Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Big Books, Cookbooks

Matt Kish, illustration for page 357 of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, from his book
Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, October, 2011, Tin House Books.

When I worked at The Bookworks we had a regular customer who came in for big books only. He called in advance and we set aside stacks of larger-than-average books in all categories. Photography, art, cooking. Gardening, exercise, film. Compendiums (big compendiums only). The selected big books were taken abroad for our customer's foreign customers, all of whom were looking for big American books. (If you're in Chicago, Bookworks is a great stop for Christmas shopping—great deals on recently released books in perfect condition,  classics and oddities of all description, a careful selection of books big and small.)

I was just in The Book Table in Oak Park and had to exercise great restraint to keep myself from "picking up" Matt Kish's Moby Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. This book is now on The A List. What a fantastic, imagination-tickling, satisfying book. This big beauty would be a perfect gift for artists, sure, and for fans of Melville, literature generally, illustration, art, design, process, personal challenges. This book will delight a motley yet sophisticated lot of folks. The trailer from publisher Tin House gives a tasty taste:



Kish's undertaking is the fruit of an ambitious self-generated art prompt, and the proof in the prompt pudding. Prompts are just ideas laid out like scaffolding and this is the kind of project that can niggle a lot of fellow artists/writers toward conceiving some tapping framework to encourage the creative sugar sap to flow. Though not evidencing Kish's fab use of color, the image below is one of my favorite illustration/quote pairings, not in the least because it selects such wonderfully poetic lines to sketch (there are so many cool drawings, so there are lots of favorites):

"But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom." -Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. Page 322 Artwork by Matt Kish.

If you're not close to Oak Park's book Table, you can order Kish's leviathan direct from Tin House as well. And check out Kish's website, blog, and Etsy shop for projects, his notes on process, and wonderful art for sale at incredibly low prices. I was reading some of Kish's blog before posting on this and particularly enjoyed his posts on book covers (appearing first on the Tin House blog). Kish's love of vintage mass market fantasy covers comes through in the Moby-Dick illustrations. I love that his Dec. 16 post touts one of the H.P. Lovecraft covers that Annie Heckman included in her contributions to the Chicago Publishes What Makes a Beautiful (and Marketable) Book? forum I wrote on recently (I highlighted two of the other Mountains of Madness covers Heckman showed; Lovecraft obviously inspires visual artists).

I've run the clock down so my 12 Days of Christmas Books posts will serve multiple/overlapping category offerings these days. . . .

Also tempting at The Book Table, India: The Cookbook, the fourteenth cookbook authored by Professor Pushpesh Pant, is an appealingly big book in its own right, packed in a printed, rice-carrier-style bag. With heft and the great design that characterizes publisher Phaidon's catalog, India: The Cookbook covers all of India's diverse cuisine regions and compiles Pant's twenty years of culinary research. (Cookbook, big book, compendium.) The book garnered the award for 'Best Indian Cuisine Cookbook in the World' at the 2011 Gourmand Cookbook Awards.

Pant's newest also shared the NYT's list of the year's best cookbooks with At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. I have a few Indian cookbooks and like to cook Indian somewhat regularly. I've turned to my text-only Madhur Jaffrey's Spice Kitchen: An Introduction to Indian Spices in 50 Simple Recipes nineteen times out of twenty over the course of the last twenty years when cooking Indian; I usually require pics, but this little sampler has me and my other very fine Indian cookbooks sit on the shelf, perfectly clean, virtually unused. I have given Jaffrey's cookbooks as gifts many times. One friend still thanks me for his Jaffrey cookbook eight years later. So, experience tells me that I don't need a new Indian cookbook. Still, India handsomely commands immediate "must-have" status.

Fish in Red Chili Chutney, India: The Cookbook (via http://www.indiawest.com)

The IndiaWest online community Web site features a few recipes from Pant's India; if you're finicky about cookbooks and not drawn in by looks alone you can try one or two dishes before committing. Make a warming winter fish dinner, using Great Lakes whitefish:

Fish in Red Chili Chutney
Origin: Coastal

Preparation time: 25-30 minutes, plus standing time

Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

1 lb 10 oz skinless, firm white fish fillets, trimmed

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

salt

For the marinade

1 level teaspoon ground turmeric*

4 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon lime juice

½ teaspoon sugar

For the red spice paste

6 dried red chilies

1/3 cup dried flake coconut

1 teaspoon malt (white) vinegar

* turmeric is a spice made from the rhizome of the turmeric plant, which is ground to make a bright yellow powder. It has a warm, dry flavour and is found in almost all curries and pickles. It also has antiseptic properties. 

Cooking Instructions:

Mix the turmeric, garlic, lime juice, sugar and a little salt together in a bowl. Put the fish in a large shallow dish and rub the fish with the turmeric mixture, then cover and set aside in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

To make the red spice paste, put the dried red chilies, desiccated coconut and vinegar in a food processor or small blender and process to make a paste, adding a little water only if necessary. 

Heat the oil in a pan over high heat, add the red spice paste and stir-fry lightly for about 1 minute, ensuring the bright red colour is not lost due to browning. Reduce the heat, add the fish with ½ cup water, stir and simmer for 7-8 minutes, or until the fish is cooked.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Frame Publishers (I Diverge)

As soon as Frame Publishers' Frameweb newsletter pops up in my inbox I minimize any paid-work windows and take an invigorating break to check out their new art/architecture/design beauties. Today's brought wind of Jonathan Harris's Balloons of Buthan, in which the artist seeks to measure happiness using balloons as a quantitative measure, on a scale from one to ten. Immediately above, "Restaurant owner Khandu shows his level of happiness." The photographs are captivating, and at the Balloons of Bhutan Web site Harris has created a deeper interactive multimedia exploration, including interviews, audio, and statistics. Each of the 117 participants also wrote a wish on one balloon, and the balloons were strung along prayer flags at the conclusion of the project. While the colorful balloons make for whimsy and cheer, the material does not avoid the more bittersweet stream that courses through the study. One man's balloon wish reads, "I want to go with you so I have a place to live." And when we see participants holding fewer than five balloons, we are able to presume (with an admixture of relief) that Harris hasn't fluffed up the happiness level of the Himalayan characters who are his subject (along with happiness and other more general and elusive states and measures).

Check out Harris's website (linked above) to see his webby/tech-related art/thought and photo projects, and to peek into his handwritten, handdrawn sketchbooks. 

I meet people. One at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and put their own in their place. They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons. They appear in every pause and come out when I am in doubt and fill all the empty space. I shake and say to myself for a long time: good, really good. —Talo/The House

(Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Crystal Eye Ltd, Helsinki.)

A month back I saw "Talo/The House" (2002), a three-channel video installation by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, at the Art Institute. Ahtila drew on research and interviews with individuals suffering psychotic disorders for her work, which is rendered with high production values, pretty sets and mise-en-scène, to make a dreamlike experience for a viewer, one part Anthropologie, two parts Roman Polanski. The dream bridges the divide between those Ahtila interviewed and the viewer on the bench in a darkened room in the corner of an art museum. I looked Ahtila up and read a NYT piece on an exhibition that came down Dec. 3.

Marian Goodman Gallery was showing two projections: "The Annunciation," enacted by non-actors (all women, excepting one, who had experienced addictions); and "Horizontal," which NYT writer Ken Johnson described as "representing a tall spruce tree rotated 90 degrees . . . six vertical projections, each showing a section of the tree, it spreads more than 35 feet across one wall. With its wind-blown branches heaving and swaying and its trunk whipping up and down, it looks more animal than plant, as if it were a great, arboreal whale." Sounds great. There's never enough (really top) video art around.

So, when that week's Frameweb email came through featuring Pipilotti Rist, my longtime (once?) favorite video artist, I went from, "Oh, I guess I won't unsubscribe," to "Now I definitely won't unsubscribe." The newsletter and website feature an agenda section that trots out mentions of a fine stable of very contemporary artists. I was lucky to catch a Rist installation in Chicago soon after moving to the city (maybe "Sip My Ocean"?), and then saw and loved "Ever Is Over All," a giant-flower-smashing-car-windows number at MOMA a few years later—uncannily, giddily uplifting (a bit of a reenactment below). The "Agenda" covered her first solo show in Italy, ending this weekend.

The divergence . . .  I am actually touting a magazine here, versus a book; a magazine available in a digital format no less (in addition to print, but given the cost of international subscriptions a digital option is a coup). Definitely peruse Frame's books offerings; if you have a serious interior designer on your gift list you can pull out the stops and make his or her season. But for uber-contemporary art lovers who blur the "line" between fine art and applied arts and design, a subscription to ELEPHANT is in order.

"A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation." Thanks, NYT.

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Collectible

Visit Dawsons' Bookshop online for rare books, particularly art, photography, and So-Cal/Western Americana history, and for awesome fine art photography. Seriously cool stuff. If you are not sure what you're looking for, sign up to receive the Dawsons' emails right away and you will receive periodic highlights from the collection for sale (not too many and always intriguing; you'll be glad to find these in your inbox).

There are offerings to suit most wallets. From more humbly fascinating items like Marcia Rittenhouse Wynn's turn-of the century stories set in the Upper Mojave Desert in a first edition (1945) with a gorgeous screenprinted cover (above), to "the post-Provoke masterpiece of Japanese photobooks," Masahisa Fukase's Karasu (Ravens) (below).

Proprietor/curator Michael Dawson also offers museum quality art photographs. Photographers represented range from the iconic, including Ansel Adams, to deserving lesser-knowns. Currently the Web site features the Sanford H. Roth collection; Roth moved from New York to Paris where he fell in with and photographed the culturati who would become lifelong friends, including Colette, Picasso, and Cocteau. Roth went on to photograph film stars in Hollywood and Eurpope, becoming famous for his portraits of James Dean.

Bastille day parade - 1950-55. Sanford H. Roth

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Photography

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking, Above, 1871, Albumen print, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Check out the Art Tattler International Web site for a great preview.

Day one in twelve days of books from my wishlist.

Two gorgeous photography books available in the Art Institute gift shop, good for a destination shopping trip.

Check out the exhibit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. Then pick up the book: Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan for any fans of photography generally, history, Western Americana. General book and art lovers should find interest in O'Sullivan's photos too; much of his work finds men (and their essentials and accoutrements for survival and exploration) dwarfed within awesome, overwhelming landscapes, beautiful, certainly, and the images are charged with a current of foreboding. Both the "pure" landscapes and views incorporating the human form similarly suggest stories and spark the imagination.

You can order direct from Yale Univ. Press too.

 
























Richard Misrach is a longtime favorite. Misrach's 2010 book Destroy This Memory looks at post-Katrina New Orleans. Misrach's eye is unique, his technique is dropdead gorgeous (let's just say he is considered responsible for "bringing color photography back"), and his subjects are meat and gristle, so his books are all substantial, worth the investment and deserving permanent shelfspace, as the images bear ongoing examination.

In his Modern Art Notes for the Artinfo blog, Tyler Green describes Misrach's gestalt for his Katrina book: "Misrach’s book focuses not on the totality of the devastation but on one way New Orleanians responded to it. . . . New Orleanians spray-painted messages on their homes, cars and propped-up boards of plywood. The graffiti are warnings, announcements, pleas and even sly jokes shared with neighbors, government, city officials and neighbors. They are among New Orleanians’ first written responses to their hell."

 

According to Green: "Misrach didn’t just make his pictures into a book, he printed them and gifted full sets of prints to five museums that serve as storehouses of our visual record of ourselves and our culture: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the MFA Houston, SFMOMA and the New Orleans Museum of Art.  Misrach is also donating the royalties from book sales to the Make it Right Foundation, which is active in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. (Readers may also click here to give to Make it Right.)"

If you're not in Chicago, or you can't make a visit to the Art Insitutitue, Destroy This Memory is offered at a nice sale price via the publisher at: Aperture Foundation (while you're there, if you subscribe to the magazine, at a 50% discount, you get a free copy of Aperture's Masters of Photography series: Paul Strand with your subscription). 

“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.”—Richard Misrach 

(If you do make it to the museum, you can always pick up a membership for someone you love, a year's worth of beauty and its effects.)

Book Design Rising

On the front page of today's NYT Julie Bosman's "Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers" outlines the newly [re]trending wisdom that sees publishers making books more beautiful again as readers elect highly designed print objects in making print purchases. The photo accompanying the NYT article features Design Sponge at Home, which I picked up off a cart at the library yesterday, after it caught my eye with its clean red heft. I didn't take it home with me (even on loan) but I did file it away as a book to pick up in the future, and it only darted onto my radar via its physicality.

On Thursday I met folks from my writing group at an edition of the Chicago Artists Resource/At Work Forum hosted by Chicago Publishes: “What Makes a Beautiful (and Marketable) Book?”A panel comprising three professionals working in different areas of print publishing discussed the question of beauty versus marketability; though the discussion was framed to look at tension between the two concerns, the panel members pretty immediately established that today, due in part to competition from e-books/readers, "print design matters more than ever." Representing the marketing perspective, Ellen Gibson, Regional Marketing Manager at the University of Chicago Press was quick to illustrate this with examples from the UC catalog, from the ubiquitous Chicago Manual of Style remade to a sharp new edition of The Iliad. Jill Bough's Donkey, also pictured below, was not mentioned, but I discovered it on the UC site as they distribute the Reaktion Books Animal series. Love it. Now I can add all forty-seven heavily illustrated species-scopics to my wishlist, from Charlotte Sleigh's Ant to Garry Marvin's Wolf.

Gibson also discussed two very appealing illustrated guides to Field Museum collections of insects, spiders, and insect and bird architecture from Illinois, featuring paintings by Peggy Mcnamara.The two books are significant in that the slightly spendier hardcover second volume found more sales than the more affordable first volume, released with a handy flex cover common in field guides (both have now been added to my to-give Christmas list). 


James Goggin, designer and Director of Design, Print and Digital Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago projected a number of very cool covers from highbrow mass market editions of culture/media/art/fiction (now) classics sporting the sleek mod designs that keep people talking (and blogging) about them decades after.

Goggin used this edition of The Medium is the Massage [Smashing Magazine on McLuhan and the message today] as an example, along with a couple of Bucky Fuller books. He did not use Dreadful Summit, but I found it while I was poking around (amidst a nice collection of vintage Penguin and Pelican compiled by an Italian designer I don't know, Paulo Gabriel). Goggin's design for The White Boy Shuffle shows that his love of type and a classic era of book cover illustration pay off in the contemporary.

Though the inexpensive, highly portable editions Goggin is influenced by disappeared in the States after their heyday in the '60s and '70s, the Japanese mass market bunkobon format continues to thrive (typically used for novels). Goggin brought in an example, pointing out that the tiny book proffered both slipcover and built-in ribbon bookmark, and used a bunkobon edition of Yukio Mishima photographs as an example of the range of subject matter deemed appropriate for publication in the format. I couldn't find a good history/overview of bunkobon to link to, but I did find Obun Printing, a company that sells "Designer book covers: T-shirts for your books. . . . for small-format paperbacks (bunko-bon) and for slightly larger general-issue books (shinsho-bon)." Features listed on the website include: "our original emotional value printing." The Obun Web site is fun to explore; look for the monthly senryu.

Goggin quoted Clive Thompson and Charles Eames to the point:

We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading. —Thomspon, Wired, May, 22, 2009

I don't remember being forced to accept compromises, but I've willingly accepted constraints. —Eames

Annie Heckman, artist, book designer, and founder of Stepsister Press, started off talking about the use of a well-known paperback edition of The Stranger in the film Jacob's Ladder, to get at the idea of the individual bonding with books (and other objects) as a significant act of identity and connection. Then she showed a diversity of cover design interpretations. Heckman asked how many people in the audience had read The Stranger and I was surprised that only around half of the hundred or so bookish crowd raised their hands (maybe it was an issue of issues with hand raising?).

Next, Heckman went on to show an array of covers for H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (see top) to the same point (I hope Guillermo del Toro gets to make his adaptation of ATMOM!). Going into the slide show Heckman asked how many in the audience had read Lovecraft, and my friend Ted and I raised our hands. That's pretty much it. It's hard to imagine that Lovecraft readers would be unwilling to "represent." I am only a mild fan, but by chance my group was to be looking at a rough draft of a new poem of mine titled "call of cthulhu" (about the strangeness of reading fiction about horrible incidents in order to escape daily life) later in evening. Possibly, this coincidence had shifted the balance of the universe and any small legion of fellow Lovecraft readers had been kept away lest the weight of us be too much. . . .

Stay tuned for my parade of mouth-watering Christmas-list books!

One of Heckman's animations, ruminating on a decomposing mouse, change in general, Becoming Formless (Heckman's animation YouTube channel):

Fulk Nerra

I just started a history of The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge. It's off to a raring start, setting the pre-Crusades scene with the tale of Fulk Nerra:

In the year 1000 , the county of Anjou (in west-central France) was ruled by Fulk Nerra (987–1040), a brutal and rapacious warlord. Fulk spent most of his fifty-three years in power locked in near-constant struggle: fighting on every front to retain control of his unruly county; scheming to preserve his independence from the feeble French monarchy; and preying upon his neighbors in search of land and plunder. He was a man accustomed to violence, both on and off the battlefield—capable of burning his wife at the stake for adultery and of orchestrating the ruthless murder of a royal courtier.

But for all the blood on his hands, Fulk was also a committed Christian—one who recognised that his brutish ways were, by the tenets of his faith, inherently sinful, and thus might lead to his eternal damnation. The count himself admitted in a letter that he had 'caused a great deal of bloodshed in various battles' and was therefore 'terrified by the fear of Hell'. In the hope of purifying his soul, he made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, more than 2,000 miles away. On the last of these journeys, now an old man, Fulk was said to have been led naked to the Holy Sepulchre--the site of Jesus' death and resurrection—with a leash around his neck, being beaten by his servant while he begged Christ for forgiveness.

While the story is accessible in a "Johnny Depp-could-play-Fulk-Nerra-in-the-movie" way, I've been mulling over Fulk's life and excesses for days. The violence, even evil; the companion remorse, sense of culpability, and epic and increasingly desperate acts of penitence. The first pilgrimage didn't mend Fulk's ways; and the second pilgrimage didn't mend Fulk's ways; it's so "us" that there is a third pilgrimage.

Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Bibliotheque des Croisades.

W.U.D. World Upside Down

When I started putting these pics up months ago, I noted that I should've been in the kitchen concocting mousse thon à la pomme verte (tuna mousse with green apple, from the first Chocolate & Zucchini cookbook) for a birthday/belated Bastille Day soirette. . . .

Kennedy and I had just spent a weekend camping on the Black River near Black River Falls. Our site was right on the river. Couldn't stop looking.

Swam in the river, which runs disconcertingly rusty red as it is black. It would be nice to call it "tea" color but it's weirder. The color comes from "decomposing organic matter"—neither of us could remember if anyone posited theories about the murderous, perilous Wisconsin Death Trip years, linking the area insanity to the water.

Went back about a month later—too cold to swim in the river, just as eye-pleasing.

I swear I read some Neil Gaiman thing online where he used the acronym W.U.D. for World Upside Down. I like a good acronym, but now I can't find the interview or reference, and just find links to things like, "How Assassin's Creed Flipped My World Upside Down," various pop songs, Monde a l'envers (Your source for unique mechanical cards and automata. Surrender to the power of paper!), and the British ballad/nursery rhyme, with various discrete versions/lyrics, from"The wine pot shall clinke, we will feast and drinke./And then strange motions will abound." to "If the buttercups buzzed after the bee," et cetera.

I loved the Midwest portions in Gaiman's American Gods (and all the other portions). Wisconsin and environs in all the mundane, morbidity, color, horror, and sweetness.

We were good about getting out for brief forays into the Midwest wilds this summer. After our last trip, a night camping in SW Michigan near Warren Dunes, we stopped at a small county fair on the way home. There were the usual attractions, animals, rides, fried pickles, and also displays of entries in sundry competitions including houseplants, photos, garden produce, and a miscellaneous category. Yipes. Taxidermy dog face.

And more doggies, more enticingly displayed (though also with a hint of horror, possibly only due to TDF), but I had already spent my fair dollars feeding the pygmy goats.

Fruit of the Temporary Amazon Purchasing Hold

In terms of print, decided to limit myself to buying in bookstores, buying from publishers, and borrowing from the library, for now.

I can get quite a bit of good stuff via inter-library loan. Then, browsing for poetry in the library is not ideal, but it can bear fruit. Found and enjoyed Zach Savich's Annulments. The format and form are nice; the book's small and squarish and the poetry is sparse on the page (I'm thinking of a dwarf conifer garden, with perfect, sometimes funny, sometimes gorgeous little trees and plenty of open space for rocks or mulch in between), such as, set apart: "Car going faster or posts grown closer together. Men pronouncing the names of fish."

I particularly liked "Real Time," the end:  

Reading together is mostly looking up 

The world a more literal place in the morning 

Standing not with a loaf but the flour

Zach Savich, Annulments, UP of Colorado, 2010.

Noir City: Newspaper Noir

The Music Box Theatre teamed with the Film Noir Foundation to present the third annual Noir City: Chicago film festival August 12th through the 18th. The fest presents a lot of films unavailable on DVD, a boon for fans of the genre who have worked the home viewing catalog pretty deeply. It's so fabulous to see a noir film on the big screen in a restored print; I imagine that some noir films that have floundered for me at home would prove much more serviceable screened and viewed as intended.

I was able to make it for my top-choice double-feature bill: newspaper noir, both unavailable on DVD, and each centered on super leads, Alan Ladd and Humphrey Bogart.

CHICAGO DEADLINE screened once during the fest. When we arrived at the theater there was a line down the block. It reminded me of how it felt to see movies when I was young, before home viewing generally thinned the theater crowds. I try to see a movie or two at the int'l film fest every year, in part to tap into the same gathering anticipatory susurration. CD offered the gratifying Chicago backdrops the audience had turned out to see. Ladd did not disappoint, his charm-grounded-in-sorrow particularly apt for this storyline in which Donna Reed plays a nuanced noir role, the soft, doomed Rosita Jean D'Ur,  a reversal from the roles I think of her in and in counterpoint to sparkling June Havoc who gets the happier ending here. Though some of the dialog suggests media critique (with unavoidable resonances with the current tabloid scandals), the performances riveted my attention in the characters' dramas and the newsie aspect of the film served more as fun trimmings for me.

CHICAGO DEADLINE, 1949, Director: Lewis Allen (thanks to retrografix blog for hard to find pics).

DEADLINE, U.S.A., directed by Richard Brooks, stars Humphrey Bogart as Ed "Hutch" Hutcheson, our editor-hero in an unabashed tribute to newspaper media. It's eerie to watch a "funeral for the press," made in 1952. In one shot, there's a sign posted in the printing room, visible behind Bogart/Hutch, that says something along the lines of: ""Newspapers Make Jobs" (I can't find a still or reference to get it exactly; should've jotted it down); this strand throughout contributes to the time warp effect that adds a layer of interest to an already engaging film. This is such a great Bogart role; it's boggling that this is not yet on DVD. My susceptible mind runs, momentarily, to kooky anti-media conspiracies. Ethyl Barrymore's media matron backs Bogart robustly and DEADLINE, set in Every-city, U.S.A., features a baddy politician Thomas Rienzi (Martin Gabel). Best editor versus mobster scene ever:



If you're interested in noir broadly, definitely check out the Film Noir Foundation. They offer a—now quarterly electronic—magazine with hooky articles, such as, The Heaviest of Them All: The Film Noir Legacy of Raymond Burr (on his baddie roles, pre-Perry Mason). The site also posts a monthly listing of Film Noir and Neo-Noir on TV. I dawdled posting, so I wasn't able to get this up before another great newsie noir screened on Fox: CALL NORTHSIDE 777, starring Jimmy Stewart and great views of the Windy City, based on a true story, and available via Chicago Public Library and likely through Netflix. Also screened on Fox this month (do we give Fox points for screening good noir?): I WAKE UP SCREAMING (1949), a really fun oddball noir (almost a musical noir, with a disconcertingly prevalent use of an "Over the Rainbow" instrumental) also available on DVD. So, good stuff on your telly. And save the dates for next year's Noir City fest! (This year a pass to see all 16 films went for an unbelievable $50.)

Given my penchant for print and justice, newspaper noir holds a lot of extra charm in an already fave field for me. I am guessing that with restored film prints now, we'll see CHICAGO DEADLINE and DEADLINE U.S.A. on DVD soon. In the meantime, Robert Feder created a shortlist of newsroom-centric flicks for TIME OUT CHICAGO last year; many of the films are noir; most are accessible now.

Looking Up, Headless

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, Antigua, Guatemala.

In Antigua, Kennedy and I always stay in Hotel Casa Santa Lucia #3, which overlooks the "wedding cake church," La Merced. (In this photo though, I am standing right at the front of the church, underlooking.)

I don't remember where in Antigua I found these headless figures. I'll have to look for them next trip. Meantime, I am adding labels to my posts, as I can now officially add a "headless" label, with two bonafide posts related.

The Writing Wall: Antigua, Lithuania, North Korea Set in Stone

Old wall, Antigua.

As opposed to much of what I've seen in Central America, the architecture in Antigua ranges mostly from old to very old. The walls are works of art. Kennedy and I are among the many who love wall photos generally. Kennedy has an old Dover book devoted entirely to wall photos, drawn on for more than one Thin Man gig poster. I can't find this book online, and I can't find it on our shelf of books-for-visual-inspiration either, leading me to the dread conclusion that I may have unaccountably shed it during one of the great purges. Hopefully a Thorough Search will turn it up in the Wrong Place.

One of the things I enjoy about the blog is the chain link affect, when folks share related/inspired items after a post, and when previously encountered tidbits nest nicely with a current musing. A friend brought up Polish artist Nicolas Grospierre's work after the Sonsonate post and my mention of Frédéric Chaubin. I hadn't been familiar previously, and I love his work—so happy for the introduction. In addition to many bittersweetly striking projects, such as featured below, Grospierre made a gift of a photo of a patinaed wall to a writer friend, to serve as inspiration. You can see The Writing Wall on his website, along with his reasoning for choosing the image.

Photo from the project Hydroklinika, Nicolas Grospierre.

Grospierre's description for the Hydroklinika project:

The balneological hospital of Druskinnikai in Lithuania, designed by A. and R. Silinskas was built in 1976-81. Having served for merely 20 years, it was shut down and destoyed in 2005, to be replaced by a (probably more) profitable water-amusement park. Hydroklinika is an attempt at documenting the hospital through a global, objective and systematic approach. Therefore, no part of the building, was neglected and all were photographed likewise.

Before I started putting up the pics from Central America, my dad shared a link to an Alan Taylor/In Focus piece in The Atlantic featuring fantastic photos of North Korea by David Guttenfelder.

Original caption: "A statue known as the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification, which symbolizes the hope for eventual reunification of the two Koreas, arches over a highway at the edge of Pyongyang, North Korea, seen on April 18, 2011. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)"

For me, this arch is another example of the architecture of hopeful aspiration that pops up all over the world—on one level all tingly-cool, regardless of the all-important technicalities that are the original purpose, message, inspiration.

In Antigua sacred/religious architecture stands out. (More pics next post.)

Cross, Antigua.

I like the little clump of vegetation growing on the right arm of the cross. At full size, you can make out the very delicate detail of the plant life, in a nice contrast to the very bold lines of the cross and its ball base. Clumps and patches of vegetation, often flowering, affix themselves to all the walls and stationary objects in Antigua. The color and contrast in this picture have not been touched; the sky is a typical, dramatic Antigua sky.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I finally watched the trailer for the BBC documentary looking at our relationship with computers, and other mammals, titled for Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." My dad pointed me to it sometime back via Poetry's Harriet blog. The trailer transmits like a poem for me, a kind of video/film/poem amalgam I'd like to see (make?) more of.

Moth at bedtime, El Zonte, El Salvador

This is a bit fuzzy but if you look really closely the moth seems to have red-eye, which is funny. I took this pic about 4 years back, when we had the chance to stay with our friends in El Salvador for a glorious three week stretch. That night I was reading The Shape of Water, the first book in Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano series (I now have a "celebrity" crush on Luca Zingaretti's TV Salvo); I remember because the cover of the book appears in another, fuzzier photo of the moth. I wish I could have caught the sound of the ocean in the picture; reading in bed with the sound of the ocean washing around my consciousness is about as good as it gets.

Horse in a rainbow bridle, Chiltiupán, El Salvador

We've gone to the little mountain community Chiltiupán to walk around the steep streets, buy fresh cheese from townswomen carrying it wrapped in large leaves; we've also tagged along when our friends have had to take care of business there—trash collection, water bills, et cetera, as Chiltiupán is the municipal center in their region. Everybody stares at Kennedy, we think because of his height. It's friendly, with some very shy giggles and smiles from the children.

Sonsonate

We're going through our accumulated pics from trips to El Salvador and Guatemala. There's not a lot of colonial architecture in El Salvador—my eye really enjoys crumbling modernity in spite of the economic/social implications. Sonsonate, the euphonious name belies; it's a hot, gritty city with not much to draw those without business there. We've passed through numerous times and made a trip to see a fine Semana Santa procession; this building caught my attention. The building reminds me of (though not quite on par with) Frédéric Chaubin's photos of mind-tickling Soviet architecture, published by Taschen in CCCP: Cosmic Commuinst Constructions Photographed. I like the pigeon keeping watch in the upper hole-window.