American war reporting is going through a strange phase at the moment. With soldier-produced images and text so easily and readily available—and, often, so poignant—the idea of journalists and photographers giving us in-the-thick-of-it reportage seems anachronistic. Aren’t all those pros just hanging out in some hotel in Baghdad drinking whiskey, forming alliances and cultivating throwback charisma? Aren’t the words and pictures given to us by soldiers far more authentic and honest? Nope: too simplistic. Encountering an amateur’s view of crisis it is a very different experience than encountering an interpretation of crisis made by an artist. When professional writers, painters, filmmakers and photographers, no matter their nationality or fidelity, produce artworks in response to their subject matter—war, crisis, or otherwise—the effect of this work, when done well, is to remove sentimentality and open the door for engaged analysis and discussion. These art works, in their artistry and complexity of thought, start conversations, whereas most non-professional images and texts have the more straightforward task of delivering “subjectified” information. This is why a book like Writing on the Edge: Great Contemporary Writers on the Front Line of Crisis, which was created by photographer Tom Craig in conjunction with Médecins Sans Frontières, is an important anthology. Through the words of contemporary writers like DBC Pierre (who writes on mental health in Armenia) and Martin Amis (who addresses gang violence in Columbia), one gets a sense of the problems of the world illuminated by art’s highest function, simply put by T.W. Adorno: “…it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, its consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”

Writing on the Edge releases in April

Dance on film has more than its fair share of detractors: as with any performance, the artifact often cannot compare to the live experience. Ready to silence the critics, and perhaps bring the feelings around dance documentation to a different place, are New York City Ballet soloists Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi. Their new film, NY Export: Opus Jazz, screened Tuesday evening at Lincoln Center and will air tonight on PBS. Filmed in a variety of iconic locations across the city, from Coney Island to a pre-renovation High Line, Opus Jazz returns Jerome Robbins’ eponymous 1958 ballet to the streets that inspired it. Working to a jazzy score by Robert Prince, Robbins perfected the candid dance language he introduced to America a year earlier with his choreography for West Side Story in the five-movement work that quickly became a modern classic after, appropriately enough, being broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show.

In the new film, which Bar and Suozzi produced with the assistance of directors Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost, the City Ballet dancers look like high-school students out for the summer, leaping and twirling through the streets, fresh-faced exemplars of all-American youth in beat-up sneakers and dusty tank tops. The opening movement finds a group gliding about in McCarren Pool; the last sees a performance on stage at Jersey City’s Loew’s Theatre. You can almost feel the seawater beneath the boardwalk and smell the French fries at the greasy diner where the kids relax. Opus Jazz commits the cardinal sin of filming dance—close-ups that cut off legs and feet—but, in recompense, takes aesthetic cues from the cinéma vérité style so beloved by independent filmmakers today.

Throughout, there’s little sense of the ways New York has changed since the 1950s: teenagers still fight and flirt, August days are still hot and sticky, the sun still sets over New Jersey. Opus Jazz makes a case for New York as a city for the young and the disenchanted, the lolling heads and languid snapping in the choreography a counterpoint to the barely-contained raw energy of youth in revolt.

Photography by Jody Lee Lipes

Teengirl Fantasy might be thought of less as a fantasy about teen girls and more of what a teenage girl’s deepest fantasies might sound like. Comprised of Oberlin College friends Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi (both male), this L.A.-meets-New-Jersey-in-Ohio-and-sometimes-Amsterdam duo has constructed a sound that is nearly impossible to categorize. Part 4/4 rhythm electronic house, part swirling melodic shoegaze, and part booty techno, their lengthy tracks are oftentimes sped up and slowed down in blessed-out simultaneity. When asked which word they would invent to make up their own genre tag, Takahashi decidedly states: “sleephouse,” without even pausing to think. Their ability to get crowds going, even in Brooklyn, has resulted in a few heated situations. “Once, in Baltimore, a couple was having actual sex on top of the table with our gear on it,” recalls Weiss. “I had to actually push against the guy’s back to keep them off of me. He was all sweaty. It was really gross.”

Teengirl Fantasy’s debut full-length is out
in May 2010 from True Panther US/Merok UK.
Photography by Marco Roso

Throughout this cold and white New York winter, I’ve had Beach House’s Teen Dream on heavy rotation. The band’s towering second album feels like a fitting complement for the mood shift between the picturesque beauty of falling snow to the subsequent nasty slush and wet toes (at least before the Bean boots get laced up). The lead single, “Norway”—with its tales of sleep, wooden houses, and lonely hearts—serves to provide an accessible shelter from the dark. A sort of hot toddy in the midst of a blizzard.

Pause.

Then I went on vacation and took this long player with me to a catamaran in the Carribean. The same songs that sound-tracked my cold and bitter journeys around an over-congested island city effortlessly became sun-kissed jams for treks around barren islands. In between cannonballs, cervezas and avocados, “Take Care” (the album’s closer) introduces tales of swimming, snakes and selflessness—all very good things to have on a little spring break.

http://www.myspace.com/beachhousemusic

For those who have ever spent any significant amount of time searching for that perfect crewneck sweatshirt that’s been washed so many times yet miraculously remains both sturdy and soft, you are not alone. Burglar.Co.,Ltd, a Swedish brand launched in 2008 that specializes in workwear and military-inspired basics, is the brainchild of one such tireless aficionado of vintage garments and hand craftsmanship. Sebastian Bacigalupe traveled over three years to far-flung locations in order to find precisely the right materials and manufacturing techniques needed to execute his vision. The comfortable, effortless pieces that resulted belie their carefully researched origins. Burglar.Co.,Ltd will soon offer a wider range of accessories and leather products, but in the meantime, Bacigalupe is working on a bag made from his most recent find, a hundred-year-old cotton and canvas sail. Sometimes it’s just easier to let someone else do the legwork for you.

Photography by Fredrik Skogkvist

The environmentalist Edward Abbey once said, “You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light,” but David Nye is out to prove him wrong. In his new book, When the Lights Went Out, Nye traces the 20th-century significance of a blanket of night falling over society. The imposed blackouts during World War II make an appearance as examples of military action. New York City’s 1965 and 1977 blackouts are contrasted to reflect the dissolution in societal bonds in those decades. California’s rolling blackouts in 2000 and the power failure that brought down the northeast in 2003 demonstrate the nation’s increasingly creaky infrastructure. Through causes economic, strategic, environmental, or just plain belligerent, Nye explores the effect of darkness on the American mind, painting a picture of a modern civilization so consumed with life under glowing bulbs that night itself seems unnatural.

NYC Blackout, 2003. Photography by Sergio A. Fernandez
Courtesy +Kris Graves Projects, Brooklyn.
When the Lights Went Out is out in March 2010 from MIT Press