Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / A Concise History of Western Music

A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths, Cambridge UP '06, 348 pages, ISBN 0521842948. Index, further reading, glossary, unillustrated.

It takes a good deal of discipline to condense the history of Western music into barely more than 300 pages, but Welsh-born veteran music critic Paul Griffiths manages to do it and in an accessible manner. Starting with the Babylonians, he parades his readers past troubadours and organists, studies the effect of the High Renaissance and the Reformation on music, dwells on the emergence of the fugue, concerto and operatic forms, drops in on New Germans and old Vienna, and ends in the modern era with a tribute to such composers as John Cage and Olivier Messiaen.

A sampling from Griffiths's graceful narrative:

"Music, so intimately engaged with perception, lights up the mind. Music, being immaterial, touches on the immaterial -- on the drift of thought and feeling, on divinity and death. Music, as sound, can represent the auditory world: the moan of wind, the repeated whispers of calm waves, the calls of birds. Music as idealized voice, can sing or sigh, laugh or weep. Music, as rhythm, can keep pace with our contemplative rest and our racing activity. Music, in proceeding through time, can resemble our lives."

Book Alert / Zelotti's Epic Frescoes at Cataio

Zelotti's Epic Frescoes at Cataio -- The Obizzi Saga by Irma B. Jaffe with Gernando Colombardo, Fordham UP '08 coffee table-format, $55, 143 pages, ISBN #0823227421. Index, selected bibliography, source notes, dozens of full-color glossy images sprinkled through text.

This reviewer's conundrum is whether the saga of the author or that of her subject is the more fascinating. Most of us face our most formidable career challenge before our 86th birthday, but hey, who can time these things? Art historian Irma Jaffe's came with an invitation from an Italian art professor to view six palatial reception rooms at the Castle of Cataio, outside of Venice, rooms that had been hidden from public view for some five centuries.

Pio Enea Obizzi, a filthy-rich Venetian condottiere, had built the castle and commissioned artist Battista Zelotti to paint 40 frescoes, depicting the Obizzi's family triumphs from 1010 to 1420. Because Obizzi and his heirs wanted the castle to be for the exclusive use of the family, Zelotti's name was gradually forgotten along with his masterpiece.

"With the revelation at Cataio," writes Jaffe, now 91, "a full understanding of mannerism, the style that characterizes sixteenth-century visual art, must now include the contributions of Zelotti. In the forty frescoes that constitute the Saga he reveals the possibilities accessible to Mannerist style in his countless poses of the human figure and horses, his variety of settings -- indoor and outdoor, land and sea -- and in expressing the range of pre-eminent sixteenth century values such as family rank and pride, personal courage, and religion....Viewing the scenes of fierce battles, magnificent weddings, bloody assassinations and triumph after triumph suggests to the modern viewer something of the grandeur of grand opera.

Author Irma Jaffe has authored or edited 18 books. She earned her PhD from Columbia in mid-life and established an Art and Music Department at Fordham. Based in New York City, Jaffe continues to research and write on Italian culture.

Documentary "Tyson" Examines Why, Against All Odds, He's Still Alive

The New York Times:

"If, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, 'boxing has become America’s tragic theater,' then one might cast Mike Tyson — the former world heavyweight champion and self-professed 'baddest man on the planet' — as the leading man.

"Yes, against all odds, Mr. Tyson is still alive. A pudgy 41-year-old who is millions of dollars in debt to the Internal Revenue Service, he has been living in the Las Vegas suburbs for about three months. And he is sober — 15 months now, he says — after years of drug and alcohol abuse. But this was not an envisioned outcome just a few years ago. In Mr. Tyson’s own words, 'I never thought I’d live to this age.'

"Now that he’s here, he finds himself on an unlikely and unpleasant path forward, although one that could prove cathartic. This week Mr. Tyson and his new advisers will fly to the south of France for the Cannes Film Festival, where a new documentary about his life, 'Tyson,' will make its premiere. Directed by James Toback, the film, which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips, has forced Mr. Tyson to relive and reconsider a life that shames him."

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Eleanor Coppola's Memoir Documents Life Around Francis

The Los Angeles Times:

"'Notes on the Making of 'Apocalypse Now,' ' Eleanor Coppola's 1979 production diary of husband Francis' audacious, flawed film released that year, remains one of the best accounts ever written of the insane difficulties involved in shooting a big-budget movie on location. Nearly 30 years later, she brings the same scrupulous honesty and lucid, thoughtful prose to her memoir 'Notes on a Life.'

"Ranging episodically over several decades, Coppola offers a poignant self-portrait of middle age -- she's just turned 50 as her text begins in 1986 -- thinking about the choices she's made. 'I am an observer at heart,' she writes, and we see her mingled admiration and envy of those who fling themselves into action. Francis and daughter Sofia direct movies while Eleanor shoots 'making of' documentaries about them. Attending a tribute to her friend Alice Waters, she muses, 'I haven't created a body of notable work in my life when many around me have.'"

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Book Alert / Looking At Laughter

Looking At Laughter -- Humor, Power and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C. -- A.D. 250 by John R. Clarke, UCal Press '07, 309 pages, ISBN #0520237331. Index, illustrations, bibliography, source notes, grouping of full-color glossy images, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"What made Romans laugh?" the author asks. Based on all the sobersides antiquarian statuary most of us have seen over the years, our answer might be "obviously, nothing." Not so, says University of Texas art historian John R. Clarke.

In his scholarly approach to what passed for humor way back when, Clarke divides his study into three parts: "Visual Humor," "Social Humor," and "Sexual Humor." To get at the essence of Roman laughter, one has to cut through layers of a cultural surround, so don't expect "A man walks into a bar," knee-slapping routines.

While Clarke has dredged up "positive images of sexual intercourse between ideal couples," he also surveys all manner of perversion as well. And the context is often revealing of what it was like to live in the Rome of antiquity:

"In positive, nonhumorous sexual images the penetrator is always an adult man, reflecting the most important rule in Roman sex: the elite man can, without stigma or punishment, insert his penis into any orifice of the body of another, as long as that other person is of inferior status. Artists emphasize the woman's eagerness to be penetrated by the man, and in male-male sex scenes they point up the difference in age between the two so that a Roman viewer immediately understands that the penetrated partner is a boy of inferior social status -- slave, freedman, or foreigner -- and therefore fair game.'

Book Alert / The Temple and the Forum

The Temple and the Forum -- The American Museum and Cultural Authority by Les Harrison, Alabama UP '07, 272 pages, ISBN #0817315632. Index, works cited, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Most people take museums for granted, as if they've always been here. In fact, most such modern institutions came to be in the 19th century, and their creation was often attended by a good deal of sturm und drang over what they should incorporate and what ideals they should represent.

Les Harrison, who teaches English at Virginia Commonwealth, focuses in on three leading museums -- Charles Wilson Peale's Philadelphia Museum (1785-1843), P.T. Barnum's American Museum (1841-1865), and Washington's Smithsonian Museum (1879--present), in advancing the thesis that museums usually chose from one of two dominant models: "the temple, an institution for the projection and protection of official culture, and the forum, its populist, marketplace counterpart."

In so doing, Harrison explores how these models manifested themselves in the literary works of some of the foremost writers of the day -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman.

Book Alert / Child 44

Child 44 -- A Novel by Tom Rob Smith, Grand Central Publishing '08, $24.99, 438 pages, ISBN #0446402389.

In his first novel, British author Tom Rob Smith looks back to a time before he was born but well within the lifespan of many living today -- the early 1950s and what The New York Times calls "a Stalinist-Orwellian nightmare." Decades before its utopian ideal crumbled, the Soviet Union made a pact with its citizens: in return for hard work and loyalty to the regime, the state would provide them food, clothing, shelter and safety.

Leo Demidov, Smith's protagonist, is a former war hero and has bought into the system. But when he learns that the state denies that a serial killer of children is on the loose because violent crime is an emblem of Western decadence, his faith founders. His faith in the principle that the only crimes possible are crimes of political thought comes under question for the first time.

Before long, Leo finds himself demoted and denounced, alone except for his wife, Raisa, whom the state had called upon Leo to spy on. His life and value system turned topsy-turvy, Leo sets out to find the serial killer "and stop a criminal that the state won't admit even exists." Fans of the TV show The Wire will be interested to know that its writer, novelist Richard Price, is reportedly writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of Smith's book.

Out in Paperback / Monkey Girl

Monkey Girl -- Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul by Edward Humes, HarperPerennial '07, $15.95, 380 pages, ISBN #0060885491. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

From the book jacket:

"From bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, PA, when the town's school board decision to confront the controversy head-on- thrust its students, then the entire community onto the front lines of America's culture wars. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of 'intelligent design,' and what happens when science and religion collide."

Barbara Walters at 78 -- At the Top of her Game!?

The New Yorker:

"Barack Obama walked onto the set of 'The View' a few weeks ago and sat down. It took a moment for the fluttering to die down. When it did, Barbara Walters turned to him and said, 'We were just saying before you came out—maybe we shouldn’t say this, but we thought you were very sexy-looking.' Walters then turned her gaze to the cheering audience, as Obama grinned and pretended to fan himself with his hands. There was more fluttering.

"Then Walters picked up a sheaf of notes on her lap and got down to business. 'O.K., so here we go. . . . You’ve condemned the racist comments made by Reverend Wright, but you haven’t disowned him. But when Don Imus made racist remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team you said you thought he should lose his job. You said, and I’m quoting'—here she read from the notes—' ‘There’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.’ What’s the difference?' Obama gave a careful and practiced answer. And now we were smack in the middle of a standard-issue news interview."

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Attention, Central Park Lovers -- Next Week Is 150th Anniversary Tribute

AmericanHeritage.com:

"Imagine New York City’s Central Park carved into an eclectic mix of ponds and glades or consumed by a labyrinth of French topiary, and you will see the Park as several landscape designers envisioned it in 1857. The Central Park design competition was the suggestion of English designer, Calvert Vaux, who disliked the original, unartistic plan by engineer, Egbert Ludovicus Viele.

"The competition was also an ingenious way of ensuring that the 843-acre chunk of Manhatttan real estate—nearly twice the size of the Principality of Monaco—would meet as many New Yorkers’ expectations as possible. The Central Park Commission received 33 design submissions, ranging in quality from stolidly practical to fantastical. The 11-man, state-appointed commission selected park superindentant, Frederick Law Olmsted’s, and English designer, Calvert Vaux’s, 'Greensward' plan on April 28, 1858.

"This coming Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the Greensward plan’s adoption, which the Central Park Conservancy in New York City will commemorate with a series of public events, including the re-christening of the 72nd Street Cross Drive as 'Olmsted & Vaux Way.' The tribute is well-deserved. 'Olmsted and Vaux’s design,' says park historian Sara Cedar Miller, 'was the most important work of American art in the 19th century.' Its success inspired municipalities across America, such as Boston and Chicago, to create their own pastoral retreats from the claustrophobic city."

                                                     (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / Yankee Stadium

Yankee Stadium -- The Official Retrospective by Mark Vancil and Alfred Santasiere III, Pocket Books '08 coffee table-format, $50, 232 pages, ISBN #1416547797. Scores of full-color and b&w glossy images sprinkled through text.

Don't ever argue to a diehard baseball fan that his stadium is just a concrete pit for playing the national pastime. Red Sox fans talk reverently, in hushed tones, of Fenway Park as "the Sistine Chapel of baseball." And for many decades, Yankee Stadium has been known as "the House That Ruth Built." No, not your Aunt Ruth, stupid -- Babe Ruth!

Against this backdrop, it's hardly surprising that the Yankee management went to considerable expense to jackhammer up the concrete visitor's dugout floor this spring to remove a Red Sox jersey that some construction worker had buried last summer as a joke during construction of the new Yankee Stadium, adjacent to the old one. No matter that a visitor from Mars would conclude from viewing this vignette that the human race must be seriously unbalanced.

The authors' timing for release of this handsome retrospective is impeccable, since the Steinbrenners turn out the lights this September or -- they hope -- October for the last time. The volume's quality makes it worthy to give for Father's Day not just to fans of the Bronx Bombers but to other baseball fans as well.

Vancil and Santasiere begin in 1923, when construction crews removed 45,000 cubic yards of dirt from an open field and used 2,300 tons of mechanical steel, 950,000 board feet of lumber, 800 tons of rebar and 116,000 square feet of sod to build the Yankee Stadium we know today. But most of the memories relate to the personalities that drew millions of fans to the ballpark -- Babe Ruth, to knock the cover off the ball and decades later to wave goodbye shortly before he died, Don Larsen to pitch the only perfect game ever in a World Series, and Lou Gehrig -- stricken by a disease that today bears his name -- to bid a tearful farewell after a stunning career.

But lest we forget, Yankee Stadium was more than an arena for baseball: "The most iconic moments in history have taken place within its walls....epic heavyweight fights, from Louis versus Schmeling to Ali versus Norton; the 1958 National Football League championship, christened the "Greatest Game Ever Played"; exciting college football games, including the one immortalized by Knute Rockne in which he asked Notre Dame to "win one for the Gipper"; and the unrivaled record-breaking successes of the New York Yankees, from the very first home run hit at the Stadium by Babe Ruth to Alex Rodriguez's 500th."

Book Alert / Monster, 1959

Monster. 1959 -- A Novel by David Maine, St. Martin's Press '08, $23.95, 245 pages, ISBN #0312373015.

In this hypersensitive age, it's reasonable to ask whether, in watching horror films, you ever sympathized with Godzilla. Oh please, no paroxysms of guilt -- I was just asking. Why?, you ask. Well, a novelist named David Maine has found a way back for you -- he tells Godzilla's story from the creature's point of view.  Feel better? I thought so.

In Monster, 1959, Maine (who wasn't even born then) imagines "an island where the U.S. government has been testing the long-term effects of high-level radiation. Among them: killer plants, mole people, and a 40-foot creature named K. Covered in fur and feathers, with unusable insect wings and antennae, and the mental capacity of a goldfish, K. is not an evolutionary masterpiece. He's Darwin's worst nightmare."

Celebrities, Notables Descend On Israel To Mark Its 60th

The New York Times:

"Jerusalem — The Jewish people are marking the 60th anniversary of their national rebirth, the founding of Israel, on Thursday with the usual military flyovers, flag buntings and televised reminiscences of aging pioneers.

"But there is another form of celebration planned, and its sponsors believe it says something about the national character: a three-day conference of some of the best minds from around the world on some of the biggest challenges facing humankind — and especially the Jews — in the coming decades.

“'The brain enriches the pocket, not the other way around,' Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and the patron of the conference, said in an interview. 'We are a small land and a small people, but we can become a daring world laboratory, and that is our desire and plan.'

"Nearly 700 guests are expected to take part next week in 35 discussion groups. They include statesmen like Henry A. Kissinger, Vaclav Havel, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, but also Sergey Brin of Google, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch, along with seven Jewish Nobel laureates and President Bush."

                                                      (Click above link to read more)

Cher At 62: Full Of Glitz And Glamour

The Los Angeles Times:

"Las Vegas -- Like the temples of the ancient Roman world that it simulates, the Colosseum at Caesars Palace is an environment suited to extravagant immortals. The artists who've graced its huge stage have all achieved that status in which one name not only serves but also explains and expands upon whatever the star projects.

"First there was Celine, clean and lean, selling every song with unmatchable melodrama. Then came Elton, whose eloquence (if not always elegance) weighs a ton. Later, there was Bette, and you can bet on her -- she's the go-to girl for solid showbiz flair.

"Tuesday night, the ultimate Colosseum dweller arrived. Cher -- the cherished icon of pop reinvention, beloved by freaks and squares, gay liberationists and straight soccer moms, Netflix-renting couch potatoes and rump-shaking disco denizens -- used every possible corner of the stage (as well as several huge screens and the walls) to present a signature performance based upon her larger-than-life story, a mythology of self-reinvention in which we can all . . . oh, you get the idea."

                                                         (Click above link to read more)

                                          

Book Alert / Campaigning for President

Campaigning for President -- Memorabilia from the Nation's Finest Private Collections by Jordan M. Wright, Smithsonian Books '08, coffee table format, $35, 291 pages, ISBN #0061233951. Hundreds of glossy color images sprinkled through text.

Writers commonly use historical archives as grist for their mills. What makes Jordan M. Wright different is that the archive he mines is his own. A lawyer and magazine publisher, he began collecting political memorabilia at the age of 10, and it just got  out of hand. His collection, never before publicly exhibited, now numbers more than a million items. His book is the companion to an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York from June '08 through Election day.

The book's cover reproduces two score campaign buttons, some of which you'll instantly recognize ("Goldwater in '64, Hot Water in '65, Bread 'n Water in '66"), others of which may be new to you ("We Don't Want Eleanor Either").  Open the book, and it just gets better.

Wright's book is divided into chronological chapters, depicting historical eras: The Early Years, 1789-1824; 1828-1852; Civil War and Reconstruction; 1876--1892; 1896-1916; 1920-1948; and 1952-Present. Like most coffee table books, it's chock full of full-color illustrations, but text is not limited to captions and supplies context for the reader in a way that makes this a lot more than a picture book.