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Marisa Olson is one of PLANET’s longtime art writers, having written major features on Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliason, Terence Koh, and many others. She’s also a pretty amazing artist herself. She’s got a performance piece running this weekend at P.S. 122 in Manhattan.
Recently, on the website FFFFOUND, we came across this sketched reinterpretation of our famous Issue One cover which featured Vincent Gallo shrouded by soft white fog — for our AIR issue. Containing a special, and very revealing, “Gallo on Gallo” interview, this issue was a huge hit at the time it came out; even so, we were totally surprised to find this rendering of it posted on FFFFOUND nearly eight years later! Could it have been rendered and posted by Gallo himself? It bears the telltale signs: his autograph and an all-caps GALLO that he adds to old magazines for sale on his website (check out the image via the site on the next page). But then again, it may have simply been copied by a clever artist / interloper who poached it from his merchandise site. You decide. (By the way, if you’ve never been to vgmerchandise.com, Gallo’s own brilliantly narcissistic paradise, you owe yourself the trip. We recommend the Personal Services link for a classic dose of the best and the worst of Vinny Gallo.)
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In light of the earthquake and ensuing tragedy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti yesterday, we’d like to encourage our readers to help in any way they are able. Here are links to two international aid organizations that have longstanding and effective aid efforts on the ground there, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders. We just made a donation on behalf of PLANET through Oxfam and hope many of you will, too, whether through these organizations or others you support. Haiti is only 100 miles from South Florida and has been the most neglected country in our part of the world. The magnitude of the death toll, estimated to be over 100,000, has much to do with poor housing and infrastructure throughout the city and countryside. The people there will simply not be able to cope, nor the country recover, without help from the rest of the world.
Photographer Jeff Antebi, whose work on Juarez we published earlier this week, made many trips to Haiti in the last several months photographing the people there, who, despite crushing poverty – the worst in the Western Hemisphere – maintain an irrepressible spirit. We wanted to include these images to put a human face on the tragedy as well as to show the innately beautiful spirit of the people. Obviously these images are in stark contrast to the scenes we have been seeing out of Haiti for the last day. The safety of the people in these images, photographed a few short months ago, is not known, but certainly all of them have suffered and are still suffering. Please help the people of Haiti and help us spread the word.
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With the new year approaching, we at PLANET wanted to share our favorite music from the past twelve months. And while there were many worthy contenders, the unanimous pick among the editors as the year’s best record is Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. After three albums that seemed to revolve chiefly around a set of artfully crafted, boundary-pushing pop singles, the French four-piece has finally released work that — from first song to last — taps into a potential that has been itching to burst out in full for years. As we wrote in May:
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix marks possibly the quartet’s most complete record to date. Its ten tracks may not vastly depart from the band’s now dependable sound, but [Thomas] Mars’ swooning croon and the band’s soft-rock polish mixed with some modest doses of spiky guitar-work (invoking the Strokes) and disco synths (partly guided by album co-producer and “fifth member” Philippe Zdar of Cassius-fame) reach their zenith on “1901”, “Fences”, and “Lisztomania”, among other such standouts. “The more we do music the more we want to do something that no other bands can do,” Mars modestly proclaims. (Check out the full interview with the band here as well as a stream of “Lisztomania” below.)
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And after the jump, we present the rest of our top fifteen albums of 2009 (with streaming audio).
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Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment — General purpose detector capable of studying many aspects of proton collisions.
Last year, photographer Enrico Sacchetti gained exclusive access to the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. It was a two-day shoot with unlimited access to the entire facility. Sacchetti says his fascination to do the shoot came about not only because of his personal interest in science but also because the experiments (the four main ones: Alice, CMS, Atlas, and LHCb) are being done in some of the biggest and most complex machineries that humans have ever built in an attempt to discover one of the smallest particles in the entire universe — the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle”. Deep below the gorgeous Swiss countryside and hidden from all of humanity, Sacchetti captures the unusual beauty of the LHC.
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