Emergency Late Nite Snake gift guide (mostly books)
Covering design, furniture, reference, film fitness... for every manner of person in your life
Scant auctions this week—nearly nothing, in fact—so please enjoy a change in programming.
Books as Gifts
In some senses this enterprise is a gift guide—what to buy every week—and in some it is not, mostly because Substack doesn’t do affiliate links... and because in another, more accurate sense, this letter’s premise is not about buying things at all but conceding that we need things, such as furniture and cutlery in our lives, and that the most frictionless way to acknowledge this is to buy correctly and move on. From my vantage that is to buy once (or occasionally) from knowledge and point of view.
This said, I am not against gifts… I’m not a deranged person… gifts are necessary… even ideal. It is good to gift well. It is one of the better things in life. Christmas is around the corner and Hanukkah is just 49 weeks away. My picks below are all books… which are ideal gifts. They cover the widest range of topics and aesthetics and prices. They are also, most importantly, specific to a person. Anyways:
Best book about furniture for beginners:
Mid-Century Modern by Cara Greenberg. I’ve recommended this to people before—journalists, friends, well-wishers—regularly. I reco it not because it’s an especially thorough or exacting book (lots of photos) but because it’s a decent and representative place to start… because it is old and does a fine job giving immediate oversight over one style of furniture. It’s the standard. Just get it. There’s a chance this book’s ubiquity and readability helped spread MCM’s palatability to a wider audience; there are not many books like this, say, for other furniture styles. Nothing for Deco, French crap, and Italian design is not as expansive (see below). It’s a shame. I now and then think of an interview with Jim Walrod, published some time ago. In it he tells a story. He’s walking into a thrift store downtown, one of his old standbys, sometime in the early-mid ‘90s, looking to score. A civilian comes out carrying an Eames rocker and loads it into his car. Greenberg’s book sits in shotgun and is visible through the window. The key to it all… democratic knowledge, the secret was out. I’m sure I’m misquoting but I remember JW saying something like, “it’s all over.” Was it? Sure. In many ways yes. Is it now? Of course, and definitely more so than before. But who can do anything about that? The truer premise to me is that the best time to plant a tree is a century ago, and the next best time is today. (link)
Good book about one designer:
Gaetano Pesce : Architecture, Design, Art by France Vanlaethem: Lots of books about GP lately, and this one, from 1989, is one of my favorites, although lacking as an authoritative text as it’s missing later (important) work… but is still nails. This is the case with all furniture books—none are exhaustive. They’re just not. This though remains a great first look at Pesce’s work, especially his architectural commissions. It is easy to get. When paired with the Out In The World book from a few years ago (the green one about him, available at a lot of retail establishments), we get lots of the way there. Helpful. (link)
Good book about the Italian furniture movement:
Italian Design by Nina Bornsen-Holtmann: Even better (to me) than the Pesce monographs is this competent look at the greatest design movement in the world—Italian crap from the 70s—that is certainly not complete in details or even ideas… but which offers a very plain, very ungilded, very immediate look at much of the work. It’s less exhaustive, even thin, compared to Greenberg’s work, but like it it covers many of the best items of that era in an expert way that it is almost impossible to get from current media. (No knowingness; only knowledge.) This thing is like from ‘94 and by Taschen. Reading design books… the subject matter justifies most purchases. This one, luckily, does better than that. (link)
Good book that collects design journalism:
The Best of Nest by Todd Oldham: Nest is the best design magazine there ever was by a standard deviation. Domestically, anyways… and it is not close; leafing through this little bitch it’s pretty surprising, shocking even, to contemplate that this magazine was around as a fairly popular mass enterprise in the late 1990s, before our so-called democratic design boom. Or… are we all wrong? One must understand: Well-heeled professionals have always had access to interior designers and rich city folk always were interested in furniture. There were always stores around that sold this. Design was never… it just wasn’t meant for anyone under 40. That’s the difference. The editorial voice here confirms this; I always liked this New York Times profile of the Nest guy from when he shut down operations. (link)
Good book:
La Comédie Humaine par Honoré de Balzac: a collection of some of Honoré du Balzac’s (French writer) work. Balzac lived in the 16th on rue Raynouard across from the Pizza Hut. He wrote about the lives of the upper class, more or less, in France, after Napoleon and in his books described and wrote so much about furniture that readers and critics called him a cataloger. But that’s their problem. The furniture people had then, which he keyed in on, expressed their values and lives… and his descriptions were ways he disseminated information about class… or perhaps values… on one level, a very facile one, in which a person could be judged by the quality of his credenza… and on a deeper level, the literary sense of place that could be expressed through this work:
Breathtaking. One wonders what current fiction lacks these days. Could it be that works about 21st century Brooklyn need to include those red Ikea TV stands? Rough. (Complete French hardcovers for $2K | English)
Good book for someone who loves vintage:
Sheer Drift: The Snake America Newsletters (1-100) by Sami Reiss: A beautiful collection of my first 100 newsletters, covering vintage clothing, in large-format size. It’s still available, and is half reference work and half creative non-fiction. Came out this year on Shining Life Press. (Buy here)
Book that probably anyone will like:
Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner: This is definitely the best airport novel ever written, and an almost competent literary work. Too much fan service? Hard to say. In one respect it’s less a novel than a working document for the production designers, costumers and actors who will be working with Mann on the film he raised funding for through this project. Genius. To the point here, somewhere in the first act Mann and the chick writer describe the furniture that the wheelchair guy has in his home. (You will remember the wheelchair guy, Kelso, as supplying the bank blueprints to Jon Voight and Neil McCauley:
NEIL: How’d you get this information?
CEZAR KELSO: It just comes to you. This stuff just flies through the air. They send this information out, I mean it’s just beamed out all over the [REDACTED] place. You’ve just got to know how to grab it. See I know how to grab it.
Nat (from R&M Corp) listened to a Ringer podcast about the movie a while ago in which the hosts said Kelso’s wheelchair wasn’t necessary. Of course it was necessary. The wheelchair is the whole point of the character.) Anyways Kelso is addressed in the book. He has lots of Danish teak in his house. They spend a whole page describing his furniture. He lives in the City Terrace neighborhood of LA. A safe bet for many. (link)
Sacred Cow by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf: I have been eating a lot of red meat lately, for the past couple years… I would say six days a week. It’s just how it shakes out. When people ask why I explain and/or direct them to this book. Effectively… Red meat is dense with nutrients, is filling (so you eat less other crap) and passes a sort of… historical test… i.e. has been around for millenia… which is addressed in research by Dr. Sasha Saravkin, a mathematician at UW. Also because cows are multi-gastric their four stomachs clean out the plastics and god knows what else in their feed… chickens don’t do that. I’m not wedded to this idea; I just practice it. This said I cannot imagine a universe in which this book is a good gift for anyone. Maybe buy it for yourself, though, if you’re curious about these things. (link)
Brother Iron, Sister Steel by Dave Draper: Bodybuilders… it will shake out one day that the successful bodybuilders from the pre-protein shake era were among the smartest people who ever lived. As an aggregate. Not as individuals. Definitely not as individuals. The work here by Draper, effectively his life’s story, is chock full of thoughts about lifting and health, and touches the edge of true wisdom. As a writer Draper is probably the best of the bunch… a lot of life and vivacity, anecdotes and attention to detail. Which sounds like a backhanded compliment. But he has some beautiful passages. I hope that is evident to him. Reading the book you see that this man sacrificed his future… or money… for health and strength and experimentation. Much like Ray Peat. Almost Jesuit in his self sacrifice… I do think we’re in a much different economic era now, though, where everything is more expensive, and as such this dichotomy between truth and money no longer exists. What a great book. (link)
“Haters: A Love Story” by Hillel Cohen: Among the most critical assessments of the Israeli government and its actions are written in Hebrew, by Israeli academics… some living there, some not. This book is not specifically focused on the state and instead offers a destabilizing reframing of fairly recent history of the region that is both very pessimistic and which offers, I would say, a slight sliver of hope. Cohen, a historian, looks here at the interaction and… once real, if fractious but definite brotherhood (and ensuing distancing, much of it state mandated) between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians in mandate Palestine. The ideas Cohen has talked about in interviews and in lectures that are covered in this book… seem to me the key to peace. I remember that Edward Said referred to the solution (somewhere in On Palestine, I forget the page reference), as a geographic/land issue and not a theoretical one. That’s down the line. Here Cohen mentions a couple ideas from the book:
No subtitles. (Some ideas are in this Ha’aretz profile article from a couple years ago; in Hebrew, you can browser-translate it.) Cohen’s focus here is worth reading because it is true… and it is also a good domestic representation of the land thing Said mentions… it paints an actual Middle Eastern society existing under the burgeoning Histadrut apparatus… with fleeting but real solidarity… brotherhood… perhaps a reverse historic Baghdad. Transitory? Illusory? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not that way now. But it seems to me nothing has worked, and Cohen’s mirror here is a real one, and these identities are still here for many people, and Mizrahi Jews have not really been incorporated successfully by Israel, and the set of interactions that will work for peace should clearly be more based in the Levant than, I don’t know, other/Western options.
Clearly far from today. But at the risk of sounding insensitive, it doesn’t cost anything to be positive and it seems to me most citizens have nothing to do with their governments. If you feel bad, do more. If you still feel bad… well, it’s hard not to feel bad. It is bad. WIP but I would be remiss to not to share this book. I like Cohen a lot and discovered his work in Al Jazeera’s Al-Nakba documentary, which was startling and which is on YouTube in its entirety for free.
Thanks for reading.
Snake