TheSelby.com has been a must-visit since its launch in 2008. Followers the world over click on regularly to see which artists, designers, performers, and style-makers have been most recently anointed, pictured in their living and working spaces by New York based photographer Todd Selby. Now Selby has compiled some of his best photo essays, along with the watercolor illustrations and hand-written questionnaires that accompany them, in one volume, The Selby is In Your Place.
     Since the website’s launch he’s been inundated by requests from viewers to visit them and photograph their homes. In an email conversation, Selby explained that he typically finds new subjects through recommendations from friends. In addition, he does extensive research before visiting artists’ homes to ensure that their decorative sensibility will suit his own, which clearly tends toward excess. As he states: “Minimalism is boring. Maximalism is exciting.”
     Selby’s photographs have tapped into a brand of interior design that has long been associated with artistic and bohemian living, one in which the home becomes a backdrop for a dense, eccentric, artfully curated display of personal possessions. Selby himself grew up in the suburbs of Orange County, California. ”Our house had tons of funny stuff we had collected from our travels,” he remembers. Similarly, the interiors that he’s drawn to are encrusted with their owners’ things: found objects, momentos, talismans, artwork, and antiques. They’re at once immensely stylish and intensely personal.

Laura Marling’s rustic sophomore offering goes down like a smoldering shot of your finest bourbon. Once inside, her poignant verses kick your guts around before soaking in to warm your belly and leave you feeling eerily serene. The twenty-year old British folk princess, who has already had an album nominated for the prestigious Mercury award, murmurs rigorous thoughts on love, faith, fear, and loss through measured beats and intricate banjo plucks on this melancholy effort. Her backing band features a rolling cast of characters throughout, including talented members of Mumford and Sons and Noah and the Whale. The organized cacophonies that they weave using flutes, twangy guitars, pounding drums, and more add texture and authenticity to Marling’s moody lyric-centric tracks. Her words remain thoughtful and adamant as ever, reflecting the temperamental process of filling out emotionally as a maturing woman.

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People are designed to function within the natural landscape, and as our natural landscape further deteriorates, designers are using green-roof technology to re-define urban development as ecologically sustainable. Green roofs reinstate some of the landscape features that originally made life habitable on land, but were torn down to make way for skyscrapers and apartment buildings.
      A green roof, or an engineered vegetative layer planted directly into the roof over concrete, tile, etc, comes in many forms, but in the end, each has the same effect: renewing the visual and environmental connection to ecological balance. Prominent in Europe and making headway in the US, green roofs re-introduce biological diversity into our cities, support architectural structure, and reduce the psychological stress and environmental impact of development.
     The design challenge of green roof is to combine mechanics with aesthetics and create an urban geography that fulfils its visual appeal and environmental benefits all at once. All systems have their design advantage based on individual architecture, but the basic green roof forms are: extensive, which are self-regenerative, low maintenance, visual gardens; and intensive, which have more of a functional basis, heavier, with more vegetative capabilities. All green roofs consist of a multi-ply water-proofing layer, drainage, filter fabric, growing media, and plants.

In a place like Sinaloa — the Pacific coast state famous for being the cradle of drug traffickers in Mexico — it’s almost impossible to carry out real journalism. After all, if the authorities don’t investigate drug gangs, then how is a reporter expected to? Some who have tried have paid with their lives.
     In this lethal setting, art becomes a powerful tool of expression, and in the last few years, as violence has exploded here, a brave new generation of cartoonists has erupted in the state capital, Culiacán. With few opportunities to publish their bold work in the mainstream press, a group of moneros got together to publish La Locha, a monthly comic infused with an angry blend of black comedy and societal critique.
     Planet recently met up with one of La Locha’s founders, the cartoonist Bobadilla, in a cantina in Culiacán, to have a chat about the situation in Sinaloa and what it means to be a cartoonist here. His strip Ñacas y Tlacuachi (loosely translates to “Rat and Weasel”), about two bumbling hitmen for hire, was recently picked up by start-up newspaper Ríodoce, a courageous new medium trying to tell the truth about what is happening in the drug war around the state. As a result of their candor, their offices fell victim to a grenade attack. Fortunately, nobody was killed. Bobadilla tells us about the incident, his work, and also a family tragedy that could have come straight from the pages of his cartoons. Like he says, in Sinaloa, reality is always stranger than fiction….

Mi Ami might break your heart. Two of its three members, singer/guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick and bassist Jacob Long, used to be in Black Eyes — the amazing post-punk band that split just as they were breaking through. The two bands sound similar enough for fans of Black Eyes to imagine what could have been: aggressively polyrhythmic, riotously cacophonous. But Mi Ami is not Black Eyes-lite. Where Black Eyes were a tornado, pulling in and destroying as many divergent genres as they could, Mi Ami look inward. On Steal Your Face, the San Francisco band’s second full-length after a handful of EPs and remixes, Martin-McCormick, Long, and seemingly inexhaustible drummer Damon Palermo have come into their own by devoting an entire record to the exploration of the tensile strength of dub and world music.

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Robert Hughes, the famous art critic, once said that an artist’s charge is to produce art that has something to say about our world. Federico Fellini, the celebrated Italian film director, was acutely aware of this task. In 8 ½, arguably his most renowned film, the protagonist, a director caught in the midst of creative stupor, reflects, “I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves.”
    The new book, Federico Fellini: The Films (Rizolli, $75), carefully explores Fellini’s oeuvre. The 317-page tome is beautifully laid out, full of behind-the-scene images and biographical photos, many published for the first time. Some of the photos printed in the book are iconic, like the image of Anita Ekberg splashing in Fontana de Trevi from La Dolce Vita. Other visuals, like Fellini’s drawings are extremely rare.
    Yet, this is not merely a coffee table book. The volume successfully combines lush imagery with a meticulous study of each of the twenty-five pictures that Fellini directed. These summaries are written by Tullio Kezich, the director’s faithful biographer, and contain comprehensive background information, from ideas born in Felinni’s head to their final manifestation as films. Each chapter starts with a quote by the director that relays an anecdote, inviting us into the filmmaker’s world, depicting his struggles and anxieties. Fellini was dubbed the Maestro, but the book depicts a man who doubted, questioned, and painstakingly toiled in order to achieve the mastery of cinematic form while maintaining a singular voice.

An exercise in Biennial belt tightening, the Whitney’s “2010” isn’t quite the visual juggernaut of years past. Pared down to fifty-five artists seeking to convey the anxiety and hope of the last two years, the exhibition is an understated paean to the present. On the modest roster is Vietnamese-born Tam Tran, a 23-year-old photographer whose contribution to a Memphis group exhibition first caught the eye of associate curator Carrion-Murayari. Tran, whose use of stark color and shadow recalls William Eggleston’s saturated depictions of the region, is quirky and disarming in her spontaneity and collaborative approach. In photographing her nephew for the Raising Hell series chosen for the show, the artist remarked, “If I see something I liked I would yell, ‘HOLD!’ and immediately push the shutter button before the moment was gone.” Often her work involves costuming or formal manipulation to emphasize ambiguous roles and narratives. Pool halls, mini marts, backyards, and her body act as canvases for studies in shifting identity and dichotomy. In a self-portrait cycle, for example, the artist transmogrifies from diminutive doll to powerful protagonist. While throughout Raising Hell the artist’s nephew wields a stick against a palpable yet invisible foe in alternating poses of victory and surrender. Rich in metaphorical content, the photograph Battle Cry from this series appeared prominently in media outlets covering the Biennial. “From the stance of an adult, the boy warrior is living out an instance of our childhood that we’ve lost,” Tran comments. It is a layered perspective on innocence, articulating fear and reassurance, force and restraint.