1001 Albums
You Must Hear Before You Die edited by Robert Dimery (Universe)
This book made me wonder if I know music as well as I think I do. Of
the 1001 albums covered here, I own about 20. Is that shameful? I don't
know. One thing I do know is that this book is as essential as the
music it celebrates. In short essays by some of the world's best music
critics, this book is divided into decades, from the 1950s to the
2000s, with scores and scores of albums covered in pithy,
right-to-the-point reviews. Also included are covers, artist photos and
track listings (with the best tracks indicated). As comprehensive as it
all is, though I had to wonder why the editors left out one of this
century's greatest: Streisand. Love her or hate her, she was and is a
musical force to be reckoned with, and it is certainly necessary to
have included her here. The fact that she's not is a serious blemish on
what would otherwise be just about perfect. -- Tony Buchsbaum
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall (Universe)
I've read 60 of them, which seems pretty pathetic, but I'm happy with
that number. I'm also jazzed that some of my favorites are here. This,
a collection of insightful reviews by notable book critics, is a
wonderful compendium of all that’s beautiful about the written word.
You'll find fiction and non, arranged by year of original publication,
starting with Aesop's Fables,
published in 620 BCE. While many authors are represented many times,
some are mentioned just once. Some -- inexplicably -- not at all (I ask
you, Mr. Boxall, where’s Pat Conroy? Where’s Ayn Rand? Where's The
Bible?). Included are author portraits, cover art, quotations from the
books and author interviews, even stills from some of the films based
on these books. If you’re into the written word -- and I know you are
-- this is a book you've just got to see to believe. -- Tony
Buchsbaum
Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic by Anne Classen Knutson (Rizzoli)
Andrew Wyeth is an American icon, a contemporary painter who is unique
because while his work seems old -- and is certainly classic -- he
himself is still alive and painting. His has been an extraordinary
career. This past year, a collection of his work toured museums, and
this book is, essentially, the show’s catalog. The best of the best are
here, but there are also cogent, insightful essays about the man, his
life and his work. Included are several of the famous Helga Paintings,
which feature a neighbor of Wyeth’s. To me, the key to his work is its
iconography, which is somewhere between bleak and pure Americana. He
has a way with fabric, painting it with as much realism as a
photograph. I suggest that he’s not painting the curtain, say, but the
invisible currents of air that cause it to wave and billow. Both
starkly realist and suggestively impressionist, Wyeth is an original,
and his work -- especially the paintings gathered here -- are classics
of American artistic literature, as much so as the best of Hemingway or
Faulkner. Open this book and you’ll lose yourself ... happily. -- Tony
Buchsbaum
Cinema by the Bay by Sheerly Avni (George Lucas Books)
Hollywood, as is often said, is less about geography than it is about a
profession. If Hollywood is simply an industry, then it can be
practiced anywhere -- New York, Bombay, Austin, wherever. That was the
thinking behind such filmmakers as director Francis Ford Coppola and
producer Saul Zaentz when they chose San Francisco as their own
personal home base. Thirty years on, the Bay Area is a filmmaking
Mecca, especially for those who denounce Hollywood’s zany insanity as
distracting and far-removed from what filmmaking is all about. This
wonderful book assembles the studios, filmmakers and films that have
come from the Bay Area. Consider some of them: American Zoetrope,
Lucasfilm and Pixar. George Lucas, Coppola, Zaentz, Philip Kaufman,
Chris Columbus, Michael Ritchie and Wayne Wang. The
Godfather, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Star Wars, Toy Story,
The Black Stallion, Apocalypse Now, Lost in Translation, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Raiders of the
Lost Ark, Amadeus, The English Patient, Willow, Finding Nemo, Shrek.
These are not small films. These are films that have literally shaped
-- even reshaped -- “Hollywood.” This book is startling in its subtle
argument, brilliant in its illustration that while Hollywood is
generally about business, the Bay Area prides itself on a separateness
that allows it to be all about show. -- Tony Buchsbaum
The Complete Peanuts, 1959-1960 by Charles M. Schulz
(Fantagraphics)
For more than 20 years I have longed for a complete reprinting of every
single Peanuts strip. Two years ago Fantagraphics started doing just
that, at a rate of four years’ worth of strips per year -- and we’re
now getting to the part of Charles Schulz’s career I've been waiting
for. It’s at this point that Schulz nails the subtleties of the
relationships between the strip’s core characters, and his skills as a
draughtsman and cartoonist blend perfectly to create a style that is at
once simple and nuanced. (All of this is summed up perfectly in one
panel, which finds Linus quietly crying behind his house after Lucy’s
repeated assertion that she never wanted a brother and wishes he had
never been born. With about 40 pen strokes, Schulz captures the same
existential torment he’d been mining for gags for a week.) Amazingly,
Schulz sustained this level of brilliance for a good ten years, which
means that as pleasurable as this book is, there’s much more to come.
-- Emru Townsend Cuba by Korda by Christophe Loviny and Alessandra
Silvestri-Lévy, Photographs by Alberto Korda (Ocean Press)
There is an image of Che Geuvara that everyone has seen. It’s been
printed on T-shirts and posters, reproduced time and again in books and
magazines and newspapers. Even if his face means nothing to you, you’ve
seen this image. He is standing, a white background behind him, a beret
on his head and revolution in his eyes. He looks beautiful and, in
retrospect, he looks doomed. The photo was taken by Alberto Korda, born
Alberto Diaz Gutierrez in Havana in 1928. Korda, who died in 1999,
started out as a fashion photographer, later becoming the chief
photographic archivist of the Cuban revolution. None of his other work
is as well-known, or as iconic, as that shot of Guevara, but much of it
is just as powerful and all of it is just as skilled. Cuba by Korda
offers up a retrospective of the photographers work and includes his
early fashion photography as well as the proof sheet from which that
famous Guevara shot was taken. Cuba by Korda is an
extraordinary work, offering a glimpse into an unimaginable time in
Cuban history and showcasing the work of a photographer who is well
worth remembering. -- Aaron Blanton
The
Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art by Tamsin
Pickeral (Merrell) The Horse is a sensational book. In fact, it's difficult
to
imagine that there could be a work on this topic that would be better.
It has that something extra that takes the book from being merely
pretty and interesting and turns it into something extraordinary. That
something extra can be summed up mostly simply by two words: Tamsin
Pickeral. Pickeral is a writer who specializes in both horses and art.
Most of the time those two interests don't overlap in her projects. In
2005 she produced two books: Turner, Whistler, Monet and Charles
Rennie Mackintosh. In the near future, she'll see the publication
of The Horse Owner's Bible.
Clearly, the two 2005 titles required expertise in various aspects of
the art world. And no one need attempt writing anything called The
Horse Owner's Bible without
a great deal of knowledge about horses. These twinned areas of
expertise are beautifully blended -- and readily seen -- in The
Horse.
It's feasible that an author could have produced a book on this theme
with a great deal of knowledge in one area and not the other, but it
wouldn't have been this book: it wouldn't have had that extraordinary
something extra. -- Aaron Blanton
Horus Vol. 1
by Johane Matte (Rufftoon)
First, a disclaimer: Horus
creator Johane Matte is a friend of mine. Second, a confession: When I
finally sat down to read the first volume of her self-published
mini-comic, I was so taken by it that I immediately read it again from
cover to cover. Combining her love of Egyptology and French/Belgian
graphic novels (_bandes dessinées_ or _BD_) along with her
training in
animation and cartooning, Matte's creation skilfully blends humour,
adventure and drama while sneaking in a little education about ancient
Egypt along the way. Quite simply, this is one of the best comics I
have read in years. -- Emru Townsend Lissa Hunter: Histories Real & Imagined by Abby
Johnston (Upala Press)
Before laying my hands on this startling book, I’d never heard of Lissa
Hunter. Now I can't imagine not knowing her work. I look at it, and I
think: totems. Faux religious artifacts. Hunter likes to make things.
Technically she sculpt them. Objects. Boxes of smooth stones or what
look to be intricately carved acorns. Other kinds of containers, such
as the one that looks like a wall of leaves, containing a small woven
bowl. Or the collection of objects -- bowls, small gathered envelopes,
a wooden box -- that rest on a patinaed wooden shelf. Her work evokes
the title here: Histories: Real & Imagined.
Are these found objects? Are they created? It would seem beside the
point, for her work is the kind of stuff that tells its own tale every
time you look at it. They’re at once a collection of objects important
to one person, or one family, and a projection of story told in just
about every way except words. Fantastic. -- Tony Buchsbaum
The Pentagram Papers edited by Delphine Hirasuna
(Chronicle Books)
When now-world-famous design firm Pentagram was founded in 1972, it
quickly made a name for itself as creators of startling, logical design
in industries across the spectrum of commercial endeavor: signage,
architecture, products, identity, you name it. The firm’s partners saw
a way to exploit and even learn about topics they cared about and
create or sponsor deluxe booklets that dove deeper. The booklets were
printed and distributed in very limited number. The best of their
spreads and words have been collected in this book. The topics? Well,
they ranged far and wide, from crop circles, to Cuban cigar bands to
weird mailboxes in Australia to funky hotel/motel signage on the New
Jersey shore to kimono designs. Truly, the Pentagram Papers are the
kinds of things its owners wanted to keep, and the booklets themselves
became a treasure. Included here is an actual copy of the 36th Paper,
on African marks, a form of pictogrammatic communication. The book is a
stunning collection, and it’ll have to do until you can afford to haunt
auction houses for some (or a set) of the originals. -- Tony
Buchsbaum
Performing
Architecture: Opera Houses, Theatres and Concert
Halls for the Twenty-First Century by Michael Hammond (Merrell) Performing Architecture by Michael Hammond took my breath
away.
Like 21st century cathedrals, the structures Hammond chronicles here
rise up in Torrevieja, Spain; in Troy, New York; in Beijing; Dublin,
Oslo and Hong Kong, taking so many different forms that one wonders
that they all, essentially, come from the very same place: the desire
-- no, need -- to create a structure where people will go for an
evening's entertainment. One important building, of course, sets the
tone for those that would follow. "The Sydney Opera House, completed in
1973 and arguably the most recognizable building in the world, set a
global precedent." Even if Hammond had not mentioned that famous
Australian building, some of the structures profiled in Performing
Architecture would bring it to mind. Not in form as much as in spirit:
grand cathedral-like spaces intended to lift the heart as well as
please the senses. Hammond profiles 51 projects in the pages of Performing
Architecture,
from the Shanghai Grand Theatre designed by Arte Jean-Marie
Charpentier, completed in 1998, to London's Music Box, designed by
Foreign Office Architects and whose build date is not included. Several
included projects have yet to go beyond the planning stages and some
are currently under construction. Interestingly, the profiles of the
yet-to-be-built projects are every bit as fascinating as those that
have already been completed. More: together, they create the whole. The
already completed projects showing where design on this scale and for
this type of project has most recently been, the to-be-built ones
showing where it's going. -- Aaron Blanton The Rejection Collection edited by Matthew Diffee (Simon
Spotlight Entertainment)
Everyone is familiar with The New Yorker’s
cartoons. But did you know that for every one that makes the magazine,
there are many that do not? Several dozen of those are collected here,
provided by the artists who created them. These are often not for the
faint of heart: some of them are crude, rude, insulting, sexually
challenging and morally questionable. But they’re a riot. Take the
second one, which happens to have been drawn by the book’s editor: two
pigeons are on a New York ledge, chatting. One says to the other: “I’d
say my biggest influence is probably Pollock.” Or another, from Mort
Gerberg: two dogs are in bed, and one says to the other: “No, no -- it
was great. It’s just that sometimes I’d like to try it missionary
style.” These are gems, each and every one. The book also includes
tongue-in-cheek, illustrated Q&As with each artist, as well as a
foreword by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker.
These are not authorized by the magazine, but they were created for its
pages, and the fact that he’s here is just a testament to how funny
and, in their own way, culturally spot-on they are. -- Tony
Buchsbaum
Stylepedia: A
Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits by Steven
Heller and Louise Fili (Chronicle Books)
What do Fascism, skateboards and junk mail have in common? Read Stylepedia
and you’ll find out that whether for good or bad, they all have at one
time or another used the services of a designer. Authors Heller and
Fili barely skim the surface of the design world but at a slight six
and a half by nine inches and 336 pages manage to cover a fair amount
of ground by hitting the highlights of some well known and not so well
known subjects. An excellent reference guide for both the neophyte and
established designer. -- David Middleton
