The term film noir gets tossed around quite a bit in the polyphonious public conversations about movies—it’s possible that its meaning has been diluted to mean anything that takes place at night that has the slightest hint of human mayhem. Thus the publication of an updated Film Noir
Sometimes I actually take note of how many days are like that winter holiday where people are encouraged to spend all the money they make on gifts, and then they are encouraged to shop at sales and buy the stuff they bought for other people at deep discounts. The various
Siglio Press’s publication of Torture of Women, created by renowned (feminist) artist Nancy Spero, who died in 2009, is the reiteration in well-designed and printed book form of her 1976 creation. Originally a 125-foot work “juxtaposing testimony by female victims of torture with startling imagery from the ancient world,
For lack of a better metaphor, suffice it to say that visits from my UPS driver and his delivery brethren make almost every day like Christmas at my address. But the recent arrival of Fantagraphics’s Gahan Wilson’sFifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (three volumes, slip-cased, 942 pages), containing over
Before the literary landscape became littered with all types of annuals entitled Best American This or That, or simply Best Blah Blah Blah 20__, I would look forward to what I took to be a precious yearly harvest. Happily, there is still one book issued every year that I count
In case you are wondering, the pop-up book has been around for centuries, more often referred to as a movable book. There was a wave of popularity in the U.S.A. in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the ‘60’s that they achieved widespread appeal (mostly for
Now that the dreary and dismal Bolshevik autocracy has been replaced by a colorful and freewheeling capitalist oligarchy, the artifacts and residue of the Soviet years are likely to be viewed more as a de-clawed feline or venom-less viper than echoes of plague years—or, in capitalism’s ultimate triumph,
Whether Frank Gehry ranks as one of the greatest living architects or not, he is certainly one of the most famous—think the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Now comes a new monograph, Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli) written by Mildred Friedman,
Photography historian and curator Gail Buckland, whose The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton) is a seminal history of photography and one of her dozen highly regarded books on photography, adds a new volume to her oeuvre, Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present (Knopf). She
I may have to amend my recent claim that I am sparing in the use of the superlative ‘amazing’ if I continue to discover books such as Andrew Zuckerman’s amazing Bird (Chronicle Books), a compendium of 200 color photographs of a variety of over 70 avian species. As I
Given, as they say, the objective conditions besetting our country (need I list them?), it would not be unreasonable to consider whether the United States (of Embarrassment, to quote Eminem) is yet functional, or perhaps to look for a time when it did work. A remarkable new panoramic study, When
