Ready Reference

I remember it well. Mrs. Reinholt’s 5th-grade classroom had the usual Catholic grade school trappings: the green chalkboards, the bulletin board colorfully displaying the steps to the scientific method, the little wooden box above the door from which we heard school announcements. The room’s treasure, however, was in the back. Under the tall double-hung windows were shelves of reference books, including the World Book encyclopedia.

The World Book was valuable, of course, to help you find the primary export of South Africa (platinum), the length of a year on Neptune (60,190 earth days), or the winner of the Best Actress Oscar in 1954 (Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday). It helped you find certain facts and write assigned papers. But for a shy kid who made excuses to avoid the terrors of the playground, The World Book was a great escape. I could pick up a volume ("Ci-Cz") open it at random and read about the life cycle of cicadas, the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge or the military hubris of General George Custer. I didn’t seek particular information, but the information seemed to seek me. Sitting on that shelf, the product of scores of researchers, graphic artists, and writers, The World Book was a trivia siren song.

It's been a while since I've had an encyclopedia in my house. But I still own a few shelves of "reference books": Collections of movie reviews by Pauline Kael and James Agee, The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Bulfinch's Mythology, Larousse Gastronomique,  Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz. And every so often I look at them and wonder, "Do I still want these?"

These days, of course, facts are just a few clicks away. We can sate a nagging curiosity or settle a dinner table dispute in a flash. Where did Mookie Betts go to college? (He didn't.) When did the first Michelin Man ad appear? (1894.) What's the tallest building in North America? (One World Trade Center.)

But some day, I will brush the dust off one of those bookshelf placeholders and open it to a random page. I might discover how to make a langue-de-chat, a small butter cookie shaped like a cat's tongue. Or learn about the family of kabuki actors collectively known as Ichikawa Danjūrō, which has produced preeminent actors in that art form since 1673. I'll maybe read about the mythical poet Amphion, the son of Jupiter and Antiope, queen of Thebes. Or discover that rock experimentalist and producer Brian Eno's full name is Brian Peter George St. John de Baptiste de la Salle Eno.

I’ll leave my phone in the other room.

Barnatan’s Beethoven

Inon Barnatan. Photo by Marco-Borggreve.

First, a somewhat bold confession: Beethoven's Fourth Concerto is my favorite piano concerto. But it is even more so after the revelatory performance by Inon Barnatan with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra last weekend. For some listeners, it might have been slightly scandalous. Barnatan highlighted the searching quality of the music, offering a vision of Beethoven as an introspective questioner, pondering moments and phrases before bursting into confident and joyous salvos. Trills receded into nothingness. Moments of silence before and during the first movement cadenza were allowed to breathe deeply. In the second movement, exchanges pitted an assertive orchestra against a tender, tenuous piano, only to explode with confidence into the final movement. For an encore, he played the knuckle-busting finale from Beethoven’s Sonata No. 6 in F Major.

Conductor Roderick Cox offered a muscular contrast to the Beethoven in the concert’s opening and closing selections. Richard Strauss’s Don Juan featured little solo highlights from many of the orchestra’s principal players, and showed off the impressive brass section. Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 is filled with impressionistic details—an opening of nail-biting tremolo strings, passages that build up speed pell-mell, and lush evocations of his native Finland’s natural beauty (including the horn’s “Swan Song” that caps the final movement). Cox built the symphony with beautiful attention to detail and pacing.

Carmen’s Spring

Spring is here, as the song goes. And with it, that seasonal push-pull. Blooms and buds appear, but so do the last gasps of winter—snow, sleet, frost. To honor the season, here’s my favorite ambivalent song of spring sung by the great Carmen McRae.

“Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” Carmen McRae, 1964.

Preston Sturges Goes Long

Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck

I’m sure film editors earned their keep during Hollywood’s Golden Age, even if it seems their jobs were much easier. Camera work was simpler then. Directors knew the power of the single long take, and performers embraced the chance to make magic within it. Watch a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly dance number and notice how long the camera lingers in that perfect uninterrupted shot.

Preston Sturges knew there was also something special about two great actors working in a single take. There are a lot of delicious pleasures in his 1941 film, The Lady Eve, but none as great as the long single-shot scene in which a con artist, played by Barbara Stanwyck, works her wiles on beer baron Henry Fonda, a shy multimillionaire who devotes most of his life to collecting snakes. It’s one of the great comic duets in film history.

Clip of the Week

It’s hard to recommend Midnight’s Children without reservations. The Booker Prize committee picked it as the great book of the last 25 years—a winner among winners. The story of an man who is born at the precise moment that of India’s independence from Britain (midnight, August 15, 1947), the book is ecstatically written—dense with comic detail, quirky characters and incident—a heady blend of fantasy and the modern history of India. The writing is charged, propulsive and often hilarious.

After Rushdie’s near fatal attack last August, I felt I needed to give it another try. You should, too. But, like all great books, it demands a certain amount of focus, dilligence and endurance. Here’s a clip to whet your appetite.

“…Rising from my pages comes the unmistakeable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, “A cook?” you gasp in horror, “A khansama merely? How is it possible?” and, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 300-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.”

Have a good week.