For most people, the thought of building a home from scratch would be enough to lay the foundation for a mid-life crisis. For Lou Ureneck, building the framework for a cabin in the woods is precisely the means for avoiding such a breakdown. While he gathers the various items he’ll need to complete the job, he also assembles a story to go along with the assembled structure, in which he tracks the course of the project, from the point of inspiration to his family’s first Thanksgiving dinner inside the cabin’s walls. It makes for a charming new memoir, based on a blog he wrote for The New York Times during the construction process, with the straightforward title Cabin.
     Ureneck’s motives are more complex than simply wanting a place for getting away. He conceives of the idea to build his very own cabin in the deep woods of Maine, not far from his brother Paul’s Portland home, as a response to the spate of bad fortune and difficult transitions taking hold of his life in the midst of his middle aged years – a failed marriage, a recently deceased mother, a newly empty nest, and a health scare of his own to top it off. This new getaway house, he figures, would provide respite from the complications of the outside world. Most likely, it would also reconnect him to his brother’s family after too many years of distance, both geographic and emotional. And having his brother’s family around might also provide some vital manpower from the pouring of the concrete foundation piers to the building of the timber-frame structure, the rafters and ultimately the roof.

Coinciding with the release of his newest film, Carnage – screening this month at the New York Film Festival (an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award winning play) MoMa is holding a retrospective of Roman Polanski’s work to date. Possibly the most contentious of living filmmakers – I will steer clear of the great Polanski debate – instead, consider one of his best – Repulsion (1965).
     Opening with a claustrophobic, close-up of a glassy retina, displaying all the frenzied paranoia that’s come to be Polanski’s most persistent concern – this heavy lashed, rapid blinking eyeball belongs to Catherine Deneuve, playing the perennially glum ingénue Carole, incongruously transplanted from France into the hubbub of 1960s, swinging London.
     Meandering through the film, in a constant state of crestfallen bewilderment – Carole works by day as a manicurist, attending to an assemblage of wealthy, cranky women. Living with her long-suffering sister, she displays all the qualities of the persnickety roommate from hell – and is otherwise consumed by averting the attention of an abundance of male admirers.

Ten years ago there was a joke that half of the world’s construction cranes were in Dubai. Today the joke might be that half of the world’s construction cranes are in mainland China, and that factories in China are producing more cranes every day. There’s been cataclysmic industrialization there and, along with it, an awesome amount of new construction. Old neighborhoods are being razed and, with incredible speed, gleaming new cities are rising. An exhibit at Rome’s modern art museum MAXXI, “Verso Est: Chinese Architectural Landscape,” takes a closer look at the architecture that’s emerging.
     Because of relatively unregulated city planning and construction, buildings get built in China more quickly than they could ever get built in North America or Europe. So while New Yorkers wait and watch Tower One rise at the World Trade Center site, Beijing’s Central China Television (CCTV) headquarters by Rem Koolhaas, which was designed at the same time, has already been open for over a year. The breakneck pace of construction is impressive and also risky. Before it’s opening in 2010 the entire exterior shell of the CCTV tower went up in flame when some stray fireworks hit it. It’s an accident that probably wouldn’t have happened at an American building site, where federal safety standards ensure that building materials are fire resistant.

Photography came to China at the start of the 1860s, introduced by foreigners but enthusiastically embraced by natives. In the decades leading up to the twentieth century, every incarnation of the new technology managed to replicate itself in the Chinese popular consciousness: formal landscapes, official portraiture, personal documentation, and architectural and street scenes. These extraordinarily rare images are the meat of Sheying: Shades of China 1850-1900, opening September 15th at Throckmorton Fine Art.
     The black-and-white photos, a mixture of work by transplanted Europeans and fledgling Chinese photographers, have the painterly shades and delicate composition of Europe’s ongoing pictorialism movement. But the pictures are unmistakably Chinese in subject matter. In a cramped Cantonese street, stall banners blot out the sky. Two prisoners pose stoically in cangues. There are countless images of harbors, filled with the bobbing handmade boats that powered the national economy. For all the influence the relatively established European photographers held, China proved itself to be an inimitable sitter. The collection provides a fascinating look at an empire before industrialization.

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How many rappers are name-checking Morrissey as an influence and using Smiths song titles for their various outlets? Trinidad-born and Brooklyn-raised, Theophilus London is quite possibly the only one. The twenty-something London, whose debut full-length, Timez Are Weird These Days, dropped in July, is an exemplar for the modern musician. Establishing himself as a persona through social networking and his sense of style long before he released any music, London is creating a blueprint for current artists.
     London is not all about futuristic approaches. He preceded any original material with two, now-classic mixtapes: This Charming Mixtape (a twist on the the Smiths’ “This Charming Man”) and I Want You. And prior to the release of his EP, Love’s Holiday, he had firm ties to high-end fashion brands such as Cole Haan.
     Alongside all this, London is maniacally active on his Twitter feed, his Facebook page, his “This Charming Blog” posts, his numerous Tumblr account posts, and his Hypebeast — not repeating the same information on any of those outlets, keeping the material fresh for today’s media-hungry, short attention span audiences.

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From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

David Strettell is the founder and owner of Dashwood Books, a tiny but enormously influential photography bookstore located on Bond Street in the Bowery section of Manhattan. Since opening in 2005, Dashwood has become New York City’s insider resource and social nexus for the latest in contemporary international photography. With an impressive run of book releases, signings, and talks by some of the top names in photography today, as well as pursuing its own publishing projects and being known for stocking unique titles, rare collectors’ editions, and short-run monographs of self-published work, Dashwood has come to present a broad but distinct range of today’s photographic work through the curatorial passion of one man. Previously, Strettell had assisted Mario Testino and then worked for the legendary Magnum Photo cooperative for 12 years. After leaving Magnum, Strettell says he took six months off to decide what was next for him, and chose to open Dashwood. Recently, I met with David at his East Village flat for tea, conversation, and to take a few pictures of the man behind the books.

“Sometimes a story told long ago will come back and speak to you in the present.” So begins Pamela Yates’ narration of her new documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator. The line refers to her acclaimed 1983 film, When the Mountains Tremble, which uncovered the genocide of indigenous (Maya) people in Guatemala. In addition to introducing the world to Rigoberta Menchú, a young Maya exile who served as the film’s storyteller and who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and run for president of Guatemala, the earlier film included footage that eventually became evidence against the military dictatorship responsible for the killings.
Filmed 20-odd years after When the Mountains Tremble won the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Festival, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is the story of the efforts to bring General Ríos Montt and his cronies to justice. In 2003 Yates was approached by lawyers orchestrating the genocide case initiated by Menchú. Their quest for more evidence prompted Yates to exhume unused footage from her previous film. She found herself reliving that earlier time when, as a young filmmaker, she gained the trust of both Guatemalan Army generals and young indigenous guerillas, as well as survivors of the killings. Granito features several of these characters then and now, and follows the genocide case’s progress as it reaches the Spanish Criminal Court. The film is both important historical document and history-making in itself.

Forty-two years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the bulky, crinkly white spacesuit he wore remains an icon of the space age. While the suit was engineered by NASA to meet exacting technical standards, it was actually assembled by underwear seamstresses. This is just one intriguing aspect of spacesuit design that’s documented in the new book “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo,” by Nicholas de Monchaux.
     When NASA first engineered the suits for the Apollo missions they wanted them to have a cold, hard, mechanical look. But the shell-like suit prototypes they produced, which made astronauts look like the Michelin Man, weren’t especially comfortable or flexible. So NASA used layers of lighter materials stitched together. The special twenty-one-layer assembly they devised had nylon inside for comfort, teflon outside for protection, and rubber-dipped fabrics in between to withstand pressure.

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Blowing on dice has never looked so terrifying. Seated at a casino table over mixed drinks in Hong Kong, Gwyneth Paltrow is the angelic host for a deadly virus unknown to the world’s health agencies. Within days, she will be dead. (Don’t worry – it’s a spoiler that’s also given away in the trailer.) By the time of her vividly filmed autopsy, the infectious agent will have found its way to cities as widespread as Chicago, London, and Tokyo, raising the concerns of the expert few who will have begun to grasp the nightmare situation threatening to emerge.
     “Contagion” arrives in movie theaters this weekend, just as the nation commemorates the 10-year anniversary of one of its most fully realized nightmare scenarios. Following a decade informed by an epidemic of epidemics, whether in the form of terrorist attacks and endless wars, environmental shocks, and financial collapses that spread like viruses from one market to another, director Stephen Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have picked one of the less-publicized dangers of the modern world as the basis of their film. Now the secret’s finally out – Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t the only one in trouble.
     Just how bad could things get? If we think we’ve seen the worst of the biohazard strain of international crises in the past decade, based on our dealings with the bird flu or H1N1 or SARS, the filmmakers emphatically tell us to think again. It could be a lot worse. Much worse, in fact. Worse to the point that parts of this movie bring to mind George Romero’s zombie classics.

The black-and-white photography of Marcus Bleasdale, who has spent over a decade documenting the conflict-torn Congo, includes some of the most comprehensive and richly textured images to have come out of the area. Bleasdale has a knack for capturing the spontaneous – his camera immerses itself in successive, wildly contrasting environments and waits for his subjects to reveal themselves in a single perfect, instinctive gesture. Thus his photos are all about movement, and the way it animates everything from a soldier-filled jungle to a children’s municipal shower. Bleasdale’s Congo work is the focus of a show at Anastasia Photo opening September 15th.

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