One summer morning when I was about eight years old, my grandmother told me she was going to teach me how to make diples, a deep fried Greek pastry topped with honey and powdered sugar. In her cramped, Formica-filled kitchen, we also made koulourakia – plump hand-shaped twists she simply referred to as Greek Cookies. Together, we rolled up our sleeves, rolled out the dough, plastered our hands and forearms in flour, and went to work. We made tray after tray, more cookies than anyone could eat. But the eating wasn’t the important part; it was the making – the passing on of food, culture, history, tradition.

As I type this memory into existence, I’m suddenly left with another thought: nobody does that anymore. Or do they?According to an article in the April issue of Esquire, the only thing grandparents (aka Baby Boomers) are doing now is systematically disenfranchising the youth of America via decades of self-serving economic and social policy. But Grandmother Power: A Global Phenomenon (powerHouse books) may just prove all the cynics wrong. Paola Gianturco, author and documentary photographer of the new book talks to PLANET about grandmother activism, survival, and the global movement going on right now in kitchens, villages and courtrooms across the world.

John Cage has been an important figure on the landscape of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago since literally the beginning: he performed at the opening of the institution’s first-ever exhibition in 1967. In the decades that followed, Cage and the MCA enjoyed a fruitful working relationship, with the artist creating and performing scores on-site and the museum hosting performances of his works over the decades, continuing after his death in 1992 and into the present day.

If only just for those performances, MCA would be a precious keeper of Cage’s legacy. But the museum has more: the material results of its long association with the artist can be seen in MCA DNA: John Cage, a multimedia exhibition opening September 1st of photographs, letters, performance, video, and Cage’s idiosyncratic scores, the most famous of which is created on a large map of Chicago. The exhibit seeks to make Cage’s scores come alive again, with displays and materials that demonstrate how to interpret them. Elsewhere the artist’s influences, such as books he kept, sit next to notes he wrote and archival papers documenting his time at MCA. The exhibit mixes art with archive and creative with strictly professional, and keeps the close link to the MCA as a central element throughout. As site-specific as a Cage performance and equally unpredictable, MCA DNA: John Cage is a snapshot of an extraordinary artist’s process.

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In May PLANET introduced photographer Magdalena Wosinska and her soon-to-be-released book, This Grass is Electric. At the time she had just returned from a road trip with friends that involved shotguns, cliff-jumping in the nude, and exploring natural psychedelic substances as they rode motorcycles from Los Angeles to Laughlin, Nevada for a Harley Davidson convention. PLANET is pleased to present images from this “typical weekend with these kids,” as Wosinska describes it.

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In 1999 Mikael Kennedy, then a 20-year-old college student, took his first cross-country trip with his thrift store-bought Polaroid camera in tow. This “exhilarating and at times terrifying” experience of living out of his car and “documenting anything and everything” via Polaroid would become both his way of life for the next 12 years and the subject of his epic series Passport to Trespass. In Kennedy’s Polaroids you see a young nomad exploring lush evergreen forests, dirt roads, cityscapes under the murky moonlight, deserts, and oceans. You also see his friends: bright-eyed and bold 20 somethings, living rough yet seemingly immersed in their present. In 2005, having accrued more than 1000 images, Kennedy created the acclaimed website to which he uploaded groups of photos arranged in chronological order. Their laconic titles and lack of description leaves context and meaning up to the viewer. The medium, however, of Polaroid film fosters intimacy— one sees Kennedy’s life as an open book. 
 
Kennedy’s recent show at Clic gallery in New York titled Between Dog and Wolf culminated his series with a look at the tension between two worlds he’s come to know quite well: domestic and wild. PLANET spoke to Mikael Kennedy about his current state of transition.
 
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Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. That morbid line belongs to an American poet with a last name in keeping with the latter category. And while Robert Frost wasn’t thinking about climate change when he wrote those words, the evidence provided by scientists — not to mention the disaster-filled evening news telecasts of recent weeks — suggests that he might have been on to something. We won’t get ahead of ourselves with thoughts of the end of the world, but as the planet continues to warm, it would appear that fire’s supremacy over ice is gaining momentum in much of the country.

It was in the same overarching context that a prominent exhibit in documentary photography opened in Beijing last year, titled “COAL+ICE.” Organized by the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, the installation was split between depictions of China’s coal mining industry and the melting glaciers in the country’s Tibetan Plateau with the clear implication that the two subjects share a crucial link. Now that a condensed version is being shown at the Resnick Gallery in Aspen, CO through the end of the month, it’s worth taking a look at this ambitious collection of works and at the calculus under which coal fire plus Himalayan ice equals something none of us want to see.

England is churning out the youthful soul singers like its economy depends on it. Latest in this assembly line is 22-year-old Lianne La Havas. Likened to Corrine Bailey Rae from that side and Erykah Badu from this side, La Havas is heralded by both Bon Iver and Prince. Plus, her debut, Is Your Love Big Enough? is produced by Aqualung’s master songcrafter, Matt Hales. With her voice alternating between soft and thin to throaty and husky, La Havas’ lyricism has a familiarity to it that lets you correctly guess what the next words are going to be before you hear them. The likeable youngster plays a mean guitar, which effortlessly complements her breezy soul-pop. Going from the stripped back “Lost And Found,” which counts heavily on La Havas’ delivery–that she doesn’t quite present, Big Enough moves to the light mood of “Au Cinema” and the playfulness of “Forget.” Love song and after love song, Big Enough isn’t as big as it could be—but it is growing and La Havas is going to get there in the end.

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