Blogcritics Author: Ernesto Burden

Book Review: Explorers of the Infinite by Maria Coffey

Ernesto Burden — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 13:01:23 EDT

Coffey reveals the spiritual and paranormal experiences of extreme athletes.
I did not enjoy my run yesterday. It was my long run of the week, and it was intensely humid, even early in the morning. I felt tired before I got off the front porch. Every mile was hard work; some might have even qualified as grueling. Along the way, aches and pains that have not cropped up for months returned, en masse it seemed, to remind me...

Music Review: Various artists - Guitar Masters Vol. 1

Ernesto Burden — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:44:11 EDT

Music to make even the masters jealous
There was a story in the Hendrix biography Room Full of Mirrors about how the first time Michael Bloomfield heard Hendrix play he left the show swearing he was never going to play guitar again. He did play again, of course, and likely gained some motivation and inspiration from the awe he felt for Jimi’s playing that night. Even if...

Book Review: Adapting to Web Standards, CSS and Ajax for Big Sites

Ernesto Burden — Sun, 4 May 2008 09:40:03 EDT

Practical advice on how to apply Web standards to HTML and XHTML, CSS, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Web software applications.
There is no piece of Web development for big sites so often viewed as critically important and at the same time pushed into the background of the process than Web standards. Because Web standards can mean different things depending on who’s describing them, and are often the subject of intense debate, they can be hard for a team to keep...

Music Review: The Lance Armstrong Run Longer Coaching Mix

Ernesto Burden — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:59:14 EDT

If you�re looking for something to spice up your interval training, it�s definitely worth checking out.
An icy spring wind howled across New Hampshire, down the Merrimack Valley and into the athletic complex at Manchester’s Livingston Park. When Lance Armstrong and I stepped onto the track, a few walkers, bundled up in parkas with scarves wrapped around their faces, were trundling around the oval, heads down against the early evening gale. I...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Zen V Plus MP3 Player Best In Its Price Range

Ernesto Burden — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 12:27:04 EST

Creative's Zen V Plus has tons of features: you can watch videos, view color pictures, sync to Outlook contacts, calendar and tasks, record with an onboard mic or a line in, FM radio tuner, and of course play and manage music and audiobooks (with bookmarking). The interface features a joystick device, back button (hold longer for other functions) and a play/pause button. Simple to use, with intuitive software for managing data and music, and as well a nice, clean podcast management software tool. It's small, perfect for the gym, and the four-gig version costs less than the four-gig iPod nano. While the sound quality is terrific, and I'm loving keeping half my music library in my breast pocket, my main use for the device was to manage podcasts, audio books and audio language learning programs. The Zen V Plus meets these needs and then some.I shopped hard for this when it finally came time to upgrade from the free Shuffle I'd gotten from Audible.com. (I liked the Shuffle well enough for music, but it wasn't a good device to manage audio books - lousy, in fact. It often failed to hold your place between sessions, and the fast forward only worked at one speed -- slow -- which was bad if you'd lost your place half way through a 16-hour novel. I've owned two Shuffles, both came free as promotional items, and one only lasted about six months before dying. I've also had one other device by Creative, a Muvo circa I forget when -- so old it took a double A battery. That also came free from Audible, and still works to this day despite much rough treatment, though with the same limitations as the Shuffle.)After reading a bunch of reviews, most not just good but enthusiastic, it was a pretty clear choice. I was surprised, standing in the store actually looking at one, how small it is (about the size of one of those old steel lighters). But the screen quality is good despite the size, and I have little need for or intention of watching anything longer then newsy video podcast type things on this anyway. For anything longer I'd choose my laptop, desktop or the living room DVD player... In any case, my review: Based on my research, my particular needs, and now my experience with the Zen V Plus, I'd say it's the best MP3 player out there for under $200.

Ernesto Burden is a digital media executive in the newspaper publishing industry. He has been an editor and reporter with daily and weekly newspapers. He is a writer, runner, musician and an avid student of the Web, technology, literature, religion and the Spanish language.

Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Ernesto Burden — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:24:35 EST

Guillermo Del Toro is one of the best storytellers working in movies right now in terms of capturing deep truths within myth and symbol through jarring, beautiful images. Pan's Labyrinth is beautiful and captivating. The movie is in Spanish, directed by Del Toro, who did The Devil's Backbone (another great Spanish language film – one of my favorite ghost stories ever) as well as some high-budget English language movies like Hellboy and Blade II.The story is set in northern Spain in 1944, just after the Civil War. A mother and her daughter, Ofelia, come to an old mill in the country to be with the mother's new husband, the sadistic Captain Vidal, whose soldiers are tasked with hunting down the last of the resistance fighters hiding in the hills. Ofelia is enamored of fairy stories, and encounters a real fairy, who leads her through an ancient labyrinth in the woods by the mill, where she meets a faun who tells her she's the long lost daughter of the king of the underworld and sends her on three quests.The story follows two intertwined plot lines – Ofelia's magical quests and the brutal efforts of Captain Vidal. The mixture reads very much in tone like Latin American literary magical realism – if the works of Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges or Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) make sense to you, this one will too. For me, this has always come down to whether a reader or viewer cares whether the story formalizes whether (and which) metaphors and symbols in the story are "real" or not. Without this formalization, some find the story line incoherent – a sentiment that seems sort of Manichean to me… why insist on absolute separation of matter and spirit (metaphorically or literally speaking)? In a story, especially this sort of story, I tend to care more about whether the plot elements are "really true" than whether the author spells out in some technical manner if they "really happened."The parallel story lines contrast the brutality of human evil and the sometimes impersonal evil of nature, along with a metaphysical hope that underlies the structure of all things. It was this hope that made an extremely dark movie different from the rash of nihilistic horror films being made right now – in the end there's hope and redemption.Del Toro is also an amazing image maker – the pictures he paints with every scene in the movie are beautiful – even the dark, scary ones. This is a movie you could watch with the volume off and still be entirely engrossed.The pacing is perfect. Ivana Baquero is captivating as Ofelia and Sergi Lopez is dark, bestial, and somehow deeply compelling as Captain Vidal. Absolutely see it.

Why I Only Read One Peter Mayle Book A Year

Ernesto Burden — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 20:09:43 EDT

Last time we were visiting, my wife's mom passed along Peter Mayle's latest book, A Good Year. "You'll read this in a couple of days, and it will make you want to drink wine and eat cheese while you're doing it," she assured me. She was almost right - I read it in a couple of evenings and it made me want to drink wine. The cheese? The southern French dishes described in the novel were so tantalizing and so unattainable that I was not made hungry, but instead left with a sort of wistful food ennui.The plot is typical of Mayle's fiction: silly, fun and full of excuses to render lavish descriptions of food, drink and lovely French women and landscapes. A London businessman, Max Skinner, is in debt and hoping for a big commission on a deal he's about to close for the high pressure, cutthroat financial firm he works at. Instead he loses his job. Coincidentally he discovers he has inherited an estate and winery in the South of France from his long unseen uncle; a place he used to stay as a child. A friend, who has (coincidentally, again) just gotten a big promotion, loans Max money for the trip and extended stay in France, and Max sets out to see if he can make a go of it as a vintner. Nothing's simple, though. The wine is awful, there's something suspicious about the man who tends the grapes, the woman who runs the local café is beautiful and interested, and to top it off, a lovely American shows up claiming to be the deceased uncle's long lost daughter. Which means, according to French law, she may well have a better claim to the estate than Max. Hijinks and drinking ensue.As I finished the book and browsed through the list of his other novels and travel books in the back, I realized how many of them I've read, and how many years that reading represents, since I only allow myself one of these a year.Why only one Peter Mayle book a year? Glad you asked:1. My liver couldn't take more.2. They might cause the equivalent of literary cavities, or at least tooth decay... (which is not to say Mayle doesn't turn sumptuous phrases, and his eye for places, people and textures is dazzling clear ... it's just that the plots and characters are, well, "breezy.") 3. My wife will not concede to move the kids to Europe anytime soon.A votre sant!

Review: Sweet World Music Escapism

Ernesto Burden — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:03:34 EDT

I have never, until now, bothered to analyze my fondness for the world music genre, though at times I have equated it with a love of foreign languages, a dislike for most popular songs once I know the words, a degree of pretentiousness, and an odd affection for the accordion. My mother is a scholar and teacher of languages, so artifacts and noises from Spanish and French speaking countries were part of the background of my childhood. But my real love affair with world music began with the Gipsy Kings, who were making very trendy dinner music while I was in college, right about at the same time I discovered great single malt Scotch and tolerable wine. Of the three, I could afford to enjoy the Gipsy Kings on a regular basis; cassette tapes didn't wear out nearly as quickly as a bottle emptied. As my tastes (thanks to the music) and my waistline (thanks to the single-malt Scotch and wine) broadened, I discovered that for world music, compilations best fitted my uninformed and impoverished passions - I didn't have to spend a fortune to sample a variety of performers, whether they were classic or contemporary flamenco players from Spain or Celtic balladeers. Finally, examining closely my relationship with world music through the compilation, I realize that at its core, my pleasure in the genre is the pleasure of escape, of fantasy and of play. It is, beyond its variable individual artistic merits, music that transports, and it does so all the better when it is presented in a well-balanced compilation. A well-chosen compilation can set an aural stage in a way that a CD by a single artist rarely does. I close my eyes, sip, and I am in Spain, or Peru, or New Orleans, or the Yucatan. There's music playing on a radio somewhere, drifting maybe between the wide-flung wooden shutters of a second story window in a peeling pastel building tucked between a colonial era church and a massive palm tree. I take another sip and I can smell lime and cumin and blooming morning-glories. In the early 1990s, Putumayo World Music grew out of the Putumayo Clothing Company, and began selling compilations aimed at being "upbeat and melodic." The company motto is "guaranteed to make you feel good," and I've found most of the releases live up to that promise.The two newest Putumayo CDs, Italian Café and North African Groove, are no exception. North African Groove is the easiest to like upon first listen. It's rhythmic, orange, and dusty with a sweet heat that drives each song. There are many moments where one senses a Latin feel, as though standing at a crossroads where the Arabic world and the Spanish meet. There are also French influences, and French lyrics, and performances by a Cuban-Algerian group, a Moroccan, an Egyptian and a Tunisian.I enjoyed my first listen to Italian Café less, but I have listened to the album far more than North African Groove in the intervening weeks since they both arrived.My first thought, as it began to play during dinner one night, was, "Yikes, this must be what the music would have sounded inside Dean Martin's head if someone slipped him some heavy hallucinogens." The disconnect was mine, though, and not the album's. I soon realized that while my perception of Italian café music was shaped by Italian-American crooners like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, this music was the real thing, not a surrealist imitation. Or perhaps more accurately, a real thing, or many real things, since the compilation features classic music from the 1950s and '60s, breaking out after the repressive musical environment of World War II Italy, as well as contemporary Italian music that still bears fruit characteristic of these exuberant roots.While the background vocals on many of the Italian Café songs will sound theme-park corny to jaded modern ears (the introduction to Quartetto Cetra's Un Bacio a Mezzanotte is nicely representative example), the lead singers are without exception wonderful; slightly scratchy, smoky voices, gruff and low and full of cool passion (check out Giorgio Conte's Gn� Gn�). Those voices wind in and out of prominent bass guitar lines like fat snakes.So despite my initial puzzlement, Italian Café, packed with oddities and musical lagniappes, has turned out to be my favorite for just sitting and listening to. Add to the compilation a warm, summer evening with Kristen on the back porch, the heat from the afternoon sun still baking up from the boards and a breeze rolling up off the river, a cool bottle of Pinto Grigio, bejewled with condensation, and I think the escape will be almost complete. Not quite Italy, but a heck of a lot more manageable than a transatlantic flight, especially when I have to be back for work in the morning.Both CDs have liner notes in multiple languages. Song samples are available to listen to at www.putumayo.com. Portions of profits from the CDs are donated to charities.

Book Review: Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Is Wicked, Human

Ernesto Burden — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:18:35 EDT

Having heard and enjoyed David Sedaris' commentary on public radio (most memorably, his tale of Christmas elf-hood on This American Life), I was pleased when my sister gave me a copy of Sedaris' book Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim recently.I read the book in a couple of sittings over the course of three days. This is extraordinary these days—I have two kids under age three in the house.Sedaris' essays are wicked and cutting, and aimed at dysfunctional family dynamics so sharply that, were they not also so sweet and funny, I would wonder darkly at the message my beloved sibling might have been trying to send.This mix of sharp and sweet is a line trod deftly by Sedaris; he knows how to admit, with relish, to the most mean-spirited and inappropriate thoughts, and somehow evidence through that admission more humility and warm humanity than many sincere efforts at gentle humor (All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, say) that drift toward mawkishness.And while mawkishness may make people sigh wistfully and smile sadly, there were viscous, tender, wicked, humane moments in this book, and plenty of them, that made me laugh out loud, and then sigh and smile and blah, blah, blah. And all of them were utterly inappropriate ... Edited: PC

Book Review: Those Terrible Middle Ages – Renaissance Thinkers Promoted Canards About The Medieval Period

Ernesto Burden — Fri, 8 Jul 2005 20:46:08 EDT

The idea that the Middle Ages were a "dark," crude and ignorant period between the Classical Age and the Renaissance has a little to do with the truth and a great deal to do with how Renaissance thinkers wished to view their own relationships to Classical materials. It was during the Renaissance that the myth that Classical knowledge vanished during the Middle Ages only to be discovered again by Renaissance thinkers was begun. That myth has lasted up to our own time.Such is the point made by Regine Pernoud in Those Terrible Middle Ages, a book written more than 25 years ago, first published in France and republished by Ignatius Press in English last year.Pernoud argues that the ideas of Classical thinkers were never lost during the Middle Ages, and in fact the Middle Ages were responsible for preserving that thought and transmitting it to the Renaissance intellectuals. This idea seems to be accepted, with some qualification, by many writers today. Though there remains a sense (I heard as much propounded in an otherwise excellent documentary on manuscripts on Public Television not long ago) that while Classical thought was preserved by Middle Ages, it was done so by rote mechanical means: monks with no idea of what they were copying simply copied because they were supposed to, like monkeys with typewriters. This is far from the case, Pernoud says. Instead, the thinkers and artists of the Middle Ages used the knowledge of the Classical thinkers and artists, but viewed this material as a set of tools to use to achieve new styles and visions. It was a slavish devotion to copying Classical styles exactly that led Renaissance thinkers to believe these styles had been forgotten. This was because, from their point of view, the highest possible expressions of beauty and wisdom had been achieved in the Classical period. If these weren't perfectly replicated in the great works of subsequent periods, those periods must have lost or forgotten them. The opposite was the case.An excellent book for dispelling myths about a vital period of development (not static bridge) for Western Civilization, as well as for beginning to think about how each of us risks mistakenly relating, either by devotedly imitating or by dismissing as hidebound, the epoch (or even simply the generation) that came before us. Edited: PC