“Liberty is not granted, it must be taken”-Meret Oppenheim

One of my new favorite artists.

“Provocatively antimonumental, this object reverses all sorts of expectations”-Ann Umland on “Object”

Filed under: Art , Art, Meret Oppenheim, Surrealism

Wake up sleepyheads

Quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in the last 20 minutes. Goes good with coffee.

Good morning.

Filed under: Art, Film , Passion pit, sleepyhead, trippy, video art

And God said let there be Fire!

For the next few days West O’s gonna be a lot hotter than normal as the Crucible’s 9th annual Fire Arts Festival ignites the nights around West Grand Ave.

As if the field across from the Crucible’s digs on 7th wasn’t huge enough, this year the festival’s migrated a few blocks East  to abandoned lot even more appropriate to set shit on fire.

At $85-95 tix are a litte steep for the average broke ass artist, but it’s all for a good cause-the Crucible’s youth workshops and scholaship programs.  So you get to see some awesome as fuck flaming art and feel like a bug wig arts patron for the night.  Flame on Bitches!

Filed under: Art, Oakland , Fire Arts, Fire Arts Festival, Oakland, the Crucible, Warehouse Art

What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead.

Alright, this is depressing as fuck.

I first heard the news as a rumor between two cats outside the corner store about 4 hours ago on my way downtown.

“Yo, you heard Michael Jackson died?”

“Naw, man I heard that was just a rumor.”

A small lump in my stomach started to throb. The kind you get when you realize something’s gone irreversibly wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.

As I kept walking the sounds of “Thriller,” “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” blasting from nearly every car that passed confirmed it and by this time the lump had blossomed into a full blown sadness. What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead?

For a minute I felt like pulling an old-black-moms-at-her-son’s-funeral and break down right at the corner of 17th and Telegraph. What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead?!

Filed under: Art, Music , Billie Jean, jimmie Hendricks George Clinton, Michael Jackson, prince, RIP, Thriller

Young? Gifted and Black…and Avant Garde?

Kalup Linzy “Chewing Gum” & “Dirty Trade”

So thinking back on last week’s post I really started questionning the young/avant garde parts of the title. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the cats on the list, but I’m not sure I’d classify them all under that banner again.  I mean Oxbow alone’s been making audiences uncomfortable for over 10 years, Spooky and the Fellinis for damn near the same amount of time. And while Greg Tate (in this week’s post) and his Burnt Sugar crew are have been giggin (as far as I know) for less than 10 years, Tate’s been putting literary and artistic smackdown on the industry for damn near quarter of a century.

So with that in mind, and seeing how in some ways pulling out a list of at least half old school artists only echoes Morgan Craft’s  sentiment in the original article, I’m giving myself a new mission: to find the most out there, “cutting edge (it’s early, and it’s the 1st desctiption that came to me)” diaspora artists out there.  Check back every so often and see who I dig up.  But until then, some mo’ favorites:

Filed under: Art, Music

Young, Gifted, Black and Avant Garde

This is already snowballing into something bigger.

I woke up this morning to the usual coffee, smokes and words and an article I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Back in March, over at Esther Ivereem’s excellent Seeing Black site, black American experimental musician Morgan Craft asked the question where are the young Black America experimental musicians under 50?

While I was waiting for approval to join the discussion on their forum I said fuck it, and figured I’d just start a list.

It’s getting to be a pretty long fucking list.

Which is great news for a longer, more involved project I’m working on (hint: black, white, read all over an bigger than a breadbox) but bad news for someone who’s on deadline and needs to be writing. So in the interest of brevity, and me getting my ass to work on time, here’s the 1st ten. There a couple of gimme’s and a few you probably haven’t heard, or at least heard much of.  I’ll post another 10 later. The rest I think I’ll just keep in the pocket for now.

I was pretty liberal with what defines avant garde and experimental, and there’s some punk, some rock and a little hip hop and out there R&B.  We can follow the Rob Fields school and label them all as Black Rock or we can classify the groups as “other” or just wait ’til some young enterprising music journalist finds a way to lump them all together, (or at least until I’ve had enough coffee to start being creative for the morning).

But until then…

Filed under: Art, Music, Street Art

Boothism as Silverfish

Two Artists+Two Bottles of Cabernet+Silver Paint+Fish+Fan=

A few years ago, after more than a few glasses of red, me and a close friend-uber talented italian photog/artist/model Marlene Demonte- were talking art work and collabs and ways we could work together. I’d been really into the multimedia collaborations between Bill T. Jones, Tseng Kwong Chi and Keith Harring and wanted to do something similar. (See the bottom of the post for some of the inspiring shots).

So after more planning, more drinking, and a hilarious trip through Chinatown and North Beach (who knew it would be so hard to find a live squid in San Francisco?) these are some of the results. I’m digging the shoot but I think I need to work on my brooding artist face. Check em out.

Filed under: Art, Media, Photos, San Francisco

11/18 Urban Real(i)ty Art and Poetry Show-Bring ya Asses!!!!

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

Filed under: Art, Galleries, Graffiti, Oakland, Poetry, Promotions, Street Art , Aimee Suzara, Chris Stroffolino, d. scot miller, Danny King, Gallery of Urban Art, Peter Spannagle, Prosody Castle

Photos: Heavy Hitterz Street Art & Graffiti Show

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…

Filed under: Art, Graffiti, Photos, Reviews, San Francisco, Street Art , , Art, Daniel Fleres, David Choong Lee, fabric8, Graffiti, Heavy Hitterz, Mildred, Phoneticontrol, Romanowski, San Francisco, Speaker Fruits, Street Art

Chitown Footworkin’: First the Southside, then Samsung, then the world!

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…

Filed under: Art, Dance, Marketing, Media , Chicago, Dance, Jit, Juke, Krump, Samsung, Street Dance, Turf Dance