May 5 – June 4, 2022

April 29 – June 4, 2022

From Top Gun: Maverick to Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once

Say goodbye to the days of dusty chalkboards and hello to the glories of dry erase. Dry-erase boards have become a staple in homes, schools, and offices, making dependable dry-erase markers must-haves. In the classroom, teachers hoard and treasure them. On the job, workers use them to quickly communicate ideas in meetings. Kids love to draw and write with them. While most dry-erase markers are made for whiteboards, you can also find dry-erase markers specially designed for use on glass. Perfect for brainstorming sessions in glass-walled offices, as well as writing on glass boards, windows, and mirrors, these markers lay down smooth, vivid color on glass without beading or streaking.  Browse our selection of dry-erase markers for glass, below.

A stuccoed stone head from a 1,300-year-old statue of an ancient Mayan maize god has been unearthed by archaeologists in Mexico.

The head was found among ruins in Palenque. Located close to the Usumacinta River, Palenque (or Lakamha in the Itza language) was a Mayan city state in southern Mexico that ultimately ceased in the 8th century CE. The ruins there date from roughly 226 BCE to 799 CE. The former city is known for its impressive Mayan architecture, sculpture, roof comb, and bas-relief carvings.

Archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found the head while they were excavating a site in Palenque. While removing debris from a corridor connecting two sections of a palace complex, the team found inside a container with the head in a small pond.

Researchers believe that the pond was meant to symbolize the entrance to the Mayan underworld. According to Mayan beliefs, the universe was divided into three parts: the sky, the earth, and the underworld. In each were venerated locations that included caves and cenotes, which would have operated as a portal to the subterranean realm, Xibalba, ruled by the Maya death gods and their aids.

Arnoldo González Cruz, a researcher with INAH Chiapas Centre, told Heritage Daily, “The discovery allows us to further understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque relived the mythical passage about the birth, death and resurrection of the maize deity.”

I wanted to recommend a different song this week, but it seemed like every news story, headline, and push notification I encountered kept nudging my consciousness into some area within my brain that contains lyrics about firearms, some mental storage locker I rarely open: “I gets down like brothers are found ducking from bullets / Gun control means using both hands in my land, where it’s all about the cautious living.” Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, rapped those lines on De La Soul’s 1996 single “Stakes Is High.” The eponymous album, Stakes Is High, was a kind of rebuke against the first glimmers of hip-hop’s big money “shiny suit” era and the hackneyed materialism and narrative clichés that came to be associated with it. Posdnuos and his partners Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, were tired of mafioso rap, “video vixens,” weed talk, brags about luxury gear. Dave’s verse, a list of the things that make him unwell, cleverly flips what it means to be “ill” in the hip-hop sense: 

I’m sick of bitches shaking asses 
I’m sick of talking about blunts
Sick of Versace glasses
Sick of slang
Sick of half-assed award shows
Sick of name-brand clothes 
Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks 
Cocaine and crack which brings sickness to blacks 
Sick of swole-head rappers with they sickening raps 
Clappers and gats making the whole sick world collapse 
The facts are getting sick, even sicker perhaps
I stick a bush to make a bundle to escape the synapse

Although Dave’s delivery is fierce, this litany of mid-nineties rap’s most overdone iconographies has a lulling effect; as flashy as it is, the music he calls out in that list is thematically listless, of no real consequence. It’s all about the minutiae of the moment, the micro-timeline of rap stardom. There is no consideration of the future. On this song, De La Soul considers a more expansive timeline: the fate of meteors, the trajectory of bullets, but also the lifelines of children. The Stakes is High album cover is a black-and-white photo of a group of kids: the kind of gathering Kathy Fish references in her flash fiction story “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” (2017), which has been recirculating after the Uvalde massacre—“Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target … A group of schoolchildren is a target.” The song’s music video illustrates the perplexing apathy of the grown-up world: the trio vacillate between performing the song with brio and hanging out lethargically, letting the external world dictate their energy levels. Except for a mural in the background of one scene and a couple shots of a school bus, there are no images of children in the clip; it features adult angst and malaise. 

The video is framed by the group’s appearance as guests on The Maury Povich Show. They’re there to discuss how much rap music “dictates real life,” and vice versa, ways “to keep it real.” Shots of Povich posing questions to them on a studio set are intercut with clips in which the men carry out everyday tasks: folding laundry, cutting grass, raking leaves, buffing a car, washing the dishes, falling asleep with a newspaper in hand, playing basketball with friends. American daytime talk shows, especially those that aired in the nineties, often showcased the country’s worst fears, or otherwise the most provocative topics in the national discourse. Rap was one of them, but so was white supremacy and domestic terrorism; Stakes Is High was released just fifteen months after the Oklahoma City bombing. By appearing on this faux-episode, De La Soul commented on their public perception while also situating themselves as participants in the spectacle, and as possible consumers of it. 

The Guggenheim is committing to the burgeoning field of technology-based art.

The museum announced Wednesday the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, which encompasses a new annual award program and the creation of a curatorial position dedicated to art that engages with virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, NFTS, and more.

The LG Guggenheim Award, administered by the Guggenheim Foundation, will recognize one artist every year for “groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art.” The award will be juried by an international panel of  artists, curators, museum directors, and other art professionals, and carries an unrestricted prize of $100,000. The first recipient will be announced at next year’s Young Collectors’ Council Party.

The inaugural LG Electronics assistant curator will focus on “deepening” the Guggenheim’s ties to such artists, in the form of exhibitions, research, and education.

Naomi Beckwith, museum deputy director and chief curator, said in a statement that by “promoting scholarship and public engagement, the LG Guggenheim initiative will provide essential support to the visionary artists who inspire new understanding of how technology shapes and is shaped by society.”

Money talks—so goes the truism—but rarely is it the subject of fiction. “Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much,” Hernan Diaz observed during a conversation in early spring about the impetus behind his latest novel, Trust. Taking the mechanics of capital as its inspiration, Trust seeks to fill this gap. The novel features a New York financier and his wife, moving between genres (a novel, a memoir, a diary) and time periods (the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the eighties) while exploring the fabular nature of capitalism. As one character declares halfway through, “Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support.”

Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, also reimagines America’s particular illusions. The novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a Swedish immigrant during the California Gold Rush. Born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now living in Brooklyn, Diaz is erudite and energetic both on the screen—our conversation began as a Zoom call when Diaz was on a fellowship in Italy—and on the page, in the email back-and-forth that followed. As he would go on to explain toward the end of that initial call, “Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else.”

INTERVIEWER

Scotland’s World Cup dream is over, but who couldn’t succumb to Oleksandr Zinchenko’s mesmerising cutbacks?

Marcus, Andy and Pete reflect on an emotional night at Hampden and a monumental achievement for Ukraine, who will face Joniesta and co on Sunday. There’s also two emotional goodbyes as Gareth Bale says Hala Madrid and Paul Pogba says hello Juventus. Plus, we hear from the pilot who almost killed England’s golden generation…

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May 13 – June 11, 2022