Tony Oladipo Allen
Drummer of Protest, Drummer of Peace
1940 – 2020
♠
Below, from No Accommodation for Lagos
“African Message”
Archives for April 2020
Transformative Expressions From The Ever-Transforming Jack Oliver
Jack Oliver
@jackoliverx
Today, Jack Oliver is a Care Worker. During the current global pandemic, he offers his precious time to the elderly and those in need of assistance. But prior to the current health crisis, Jack Oliver invested over a decade of his life and passion to the Artistry of Make-up. His transformative, creative expression transgresses many fields of industry; art, drag, beauty, fashion and theatrical fantasy. “My work” he tells us, “ranges from rather simple constructs to more mind provoking images. I enjoy creating self-image as a way of expressing emotions of the Self. I previously titled a lot of my work SELFart.” [Read more…]
The Silence and Other Poems
The Silence
My friend
who lives in the woods
told me there’s
a silence there
he’s never heard before.
Said
he’s lived in the woods
for nearly twenty years
and while he’s heard
plenty of quiet,
volumes and volumes
of quiet,
the silence
that he’s now hearing
is something new,
[Read more…]
From Sonic Collage To Stepping Groove: John Tejada’s “Moving 909s”
Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms
by Mary Schmidt Campbell
Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95
edited by Robert G. O’Meally
Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
NYR
Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics
Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained. [Read more…]
Prince BeProud: Moodymann’s Sinuous “I’ll Provide”
from the recent Sinner release
on KDJ Records
The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World
Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful period as a filmmaker, a truth made all the more striking in that upon its initial release, Until the End of the World was a failure.
[Read more…]
The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History
on Impulse! Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR about the illness, its impact on touring musicians and the financial hit the quarantine has put on those musicians. “Literally, all my gigs in the next two months have been canceled. And everyone I know is in the same boat.” Questions surround the entire world as markets crash, people lose jobs across every sector, and the illness continues to mount. Hutchings isn’t a doomsayer. “We have to make the best of the situation, or the situation will just be tragic. And all situations have the potential to be tragic, or the potential to be tragic and transformative.” [Read more…]
The Coronation, The Relinquishing Of Fear And The Way As A Species Forward
The Coronation
by Charles Eisenstein
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? [Read more…]
Charles Eisenstein On “The Coronation” And An Epidemic of Control
Interview by David Fuller
The Painter and The Thief Offers The Best Kind Of True-Crime Bait-And-Switch
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
Is there a word for cinema that lures you in with a dark promise, then delivers something profound, surprising, and humane instead? When I first saw the trailer for The Painter and The Thief, I thought I had its number, having seen myriad of true-crime docs. The tantalizing trailer teased a tale of two sides: the painter and the thief. I assumed theirs would be a story of victim and criminal, hero and villain, saint and sinner. However, what documentarian Benjamin Ree offers is far more compelling and so exhilarating that made me relish being wrong. [Read more…]
Quentin Tarantino Pure Cinema Podcast
Elric, Brian, Phil and Jules are joined remotely by Quentin Tarantino himself for an epic discussion about a great feature on the New Beverly website called “Tarantino’s Reviews” where QT has been writing his own articles on movies and TV episodes. He also offers five of his own picks in response to our “Ripoffs” from way back in 2017.
Bacchanal Euphonies In Yaeji’s “Money Can’t Buy”
feat. Nappy Nina
from What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던
out now on XL Records
John Bradford: By Land And By Sea
at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx
“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick
The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset. What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read more…]
Moving Room To Room, Tentacle By Tentacle: Michael McCall’s Long Strange Trip
By Peter Frank
Forward to:
Captain Squid & The Tentacle Room:
Adventures in Life, Love & Art
by Michael McCall
Fabrik Press, 260 pp., $35.00
Michael McCall came of age at a time when it was cool to live your art. That time may be coming back (no little thanks to McCall’s example, I’ll wager), but between coming of age and compiling this account, McCall’s lifestyle came to be regarded as more vagabond than renegade, more hippie than hip, more irresponsible than irreverent. Plenty of wannabe art-lifers gave the art-life a bad name. McCall – always an art maker, not just a goof, and always answering to aesthetic and ethical standards – wasn’t one of them, and he was brave enough to stick to his guns, keep on living his life as if it were an artwork, and keep on being committed to that life/art. [Read more…]