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.