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Culture Watch
Books
a
book of books
by Abelardo Morell
with a preface by Nicholson Baker
Bulfinch Press. 107 pages
Abelardo Morell's work of photography, a book of books, is a form of eye candy for the bibliophile, a kind of bookish pornography. Morell says, "One of the big pleasures of this project has come from spending a good amount of time looking at, holding, smelling, and reading a terrific number of skinny, fat, tall, pompous, modes, funny, sad, proud, injured, and radiant books."...For me, the magic of these objects lies somewhere between a photography of a book and the book itself; at times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life — at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z."
All book lovers will find the experience of looking at a book of books intense — the angles, the entrances into the books that he creates are both intimate and familiar.
Baker, in his preface, sums it up best:
"Some of the most evocative photographs in this collection are the ones in which a book is allowed to fall open slightly, so that we glimpse the foreshortened secrets (an upward glancing face, a coliseum) it may hold. Pages for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak. And it does."
Morell is perhaps best know for a technique called camera obscura and in 1999 there was an traveling exhibition of the Cuban photographer's work entitled Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston profiled Morel, explaining this ancient technique:
"Morell’s best-known photographs, however, are those in which the outside world is projected upside down against the wall of a room (opposite). For these pictures, the artist used a camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”), a device that goes back to Leonardo da Vinci and possibly even Aristotle: if a box or room is completely light-tight except for a small hole in one side, the image of the world just outside will pass through the hole and appear inverted on the box’s or room’s far side. Morell has made room-size camera obscuras in which he places his four-by-five-inch view camera, taking surreal, playful, long-exposure photographs of the outside world projected upside down, transparently overlaying everything in the space."
Music
Three CDs that caught our eye (and ear) were those by Diana Krall, Renée Fleming and Andrea Bocelli.
The first time we heard Bocelli was when a restaurant in Rockefeller Plaza, Tuscan Square, was early in promoting the singer. Bocelli quickly acquired a loyal audience and they will not be disappointed by Sentimento's operatic and semiclassical selections nor by the conducting by Lorin Maazel on the Philips label.
The selections on Diana Krall's Live in Paris CD will strike a special chord for an older audience with familiar ballads such as The Look of Love, I've Got You Under My Skin, 'S Wonderful and Fly Me to the Moon. With Krall's smoky and relaxed singing style on this Verve issue, the old standards are made fresh. Hers is going to be a long career, satisfying all ages.
We've come to appreciating opera very late in life, but Renée Fleming makes that initiation easy. Appearing on TV specials and being interviewed on NPR, among others, has introduced her to a following that might not be able to attend her performances. Bel Canto, recorded with the Orchestra of St Luke's and conductor Patrick Summers, highlights the music of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini on the Decca label. It has been an immensely successful recording for Fleming, deservedly so.
—TG
Seabiscuit and Flesh and Blood reviews
