Our favorite oversized, overpriced and flat-out gorgeous slipcased volumes this year celebrate in plenteous minutely copious splendors of creation. The two volumes of The Field Guide Art of Roger Tory Peterson (Houghton Mifflin. $300) reproduce his chastely colorful and precise paintings of American birds. And the 17th-century Tibetan Medical Paintings (Abrams. 2 vols., $195), which originally illustrated a contemporaneous treatise on healing, contain thousands of small, vivid images, illustrating herbs, medical instruments, anatomy-and pathologies from dropsy to demonic possession. Nothing is neglected, from dying to lovemaking-and everything is cherished.
Also guaranteed to elevate the spirit and class up the coffee table are two extraordinary collections of dance photographs. Lois Greenfield, in Breaking Bounds (Chronicle. $35), sends her subjects up into the air, preserving an electric moment with startling clarity and vigor. Philip Trager’s Dancers (Bulfinch. $75) offers a flock of performers, often nude, in outdoor settings where they look like the gorgeous ruins of classical temples.
It’s been 80 years since the biggest luxury liner then afloat sank on its maiden voyage, but the tale of the Titanic still intrigues: it’s both a morality play and a disaster movie. In Titanic: An Illustrated History (Hyperion. $60), artist Ken Marschall’s exquisite, lifelike paintings complement historian Don Lynch’s vivid, vignette-filled text.
A shade less grim (and far less expensive) is Expect the Worst (You Won’t Be Disappointed), by Eric Marcus (Harper San Francisco. $8), a bah-humbugging collection of hilariously gloomy quotes from pessimists both celebrated and unknown. A thought from one of the latter: “When the cat’s away, chances are he’s been run over.” The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes (Andrews and McMeel. $12.95) is a treasury of Bill Watterson’s comic strip in which spiky-haired Calvin and his articulate cat pal Hobbes star in a kind of nonideological “Doonesbury.” Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes, by Kristin Thompson (Heineman. $24.95), is a Christmas wish come true for the P. G. Wodehouse fanatic: a critical appreciation that treats Wodehouse as a serious literary craftsman-yet never gets stuffy.
The photos in Elvis: 1956 Reflections (Morgin. $49.95), shot by Ed Braslaff in a single August afternoon, aren’t supposed to be funny, but the effect of juxtaposing quotes from Santayana or John Cage with touchingly awkward images of the once and future King struggling out of his shirt or idling on a hotel bed makes this a must for both serious fans and connoisseurs of camp. The King & 1: A Little Gallery of Elvis Impersonators (Chronicle. $9.95) is a stocking-size book of similarly open-ended appeal. These people have their problems (“I wish they’d make better gold glasses-once you sweat, the gold comes off”) but also their moments of transcendence: Elvis, says one, holds out “a hand to God and a hand to us.”
Reference books make useful (if momentarily disheartening) gifts. The Random House Word Menu ($22) is a sometimes-useful hybrid of dictionary and thesaurus that organizes 75,000 entries by subject. The thing has glitches-the only entry for “entry” is under “Accounting” but at the very least, it could increase the odds of gripping the groped-for word.
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (Grove’s. $850) may cost as much as a subscription to the Met, but it lasts a lot longer-and you don’t have to change out of your ratty jeans to use it. Four exhaustive but engaging volumes contain 10,000 entries, from Aachen (HQ of a celebrated German opera troupe) to Zylis-Gara (Teresa, Polish soprano, b. 1935). The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Viking. $35) is an anthology of classic articles. Its first half shows the evolution of the treatment of such subjects as electricity, money and “woman”; the first edition (1768) called “Callifornia” a “large country of the West Indies.” The second half presents famous writers’ contributions: Freud on psychoanalysis, Trotsky on Lenin, Lillian Gish on the Silver Screen.
But that was then. The Digital Book System (Franklin Electronic Publishers. $199) is now: a doohickey slightly bigger than a cassette box-that stores the equivalent of 10 Bibles. You can feed it ROM cards with info on movies or adverse drug interactions; Radio Shack sells it loaded with word games and a Merriam-Webster Dictionary. State of the art? Maybe. But any 6-year-old knows more cusswords. Try punching in what you say when you hit your finger with a hammer. “Correcting. . ., " it tells you, then asks if you meant “chit,” “shut,” “shot,” “sheet” or “shoat.” It may be worth the price just to watch the thing get flustered.
Makes a body nostalgic for books printed on paper and read by the light of a bedside lamp. If there’s a curmudgeon on your list who curses the day ROM cards were invented, wrap up Michael Olmert’s beautiful homage to print, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Smithsonian. $45). From illuminated medieval manuscripts to Dr. Seuss, Olmert lovingly traces a sumptuous history.
When the big clothbound edition of Henri Matisse’s Jazz, a book of bright paper cutouts and handwritten observations on art, first came out in 1983, NEWSWEEK exclaimed, “A book of magnificent exuberance.” No need to stand down from that now that it’s available in a small version (Braziller. $10.95). But now we can add: heck of a bargain. In their art, both Matisse and Pierre Bonnard fed on the mundane details of daily life. Bonnard/Matisse: Letters Between Friends, 1925-1946 (Abrams $19.95) is full of animated talk about the weather, their respective infirmities and the perils of poorly heated hotels-and they cheered each other on like a pair of art-school neophytes. These eloquent, cant-free letters are marvels of unselfish and sympathetic friendship.
The graphic artist Saul Steinberg immigrated to this country in 1942 and promptly began a love affair with icons of the American scene-cheerleaders, parades, subway straphangers. The Discovery of America (Knopf. $65), a zestful chronicle in pen and watercolor of that romance, finds Steinberg always at home in burgs big or small, always discerning, and always tender-yet never schmaltzy. Those who like their discoveries more exotic will find that Wen C. Fong’s Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th-14th Century (Yale. $85) opens a whole new world. The writing is scholarly but lucid, and the pictures are, well, beyond representation. And the Russian Constructivist Posters (distributed by Abbeville. $27.95) are the best, most inventive posters ever-all jagged angles, screaming type and futurist factoryscapes, with plenty of red splashed around.
The Art Pack (Knopf. $40) is a pop-up book with a purpose: to show what makes art tick. It comes with audiotape, color wheels and reproductions of old and new masters-but the best thing is when you turn a page and suddenly, a little Renaissance man, a plastic window and some strings go boing! to demonstrate perspective. And for those who love Michelangelo, how about his statue of David-as a refrigerator magnet (Caryco, 206-633-1815. $19)? To ensure family values in the kitchen, you can cover him up with a stick-on wardrobe. Or not.
A wonderful series, Photographers at Work (Smithsonian. Paper, $15.95 each), continues to grow. Each volume concentrates on one artist, with an interview and photoessay. Len Jenshel gives us his acerbic, cockeyed take on the American desert, Tina Barney and Nicholas Nixon profile their families, Lee Friedlander focuses on his wife, and Annie Leibovitz looks at dancers.
The photocollective Magnum is one of the most intriguing alliances in the annals of art: famous photographers recording history as it happened. In Heroes and Anti-Heroes: Magnum Images (Random House. $65), Henri Cartier-Bresson captures Gandhi’s funeral and Eve Arnold gives us a steely Malcolm X. Not a single heavy hitter-from Castro to Khomeini-fails to turn ham before the camera’s beguiling eye. But like it or not, the photography book of the year is the definitive retrospective Mapplethorpe (Random House. $125). Superbly reproduced, the photographs include all of the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s themes: the flowers, the portraits-his Roy Cohn is a mask of malevolence, self-loathing and narcissism-the controversial pictures of children, even the most shocking of his pictures from the world of gay S&M. A fine essay by the distinguished art critic Arthur C. Danto leads you through the moral tangle of Mapplethorpe’s work with luminous common sense.
Archiblocks will make a master builder of anybody with an opposable thumb. These hardrock maple blocks can become Greek, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Modern structures-or you can mix and match. The latest set features the style of Frank Lloyd Wright: 70 pieces, including usable box (Bower Studios, 802-877-6868. $60). And to get the lowdown on the architect, get Frank Lloyd Wright by Meryle Secrest (Knopf. $30), the first of Wright’s biographers to have full access to his archives. Artist Brian Overly’s Gothic cathedral birdhouse is so beautifully handcrafted (and so pricey-$199.95) that it’s billed-pun intended-as a birdhouse sculpture (Plummer-McCutcheon, 800-321-1484). But since it’s got a hole and a floor, we don’t see why a feathered friend couldn’t move in and raise a family before you bring the thing in for the winter.
Vienna 1850-1930: Architecture (Rizzoli. $65) is a tour de force: photos by Roberto Schezen of 28 buildings by such architectural giants as Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann make it the next best thing to an airline ticket. The traveling exhibition, Josef Hoffmann Designs, from Vienna’s Mak-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, is at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York City through Jan. 23. There’s a fine catalog, too (Prestel, $65). French Royal Gardens: The Designs of Andre Le Notre (Rizzoli. $40), photographed by Jeannie Baubion-Mackler with text by Vincent Scully, becalms you with luminous visions of the grounds of Versailles, Chantilly, Vaux-le-Vicomte. Why shoot these magnificent 17th-century gardens in black and white? So you can savor their shapeliness undistracted.
Art Deco was once a ubiquitous design style-variations still abound in older American skyscrapers, hotels and gas stations, as well as in Parisian apartment houses and industrial buildings throughout the world. A wonderful new book, Art Deco Architecture: Design, Decoration, and Detail From the Twenties and Thirties, by Patricia Bayer (Abrams. $49.50), is the first international survey of the style’s heyday. L.A. was once an Art Deco hot spot-but that’s only one of this shape-shifting city’s many styles. Paddy Calistro and Betty Goodwin’s L.A. Inside Out: The Architecture and Interiors of America’s Most Colorful City (Viking. $40) shows that Angelenos can (and do) do anything with their homes: from Mulholland Drive Moorish to barrio Bauhaus.
Franklin D. Israel: buildings + projects (Rizzoli. $60. Paper, $35), with an introduction by Frank Gehry, is the portfolio of a venturesome bicoastal architect now based in Beverly Hills. He’s not afraid of bold angles or color, and his modernist designs range from pool houses for Audrey Hepburn and Candice Bergen to the Wiseman Art Pavilion. You may not be able to afford either an Israel-designed glitz box or a pristine 18th-century colonial, but handcrafted ceramics suit almost any house, in almost any architectural style, at almost any budget. Gift stores throughout the country scour their regions for the best examples; we happened to find a colorful, rough-textured pitcher at ABC Carpet and Home in New York City (800-888-7847. $220).
Such traditional treats as plum pudding make dicey gifts these days. So why not please a loved one with something equally rich and delicious: If You Love Me (London), a set of 18th-century Italian songs by the irrepressible 26-year-old mezzo Cecilia Bartoli. At 87, pianist Arthur Rubinstein still played with profound passion. The Last Recital for Israel (RCA), a previously unreleased 1975 concert, showcases two etudes this incomparable Chopin interpreter had never recorded.
Dragons! Dwarfs! Gold! Fire! Incest! It’s the Metropolitan Opera’s glorious production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, now on video (7 tapes. Deutsche Grammophon). Even those whose German is rusty will have no trouble following the gnarly plot: most of the singers are also fine actors-and, more important, there are English subtitles.
In Haunted Heart (Gitanes/Verve), jazz bassist Charlie Haden and Quartet West have gotten drunk on film noir atmosphere and put a ’90s spin on music from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s: the theme from “The Maltese Falcon,” tunes by Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, even electronically grafted period vocals by Jo Stafford and Billie Holiday.
Carl Smith was the suavest of honky-tonk singers; The Essential Carl Smith, 1950-1956 (Columbia) catches him at his absolute best. The Essential Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, 1945-1949 (2 CDs. Columbia) really is essential: it has the complete recordings of the band (featuring Flatt and Scruggs) that virtually invented bluegrass. The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, sang the greatest country harmonies ever; Close Harmony gives them the definitive treatment that’s the specialty of Germany’s Bear Family label (8 CDs. County Sales. 703-745-2001). Keening, soaring voices; songs secular and spiritual: “That word ‘broadminded’,” goes one, “is spelled S-I-N.”
Sin and salvation also duke it out in Jubilation! Great Gospel Performances (Rhino); salvation wins. The white gospel in volume three is nothing special, but get volumes one and two, with such black singers as Mahalia Jackson, Shirley Caesar, Aretha Franklin and the Swan Silvertones: 36 tracks, and not a single loser. The Tahitian Choir (Triloka), recorded on the remote Pacific island of Rapa Iti, sounds at first like Protestants singing hymns in unknown tongues. Then comes a microtonal plunge: is something wrong with the CD player? Somebody slip something into the eggnog. Those who liked “Mystere des Voix Bulgares” will like this. And Global Meditation (4 CDs. The Relaxation Company) is a paradoxically lively compilation of trancy music: from Norwegian traditional singers to Turkish dervishes. Cleverly disguised as New Age pap, this is a well-chosen world-music sampler.
Last season was Broadway’s biggest in history, and now an impressive array of cast recordings from the hottest shows is out in time for Christmas. Jelly’s Last Jam (PolyGram) is a can’t-miss with Luther Henderson’s smooth and sexy adaptations of Jelly Roll Morton tunes; even the tap dancers sound sultry. And The Most Happy Fella (RCA) is stripped down to a two-piano accompaniment, spotlighting Frank Loesser’s beloved lyrics. March of the Falsettos/Falsettoland (2 CDs. DRG) brings together the two original off-Broadway casts of William Finn’s “Falsettos,” including Alison Fraser and Faith Prince.
But don’t pass up three CDs that are pure products of the recording studio: the magnificently resilient Julie Andrews in The King and I (Philips), operatic tenor Jerry Hadley with choice selections from classic musicals-plus a few surprises-in Standing Room Only (RCA); Good! (Elektra Nonesuch), the first complete recording of the score from George and Ira Gershwin’s landmark jazzage musical. It made stars of Fred and Adele Astaire; this ebullient re-creation will make a believer out of you.
If you’d rather hear yourself singing some of those great old tunes, open up and let ’er rip. This season is the 50th anniversary of “Oklahoma!"-the show that changed the American musical forever. Ethan Mordden’s Rodgers & Hammerstein (Abrams. $45) ranges through the entire R&H repertoire (including the made-for-TV “Cinderella”) with terrific black-and-white photos, smart but not smug musicological observations and some hilarious anecdotes.
Patrick Stewart brings his one-man version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to New York’s Broadhurst Theatre from Dec. 15 to Jan. 3 (Tele-Charge, 212-239-6200. Tickets $45 and $40). Stewart, a.k.a. Captain Picard on TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” acts out 39 characters without changing his gray suit. The Lenny Bruce Performance Film (Rhino) is a whole other kind of one-man show, a videotape of the only complete film of a Bruce performance, shot in 1965 at a San Francisco nightclub. This isn’t kid stuff: it’s got his scatological takeoff on the Lone Ranger, and an accompanying audiotape contains his impression of Adolf Eichmann explaining the Holocaust. The hollow-eyed hipster we see here was dead a year later. Since then only Richard Pryor has been in his class as a comic who made us laugh at the naked truth.
Admirers of the greatest epic movie ever made must, must, MUST be Christmas-gifted with Lawrence of Arabia, by L. Robert Morris and Lawrence Raskin, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese (Doubleday. $40). It took 35 years of false starts before David Lean arrived to get Lawrence on film-at one point Winston Churchill was involved in the project-and filming went on longer than the hero’s own desert campaign. Both Brando and Olivier were scheduled to play “El Aurens” before the 27-year-old little-known Peter O’Toole got the part. With 500 illustrations, this is a book to wallow in.
Meanwhile, Aljean Harmetz, author of “The Making of the Wizard of Oz,” turns her voracious eye on the making of “Casablanca” in Round Up the Usual Suspects (Hyperion. $24.95). It’s the story of one of Hollywood’s luckiest accidents: Bogart and Bergman never warmed up to the project-or to each other-and if composer Max Steiner had had his way, “As Time Goes By” would have been replaced by an original tune. A fascinating study of how the studio system created an immortal film in spite of itself. And plugged-in film fans-you need a multimedia-ready IBM-compatible PG-may get hooked on the Cinemania interactive CD-ROM disc (Microsoft. $79.95). A library-shelf worth of information on 19,000 films and the people in and behind them, plus star photos, movie stills and almost 100 sound clips of legendary lines-all instantly accessible. Frankly, my dear …
A wonderful way to put out the welcome mat over the holidays is to feed your guests royally out of the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf. $30) by Marcella Hazan-the Julia Child of Italy-or just companionably, out of Maggie Waldron’s Cold Spaghetti at Midnight (Morrow. $19), a compendium of comfort foods ranging from New York egg creams to grilled fish in grape leaves. Or you could just put out a welcome mat, like the recycled dark-gray sponge-rubber one, in the homey shape of a picket fence, available from Rizzoli Art Boutique (800-522-6657. $20). Traditional handicrafts meet modern materials in the brightly colored, zippy-patterned baskets made by Zulu men and women out of discarded telephone cables (The Museum of Modem Art, 800-447-6662. $40). While we’ve got you in the kitchen allow us to buttonhole you about Smart Design’s prize-winning Good Grips kitchen gadgets (Oxo International, 212-213-0707. $6 to $15). Slightly larger handles make everything from the garlic press to the jar opener easier to operate; the Swivel Peeler is poetry in motion. The more you look at the Mona Lisa cookie jar (Vandor, 800-321-7697. $49.95), the more that smile seems to be saying Bet you can’t eat just one. Architect Frank Gehry has designed a stainless-steel Alessi kettle (Markuse, 617-932-9444. $495); it looks like one of those bullet-shaped thingies off an old Cadillac bumper. It has a fish-shaped wooden handle and a whale-shaped wooden whistle that mimics a whale’s mating call. Not recommended for a beachfront home.
Though they are made of aluminum, Four garden (Allen Simpson Marketing, 800-268-6893. Around $30 for a set of two) look too good to use. But they won an industrial-design award for function as well as form. The handles come to a point at the end-so you can poke the dirt to drop a seed in-and their gentle curve is easy on the wrist.
We wouldn’t call the dolphin razor (Paragon, 800-343-3095. $18) ergonomic exactly, but it was designed with a sense of porpoise. This pleasingly piscine shaver (the blade fits under the tail) is light, trim and comes in the soft colors of sea glass. For more sophisticated types, the Porsche sports-car people now offer the portable, rechargeable, predictably sleek Xenic shaver (Bergdorf Goodman, 800-662-5455/fax 212-339-3030. Around $200). A computer chip monitors each shave’s motor speed and duration, in order to nag you when it’s time to replace the screen.
We’ve test-sat lots of handsome-lookin chairs this year-a brutal job, but we go the extra mile for our readers-and if you want to give a piece of designer furniture for Christmas, our choice is the sturdy new Vikter chair by Dakota Jackson (Museum of Modem Art, 800-447-6662. $585). The wooden back and seat, curved to fit the body, are supported by a subtly flexible steel frame. It comes in a cheerful array of colors: natural cherry, pumpkin, green and purple.
Need to get cozy as well as comfortable? Wrap yourself up in a Circle of Life blanket (Pendleton Woolen Mills, 503-226-4801. $149). In the tradition of its classic Indian-style blankets, Pendleton has lately been basing designs on Native American teachings: in the center circle, black, white, red and yellow represent mankind (and the four directions, and the four stages of life); on the edges, brown, blue and green evoke nature. Plummer-McCutcheon’s Aztec-y terry bathrobe for women (800-321-1484. $149.95), for all its rich colors, doesn’t seem to offer that much of a world view. But it will make the wearer feel warm all over, if that’s any help.
Man-not to mention woman-does not live by CD-ROM and interactive computer technology alone. How about some soft lights? Throw the switch on a ‘Miss Sissi’ lamp (Flos, 516-549-2745/fax 516-549-4220. $95), and your surroundings suddenly get intimate. Designed by Philippe Starck for cocktail tables at the Paramount Hotel in New York, these little tinted magic lanterns come in deep purple, opal white, terra-cotta red and soft green. And what would you say to some romantic music? Tony Bennett, who puts rock-guitar gods to shame just by loosening his bow tie, takes on the ultimate old smoothie on Totally Frank (Columbia), a new recording of songs associated with Sinatra: “Night and Day,” “One for My Baby” . . . Old Blue Eyes invested these songs with tragic grandeur; Bennett glides over them wistfully. (Feel free to take your shoes off.)
We realize it’s probably terribly incorrect to suggest it these days-but would you care for a drink? We don’t mean Evian with an ascetic twist of lemon, or even a glass of white wine. We mean the kind of glamorous concoction sipped when the sun slipped below the yardarm by the likes of Myrna Loy and William Powell-sumptuously photographed by Sam Sargent for Philip Collins’s The Art of the Cocktail: 100 Classic Cocktail Recipes (Chronicle. Paper, $12.95). How about an Old Fashioned? Or, if you’re feeling especially devilish, a Satan’s Whiskers? (Sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, gin, orange juice and Grand Marnier with a dash of orange bitters.) And for planning the perfect evening out-or in-you might want the white-on-black Phases of the Moon wall calendar (Chiasso, 800-654-3570. $15). It’s absolutely impossible to write business appointments on it, thank God; the 365 lunar sketches will tell you why the surf is surging tonight and why you suddenly have an urge to howl.
For writing those special billets-doux, how about some stationery that’s not yellow Post-It notes or pink While You Were Out pads? Laughing Elephant offers a box of envelopes (800-354-0400. $19.95) decorated with romantic and whimsical images of mysterious women in big hats, smooching couples and bears on stilts. Artist Richard Kehl leaves just a small blank area for name and address, but he assures us that the post office is very understanding in these matters. And now, can we make a Christmas date? Cabaret star Andrea Marcovicci specializes in love and heartbreak with a bittersweet twist of wit, via the lyrics of Porter, Coward, Hart and Hammerstein. She will be at the Oak Room in Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel over the holidays. Will you?
More hyperactive than the Super Mario Brothers! Gaudier than a flashing metallic-pink plastic Christmas tree! Able to leap tall octaves in a single Wooooo! Yes, it’s Little Richard, putting the wop-bop-aloo-bop into a dozen favorite children’s songs on Shake It All About (Disney). The hottest “Hokey Pokey” you’ll ever hear, and the most mournful “On Top of Spaghetti.” (His poor meatball.) This is the album of the year for all children who happen to have parents. For quieter times-well, slightly quieter times-check out the bargain-priced package of five cassettes in the award-winning American Melody series (Sony): songs and stories with a country-folk flavor. The Music of Disney: A Legacy in Song (3 CDs., Disney), ranging from “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” to “Beauty and the Beast,” is for better or worse as much a part of an American childhood as “Old MacDonald” and McDonald’s. But isn’t “When You Wish Upon a Star” a heartbreaker? And don’t all of us, kids and former kids alike, secretly love this stuff, even at its most annoying? Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo to you too.
Give yourself a break: forget battery-not-included robots and trikes that take an engineering degree to assemble. What you want-and maybe what your kid wants, too-is a funny little red dog on wheels that looks like a pull toy designed by the late Keith Haring. It is a pull toy designed by the late Keith Haring (Museum of Modern Art, 800-447-6662. $45); there’s also a set of dominoes with Haring’s signature figures jigging about in electric colors ($45). Simple. Like the round chalkboard clock (Elika, 800-328-8552. $30) that comes with two hands, three pieces of chalk and no numerals: kids design their own. Educational. Creative. Fun. Not messy.
Kid Pix (Broderbund. $59.95), a computer painting program (now in a Windows version), is likely to be commandeered by adults. It enables those who can’t paint or draw to generate images anyway. (No cracks about the abstract expressionists, please.) Paul Spooner’s cutout book Museum of the Mind (Abrams. $19.95) is more of a hands-on experience. Here are the materials for building a 3-D paper head, out of which pop fanciful sculptures (Europa and the bull is one). There’s a construct-it-yourself air pump to make the whole thing go.
Three faux-Victorian guides to the forgotten intricacies of structured fun-Parlor Games, Card Games and Conjuring Tricks (Bulfinch. $8.95 each)-are the right size for a stocking. How to play cracker whacker, dumb crambo, slippery hog, old sledge, klaberjass and fan-tan (the last three are card games). “Conjuring Tricks” explains how to force a card or make a coin appear inside an egg. Nifty as these stunts may be, they seem pretty tame next to the mayhem proposed and explained step by step in Penn & Toller’s How to Play With Your Food (Villard. $20). Imagine a bleary-eyed dad peeling a banana that’s already sliced. Parents, though, may not thank these irreverent illusionists for teaching kids how to fake all too convincingly the grisly symptoms of biting into a Halloween apple with a razor blade inside.
Young sports fans aren’t too young to learn that deplorable social conditions sometimes produce wonderful things. Before blacks were allowed into major-league baseball in the 1950s, the Negro leagues-as evidenced by Bruce Chadwick’s When the Came Was Black and White (Abbeville. $24.95)-produced heroic men, great games, enduring pride. And some not too shabby uniforms. Hip-hoppers who have a prideful sense of history (but are starting to find those X caps old hat) may appreciate a replica Negro leagues team cap (The Roman Company, 800-288-5515. Around $20) from such teams as the Cuban X Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants-and, very oddly, the Denver White Elephants. For outdoorsier kids: the Adventure 700 All-Purpose Camping Tool (Zona Alta Project 800-457-5888. $20). This small shovel is also a hatchet, saw, hammer, bottle opener, nail puller and wrench; the hollow handle holds hooks, line, sinkers, a knife, nails, matches and a compass.
But the best present of all this year, for young and old alike, is the one that celebrates the 100th anniversary of the traditional holiday ballet, The Nutcracker. As sure as Go& made party shoes, there’s a “Nutcracker” performance near you: more than a thousand productions take place every year. We can’t recommend a good at home “Nutcracker” on video, but the London Philharmonic’s CD set (2 CDs., EMI) comes with a book that tells the story and introduces the instruments of the orchestra. And the L.A. Guitar Quartet (Delos) wraps its eight fast-fingered hands around the suite with a sweet energy that will have your kids dancing all around the house. More than coffee-table tomes, bigticket teakettles or multi-CD extravaganzas, that’s what the holidays are about, yes?
title: “All I Want For Christmas…” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-24” author: “Paige Hodde”
AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, YOU’D NEED hiking boots and a warm coat to see the chirping real-fife critters that inspired John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America (Villard. $75); why not just pull up a chair? These birds sat for their portraits 150 years ago. Now you can sit and savor Audubon’s near-photographic detail. But for just twice the price, you can get reacquainted with a guy who was 20 times the painter. Christian Tumpel’s Rembrandt (Abrams. $145) is still hefty enough to make strong coffee tables tremble, even though it accepts the Rembrandt Research Project’s deattribution of much of the official oeuvre.
The recently discovered work in The Unknown Modigliani: Drawings from the Collection of Paul Alexandre (Abrams. $75 until Jan. 1, $95 thereafter) plays better in the lap than it did on the wall in a recent show in Venice. But this year you get the most revelations for your art-book buck–more than 1,000 illustrations, many never before published–with Art of Africa by Jacques Kerchache, Jean-Louis Paudrat and Lucien Stephan (Abrams. $175). An impressive book on an essential subject.
Table still holding up? Then top off the stack with Andy Warhol: Portraits (Thames & Hudson. $45), in which his silk screens illuminate various vapid celebrities as if they were stunned bunnies caught in headlights. You probably don’t want any riffraff in such company, but American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco (Knopf $75), a well-produced collection of inspired crankery, might do for down in the rec room–and be more fun than some of the stiffs upstairs. You may want to banish Harrod Blank’s Wild Wheels (Pomegranate, $25) to the garage: these “art cars” with all manner of junk welded, glued and other-wise stuck to them are even outside the outside. La Bolsita, by Rolando Politi (Exit Art, 212-966-7745. $64), is outsider art you can own: swing this jagged, undersize handbag, made from a Cafe Bustelo can, by its itchy rope handles and be queen of the mosh pit. Or make a statement in your office with police barricade tape imprinted with the words BIAS INCIDENT (Exit Art, 212-966-7745. 50 cents a yard). Ain’t you got fun! Still feeling subversive? With the Venus refrigerator magnet (Caryco, 206-325-2767. $20), you can dress up Bouguereau’s statuesque goddess in any (or none) of 15 pieces of clothing, including a leather suit–complete with AIDS awareness ribbon–and make em green with Venus envy.
(Shambhala/Redstone. $25 box) is a sampler of lurid art inspired by this death-defying holiday on which families picnic in graveyards. It includes part of a Diego Rivera mural, prose by the likes of Octavio Paz, even a little tin skeleton-death as party animal. Italian Art Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars by Steven Heller and Louise Fili (Chronicle. $16.95) is just a book, not a fun kit; still, it’s priced so reasonably that you could almost take scissors and rubber cement, make these zippy little logos and ads into stickers for kids or adults–and not feel guilty. But don’t even get fingerprints on Industrial Design: Reflection of a Century (Abbeville. $65), the lavish catalog for last summer’s flawed exhibition in Paris. This souvenir program far outclasses the event: copiously illustrated with such seminal products as a 1950 Electrolux vacuum cleaner and the Lockheed stealth bomber, beautifully designed, succinctly written.
The sun and landscape (and money) of California helped produce America’s liveliest–and most playful–architecture scene. West Coast Wave (Van Nostrand Reinhold. $49.95) is a good place to sample the work of such current practitioners as Melinda Gray and Randy Dalrymple. It was no fun actually being a companion of the megalomaniacal Frank Lloyd Wright, but The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, by William Allin Storrer (University of Chicago. $ 75), gives us the architecture without the aggravation: plans, black-and-white photos and histories of everything he built. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and David Larkin (Rizzoli. $60), is more selective and more satisfying: color photos of such quintessentially American houses as Pennsylvania’s Falling Water or California’s Hollyhock House.
We all know Michelangelo as painter, sculptor, sonneteer and, lately, gay role model. Now meet Michelangelo: Architect (Abrams. $125). Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Contardi chronologically catalog his 31 projects and interpret them in light of his work as a whole. The beautifully textured photography makes Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library vestibule–one of the world’s most magnificent spaces–look almost as good on the page as it does in Florence. Almost.
COME ON-A MY HOUSE,” SANG ROSE mary Clooney. “Come on in my kitchen,” sang Robert Johnson. “Step right up, come on in,” sang George Jones, “if you’d like to take the grand tour.” “Lay lady lay,” sang Bob Dylan, “lay across my big brass bed.” He meant lie, but you get the idea: even artistic types are into decor big time.
So why don’t you come on in our kitchen? French designer Philippe Starck’s elegant JoJo Long Legs knife (Modern Age, 800-3584284. $89) looks like a Bowie knife with savoir-faire. The handle (gold, red, green or black) has little legs that keep the blade half a hairbreadth from the counter-top. Alessi’s rounded, stainless-steel penguin teapot (Marcuse, 617-932-9444. $190) also has legs, little green polyamide ones, on which it seems to perch expectantly. The industrial-design-award-winning Thermos electric grill (Thermos, 800-435-5194. $299.99) looks like it came out of the galley of the Starship Enterprise, but with three legs instead of four it can fit into even tighter quarters: puny patios, small city balconies. Thermos be someplace you could use it.
On the cookbook shelf. Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby’s Salsas, Sambals, Chutneys & Chowchows (Morrow. $20) is the smartest, best-looking book on this subject in years and a boon to the corn chips and hot dogs of the world. Moira Hodgson spices her Favorite Fruitcakes (HarperCollins. $12.50) with distinguished writing–about fruitcakes–by the likes of Calvin Trillin and Truman Capote; some recipes call for those revolting little red and green things, some don’t. Then there’s The Mafia Cookbook (Simon & Schuster. $15), by exGambino family member Joseph (Joe Dogs) Iannuzzi, leavening the heavy fare with folksy chat: “Remember the crowd I was feeding. Any meal may be their last, so it better be a good one.” Words to live by.
Moving right along to the rest of the house: the dynamic Star Wine Rack (The Whitney Museum Store Next Door, 212-6060200. $59.95) looks as if it’s about to dance off with the eight bottles it holds. The ’toon radio (Plummer-McCutcheon, 800321-1484. $59.95) is also jauntily out of kilter; they say it’s art deco, we say it’s R. Crumb Moderne. Marco Pasanella’s Stowaway Chair (Pasanella, 212-242-2002. $180) just sits there in symmetrical simplicity. It comes in four colors; you can stow books, blankets, whatever, in the shelf below the seat–until your cat claims the spot.
The bold, simple folk figures that Bill Finks makes out of scrap metal and old wire would look great on any wall. Bill’s wife, Marcia, paints them, borrowing patterns derived from African and Southwestern art. They come out looking like Happy Couple (Sundance, 800-753-6669. $149). (How’d they dream up that name?) And there by the door is a Magritte-inspired Sky Umbrella (Museum of Modern Art, 800-4476662. $78), with dappled clouds on the underside. Grab it and we’re outta here.
WHAT’S CHRISTMAS WITHOUT A LITTLE Schlag? The creamiest, Richard Strauss: Rosenkavalier Suite, with Andre Previn conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon). The disc has music from other Strauss operas, but the suite is so seductive you may never get around to the rest. The Impatient Lover (London), by the deservedly trendy mezzo Cecilia Bartoli, accompanied by Andras Schiff, is a set of Italian songs by such sunny Mediterranean types as…Beethoven? Schubert? Mozart? When a friend told us about Anne Sofie von Otter’s Grieg: Songs (Deutsche Grammophon), we thought that was Mediterranean, too. “Never on Sunday”? Then we got it; you should go do the same.
Vladimir Horowitz’s legendary 1965 Carnegie Hall comeback is a highlight of Horowitz: The Complete Masterworks Recordings, 1962-1973 (Sony. 13 CDs). But don’t miss his highly charged readings of Rachmaninov and Scriabin: jeez, talk about Russian fingers!
Can your budget stand more complete masterworks? Frank Sinatra: The Columbia Years, 1943-1952 (Columbia. 12 CDs) is a heartbreaker: the preRat Pack, pre-ring-a-ding-ding Young Blue Eyes, sounding almost fresh and innocent. If you’re burned out on Bing this holiday season, try When My Heart Finds Christmas (Columbia). With a hint of mischief in his voice, Harry Connick Jr. freshens up such oft-roasted chestnuts as “Sleigh Ride.”
This year’s abundant blues, jazz, country and rock reissues make a virtual decade-by-decade history of vernacular music, American style. The Blues (Smithsonian. 4 CDs) is a well-selected sampler starting with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “That Black Snake Moan” (1926)–but with two King-size holes where B. B. and Albert ought to be. Benny Goodman: On the Air (1937-1938) (Columbia. 2 CDs) is–trust us–the best Goodman album ever. The band is loose, joyous, ferocious: the sheer unneurotic emotional exultation is amazingly bracing today.
It’s arguable that Charlie Parker killed jazz with modernist self-consciousness–but what a way to go. In 1946 and ‘47 he was at his best–and worst. The Complete Dial Sessions (Stash) is essential Bird-from his famous alto sax break on “A Night in Tunisia” to his equally famous breakdown on “Lover Man”–decently remastered at last. just what was Parker up to? John Fordham elucidates this and other mysteries in Jazz (Dorling Kindersley. $29.95). Its reader-friendly magazine-like design–time lines, essays, diagrams, discography–steers neophytes in the right direction and gets aficionados in as deep as they care to go.
It’s astonishing that Ornette Coleman’s Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (Rhino. 6 CDs) begins just four years after Parker’s death: it’s Bird atonalized and deconstructed. It sounded weird as hell then; today it sounds inevitable. Thanks in part to free-form iconoclasts like Coleman–who played in Texas R & B bands–jazz purists can now loosen up and enjoy treasures from defunct R & B labels. The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story, 1949-1957 (Epic. 3 CDs), has such racy items as The Treniers’ “Poontang”; The Cobra Records Story (Capricorn. 2 CDs) has bluesmasters Otis Rush and Buddy Guy.
Otis Redding recorded only from 1960 to his death in 1967; long as it is, Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding (Rhino. 4 CDs) isn’t overpadded. Good people don’t necessarily make good art, but Redding was, by all accounts, a good man who made great soul music: rough, tough and tender. Bluegrass founding father Bill Monroe was one of Elvis’s great influences; in Elvis’s heyday Monroe was also at his peak. Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys: Live Recordings, 1956-1969 (Smithsonian/Folkways), culled from both concerts and picking parties, reveals what a holy terror he was in front of an audience–even of friends, at 4:45 a.m.
The 1970s were the infancy of heavy metal–20 years later, it’s still infantile–and for Led Zeppelin: The Complete Studio Recordings (Atlantic. 10 CDs), guitarist Jimmy Page has again remastered the tapes. This is Led Zep’s third boxed set: Box 1 + Box 2 = Box 3, give or take. For the smart side of the ’70s, nothing beats Elvis Costello’s 2 1/2 Years (Rykodisc, 4 CDs): three studio albums (including his first, from ‘77) bristling with wit and venom, plus a bonfire of rarities and a top-flight live set.
All the best and worst tendencies of the ’80s are in Message in a Box (A&M. 4 CDs), which has everything the Police ever recorded. They were passionate and mercurial, slick and pretentious. They gave us Sting. We hate to think what might end up epitomizing the ’90s, but the unimpeachably cool Metallica will do for now. The best part of Live Sh*t: Binge and Purge (Elektra. 3 CDs, 3 videos) is the booklet, a funny, nervy scrapbook full of budgets and business correspondence, including a fax from the flacks regarding a NEWSWEEK interview: “It would be a good move to do this. Ten minutes tops.”
READY FOR A CLOSE-UP? IN THE Ziegfeld buch (Abrams. $49.50), Richard (Florenz’s cousin) and Paulette Ziegfeld home in on the legendary Broadway showman, whose pursuit of beauty onstage and backstage led to financial and moral bankruptcy. Ziegfeld’s production of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Show Boat” was a Broadway benchmark; on Jerome Kern Treasury (Angel), conductor John McGlinn and six splendid singers showcase a handful of the composer’s gems. Some are beloved heirlooms (“Till the Clouds Roll By”); others, forgotten jewels (“The Bullfrog Patrol”).
The recent practice of operatizing classic musicals (bleating tenors! swooning sopranos!) threatens to drive the genre back to the Dark Ages. Once in a while, though, comes a glorious exception. Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town (Deutsche Grammophon), recorded live last year in London (it’s also on video), includes numbers dropped before the Broadway opening. The exuberant cast includes Thomas Hampson and Frederica von Stade. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (EMI Classics), on the other hand, is a genuine opera–and it took a Broadway and West End director, Trevor Nunn, to get it on video at last, with the mesmerizing Willard White as Porgy.
Of the two Gershwins, George was always the dashing, died-before-his-time one; Ira was the other. Robert Kimball’s The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin (Knopf 845) gives Ira his long-overdue due with more than TOO lyrics, almost 400 never before published. Ira put it best: ‘S wonderful. For devotees of what Sondheim himself calls the “Sondheim cult,” Unsung Sondheim (Varese Sarabande) is a must. For others, these 16 songs are just fun. Even so-so Sondheim beats most of what you hear on Broadway, and “What Can You Lose,” cut from “Dick Tracy,” is a three-hankie gem. But this century’s number-one, all-around, quintuple-threat man of the theater was Noel Coward: playwright, director, actor, composer, singer. Noel Coward: His HMV Recordings, 1928 to 1953 (Angel. 4 CDs), is a panorama of his career in 80 numbers. Coward clipped his diction like a silver cigarette case snapping shut; if a dry martini could sing, this is how it would sound.
BY ABOUT MID-MAY THE WEATHER Will be warm, the Christmas bills will be paid off and you’ll have had ample time to digest both the food in Plummer-McCutcheon’s silver-plated, ship-shaped Condiment Boat (800-321-1484. $99.95) and the information in two new series of guidebooks to European cities. Both the Knopf Guides ($25) and the Eyewitness Travel Guides (Dorling Kindersley. $24.95) include hundreds of pages of colorful maps, photos of town, countryside and cuisine, reproductions of local art works, diagrams and cross sections of buildings–well, we could go on. Both fit snugly in the palm. Both are terrific. Which is better? Well, for your extra 5 cents Knopf gives you a handsome plastic binder–if that’s not a contradiction in terms.
But there’ll never be another city guide like Atget Paris (Gingko. Paper, $55): 840 images by Eugene Atget, the great photographer who refused to call himself an artist. “The pictures I take are simply documents,” he insisted. From 1898 until he died in 1927, he anatomized Old Paris right down to the doorknobs–the book is the exact size of a Parisian cobblestone–but as arranged, neighborhood by neighborhood, the photos comprise one of the great works of art of the last two centuries.
When we think of travel books we think of something like Morocco (Abrams. $49.50), with essays by longtime Moroccan exile Paul Bowles (written over the past 40 years and never before brought together) and almost gaudy color photographs by Barry Brukoff. But Aglaia Kremezi’s The Foods of Greece (Stewart Tabori & Chang. $50) is as much a travel book as any tourist guide or account of adventures and misadventures abroad: not just because of its lush pictures but because it’s a real working guide to preparing the traditional dishes found all over Greece. Christopher Alexander’s tediously titled yet profoundly thrilling A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (Oxford. $130) is a trip through both space and time: for Alexander, an architect, painter and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Turkish carpets are portals to the Absolute. But this isn’t an academic Shirley MacLaine gazing through a rug into his own navel: the tough-minded Alexander shows that the early Turks knew some basic truths about structure, color and light that have been forgotten in our time.
Indigenous music, too, is a map of a nation’s consciousness. A World Out of Time, Vol. 2: Henry Kaiser and David Lindley in Madagascar (Shanachie) documents these American musicians’ 1991 musical factfinding trip. (Vol. I appeared last year.) The folk groups and rock bands they met evoke Madagascar’s eclectic culture, where tradition and modernity trade licks with a grin. When Lindley and the Rossy band light into Merle Haggard’s hit “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” it’s enough to make you believe we could be a global village. But let’s get a grip: some of the musicians on the splendid Bosnia: Echoes from an Endangered World (Smithsonian/Folkways), recorded in the mid-’80s, are now dead or displaced in the current tribulations. Here East meets West harmoniously–but only in the music. Royalties from this CD go to humanitarian aid.
IT’S SHAMEFUL TO ADMIT, BUT WHEN zipping across the fruited plain isn’t it a relief to see a crudely painted billboard or a malformed neon motel sign instead of wave after wave of amber grain and those damn purple mountains that don’t seem to get any closer? John Margolis and Emily Gwathmey’s Signs of Our Time (Abbeville. $21.95) rips the lid off this dirty little secret, reveling in gas stations shaped like teapots, hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs and other roadside ephemera. Jane and Michael Stern wrote the book on this sort of kitsch in fact, they’ve Written 19 books; their latest, Way Out West (HarperCollins. $35), is a compendium of campy buckaroo iconography, from cowgirls to cow skulls. The leather-bound four-CD set Songs of the West (Rhino) is a darn good audio sidekick–everything from “Cool Water” to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”–and the illustrated booklet ain’t half bad. Or ugly.
But there’s a grim flip side to this frontier jollification. In 1898, ethnographer and photographer Edward Curtis began to interview and photograph America’s vanishing Indian nations. In 30 years he filled 20 volumes with 2,200 photogravures and a thousand pages of text; Native Nations (Bulfinch/Callaway. $60) reproduces 110 quadratone plates with state-of-the-art care. Curtis plainly bought into the noble savage notion, but there is nobility here. Tragedy, too: faces closed fist-like around the knowledge that their world is going. Without Curtis, it would have gone without a trace.
Robert Frank’s legacy is more ambiguous: without his 1958 photo anthology, The Americans (Scalo. $50, paperback $26.50), we wouldn’t have had road movies like “True Romance” or TV shows like “Picket Fences.” Yet as Jack Kerouac (without whom…oh, skip it) wrote in the original introduction, Frank captured “that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral.” “The Americans” goes in and out of print; it’s wonderful to have this well-reproduced edition. It’s the masterpiece of photography’s Desolation Angel.
OH SURE, IT’S EASY TO SNICKER NOW at the cornball fable of the miser Scrooge’s Yuletide redemption, with Bob Cratchit and his coal scuttle and his cockney piety, and crippled Tiny Tim Godblessing us every one. But wait till Dickens gets you in his clutches again. Go on: let’s see you keep a dry eye. This year you might try the new facsimile edition of A Christmas Carol (Pierpont Morgan Library and Yale. $30), which juxtaposes the printed text with Dickens’s vigorous, curlicued and much-crossed-out manuscript. You may or may not be awed to see the workings of his genius, but you’ll come away with reverence for whoever invented the word processor. Latter-day Scrooges will find kindred spirits in Christmas Stories (Chronicle. $17.95), with an introduction by the Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu–who’s proud to be a communist and a Jew. Sure, there’s an uplifting excerpt from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but there’s also Anne Sexton’s “Christmas Eve,” about her dead mother’s portrait staring down from the wall near the Christmas tree. Noel, noel.
Some of us see this joyous season as merely part of the bleak stretch between the last out of the World Series and the first push-up of spring training. But there’s solace in this winter’s solstice-Baseball Days: From the Sandlots to the Show (Bulfinch. $24.95). In essays as sharp as an Orel Hershiser curve ball, Bill Littlefield appreciatively scrutinizes every aspect of the game–including the rain delay. Rather play head games? Amaze friends with The Paradox Box (Shambhala/Redstone. $25): 19th-century optical illusions, brainteasers and conundrums. The Victorians were sick pups: Geraldine Adamich Laufer’s Tussie-Mussies (Workman. $22.95) decodes the messages they sent with floral bouquets. We get epistles-in-pistils like “Consolation for a Hangover,” in which red valerian signified “drunk and blowsy.” Pansy was “thought”–pensee, get it?–but go figure why wood sorrel meant “ill-timed wit.”
If that’s not surreal enough, John Tobler’s day-by-day historical account This Day in Rock (Carroll & Graf $19.50) will tell you, if you care, when Alice Cooper’s pet boa constrictor was bitten to death by a rat (June 5, 1977). On a more elevating note, John Dizikes’s lively, authoritative Opera in America: A Cultural History (Yale. $35) explains why Puccini quickly became popular in America: not just for his hummable tunes but because he was seen as a regular guy who’d rather talk duck hunting than duets. Miles Davis, as Richard Williams’s The Man in the Green Shirt (Holt. $40) makes clear, was a highly irregular guy; Williams combines striking photos of this jazzmaster with a smart, compact biography.
Talk about smart: Oxford University Press has come out with The Oxford Sherlock Holmes ($99), nine sturdily bound, annotated volumes instead of the customary single tome that has cut off circulation in so many sedentary legs. Holmes once airily proclaimed his ignorance of the Copernican system–irrelevant to the science of detection–but with the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition (Columbia Univ. Press/Houghton Mifflin. $125), you can have the universe on your desktop. Comprehensively updated (bye-bye Burma, hello Myanmar), it’s strong in the basics but flaky in popular culture: an entry on Andre Kostelanetz but not Muddy Waters? And by the way, fellas, Hank Williams did not die in a car crash.
L. Rust Hills’s How to Do Things Right (Godine. $22.95. Paper $15.95) is an elegant compendium of esoteric but indispensable advice (how to eat an ice-cream cone) and opinion (what’s wrong with adultery: “Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch”). People who really don’t do things right may be pulled up short by Alice K. Tumer’s The History of Hell (Harcourt Brace. $29.95)–but more likely, they’ll just be superciliously amused. Did you know there was a real Dr. Faustus, B.A., Heidelberg, 1509?
And since we’re on the subject. When last we heard, Santa Claus was still Ho ho hoing, but it’s surely just a matter of time before even the old gent himself starts going Hehheh, heh-heh. Things are now so out of hand that you can get Beavis and Butt-head Christmas stockings by Dakin ($10 each). We weren’t convinced that B&B was prophecy masquerading as idiocy until we read this passage in This Book Sucks (MTV Books–now there’s a concept–$10): “Tattoos kick ass. Messing up your skin is cool…This dude in the park told us that in Japan? They like give the coolest tattoos to the criminals. Me and Beavis were going to hitch over there. . .” The voice of the rising generation! And a Happy New Year.
IF YOU MUST GIVE TOYS THIS YEAR, give ’em to your pooch–the postmodern squeaking dog toys sold by Alphabets, for instance (212-475-7250. $9.95 each). They’re shaped like crowns, wreaths and, for some reason, logs. Oh right: dog, stick. But why not get your kids something they can sink their–no, that won’t work. Something they can do something with. Like the Terra Cotta Building Kit (Museum of Modern Art, 800-447-6662. $55), with 161 bricks, water-soluble mortar, construction plans and a copy of Poe’s “The Black Cat” (hehheh, heh-heh, just kidding about Poe).
Why not get them a camera of their very own? The Holga 120S (International Center of Photography, New York City. $20) is priced right and OK for either beginners or, as the catalog puts it, “the experimental photographer who enjoys oddly focused, slightly unpredictable images.” A far higher-tech gift is children’s software. Kid Cuts (Broderbund. $30) is a package of arts and crafts projects–masks, play money, crowns, paper air-planes–that kids design, print out and cut up.
Spinneybeck major-league team-logo baseballs (Hammacher Schlemmer, 800543-3366. $26.95; $699 for 28 teams) are hand-stitched, flawlessly colored–almost as beautiful as a perfectly mown infield. But keep ’em on their stands. If the dog puts tooth marks in that leather, it could ruin your day. Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc) could save it. With guitar, mandolin and a little help from their friends, these fast-fingered folkies do low-key versions of whimsical songs they remember from New Lost City Ramblers records and such.
We’ve had it up to here with Belle and the Little Mermaid and whatever her name was in “Aladdin.” (Don’t even get us started on Barney.) What’s great about The Disney Villain (Hyperion. $45) is that you’re not going to see a lot of the creeps in this book on lunchboxes, sneakers and little girls’ underwear. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two longtime Disney animators, tell how 55 memorable evildoers evolved. The sinister Stepmother in “Cinderella.” The tush-twitching, salami-slicing Stromboli in “Pinocchio.” The batwing-flapping, drooling Devil himself in “Fantasia.” What would childhood be without them? Like a Christmas that was all Santa Claus and no Scrooge: blander, less vertiginous, and in the long run less precious.
title: “All I Want For Christmas…” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Joan Childers”
It’s hard to be an opera-lover and get with the new America-first program, but American composer Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 American opera, Susannah (Virgin. 2 CDs), has a topflight American cast: a heartbreaking Cheryl Studer, a seductive Samuel Ramey. Set in rural Tennessee and based on the Bible – how mid-’90s can you get? – it has the lilt of a square-dance tune and the passion of a revival meeting. Curl up and listen under the Operabet cotton blanket (Metropolitan Opera Guild, 800-892-2525. $50), with A-to-Z characters (Aida, Brunnhilde, Carmen . . .) woven in. All foreigners, but the thing itself is ““crafted with pride in U.S.A.’’
Fiddle freaks will beg Santa for Jascha Heifetz: The Complete Collection (BMG. 65 CDs. Not a misprint); it’ll be hell on the reindeer. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter (Philips) has selected his best performances and kept it down to a modest 21 CDs. Most were recorded live, so sound varies; musicianship, never. Not live enough? You could get a loved one and yourself – don’t forget yourself – tickets to next May’s Mahler Festival in Amsterdam. All the symphonies, by the Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonic and Mahler’s own Vienna Philharmonic – plus the songs, by the likes of Thomas Hampson and Anne Sophie von Otter. Your airline may offer frequent-flier miles for sitting through the Symphony of a Thousand. If you prefer the virtual, the digital and the interactive, Robert Winter’s CD-ROM Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9: From the New World (Voyager. For Macs, $59.95) parses the music and leads you out into the cultural history.
Irving Berlin rose from rags to riches, stayed rich, lived to 101 and still had his troubles. This may not be the time of year to read about the secret sorrows of the man who wrote ““White Christmas,’’ but Mary Ellin Barrett’s Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster. $23) is a literate, moving account. Berlin, Irving, didn’t make The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (St. Martin’s. $50), but Berlin, Ben (““Estonian bandleader, pianist, and arranger’’), did. You know – recorded ““Piccolo Pete’’ back in ‘29? This essential reference work now sells for the price of a box set somebody will listen to half of once.
No such problem with a Bud Powell box; two superb ones are out for what would have been the master be-bop pianist’s 70th birthday. The Complete Bud Powell on Verve (5 CDs) has Powell in his prime, from 1949 to 1956, and a 150-page book that may be the most informative such mini-bio ever. The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (4 CDs) has stuff from the late ’40s, then jumps to the early-’60s recordings some cognoscenti prize for their weirdness.
The dry, intense post-Coltrane tenor-player Joe Henderson has become a star doing theme albums – Strayhorn, Miles – but his own best original tunes are on The Milestone Years (8 CDs). It’s been a good year for tenor-sax records: Joshua Redman’s Moodswing (Warner) has been hyped, but not overhyped; it’s a killer. So is The Journey (Columbia), by the less celebrated David Sanchez, one of Dizzy Gillespie’s last proteges, and JC on the Set (Columbia), by the ferocious Detroit native James Carter. The old Riverside History of Classic Jazz (3 CDs) was the anthology for ““moldy figs’’ who deemed bop anti-jazz; at last it’s on disc. Obscure stuff from the greats (Satch, Bessie, Bix), great stuff from the obscure (Original Memphis Melody Boys) and ““Slidus Trombonus,’’ by Sodero’s Military Band. Meanwhile, back on the cutting edge, New York composer-drummer Bobby Previte’s Slay the Suitors (Avant) and Hue and Cry (Enja) have such smart players as Don Byron weaving in and out of many-hued, many-textured ensembles.
Each disc of Celebrate Broadway (RCA, 6 CDs) is a mini-revue with major talent: ““Beautiful Girls’’ has Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, Julie Andrews and Bernadette Peters. The CD-ROM Vid Grids (Geffen/Jasmine Multimedia. For Windows, $34.95) does what true Broadway fans long to do: slices up videos by Guns N’ Roses and Soundgarden and scrambles the pieces. You have to put them together before the music stops.
Well, you don’t have to. You could always hole up with Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra: The Song Is You (RCA. 5 CDs) and pretend time has stopped; it’s fun for the first hour. Sinatra once pointedly called George Jones America’s second-best singer; Cup of Loneliness (Mercury. 2 CDs) is early, raw and scary. The Everly Brothers achieved a near-perfect synthesis of country anguish, rock-and-roll energy and teen appeal; Heartaches and Harmonies (Rhino. 4 CDs) has the essential Everly oeuvre. If the second half lags, it’s only because the first half would make anything sound lame. Since Dolly Parton’s career has the same problem – her accountant would disagree – the live, unplugged Heartsongs (Columbia) is a step in the right direction – backward. Way to Blue (Rykodisc) is a single-CD retrospective of the late British singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who OD’d on antidepressants in 1974; his stately acoustic arrangements have a tragic perfection that seems not of this earth.
On Lead Belly’s Last Sessions (Smithsonian Folkways. 4 CDs), from 1948, they kept the tape rolling as the great African-American songster ran through much of his vast repertoire of blues, hollers, gospel, pop and protest songs, pausing to comment or reminisce. Return of the Repressed: The John Fahey Anthology (Rhino. 2 CDs) surveys three decades of blues-based, Indian-influenced ““American primitive guitar,’’ music as strong and lean-lined as a Shaker church. Young Doc Watson played electric guitar in a country band, but on his first recordings (1960-62), Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley (Smithsonian Folkways. 2 CDs), he got back to basics with old medicine-show banjo-man Ashley, fiddler Fred Price and singer Clint Howard. His greater sophistication never jarred with their simplicity; the music hasn’t aged a day.
Sam Cooke’s SAR Records Story 1959-1965 (Abkco. 2 CDs) illuminates a cultural moment: when the sacred and profane strands in black American music gave birth to soul. There’s little of Cooke’s own singing: SAR is the label he founded to record both R & B (Johnnie Taylor) and doo-wop-inflected gospel (the Soul Stirrers). Yet his presence can be felt in every track: the gospel moves; the R & B stretches toward heaven.
Oh, speaking of which. We look forward to each year’s new Christmas albums about the way we look forward to the new cat books. Still, The Spirit of Christmas Past (Nimbus) has operatic immortals singing such seasonal evergreens as ““Ave Maria’’ (Ponselle) and ““Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’’ (Schumann-Heink) – plus Basil Rathbone reciting ““The Night Before Christmas.’’ And If Every Day Was Like Christmas (RCA) borrows from Elvis Presley’s five holiday albums, from rootsy (““Merry Christmas Baby’’) to cutesy (where do we start?). But what sold us was the 3-D pop-up of a snow-covered Graceland that springs in your face whenever you open the package. O come, all ye faithful.
The trouble is, we’re supposed to be happy at Christmas,’’ writes Elisa Segrave in her introduction to The Junky’s Christmas and Other Yuletide Stories (Serpent’s Tail. $12.99). We know we said no downers this time, but such a bracingly unsentimental collection – including William Burroughs’s sardonic title story – will cheer misanthropes and malcontents who might feel excluded at this glad time of year.
You want inclusive? Even encyclopedias aren’t encyclopedic enough to encompass Flannery O’Connor, Jerry Clower and Memphis Minnie. Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor (Norton. $27.50) has ’em – plus Louis Armstrong holding forth ““On an Empty Stomach.’’ A book to read till it falls apart. Blount reprints a scene from Tennessee Williams’s ““Baby Doll’’ film script; equally funny – if inadvertently so – is this opening line of Williams’s, exhumed in First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers (Little, Brown. $22.95, paperback $12.95): ““Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes.’’
Buzzing are the streets of not-many-peopled Eden, N.Y., home of the American Kazoo Company, one of George Cantor’s Pop Culture Landmarks (Visible Ink. $17.95). Your own living room can be a pop-culture landmark with Walter Laird’s The Ballroom Dance Pack (Dorling Kindersley. $24.95): a CD to waltz, tango and cha-cha to, a book to tell you how – and foot charts suitable for framing as Dada art. Richard Kadrey’s Covert Culture 2.0 (St. Martin’s. $12.95) explores borderlands where the cutting edge frays to a fringe: e-zines (e-mail magazines), Hong Kong action films, didjeridoo music and bizarre corners of the Internet. Dick DeBartolo’s Good Days and MAD: A Hyster-ical Tour Behind the Scenes at MAD Magazine (Thunder’s Mouth. $29.95) may seem tame by comparison. That’s because MAD is so familiar we’ve forgotten how bizarre it is: ““Spy vs. Spy?’’ Alfred E. Neuman? Where did this stuff come from? Even DeBartolo’s chapter headings – ““A Brief, But Short, History of MAD Magazine’’ – have us scratching our heads. Funny? Not funny? So not-funny it’s funny? So funny it’s not even funny? At least we’ve figured out what to think of Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Universe: Volumes 8-13, from the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome (Doubleday. $15.95). This project started in 1978 and we can assert that it’s genuinely educational, genuinely accurate and a hoot. King Solomon’s Garden: Poems and Art Inspired by the Old Testament (Abrams. $24.95) covers the same ground more reverently – though with subversives like Frost and Dickinson involved, watch your back.
No film buff – no anybody – should be without Pauline Kael’s 1,291-page For Keeps (Dutton. $34.95). It’s the best of the best of four decades, and her reviews have lost none of their feisty, slangy, provocative charge. No less idiosyncratic, and no less fun, is David Thomson’s radically updated A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf. $40, paperback $25); his independent opinions – Down with Scorsese! Up with Mitchum! – and quirky style make it compulsive reading. But the best movie reference book, hands down, is the newly revised edition of the late Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia (HarperPerennial. $25): highly reliable, highly readable.
Nothing is less readable than computer books; Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver’s The Cyberspace Lexicon (Phaidon. $29.99) gives lucid – we swear it – definitions of cyberjargon from ““anti-aliasing’’ to ““Z-buffer.’’ It even tells you what cyberspace is. Out-of-towners can find New York City even more alienating than cyberspace (if you move your mouse to the wrong place on the pad, nobody tows it); Eric Homberger’s The Historical Atlas of New York City (Holt. $45) uses charts, maps, photos and text to show how New Amsterdam became post-Fun City. But don’t kid yourself: every place is a zoo these days. The Atlas of Contemporary America (Facts on File. $45) shows the distribution of hate groups and toxic-waste dumps; Latitudes & Attitudes (Little, Brown. $14.95) locates the relative concentrations of bowlers vs. racquetball players, Oprah-watchers vs. Donahue devotees.
Knopf’s Restaurants of Paris guide ($25), by contrast, is up-market America’s vision of the Good: lavishly illustrated histories of 100 ““memorable’’ beaneries and the lowdown on a couple of hundred others. The encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Wine ($45) doesn’t miss a trick: from oenophilia in lyric poetry to the requisite color plate of barefoot grape stompers. If you’re a culinary do-it-yourselfer – like you really have the time – let Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts (Chapters. $29.95) be your co-conspirator in cookery. Sand tarts, jam cake and half-moon pies, with clear instructions and illuminating asides. Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts (Warner. $35) sounds like consumer fraud. But no tofu-carob-aspartame horrors here; just good-tasting stuff that’s artery-friendly.
Maria Grammatico and Mary Taylor Simeti’s Bitter Almonds (Morrow. $20) is a reader’s cookbook; imagine Oliver Twist actually getting some more. As a child, Grammatico lived in a bleak Sicilian convent, where the nuns supported themselves by making almond pastries. Simeti has adapted the ancient recipes for American kitchens. How strange and wondrous those kitchens will seem when the nuns’ almond pillows, sighs and desires, and mothers-in-laws’ tongues come out of the oven.
There’s a limit, we know, to how much more handsomely designed stuff you can cram into the house before something has to go out to the garage. It’s part of what we like about the miniature modern chairs (Vitrashop, 212-879-8074) from Germany’s Vitra Design Museum: beauty without bulk. Among the 34 available replicas of classics, we fancy Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s tall ladder-back ($175), and the Eames molded-plywood occasional chair ($140). The life-size Eames chair reissued this year (Museum of Modern Art, 212-708-9880) goes for $680, and it doesn’t even lean back! Stick with the miniatures and your old La-Z-Boy.
The foot-tall Iota bedside/table lamp (Nemo, 203-378-4000. $149) looks like a space-age dunce cap until the black-matte peak smartly lifts up, swivels and adjusts to focus the halogen lamp inside. An even lovelier light is shed by Beth Mueller’s colorful ceramic menorah (Guggenheim Museum store, 212-423-3542. $98), which suggests both Chagall and postmodern architecture. Alison Palmer’s handmade, hand-painted ““Demoiselle’’ ceramic spoon rest (Guggenheim Museum store, 212-423-3542. $26) does more than suggest Picasso – and Picasso might have a suggestion for her if he’d lived to see it. But hey, it’s nice to be remembered. Take Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting ““Paris Street; Rainy Day’’; that’s now on an umbrella (Museum Collections, 800-442-2460. $39), and nobody’s bent out of shape but folks who bought those Magritte umbrellas last year.
We don’t know what it says about us, but we’ve ended up with a passel of vessels: jaunty Storybird pitchers (Chiasso, 800-654-3570. $30 and $70), made of glossy dishwasher- and microwave-safe stoneware. Ursu-la Munch-Petersen’s Fiesta-ware-colored ceramic pitcher (Royal Copenhagen, 800-431-1992. $36 and $65), elliptical and aerodynamic; ideal for those times when only flying crock-ery seems to get your point across. Metrokane’s award-winning Gallery glasses (800-724-4321. $5), jewel-toned and shapely, made of light acrylic plastic. And the sneakiest vessel of all: the leather-covered stainless-steel organizer flask (Museum of Modern Art, 212-708-9880. $54) fits into a Filofax-type appointment book and holds four ounces of whatev-er they used to put in flasks. Gee, the ’50s – the ’20s? – really are back.
Mittel Europa, the latest in the Clarkson Potter style series ($50), celebrates not just the baroque and Biedermeier of Vienna but the babushkas of Slovakian grannies. Meanwhile, such earlier books in the series as Japanese Style ($12) have been scrunched down to stocking stuffers. Caribbean Style ($12) is an armchair winter holiday: a guide to the candy-colored vernacular architecture of the islands. And speaking of style: for the cutups on your Christmas list who sometimes waggishly sport those fish neckties with their oxford shirts: fish bedroom slippers (Casu-al Living U.S.A., 800-843-1881. $12.50). Choose rainbow trout or largemouth bass; each has glassy button eyes and nonskid ““scales’’ on the soles, no pun intended.
We don’t mean to imply that your baby is just a garden-variety kid, but the hand-knit, machine-washable Fruit and Veggie Caps from Hand in Hand (800-872-9745. $29.95) make a cute garnish for infants to 4-year-olds. Top off toddlers with a strawberry, a lemon, a carrot or an eggplant; when you read them ““The Tale of Peter Rabbit,’’ they may wind up rooting for Mr. McGregor. (They’ll know it’s story time by the colorful, pull-apart Polyfoam Puzzle Clock [Museum of Modern Art, 212-708-9880. $15] or the cap-shaped Jester Clock [Caravansary, 212-463-9513. $48]: three bells and all is well.) Kids won’t mind that the ladybug yo-yo (Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 212-860-6939. $8.95) glorifies another garden pest.
Grown-ups know it’s a dog’s life, but we had a Pavlovian response to the woebegone pooch place mat (Mxyplyzyk, 212-989-4300. $6.95): we had to smile. (Won’t improve table manners.) Ren + Stimpy Classics II (Sony. $14.98) will lower the tone of your household even further. With creatures journeying into each other’s bellybuttons, it’s not for the fastidious. This volume has the ““Sven Hoek’’ episode, whose homosexual subtext freaked out Nickelodeon. Need we say parental discretion is advised? Need we explain the appeal? And to think parents once fretted over Looney Tunes. These Sylvester and Tweety bookends (Warner Bros. Studio Store, 800-223-6524. $120) are perfectly wholesome – and you can put books between them. Real books.
The Dorling Kindersley History of the World ($39.95) and the same publisher’s Eyewitness Atlas of the World ($24.95) combine crisp text and stunning visuals, from African art objects to recent news photos. But even these snappy, magazinelike layouts feel a bit good-for-you next to a truly compelling disaster. In Hindenburg: An Illustrated History (Warner. $60), Ken Marschall’s high-drama paintings complement Rick Archbold’s narrative of the famous airship’s fiery demise. Historical importance: B-minus. Mythic resonance: A-plus. Kids today know baseball as one more corrupted corner of the entertainment industry; Donald Honig’s elegiac Shadows of Summer (Viking. $60) reminds us of its vanished nobility. Black-and-white and sepia photos taken between 1869 and 1947 catch long-gone heroes in splendid isolation. You can’t get pictures like this from the 3D Magic camera (3D Im-age Technology, 404-416-8848. $14.95). But you can get prints that look remarka-bly like cheesy old novelty postcards.
If you crave a higher-tech experience, Encarta ‘95 (Microsoft. $99.95), a multimedia encyclopedia – hey, that rhymes – for Windows, can teach you to say ““My name is . . .’’ in 60 languages. Its 26,000 articles are accompanied by 100-plus animations and video clips. Read about Watergate, then watch Nixon give his resignation speech. Voyager’s Macbeth CD-ROM ($49.95) offers film clips (from the Welles, Kurosawa, and Polanski versions), critical essays, a glossary – we keep forgetting if ““incarnadine’’ is a verb or an adjective – and a chance to play Lady Macbeth via the ““Macbeth Karaoke.’’ Sounds like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is here today. Whew: Christmas ‘94. Does the fun ever stop?
Sister Wendy Beckett, a British Carmelite nun, has become the Andrew Greeley of art criticism. The cover of The Story of Painting: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Art (Dorling Kindersley. $39.95) has her picture cheek by jowl with such earlier celebs as van Gogh and Botticelli’s Venus. The Art Book (Chronicle. $35) is less conventional: a fat, fun volume of alphabetical, one-artist-to-a-page entries, each with a big color plate. Great Art Treasures of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (Abrams. $195), a two-volume, 20-pound ““suitcase’’ edition, is worth the weight: a lavish look at the finest objects in one of the world’s great museums. Some curmudgeons think restoring Michelangelo’s murals was a bad idea (something about how centuries of grime add to his conception). But hardly anybody will think The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration (Abrams. $75) isn’t a beautiful book: a Marvel Comics vision of sacred history, as if drawn and inked by God himself.
But must art be tucked away in hard-to-get-to museums and hard-to-lift volumes? Art Playing Cards (ABC Carpet & Home, 212-473-3000) are handheld retrospectives: Leonardo, Michelangelo and The Nude in Art, 55 – count ’em – 55 bodacious bare-alls, from Goya’s ““Naked Maja’’ to Rubens’s ““Three Graces,’’ each of whom has more flesh than 55 Kate Mosses. Educational too!
Naomi Rosenblum’s A History of Woman Photographers (Abbeville. $60) draws on the work of 240 women, from the celebrated (Margaret Bourke-White) to the unjustly neglected, like Frances Benjamin Johnston, whose 1896 self-portrait mocks the ““new woman’’: cigarette in one hand, tankard of beer in the other, stockinged legs revealed to the knee. Freud, who asked, ““What do women want?’’ would have been scared by this book, which answers: ““Everything.’’ Nancy Stout is too young to qualify as a historical figure, but her Havana (Rizzoli. $45) captures the contemporary city’s crumbling glamour, from its squalid back streets to a marble-girt drawing room, presided over by a brooding portrait of Lenin.
George Rodger’s pictures of African tribes and the London blitz are hallmarks in the history of photojournalism. A new retrospective of this photographer’s photographer, Humanity and Inhumanity: The Photographic Journey of George Rodger (Phaidon. $60), shows no one had a keener understanding of the human heart.
Albert Watson is a post-punk Irving Penn. Cyclops (Bullfinch. $75), full of actors, monkeys, rap stars and prisoners, is all about style and impact, pitched at a worrying level of high-strung artificiality. But photographers tend to be at their most artificial – and sometimes most revealing – when they photograph themselves. (Do they have to run around the tripod or what?) The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits (Abrams. $75) has marvelous autosnaps, from Nadar decked out as an Arab (circa 1863) to a lipsticked Robert Mapplethorpe (1980). The year’s most unsettling self-portraits may be in John Peter’s The Oral History of Modern Architecture (Abrams. $67.50): the ghostly voices of mostly long-dead big shots from Alvar Aalto to Frank Lloyd Wright discuss their work on a CD tucked into the back cover. In fact, come to think of it . . . a memento mori on Christmas morn? No. Great talk, edifying edifices: keep this one for yourself. And stay merry, will ya?
title: “All I Want For Christmas…” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Robert Polan”
If angels sang the music of just one composer, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. And in between their sets, you’d hear Mst-slav Rostropovich’s recording of Bach’s Cello Suites (EMI. 2 CDs) on the jukebox – time means nothing up there-and you’d get three plays for a quarter. “You don’t play this music for the audience,” Rostropovich has written of one passage, “you play it for yourself-the audience is merely eavesdropping, glimpsing the white-hot intensity of solitude.” Heaven can wait.
The Kronos Quartet does play to an audience: are they having too much fun? Samuel Barber and George Crumb, OK – builds character – but Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”? Their anthology Released: 19851995 (Nonesuch) proves their musicianship is impeccable, they make potentially arid pieces like Crumb’s “God-music” sing and they can’t play rock and roll.
If ever a whiz of a soundtrack there was, The Wizard of Oz (Rhino. 2 CDs) is one because because because – well, you know. Let’s just say the booklet’s also great and shut up. Some of Harold Arlen and E. Y. (Yip) Harburg’s songs – dare we say this? – can wear thin. (Which old song? The “ding-dong” song.) But if there’s such a thing as too much Gershwin, we haven’t heard it yet – and we’ve just sat through four CDs’ worth. (Nice work ff you can get it, huh?) George Gershwin: I Got Rhythm (Smithsonian) features singers from stage and screen and jazz instrumentalists-often in the songs’ first recordings. Gershwin himself plays “Rhapsody in Blue,” and it’s still hotter than what you’ll hear at most pops concerts.
The year’s unlikeliest Gershwin performance? His string quartet arranged for orchestra on orange Crate Art (Warner) by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. This loose, good-hearted album about true love, lost youth and California finds Wilson in fine, unfussy voice and writer-arranger Parks at his most eclectic. Singer Mandy Patinkin’s best friends wouldn’t call Oscar & Steve unfussy: his falsetto on “Bali Ha’i” is above and beyond over-the-top. But he pours his heart into this tribute to Hammerstein and Sondheim. If the h’ai intensity proves too much, skip to “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”
You lose alternative-rock points for having a box set, but at least The Velvet Underground (Polydor. 5 CDs), who practically invented the genre in the ’60s, kept that enigmatic Andy Warhol banana on the cover. No punk, no new-waver, no grunger, ever got more alienated than “Heroin,” “Sister Ray.” A surprise for punk purists: 1965 demos, on which “I’m Waiting for the Man” is a country song and Lou Reed sings like Bob Dylan. With harmonica. Bluegrass purists will find The Osborne Brothers: 1956-1968 (Bear Family. 4 CDs) too Nashville – drams! pedal steel! – and Sonny’s banjo too bluesy. But nobody with a lick of sense will mind. And those harmonies – to live for.
If you like country music and don’t care what country it comes from, we recommend Planet Squeezebox (Ellipsis Arts. 3 CDs), a collection of accordion music from around the world. An air from Ireland’s Tony Mac-Mahon, a tango from Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla, juju from Nigeria’s I. K. Dairo. Cajun two-steps, Creole funk and klezmer music, polkas and a Debussy prelude. And jazz accordionist Alice Hall: her “What Is This Thing Called Love,” complete with Slam Stewart-like unison scat-singing, will raise your pulse if you’ve still got one. Too much digital culture-grazing? Settle in with the deservedly trendy Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir’s collected Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares (Nonesuch. 3 CDs). East European hillbilly music, as stark as Appalachian shape-note singing, tweaked to make it easy on urban ears-but with yelps that would make a Cajun proud.
Miles Davis: The Complete Uve at the Plugged Nickel 1985 (Columbia) catches the trumpeter at a turning point: new band (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock), old book. But eight CDs with every song of an entire gig at a Chicago club? How many versions do we need of “I Fall in Love Too Easily”? Call us crazy, but we say all of them. This band hadn’t yet figured out where they were heading to more open-ended tunes and freer playing-but this very frustration generates wild heat.
Sixties jazz thrived on such adversarial energy. In Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings (9 CDs), even the passionate, visionary alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist’s own compositions seem too small to contain him. His leaping, squiggling, shrieking solos sound like a pair of Charlie Parkers on acid. Pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) anticipated the current cross-generational amity in her ’70s piano duets with the iconoclast Cecil Taylor. But when was she not ahead of the curve? Her 1945 Zodiac Suite and her 1974 Zoning (Smithsonian/Folkways) could have been recorded yesterday. And on Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs (Verve), former Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden and pianist’s pianist Hank Jones play a spare, Zen-simple set of such songs as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” They even find the Tao of “Danny Boy.”
We’ve saved the toughest sells for last. Just hear us out. We know Bobby Darin was cheesy-it’s why we love him. And he did do a couple of classics the breezy “Beyond the Sea,” the spooky “Dream Lover.” And “Mack the Knife”: Sinatra covered his version. As long As I’m Singing (Rhino. 4 CDs) has all you want and much, much more – including his bizarre late folkie phase. Hell of an entertainer, but a hard guy to get a handle on. Which sort of brings us to Elvis. We’ve wanted to forget his last years. He popped pills like a chicken pops cracked corn. He sweated. He sang “Something.” But of the three major Elvis boxes, Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential ’70s Masters (RCA. 5 CDs) now seems the most revealing and treasurable: it shows the gap between the publit’s image of Elvis and Elvis’s image of himself. At least that’s one way to intellectualize our guilty pleasure in “My Way.” But “Burning Love” and “Always On My Mind”? No apologies.
OK, so our big-ticket gift ideas may be a little flaky this year. (Eight CDs from a single Miles Davis gig? Yeah, right.) But we’ve got the best stocking-stuffers since Betty Grable. The copiously illustrated, deftly written Discoveries series (Abrams. $12.95) of pocket guides to everything from Rembrandt to the Irish potato famine. The (ditto) Pockets series (Dotling Kindersley, $5.95). The (ditto) Miniature Editions series (Chronicle/Phaidon. $8.95), whose latest, The Designs of William Morris, emphasizes the hyperactive old Brit’s textiles, tapesties and wallpaper: the selection is expert, the color spot-on. And don’t high-hat those handsome little Penguin paperbacks (95 cents) at bookstore checkouts: Shakespeare, Emerson, even an abridgment of the original Fannie Farmer cookbook.
Penguin’s also got Robert Frost’s 1916 book “Mountain Interval,” crassly retitled The Road Not Taken and Other Early Poems, but knowing you we doubt you’ll settle for less than the Library of America’s definitive Frost: Collected Poems, Prose & Plays ($35), ‘For once, “Stopping By Woods” is punctuated right-lovely, dark [no comma] and deep-and his prose and interviews teem with stuff we never knew. He was so nuts about Hemingway’s “The Killers” he wanted to read it aloud to people. What do you think of beat poets reading to jazz, Mr. Frost? “Death! Hang ’em all!”
Ralph Ellison (who loved jazz, if not beat poets) wrote of Charlie Parker as “a man dismembering himself with a dull razor on a spotlighted stage” – that is, a Ralph Ellison character. You’ll find Ellison’s tribute in his Collected Essays (Modern Library. $20). Like Frost and Ellison, the photographer Walker Evans was a modernist who made his name with rootsy raw material – in his case, Depressionera sharecroppers. The beautifully made, intelligently annotated Getty Museum Collection (Getty Museum. $95) shows Evans’s many contradictions. His Polaroid candids, taken late in life by the man famous for calling color photography “vulgar;” are among the best work ever done in the medium.
Until we started browsing in The Encyclopedia of New York City (Yale. $60) we never knew the place had six Sons of Norway lodges. We knew that such banal, boxy buildings as the World Trade Center and the General Motors building trashed the city’s skyline, but it took the 1,374-page New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (Monacelli. $125), by Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, to tell exactly how. Fascinating – just not pretty. And we knew who created Central Park-forgot his name, that’s all-but only in Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape (Razzoil. $70), by Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, did we learn that some 5 million cubic yards of dirt and rock got moved: a parade of one-horse cart loads that would have stretched, in single file, $0,000 miles. Jeez, we thought they’d just moved out a few wigwams and cut the grass.
Speaking of which-have you slept in a wigwam lately? How about a train car? Agiant wine cask? A miniature Alamo? These and many more can be found in John Margolies’s Home Away From Home: Motels in America (128 pages. Bulfinch. $29.95), which traces motel evolution from 1920s roadside campgrounds to cozy-classic ’40s cabins to the franchise revolution of the ’50s and ’60s. For our money – usually around $27 a night – we’d rather stay at the Ho-Hum (Burlington, vt.), the Kozy Kamp (La Vale, Md.), the Ditty Wah Ditty (Memphis, Tenn.) or the Rock-Wood (Klamath Falls, Ore., made out of petrified wood) than some Martha Stewart manque bed-and-breakfast. Not just because J. Edgar Hoover called them “camps of crime” – though it’s part of the appeal.
You know what else we get nostalgic about in the age of CD-ROMs? Art books – those slick, thick, hundred-dollar babies that’ll buckle the legs of your coffee table. Bear with us while we bend your ear about Paintings of the Prado (Bulfinch. S100): same size as a big-city phone book and about 10 times as heavy. The great Madrid museum has, among other earthly delights, Goya’s “The Execution of May 3, 1808,” Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (some say it’s the greatest picture ever painted) and Hieronymus Bosch’s garden of you-know-what. Pugin: A Gothic Passion (Yale. Paper, $30) isn’t in this league, but it won’t bust your budget or your coffee table. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) almost singlehandedly revived the highly carved, soaring Gothic look in buildings and their interiors; this volume has everything from his cathedrals to his chalices and inkpots. He died, at 40, of nervous exhaustion. And no wonder.
We thought we bad a strong contender for most decadent book of the year when Sometime in NEW YORK CITY (Genesis. $450. 800-775-1111) landed on our desk. Then on the floor. Then on the floor below. It’s 254 metal-clad pages of photos of John Lennon by photographer Bob Gruen, who took the famous shot of Lennon, arms crossed, in the “New York City” tank-top T shirt. John in concert. John and baby Scan. John and Yoko. More John and Yoko. There are just 3,500 copies, the first 2,500 signed by Bob and Yoko. If you’ve got enough of a life to afford it, why would you want it?
But an even stronger contender is Under World (Knopf. $65), photographs, mostly arty, of people in underwear, compiled by Kelly Kleir,. She’s coyly identified as “the author of ‘Pools’,” who “lives in New York and East Hampton.” But you know darn well she’s Calvin Klein’s wife. She explains that all these pictures “convey our ‘humanness’ during various stages of life.” Will somebody convey her outta here? You want humanness – without the quotation marks, thank you very much – at its best, and some scantily but decorously dad bodies, too? Then you want Toni Bentley’s Costumes by Karinska (Abrams. $60), a tribute to the great costume designer Barbara Karinska. Best known for dressing Balanchine’s ballets, Karinska also designed for opera, Broadway, movies and the Ice Caparies. Her passion for detail was legendary. Asked why she added lace to the hoops underneath the gowns in the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Traviat” – lace the audience would never see – she answered, “It is for the soul.”
One thing we could all use at Christmas is plenty of jack – and here’s what to put it in. This multicolored ceramic Jack hank (Chiasso. 800-654-3570. $25), handmade by Mayans in the Yucatan (who could probably use some jack themselves), will hold up to several thousand dollars – if you stick hundred-dollar bills through the slot.
But you won’t. You’ll fritter your money away on enticing stuff like these yard-sale items of the future. The Alessi kitchen scale (Museum of Modern Art. 800-447-6662. $150), made of plastic in red, greenor blue, holds up to 43/4 pounds – don’t try weighing Aunt Alice’s fruitcakes – and its basinlike top comes off for pouring, cleaning or holding aloft in weird midnight rituals. MOMA’s heavy, palm-size solid aluminum elephant bottle opener ($25) looks like a Thurber rabbit to us, but the indicator on Milanese architect Maurizio Duranti’s kitchen timer (Chiasso. 800-654-3570. $40) is unmistakably a bright yellow lightning bolt-just the thing for terrible swift eggs.
Which brings us to the egg-shaped Brera 5 lamp (FLOS. 800-939-3567. $255), inspired by Piero della Francesca’s painting of the Madonna and Child seated under some kind of a clamshell thing, from which an egg hangs suspended as an emblem of Christ’s resurrection. The way Piero’s got his egg wired looks better than the new model, but it may not be up to code.
Still, our favorite hanging stuff this season is trendily unplugged. Tutti-Frutti people for the tree (Wolfman Gold. 212-431-1888) in strawberry, pineapple, lemon and grape. Flying pig ornaments of painted wood, in boar, sow and piglet (Aris Mixon & Co. 212-724-6904. $29, $23, $16). A set of four Egyptian glass ornaments (Art Institute of Chicago. 800-621-9337. $85): a pyramid, a ball circled by hieroglyphics and heads of Tut and Nefertiti. And most seasonal of all, a hand-painted Trumpeting Angel (Art Institute of Chicago. 800-621-9337. $36), adapted from a French tapestry. There may be some mystic meaning to those two trumpets, butthey made us wonder if even up yonder they’re just not replacing workers. A lean and mean hereafter: it would figure.
Even more than the sometimes arty and sentimental Chaplin, Buster Kaaton, with his Great Stone Face, is the thinking per-softs silent comedian. Folks who call movies films talk about how he used the frame and the screen’s illusion of depth, and the way one joke dovetailed into the next. Folks who call films movies still think the guy’s a regular riot. Kino Video has collected most of his best work in three boxed sets (Boxes 1 and 3, $79.95; box 2 $109.95. 800-$62-3330). The startlingly clear prints are recorded – for once – at the right speed: the actors don’t look like windup toys, but like regular people in old-time clothes. We’d hate to have to have to choose among them, but box 3 – with “The General,” “College,” “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” and seven astounding shorter films – may be the hardest to resist.
For those under 30, though, Keaton is as remote a figure as David Garrick. (No, we don’t mean Dave Garroway. But he’d work too.) They remember running home from school to watch reruns of The Monkees: Davy (the cute one), Peter (the sweet one), Micky (the funny one) and Mike (the one with that pompom hat). Now, with the Deluxe United Edition Box Set (Rhino Home Video. 21 videocassettes. $399.98) they can wallow at will in each of the 58 episodes (which first aired from 1966 to 1969). Remember the one where the Monkees get involved in the cold war after Davy buys a very special pair of maracas? Slapstick, silly sight gags, plaid bell-bottoms, fringed boots and shiny hairplus music little worse than much of what’s on MTV. Imagine Jim Carrey periodically breaking into song, times four.
Performance artist Karen Finley is no Jim Carrey, but that thing she does with the chocolate frosting would have been cool back in “Animal House.” Now God’s gift to Jesse Helms has a gift for you – a wristwatch that says “Arrive Late” on its face (Art Matters. 800-979-ARTS. $48). Hell of a good-looking watch, too, though we don’t know if that message is subversive or just sound advice for people out to call attention to themselves. Your 48 smackers helps support Art Matters Inc., a nonprofit foundation combating the philistine right-wing notion that contemporary art-Karen Finley, say – is pretentious soft-porn hogwash. They’ll need every cent they can get.
Actually, the avant-garde may be even more deeply entrenched than Jesse thinks: ’ Hey Skinny: Great Advertisements From the Golden Age of Comic Books (Chronicle. $10.95) makes us wonder fla secret dadaist cabal controls the comic-book industry. How else to explain that thing that looks like a syringe for shooting horse tranquilizer that’s supposed to REMOVE UGLY BLACKHEADS? Or the “gorgeous scenic table lamp” that shows a forest fire sweeping through pine trees? This book somehow missed old ads for the whoopee cushion, but some obvious dada front organization called the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild has just put out a Mona Lisa pillow (Aris Mixon. 212-724-6904. $27) which (thanks to some battery-operated gizmo inside) cackles demonically when you sit on it. (They say it “giggles.” No way.) They’ve also got Munch’s ‘The Scream.’ It does.
And the highbrow hijinks keep on com-in’. A 703-piece three-dimensional Eiffel Tower jigsaw puzzle (Wrebbit/Rand McNally. 800-234-0679. $40) stands one meter high – eventually – and will lend je ne sais quoi to any rec room. And a board game called Playing Shakespeare (Aris Mixon. 212-724-6904. $41) requires, as part of the jollification, charades to complete such famous lines as this from “Hamlet”: “Something is rotten in the state of – .” Sounds like . . . Men bark? Zen shark? Anyway, sounds like fun. We guess. And may the best ham win.
You know, men hold up half the sky, too-and probably nine tenths of the banks, gas stations and convenience stores-but these days they get grief for holding a door. Testosterone is now the ultimate toxic waste, blamed for everything from the Bomb to the mommy track. So here’s some stuff just for the guys.
Bob Sloan and Steven Guarnaccia’s A Stiff Drink and a Close Shave: The Lost Arts of Manliness (Chronicle. $12.95), with its kitschy pictures and knowing text, evokes the days of mood music on the hi-fi, after-shave on the jowls, a snap-brim hat on the head and broads on best behavior. The stiffest drink of all was The Martini (Chronicle. $24.95); author Barnaby Conrad III writes that “one might see [it] as an extended metaphor for Euro-American culture itself.” You know, Dutch and English gin, Italian vermouth . . . And if that doesn’t make you thirsty, the pictures will.
What red-blooded guy wouldn’t love Joseph G. Rosa’s Age of the Gunfighter: Men and Weapons on the Frontier, 1840-1900 (Oklahoma. $19.95) for its color photos of old guns and black-and-white photos of old gun-fighters-some of them after they were shot dead! But we wish we’d never read the text. Billy the Kid’s 21 victims get debunked to half a dozen; Butch Cassidy scores a big fat zero.
No such judicious scholarship screws up Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford. $25), though editors Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian clearly know their stuff. “I’ll Be Waiting” is Raymond Chandler’s most subtly melancholy tale, and “Three-Ten to Yuma” reminds us that even when Elmore Leonard wrote Westerns, he never saw a white hat he didn’t want to soil. Men who like their mayhem sedate and their detectives celibate will like Baker Street Studies (Otto Penzler. $8), first published in 1934: another anthology of gloriously stodgy essays in the Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library. One essay defends Holmes against imputations of misogyny, and blames the sexless sleuth’s cocaine habit on “frustrated desire.” We’ve got our doubts: seems to us they could say the same thing about guys who watch eight hours of football every Sunday. Normal guys.
And best of all, the quintessential normal guy is back: John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (Everyman’s Library. $30) in a single volume thicker than the heartlest cut of prime rib. At last you can follow Rabbit from his glory days as a high-school jock to his sour success as a Toyota dealer to his heart attack-all in the same typeface. So there you go. Have a good one, fellas. Hey, and a week after Christmas you got the bowl games, then Super Sunday’s right around the corner. From now on your troubles will be out of sight.
title: “All I Want For Christmas…” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Joel Jones”
GEE, IT’S NOT SHAPING UP TO BE MUCH OF a Christmas here at NEWSWEEK. The election follies are over, Newt’s profile is so low we may get letters asking “Newt who?” and the stock market still hasn’t crashed. So by way of consolation, we went out and bought stuff–all the books and CDs we’ve wanted all year–the excuse being that it’s time to do gift ideas again. It’s not that these things aren’t great (though Sun Ra’s Disney tribute may not be the thing for Uncle Harry). But what we’d give for a good donnybrook, even a flap–or news that, say, hair loss could be reversed by surfing the Net. So Noel, have a good one, and hang on. We’ll get through this season. Always have.
There’s no sense tiptoeing around this: we’ve found the ideal gift for the art lover on your list, and you can’t afford it. It’s the Grove Dictionary of Art (32,600 pages. $8,800). It’s got 34 stately dark green, mostly readable volumes, written by 6,700 art historians. It’s got pictures. And guess what. The closest you’re realistically going to get to it is in a very well endowed library. So get over it.
Back in the real world, Colin Eisler’s Masterworks in Berlin: A City’s Paintings Reunited (Bullfinch. $125) reminds us of the treasures that can now easily be seen on a trip to the reunited German capital. Berlin has no 800-pound gorilla of a museum like Paris’s Louvre, but it has a bunch of first-rate second-tier institutions, many hidden behind the Iron Curtain for half a century. And we’ve got a pocket-size stocking-stuffer: Books of Hours (Phaidon. $8.95). In the Middle Ages, “hours” were flexible amounts of time bracketed by prayer, and small, illuminated “books of hours” guided devotions; this eclectic sampling reproduces lovely pages in almost the original sizes.
Roger Sabin’s Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (Phaidon. $59.95) isn’t the only such book you’ll find out there–just the best. Sabin is thorough and likes all the right people (George Herriman, Harvey Kurtzman). When someone like R. Crumb dominates an era, Sabin gives him a lot more space than some mindlessly “evenhanded” survey would. Production values? A-plus.
To you, magazine-cover artists may be no higher than cartoonists on the food chain. Not to us. In 1962, Esquire magazine hired adman George Lois to design covers that would be the visual equivalent of the writers’ irreverent “new journalism.” Covering the ’60s: George Lois–The Esquire Era (Monacelli. $35) has the classics: Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, Sonny Liston in a Santa hat. These images remind us that in weird times, being a smartass may be healthier than keeping a stiff upper lip. On the other hand, the ravishing, red-boxed The Best of Flair (HarperCollins. $250) is enough to depress the hell out of us. This fashion magazine debuted in 1950 and died after 12 lavish issues, festooned with expensive die-cuts and pullouts and featuring essays by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and George Bernard Shaw. There’s a message here about the realities of the magazine business that we are just not up for hearing during the holiday season. But you go ahead and enjoy.
One Time, One Place. Photographs by Eudora Welty (University Press of Mississippi. $27.50). While working for the WPA in the ’30s, the then not-so-famous writer photographed, in black and white, fellow Mississippians butchering hogs, making molasses, lugging ice from the icehouse. Her sense of detail–the way white dresses at a Holiness church seem to glow from within, say–educates the eye to what’s around us when we close the book. Welty’s people couldn’t have afforded the funkiest clunker in Pickups: Classic American Trucks (Random House. $39.95). And most of these vehicles–a 1913 International MW with a load of hay, a tailfinned, electric blue 1960 El Camino–have been lovingly, expensively restored. West Virginia barber Ron Jones’s ‘33 Chevy truck is shot parked in front of a church sign reading PUT YOUR WILL IN NEUTRAL SO GOD CAN SHIFT YOU.
Erwin Blumenfeld’s ’50s photo of a gussied-up model resting her enigmatic face on the hood of a Caddy is a universe away, but the Cars “R” Us subtext is the same. Blumenfeld, who shot for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, was once a Dada collagist; Blumenfeld Photographs: A Passion for Beauty (Abrams. $60) shows that in photographing “the eternal feminine,” he kept a smidgen of ironic distance.
We might’ve known there’d be a resurgence of tilemaking: there’s everything else. Tile (Artisan. $35), by Jill Herbers and Roy Wright, and Tiles (Potter. $40), by Olivia Bell Buehl and Lisl Dennis, both look great. And these folks sure know tile. But if you buy only one tile book this year, make it Mosaics of Roman Africa (George Braziller. $90), displaying the elegant floor tiling the Romans did in Tunisia from the 2d to the 4th century. We used to think tiles were just to put teapots on. Have we learned! And we’ve learned about teapots, too. Garth Clark’s The Eccentric Teapot (Abbeville. $29.95) should put to rest that “short and stout” canard. He’s got teepees, fire hydrants, vampires, Brooke Shields and one topped with a nuclear mushroom cloud.
A couple of these would’ve dressed up Richard Weston’s Modernism (Phaidon. $75), but otherwise we can’t kick. This handsome history looks at modernist design in all its international complexity, from constructivist posters to bentwood Aalto chairs to the elegantly spare architecture of Tadeo Ando. Modern American Houses (Abrams. $49.50) has dream domiciles featured in Architectural Record magazine over the past 40 years. Earlier ones sit like stately sculptures in wooded isolation, but in the ’80s, postmodernism came in the door and rules went out the window.
Yet this architectural war zone was a playpen compared with turn-of-the-century Istanbul. Diana Barillari and Ezio Godoli’s Istanbul 1900 (Rizzoli. $75) chronicles (and, better still, illustrates) the war between art nouveau Westernizers and the Islamic backlash. And the winner? Anybody who ever saw these buildings: idiosyncratic byproducts of cultures in conflict. In Japan, the analogous Momoyama period (1573-1615) saw the introduction of firearms and an opening to foreign trade. Japan’s Golden Age: Momoyama (Yale. $40) has the once hot skinny on all this–and some of the most beautiful art in history.
James Thurber’s writings and drawings were sweet and wacky, vinegary and bleak, and always alive to the comic possibilities of life and the beauty of American prose. The best are now in a single bulging volume, James Thurber, Writings and Drawings (Library of America. $35), edited by Garrison Keillor. Thurber’s baseball-playing midget, Pearl du Monville (in the story “You Could Look It Up), was only a slight exaggeration of characters who used to inhabit the major leagues. Songwriter Seth Swirsky began corresponding with ballplayers a couple of years ago, and his Baseball Letters (Kodansha. $24), to and from the likes of Ted Williams and Cal Ripken Jr., include an old-time pitcher’s memories of the improbable Babe Ruth. Swirsky asked Bobby Doerr (if you have to ask . . .) if he’d ever had a moment on the field when he felt " rush of happiness that you were where you were at that moment in your life?” Doerr wrote back: “Yes.”
Did the world need one more translation of The Odyssey (Viking. $35)? Yes. In Robert Fagles’s lucid, muscular verse, these ancient measures stalk across the page in march time, from the first sight of “young Dawn with her rose-red fingers” to the moment when the last suitor has been slaughtered and Odysseus takes his Penelope to bed. And Ian McKellen has recorded a pungent reading (12 tapes. $45.95). Most audiobooks are a guilty pleasure, but this one is unabridged–and besides, Homer’s first readers were actually listeners. Julie Christie’s reading of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Audiobooks. $23.95) is not unabridged, but somebody did a decent job of cutting, and Christie revels in creating voices for characters from the vulgar Mrs. Jennings to the majestically clueless Mr. John Dashwood. And Penguin’s 12-tape, six-volume anthology of English Verse ($16.95 each) is read by a first-class crew of British actors; Judi Dench has the sexiest voice you’ll ever hear reading Isaac Watts’s “Crucifixion to the World by the Cross of Christ.”
If you’ve got a major film buff on your gift list, the book-length journal Projections ($16.95 per issue) is . . . well, “a must” is putting it mildly. For hundreds of pages, directors, editors and production designers discuss their work for an audience of their peers. No French theory. Projections comes out once or twice a year; you can find it in bookstores.
B. B. King knows he’s considered an oxymoron: a happy bluesman. “It angers me,” he writes in his autobiography, Blues All Around Me (Avon. $23), “how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.” King remembers his hardscrabble upbringing in Mississippi as years of mystery and sensuality. He lost his virginity when he was 6 or 7, and never did bother to look for it: he fathered 15 kids by 15 women. All he frets about is people thinking he should be miserable. Now it’s white “alternative” rockers who are supposed to be wretched to keep their credibility. But photographer Michael Lavine’s Noise From the Underground (Simon & Schuster. $25), which documents the grunge revolution, suggests that even these folks weren’t all gloom and doom. Mudhoney clowning in faux-iconic poses? Kurt and Courtney in a blush of love? How dare they?
If these books testify obliquely on the side of joy and pleasure, Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food (Knopf. $35) actually gives you 800 recipes for attaining it. Calcutta Hilbeh, a hot green relish she calls “strange and extraordinary.” Chicken with noodles, a dish her father’s family made in Egypt. Russian fruit ravioli. Roden, who wrote the definitive books on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine, traveled and cooked for 15 years to produce this compendium of earthly delights.
We thought Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies (Scribner. $16.95) was going to be our grand finale, but now we’re not so sure. Low-fat recipes are probably obligatory in the ’90s, but Christmas cookies with canola oil instead of butter? You know, we tried driving 55, too. Still, the stuff that’s not good for us has that old come-hither look, and there’s a gingerbread house that looks less complicated–slightly–than the no-tools-required-for-assembly toys we’ll be tussling with on Christmas Eve. And it could have been “Joy of Fruitcake,” there’s that to be said for it. “Joy of Cheese and Sausage.” Hey, we’re easy.
In an old New Yorker cartoon, a man lying in bed says to his wife, “OK, I know the doctor says I’m going to make it, but will you still play side eight of “Rosenkavalier’ again?” The last half hour of Richard Strauss’s opera is as close to heaven as music gets, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s 1957 Der Rosenkavalier with Herbert von Karajan (EMI, 3 CDs) remains an operatic Everest. Now that it’s digitally remastered we’ve got some 1s and 0s worthy of beaming into space to tell folks a zillion light-years away what we were all about.
Another great soprano, Leontyne Price, once described her voice as “juicy lyric”–and even then she sold herself short. Juicy, sure, but also packed with power and emotion. The Essential Leontyne Price (BMG, 11 CDs) has arias from her famous Verdi, Puccini and Mozart roles, lieder, spirituals and song cycles, including a matchless version of Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Sure, our flesh creeps, too, when we see “opera singer” and “Broadway musical” in the same sentence. But give Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel’s Something Wonderful (Deutsche Grammophon) a chance before taking it to the lake to see if it’ll skip as many times as Jessye Norman’s “Lucky to Be Me.” Terfel is the Maserati of singers, going from whisper to full throttle in an instant; he sings Rodgers and Hammerstein with perfect enunciation and, praise the Lord, in American.
Though he’s performed, pianist Byron Janis didn’t record for 30 years because of arthritic hands. But the new Byron Janis Plays Chopin (EMI) shows he hasn’t lost the poetic precision that complements this bittersweet music. In reimagining the terminally familiar waltz in G-flat major, he makes the brisk opening strain a springy folk dance; the tender second strain winds down like a music box and just about breaks your heart.
Bernard Herrmann is the one film composer whose music is instantly recognizable. The Film Scores (Sony), by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, adds his music for such films as “Taxi Driver” to his classic scores for Alfred Hitchcock. But Music From the Great Hitchcock Movie Thrillers (London) has the basics, with the composer himself conducting the London Philharmonic in 1969. That woodwind-rich music from “The Trouble With Harry” is one of the drollest tone poems ever written.
The visionary bandleader Sun Ra was a one-man history–and future–of jazz. Sun Ra: The Singles (Evidence, 2 CDs) gives a taste of his eclecticism. In the ’50s, he was doing Gershwin, doo-wop and some kind of stuff that sounds like rap. Later came the strange sci-fi songs, the chanting–and good straight-ahead jazz. Beginners may want the Leo import Second Star to the Right (Salute to Walt Disney) (315-287-2852), which is just what the subtitle says; his “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” is so bent it doubles back into affectionate. Of course Louis Armstrong’s Disney Songs the Satchmo Way (Walt Disney Records) starts out affectionate and warms up from there. Our favorite new jazz release? Joe Henderson Big Band (Verve), the first time since the tenor player’s 1990 rediscovery that he’s recorded his own wonderful tunes.
The years between 1958 and 1963–post-Elvis, pre-Beatles–are the lamest in rock history. That’s why they’re interesting. This was the time of Connie Francis: she of the red lips, the prom gowns and the dreamy voice aching with sexual repression. Connie Francis Souvenirs (Polydor, 4 CDs) shows she didn’t just sing blush-inducing “rock numbers” like “Stupid Cupid” but also Italian evergreens, “German Favorites” (an actual album title) and an alarming “Exodus/Havah Negilah.” But the perky little pepperpot bared her soul in “Where the Boys Are.” Feminists, beware: when she wraps that silken voice around the notion that getting a man is secular salvation, you’ll believe it.
And can we say a word about Mr. Neil Diamond? Brill Building drudge, brooding folkie, sequined arena hero, slightly irregular middle-aged sex symbol. The hits and misses on In My Lifetime (Columbia, 3 CDs) seldom catch him in mopey confessional mode; he does characters (“Sweet Caroline”) and situations (“Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”) with clarity and economy. And who else links the Monkees to UB40 to Barbra Streisand to “Pulp Fiction”?
Willie Nelson is hardly a neglected figure, but if you’ve been neglecting him, check out Spirit (Island). This spare masterpiece stakes out a space next door to folk, around the bend from country, miles from the nearest market niche. We played it five times before it hit us that there were no bass and drums: just Johnny Gimble’s Texas fiddle, sister Bobbie Nelson’s piano, Willie’s gut-string guitar (as distinctive a voice as his voice) and Jody Payne playing rhythm. But even Willie sounds slick next to the singers, fiddlers and banjo-players on Mountain Music of Kentucky (Smithsonian/Folkways, 2 CDs). Most were already getting up in years when folklorist John Cohen recorded them back in 1959–and even then their music sounded archaic and archetypal. There’s an “Amazing Grace” here sung by a Baptist congregation that sounds like Gregorian chant.
And finally, why not some Christmas music? Esquivel: Merry Christmas from the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Bar/None) is a swinging swankfest from the Mexican master of musical whatever. It’s all sci-fi modernism and game-show gaiety, with psychotically jovial mixes of xylophone, glockenspiel, harp and bassoon. Recorded mostly in 1959-62, the album has new intros and outros from neo-loungeheads Combustible Edison and warm holiday greetings from Esquivel himself, now in his 70s. Listening to his surreal “White Christmas,” we got to thinking. To reach a ripe old age and have young folks think you’re cool, if a little crazed–that’s not such a bad holiday wish in a time of diminished expectations. Good, we thought. We’ll wish that.
