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˛ena:\zhay'na\ means woman in czech moon:\moon\ honors the power, cycles and light reflected throughout our lives |
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new beginnings |
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obelisk (not shown) - 3"x8", burns up to 80 hours
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Customer Feedback Tomma G. (Winston-Salem, NC) I have been burning (all weekend) my New Beginnings candle and ~ OH How Nice!! I am moving into a New Beginning here...and your candle has brought comfort and peace.
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Our Recommended Books, Music & Movies for New Beginnings zena moon sells books, CDs and DVDs in association with Amazon.com. To order, click on the item's title or image, then add it to your Amazon shopping cart. Orders are then filled and shipped by Amazon. Send us your recommendations for this page--we may post them here.
Last updated 4/5/2005
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God
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From Amazon.com: At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
"It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment."
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices.
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From Amazon.com: What do you need to change to make your life work better and make you happier? Top-level personal coach Cheryl Richardson, author of the popular Take Time for Your Life, shows you how to make your life over, one week at a time, using her philosophy of extreme self-care. The result: you'll reevaluate your life and connect to what matters most to you, improving the quality of your life.
Life
Makeovers is organized into 52 chapters, one for
each week of the year. (Procrastinators: Don't wait until January 1 to
start--just call this week "week 1" and get going.) Each chapter has a
specific theme with a "Take Action Challenge": a practical strategy to put a
change into action immediately. For example, week 1 encourages you to reflect
on what you've done right by writing down your five greatest accomplishments
and three ways you've grown in the past year. Week 5 helps you manage your
time by creating an "Absolute Yes" list of your five top priorities for the
next 3 to 6 months. Week 20 helps identify behaviors that trigger feelings of
irritability or frustration with a "I know I'm headed for trouble when..."
list and three things you'll put in place to support your self-care when these
happen. Additional topics range widely, such as exploring your internal rules
and standards, asking for support, improving your sleep, shaking up your daily
routine, and sharing with those in need. Each chapter also includes several
well-chosen resources for exploring the topic further. If you use
Life
Makeovers as it's designed, you'll have the wisdom
and inspiration of one of the best personal coaches in the business for a
whole year. You'll have to work with her--no instant magic here--but it will
be worth it.
3. Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock and Finding Myself on a Farm
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From Amazon.com: Jeanne Marie Laskas is 37, with a house, garden, dog, cat, flourishing writing career--all of the perfect ingredients, in fact, of a happy city-person's life--when a childhood dream resurfaces. It is a farm dream, this "song I couldn't get out of my head," and it would make more sense, she ruefully admits, if she were "at least the farm dream type. A person with some deep personal longing to churn butter." But not Laskas. She likes malls. She eats Lean Cuisine. She believes "very deeply in the power of air conditioning, microwave ovens, and very many things you plug in." Nonetheless, she spends weekends on make-believe "farm shopping" excursions with her boyfriend, Alex, who is another city person, a shrink and the owner of an honest-to-goodness poodle--a farm dream disqualifier, if ever there were one. Then, one summer afternoon, the perfect place appears, and it's very real: fifty acres, a pond, an Amish barn, and a magnificent view out over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania's Washington County. They fall in love. They buy the farm. Goodbye, city-person life.
But the scenery with which they fell in love is not quite like the scenery in postcards. Things need to be done to it, and all of these things involve buying and learning how to use different kinds of tractor attachments. And then there are the neighbors: the sheep farmer who shoots dogs, the curious proliferation of Joe Crowleys, everywhere the hunters. ("Congratulations on your ... dead deer," is all Alex can think to say to them.) Over the year that follows, the two city slickers find out a great deal about livestock, tractor attachments, and themselves; all of which is related in Laskas's funny, warm, conversational style. As she leaves behind her ordered, interior world for one that's gorgeously, chaotically exterior, Fifty Acres and a Poodle becomes much more than just a book about learning to live in the country; it is, in fact, a book about learning to live--dead groundhogs, emotional messes, and all. You don't need your own farm dream to fall in love with this witty and winning memoir, but it wouldn't hurt to look through the real estate pages, just in case.
1. Everyday
Original Release Date: 2001
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From Amazon.com: With three years passed and a new producer at the helm, the Dave Matthews Band find themselves stretching beyond the borders of Before These Crowded Streets to more emotionally explorative territory. On Everyday, Matthews's clenched-jaw delivery has an unrelenting constancy that's cunning and determined. "I Did It" opens the CD in an aggressive groove, while "When the World Ends" follows with clipped licks that dive into a muddier, open-flowing chorus. From there on out, the floodgates open into something that often recalls Peter Gabriel, which is ironic, given that the band replaced producer Steve Lillywhite, whose work with Gabriel is legendary, with Glen Ballard, whose work with Alanis Morissette is of equal note, if not acclaim. The album is Gabrielesque in scope, from Matthews's deepening rasp to the epic instrumentation. Yet, what's lacking is Lillywhite's ability to capture a sense of naked honesty. Instead, Ballard dosses down the tracks in designer-suit production, unable to save a band that might simply not be up to the task on such an ambitious sonic endeavor. That, combined with Matthews's tendency to eschew conventional hooks, leaves the album stalled between the group's jam-band compulsion and radio-friendly packaging. To capture the latent majesty of this album, you're going to have to hear it live, and with this band, that's always been precisely the point.
2. New Favorite
Original Release Date: 2001
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From Amazon.com: After her 1999 gold release, Forget About It, Alison Krauss has found additional success as part of the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?--an album that's done more to advance the cause of bluegrass since Bill Monroe first conjured the music out of the hills of western Kentucky. While Forget About It showcased the more contemporary part of Krauss's musical equation and the O Brother soundtrack spotlighted the more traditional, New Favorite combines the approaches in balancing the softer sounds with the rougher-edged material. Krauss particularly shines on the soulful title tune of love gone cold, her vocal--softer than a cloud and more intimate than a midnight kiss--threatening to steal your breath away. However, it's mostly the older sounds that you'll remember from this largely somber album, one that telegraphs uncertainty, doom, and the promise of bloodshed throughout much of the repertoire. On "Momma Cried," a song about a child-snatching that tore a family asunder, Dan Tyminski's tenor vocals rise above a wailing Dobro, a driving banjo, and a thumping, anchoring bass to convey unspeakable pain. Too many of the pop-minded songs fall flat in comparison, but although this may not be the group's best effort overall, no other crossover bluegrass band begins to meet their mark either musically or emotionally, as New Favorite so amply shows.
Original Release Date: 2000
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From Amazon.com: Consider this Emmylou Harris's emancipation proclamation--an album that confirms that 1995's adventurously atmospheric Wrecking Ball wasn't an aberration, but a preview of more radical changes to come. Long the godmother of alternative-country's traditionalist wing, Harris here writes songs with Luscious Jackson's Jill Cunniff, sings a duet with Dave Matthews ("My Antonia"), and recruits Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa to provide harmonies on the album's most compelling ballad ("Tragedy"). The production by Malcolm Burn applies sonic treatments of drum machines, shimmering guitars, and echoed vocals to a song cycle by Harris that is largely original and deeply personal, filled with dream imagery and evocations of a spiritual quest. While material such as "Michaelangelo" and "Bang the Drum Slowly" suffers from an arty ponderousness, it's doubtful that Harris has ever recorded an album that means more to her than this one.
1. Shall We Dance? (Full Screen Edition)
(2004) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: Something got lost in translation from 1996's critically acclaimed Japanese comedy, but the American remake of Shall We Dance? is not without charms of its own. In being transplanted from Tokyo to Chicago, the original version's subtle humor is shaken out of its cultural context, but this is an otherwise faithful adaptation in which a weary lawyer (Richard Gere) battles his midlife crisis with ballroom dancing lessons, while his wife (Susan Sarandon) hires a private detective to see if he's cheating. Those expecting a Jennifer Lopez showcase will be disappointed; her role as the melancholy dance instructor keeps the beautifully lovelorn J-Lo on the sidelines, while a cast of standard-issue supporting characters (especially Stanley Tucci's clandestine faux-Latin dance lover) provide a generous dose of Hollywood-ized comic relief. All of this gives Shall We Dance? a polished sheen of mainstream entertainment that many viewers---and especially ballroom dancers--will find delightfully irresistible.
2. Bagdad Cafe
(1988) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht), a German tourist, has just walked off from her husband at the side of the road in the middle of the Mojave Desert; Brenda (CCH Pounder) has just kicked her husband out of the roadside cafe-motel they operate. When Jasmin arrives at the cafe, the two begin developing a prickly but ultimately rewarding friendship. Many other movies have tried to duplicate Bagdad Cafe's mixture of loose storytelling, off-kilter metaphors, and rich emotions, but most often these imitators leave out the random chaos of life and the awkward pain of change that Bagdad Cafe captures with such a gentle touch. Bagdad Cafe earns both its quirkiness and its sentiment by keeping one foot firmly rooted in reality. Director Percy Adlon teamed with star Sägebrecht in two other similarly offbeat movies, Sugarbaby and Rosalie Goes Shopping; his more recent features without her haven't been as successful. Still, he continues to be noted for his odd but lively use of color filters and jagged editing. Bagdad Cafe also features the great Jack Palance playing an easy-going painter; the opportunity to be an ordinary person, rather than his usual wicked fiends, brings out a delightful mischief in Palance. Pounder, who usually gets small supporting parts, deserves another role like this to take advantage of her remarkable range. All in all, an eccentric and wonderful film.
(1983) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: Sometimes everything comes together in a movie and it becomes something so much greater than the sum of its parts that it can only be described as a miracle. That's the case with Tender Mercies, a quietly luminous character piece about an alcoholic, washed-up country singer named Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall in an Oscar-winning performance) who hits bottom in a motel room one night and then slowly finds his way back into the land of the living with the help of the widow (Tess Harper) and her young son. It's a low-key, contemplative film that feels like a rural American family comedy in the vein of the great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. Tender Mercies was directed by Australian Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), written by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird), who won an Oscar for his screenplay, and has an unbeatable cast. This is one of Duvall's most intimate and deeply personal performances, matched only by his debut 14 years later as actor-writer-director in The Apostle. | |||||||||
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