This morning brings exciting news of the next New Pornographers album. It’s called Together and will be released on May 4. Their Web site has a bunch of photos of their recording sessions. We see horns, reindeer bells, a Mellotron, a xylophone, cats and dogs, ice hockey, a foam hand, a mennorah, action figures on a mantelpiece, Dan Bejar birthday cupcakes, John Collins brushing his teeth, sausages and a cardboard deer head.
From Dwight Garner’s New York Times review of “The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back” by Charles Pellegrino.
Do you have a passport and a library card?
— According to a woman quoted in this New York Times story, she has a “genius friend” who uses this as a screening criteria for dates.
Black Whole Conference installation by Michel de Broin… Chairball.
via simko
A video preview for Raj Patel’s new book, The Value of Nothing. I saw him speak last week in NYC at the Ethical Culture Society. Cool guy. Need to pick up his book. Fascinating that books now have preview videos. Somewhat related: There’s a band called OK Go that wrote an interesting thing about not being able to allow their fans to embed their YouTube video because their record label couldn’t make money on it.
For the last two or three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed also over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.
— Tino Sehgal (“Making Art Out of an Encounter” by Arthur Lebow, The New York Times, Jan. 15, 2010). A show of his work opens at the Guggenheim on January 29.
“Cinq ellipses ouvertes” (Metz, France) by Felice Varini. (Via Eyeteeth.) Kind of a bigger and bolder version of Aakash Nihalani’s work.
“Sun Is King” by Laura Veirs from her new album, July Flame.
Noah Sheldon’s photos of a decaying Biosphere 2 discussed on BLDGBLOG: “The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed ‘as a transgressive animated force against buildings’—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.”
Roger Penrose’s Impossible Triangle.
