James Strecker Reviews the Arts

For a composer esteemed nowadays for the inherent weight in his large-scale compositions, Brahms certainly endured much weight upon his spirit in order to create the first of these, the Piano Concerto # 1 in D Minor. There was Robert Schumann’s published praise of the as yet untested twenty year old’s creative worth which, in turn, set daunting standards for the young Brahms to achieve. There was Beethoven’s enormous shadow looming over any compositional aspiration in the nineteenth century since, after all, what does one do after Beethoven?

There was also the relationship with Robert and with Clara Schumann whom Brahms had met in 1853 via a letter of recommendation from violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms penned his sketches of the D Minor’s intense opening movement not long after his friend and mentor Robert had jumped into the Rhine in 1854 in order to end his life. By the 1859 premiere of the concerto in Hanover, Schumann had died in 1856 and the Brahms-Clara relationship, whatever it had been, was now profound and platonic. The Concerto itself had progressed from an abortive attempt at a symphony, for which Brahms at the time was too inexperienced in orchestration, to a sonata for two pianos, to a massive concerto with all but the now reworked first movement scrapped.

How all this relevant background specifically informs the D Minor is difficult, of course, to gauge but the outcome is a work of unsettling power, heartbreaking poetry, and surprising joie de vivre. Any performance, however, requires a soloist, a conductor, and an orchestra in top notch ranks of technical and interpretative skill and, happily and memorably, such was the case recently with the National Arts Centre Orchestra with Pinchas Zukerman conducting and his pal from student days, Yefim Bronfman, as a consummate piano soloist.

Whatever one’s inevitable preconceptions of the work –and mine are no doubt coloured by Gilels with Jochum, plus other recordings by Curzon, Gould, Fleisher, and Grimaud- here was a performance of awakening newness and secure revelations about the work that held one breathless throughout. It was inherently potent but not showy, constantly evocative but not insistent, all with a prevailing mood that resolution was not so much inevitable as imminent. It was very much a performance of the present tense, one that had to discover and pursue its musical implications, one that was not so much metaphysical as on the verge of metaphysics and, certainly, human mystery.

Right from the outset of the Maestoso movement, Zuckerman favoured fluid richness over aggressive declaration and made his impact not so much with punctuating tutti as with unfolding tonal richness, with refined emotion that also suggested an underpinning of suspense about the almost unknown. The orchestra’s organically realized forward momentum revealed the music speaking enticingly inwardly. This was an integrated musical argument to be sure, one from which all Brahmsian devices seemed to emerge naturally to fulfill its aesthetic logic.

Thus, the piano’s octave progressions, its leaps and taxing tremolos and descending trills, its distinct but sympathetic presence with the orchestra, all showed Bronfman to be unobtrusively superb in creating a natural and beautifully phrased voice as he melded one’s thinking and feeling. Elsewhere, the flutes seemed like the music’s subconscious blended into the orchestra’s textures before they drifted off into air, while the timpani, whose potential Brahms was at this point exploring, took the route of suggestion over overt declaration of their presence. As a result, we had the composer’s classical architecture inside of which there beat a complex and inherently majestic human heart.

In the lyrical and hymn-like Adagio, Bronfman’s richly precise touch and liquid emotionality created an air of blossoming tenderness. One sensed vulnerability, yes, but also confession on the verge of self-discovery of a deeply felt personal truth. This was a soliloquy of the heart resolving its emotional needs and we sensed a pianistic voice revealing matters that should not be said but must be heard. In these moments of breathtaking intimacy, the orchestral restraint –or was it poise? – created a subtle tension and gave one enough to feel but not enough to comprehend. One therefore felt suspended in profound beauty.

In the Rondo the orchestra took up the piano’s rhythmic energy as if ignited by a subtle flame into dignified exuberance. The tutti seemed to expand and diminish like a pair of lungs breathing and, if the music was gypsy-inspired, Bronfman emerged as something of a “gitan” consumed by the music’s passion. Thus, as in the other two movements, we once again heard an emotional truth so genuine that it needed no confirmation beyond itself. It was, it did not cater, it unfolded as profundities often do into our hearts, for the evening and perhaps for a very long time. And to think this was only part of the program!

In an interview with Eric Friesen prior to the concert, Pinchas Zukerman stated that Brahms wrote “songful and soulful” music “from the soul of the human being.” Regarding the evening’s vocal performance, he added that “not many have the voice for this music” but that this evening’s soloist Michelle DeYoung did. In the two songs, “Gestillte Sehnsucht” and “Geistliches Wiegenlied,” as predicted, DeYoung instantly established her emotional authority with a tonally solid but inherently warm voice that produced an easily evolving lyricism. Both songs, new to me, were accompanied by Bronfman, with Zukerman’s viola echoing the mezzo’s elongated phrases or shaping lilting counter lines, more like a second voice than accompaniment and with its own caressing lyricism. One sensed an emotionally reverent poignancy here, a discreet intensity, an unforced delicacy, and in sum a no-holds barred assertion of the heart’s riches.

Friesen introduced the Alto Rhapsody with an anecdote about author William Styron who, depressed and very close to suicide, happened to hear the third part of this moving work. In Friesen’s words, “The music breaks through, he goes up to his wife and says ‘Take me to the hospital’……So music has tremendous power, music can save lives.” In turn, mezzo Michelle DeYoung, who stated that she finds the combination of soloist and male chorus “always so comforting”, brought a despair-cleansing assurance to Goethe’s text and Brahms’ music. It was a vocal performance of evolving ripeness and intensely-longing inner logic, both integrated with Zukerman’s acutely sensitive conducting. It is certainly difficult to articulate the effect of sensed vulnerability such as in this perfomance, but Brahmsian orchestral weight seemed also, paradoxically, to hover air-like like blessing and just out of reach, though still rooted in this performance. No more be said, this was beauty at its most affecting poignancy.

The concert opened with two early Brahms choruses, melodically inspiring and beguilingly sung by a mostly female high school chorus and accompanied by two French horns and a harp. It was an inspired decision to feature this talented group, who were slated only for pre-concert performance in the lobby, because, for one, we heard the special pleasure young people can feel in singing the classical repertoire. This brief and sincere performance confirmed the value of classical music as a means to give young lives an alternative voice and a musical world to discover. Earlier Friesen had asked Bronfman how he had changed over time regarding the D Minor Concerto and the pianist had responded, “My first time I thought it was an easy piece, but I was stupid. It’s always a work in progress.” The genuine commitment of these young singers suggested that they already had learned Bronfman’s vital lesson about music-making –and about living in this world.

My following book reviews first appeared over the past few years in an alternative tabloid publication in Hamilton. Perhaps reading the following paragraphs will tempt you to visit your local independent bookstore and to check them out there. Here’s Part VI:

1.)Like a sacred text of any religion, the religion here being classical music, The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2008 invites anyone, from devout believer to potential convert, to come forth and experience anew the nuanced profundity of spirit. Fortunately, the tone herein, although imbued with the writers’ erudite and fanatical dedication, is one of objective consideration that acknowledges variety in individual preferences. One may be a believer in classical music, it is further implied, but one has a responsibility to explore composers and styles as yet unheard, to compare interpretations, and above all to go forth with informed ears and hearts, thanks to the Penguin Guide, and listen and hear and listen again. I’ve been referring to the Penguin Guide since times B. C. (before compact disc) and can’t imagine doing without.

The current edition begins with Adam, of the Giselle ballet, and ends on page 1588 with one recording of Symphony 2 by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich -and there’s an issue. With the editors’ goal to provide sufficient evaluation of each named recording, you won’t, of course, find every worthy classical recording included here. Thus, even acknowledged cornerstones like Schnabel’s complete Beethoven Sonatas on EMI or Toscanini’s take on Verdi’s Falstaff, must be found in previous editions. On the other hand, this guide does include many lower-priced discs that allow one to create a substantial library without going into debt, most often thanks to the Naxos label. The writing speaks to both professional and novice –and delights as it informs Try this summation of the Takacs Quartet recording of the Bartok String Quartets: “ (They) bring to these masterpieces the requisite virtuosity, tonal sophistication and command of idiom. These are full-blooded accounts of enormous conviction, with that open-air quality which suggests the fragrance of the forests and lakes of Hungary.” Such writing not only inspires one to listen, but also to develop one’s musical knowledge -and oneself- for more sensitive and acute understanding.

2.)The Eighth Edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings also, at 1534 pages, weighs heavy; this makes sense since it contains reviews of 14, 000 CDs. Many entries include a sometimes too succinct but helpful biography and all follow the Penguin approach of designating one to four stars with half stars allowing for finer points. One plus is that 2,000 new discs are reviewed in this edition with more than 400 new artist listings, so a noble effort is made to be up to date. As well, the writing is informed as to each recording’s stature in an artist’s career, plus the artist’s historical impact, stylistic achievements, and aesthetic clout, and many a time I read passages again for pleasure. Try this piece on June Christy: “(Her) wholesome but peculiarly sensuous voice is both creative and emotive. Her long, controlled lines and the shading of a fine vibrato suggest both a professional’s attention to detail and a tender, solicitous feel for the heart of a song, something that makes the often dark material of her later years the more affecting. Her greatest moments are as close to creating definitive interpretations as any singer can come.”

Concise, evocative, apt –that’s nice. But I am playing The Complete Lester Young Studio Sessions on Verve as I write this and, of course, feel the critical entry on the same recording is missing some, though not all, Zen possibility. And I remember Oscar Peterson explaining to me how most critics presume to know the inside track but in truth miss the boat, remember Oscar’s friend and bassist Ray Brown answering my question as to the purpose of critics with a quickly-retorted, “Critics, we’re just happy if they get the tunes right.” But, for all that, this volume is essential and I will be consulting its pages many times. (By the way, Lester Young is now singing, on a rare recorded occasion, and Margaret, walking by says, “Lester sounds like Jackie (Washington).”)

3.)Last of three Penguins, if you check out The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings, you will have one of the true mysteries of music, Robert Johnson, on the cover staring out at you –and look at those stilt-long fingers that helped make a sound so untouchably itself. Like jazz, blues music inspires passion and invites writers to pass off personal enthusiasm for universal truths, but the ensuing dialogue –or is it conflict?- is good for the soul. And the critics in the Penguin Guides do impart much knowledge and much insightful argument to reflect upon as they blend their reasonings into judgment of compelling worth; these are real people feeling the music of which they write.

So automatically I go looking for the entry on Tommy McClennan and realize that, yes, he did “force his vocals in the manner of Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson” and discover that “contemporaries were impressed that such a loud voice could emanate from his diminutive frame.” In the entry of Lucille Bogan, whose sexually-explicit Shave ‘Em Dry sits proud in the raunchy hall of fame, one discovers that “She made her debut recording during Okeh’s session in Atlanta in June 1923, the first time blues was recorded on location in the South…” Yep, this volume will sit beside my CD collection.

So here’s why the Penguin Guides are so popular, chez moi and everywhere. One wants to come away with a fresh perspective on musicians one knows and informed with new information into reconsideration of their work. One wants to be seduced into checking out artists one doesn’t know or, better, challenged in one’s biases, for or against, concerning already known artists, so one won’t become aesthetically lazy. One wants to agree to disagree with writers whose integrity is, as far as possible to tell, beyond reproach and then read someone sharing their passion for music –be it classical, jazz, or blues- with addiction-inspiring enthusiasm. One wants to know more about good music, music of substance and not the clichéd mediocrities that the music industry too often imposes upon us, because we ourselves are as substantial as the depth of the sounds we allow into our ears and minds and emotions.

4.&5)The barbaric destruction of a city’s accumulated character, through indifference or wanton demolition of its buildings, dehumanizes us. We are robbed of a past we once lived in our stores and offices and theatres; we are left to despair over an ugly wasteland of parking lots, especially in our city’s core. Take a look at Gary Evans’ dozen books celebrating, in photographs, Hamilton’s years gone by and realize how people once walked our streets in intimate relation to the buildings around them. Who is it who profits that our civic spirit should die in the ruin of our city?

Christopher Rauschenberg’s Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget’s Paris (Princeton Architectural Press) shows, of course, how much of that city’s overwhelming charm ensues very often from its remaining unchanged. The 76 pairings of elegantly-reproduced photographs, taken a century apart, illustrate time almost standing still and the impact is haunting. More focused on people actually living their day-to-day lives within their architectural past are Federica D’Orazio’s Rome Then and Now and Peter & Oriel Caine’s Paris Then and Now, both from Thunder Bay Press. Once again vintage photographs are paired with a current viewing of specific locations and I’m reminded over and over why I love to visit each city. Each one is sculpted from its past.

6&7)Two new volumes from The Boston Mills Press, both by Ron Brown, are endlessly fascinating with their exclusive focus (hundreds of photographs) on our own province . Top 100 Unusual Things to See in Ontario includes the eerie Cheltenham Badlands, the fascinating Cryptic Gavestone of Rushes Cemetery, and our “last covered bridge,” located in West Montrose, all within driving distance of Hamilton. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Ghost Town Heritage features over 80 locations, including 10 near Hamilton, Crook’s Hollow near Dundas and Guelph Junction being two. I find the photographs here –now a collapsed roof, now a solitary building remaining from an entire village, now an unpainted wooden wall blackened with time- seductive, unsettling, and oozing with history.

8.)The reason for Michael Dirda’s Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism speaks on every page of his Classics for Pleasure in which he considers ninety authors/titles from world literature. These include Lao-tse, Pope, Chekhov, Gorey, Spinoza, Doyle, Beowulf, Stoker, Plutarch, Frazer, Pound, Kierkegaard, Hammett –how’s that for range? Dirda writes with an evocative clarity, an informed but unpretentious delight, and an insightful knack for revealing biographical and cultural detail, all as he admirably structures each four page chapter into something of a new world for his reader. Writing like this invigorates because it blends human smarts, literary passion, and a love for getting each sentence right. I’m delighted, each time, at how much I enjoy a dip into these pages.

9.)Some favourite recent books, that involve the deeper human dimension of creativity, include Parallels and Paradoxes, published by Vintage, a series of conversations between conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, and Edward Said, a Palestinian academic. It’s subtitled Explorations in Music and Society and it certainly illuminates on many topics. We learn from Barenboim, for example, that in the operas of Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite, “there is not one Jewish character. There is not one anti-Semitic remark.” And, “By knowing your Boulez and your Carter, you see aspects of Beethoven in a different way.” One leaves these pages challenged and invigorated by the authors’ passionate voices that speak their lives, their arts, and their deep concerns for truth.

10.)Testaments Betrayed by novelist-essayist Milan Kundera, from Harper Collins, is an eloquent defense of creative individuals like Kafka, Stravinsky, Hemingway, and Rushdie, who were subjected to misguided interpretation by others and, as a result, had their artistic rights and creative integrity abused or compromised. Critical opinion is too often a case of presumption without qualifications and Kundera here convinces that the artist, not the critic or any outsider, knows best. A culture must respect its artists’ sincere intentions.

11.)Some years ago, the custodian of the Franz Schubert apartment museum in Vienna shook with emotion as she told me, “Schubert was very, very poor when he was alive.” I remembered her passionate sorrow while reading Michael Steen’s The Lives & Times of the Great Composers, published by Oxford or Icon, which shows in genuinely distressing detail the horrid conditions, both social and personal, in which many of our culture’s musical masterpieces were created. We sometimes forget in our concert hall chatter that in this music real lives are speaking.

12.)Although critical consensus deems some of the Shakespearan productions at Stratford this season misguided, check out Frank Kermode’s essential Shakepeare’s Language, published by Penguin, which provides an incisive and enlightening account of the Bard as writer. Kermode, whom I’ve found elsewhere to be unnecessarily obscure, here clearly charts Shakespeare’s dramatic development from a classically influenced style to a versatile one that poetically reflected individual psychology in memorable lines. Thus he helps us to find the human within the Bard. Kermode’s consideration of passages in Shakespeare that make no apparent sense, then and now, is especially fun.

13.)My favourite books this month include Canadian Paintings, Prints and Drawings (Firefly Books), a visually impressive, oversized volume by Anne Newlands of the National Gallery of Canada. Each of 164 artists, native included, from the 17th century up to today, gets one vivid reproduction and a text of one page in which Newlands concisely blends involved aesthetic evaluation, helpful historical and geographical context, and insightful biographical gems all to demonstrate each individual life process. I especially enjoy Newlands’ literary smarts at blending information to make each painting and its artist into an event, but I did smile at the inclusion of Harold Town’s quotation, “I paint to defy death.” Every time I visited Harold, with whom I collaborated on several books, he’d be working on several projects at one time, not defying death, I suspect, but just because his creative imagination allowed him no rest.

14&15.)In 1935, the population of Ethiopia, which I haven’t visited, was 15 million; today it is 75 million. I learned this astounding fact in The Africa Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the Continent, published by Lonely Planet. When the government of Kenya, which I have visited, recently legislated free primary education for all, one 84 year old donned school uniform shorts and, hard of hearing, sat in the front row so that he might first learn to read, then read the Bible, and then prove his preacher wasn’t following it. In other words, this oversized book, and its companion volume The Asia Book, which includes the Middle East, combine essential information about Landscape, People, History, the economy and much else in six richly illustrated pages per country and always with a human touch that brings each country to flavourful life. We are outsiders to most of the world and these two volumes help to break down many shut doors of our own ignorance –unless, of course, one is president of the USA and flaunts that ignorance.

1.)My list of Notable New Books begins with an oversized The USA Book: A Journey Through America from lonely planet. This volume brings each of the fifty states to vivid life with four pages, for each one, that include half a dozen visually-intriguing photographs and concisely informative but evocative text. We learn about each state’s history, landscape, people, culture and traditions, economy, myths and legends, cuisine, representation in the arts and so much else. Tidbits include the etymology of each state’s name, its nickname, motto, and flower. As usual, lonely planet excels at pinpointing essential cultural flavours and bringing both land and its people to life.

2.)Ingrid Newkirk, president and founder of PETA, is a legendary force in our modern world, not only because she tries to reduce human cruelty to animals on a major scale, but also because she is unstoppably and comprehensively practical as in her new book The Peta Practical Guide to Animal Rights: Simple Acts of Kindness to Help Animals in Trouble (St. Martin’s Griffin). This essential guide includes endorsements from Woody Harrelson, who calls it “the ultimate animal rights encyclopedia” and Martin Sheen who calls it “a terrific book that uplifts you by showing you there are easy, sensible and clear ways to help animals,” plus a Foreword by Bill Maher, and its scope is enormous. Most chapters begin with the words “What You Can Do:” and this inspiring and practical volume belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who aspires to be forward-thinking and effectively compassionate.

3.)With richly detailed discussion of twenty-one topics such as “The conductor and the soloist,” “The central European Tradition,” “Women on the podium,” and “Conductors in rehearsal,” The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, edited by Jose Antonio Bowen, transforms the reader into an informed insider in the world of conducting and classical music. For example, a chapter titled “The orchestra speaks” provides advice for an incoming conductor that includes “Don’t skip intonation,” “Don’t conduct only the melody,” “Never be sarcastic and never lose your cool.” And did you know, for example, that Karajan “claimed to admire Toscanini for his precision and clarity, and Furtwangler for his elasticity and expression….and tried to combine these elements in his readings”? Or that Boulez “outmaneuvered the establishment by joining it?” This volume is a pleasure.

4.)Bird by Andrew Zuckerman and published by Chronicle Books is an experience that is breathtakingly surreal, boldly present, and exquisitely intimate, as it shows 75 species in 200 oversize photographs, with Zuckerman photographing each bird “against his trademark white background.” It is unnerving that the photographer takes the viewer so close into the faces and feathers of each bird that one is overwhelmed with the assured and potent sense of existence in the former and becomes lost in the infinitely delicate world of the latter. We are so close to these birds that we feel amazement at the shape and colour and internal life of each bird. Apparently, Zuckerman’s ideal shutter speed is 1/8000th of a second; as a result, he allows us to enter a new universe because we never get so close otherwise.

5.)Each photograph we take is an extension of our sensory makeup: we seek familiarity of some kind but, perhaps more essential to our development, we test what is new and explore its possibilities. At least that’s what I think while doing page by page of The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers From Around the Globe from Chronicle Books. As promised, the graphic designers featured here “have unique ways of looking at the world” and they certainly show both the relativity of what we see as already significant and the unique aesthetic brought to the fore by each photographer in setting up and taking a shot. Over and over, this book demands that we rethink the pictures we create and also rethink ourselves.

6&7)Both Secret Lives of the Great Artists and Secret Lives of the Great Composers (Quirk Books) by Elizabeth Lunday, who writes the ‘Masterpieces’ column for mental-floss magazine, promise “outrageous anecdotes” and the “seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters.”And, yep, we have Leonardo the ‘alleged sodomist’ and Caravaggio the ‘convicted murderer’ and Hopper the ‘alleged wife beater’ or Rossini the ‘draft-dodging womanizer’ and Wagner the ‘alleged cross-dresser.’ If the word “alleged” troubles you, you’ll still find delight here with this peppy and perky biography on the run format –six to nine pages per great artist/composer on heavy stock pages, variation in font and page design, the essence-grabbing and hilarious illustrations Mario Zucca, and Lunday’s freshly energetic prose that does indeed bring each creator to life, often with a twentieth century tone to the telling. The strange effect is that, while being informed and entertained, one gains a lively, if somewhat limited, sense of each artist or composer.

8.)“It’s a swamp adder,” cried Holmes, “the deadliest snake in India!” We then read, in The Sherlock Holmes Handbook by Rascom Riggs and published by Quirk, that “there is no such snake in India,” that snakes are deaf and so cannot respond to whistles,” and that “they are physically incapable of climbing ropes.” But, what the hell, The Speckled Band, the source of the quotation, is a gripping tale and so much else in this always entertaining, always informative Handbook redeems the sleuth of sleuths as a marvelously informed, wise and sharp fellow. One learns, for example, “How to use Analytical Reasoning,” “How to Fake Your Own Death,” “How to Deal with Friends and Relations,” and “How to Survive a Plunge Over a Waterfall.” For druggies there’s “Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era” and for royalists there’s “How to Interact with Royalty.” In “How to Deal with Women,” Holmes says, “Women are never to be entirely trusted” and then advises “Always be a gentleman,” “Take care when attempting to deduce their motives,” ”Use their emotions to your advantage,” “Underestimate them at your own peril,” and “Beware a woman scorned.” A very useful book indeed.

9.)For those making the trek to Vancouver this winter or thereafter, lonely planet offers a hand and pocket size, visually splendid Vancouver Encounter which covers the city’s nine “neighbourhoods” under four headings each: See, Shop, Eat, Play. Other chapters include Museums & Galleries, Green Vancouver, Gay Vancouver, Accommodations, and Live Music. The many colourful maps herein are splendid in readability and the many box inserts are rich with surprising information. The prose, as one expects from lonely planet, is lived in, with it, and inspiring. Go west, my reader, go west!

10.)Pomegranate Books has just reissued The Art of Robert Bateman in a striking 25th anniversary volume that differs in several ways from the original edition published by Allen Lane. Most significant, the colours of the new version are bolder and brassier with an orange tint and yellowish backlighting that suggest sunset. The result is that detail stands out more, but there is also more repeated homogeneity of tone than in the more nuanced, tonally varied, warmer and mistier reproductions of the original edition. On the other hand, there is more revelatory colour in the expanded samplings of Bateman’s sketchbooks in the new edition. What makes having both volumes a necessity is that images are often cropped differently and differ in size between the two editions, so what one loses in omission, one gains in presence and detail. Ergo, you need both volumes of an artist sometimes maligned but always a crucial documenter, an icon maker, of our vanishing natural world. These images do inspire wonder and take one’s breath away.

11.)Dale Chihuly is certainly the most celebrated glass artist living today, renowned for his innovation and creative daring in both concept and method, and The Art of Dale Chihuly (Chronicle Books) is a dazzling celebration of the artist’s breath-seizing works. This volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, covers all of Chihuly’s thematic series and includes a major illustrated essay by Timothy Anglin Burgard which considers the artist in a historical and cultural context. But it’s the photographs that demonstrate imagination at work and show why glassblowers I know speak of Chihuly with reverence as if he were a maker of magic, which indeed he is.

12.)In Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress: Frida’s Wardrobe, Chronicle Books pays tribute to another legend, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, through a careful look at her famous garments which, as much as her beloved paintings, denoted a creative surge of unique individuality. Included are many photographs of Kahlo wearing the garments, shoes, jewelry and headdresses, now restored and illustrated here, in stunning display. Like the Chihuly volume, this very beautiful book pays tribute to aesthetic daring that ultimately shapes icons for the collective mind and proves that true beauty has guts to follow its own course.

BOOK REVIEWS FROM MY RECENT ARCHIVES

My following book reviews first appeared over the past few years in an alternative tabloid publication in Hamilton. Perhaps reading the following paragraphs will tempt you to visit your local independent bookstore and to check them out there. Here’s Part IV:

1.)My title-says-it-all awards this month go to Chronicle Books for What Your Poo is Telling You, by Josh Richman and Anish Sheth, which considers 27 types of poo – laugh all you want, but ignorance of what you leave behind may prove fatal. 2.)Also to Eric Groves’ Butt Rot & Bottom Gas: A Glossary of Tragically Misunderstood Words, from Quirk Books, which includes terms like maidenhead locator system, “a system used by radio operators to locate sites on earth,” and cum dividend, “a payment received by share buyers if a stock is sold.” No doubt the authors of these two wee books had much fun compiling them as you certainly will while reading the same.

3.)My favorite books this month are truly special volumes to which I expect to return many times. Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford University Press) covers twenty-seven themes like Towering Figures, Inspiration, Turning Points, Scandals, Dancing and the Movies, On Partnering and Partnerships, and Injuries, Maladies, Misfortunes, and Cures. Each page offers a surprising insight, a fascinating snippet of information, or a delightful piece of writing that one savors and rereads. For example, here’s Eleanor Powell on Fred Astaire: “Fred dances on the off-beat and mostly on the foot, while I am always on-beat and get most of my taps from my heel.” Alastair Macaulay’s passage on Fonteyn and Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet, and their profound effect on him, is a memorable piece of exquisite prose.

4.)After many profoundly-felt hours in cemeteries like Pere Lachaise in Paris, Highgate in London, and the Zeltralfriedhof in Vienna, and perhaps because in the last dozen years I’ve had too many dear ones return in death to the earth, I find Firefly Books’ Old Canadian Cemeteries: Places of Memory by Jane Irwin a deeply moving and treasured experience. John de Visser’s 250 photographs alone -each one evocative, aesthetically potent, unaffectedly atmospheric, and intuitively sensitive to a given subject- would make this an invaluable volume, but it’s the writing itself that subtly reaches through one’s individual and collective consciousness and deep into the soil beneath one’s feet. Irwin’s concerns are the burial places across our land that denote, in commemoration, the customs of our ancestors and serve as anchors for the “future of memory.” Irwin’s admirable approach reveals historical and cultural sensitivity, plus an uncompromising dedication to human scale and human values. Most important, she argues that our dead are within us and, that in destroying their monuments, we erase a crucial means to sustain their spirit and our humanity.

5.)David Thomson’s Have You Seen…? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf) is a film-lover’s mine of information. For example, we learn –at least I didn’t know- that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, Nunnally Johnson’s script was ready by July 13, 1939, John Ford started shooting it October 4, 1939, and the picture opened October 4, 1940. And that, for Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, “Coco Chanel made the clothes and Henri Cartier-Bresson was an assistant.” It’s also a seductive, challenging, occasionally obscure, joyfully idiosyncratic and always delicious read. The thoroughly informed and incisively opinionated Thomson can be blunt in condemnation, as in his speculation as to how Dirk Bogarde brought himself to howl with grief in Visconti’s The Damned: “Bogarde could only get himself to cry out loud by asking the question, ‘How did I get into a piece of shit like this?’” Sometimes one agrees –“Steiger became a nearly unwatchable actor as he grew older”- or disagrees –High Noon is “not a film to see more than once”-but always, in reading Thomson, one loves film more.

6.)Spatiality is fundamental to our experience of the world and the 114 architects featured in The New Architectural Generation by Kieran Long (Laurence King Publishing) give sometimes exhilarating, sometimes unsettling, but always challenging indication of the structures we will, in the near future, live our lives within. Like each of the 800 mind-expanding photographs and drawings here that challenge one’s conceptual and aesthetic complacency, the writing does likewise, say in this passage by Tom Wiscombe: “Emergent’s approach is informed by contemporary models of biology and systems theory rather than by the arts. Ecologies and economies are evolutionary, interactive and resilient –vital qualities that are conspicuously missing from architecture, but necessary for survival in post-industrial culture.” Wiscombe attempts to move beyond the “the dead-end logic of ordering, vertical structure and façade composition” in which much of the world lives. Are we ready?

7.)Since 1968, when economics joined the ranks, there are now six categories in which Nobel Prizes are awarded annually, the rest being physics, chemistry, literature, medicine/physiology, and peace. Nobel: A Century of Prize Winners, Selected and edited by Michael Worek (Firefly) groups winners in annotated lists by decade and then by year and also provides “photographs and background information on more than 200 of the most famous and most interesting laureates,” usually a page each and sometimes more –Churchill, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama. It’s all fascinating as biographical information and did you know that Linus Pauling “was the only man in history to have accepted two Nobel Prizes in two different countries?” Another special pleasure is the inclusion of here a page beside Banting and Macleod explaining Insulin or another beside Tonegawa on Gene Theory and the Immune System or one beside Chandrashekar considering The Death of a Star, that for which each took a respective prize.

8.)The Art of the Movie Poster with text by Dave Hehr ( Chronicle Books) measures 13 ¼ by 11 ¼ inches, it’s 1 3/8 inches thick, and it contains 1,500 posters for films from “every corner of the globe for the last 60 years” in glorious colour. So let’s put it this way: if you are interested in film or graphic arts or differences in cultural aesthetics or creative imagination or iconography or media, be sure to warn family and friends, before you open the cover, that you’ll be gone a few days. For starters, try the five posters for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, one from each of Italy, France, United States, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and see where art and sensual sophistication of a culture combine. Or Gary Cooper in High Noon fulfilling various archetypal propensities in Argentine, Polish, Belgian, Italian and Czech posters. Or check out the distinctive and memorable –or is it unforgettable? -styles of Bob Peak (My Fair Lady), Peter Strausfeld (Seventh Seal), or Saul Bass (West Side Story, Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder). Or the designers playing with sexual censorship in Bhowani Junction, the Bond films with all those phallic guns, Blow Up, Magnificent Obsession and most other films. And have, with each image, a creative experience before you….after all, why did they do it that way and how did they know to do it that way? You’ll soon realize that each poster here was individually, by itself, intended, with all sorts of artistic and psychological acumen behind it, to stop you in your tracks and get your butt into the local cinema. Multiply that by 1,500 and this book gets intense.

9.)Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking, edited by Eric Lax and published by Alfred A. Knopf, is a book bursting with revelations from inside the creative world, process and life. Allen confirms my initial feeling that his Truffaut-like Vicky Christina “is almost more of a French movie” and, in self-effacing comparison of himself to Bergman, comments, “I’m more in control than that on a cerebral level and less in control on a competence level.” Elsewhere he notes that “whether a film is in black and white or color is of no import” and in the chapter on Directing he provides several lists of his fall-time favourite films. In Writing It, he remarks, “I think in the cracks all the time. I never stop. I don’t need peace and quiet to think…..When it comes to write, I need some space.” Also, “I always loved Eve Arden.” Me too.

10.)Cally Brackman’s One Hundred Years of Menswear (Laurence King Publishing) certainly proves that the garments we don are a costume, one that helps to create what we assume to be inner and outer reality, and that we are indeed the clothes we wear. This beautiful and intriguing volume wins on many counts, especially with hundreds of imaginatively chosen and often rare photographs and commentary that is academically informed and colloquially bubbling. While Johnny Rotten is captioned with “After punk, the power to shock through dress dissipated; never again would clothing be so disturbing,” we also encounter in 1926 “Cambridge graduates in plus fours” who also look like style-challenged idiots. My surprise is Tsuguharu Foujita, whose self portrait hangs in our dining room, in “a collarless peasant print shirt with a jacquard-knit jacket c. 1924. I especially love the Brylcreem ad from 1954 when all of us were greasy and yucky but oh so cool..

11.)I have long been annoyed by writers on wine who drop a handy and trendy vocabulary of assessment into monthly columns, as if a common language and, more fundamental, a common experience of wine existed, as we tilted a glass of Bordeaux or Burgundy and their international kin toward our eager lips. Thus, the cleverly titled Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, edited by Barry C. Smith and published by Oxford, is both enjoyable and appreciated as a consideration of the experience of tasting wine. Contributors include a biochemist, a linguist, a wine critic and several philosophers who consider, in ten chapters, topics that consider “What good is knowledge (in enjoying wine)?” “Wine and the brain,” “Can wines be brawny?: Reflections on wine vocabulary,” and “Wine as an aesthetic object.” In other words, henceforth, drink but think!

12.) It was the loss of his wife, his father and his mother within six months that inspired Hamiltonian Jeff Seffinga to write his latest collection of poetry, In Times of Changing Seasons. Seffinga’s voice here is at once colloquial and noble with resolution, while his knack for achingly evocative and heart-enriching details makes the poetry resonate quietly with a profound and dignified passion. What do we do about the deaths of those love? Seffinga’s answer is a book of poetry that comes with us into the fibre of our own hearts and shows us we are not alone in grief. It’s published by Serengeti Press.

My following book reviews first appeared over the past few years in an alternative tabloid publication in Hamilton. Perhaps reading the following paragraphs will tempt you to visit your local independent bookstore and to check them out there. Here’s Part III:

1.)Business Cards 3: Design on Saying Hello (Laurence King Publishing) presents “over 200 innovative interpretations of the humble business card, from designers and clients around the world and across the creative industries” and it’s a good thing too. All too often one is handed a business card that makes little impression or, worse, a negative one for some reason and here, with such variety to consider, one can isolate the qualities that make an aesthetically-compelling business card, and perhaps a client, a keeper. There are many creatively exciting examples here to consider. Within the perspective of history,

2.),Made in France by Reed Darmon (Chronicle Books) is a dandy little goldmine of images from the past century of “everyday French design and pop culture ephemera.” It includes posters from travel, cinema, cafes, packaging for cigarettes (O, Gitanes and Gauloises, I remember thee well!), Pathe record labels, and much else, all given visual representation, usually with nods to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

3.)The most visually poetic volume this month is Sites of Impact: Meteorite Craters Around the World, with eerie and stunning photographs by Stan Gaz, no doubt in part because it reminds one how vulnerable the earth and its inhabitants are to destruction. Or put it this way: “The instant an asteroid collides with Earth, the billion-year course of geological and environmental history is changed forever. Energy is transferred. Matter is displaced. Climates are irrevocably altered. Entire species of plants and animals are obliterated.” Photographer Gaz takes us to ten locations, four in Australia, three in the United States, and one in each of South Africa, Namibia, and, also, Quebec. Our Canadian crater is 1.4 million years old, 3.4 kilometers in diameter, and currently doing its duty as a lake of 270 meters in depth. Introductory essays explain structures and photographs, but the fact that “the impacting meteorite melts or vaporizes during impact” is reminder enough that in this universe of ours, humanity’s most damning and perhaps redeeming quality is our insignificance among natural forces. From Princeton Architectural Press.

4.)The 2008 Canadian Subsidy Directory promises to be “the most complete and up-to-date publication available for anyone searching for Canadian grants, loans and government programs” and it certainly delivers the goods -3208 times, in fact! Indeed, the possible sources of dollars described here from just the Canada Council for the Arts alone number over 150. The directory is available in print version for $149.95 or, as either a CD or pdf file, for $69.95. Everyone in the country from the Armenian National Committee of Canada to the Hamilton Police Pipe Band to York University to the town of Tillsonburg seems to have a copy because, as one can see, this outstanding resource is both comprehensive and easy to use and it suggests new possibilities with every scan of its contents. Businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals can find, inside, detailed contact information for each funding body along with a description of each grant, loan or program available. Order toll free by calling 1-866-322-3376 and for clarification of grants, scholarships, loans, mortgages, and venture capital, check out the website at http://www.canadianpublications.net/. Do so and you’ll save yourself hours of research and frustration.

5.)Another outstanding resource, one for those wanting to know “where & how to sell what you write,” is the immensely popular Writer’s Market, with ‘over 5 million copies sold” and published annually by Writer’s Digest Books. This 88th edition for 2009 contains over “3,500 listings for book publishers, consumer magazines, trade journals, literary agents and more” -and you’ll find this blurb is rather modest since this volume contains much, much more indeed. For examples, the editor has decided to anticipate the stuff people always ask in chapters titled “Query Letter Clinic,” Freelance Newspaper Writing 101,” “How Much Should I Charge?” and “Launching Your Freelance Business.” The amount of content in a volume of 1170 pages could easily overwhelm, but Writer’s Market is, first, designed with kindness to the reader’s eyes in mind and, second, helpfully divided into categories and sub-categories that allow easy negotiation of sections on Literary Agents, Book Publishers, Consumer Magazines, Trade Journals, and Contests & Awards. Included also are sections on Canadian Book Publishers, Small Presses, and especially useful, one called Book Publishers Subject Index to let you know who publishes specific genres like Experimental, Feminist, Science Fiction, Gay/Lesbian, and Gardening, to name a few of many.

6.)Scott Yanow has, for over thirty years, written for every key jazz magazine around, from DownBeat to Coda, and I’ve long heeded his reviews in the All Music Guide to Jazz. He is thoroughly-brewed in both his love and knowledge of jazz; he is balanced, giving but firm, and engagingly passionate in his assessments; he has a knack for placing crucial historical and biographical facts; and yes, he is a pleasure to read. In his appropriately titled The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide, published by Backbeat Books, Yanow provides profiles of over 500 vocalists in the idiom from the likes of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton up to the freshly-minted breed of today that includes Diana Krall and Cassandra Wilson. You’ll find here many lesser known but worthy vocalists, recommended recordings, often websites of the singers, and chapters titled “198 Other Jazz Singers of Today,”55 Others Who Have Also Sung Jazz,” “30 Jazz Vocal Groups,” and a listing of suggested DVDs. One reason, I’ll read and re-read this Guide is for a fresh take on the singers; for example, I’ve known swing and classic jazz singer Alex Pangman for some years and still learned new stuff from Yanow’s entry on Alex.

7.)Because so many musicals set up sets locally in Toronto, Hamilton, the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, and your nearby amateur theatre, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television by Thomas Hischak is certainly essential to any music-lover’s library. With the enthusiastic and well-deserved endorsements of Marvin Hamlisch, Carol Channing and Jonathan Pryce, this hefty reference weighs in at 923 densely-packed and addictive pages and scores for many reasons: it includes over 2,000 entries; it features musicals, producers, composers, lyricists, choreographers, and of course performers; it covers all three media; it is designed for visual appeal, with its informative box inserts and many evocative photos; it allows easy cross-reference. I especially appreciate the writing here –thoroughly informed, deeply involved, many an entry with a surprising and previously unknown detail that brings the subject to new and vivid life, judgments throughout that seem well-reasoned and inevitable. Be warned, however: this volume is a repeatedly delicious experience from within the world of musical theatre, as much as a comprehensive resource, and, once in, you won’t want to leave.

8.)My current favourite guide to everything is the Penguin Book of Facts, edited by David Crystal and deemed by the Independent on Sunday as “One of the greatest reference books ever published.” Did you know of The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion?” I didn’t. Do you remember your Chemistry Table of Elements? I don’t. Can you provide the capital, currency, ethnic groups, brief history, climate, and head of state for every country on the planet? Me neither. And what can you tell me about Radioactivity Units, every Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the development of computers, Saints’ Days, the perpetual calendar from 1821 to 2020, the grape varieties of every region of France, the length of pregnancy in various mammals, the major works of Shostakovich?…..and et cetera ad infinitum. This too: as a flexible and sturdy paperback, the Penguin Book of Facts is comfortable to use too!

9.)The best reeference (sorry, I could not pass without…) book of the month, is The Official High Times Pot Smoker’s Handbook (Chronicle Books), by David Bienenstock and the editors of High Times Magazine. It promises to be “the definitive guide to pot culture” and, if you are high or not, it will no doubt take you higher. Chapters cover How to Smoke-proof your dorm room, the best pot scenes in movies, Holy Smokes: Was Jesus a Stoner?, 30 Years of High Times’ Best Buds, and –start at #1 folks- 420 things to do when you’re stoned. This one will keep you rolling in the aisles or anywhere else, for that matter, and, once you weed out your friends, this will make a nice token gift (Okay, no more).

10.)Back in the early nineties, I found myself in the south of England chatting with Jon Wynne-Tyson about his play on the relationship between Jon’s mother Esme and Noel Coward, a script which eventually was heard on the BBC. Letters between Stoj and Poj, as they called each other, are included in The Letters of Noel Coward (Knopf), a 780 page goldmine from the playwright’s private world of correspondence which embraces as well Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Ian Fleming, Marlene Dietrich, FDR, GBS, T. E. Lawrence and everyone else in the Who’s Who of his era. This indispensible collection reveals much of the man and certainly confirms Sir Noel’s “talent to amuse” -and his talent to surprise as in his remark, “Did I mention that Mexico City is a cunt?”

Because I adore Coward’s plays quite often as theatrical perfection, I especially enjoy this collection’s behind the scenes documentation such as Coward musing: “I wonder why it is that my plays are such traps for directors….Nobody seems capable of leaving well enough alone and allowing the words to take care of themselves.” The account of Coward’s song “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans,” which FDR loved and which Coward was obliged by Churchill to sing until he was hoarse, is hilarious, especially because the offended folks at the BBC missed completely the irony of the song. Some quibbles: editor Barry Day’s flip analogy of the Spanish Civil War as “an out-of-town tryout for what was to come” is glib and shallow, to be sure. But Coward, for me always suggests a complex and intense fellow, behind the seemingly easy theatrical genius on stage, and this volume helps to reveal why.

11.)With over 2,000 entries and 506 pages, Researching the Song (Oxford University Press), by Shirlee Emmons and Wilbur Watkins Lewis, is intended to guide performers, teachers and enthusiasts through “most of the mythological, historical, geographical and literary references contained in western art song.” If your familiarity touches only the works of, say, Schubert, you’ll find that many of the entries here enrishing. Did you know that Igor Stravinsky wrote “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas?” That Walt Whitman’s poetry has been set to music by at least fifteen composers who include Ned Rorem and Charles Ives, but also Vaughan Williams and Hindemith? That Schonberg set Nietzsche to music? That Shostakovich did likewise with Robbie Burns? Entries include Wilhelm Muller, whose poems were set to music not only famously by Schubert but also by Fanny Mendelssohn, Mother Goose, Sodom, and “blows his nail,” an expression used in Elizabethan lyrics. This endlessly informative volume is a constantly delightful read and an essential cornerstone for any classical music library.

12.)The most visually stunning book this month is Image and Imagination Georgia O’Keefe (Chronicle) by John Loengard, the Life photographer whose 39 haunting photographs of the 80 year old O’Keefe are here juxtaposed to stunning effect with the elderly artist’s iconic paintings. This memorable volume is visually breathtaking and evokes inner feeling akin to serenity.

13.)Fascinating as a thorough look at the many dozens of careers and occupations in the ancient world, Vicki Leon’s cleverly titled Working IX to V (Walker & Company) covers dozens of ways, some quite bizarre, that people of antiquity made a buck. Leon’s perky, entertaining and inherently enthusiastic style brings the working folk of ancient Greece and Rome to vivid life and you’ll be surprised to read about occupations such as Orgy Planner, Sycophant, Funeral Clown, Stercorarius (Manure Entrepreneur), Pirate, Vestal Virgin, and Armpit Plucker.