Things will get worse before they get better

[Image: From Volume, the bootleg issue].

With an official opening date of February 11, but apparently with some public previews of the exhibition on the 10th, Urban China: Informal Cities at the New Museum in Manhattan "is a multifaceted exploration and physical manifestation of the groundbreaking magazine Urban China... the only magazine devoted to issues of urbanism published in and about China."
While I'll admit that I had not previously been aware of that magazine, the New Museum's continued description is compelling:

In articles, interviews, photographs, and visually compelling diagrams, each issue’s pages brim with an exuberant air of possibility mixed with melancholic reflection. Urban China expresses a joy in analyzing the world anew, finding fresh ways to map it, and in that mapping, showing us the unheralded and unknown connections and relations that shape the way cities and lives are continually made and remade.

Accompanying the exhibition, meanwhile, will be a special bootleg version of Volume #19, the "Crisis" issue.

[Image: View larger. From Volume, the bootleg issue].

I'm particularly excited about this issue, I have to say, as it includes two texts I played a part in realizing, but it shouldn't be missed by anyone for its huge range of material: from Eyal Weizman and Keller Easterling to Mark Wigley and Stephen Graham, from Laura Kurgan and Jiang Jun to Gavin Browning of Studio-X – Browning takes on near omnipresence here, with four great interviews and an essay – by way of a long conversation between Jeffrey Inaba, the issue's editor, Sam Jacob, Joseph Grima, and Christopher Hawthorne, all ending with a fantastic photo essay by Todd Hido.
Hido's work is unbelievable, by the way, if you don't know it.
In the middle of all of it, though, is this amazing spread, featuring images of skies sutured together from various disaster films:

[Image: Definitely view larger! From Volume, the bootleg issue].

The apocalyptic atmospheres of 28 Days Later meet the skies of There Will Be Blood – Twister meets The Perfect Storm meets The Day After Tomorrow – forming a panoramic look at aerial catastrophe. A crisis of the sky.
Check out a much larger version of that spread here.
So if you're in New York, check out the exhibition; if you're anywhere else, look out for the bootleg Volume or the real issue #19 coming soon.