Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed this week “Latin Alternative Week” and there’s a lot to be excited about. For eleven years and counting, artists, journalists, industry personnel, and fans have convened throughout New York City for a peek at what’s next from international stars and newcomers alike during the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC). Expect performances from hip hop and rap artists like Ana Tijoux and Los Rakas (stream below); electronic artists like Nortec Collective Presents Bostich+Fussible, The Pinker Tones (stream below), El Guincho, and Toy Selectah; and rock veterans Maldita Vecindad — at venues such as Central Park Summerstage and the Bowery Ballroom. Santa Monica’s adored KCRW radio station, a media sponsor, and DJ Raul Campos will be broadcasting live sessions. Panel discussions will address topics ranging from the future of digital music to touring to the role of labels today.

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Buy this album at iTunes. To get your baile on, visit latinalternative.com for schedules, including where to find free shows.

Forget space travel, time capsules. Past, present, and future are but alter egos video artist Mariko Mori (森万里子, b. 1967 in Tokyo, Japan) embodies in the glow of a moon-age daydream. Now showing through August 1, Kumano (1997-98) celebrates the Asia Society’s recent acquisition of a pivotal work in the artist’s oeuvre. Affirming her knack for re-invention and media overlay, Kumano witnesses Mori’s quirky jumble of the temporal continuum in fairy, shaman, and angel incarnations. As the exhibition flows from traditional layout to meditative chamber and theater, Mori’s own spiritual journey (no whimsical diversion but a twelve-hour trek) to the revered 8th century pilgrimage site is illuminated. An ancient stone statue, 18th-century golden Tibetan icon and Japanese silk scroll are among the treasures she cycles through with shimmering, looping vocals, as if to reference the non-linear arc of Shintoism and mutability of adopted religions. Once having described her aim to “connect [ancient things] with contemporary life through the technology we have now”, Mori implements aural layering and digital imaging to splice epochs of Asian belief systems.

Although I’ve lived in New York many years now, one thing that never ceases to amaze me — and that I love — is that, on any given day, you never know who you might meet. Walking down the street you might cross David Bowie. Or sitting in a café, you might look next to you and receive a smile from Natalie Portman, and then proceed to talk with her about the latest French cinema. But not only is it true you might meet a famous person, even one of your own personal giants, there are plenty of unknowns — unknown people, that is — who have crawled onto this island in one way or another to pursue a dream. New York City is an ocean of aspiration — and, as they say, a sea of flesh. Put the two together and you have the world’s greatest, scariest, and most wondrous density of striving and struggling artists…and those…who somehow make it. Walking down my street the other day I met one such dream-seeker, a young woman who I often see walking her dog but had never spoken to.
     Her name is Niia, and she moved to New York City from Needham, Massachusetts to attend the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music as a Jazz vocal major. The great part about her story is that while studying at the New School she met Wyclef Jean, who was so impressed with her voice and musical skills that he began working with her and later featured her on his 2008 single, “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)”, which reached number 12 on the pop charts and took her all over the world to perform. All this I learned later, after we parted.

Last Friday saw the fiftieth, and final, of Ryan McGinness’ 50 parties project. Conceived of one year ago by the New York-based artist, the project involved fifty consecutive parties, one thrown each week, in McGinness’ studio. Since New York’s rave culture of the 1990s died and turned corporate, it may be safe to say that we’re all sick of crowds, bouncers, and sponsorship. With a “No strangers. No sponsors.” tagline, these parties revived the concept of the artist’s studio as salon and incubator for discourse and intimacy among the creative community. NYC photographer Nathan Perkel was not only lucky enough to come by a standing invitation, but he received permission from McGinness to take aside party goers to photograph them in his studio. With the context of the events removed, viewers are left to imagine height of the celebrations these fantastic dressers were attending. Following the end of the project, Perkel answered our questions about his favorite themes, the parties’ impact on New York party culture, and what it was like to attend the events as both participant and detached voyeur.

There’s something comforting yet mystifying about Laurie Anderson. In a single breath, Anderson can wax provocative about economic apocalypse before discussing an upcoming Christmas record by her piano-playing dog, Lola Belle. Yet, no matter how hyper-intellectual or flat-out absurd her words and works might seem, in conversation she somehow straddles the line between pretentiousness and preposterousness without ever succumbing to either. Since her breakthrough work from forty years ago, Duets on Ice, in which she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice and played violin until the ice melted away, through her ten-plus albums featuring collaborations with William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Antony Hegarty, and husband Lou Reed, Anderson has mastered the far-flung worlds of avant-garde art, literature, film, experimental music, and even technology, inventing instruments such as tape-bow violins and voice filters. Using the voice filters in much of her spoken word and musical works, Anderson cultivated a male alter-ego (in an act she calls “audio drag”) named Fenway Bergamot, whose visage and voice take center-stage on Anderson’s latest album, Homeland, which continues her critique of American identity and injustice.

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Buy Homeland at iTunes. Visit Nonesuch Records to hear song samples. And for more remixes of “Only An Expert”, visit Indaba Music.

In the novels of Edith Wharton, a bygone era of New York is immortalized, one in which New York’s burgeoning urban space exists alongside sprawling wilderness. The cartography of the Manhattan isle has long since been charted — but in parts of the Middle East, newly-constructed skyscrapers stand against a seldom-interrupted backdrop of desert sand.
     Rotterdam-based artist Bas Princen was introduced to this curiously disparate landscape as a research project for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. However, his photographs of rapidly-developing urban centers in areas like Dubai, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, and Istanbul reveal differences that extend far beyond architecture.
     While most of his images are absent of people, when he does juxtapose human figures with the structures-in-progress, their physical proximity belies the two entities’ social distance from one another. Clad in blue workman’s uniforms and clustered near piles of rubble, groups of laborers gather in front of a massive slick black cube of a building. It is clear that these workmen occupy a very different world than the one that they are working to create for others.
     The cities portrayed in Bas Princen’s images have the feeling of a work in progress. Yet while the landscapes he has captured are certainly progressing toward urbanization, the somewhat desolate atmosphere of his pictures impose a looming question mark over this new generation of flourishing cities.

Since her explosion onto the American pop charts in 1997 with “Show Me Love”, when she was 18 years old, Robyn has graduated from the school of hard-knocks. Her 2005 comeback album, Robyn, featured songs filled with strife and swelling egoism — the songbook of a girl who’s not going to take it anymore. Her new album, Body Talk Pt. 1 (of what she promises will be a three-part series) is no different. Though these tracks are composed of pulsing, straight-forward dance beats, the lyrics reflect an endless string of heartbreak, boredom, and violent confidence. In the video for “Dancing on My Own”, Robyn proudly presents her biceps like a champion fighter before the ring. While she admits, in the opening track, that her drinking, smoking, PMS, mother, and shoes are killing her, she also posits, “Don’t fucking tell me what to do”. Then, as if the posturing had become exhaustive, she finishes the album with a ballad, “Hang With Me” (whatever you do, “don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love” with her), and a sweet traditional Swedish folksong, “Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa”, that shows off her vocal prowess.

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After the jump, check out the video for “Dancing on My Own”. Buy this at iTunes.

The veritable hodgepodge of influences that define Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander’s work is reflected in her own heritage and training. Born in Belo Horizonte of mixed ancestry, Neuenschwander has darted back and forth between her home country and the European continent for much of her career. Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, now on display at the New Museum, presents the last decade of the artist’s multi-genre work.
     Dabbling in film, painting, and sculpture, Neuenschwander relies on a fluid relationship between herself and the audience. The hundreds of colorful ribbons that make up I Wish Your Wish are printed with wishes submitted by past visitors. Viewers are encouraged to take one of the ribbons and tie it to their wrist, and replace the empty spot with a written wish of their own. The inspiration for the project stems from a tradition practiced by members of the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
A Day Like Any Other is curated by Richard Flood at the New Museum. On Thursday evening, Flood will discuss the exhibit with the artist herself, touching on Neuenschwander’s contributions to Brazilian Conceptualism and the ways in which her rich background has allowed her to surpass her predecessors, creating work that at once references the past yet is still uniquely her own.
     Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other will be on view through September 19, 2010 at the New Museum. Rivane Neuenschwander and Richard Flood in Conversation takes place on June 24 at 7 p.m.

Fifty years ago today, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless broke new ground and heralded the arrival of what came to be known as French New Wave Cinema. Breathless was shot in a single summer, in a style unprecedented by previous films. Godard was 29. Determined in equal parts by practical and aesthetic concerns, the film’s distinct jump cuts, long shots, and vivid visual style — combined with its exploration of existential themes through Michel, the petty, Humphrey Bogart-obsessed criminal, and his lover, Patricia, played by Jean Seberg in the role that made her famous — came to define an iconic moment in contemporary film.
     A fully restored version of the film was released last month by Optimum. While it’s hard to imagine seeing this movie for the first time, seeing it restored today reminds us of its stand-alone style and hopefully brings new admirers to what remains a revolutionary work.

While “sustainability” is possibly the hottest buzzword in the world of contemporary design, the term “net zero-energy” is comparatively unknown. Red Hook Green, the newest project by the Brooklyn-based Garrison Architects, is likely to change that. The project is poised to be New York’s first net zero-energy live/work building — it will sustain itself through natural means, and contribute no pollution to our beleagured city air.
     The US Department of Energy defines a zero-energy building, or ZEB, as “a residential or commercial building with greatly reduced energy needs through efficiency gains such that the balance of energy needs can be supplied with renewable technologies”. What’s most revolutionary about the concept of a ZEB is that it asserts that city structures can meet all their energy needs from such low-cost, locally available, and renewable resources as solar and wind power.
     Red Hook Green is approximately 4,000 square feet and includes space for a studio/workshop, corporate offices, garages and a residential apartment — as well as an outdoor green space. Inspired by shipping containers (whose creative potential we covered earlier), the building’s form pays homage to the its Red Hook location, which has long been defined by its active shipping port. Composed of stacked, modular units, the design also takes advantage of the area’s incomparable harbor views. Here’s hoping that this initial effort allows the most greenest of design concepts to take root in the most urban of settings.
     Red Hook Green is to be completed by December 2010. Until that time, those interested can follow its progress through its blog.