Songs of Heaven and Earth

Far Out Earth Songs

Advantages: Melodic ecological messages
Disadvantages: Noth everyone's style of music

On My Shoulders is a slow dreamy song, a reminder of the good things in life like sunshine and friendship. ?Sunshine almost always makes me high?. The Eagle And The Hawk was written as a theme song for a documentary The Eagle and the Hawk featuring Morley Nelson an ornithologist. John joined Nelson in a campaign to restore a Red-tailed Hawk and a Bald Eagle back to health. It starts quietly building up to crescendos in imitation of the eagle soaring upwards. ?Reach for the heavens, and hope for the future, and all that will be, not what we are?. Eclipse features a clarinet and a percussion whose sound resembles that of a clock pendulum. The lyrics illustrate the negative effects of industrial emissions not only on the Earth but also on the narrator. As the sun gradually sets, he realizes that the smoggy air eclipses his view ...

MAFARRIMOND 27.05.2004 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Earth Songs - John Denver

Not quite heaven on earth

Advantages: An interesting snapshot of intellectual history
Disadvantages: A bit disconnected from most fields, very narrow in topic

What Casti means by the title 'One True Platonic Heaven' is polyvalent - in the first place, it is frequent reference to the IAS, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a think-tank founded for the advancement of pure science. So adamant are some that it remain 'pure' rather than 'applied', that when one of their number proposes to bring a computing device in, there is controversy among the members, that this would end up being an 'application', and implicit slippery slopes abound. Of course, the timing of this novel (and it is a novel) is the early twentieth century - the prologue begins with snapshots of various points prior to World War II, key moments in the development of mathematics and scientific epistemology. The core of the book takes place just after the war, in Princeton, as the earliest computing ...

frkurt 10.08.2004 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The One True Platonic Heaven - John L. Casti

Number one Song in Heaven Sparks

Advantages: more beat and melody than you can handle
Disadvantages: it ends

seemingly goes on forever or at least six minutes or so. Most great albums have a track which radically departs from its main body of work,in this case its "My Other Voice "so sublime and strange yet hypnotic and euphoric that you might think that you have died and gone to heaven,its backward symbols intro makes way for an electronic angelic choir which in turn submits to a spaghetti western guitar line before the cherubic Russell sings of the joy of having two voices ,the song makes no sense at all in the real world but in the abstract surrealism of The Mael Brothers /Sparks it all makes complete sense of course ,but you will never hear a song so staggeringly different within the realms of a pop song . In perverse and awkward Sparks fashion the title track is also the last,the sprawling electro epic"The Number One Song in Heaven "in its ...

terriano 14.01.2007 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Number One In Heaven - Sparks