Here at Ballroom we’re busy preparing for next weekend’s Valentine’s Dance with Texas country music legend Gary P. Nunn, spreading the word about this special night of Valentine’s romance.

But that’s not the only thing happening this week in the Trans-Pecos to commemorate the Feast of Saint Valentine …

If you’re eager to get an early start on the festivities, Marfa Public Radio is hosting a Sweethearts Ball and silent auction at the Hotel Paisano this Saturday, 9 February 2013. Tickets are $35 in advance, $50 at the door, with proceeds going to benefit public radio in West Texas.

On the big day itself, Big Bend Brewing Company is hosting a beer-tasting from 4-8pm in Valentine, TX at the “Old Mercantile Building in the middle of town,” featuring performances from The Doodlin’ Hogwallops and Andy Schneider. If you catch the Hogwallops performing their hit single “Valentine Texas” in Valentine, Texas on Valentine’s Day you’re guaranteed some kind of good luck in love in 2013, right?

And then of course we’ll be capping off this most romantic of weeks with Gary at Ballroom Marfa on Friday, 15 February 2013. Doors open at 7pm, show at 8pm. Tickets are $10 at the door.

Fearless cinematographer Rod Lamborn captures Alvin Ailey dancer Samuel Lee Roberts tumbling through the Far West Texas landscape on the shoot for Rashid Johnson‘s upcoming video. The yet-to-be-titled short film is set to premiere as part of Johnson’s solo exhibition New Growth, opening 8 March 2013 at Ballroom Marfa.

Border politics, violence and complicated class dynamics have been touchstones of Marfa’s film culture from the days of Giant through Meredith Danluck’s Ballroom-commissioned North of South, West of East to No Country For Old Men, which features our beloved local bank president as the first of many assassinations …

So when Larry Clark chose our high desert town as the setting for his latest exploited-teen bummer trip — the straight-to-internet Marfa Girl — he was in good company.

Various artifacts from Clark’s career are going up for sale this weekend in Los Angeles at “Larry Clark Stuff,” an exhibit co-curated by Boo-Hooray and Clark as part of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair at MOCA. Most of the Marfa Girl-memorabilia was sold out last we checked, but there’s still plenty of skateboards and T-shirts up for grabs online (it’s Larry Clark so of course NSFW) or if you stop by the show in LA.

Every few months I go on a weird Flickr run for photos of Marfa and Ballroom, and it’s a total rabbit hole, because seeing the place you live and work through others’ eyes is suprising/exotic/refreshing/strange/mesmerizing. Yesterday I found this photo of Sunand Prasad’s weather balloons from Carbon 13, courtesy of Yelp Bham, and a great one from Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie, who played at Marfa Book Company back in September, and this Prada Marfa photo, courtesy of anand_modi. More favorites here.

May have already posted this but, if not, download immediately: Townes Van Zandt, live at the University of Minnesota’s Whole Coffeehouse in late 1973. Courtesy of our pals at Aquarium Drunkard.

Photo of Ballroom Marfa circa 2006, taken by Dashiell Oatman-Stanford, through a hole in the courtyard wall.

Live from the Houston Tank Depot: Here’s our Exhibition and Program Coordinator, Rosa McElheny, and Associate Curator, Erin Kimmel, learning new tank skills, in preparation for the Texas Contemporary, where we’re presenting one of the fair’s public centerpiece exhibitions, Pyramids of Conscience by Agnes Denes (photo coming soon). The fair opens tomorrow, so stop by and see what all our work with tanks and hoses has wrought.

Our new Carbon 13 sign in progress. Painted by Sam Schonzeit. Our experiment with a forklift begins tomorrow.

Prada Marfa, courtesy of the 55 (http://the55.heroku.com/)

After intending to sign up for at least six months, and taking our cue from our pals at Frama, Padre’s and the Chinati Foundation, we finally did it — we adopted a highway! Praise be. We’ll be cleaning the area around Prada Marfa four times a year, with two of the cleanings open to community volunteers. Orange jumpsuits at the ready. Thanks to Jessica Brassler and John Conners at TX DOT for making this happen (and thanks to the 55 for the great photo of Prada Marfa). –NI

Cape Farewell, an interdisciplinary project of David Buckland, just opened a new show at the Espace Fondation EDF in Paris, France. Titled Carbon 12, the show is a counterpart to Ballroom Marfa’s fall 2012 exhibiton, Carbon 13, also curated by Buckland. Both shows ask artists to think about, respond to, and propose solutions for the global climate change crisis. Read more about the exhibition and accompanying conference here, and more about Cape Farewell on their website. Can’t wait for Carbon 13! – RM

Scott Hug, whose collaged pie charts are included in Data Deluge, has a new show right now at Rawson Projects in Brooklyn. Titled Hell to Pay, the show is the second in the gallery’s series of poster projects, in which they invite an artist to design an open-editioned, un-signed poster. Hug designed his posters, pictured above, by remixing found graphics and text from advertising, a process inspired by the little-known California artist/poet/publisher/gallerist/physicist Bern Porter (1911-2004). As Hug puts it in an interview: “Basically, I filter the visual pollution of our printed world via magazines, newspapers, catalogues, junk mail, etc. and export it through a sharpening lens.” Looks good! Up through May 6. More info here.