Buju Banton, Wanna Be Loved

Props to the wonderfully cute and big brained Etta Strange for the inspiration. We were talking the other day and she surprised me by playing this Buju vid, hands down one of my favorite songs of all time. So in her honor, here are a few vids that I love, that she loves and that you’ll love after viewing. Enjoy.

-kwan

Parliament Funkadelic-Mothership Connection

Miles Davis and John Coltrane-So What

Rick James-Give it To Me Baby

Nina Simone-I Put a Spell On You

D’Angelo-Brown Sugar

Jazzanova and Viktor Duplaix-Soon

See more videos on my VodPod page, or click the video bar on the right.

So I’m involved in this event so I have an admitted bias, but hell-it’s gonna be one fly ass event so I think it’s warranted, yes?

Prosody Castle and Otherside Media Present

Urban Real(i)ty

Nov. 18th, 2-5pm

Art by

Danny King

Lara Durback

Erika Staiti

Peter Spannagle

Crude

2AM

Kristian

 

Words by

Aimee Suzara

d scot miller

Ayodele Nzinga

Shawn Taylor

Chris Stroffolino

Phill Weber

Kwan Booth

This Sunday evening come explore Oakland’s out of the way art locals, murals and site specific instillations at this touring art exhibit and poetry reading. For Urban Real(i)ty, the Gallery of Urban Art is packing loads of visitors into vans and shepherding them around the city for a look at some of the out of the way art that makes the town that creative mecca we all love. There will be pieces created just for the show by street artists Crude and Safety 1st alongside fine art instillations by Lara Durback and Erika Staiti, a tour of east Oakland murals and tons of surprises.

After the reading will be a poetry reading from lyrical legends including Aimee Suzara, Shawn Taylor, d scot miller and even yours truly, as well as a gallery show by Oakland Artist Danny King.

Prosody Castle and Otherside Media Present

Urban Real(i)ty
$5
2-5pm

Gallery of Urban Art

1746 13th (at Wood)
www.galleryofurbanart.org
http://www.prosodycastle.blogspot.com

One of literature’s most famous pugilist finally rests.

I never met the man and won’t claim to be the world’s greatest Mailer scholar, but I admired the hell out of his work and career.

Even if he tended to dip deep much into the art of spectacle, it was with a sheer force of personality you had to admire. Especially because the man behind the mess was full of such damned fine writing.

Like James Baldwin and Oscar Wilde, to me Mailer represents the ultimate man as artist. A champion of literature and culture-loud in life and brash in his search for truth-I admired his insistence that as writers, the work we create is necessary, even vital, in order to truly comprehend ourselves as humans.

Far better writers than I have summarized his life and death, so this will simply server as a link to some of his memorable moments-the sights, sounds and reviews. No matter if you loved or hated him, you’ve got to admit that we’ve lost one of the really important ones. We’ve got some big shoes to fill…

-kwan

Text

Norman Mailer Interview

The Naked and the Dead ebook

Mailer All Time Enemies List

Review of the Spooky Art

Synopsis of Mailer’s Films

Audio

Mailer at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco

Mailer Discusses Harlet’s Ghost and the Writer’s Life

Mailer interviewed by Rollingstone

Norman Mailer discusses “the Spooky Art”

More Mailer on KCRW

Video

Norman Mailer vs Rip Torn

Norman Mailer debates Marshall McLuhan

“One a prophet of hip and probable conscious of the nation, the other a prophet of the media and spokesman for the electronic age”

Norman Mailer BBC Tribute

Photo Slideshow*

*all copyrights retained by owners. If you would like your work removed email and it will be done as soon as possible

Heavy Hitterz Street Art & Graffiti Show
So these Speaker Fruits cats throw a pretty damned good party. This past Friday at Age Song gallery in San Francisco, SF along with Daniel Fleres, fabric8, and Phoneticontrol brought in around 80 artists from around the world for Heavy Hitterz, one of the best graffiti/street/comic art shows I’ve been to in a minute.
Local heads like Romanowski and Mildred mixed it up with emerging artists from around the continental US, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Japan, France, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Brown bag 40’s were flowing, David Choong Lee blessed the spot with a live painting session and Celskiii, Deanndroid, and shredO dropped the ill soul and old school jams. Not a bad night in the city. See the pictures for more.
-kwan

More inside…

Heavy Hitterz runs through November 17 at Age Song Gallery-580 Hayes St. in San Francisco-and ends with a fashion show and party from 9pm-2am.

The Arkivest: Chester Himes
-d. scot miller

When reviewing the prolific life of Chester Himes the first lesson to learn is that as Black artists, we are the world-walkers. The second is as Black writers we are the scribes of the jubilee apocalypse.

With sixteen novels covering thirty-two years of professional writing, it is amazing that so few people know of his established presence in neither American literature nor his contributions to what is now known as Black Futurism.

And how does Chester Himes relate to Black-Futurism? Though he passed away nearly 25 years ago, and many of his writings are set in the time and place he was in, Chester Himes‘ life was, the embodiment of the Black Avant Garde and, dare I say, apocalyptic sage of the Black Futurist literary tradition.

Before the redemption narratives of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, Himes began his writing career while serving a three-year prison bid for armed robbery by writing articles for Esquire and Harper’s.

Before Ralph Ellison addressed the perils of Black men struggling with absurd disenfranchisement in Invisible Man and Richard Wright confronted the exploitation of Black people by American Capitalism and Communism through the 40s and 50s in Native Son, Himes had nationally published two separate full-length novels- If He Hollers Let Him Go (Doubleday, 1945), and The Lonely Crusade (Knopf, 1947) – laying the groundwork for these two seminal works.

By the time James Baldwin, John A. Williams and Cecil Brown escaped this Land of the Free; Chester Himes had traveled across Europe several times and was there to greet the expatriate Black writers on Parisian shores. In the 70s, Melvin Vann Peebles stayed in Himes‘ Paris apartment while Chester, then in his late 50s, traveled through Spain in a busted Volvo, writing.

One only has to follow his bibliography to see the evolution of Black Futurist thought as it emerged from the African American subconscious. The Primitive (New American Library, 1955), tells the story of Jesse Robinson, a drunken, guilt-ridden reprobate, holed up in a New York City penthouse with a White socialite and too much booze to go around. The fact that he wove narratives fully exploring miscegenation in a time of overt segregation would be enough to clarify his trajectory as a radical man of letters, but the last scene of the novel – where Robinson sits naked on the living room couch, plays with his Johnson and watches a talking gorilla on a morning news program inform him that the socialite lies dead in the next bedroom, that he is the killer, and will be going to jail for life shortly – places him, again, at the forefront and gives an unnerving, and genre-shattering glimpse into the future of speculative fiction.

In the second book of his double-volume biography, The Quality Of Hurt / My Life Of Absurdity, Himes tells of after a failed marriage and being blacklisted by the American literary establishment, he takes a cruise-ship to Europe. What met Himes there was a whole new level of absurdity. As with nearly all of the great jazz musicians of the era’s Avant Garde, Paris made a home for Chester Himes. The writer was offered a contract with Serie Noire-Gallimard, the most successful detective novel publishers in France. He received the best pay of his career, but Himes wrote and drank all day, everyday, in apartments and chateaus all over Spain, Paris, and Holland, while living in relative obscurity and poverty.

For twelve years, Himes published a book a year. He was honored with le prix du Roman Policier in 1958 for his 1957 novel For The Love Of Imabell/A Rage In Harlem. Cotton Comes To Harlem (1963) was made into a movie directed by Ossie Davis in the 70s, and twenty years later, A Rage In Harlem made it to the big-screen under the direction of George Duke.

Himes, having been away from America for so long, had vivid recollections of the sights and sounds of Black America that gave life to his detective novels. Along with remembering streets and bars throughout Harlem, he also took advantage of fictionalizing the world of cops and robbers through his lens of surreal experience. In the beginning of Real Cool Killers (1959), for example, a man’s arm is chopped off at the elbow by a fireman’s axe as he confronts a patron in a bar.

The publication of Amistad #1, Writings On Black History and Culture (Vintage Periodicals, 1970), marked an important occasion in literature and Black Futurism. In it, John A. Williams, author of The Man Who Cried I Am, traveled to Spain to interview Chester Himes for a piece entitled “My Man Himes.” In it, for the first time, he is asked about his life as a writer and thinker. It is here that Chester Himes, Black Futurist, truly emerges as he discusses the work he is doing on his final novel, a piece of pure speculative fiction, Plan B. Though he hadn’t chosen the title at the time of the interview he explains, “-all dialogue ceases, all forms of petitions and other goddamned things are finished. All you do then is kill as many people as you can, the black people kill as many of the white community as they can kill. That means children, women, grown men, industrialists, street-sweepers, whatever they are, as long as they’re white.”

Chester Himes made a place for himself in the Arkives by stating and living his truth at all costs. Peep him. Now.

For more on Chester Himes:

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/HIMES/CHESTER.html

http://www.spikemagazine.com/0899lesleyhimes.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Himes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agH85CNC5Lc

d. scot miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist , teacher, and curator. A founder of The BlackBard Writing Collective, and on the board of directors to nocturnes review, a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, SF Weekly, YRB NYC, Popmatters, Showcase Magazine, and has published the afro-surreal Knot Frum Hear(an excerpt is in Bronx Biannual Two ISBN: 1-933354-09-7 l $13.95 ), and Slicker, a book of poems. He can be reached here.

This is the new video from Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings song “100 Days, 100 Nights”. I’ve always been a fan and the way they shot this works perfectly with the song.

The video brings to mind a lot of old soul-that funky, moanin’,  good lovin’ that hurt so bad kinda soul, so I threw in a few Jones predecessors doing doing there thing.  A little Betty Davis, Fontella Bass and Dinah Washington.  Enjoy…

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings-100 Days, 100 Nights :

Fontella Bass-Rescue Me:

Betty Davis-Shut off the light:

Dinah Washington-Mad About the Boy:

In keeping with the dance theme, I offer this gem. Apparently Sage was at the Epitath Records HQ, probably drinking bub and smackin bitches-like any proper hip hop star-when somebody challenged somebody else to a dance battle.

This hilarious mess is the result.

I dug Sage Francis a lot during the spoken word years when he running around as part of the Non Prophets. He dropped an album earlier this year and this vid makes me want to see what he’s been up to. Looks like he’s still being…creative.

Do your dance dude.  Do your muthafuckin’ dance:

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been preachin’ the relevance of regional dance music for years. From D.C. Go Go to Baltimore Club, Detroit Techno to Miami Bass each form had it’s genesis in the city’s urban core and gradually spread to a wider audience. These styles have at least some core elements of hip hop and it’s always interesting to see the ways various geographic flavors gets thrown in and effect the corresponding dance styles.

In our constant search for the next hot “it”, us media and marketing folks have given these styles some shine over the years, not always to the best ends-sometimes making the underground mainstream is a really bad idea-but it’s good to see folks getting some recognition and (ideally) eating off their craft.

Footworkin’ has been a Chicago staple since at least the late 90’s and grew out of the city’s fierce house and club scenes. The music is like House on meth:fast, neckbreaking stuff-and the footwork, well just check it:

Recently Samsung, in a move that kicked them up about 1 zillion notches on my “Marketers who are on their shit” list, rolled out the ad campaign for their new “Juke” phone, featuring real live jukin from Chicago’s FootworKINGz:

With the commercial nod, a recent article in Rolling Stone, a theater debut at this years “Hip Hop Dance Fest” and yes folks, a movie deal in consideration, looks like Footworkin’, or at least the FootworKINGz, are set to be repping the Windy city lovely for a minute. I really hope creators of these dances and musical styles have their business hats on, are smart about how much control they give away and make it a point to establish some form of ownership over their creations. I’m down for everybody groovin, but just make sure that green goes into the right hands at the end of the day.

I mean, I’m way too young for this, but I hear cats used to listen to Rock n Roll and do the Charleston in the hood. Now ain’t that some other ish…

A little street dance multimedia:

A couple of years ago its was Krumping:

The southern Cali Style made famous by a big man in a clown suit and a world famous fashion photographer. There was a movie, there were guest appearances and the cats down in Compton got a little love for the work they had put in. All was good in the hood.

Then there was Turfin‘:

Turf (Takin Up Room on the Floor) is straight out of the BAY A-R-E-A!!!!! (sorry, if you live in the bay it’s the requirement…). Made famous by, strangely, another very big man-and a gang of youngsta’s from the hoods of east and west O.

While Turfin’ came in full force when Hyphie music briefly took over the national airwaves, the style is a hybrid of break dancing and Cali pop locking. There’s been a lot of local attention paid to the dance and some steady national buzz and hopes are high that you’ll be seeing groups like the Animaniakz and the TURF Fienz on the big stage sometime soon.

TURF vs Krump:

The Charleston-Remixed

Just an ill ass B-Boy vid (Junior vs Benji):

-kwan

San Francisco’s Clarion Alley holds a legendary space among muralists. The block long alley between Mission and Valencia has been provided a home to the cities painters since the 60’s. Every year the Clarion Alley Mural Project hosts a two day mural celebration with selected artists updating the alley on Saturday and an all out party Sunday. These were taken at this years party a few weeks ago. Dig it.

-kwan

Eulipia Performance Salon 1st Anniversary Finale Gala

October 2^nd, 8PM (sharp)

Walter Kitundu

Please join us for this night of celebration and reflection.

Since October 2006, Eulipa/Knot Frum Hear has featured some of the Bay’s innovators in the worlds of word and music and continues to explore alternative spaces through performance, sound, and vision.

This gala event, that marks our 1st year and the end of our residency at The Luggage Store Gallery, brings together many of the profound artists that have visited our shores over the past year.

Past performers Kwan Booth, David Boyce, Rebecca Cross, Walter Kitundu, D. Scot Miller, Janaki Ranpura, and giovanni singleton will explore artistic styles including poetry, puppetry, performance art and soundscapes that stretch from noise to jazz.

“The Eulipia/Knot Frum Hear Performance/Salon is part of the Luggage Store’s fostering a space for multimedia and other works that bypass the prevailing avant-garde status quo.”

-sf flavor pill

The Eulipia Series is a monthly exploration of collaborative performance art that interweaves musical improvisation and the recitation of poetry and prose. This event features a unique “salon-style” forum for comment and participation.

- Oaklandartists.com

Eulipia Performance Salon 1st Anniversary Finale Gala

Luggage Store Gallery

1007 Market Street

San Francisco, California

October 2^nd, 8PM (sharp)

$6-10
No One Turned Away Due to Lack of Funds

www.myspace.com/dscotmiller