Death Waltz
Charlee Wilkes is a beautiful young woman living in Lake Arrowhead, California, who becomes inexplicably drawn to move to Rogue River, Oregon—alone. Against family wishes, she moves with her Saint Bernard and buys a small house, and mysterious things begin to happen after she buys an old typewriter from the local antique store. Is the house haunted? Or has a spirit attached itself to the antique typewriter? Terrifying occurrences in the house cause her to question her sanity. She is drawn deeper into unraveling a mystery of murder and is astonished to realize it all revolves around her.
DEATH WALTZ
The Death Waltz consists of eight separate tales of men in different points of their lives dealing with death. Survivor's stories are woven with the lingering effects of losing a loved one; a dance with death that creates the very fabric of the shattered lives of those left behind. The death of a wife, a brother, a life once lived... are examined through the lens of the men struggling to move on, after finding themselves without someone, or something, they never imagined being without. The decision of surrendering to, or fighting the inevitable end of life's journey touches the lives of everyone involved in each story. Growing up around death where his family cared for hospice clients, author Terry Powers pensincredibly touching heartfelt stories that give insight into the male mind as it deals with loss, and how death affects a wider circle than we could ever imagined."
The Viennese Waltz
This book shows how over the hundred years between the Vienna Congress and the dissolution of the Empire, the waltz altered from signifier of upper-class artifice—covering with glitz and glamour the poverty and war central to the time—to the link between the three classes, between man and nature, and between Viennese and “Other.”
Studying Waltz with Bashir
On its release in 2008, Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir was heralded as a brilliant and original exploration of trauma, and trauma's impact on memory and the recording of history. But it is surprising that although the film is seen through the eyes of one particular soldier, a viewpoint portrayed using highly experimental forms of animation, this has not prevented Waltz with Bashir from being regarded as both an "autobiographical" and "honest" account of the director's own experiences in the 1982 Lebanon war. In fact, the film won several documentary awards, and even those critics focusing on the representation of trauma suggest that this trauma must be authentic. In this sense, it is the documentary form rather than the animation that has had the most influence upon critics. As Studying Waltz with Bashir will show, it is the tension between the two forms that makes the film so complex and interesting, allowing for multiple themes and discourses to coexist, including Israel's role during the Lebanon War and the impact of trauma upon narrative, but also the representation of Holocaust memory and its role in the formation of Israeli identity. In addition to these themes that coexist by virtue of the film's unusual animated documentary format, Waltz with Bashir can also be discussed in relation to a broad range of contexts; for example, the representation of war in film, the history of Israeli Holocaust cinema, and recent trends in experimental animation, such as Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), as well as Folman's most recent live action/animation work The Congress (2013).
Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich
Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer‘s middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende
