Philip Kaufman at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 5.
Insdorf will be signing copies of her critically acclaimed book at 7pm at the Castro Theater prior to the Q&A and screening of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“A thoughtful, scholarly study of one of America’s most underrated filmmakers.”–Leonard Maltin
“A sympathetic, in-depth, and entirely jargon-free look at Kaufman’s work.”–DGA Quarterly
“A shrewd and very readable study.”–Filmmaker
“Superb.”–Hollywood Reporter
“A study so closely tuned to his work and so neatly supplemented with his own insights from interviews and e-mails that it reads like a biography of an oeuvre.”–The New Yorker online
Charles Ives in the Mirror just arrived from the printer, and it is bright! I think it conveys the mood of the book well. Here’s an excerpt so you can decide for yourself:
“Early in 1921, several hundred Americans were puzzled to discover an unsolicited package in their mail that contained a pair of books. (1) The larger of the two was bound in dark red cloth, and on the cover, framed by horizontal double lines, gilt lettering with a curlicued ‘M’ and ‘E’ lent a modest decorative touch. Roughly twelve inches in height, its size was typical for a volume of music, which the title, ‘Second Pianoforte Sonata,’ declared it to be. There was also a subtitle, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-60,’ and for it the largest lettering on the sparse front cover had been reserved–larger even than for the names of the composer, Charles E. Ives. The second, smaller book, entitled Essays Before a Sonata, contained only prose, but it was attributed to the same Mr. Ives. The name was unfamiliar to all but a few of the recipients. Perhaps some of them thought they had received the books as targets of a marketing strategy devised by the ingenious minds of the rapidly growing advertising industry. They would not have been far off the mark, for Mr. Ives, composer and author, was also responsible for some of the most successful advertising copy ever written in the insurance business.” Find out if the campaign by the insurance-adman-turned-composer was successful in Charles Ives in the Mirror by David C. Paul.
This digital cover image created by the designer is good, but doesn't quite convey the same effect as old-fashioned paper printing with its blurry mirror effect.
Thomas Leslie’s forthcoming book Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934, highlights architectural progress in the skyscraper’s birthplace from the Great Fire to the Great Depression. During this time, such iconic landmarks as the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field and Company Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Palmolive Building, and many others rose to impressive new heights.
Click the image above to view the book trailer.
Stephen Wade, author the recent book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, was a guest on the April 8, 2013, edition of WGN-TV’s Midday News.
As the St. Louis Cardinals play their 2013 home opener today, Japanese or Japanese American players are no unusual site in Major League ballparks. But that wasn’t always the case.
Samuel Regalado notes that the first Major Leaguer of Japanese American descent suited up for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975.
Regalado’s book, Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues, examines baseball’s evolving importance to the
Japanese American community. “Nikkei” is a term not only for the value of the share on the Tokyo stock exchange, but also refers to first generation Japanese Americans.
“Ryan Kurosaki was an unassuming pioneer who brought with him, in spirit, generations of Nikkei ballplayers whose devotion to the game was overshadowed only by their love for their country,” Regalado says.
The author says that the young pitcher’s debut was a low-key one; there was no reporting of Kurosaki’s debut on the Japanese American newspapers at the time.
“Kurosaki’s path breaking entry into the big leagues was only unassuming to the Nikkei because their community had, by then, changed from its pre-Second World War identity as a strictly Japanese American enclave to a much wider Asian American profile from which baseball’s prominence played a less distinctive role.”
Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass book trailer
Posted by michaelIn May 2013 we will publish Murphy Henry’s new book Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, which documents the musical lives of more than seventy women including Sally Ann Forrester, Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, the Dixie Chicks, Bessie Lee Mauldin, Wilma Lee Cooper, Roni and Donna Stoneman, and many more.
Click above to watch Murphy speak about the writing of Pretty Good for a Girl.