from Red Bull USA 

THE NEW MASTERS OF GRAFFITI

by Caroline Ryder 

As crowds flock to LA for the biggest-ever retrospective of street art and graffiti, we showcase the artists most likely to follow in the footsteps of Banksy and Shepard Fairey.

The rise of the leading pop-art movement of our time has been somewhat improbable. From the clanging, dirty New York subways that were its first canvases to white-walled galleries in London, New York, or Tokyo, graffiti has entranced teenagers and art collectors alike. Now the movement’s birthplace is finally recognizing its most wide-reaching visual-art phenomenon with the first major museum exhibition to pay homage to the artists (or vandals, depending on your point of view) whose canvases are the urban streetscape.

“Art In The Streets”, which opened last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, honors graffiti – and its hip young sibling, street art – with an exhibition spanning 30,000 square feet and featuring 50 artists, a number and size unprecedented in the movement’s history.

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from The Village Voice 

Poly Styrene, Lost & Found

Like many of her peers, she discovered the sound of being a grown woman

By Vivien Goldman

Janette Beckman

It was meant to be a delicious comeback for the transgressive girl whose defiant 1977 single, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” fired up Afro-Punk, riot grrrl, and every punk worth their peroxide. Instead, the return of Poly Styrene became one of pop’s most poignant ironies. Generation Indigo — a bubbly, cuddly, insightful record, her first in seven years—was released on the day her death was announced last week.

The loss of 53-year-old Poly Styrene six months after the death of 48-year-old Ari-Up, the dreadlocked singer-songwriter of the Slits, is a reminder: how few were those brave women who shattered all pre-existing models during U.K. punk’s first wave. This ragtag crew was the first self-determined generation of women musicians, and their influence is incalculable; today, their giddy progeny have stormed the malls with their camouflage, neon fishnets, and combat boots worn with gowns. And while their sounds may resonate differently, today’s alpha women—Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Pink — still ride the whirlwind of independent female energy that shook mid-1970s London.

[ click to continue reading at The Village Voice ]

from SPACE.com 

Six Planets Now Aligned in the Dawn Sky

Geoff Gaherty, Starry Night Education,

If you get up any morning for the next few weeks, you’ll be treated to the sight of all the planets except Saturn arrayed along the ecliptic, the path of the sun through the sky.

For the last two months, almost all the planets have been hiding behind the sun, but this week they all emerge and are arrayed in a grand line above the rising sun. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are visible, and you can add Uranus and Neptune to your count if you have binoculars or a small telescope.

This sky map of the six planets shows how they should appear at dawn to observers with clear weather and an unobstructed view.

Astrologers have always been fascinated by planetary alignments, and the doomsayers of 2012 have been prophesying a mystical alignment on Dec. 21, 2012.

[ click to continue reading at SPACE.com ]

from EXHIBITION a

JAMES FREY

James Frey during a studio visit with Wes Lang

James Frey is a best selling author whose previous novels include A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard and Bright Shiny Morning. Signed copies of his newest book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible can be purchased on Exhibition A.

Who did the cover image for The Final Testament of the Holy Bibleand how did you arrive at that visual?

Gregory Crewdson shot the cover. We talked about what it should be, and I wanted a scalpel. If you read the book it becomes evident why. We looked at all sorts of scalpels and trays, and shot it in a studio in Chelsea. I was really honored to have him do it. He’s a great artist and one I admire greatly.

If Jesus came back around, as your book suggests, who would be best suited to paint his portrait.

Richard Phillips or John Currin. Maybe Jenny Saville. Maybe Nan Goldin.

[ click to continue reading at EXHIBITION a ]

from Newsmax

Book Assailing Bible as ‘Forged’ Promotes Fakery

By Jerry Newcombe

A new book by a major New Testament scholar is sure to make mincemeat of many people’s faith. Needlessly. The scholar is the iconoclastic Bart Ehrman, who teaches religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Ehrman, whose book is titled “Forged: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are,” said on a radio broadcast that about 75 percent of the New Testament documents are supposedly forged. They’re frauds.

Sam Lamerson, a conservative New Testament scholar who teaches at Knox Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., heard Ehrman on a radio broadcast say words to this effect: “I want to be the scholar that uses the F-word about the Bible. I want people to know that these books were forged.” (By way of full disclosure, I’ll note that I earned a theology degree at Knox.)

“Forged” is a strong word. Several of the New Testament books claim no authorship at all. Church tradition has attributed them to various writers, but the biblical text itself does not claim authorship for these particular books. For instance, none of the four Gospels (of which tradition names the writers as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) actually has the names of the authors at the beginning of their documents.

But if a document is anonymous, how could it be a forgery?

[ click to continue reading at Newsmax.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times

Last Supper was not Jesus’ last supper, researcher says

A British academic believes Jesus used a largely abandoned 3,000-year-old calendar that had Passover beginning Wednesday evening, and that the meal was indeed a Seder. So his actual last supper would probably have been jail fare.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” as depicted in a 1947 Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. (Los Angeles Times)

By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

The Last Supper was probably the next-to-last supper of Jesus’ life, a British researcher has concluded after using ancient calendars and astrological data to rethink the chronology of what Christians know as Holy Week.

Colin Humphreys, a scientist who previously explored the Exodus of the Old Testament, believes his studies show that Holy Thursday — the day that Jesus gathered his disciples for the famous supper, according to tradition — was actually a Wednesday.

Humphreys’ book, “The Mystery of the Last Supper” (Cambridge University Press), was published Thursday, a day that many Christians observed as one of the holiest of the year. That’s a mistake, according to the researcher, a professor of materials science at Cambridge University who has made a sideline of biblical research.

“The Last Supper was on Wednesday, April 1, AD 33, with the crucifixion on Friday, April 3, AD 33,” Humphreys writes. He believes that his research not only definitively establishes the dates, which have eluded most scholars, but that it resolves an apparent conflict within the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last days.

[ click to read full article at LATimes.com ]