San Francisco is the proud home of the Jewish Music and Poetry Project, an ambitious performance of new music based on texts written by 20th century Jewish women poets. Included will be new music written by acclaimed composers Gabriela Lena Frank and Elena Ruehr. The next concert will take place at Old First Concerts in San Francisco on April 5, 2013 - mark your calendars. Both West Coast premieres and World premieres will be featured, as well as music by banned composers. David Garner, Academy of Arts and Letters nominee, will compose new music for "Phoenix", a witty and wistful exploration of exile and displacement. Disclosure: They have a superb lyric soprano, Nanette McGuinness, who just happens to be my daughter!

The Dead Sea Scrolls are now available thanks to Google's online library. In a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority, some 5000 fragments are now available on the Web. The library took over two years to put together, using technology first developed by NASA.

A Benedictine monk named Dom Sylvester Houedard, 1924 - 1992, published an obscure magazine focused on Concrete Poetry. Houedard was one of the early champions of Concrete Poetry in Great Britain. He called his poems "typestracts" and on this site you will find some exquisite examples of his work. DSH is the way he referred to himself. The works shown here are incredibly contemporary in their design. Much of his thinking appears to have come from studies in medieval mysticism and Zen Buddhism.

"Behold", the photography blog sponsored by Slate magazine, has put up an amazing group of nude photographs by photographer Shinichi Maruyama. These are not like any nude photographs I have ever seen. Each shot combines some ten thousand individual pictures of dancers, shooting 2000 nudes per second.

The Financial Times has published an article by the prominent American critic and teacher Dave Hickey. In it Hickey explains why he is quitting the art world, which he describes as "nasty and stupid". Hickey has some important things to say about the current state of art. Titled "Beyond the froth and jargon", this is a significant comment on the art we see and show.

We have commented previously on the genius of Alexander McQueen. This series of slides from the Guardian newspaper gives further evidence of his exceptional talent.

At the edge of a large Mayan City in northeastern Guatemala, archaeologists found a buried house once used by royal scribes and artists. Along with black-painted human forms there were columns and glyphs that seem to have been the basis of the Mayan calendar. The Mayan City, now known as Xultun, appears to be an early ninth century workshop, discovered one hundred years ago but not closely examined until now.

A British street artist named Phlegm has made his first New York City murals in the East Village and Chelsea. Utilizing his characteristic black and white palette, Phlegm has created three-story-high public murals combining fantastic creatures and odd machinery.

A huge skeleton of a mammoth, thought to be one of the creatures that existed between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, has been found in France in a site not far from Paris. It is perhaps only the third such discovery in France in the past 150 years, since such finds are usually unearthed in Siberia.

Keep an eye out for a revolutionary new process called Claytronics. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Research Labs Pittsburgh are very close to creating objects that can morph into something else, like a watch that changes into a laptop computer when you take it off. The possibilities are endless, like programmable clothing that can change into impenetrable steel.