With his fifth album under the Twilight Singers moniker, former Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli regroups his collective for one of his strongest, darkest efforts yet.
As always, there are notable guests on hand for Dynamite Steps, with frequent Dulli collaborators Mark Lanegan and Joseph Arthur both appearing, along with Ani DiFranco and the Verve’s Nick McCabe. Drenched in the explosive booze-and-soul-fueled rock with which Dulli is synonymous, the album also hints at the more slow-burning menace of his other project with Lanegan, the Gutter Twins.
Offering a photographic view of an urban Swiss subculture, Karlheinz Weinberger’s Rebel Youth takes book lovers for a walk on Zurich’s wild side in the 1960s.
A warehouse worker by day, Weinberger led a double life documenting the unconventional street styles of juvenile delinquents, biker gangs, and gay youths. Influenced by the defiant personas of Elvis Presley and James Dean, the young subjects flaunt homegrown fashions and hipster hairdos to convey individualist attitudes, while still running with a pack.
Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s magic-realist novel, Shirin Neshat’s debut feature uses Iran’s 1953 CIA-backed coup d’etat as a backdrop for examining the anatomy of the country’s patriarchal society.
Over the course of several days, Women Without Men follows four women of varying social class and age as their lives converge in a haunting metaphorical orchard. All are at points of transition: Munis, the political activist; Zarin, the young prostitute; Fakhri, the unhappily married middle-aged upper cruster; and Faezeh, the innocent. Together, they struggle to find themselves amid the political and social turmoil of the time.
Through its online home, Brooklyn-based organization Art House Co-op produces ambitious international art projects that anyone can participate in.
The group’s most popular undertaking is The Sketchbook Project, a traveling library of artists’ sketchbooks. Over 10,000 books from 104 countries will begin touring the US this month, with stops in New York, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco. A Million Little Pictures, the cooperative’s roving photography exhibition, is currently open for participation.
Notorious for his banned cover art to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, George Condo is a wild, prolific painter with a masterful eye for the grotesque.
Employing a twisted, kitsch vision of comic and tragic muses, Condo paints powerful, psychological portraits, based on memories of old-master paintings and keen observations of everyday people. Working in a style that he has dubbed “artificial realism,” Condo turns the world around us into a surreal playground for the bizarre.
Named after a Danish fairy tale, UK trio Esben and the Witch create a dense, chilling, and spellbinding world within the layered sonics of their debut album.
Evocative of a dark alliance formed between Florence and the Machine and the women of Warpaint, Violet Cries is filled with songs whose titles loom as large as their enveloping atmospherics: “Hexagons IV,” “Eumenides,” and, more bluntly, “Warpath.” At its most grandiose, it’s a call to arms (“Battlecry” and “Marching Song” are other titular clues you’ll discover), while at its subtlest, it’s the soundtrack to every spooky fable — including the one from which the band takes its moniker.
New York-based, self-taught photographer Mike Schreiber’s unique vision of hip-hop celebrities, from Nas and Biz Markie to Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Jay-Z, is collected for the first time in True Hip-Hop.
Schreiber captures his subjects with a real-life grit that becomes seemingly tangible. Most jaw-dropping is the strikingly candid proof sheet presenting a vulnerable young artist then known as Maya Arulpragasam, who would use Schreiber’s photos as she rose to fame as M.I.A.
Now out on DVD, director Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is a visually arresting psychosexual acid trip through the Tokyo underworld.
New to the neon jungle, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) gets caught up with drugs, while his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) finds refuge working at a local strip club. After a bust goes awry, Oscar’s spirit sets sail — but helplessly hovers over the city as his friends and loved ones deal with the aftermath of his indiscretions. Loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead and scored by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, the film presents a mind-bending, candy-coated nightmare.
After capturing the likes of Oliver Stone, Simon Cowell, Margaret Cho, and Amy Poehler, photographer Austin Young is turning his camera on the public with an interactive solo exhibit.
Young’s vibrant portraits have been published in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Flaunt, and Interview, with subjects ranging from A-list celebrities to drag queens. Part Warhol’s Factory, part 21st-century photo studio, his latest project, Your Face Here, is an opportunity for non-celebrities to become part of the show, too.
Exploring issues of racial and gender identity, Lorna Simpson blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in her poignant photographic and video installations.
Mining eBay and flea markets for vernacular photos of African Americans from the era of segregation, Simpson recontextualizes the imagery to coax new meaning from lost memories. Photo-booth pictures get paired with the artist’s wistful drawings, while alluring, pin-up-like snapshots are re-created with Simpson simulating the unknown subjects’ playful poses.
