Am late on sooooo many things right now — this is one of them. I managed to catch the exhibit of Rammellzee’s so-called ‘Letter Racers’ at Suzanne Geiss before it closed late last month. And all I gotta say is: daaaaaaaaang. The man knew his way around his materials. Those high-tech looking toys you see flying in formation are actually beautifully assembled bits of junk: umbrella handles, cheap plastic watch bands, broken milk crates, Bic pens and bottle caps. (And lots of dust.)

For a good backgrounder on where these pieces emerged from, check out this NYT piece. And if you get a chance to see his work in person (no matter how small the show), do not miss it.

• L.A.: Globalize This! International Graphics of Resistance, at Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis. Opens Saturday. A reception will be held on Thursday, March 29 at 5:30pm.
• Berkeley: Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz are giving a talk at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Art Practice as part of the Visiting Artist Lecture Series, this Monday, March 19 at 7:30pm. These are some very good peeps (they run the Slanguage studio in Wilmington) If you’re in the area, this will definitely be worth checking out.
• Miami: Natalya Laskis, Shortness of Breath, at Locust Projects. Through April 27, in Wynwood.
• Plus: Find all my latest NYC recommends (including an artist-led figure painting class) over at Gallerina…

• Alive in Baghdad, a photo essay.
• Southern California has to stop it with the green lawns.
• Today’s Must-Read: Martin Amis’s (disavowed) guide to video games. Sample text, on Pac-Man: “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.” (Fank Yew @KristonCapps.)
• Literary characters as rendered by law enforcement composite sketch software. (@giovanniGF.)
• The Tate’s photographic archive rescued from the garbage. If they didn’t want it, they could have had the decency to put it on eBay. (@WayneFord.)
• Randy Kennedy has a profile of Battle Station master Rammellzee. Highly fascinating.
• Marina Abramovic + Rem Koolhaas = Mind. Boggled. (@ClaudiaLaRocco.)
• Photo Essay: A little bit of Google Street View, as curated by Jon Rafman. I love the runaway moose.
• Alissa Walker dissects the role of the critic: the food critic. Raises an interesting point about critics engaging the world beyond just what’s in front of them.
• Graffiti planes. (@glasstire.)
• And, yet another reason it pays to see art in person.
• Cholafied: Best. Tumblr. Ever.

On Public Housing

A view of the Marcy Houses. (Photo by NYC-Metrocard.)

Michael Kimmelman has an interesting piece about large-scale housing developments in the New York Times. He takes a look at the fate of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis and draws a comparison to the Penn South buildings in New York’s Chelsea, which have been largely successful as a housing development. He discusses how economic and other urban development factors can affect the success or failure of architectural design. All around an interesting piece. But while I dig Kimmelman’s focus on publicly-minded design (a breath of fresh air after Ourossoff’s era of mega-projects), it seems like a bit of an oversight to pen a very long story about these types of constructions and not even mention places like the Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy or Red Hook Houses in Red Hook — two places with a history that is infinitely less rosy than that of Penn South.

Linkage

• In an essay in Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson says we are in a period of cultural stasis — relentlessly remixing everything that came before, but not necessarily adding anything new: “In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.” Sure explains a lot of the art I see…
• Holy Shit: Dude surfing a 90-foot wave.
• Interesting essay in the Atlantic on how much information is too much for Google to have.
• Bytebeats: music from the programming language C.
• That point where Tony Curtis and Christopher Wool intersect.
• A proposed turn-of-the-20th-century reconstruction of the Venus de Milo. Amazing and weird. (@giovannigf.)
• The New York Observer profiles the life and times of artist and ArtNet editor Walter Robinson.
• And the Wall Street Journal mag takes on Anne Pasternak, the director of Creative Time.
• The Day in Art Merch: Private jets decorated with graffiti by RETNA.
• Plus, speaking of airplane graffiti: The Boneyard Project. Making airplane hulls all pretty-like.
• There’s nothing like a book review that revels in a little dismemberment: Heather Havrilesky on Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Yowza. (@embeedub)
• “The main thing to remember is the sunlight, and the immense expanse of sky and earth that it illuminates: it sucks the color out of everything that it touches, takes the green out of leaves and the sap out of twigs, makes human beings seem small and of no importance.” — Mystery writer James Cain, on California in the 1930s.

I like the digital reference on this one. It means “Power to the People.”