Happy Spring, Precipitate supporters! Check out this week’s staff picks, and let us know what you’re reading, listening to, and watching this week.
Cameron’s Pick:
In anticipation of the release of their new album, Burst Apart, on May 10th, I’ve been glutting myself on The Antlers, the Brooklyn-based project whose 2009 album, Hospice, gnawed at parts of my heart I didn’t even know existed, and landed the band a spot on most of the year’s best-of lists. Hospice features frontman Peter Silberman’s falsetto, belting and sometimes near-whispering his way through riveting confessionals about hospice workers, claustrophobic relationships, artistic self-destruction (Sylvia Plath figures prominently), and terminal illness. If Burst Apart has even a tenth of Hospice’s raw narrative power, brace yourself.
Caitlin’s Pick:
Nancy Spero, renowned visual artist, scholar, and feminist art pioneer, completed Torture of Women in 1976. Recently published by Siglio Press in 2010, Spero’s collection confronts the many political and social injustices women across the globe have faced. Consisting of fourteen panels, the original installation spans 125 feet and includes collaged mythic images of women, along with typewritten or hand-printed words from real victim testimony. Torture of Women reveals an eye unwavering in its attention to place not only through gender, but also through process, as Spero’s collaged images quite literally pull the viewer into the tortured body. Not for the faint-hearted, but definitely worth experiencing.
Gwynne’s Pick:
Tired of glazed expressions when you utter some variation of the word “environment”? Ever wish you could have a conversation about an ecological concern without first prefacing your perspective with an “I’m not a crazy hippie, but…”? Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World” may be the salve for you. In the essay, they argue that while the term “environmentalism” has been co-opted as a marketing strategy, freeing ourselves of the “green” brand is the first step in communicating the true import of the global environmental crisis.
And if you’re jonesing for a post-environmental nature essay that expresses Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ argument, give Jonathan Franzen’s “The Bird Problem” a read, but don’t send me angry emails if you find yourself sporting a bird bra and obsessively searching the trees for a glimpse of our fine, feathered friends.