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A Glitch "Code de Données Burqa Tchador ~ Ètude I”
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There are rappers who rhyme, and then there are rappers who make the rhyme sound like it has somewhere to be. Kool Moe Dee was one of those.
You could hear it before you understood it. The voice came in hard and angular, the syllables stacked up like bricks, and suddenly the beat wasn't just a beat anymore. It was a road, and Moe Dee was driving too fast down it.
People remember the battles. They remember the sunglasses. They remember “Wild Wild West.” They remember the great rap-war with LL Cool J, and the spectacle of two generations arguing over who owned the microphone. But somewhere inside all that history is something easier to overlook: Kool Moe Dee was a hell of a lyricist. Not just a clever one. Not just a guy who could come up with a good insult when the lights were on. A flow lyricist. He understood that the words weren't merely supposed to sit on top of the rhythm. They were supposed to become the rhythm.
Listen to him and you get that feeling of somebody trying to outrun the bar line. He'd cram a phrase into a space that seemed too small for it, then hit the next phrase harder, and somehow the whole thing landed exactly where it was supposed to. There was tension in it. Compression. Momentum. That's a part of rap history that doesn't always get the attention it deserves.
“I'm no phony, I'm the only macaroni”
Before rap became an industry of endless subcategories — conscious rap, gangsta rap, alternative rap, backpack rap, trap rap, whatever else the record-store clerk had to write on the divider — there were MCs figuring out what the human voice could actually do with a beat. Kool Moe Dee was one of those experimenters. He came out of the Treacherous Three, when the microphone was still close enough to the street that you could hear the invention happening in real time. The MC wasn't merely the person who introduced the DJ. The MC was becoming an athlete, a poet, a comedian, a provocateur, a rhythm section with a pulse. And Moe Dee had that athletic quality.
There's a difference between knowing words and knowing how words move. Moe Dee knew how they moved. He could bend a line around the beat. He could make consonants snap. He could accelerate without sounding panicked. He could repeat a phrase until repetition itself became percussion. That's why calling him merely an "old-school battle rapper" doesn't quite get there. That's like calling a great jazz drummer a man who knows how to keep time. Technically true. Completely insufficient. Because the thing about Kool Moe Dee is that he understood the microphone as an instrument. His voice had attack. It had texture. It had attitude. And when the rhyme came around, he didn't simply deliver it, he leaned into it.
Maybe that's why some of his work can feel strange to younger ears now. We're accustomed to flows being analyzed like engineering diagrams: triplets here, internal rhyme there, sixteenth notes, double time, syllabic density, breath control. Moe Dee was doing plenty of that before everybody had a vocabulary for describing it. He was making the machinery while people were still arguing about what the machine was for.
And then there is the other thing: the sheer intelligence of the man. He didn't treat an MC as somebody who merely rhymed the last word of the sentence. He treated the entire line as material. Sound, meaning, rhythm, timing, attack. The rhyme wasn't the destination. It was part of the architecture. That's why going back to him is worthwhile. Not just for nostalgia. For technique. Listen past the costumes. Listen past the battles. Listen past the mythology of the golden age. Listen to the syllables. There's a man in there who really knew what he was doing. And maybe that's the odd fate of certain pioneers. They become so important to the history that people stop listening to them as artists. Their name gets put on the timeline, their photograph gets placed in the museum, somebody says legendary, and then the record gets left sitting on the shelf. But records don't care about timelines.
Put on Kool Moe Dee and let the man work. You'll hear the sharpness. You'll hear the discipline. You'll hear the ego, naturally — this is rap, after all — but you'll also hear the craft underneath it. That mad flow. That sense that the next line is already chasing the one before it. And when it all locks together, you remember something that music has been teaching us forever:
Sometimes the person who arrives early doesn't get enough credit for how far ahead they were. Kool Moe Dee was early. And he was very, very good.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact: ibarraloana@gmail.com
There are people who pass through your life and leave behind a name, a face, a telephone number, maybe a book they forgot at your place.
And then there are the people who pass through your life and somehow acquire a piece of secret information about you.
Not the kind of information that can be put in a passport.
The kind you could never explain at a dinner party.
The kind that has to do with Caravaggio.
Because I have a huge love for Caravaggio. Not a tasteful little appreciation. Not the sort of love you can put on a museum brochure between masterpiece and baroque chiaroscuro. I mean the kind of love that gets into the bloodstream. The kind that makes you stand in front of a painting and forget that other people are standing there too.
For about three years, there was a painting we went to see together.
And somewhere along the way, this person learned my secret.
That when I stand in front of a painting I truly love, I sometimes, very carefully, when nobody is looking, reach out with the tip of one finger.
Just the tip.
A tiny trespass.
A ridiculous, sacred little crime.
Because I want to be able to leave earth knowing that I touched something a master once made.
I carry with pride a collection on my fingertips.
Not the frame. Not the museum wall. Not the glass.
The thing itself.
The paint.
The place where somebody else's hand once was.
You could call it childish. You could call it unhygienic. You could call security.
But I call it history.
And now this person has been to Berlin.
And this person sends me an image of the painting he saw me caress:
“Hej Loana, Nu har jag varit i Berlin och petat på tavlor igen. Och då tänker jag naturligtvis på dig.”
Hi Loana, now I’ve been to Berlin and poked at paintings again. And naturally, I think of you.
Naturally.
That word is doing a lot of work there.
Because there are some people who, once they know your peculiarities, carry them around with them.
They see Berlin and think of you.
They see a painting and think of you.
They stand in front of some old arrangement of light and flesh and shadow, and somewhere in the back of their mind there you are, extending one furtive finger toward eternity.
Only, he doesn’t actually do it.
Of course he doesn’t.
He has manners.
He has museum training.
He has apparently retained the basic social contract.
And besides, he tells me, they have covered the painting with glass now.
There it is.
The end of an era.
The museum has discovered us.
The glass has come down between the living and the dead.
Between the visitor and Caravaggio.
Between the hand that made the painting and the foolish little hand that once, just once, touched it.
But maybe that’s why the message is so funny and so tender.
Because he knows.
He knows that somewhere underneath all the years, all the cities, all the people who have come and gone, there is still this strange little girl standing in front of a Caravaggio, waiting for the museum guard to turn his head.
And he remembers her.
Not because she told him to.
Not because she asked to be remembered.
But because Berlin happened.
And paintings happened.
And for a moment, apparently, the whole world became a Caravaggio-shaped reminder of me.
Which is how love survives, I suppose.
Not always as romance.
Sometimes as a private joke.
Sometimes as a message from Berlin.
Sometimes as a finger you don't dare extend anymore.
And sometimes as a little piece of glass between you and the painting, reminding you that the past is still there—
you just can't touch it.
Not anymore.
There are records that ask for your attention, and there are records that simply wait by the window until you notice they're already in the room. “Smoke Ring for My Halo”, 2011, belongs to the second kind.
You don't put it on so much as you leave the door unlocked for it. Outside, the rain has settled into that slow summer rhythm that doesn't seem interested in ending. It taps against the leaves before it finds the glass, and when the window is open just enough, the smell comes wandering in, you know, that scent of wet pavement, dark soil, old wood, and grass remembering every spring it ever survived. It's the kind of weather that makes silence sound expensive. That's where "Baby's Arms" begins. Not with a grand entrance, not with a declaration, but with a guitar that seems to have been awake for hours before anyone else.
Kurt Vile sings the way some people think while driving alone: half to himself, half to the road, never entirely certain where one thought ends and another begins. The melody doesn't demand belief. It simply offers companionship. The rain keeps falling. You realize that "Baby's Arms" isn't really opening an album. It's opening a room inside your own afternoon. The guitars don't sparkle; they breathe. Every note carries enough space around it for memory to sit down beside it. The song feels like looking through an old window where every season has left a fingerprint. That's one of Kurt Vile's quiet miracles.
For years people tried to describe him by comparing him to somebody else. Neil Young was mentioned. Tom Petty drifted through the conversation. Lou Reed appeared around the corner. Even the old folk ghosts got invited in. Those comparisons aren't wrong, exactly—they're just incomplete. Because influences are like rivers. They matter less than where they eventually empty. Kurt Vile's destination has always been unmistakably his own.
What makes “Smoke Ring for My Halo” remarkable is its confidence in understatement. Earlier records hid behind fuzz and lo-fi static like old photographs left in the sun. Here, the songs step into clearer light without losing their mystery. Producer John Agnello doesn't polish away the imperfections; he simply dusts them off enough so you can appreciate their shape. The result is an album that feels intimate without ever becoming confessional, psychedelic without floating away, folk without pretending to be antique. Listen to "Jesus Fever," "On Tour," "Runner Ups," or the title track, and something curious happens. The songs move slowly, but they don't stand still. They're always drifting toward another thought, another guitar phrase, another horizon just beyond the trees. They trust repetition the way rain trusts gravity. The same patterns return, but never quite the same way. That's the secret of Vile's music. Hypnosis isn't excitement slowed down. Its attention stretched out.
His guitar playing deserves more praise than it often receives. There's a deceptive looseness to it, as though every phrase just happened to arrive at the perfect moment. But beneath that casual surface is extraordinary control. His fingerpicking winds around itself like ivy climbing an old porch, never in a hurry, always finding another way upward. And then there's that voice. It doesn't chase perfection. It isn't trying to overpower the room. It sounds lived in. Like a favorite denim jacket or a porch swing that's weathered enough summers to know that storms always pass eventually. That's why “Smoke Ring for My Halo” has aged so gracefully. The record never chased fashion, so fashion never had the chance to leave it behind. Critics recognized it immediately as a breakthrough, praising its songwriting, emotional clarity, and singular atmosphere, and many listeners still regard it as the defining point in Vile's catalogue. I’m one of them.
The best albums don't answer questions. They improve the weather inside your head. On an afternoon when the rain hangs over the trees and the open window lets the scent of earth wander into the room, “Smoke Ring for My Halo” feels less like music than like another element in the forecast. The songs settle onto the furniture. They mingle with the sound of distant tires on wet streets. They become part of the air itself.
Some artists write songs that point toward the extraordinary. Kurt Vile has always trusted the ordinary enough to reveal that it already contains everything we spend our lives searching for. Sometimes that's a love song. Sometimes it's a lazy afternoon. Sometimes it's just rain finding its way through an open window while "Baby's Arms" reminds you that the smallest moments are often the ones that echo the longest.
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08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
Etant donnés
Snow. The kind that settles over memory. The kind that lands on a Japanese rooftop at dusk and stays there long after the footsteps are gone. Today we celebrate Yasunari Kawabata.
Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899, and by the time most boys were learning how to whistle or throw a baseball, he'd already learned something else: how quickly people can disappear. His parents died when he was young. Then his grandparents. One by one, the lamps went out. Some people spend their lives trying to forget loneliness. Kawabata took loneliness, sat it down at the table, poured it a cup of tea, and listened to what it had to say.
You know, some writers build cathedrals. Some build battleships. Kawabata built paper lanterns. Small things. Delicate things. Things that seemed like they might blow away in the wind. But somehow they're still glowing. When you read him, you enter a world of mountain inns, falling snow, distant train whistles, women glimpsed through shoji screens, and men who realize too late that beauty was standing right beside them all along. It's a world where silence isn't empty. Silence is part of the conversation.
His novel “Snow Country” begins with a train emerging from a tunnel. That's a good way to enter Kawabata's world: passing from one realm into another. The ordinary slips away and suddenly every gesture, every glance, every drifting snowflake seems charged with meaning. Now, Kawabata wasn't interested in heroes conquering kingdoms. He was interested in moments. A sleeve brushing against a sleeve. A face reflected in a train window. The sadness that arrives just as something beautiful appears. He understood that beauty and loss often travel together, like two musicians sharing the same bus.
In 1968, he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The judges praised his ability to express the essence of the Japanese mind. Maybe that's true. But readers from everywhere recognize something in his work. Because grief doesn't need a passport. Neither does longing. The thing about Kawabata is that he never seems to raise his voice. The century around him was full of wars, revolutions, machines, and noise. Yet he wrote as though he were listening for a single bell ringing across a valley at twilight. And if you listen closely, you can still hear it.
So wherever you are standing right now, spare a thought for Yasunari Kawabata. He knew that life is fragile, beauty is fleeting, and memory is often all we have left. Sometimes that's enough.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Rbma 2006 Participant Sheryar Hyatt (Karachi, Pakistan) playing records @ Horse Bazaar [Melbourne] before Strobocop [Karaoke Kalk, Cologne].
Some records arrive like a parade. Others come in through the kitchen window after midnight, carrying the smell of salt water and old amplifiers. “Crazy for You” 2010, by Best Coast is one of those records. It's the sound of California without the postcards—the beaches after the crowds have gone home, the radio humming in a car that's been parked too long, the kind of love that burns fast enough to leave its name on the walls. I’ve been loving it since it was born.
People have been writing songs about wanting somebody since somebody was invented. From Tin Pan Alley to garage bands rehearsing in rented lockups, the story hasn't changed much. The names do. The guitars get louder or quieter. But that ache—that beautiful inconvenience—keeps finding new melodies.
Bethany Cosentino doesn't try to outrun that tradition. She leans into it. Her voice doesn't ask permission; it confesses like bubblegum in your mouth. She sings as though she's reading yesterday's diary and discovering she's still living in it. There's no elaborate disguise, no smoke machine to hide behind. Just melodies that know exactly where they're going and feelings that don't. The guitars glow instead of sparkle. Every chord seems to have been left out in the Pacific fog until the edges softened. The fuzz isn't there to make the music heavier. It's there to make the memories blur in all the right places. Beneath the distortion is craftsmanship that's almost old-fashioned. These are pop songs built with the confidence that two or three chords, honestly played, can still tell the truth.
The remarkable thing about “Crazy for You” is how little it asks of the listener. It doesn't demand to be decoded or admired from a distance. It simply asks you to remember the last time you wanted someone to call, the last drive taken with no destination, the last afternoon when a three-minute song somehow understood your whole week. That's harder than it sounds. Simplicity is expensive. Plenty of artists mistake repetition for honesty. Best Coast know the difference. Every familiar phrase lands because it's carried by conviction rather than calculation. They understand that the oldest stories become new every time somebody means them.
The album lasts barely long enough to finish a cup of coffee, but it lingers like a faded Polaroid tucked inside a favorite book. It belongs to that rare class of records that become companions instead of monuments. You don't visit them once a decade to admire their greatness. You leave them by the turntable because they'll probably make sense again tomorrow. The last track “When I’m With You” is indeed an explosion, a marvelous perfect ending.
In the end, “Crazy for You” isn't trying to reinvent rock and roll. It's reminding you why rock and roll survived in the first place: a guitar with a little static, a melody you can whistle without realizing it, and a heart stubborn enough to keep believing that the next chorus might change everything—even if only until the song fades out. This album consists of no track to skip.
CRISIS DEL CUARTO DE VIDA (Parte 2 - Pretensiones)
"Da pena verme vivir oculto detrás de mi cara. Decidir vivir es bello, estar obligado a vivir no".
"It's so sad to see me living hidden behind my face. Deciding to live is beautiful. Being forced to live is not"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlhCmvi0og
"Crisis del cuarto de vida" Es una serie de vídeos experimentales. "Pretensiones" es la segunda parte de esta serie.
"Quarter-life crisis" is an experimental video series. "Pretence" is the second video of the series.
Parte 1/1st part: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ON9VtHpxQQ
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Jenny & the Mexicats Lunario 87
Jenny and the mexicats
Photographer: Ernesto De la Vega “Kaede”
Nikon D5100
Lens 18 – 55mm y 55 – 300mm
2013
People tend to say that perfection doesn’t exist, but I consider that a lie. Perfect are the flowers—even in a vase.
Look at them. Really. Look at them. The colors seem to understand one another with a precision that we spend years trying to learn. One shade beside another, a certain green against a particular pink, the dark purple against the light purple, the almost imperceptible transition between one color and the next. We call it color theory. We study harmony, contrast, temperature, balance.
But who taught the flower? How does it know?
How does a flower understand that this particular shade of red belongs embracing that particular pink? How does it arrive at a nuance so exact that, if we tried to reproduce it with paint, we would probably fail?
I have always been amazed by this. Perhaps more than most people. And I think it runs in my family.
Even my nephews can stop in the middle of a garden, or in a park, or anywhere they happen to find a flower, and simply stare at it for what feels like hours. They notice them. They become absorbed by them. There is something almost instinctive in the way we look at flowers, as if somewhere in our family we inherited not only an appreciation for beauty, but a particular kind of attention.
The painters in my family used to paint flowers, but painting them was never simply about reproducing what they saw. They studied them. They looked closely at their shapes, their colors, the way the light moved across a petal, the strange precision of one color meeting another. They knew that looking was part of the work. You could not really paint a flower without first spending a long time trying to understand it.
Perhaps that is why I still receive photographs of flowers from my mother and her cousin, flowers from their little discoveries from the garden, sent to me almost as if they were messages. A flower blooming somewhere, a particular color, something they thought I would want to see. They know I will look. They know I will understand why they sent it. And I love them for that.
And then there is my father, who used to receive me in Mexico at the airport with enormous bouquets of Mexican flowers. Not modest bouquets. Big, extravagant, mexican, almost impossible bouquets—the kind of flowers that seemed to announce themselves before anything else did. I remember them as gestures of love, but also as something unmistakably him: flowers as welcome, flowers as abundance, flowers as a way of saying I am happy you are here.
Maybe this is why I find it so difficult to accept the idea that perfection doesn’t exist.
We give these things names—hue, saturation, undertone, nuance—as if naming them makes the mystery smaller. It doesn’t. Perhaps that is what I find most perfect about flowers.
They do not know they are doing it.
They do not compose themselves.
They simply appear, already resolved.
No hesitation, no correction, no need to be told where one color should end and another should begin.
And then we put them in a vase, believing we have arranged them. But perhaps we have only interrupted something that was already perfect. Even as they begin to fade, even as the colors become quieter and the petals lose their firmness, there is something beautiful in that transformation. Perfection was never about permanence. It was about the impossibility of improving what was already there.
Perhaps that is also why my family keeps looking.
The painters looked because they wanted to understand. My mother and her cousin send photographs because they know there is something worth stopping for. My father bought them from a flower seller in the market and brought them to the airport because flowers could say something words could not. And even the children, without knowing any of this, will stand in a garden and stare.
Maybe some things are simply passed down.
Not a theory. Not a lesson.
Just the ability to stop and look.
The flower never needs to understand color theory. It simply understands color.
And perhaps the rest of us, if we are lucky, spend our lives trying to understand what the flower already knows.
Son of Big Daddy Roth (site-specific sculpture)
Year: 2004
Polystyrene, polyurethane, sand, acrylic, wire, pompoms, glue, glitter flake, google eyes
152 x 92 x 80 inches
Son of Big Daddy Roth was a site-responsive temporary sculpture created for Blue in Green, an outdoor exhibition of new works highlighting various dimensions of Heron’s Head Park in the Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighborhood in San Francisco. Monumental in size, the sculpture continues my experiments with new materials and finds conceptual roots in the way-out art and imagery of California hot-rod champion, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. My point of interest for this sculpture was the controversial PG&E facility located adjacent to Heron’s Head Park, which I chose to highlight through the affable yet mutant-like quality for this work. The project was built on site.
You know, puzzles have been around longer than most arguments and shorter than most regrets. Somebody hands you a handful of pieces and says, "Here, the world's broken. See if you can make it whole again." That's a pretty optimistic thing to do when you think about it.
A puzzle doesn't care if you're a banker, a baker, or a barefoot hitchhiker with two nickels and a bus ticket that expired sometime during last year. Every piece fits somewhere. Even the one you've been blaming for twenty minutes, convinced it belongs to another box entirely.
People think puzzles are about finding answers, but they're mostly about learning how to look. Anybody can stare at a hundred detailed pieces and call it the sky. It takes patience to notice one of them is really the reflection in a puddle beside an old mailbox where somebody once waited for a message that never came.
Life's got a habit of scattering its pieces under the furniture. You find one when you're twenty, another when you're fifty-seven, and another falls out of a coat pocket you haven't worn since a winter that seemed like it would never end. Funny thing is, the picture changes depending on when you finish it.
Some folks race through a puzzle like they're trying to beat the clock. Others leave one piece sitting on the table for days, maybe because they're not ready for the picture to be complete. Every ending closes a door, even the happy ones.
There's something comforting about cardboard certainty. In a world where tomorrow changes its mind before breakfast, a puzzle still promises that every jagged edge has a companion somewhere. The trick isn't forcing the pieces together. It's recognizing each one when it finally comes into your hands.
So if you've got a puzzle spread across your kitchen table tonight, don't worry too much about finishing it. Sometimes the best part isn't seeing the whole picture. It's watching a little corner of confusion slowly begin to make sense, one quiet click at a time.
Handmade puzzle, acrylic on cardboard.
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Painter Gaby Rico holds one of her landscape paintings. The painting is part of a series of works called "Chasing Rainbows. A Lucid Daydream" that were exhibited at Hinovations Art Gallery in McAllen.
Feb 28, 2014 © Imanol Miranda.
A charity project through Bridge Communities; 'A Chair Affair' was an event where artists were sponsored to create a work of art using chairs as the vehicle, which were then showcased in retail shops in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. These works then went up to auction where 100% of the proceeds went to families and individuals in need. Bridge Communities strives to help those in need and aim to help people get their lives back on track. This was my second 'A Chair Affair', my first one taking place in Naperville in 2014.
Obra: La Ultima Cena.
Autor: Dan Rosen.
Dirección: Sebastián Blanco Leiss.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía y Vestuario.
(Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Diagonal. Mar del Plata.
Ganador Premio Estrella de Mar 2009: Mejor obra del Circuito Off.
Teatro: ElKafka Espacio Teatral. Buenos Aires.
Temporada 2009.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.
"Eight Expressions" is a sculptural series designed for The Black Dahlia Show at 21 Grand Art Gallery in Oakland, California. For this series, I explored my deep interest in true crime through multiple wall pieces that drew allusions to Disney’s Snow White character and the infamous Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles, California, 1947. This project delicately balanced terror with beauty through use of glamorous glittery materials, alluring Hollywood folklore, and one of the most horrific unsolved crimes in American history.
118 x 54 x 54 inches
Acrylic paint, glitter flake, molded urethane foam
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08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
The Bike Grinder
I have a very personal inner spirit that yearns for the exceptional. I absolutely desire to live passionately, and this drive seems to be inherent to my core being. I’m visually inspired by nature, culture and concepts such as truth.
~ Craig Tracy
See our interview with BodyPainter Craig Tracy: www.adistinctivestyle.com/issue/22468/9
A Glitch “Beauté Perturbatrice (Ενοχλεί) ~ Ètude V”
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #error #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #glitchportrait
Let this day’s light signal hum like a moth against the screen door, because today we’re celebrating the dial to a frequency that comes in hot, holy, and a little bit haunted. We’re talking about the High Priestess of Soul herself, Miss Nina Simone.
Nina Simone wasn’t born Nina Simone. No. She came into the world as Eunice Kathleen Waymon down in Tryon, North Carolina, where air hangs thick with hymnals and red clay. A piano prodigy before most kids could hold their spoons. She wanted to be the first great Black classical concert pianist, another Johann Sebastian Bach whispering through the American South. But the gates of the conservatory don’t always swing open just because you can play every note better than the rest. So she built her own conservatory out of nightclubs and cigarette smoke.
She took the name Nina — “little girl.” Simone — after the French actress Simone Signoret. And once she sat down at that piano, the piano didn’t stand a chance. She played it like it had insulted her mother. Voice like midnight velvet dragged across gravel. Could sing you a lullaby or an indictment.
Songs like “Mississippi Goddam”, “Sinnerman”, “See-Line Woman”, “Baltimore” weren’t just songs, they were telegrams from the front lines of the American soul. When the world shook, Birmingham, Medgar, the long hot summers, Nina didn’t whisper. She thundered. She turned concerts into courtrooms. She turned melody into a raised fist.
Nina Simone famously rejected the label "jazz" saying it was a term coined by white people to define and restrict Black artistry. She believed her music, which blended classical, jazz, blues, and gospel, deserved the same prestige as European classical music.
So yes, Nina had fire. The kind you don’t bottle up. The kind that sometimes jumps the fence. And I always did have a soft spot for that kind of blaze. Hot, sure. Real, absolutely. The kind of heat that doesn’t ask permission to exist. Especially when it rises up out of a woman who knows the weight of her own footsteps. No porcelain figurines here, no trembling sparrows chirping, “Oh save me, I’m just a little fragile bird who forgot how to fly.” So irksome. None of that paper-wing routine. No victims waiting around for a hero with a cape and a bad haircut. This was a woman who could light her own cigarette and look you straight in the eye while the match burned down to her fingertips.
And me? I would’ve given just about anything to sit across from her in some dim corner booth, coffee going lukewarm between us, smoke curling up like a question neither one of us felt obliged to answer. Just to watch that fire flicker. Just to feel the heat of it, steady and unafraid.
There’s a story, and like all good stories it’s got a little smoke around the edges, about a day when a neighbor was practicing trumpet. Practicing is a generous word. The man was butchering it. Notes flying around like pigeons in a hurricane. And Nina, who had perfect pitch and very little patience for sonic vandalism, reached the end of her rope. She stepped outside with a gun and shot him in the leg. Didn’t kill him. Just punctuated the arrangement.
Now I’m not here to tell you to settle your noise complaints that way. But if you’ve ever heard somebody mangle a melody you love, you understand the crime. Nina lived in a world where music was sacred text. You don’t scribble on sacred text.
She was brilliance and contradiction in the same breath. Tender one minute, volcanic the next. A woman who could sing “I Love You Porgy”, “Be my husband”, “Mood Indigo”, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” (oh me oh my) and make time stop, and then tell you exactly what was wrong with the country before dessert was served.
She left the US for a spell, found herself in Liberia, in France, places where she could breathe without somebody measuring the air. But wherever she went, she carried that same storm cloud harmony.
Nina Simone didn’t just sing songs. She made you sit with yourself. Made you reckon. Made you feel taller and smaller all at once. Cry, make you smile and fill you up with strength. Some artists entertain you. Some artists comfort you. Nina demanded something from you.
And if you played the trumpet badly outside her window… well, you might’ve gotten a sharp review.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
In February 2006 Craig Tracy opened the PaintedAlive Gallery in his home city, New Orleans, La, USA. PaintedAlive is the first gallery in the world dedicated exclusively to fine art Bodypainted images. But where did his passion for using the human body as a canvas start?
Read on...
On Thursday 30th June, dot-art ran it's first Introduction to Life Drawing day, led by Roy Munday in Liverpool City Centre. Life model Arthur posed for participants, who were taught the basic skills required, and given individual tuition and feedback.
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
A Glitch "Polysémie series BDSM (πολυσυμία) ~ Ètude II”
This art piece were created for my PhD and based on a Digital and Analog Aesthetic Research on "Artistic Practices, Digital Art in Social Networks and Net Art", some digital techniques used of artistic diversity, such as the re-mixed appropriation of image or video, also work conceived as original data work called creative altered binary code, datamoshing, generative art and glitch art worked in all its forms and expressions; works of art with a strong focus decoding the i-frames of images and videos (also known as key frames and altered or distorted creative binary code) mixed with seductive techniques of Pixelsorting Art; making it seem extremely sensitive and abstract; created exclusively for the virtual gallery on-line.
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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Friendly Fire (site-specific sculpture)
Year: 2006
Materials: wood, acrylic, metal
Dimensions: 215 x 185 x 81 inches
Information: “Friendly Fire” was conceived through my 4-month Residency as part of the SF Recycling & Disposal Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program. With 24-hour access to their wonderful studio facilities and support from their expert staff, I was able to produce “Friendly Fire”, a large-scale sculpture series uniting the surrounding Brisbane Mountain range with my deep appreciation for Archie Comics. With recycled wood gleaned from the exhibition site I was able to launch a vibrant campfire scene with abstracted Archie iconography. The 6 large-scale sculptures formed a heart-warming view of American culture and mythology, with fluorescent hard-edge colors inspired by the safety vests worn by the facility’s personnel. By imaginatively connecting the industrialized architecture with a rustic cultural pastime I was able to meet the challenges of this most fantastic landscape.