I’ve always held to the radical belief that writers should be able to write, painters to paint, and singers to sing. Now I’ve had the fortune of marrying a woman who can do all three things, and let me tell you, even for the talented, it’s damned hard to be discovered. Being remembered seems impossible.…
I’m not going to tell you about Angel Haze. Instead, I will let her speak for herself. Down is a direction, not a destination. Don’t live there. If you don’t know Haze, here is one of her big hits, performed with Sia. Now, fuck that. Here’s Haze. Out.
On May 15, 1961, Melvin Glover, aka Melle Mel, was born in the Bronx, NYC. After a brief stint as a B-boy break dancer, Mel took up the mic, as the back spin had become popular, a move the lanky Mel couldn’t do. At that time DJs were popular, but let’s not get it twisted,…
I could write pages on my favorite deejay, Christian Winston Foster, aka, King Yellowman, but I’d get too emotional if I were to burrow to deep below the surface layer. Suffice it to say that the shit you’ve dealt with is no larger a pile that what Yellowman has faced his entire life. He grew…
What you say matters. Let me be clearer: what you say always matters and how you say it matters more than what you say, but what you intended only matters to a court of law. Artists must be deeper, to steal and paraphrase a lyric by Junior Kelly, and we must make our words (the…
Just a shout-out to those of you who find yourselves coloring outside of the lines. All of us have faced it at one time or another. Street photographers are quoted prescribed rules of conduct for their art, often by way of people (like Henri Cartier-Bresson) who were merely answering questions as to what they were…
When I die one day, and I just might, though the idea currently seems absurd, I hope that in lieu of some phony ceremony wherein people I didn’t like and who didn’t like me much show up and pretend to mourn so that later they can eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and potato salad, somewhere, in…
As an introduction to our new Watchful Wednesday series, we are presenting a couple of short videos about photography. The first is a slideshow of some of Vivian Maier’s work. If you’re a regular here, then you should already know Ms. Maier, her work, and her unique story. Instead of rehashing that, let’s take two-and-a-half…
More often that people realize, song lyrics aren’t just brief works of fiction. Inspiration is all around us, every day, and songwriters pull from real life to tell their stories and wrap them in musical harmonies. Songstress Erykah Badu, in a recent interview with Rap Radar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller, disclosed one such story, that of…
Although I’ve been a lifelong fan of animation, when it comes to selecting films to show here, I’m much less fan than I am fellow writer. I have no thematic bent; however, I do look for shorts that tell a story in their brief allotted time. Here are 2 such videos, which combined should take…
Raw, Naked Art 