A mystery and a love story, Nick Bantock’s unconventional novel Griffin & Sabine (Chronicle. $16.95) is about a London postcard designer who corresponds with a female postage-stamp designer in the South Pacific. It’s also about the illicit pleasure of reading other people’s mail. Because both correspondents are artists, Bantock reproduces their lavish cards and letters, down to the envelopes and the handwritten letters tucked inside each page is as much fun to look at as it is to read.
Cole Porter, that most “elegant, sw’elegant” of songwriters, traveled in style. He stayed at the tres chic Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, lunched in Lisbon with the tres riches Gulbenkians, and cruised the Greek Islands on Niarchos’s yacht. Movie actress turned photographer Jean Howard, who joined his entourage for two trips to Europe and the Near East in 1955 and 1956, tells how exciting-and exhausting–a grand tour with Cole could be in a grand coffeetable book called Travels With Cole Porter (Abrams. $39.95). And if you believe gentility is still viable in a Kitty Kelley world, A Cup of Tea (Simon & Schuster. $15.95) is just your you-know-what. The richly bordered text mostly relates tea lore-guaranteed not to overstimulate-but it’s sprinkled with recipes for scones, madeleines and Devon honey cake.
The Reader’s Companion to American History edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Houghton Mifflin. $35)is a browser’s paradise, with absorbing essays on Americana from birth control to fire departments to pop art to Orson Welles. Alabama photographer Charles Moore documented one of the most painful chapters of American history-the civil-rights movement. Powerful Days (Stewart Tabori & Chang. $24.95) is powerful stuff. The freedom marchers look as heroic as Iwo Jima Marines fighting their way up a mountain-which is just about what they had to do.
If you’re all for the environment but wish ecologists weren’t so boringly virtuous, check The Earth First! Reader (Peregrine Smith. $14.95) which combines good science with rude humor. A mere wild life photo book may seem tame by comparison, but Here Today: Portraits of Our Vanishing Species (Chronicle. $35) is a heartbreaker, with Avedon-style portraits: a North American river otter, a bright-eyed salt-water harvest mouse. Call us anthropocentric, but these creatures seem possessed of beauty, dignity, even wit.
You could be locked away for seeing dogs, snakes and dragons on your kitchen ceiling; step into the backyard and you’re OK. If trying to pick out Canis Major, Hydra and Draco in the random stars is your idea of a good time, drop hints about Giuseppe Maria Sesti’s The Glorious Constellations: History and Mythology (Abrams. $95), with 624 charts and pictures, and 48 color plates of a charmingly crude astronomical fresco in Italy’s Villa Farnese. Sesti does not mention a fat guy with reindeer-perhaps because he only appears once a year.
Most Christmas lists have a case or two of arrested development: Leslie Singer’s Zap! Ray Gun Classics (Chronicle. $12.95) to the rescue! No fancy interpretive essay-Freud died in 1939-just color photos of toy ray guns from the Buck Rogers XZ-38 Disintegrator Pistol (1936) to the Han Solo Laser Pistol (1978) and on into the ’80s. Plus a few things boys didn’t point at each other, like winged badges, and InterPlanet Space Money: “Be a Space Millionaire.”
Marc Okkonen’s Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century (Sterling. $30) will be to the diamond’s fashionmongers what Bill James’s books are to its nerds: the bible. Year-by-year spreads of home and away uniforms are prefaced by the sartorial histories of individual clubs. Suspicions confirmed: frequent and radical redesign (e.g., the Chicago White Sox) is characteristic of chronically bad teams; and baseball’s front-office troglodytism is probably caused by overexposure to double knits.
Anyone reading this will probably be interested in The American Magazine (Abrams. $60), celebrating 250 years of a versatile, sometimes magnificent, medium. Lavishly produced, this reader’s feast is also a thumbnail social history of the United States, from William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionism to the rise of women’s magazines to the golden age of The New Yorker. Any magazine of consequence (and some that aren’t) receives at least brief mention.
In 1984, Harper’s magazine Index, a page of pointedly selected stats. What Counts: The Complete Harper’s Index (Henry Holt. $12.95) tells us that 26 brand-name products appear in “Back to the Future, Part II” and that 30,000 Americans hold Pan Am reservations for a trip to the moon-or did, before other airlines took over many of its routes. Is Delta ready for this?
From “dabble (to wash or rinse quickly)” right through to “hyuh” (i.e., “here”) the Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. 2, 0-H (Harvard/Belknap. $59.95) catalogs the crazy ways we talked before being masscommed into a nation of mushmouths. Well, not all of us. The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (Pantheon. $15), a trove of unbecoming terms, proves the language retains its own rough poetry.
Remember what books were like before the cost-crunchers? The First Edition Library (1800-345-8112) offers replicas of American classics (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cather) as they first appeared. The latest is a handsome Huckleberry Finn ($34.95), with the original typeface, goldstamped cover and line drawings by E. W. Kemble. As Huck would say: downright sivilized.
Late in the 14th century, a French gentleman in his 5Os married a 15-year-old orphan and (in response to her pleading, he claims) wrote for her edification a volume of instructions on how to care for home and husband. A Medieval Home Companion (HarperCollins. $20) has lovely period woodcuts, and is full of thought-provoking tips: walk with your head down, speak as little as possible, emulate faithful dogs who think only of their masters, and if you are planning to carry around a live carp all day, wrap it in wet hay.
Big, glossy cookbooks are easy to give but pretty pointless to receive. Better to give the sort of cookbook that’s going to get stained and smeared and dogeared because it’s used so often. Susan Herrmann Loomis’s Farmhouse Cookbook (Workman. $14.95) is full of hearty dishes emphasizing fresh, country flavors, and she includes delightful essays on family farms across the United States. If you know kids whose idea of home baking is a microwaved brownie, rush over with My First Baking Book, by Helen Drew (Knopf $12), an excellent guide to cupcakes, peanut-butter cookies and other divine rights of childhood.
It had to happen: a compact-disc trivia game. The only surprise is that it’s so much fun. With a dozen categories and close to 1,800 questions, Play It By Ear (Rykodisc. $40) can entertain almost anyone. Just choose a field, get a question card, pop the CD into your player, listen to the info/clue and holler out the answer. Best: the Short-Term Memory and Really Short Stories sections, which test attentiveness, not knowledge.
The Flying Karamazov Brothers’ How to Juggle & Other Matters of Life & Death (1-800-FLY-9000, ext. 814. $19.95) has to be the most entertaining how-to video ever made. But anybody who’s seen this zany foursome in person would expect nothing less. Their 35-minute video is a charmingly wacky tale of heaven and hell that manages to integrate juggling lessons into the plot. Tricks like the Wandering Odd Ball and the Three Ball Shower, for example, are taught by two devils on an HTV-ha, ha-program called “Juggling for Your Soul.”
Remember the parody Swiss Amy knife that opened into a three-bedroom bungalow? Life imitates jokes: now the Eddie Bauer catalogue has one called the Hero ($99.95) whose 16 blades can pop a beer, carve “The Rubaiyat” on a pinhead and pirate the pay-per-view signal for Wrestlemania. Well, almost. Closed, it’s big enough to serve as a chock for a parked DC-10.
If you long instead for gizmos from earlier times-say, the days of knights-then consult the catalogue of arms and armor from Museum Replicas Limited (1-800-2413664), which has such swell accessories as jerkins, poison rings and “vessels for wine, mead or Druid’s fluids.” For only $28 you can throw down the gauntlet; for $255 you can wield a Norman sword; for $595 you can don a 50,000-link chain-mail shirt. But it’s the helmets that make us swoon: IndoPersian (with a tube for feathers), Arthurian/Roman (flexible cheek plates) and our favorite, a Viking beauty with brass wings.
So you’re not as gutsy as Amelia Earhart or Chuck Yeager. You can still be a fearless backyard pilot-and one-up them by building the craft yourself Design stores are stocking Whitewings kits (AG Industries, Inc. $17) with 15 sleek paper airplanes, old favorites or futuristic fantasies. The hefty manual has step-by-step instructions for assembly, aerodynamic tips and formulas for designing your own planes. Rubber band and catapult are included.
Who’d guess that the most fun in New York theater these days can be found not up on Broadway but in a downtown Polish Army Veterans Association hall? In Song of Singapore, the hall has become Freddy’s Song of Singapore Cafe circa 1941, from which the Malayan Melody Makers swing band and their amnesiac singer are trying to escape just as the Japanese are due to arrive. It’s part campy mystery, part saucy revue, but the music is great and the banter between the band members is sharp. Tickets are $25 to 40. Show up early for preshow dancing, Freddy’s blue-plate special and exotic drinks like the Taiwonon.
The Micro Zen Rock Garden may seem a sacrilege: a 6-by-10-inch “executive sandbox” replicating the 16th-century oasis at the Ryoanji temple in Kyoto. No matter. The kit (from Sarut, 800-345-6404) contains a wooden frame, white sand, a raking tool and six rocks. Pour in the sand and rake: this is the vast, eternal sea. Carefully place the rocks: these are the earth. Do it all “as slowly as possible.” Even the price is calming: $23.
Add some legs to the huge Georgia O’Keeffe: The Now York Years (Knopf/Callaway. $100) and you would have a coffee table, not just a book for one. You’d also have the best of the series (which includes “A Hundred Flowers” and “Georgia O’Keeffe in the West”) simply because it contains her best paintings, including the incredible “The Shelton with Sunspots” (1926). But an O’Keeffe book under the Kovacs lamp is like a ponytail on a bankruptcy lawyer: expected. For true cultural suavity, you have to turn to Richard Parks Bonington: On the Pleasures of Paintlng (Yale. $85). Bonington is one of those artists who get so overexposed in their time (“the most influential British artist of his era after Turner and Constable”) they are doomed to be forgotten (he died at 26 in 1828, so we look at Delacroix instead). Now Bonington’s getting hot again. The book is as solidly written as it is beautiful. It’ll nourish you long after the canapes have gone stale.
Winslow Homer, on the other hand, is a perennial. He never said much-to anyone, apparently-but he said a mouthful when he predicted (and we’re paraphrasing a bit), “Forget the rest, I will be remembered for my watercolors.” Exactly right. In Winslow Homer: Watemolors (Hugh Lauter Levin. $75), trees, boats, fishermen, women all look like trees and boats and so on, but they’re also pure color, pure form, the perfect marriage of intention and execution.
Such formalist beauty in photography is always unexpected, because the artist can’t make it. He has to find it. That’s what Henri Cartier-Bresson does in America In Passing (Bullfinch. $75), a weirdly peaceful set of images from the especially unpeaceful years after World War II. Like a graceful cat, Cartier-Bresson pounces again and again on moments that should be about Something Important-angry protesters, political conventions-and unearths unexpected beauties in a wave of picket signs and the tidy hats of Republican women.
For those who prefer the ridiculous over the sublime, how about “adult” comic books? Adult implies the wrong thing, so let’s just call ’em weird. Selecting from this huge field requires an eagle’s eye and a hyena’s humor. The best drawing style is Drew Friedman’s photo-pointillism in Worts and All (Penguin. $9.95). The stories (“I, Joey Heatherton” among them), however, are an acquired taste. By contrast, Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties (Penguin. $12.95), featuring Jules Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, is almost whole-earth wholesome. The dumpy li’l guy with the pencil mustache just wanders lower Manhattan wishing for things like public mustard fountains. If you insist on titillation, try Hearts of Sand (Catalan. $13.95), a translated French comic-book “novel” that’s a combination of “Casablanca” and “Blue Velvet.” Shows what can happen when your libido and inkwell stay out in the desert sun too long.
None of this inspired cartoon dementia would have been possible without Mad, whose rise from the nose-thumbing comic book your grandparents loved to hate (they couldn’t figure out what “potrzebie” meant) to its current settled status as the Walter Cronkite of satirical magazines is chronicled in Maria Reidelbach’s Completely Mad (Little, Brown. $39.95). The raw material is so good you almost hate to have it interrupted by historical analysis.
Although your local major museum does need the money, and while you might enjoy a gift-shop discount and a Chablis-’n’-pate preview of “Pewter Miniatures from Bavaria,” expand your esthetic horizons with an alternative space annual membership instead. Places like Hallwalls in Buffalo, N.Y., Artists Space in Manhattan, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, DiverseWorks in Houston, The Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara and The Capp Street Project in San Francisco are where the artists who drive Jesse Helms nuts get started. Arrive before the police do and see the work in real life, not just photocopied on a Rev. Donald Wildmon handout (average price: $35).
Besides irritating Philistines, art can convert the unbeliever, rally the troops … and win hands of poker. If you’re holding bona fide Michelangelo playing cards, that is. The Deity’s face backs one set, Adam’s is on the other (Piatnik, 800-962-3468. $10 for a two-deck set). And of course art can be therapeutic. Help dear ones soothe inner beasts or at least unleash artistic potential: give them the irresistible Color Collection (Xonex, 216-442-1600. $20). Packed in a sleek black case are watercolors, oil pastels, magic markers, colored pencils and crayons (a dozen of each). And if these dear ones have land, give them a “palette” of the Flowers of Nonet (White Swan, 800-233- 7926. $30), color-coded containers of flower seeds that bloom in the hues of the master’s garden at Giveny. Some of the 61 varieties are familiar, but when was the last time you planted Seine Valley poppies?
Forget all the glitzy, pretentious (and expensive) designer stuff of the ’80s; it’s time for a down-to-earth Christmas. You can find lots of nifty, sleek small items in museum and design specialty shops. One of our favorites: a slim, black double-blade razor (Travelshave, 514-8665112. $8) that’s only slightly larger than a Mont Blanc pen but holds enough shaving cream for 10 shaves in its handle. Or, if you insist on a little luxury, there’s the spacious stainless-steel cocktail shaker by Milan-based designer Matteo Thun (WMF Hutschenreuther, 800-999-6347 $90). Its undulating bulges supposedly make it ergonomic, but it reminds us of some of the puffed-up guys in Men! (Chronicle. $8.95), a book of duotone postcards of he-men from the ’20s. But we digress … Kids born with silver spoons in their mouths can really get a grip on Spoons to Brow With. The utensils won a prize from the Industrial Designers Society because the wide handle-in the shape of a bear, a bunny or a fish-is easy for little fists to grasp (Stelton USA, 212-683-5099. $88).
The same specialty shops are also troves of first-rate crafts. One-of-a-kind ceramic pieces like Anne Lloyd’s blue-skies-and puffy-clouds Magritte vase (The Whitney Museum Shop, N Y C $240)waft right over the line from craft to art.
William Morris railed against the Victorian fondness for reproducing furnishings from past eras, yet here we are, more than 100 years later, eating up reproductions of the English designer’s wallpapers and fabrics. But it figures: his richly colored patterns are nature-based. The man and his work are detailed in William Morris, Decor and Design by Elizabeth Wilhide (Abram. $45), and Arts and Crafts Carpets by Malcolm Haslam (Rizzoli. $65) celebrates the lush carpets of the international design movement Morris inspired. Vibrant replicas of the rugs are now in some major carpet stores ($2, 000 to $10, 000).
Talk about old-fashioned. When the snowy winds are howling, take a look at the sunny, neo-Victorian village detailed in Seaside, edited by David Mohney and Keller Easterling (Princeton Architectural Press. $39.95; paper $24.95). This is the first book devoted to the postmodern experimental community in the Florida panhandle, where the husband-and-wife planning team of Duany and Plater-Zyberk tested out its powerful-and simple-ideas for alternatives to our suburban sprawl.
Speaking of armchair-traveling, The Splender of France: Chatsaux, Mansions, and Coon. try Houses (Rizzoli. $110) provides a breathtaking tour. The 330 color photos of picture-perfect exteriors and gardens, and exquisite gilded, frescoed and tapestry-filled interiors are dazzling. (Don’t leave this on the seat of your Louis XVI fauteuil-it might not withstand the weight.)
Let’s face it: the true meaning of Christmas is lots and lots of crummy music, redeemed by traditional carols, Handel-and Phil Spector. And this year, by the Chieftains’ The Bells of Dublin (RCA), with the Irish folk ensemble and guests: Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Marianne Faithful. This something-for-everyone disc will also keep peace in the house. Equally Celtic and equally Christmassy is Celebration: Christmas Fanfares & Carols (Nimbus): the BBC Welsh Chorus sings such vernacular carols as the regal “Tua Bethlem Dref " and “Tawel Nos,” a lovely variation on “Silent Night.”
Most opera stars should resist the urge to record Christmas albums, but Christmas with Thomas Hampson (Teldec) is the best since Leontyne Price’s ’60s evergreen. Baritone Hampson serves up 21 songs, from “Adeste fideles” to “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” with the richness and spice of a plum pudding. Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle embrace music that knows no season on Spirituals In Concert (Deutsche Grammophon) with infectious abandon: sorrow songs, foot-stompers and a wickedly dishy “Scandalize My Name.” As the Welsh say, Haleliwia!
An opera about a woman who asks Herod for the head of John the Baptist may be a bit gory for the holiday season, but the new Salome, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli (2 CDs. Deutsche Grammophon), is the record of the year. In the Richard Strauss masterpiece, Cheryl Studer sings with a rare and steely sensuousness; she has the power to drive through the orchestra and the flexibility to float over it. Judy Garland’s legion of fans has remained loyal since her death in 1969, but Judy Garland: The One and Only (3 CDs. Capitol) may recruit new admirers. Her wit, intensity and clarity are all in full bloom in these recordings from the’ 50s and early’ 60s. She was surely the last singer who could’ve gotten away with a serious torch rendition of “Why Was I Born?” Billie Holiday gave a new voice to American song, but her life finally undermined her voice. In The Legacy 1933-1958 (3 CDs. Columbia)–Only two of the 70 tracks were cut after 1942-she’s brave, breezy, knowingly innocent. In The Complete Dacca Recordings (2 CDs. GRP), from 1944 to 1950, she’s still in good form, but Lady In Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years (2 CDs. Verve) is for fans of tragedy only. The Patsy Cline Collection (4 CDs. MCA) has 104 cuts by the doomed diva of country. Not just “Crazy” and “Sweet Dreams,” but “Crazy Dreams” and “Crazy Arms.” Someone you know will be … wild about it.
“A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector,” released in 1963, remains the one rock Christmas album worth hearing. The Ronettes’ “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” will still shiver your tinsel. This and three more CDs of classic Spector productions return on Back to Mono (1958-1969) (4 CDs. ABKCO). Weird pop didn’t die with Spector’s three-minute wall-of-sound operettas: it went global. A Luaka Bop Compilation (Warner), a sampler from David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, offers the samba of Rio’s Jorge Ben, the roof-blowing mambo of Havana’s Conjunto Rumbarana-and Byrne’s own hodgepodge of idioms. What distinguishes Luaka Bop from more sobersided world-beat labels is Byrne’s wittily impure ear.
Count Basie was slicker than the Kansas City original, but the Count’s bands were always lean and mean. As sportscasters say, they came to play. In the late ‘5Os and early ’60s, Basie was best heard live, and there was no available format expansive enough to capture his band stretching out. Until now. Live Roulette Recordings (8 CDs, 12 LPs. Mosaic. 203-3277111) is a mother lode of highenergy arrangements and great playing. It’s also a triumph of packaging, by a strictly mailorder archival outfit that restores and reissues (and, in this case, unveils) out-of-print jazz and blues classics in the classiest manner possible.
Why another Annie Get Your Gun (Angel/EMI)when the original cast recording with the irreplaceable Ethel Merman is still around? To remind us how marvelous Irving Berlin’s score is. Sweet-and-sassy Kim Criswell as Annie Oakley and Thomas Hampson as a creamy-voiced Frank Butler deliver firstrate performances. But suppose you’d forgot ten Berlin wrote “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” or for which show, or who sang it. Are your days too busy for rifling through a stack of books to learn who wrote, say, “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day”?’ You need Lissauer’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music In America: 1888 to the Present (Paragon. $135). Robert Lissauer covers everything from soul to rock to show tunes in a 1,687-page volume with 19,000 plus titles. (*Answer: Maurice Sigler, Al Hoffman and Mabel Wayne, 1934.)
The big news for film buffs (as opposed to movie fans) is the long-awaited video release of Marcel Carne’s 1945 romantic epic Children of Paradise (Home Vision Cinema. $79.95)fully restored to 195 minutes, with newly translated subtitles. Starring Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault, and set in Paris’s theater world of the 1800s, the film was made under incredible hardships during the Nazi occupation. The all-time favorite of many, it’s sometimes called “the French ‘Gone With the Wind’.” Also, for cineastes, we recommend Jean Cocteau’s poetic version of Beauty and the Beast (Embassy Home Entertainment. $39.95) from 1946 with Jean Marais as the Beast. Then you’ll be able to say smartly at cocktail parties, “Oh, you mean the Disney version.”
Speaking of Disney, the good news is that Fantasia, the beloved animated celebration of classical music, will finally be available for holiday gift giving this year (Walt Disney Home Video. $24.99 for video alone, $99.99 for Deluxe Collector’s package; also on laser disc). The bad news is that this will be the first and last time the original will be offered for home viewing. Furthermore, the next time the landmark feature is released theatrically, in 1996 or 1997, it will appear under the title “Fantasia Continued,” with some of the eight original sequences replaced by new selections. NEWSWEEK to Disney: in our opinion, the apprentice sorcerer with the big ears has an ironclad no-cut contract.
If your kids can do their homework in front of their favorite tapes, there’s no reasons why you can’t read about movies while you’re watching them. Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics’ Video Guide to Foreign Films (Mercury House. $14.95) might sound soporific, but it’s actually a generous (568 pages) compilation of very readable reviews. Kael, Sarris, Denby, Ebert, Rafferty, Schickel and (ahem!) this magazine’s film critic are all represented. They certainly remember when college kids in the 1960s flocked to revival houses to see old Humphrey Bogart flicks and went home to dorm rooms plastered with posters of the star who could dangle a ciggie from his lip like a bungee diver from a bridge. If you remember the revivals or if–congratulations-you went to Bogie films when they were new, take a look at a lean, elegant new photo book, Humphrey Bogart: Take It & Like It (Grove Weidenfeld. $30). Jonathan Coe offers a smooth essay to tie together the 150 lacquered pix. Who knew the great tough guy had an early Valentino phase, smooching giddy dames in Broadway shows?
Spoons baby can get a grip on (left), Seaside, the neo-Victorian experimental community on Florida’s panhandle (top), Lloyd’s finely handcrafted ‘cloud’vase (STEVEN BROOKE; MARRIA FERRARI)
