Very. But at least they didn't get Alicia Keys (this time).

Given the most frequently recurring motifs in Meth's music and his various screen roles to date, I think we know what to expect from The Mortician: 3D bongs, 3D joints and 3D gunfights. I hope he really gets into the role and grows back the dreadlocks he wore at the beginning of his career. Also, the choppy fronts he's wearing in the image at right. Now that would be thrilling in 3D! (HipHopWired)

Art parties elsewhere in Brooklyn and Chelsea after the jump.

Ricky has been inexplicably passed over for the couple of months he's been in foster care. It's time to get this guy a home!

AP reports that the project still needs some major funding and has not set and itinerary yet, but will probably start by the end of 2010. Obviously this is a great idea—the more art people are exposed to the better—but if mishandled this project could also come off a lot like cultural colonialism, particularly in the ghettos of France's major cities. Let's wait to worry about that until this is a sure thing, though.

There is much to be said about this performance from last night in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, such as, "No two people have ever had less on-stage chemistry than Jay-Z and Bono, which is understandable because Bono is old and embarrassing while Jay-Z is the best." But instead, let's just leave it at, "Ooooh! Look how furry Adam's collar is!"

The magazine's risky move to get attention by featuring the widely-despised Brown will be balanced by having him share cover duties with the inexplicably popular Drake (ugh!). All of this basically spells disaster for Vibe in print, which should probably give up and go online-only already. Hall all but admits as much, telling AdAge: "Whether it's the magazine, or we decide to do some kind of TV programming down the line, everything needs to come back to Vibe.com." Vibe TV? Sounds like a great idea...

No word yet on how much bigger the new space will be or who will design it, or what Pace Wildenstein is planning to do about the space crunch. The news bodes well for the Chelsea art scene, though, which needs as many permanent art institutions as it can get (like the upcoming Whitney expansion) to insure its ongoing vitality as the recession (and the growing popularity of the LES) thins out the area's numbers.

They're expected to push that first preview date back some, and Taymor will likely ask that the first rehersals be postponed until the New Year, so that all the technological wizardry of, you know, web-slinging around a theater can be worked out. The weekly operating cost of the show has been projected to hover somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million, which basically means the show would need to run, sold out, for like a year before it made any profit. While we wait on the results of this mysterious meeting, let me just say that I'm all for stage spectacles, but certain things were just not meant to be plays.

"Fuck you. You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool."

So then I decided not to write about it because I felt stupid that I didn't understand what the hell was so cool about Harry Patch. But then!

The Box: When I first heard that Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales was adapting a Richard Matheson short story that had also been a Twilight Zone episode, it all seemed strangely simple. Why would Kelly, whose two movies have so entertainingly (if puzzlingly) overflowed with insane ideas, focus so intently on a story that can apparently be told in under an hour? According to the trailer, the answer is apparently that a simple short story provides a study handle from which to fly off. Kelly's version of the story, in which a financially strapped couple is given the option of pressing a button that will anonymously murder a strange for a payment of one million dollars, seems to go off in his customary crazy-ass directions, with a half-faced Frank Langella and lots of dead-eyed minions and a chilling Cameron Diaz attempt at a Southern accent (that said, she's an underrated actress). Obviously I am way on board. [Jesse, you will not be disappointed, which is to say good luck being this cogent about the movie after you've actually seen the damn thing. -Ed.]

In an interview with The Brooklyn Paper about the project, Mattingly explained that the living space could eventually be completely off the grid, generating energy from solar panels and wind turbines, collecting compost and turning waste into fuel. Though Mattingly's proposal still has to gain approval from the building's owner (who sounds very supportive in the BP article) and pertinent municipal agencies, if the project gets the go-ahead some lucky artist could be moving into the Brooklyn bird nest as soon as June 2010. (Curbed)

Chelsea
Dan Flavin's colorful fluorescent lighting at David Zwirner, 519 W 19th St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), 6-8pm
Emily Noelle Lambert's paintings and sculptures of dead bodies and sculptures (pictured) at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, 547 W 27th St, 5th Fl (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), 6-9pm
Sean Scully's paintings of rectangles made up of painted rectangles at Galerie Lelong, 528 W 26th St (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), 6-8pm
Hendrik Smit's colorful and vigorous abstract expressionist paintings at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, 532 W 25th St, 2nd Fl (between Tenth and Eleventh Aves), 6-8:30pm

More Manhattan art events after the jump.

Which brings us to this grumpy-ass piece at Guernica by Honduran-in-exile writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Moya's upset that North Americans occasionally drop lit-star Roberto Bolaño's name, and thinks, grumpily, that:

...the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

I am wary of any argument that cites a "North American cultural establishment" acting with the sort of predatory agency that's implied here. But let's, for a moment, concede that the NACE [pronounced Nah-tsee] supreme council came up with a unified plan to profit from a densely challenging 670-page work of metafiction-in-translation by a charismatic/dead Mexican-Chilean. Yes, let's.

Here's some great selections from the barrage he unleashes on the movie:

You know adoptions are slow when a puppy doesn't get adopted right away... All puppies require some extra attention—training, walking, and socializing—but Simba is well on his way: he's been living with an experienced dog person, and her two dogs, and is coming along famously.

Do you have room in your heart (and schedule) for Simba? He's ready to go...

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN CHECKING OUT SIMBA THE WONDER PUPPY, EMAIL DOGS@THELMAGAZINE.COM

(Click through for a totally adorbs photo of Simba the Wonder Puppy)

A clip from the much publicized Diane Sawyer interview with Rihanna aired on today's Good Morning America, and if it's any indication of what's to come when the interview aires in full on 20/20 tomorrow night, it should probably be required viewing for young women everywhere. The emotional maturity she displays, in her ability to remove herself from the situation long enough to think critically about how best to handle it, is a far cry from what most would expect from a 21-year-old pop star.

Walter has created alternate covers for 18 Wu-Tang and Wu members' albums in the style of Blue Note Records record covers, and the results are pretty wonderfully contradictory, weird mashups of an easy listening aesthetic with gangsta rap photos and text. The best one is after the jump.