Though it was thought that the last The Force Awakens trailer would, indeed, be the last The Force Awakens trailer, it turns out it sort of wasn’t. To the delight of Star Wars fanatics (and dismay of writers who have to parse this stuff), a Japanese trailer for the film — containing new footage — was released today. Both /Film and The Guardian posted analyses of everything the trailer revealed.
In advance of a press conference in Reykjavik held with environmentalist Andri Snær Magnason, Björk released a video asking people for support against the Icelandic government’s plans for development that’d stretch across the country, and, so she claims in the video, “end Iceland’s wilderness in a few years.” Rolling Stone reports that at the press conference — held today — she rallied support to create a national park to protect the country’s central highlands from the construction of industrial roads, over 50 dams and power plants, and a high voltage power line down the middle of Iceland, that’d supposedly, according to The Guardian, “cleave the wilderness in two areas.”
Speaking of Björk, her former collaborators, Matmos, revealed information about their upcoming album today, including the fact that it’s made exclusively of the sounds of the cycles of the washing machine in their Baltimore basement. According to The Creators Project, the band describes the album — titled Ultimate Care II — as the composite of “the machine’s rich vocabulary of rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rise cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps.” The album will be released on February 19, 2016.
A Village Fair With a Church Behind, Post-Restoration
Smithsonian writes that “conservators who recently cleaned a 17th-century painting in Queen Elizabeth II’s collection have discovered a …surprise.” The painting (which has been owned by the Royal Family since the early 1800s) is by Dutch painter Isack van Ostade, and is a 1600s street scene in the back of a church, straightforwardly titled “A Village Fair With a Church Behind.” As Hyperallergic observes, this title may be a little sneakier than it seems. The restorers, having removed a bush they identified as an addition to the original painting, found that the “the Church Behind” may actually refer to the behind of the man squatting and pooping on the street — formerly obscured by the bush.