Short Takes

TELEVISION

A Grueling Tale of Frontier Horror

IN 1846 A BAND OF SETTLERS LEFT ILLInois for California. They ended up stranded in the Sierra Nevada at the outset of the worst winter ever recorded there. By the time the starving survivors straggled into Sutter's Fort, THE DONNER PARTY had written one of the darkest chapters in American history, a tale of humans reduced to the most desperate circumstances -- including, famously, cannibalism. For this PBS documentary, Ric Burns, a co-producer with his brother Ken of The Civil War, uses the same techniques as that series -- archival photographs, readings from diaries and letters -- to re-create the story with harrowing scrupulousness. A grueling, unforgettable trip.

MUSIC

Bedtime Story

THE CATCH IN TAMMY WYNETTE'S VOICE sounds like a heartbreak that's become a habit. For 25 years, Wynette has been one of country music's best habits. The 67-song CD set Tears of Fire offers a lot of fine down-home hits (Stand By Your Man, We're Not the Jet Set) and a little social history, so often does Wynette sing about the soul-scarred Southern woman. Some of her best songs (I Don't Wanna Play House, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, Dear Daughters) are bedtime stories for a child from a ravaged home; they translate complex hurts into simple poetry. That could be a definition of country music, and Wynette is its most plangent hard-luck heroine since Patsy Cline.

MUSIC

The Abbe's Road

TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY PIANISM IS shrouded in a golden-era haze, but just how good was it really? A new double CD from Pearl Records, THE PUPILS OF LISZT, provides some clues. Here are such pedagogic scions of the Hungarian firebrand as Eugen D'Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Arthur Friedheim and six others. Even allowing for poor recording quality and the advanced age of some of the performers, what is remarkable is how ordinary most of the playing is. Only the dazzling if sometimes clumsy Rosenthal and the elegant Jose Vianna da Motta would get a second listen today. Friedheim, in particular, is appalling in selections by his mentor and Chopin. Memory does play tricks.

THEATER

Married to the Muralist

EVERYTHING ABOUT MEXICAN PAINTER Frida Kahlo was high drama. In pain all her life after a streetcar accident, she battled drugs and despair, had a tumultuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and conducted affairs with women and men, including Leon Trotsky. FRIDA, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, adds to her stature as cult figurine. Mexican musical motifs blend with spoken monologues and lyrical, character-defining songs, while masks and puppets recreate the magic realism of her paintings. In the title role, Helen Schneider conveys the radiance and explosive fury of the woman whose art was, in the words of Andre Breton, a "ribbon around a bomb."

BOOKS

Sodom High

A FEW GOOD THINGS ABOUT MADONNA'S SEX: she's in splendid shape physically; the text offers helpful dating tips ("Everyone is a sucker for garter belts"); Steven Meisel's photos have a chummy decadence about them, like "Activities" pix from the Sodom High yearbook. An acid test for your queasiness quotient, Sex (Warner Books; $50) displays the protean pop icon in many a raunchy pose with many a tattooed or manacled partner. Madonna means it all to be therapeutic. In the age of AIDS, she suggests, fantasies of power and pain should not be taboo; they are all some people have left. She also knows that stardom, like any other form of exhibitionism, is about surfaces, not essences -- which is why dust, not sulfur, rises from these pages. Much of Sex is S&M camp, a nostalgia item from an era that existed mainly on French postcards. Six months from now it will be the first aluminum-covered soft-porn book ever to grace the remainder bin.