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Today we're spinning cats. Not the kind that curl up on the windowsill or chase shadows across the kitchen floor. We're talking about the kind that wear sharp suits, walk into crowded nightclubs at midnight, and leave with the whole room hanging on a snap of their fingers. That brings us to Fred Buscaglione.
Back in postwar Italy, when the world was trying to remember how to smile again, Buscaglione came along looking like he'd wandered out of an American gangster picture that had somehow drifted across the Atlantic and docked in Turin. Pencil mustache, tilted hat, cigarette smoke in the air. He wasn't selling danger so much as the idea of danger. The fun kind. The kind that arrives with a brass section.
Buscaglione built a character from the movies and the music he loved. He took a little swing, a little jazz, a little Hollywood mythology, mixed it all together, and came out sounding like a man who knew every bartender in town and owed money to half of them.
His songs were crowded with tough guys, beautiful women, fast cars, and improbable adventures. The stories unfolded with a wink. You got the feeling he was in on the joke before anybody else was. That's a rare gift. Plenty of performers can tell you a story. Not many can let you know they're laughing along with you.
The remarkable thing is how international the whole affair feels. Here's an Italian singer channeling the dream-world of American noir, but turning it into something uniquely his own. Culture travels funny roads. A trumpet phrase leaves New Orleans, catches a boat, crosses an ocean, and years later turns up wearing an Italian suit.
Buscaglione had rhythm in his bones and timing in his pocket. He understood that music doesn't always have to confess its deepest secrets. Take that one track “Eri Piccola Cosi”, that drama, that trumpet, those drums, oh me oh my. Sometimes it just has to swagger down the street and buy everybody a drink.
His life ended suddenly in 1960, in a car accident, when he was only thirty-eight years old. The legend, naturally, grew larger afterward. Legends usually do. They don't age, don't get tired, don't have to explain themselves. They remain forever under the spotlight, forever in the middle of the song. And if you listen closely to Fred Buscaglione today, you can still hear that world: the clink of glasses, the glow of neon, the band counting off the next tune. A world where every night promises trouble, every trouble has a punchline, and every punchline swings in time.
So pull your hat down low, straighten your tie, and keep one eye on the exit. Fred Buscaglione is coming through the door, and the band is already playing his song.
Today we celebrate Sade, that’s Sade Adu, not the whole band, though the band’s always there like a good shadow at sundown.
Nigerian-born British singer Sade, short for Helene Folasade Adu, sings like she knows a secret she’s not gonna tell you, not all at once, anyway. She doesn’t chase the song; she lets the song come to her, like a cat on a hot afternoon. No wasted steps. No false confessions. Just that voice, smooth as polished stone, carrying stories that feel older than the calendar but somehow right on schedule. You hear a Sade record and suddenly the room changes shape. The lights dim themselves. The air gets heavy, like it’s about to rain, or already did. These aren’t songs that shout from the rooftops they lean in close, whisper something true, then pull back before you can ask too many questions. Love, loss, devotion, betrayal, yeah, all the big words but spoken softly, like they might break if you said them too loud.
There’s jazz in there, sure. Soul. A little R&B slipping in through the side door. But mostly there’s space. Space between the notes. Space for you to think about who you were when you first heard her, and who you are now. That’s the trick. Time doesn’t pass the same way when Sade’s playing. Three minutes can feel like a long night drive with nowhere you need to be.
She came up in the ’80s, a decade that liked things loud and shiny, but Sade went the other way cool, restrained, dressed in understatement. While everybody else was turning it up, she was turning it down, and somehow that made it last longer. Those records don’t wrinkle. They don’t age. They just wait. Sade doesn’t release albums often. She’s not chasing the clock or feeding the machine. She shows up when she’s got something to say, and then she disappears again, like a mirage that knows you’ll remember it better if it doesn’t stick around too long.
So if you’re out there tonight, driving with the radio low, or sitting alone with a glass that’s half full or half empty, Sade might be just what you need. Not to tell you what to do. Not to save you. Just to sit with you for a while and remind you that feeling deeply is still allowed. And that’s worth tuning in for.
ink, watercolor on paper
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Next time you're brushing your teeth or sitting on the train just remember: you're walking around with your own altar inside you. A temple of bone. And every shelf of it tells a story. Some loud. Some whispering like a secret between ribs.
I’ve been thinking lately, maybe my skeleton doesn’t live under my skin. Maybe it’s over there, in the middle of that long wall, standing semi-tall and dusty: a bookshelf. The one that creaks when the floorboard sighs just right. The one I’ve moved around every time I have to make some space for new occupants, like an extra rib I couldn’t leave behind.
You want to know what holds me up? What keeps me upright? Sure, there’s calcium and collagen, sockets and joints. But I’ll tell you, sometimes, I think it’s the shelf(s) that does the real work. That’s my skeletal system. Every book on it? A vertebra. A knuckle. A femur I forgot I needed. The Collected Poems of Lorca -lumbar spine, no question. I lean on it when I forget how to speak grief. A battered paperback of Frankenstein, margins scribbled to hell, that’s a clavicle. Something fragile I keep breaking and resetting. A field guide to birds, the one with the duct-taped spine? That’s a shoulder blade. Wings I never grew, but inherited anyway.
And altars? Oh, there are altars. A postcard of Shiva sent from a friend visiting India for the uncountable time, like a slipped disc, reminding me the spine is a sacred ladder, he knew I would love it and I love it. There is a wonderful smelling geranium from my mother making it feel just like paradise to my bestie Carlitos Bukowski. Something tender that’s still holding. And a photograph of my father in a silver frame, crooked smile, Beatles hair, eyes full of silence. That’s a rib. Maybe the sixth. The one that aches in the rain. Even the dust plays a part. Settling in the joints, softening the hard edges. Like cartilage. Like memory. The shelf itself bows a little in the middle. That’s age. That’s the weight of living. You carry enough stories, you sag. It’s natural. It’s honest.
So when I talk about the skeletal system, I’m not just talking bones and marrow. I’m talking about the structure I built to keep myself from collapsing. And yeah, it creaks sometimes. It’s not perfect. But it’s mine. And it stands.
//keep standing straight, your always anatomically Loana Ibarra
There was always something strange about those Stormtroopers. White armor like refrigerator doors, marching in straight lines through galaxies that looked like they’d been dreamed up in the back booth of a highway diner at 2 a.m. I’d see them coming through the smoke on a flickering television screen and hear those clipped little laser sounds, and for a kid, that was enough to rearrange the entire world of imagination forever.
I grew up with those films in Lausanne, watching them alongside my brother, the dialogue dubbed into French — Darth Vader sounding less like a mechanical prophet and more like a weary existentialist from a café beside the lake. Somehow that made it even better. The galaxy far, far away passed through another language before it reached me, like an old folk song crossing borders and changing shape every time somebody sang it.
And the Stormtroopers, they weren’t just soldiers. They were rhythm. Repetition. Like the snare drum in a marching band or the click-clack of train tracks rolling through day and night. I knew they couldn’t hit anything with those blasters, but that didn’t matter. Their power was visual. Pure design. Those helmets looked both ancient and futuristic, like samurai masks filtered through a television antenna from another century.
That’s the thing about childhood obsessions: they don’t leave politely. They settle into the wallpaper of your mind. Maybe that’s why years later I still carry pieces of that universe with me, a couple of Star Wars rings catching the light now and then like tiny relics from the Empire’s lost jewelry store. Little chrome reminders that somewhere inside every grown-up is a kid staring wide-eyed at impossible worlds.
And maybe that’s what Star Wars always understood better than most stories. The machines, the masks, the dusty planets, the lonely heroes, they all become part of my own mythology after a while. Like songs from an old record. You don’t just remember them. You live inside them a little.
Slide that vinyl out of the sleeve real slow… let the dust dance in the lamplight… drop the needle gentle. Today we’re riding with and celebrating Erykah Badu.
Some call her a singer. Some call her a poet. Some say she’s a high priestess of the low-down groove. I just call her a traveler. She walks barefoot through the back alleys of soul music, picking up broken pieces of rhythm and breathing incense into them till they glow.
She came drifting out of Dallas in the late ’90s when the world was shining its shoes real hard, trying to look futuristic. But she stepped in with a headwrap tall as a church steeple and a sound older than memory.
That first record felt like somebody left a window open in 1973 and the breeze just kept blowing for twenty-five years. Warm basslines, drums that didn’t hurry nowhere, and a voice that curled around the beat like smoke looking for a story.
Badu don’t sing at you. She sings around you. Sometimes behind you. Sometimes like she’s already inside your thoughts, rearranging the room.
There’s jazz in her phrasing, the kind that shows up after midnight when the trumpet player’s had exactly two drinks and is finally telling the truth. There’s hip-hop in her bones, not the shiny chrome kind, but the back-porch cipher kind, where words matter and silence matters more. And there’s soul, deep soul, the kind that knows heartbreak ain’t an emergency; it’s a teacher.
Erykah Badu makes songs that stretch out like summer afternoons. They don’t beg for your attention. They assume you’ll sit down eventually. She’ll let the groove simmer for six, seven minutes, like she’s cooking something slow in a cast-iron skillet. No rush. No microwave love.
And she’s funny, too. People forget that. There’s mischief in her music. A wink tucked between the lines. She’ll flip a phrase sideways just to see if you’re still listening. She’s got that trickster sparkle — the kind you find in old blues singers who knew the world was heavy but decided to dance anyway.
Now style? Ain’t costume. It’s continuity. She carries yesterday into tomorrow without spillina drop. Some artists chase trends. Erykah Badu lets trends chase her.
When you put her on the turntable, the room changes temperature. Conversations get slower. Lights get softer. People start telling secrets they didn’t plan on telling, I’ve been there. That’s power. Not the loud kind, the gravitational kind.
So if you’re driving tonight, windows cracked, city lights blinking like Morse code from another planet, let her ride shotgun. She won’t tell you where to turn. She’ll just hum something that makes the road feel older… and kinder.
That’s the thing about Erykah Badu. She doesn’t just make music. She remembers it.
watercolor, ink on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Tales and peeling back the posters you find in unexpected places. Today, we’re talking walls. Not the Berlin kind. The kind you find in the toilet of your local coffee shop.
A crying Frida Kahlo, staring straight at you showing off her sickly obsession with Diego Rivera as her third eye. And just under her? The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with all their acid-colored regalia.
Let’s start with Frida.
She’s everywhere these days. Tote bags, T-shirts, mugs, wallets, enamel pins, the mexican bills and yes, bathroom walls. But the Frida on the wall isn’t the whole Frida. They gave her a flower crown and took away her politics. They’ll tell you about her pain — the accident, the heartbreak, the Diego drama. But they won’t mention that she wore earrings shaped like hammers and sickles. That she posed with Lenin’s bust the way most people pose with their pets. That she was a card-carrying Communist until the end, even after Stalin’s show trials and gulags made it harder to romanticize the red flag.
Hell no. The museum labels call her "passionate" and "iconoclastic," but they tiptoe past the fact that she believed in revolution — not metaphorically, not as an Instagram aesthetic, but as a real, political act. They hang her self-portraits but never her allegiance. And somehow, that poster in the bathroom says more than a thousand-dollar catalogue essay. She's still staring, even when we forget what she stood for.
And then there’s Sgt. Pepper.
The album cover that launched a thousand think-pieces. All those faces — from Edgar Allan Poe to Bob Dylan himself. A patchwork of 20th-century icons and eccentrics putted together by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. But look closer, and you might spot Karl Marx lurking in the back, next to Lenny Bruce and above Marlene Dietrich. Quietly photobombing a cultural revolution. The Beatles didn’t put him there by accident, they were flirting with radicalism too, in their own psychedelic, softly subversive way. George went to India. John went to bed for peace. And Paul? Well, he just wanted to hold your hand, but even that felt radical in '63.
Now these two — Frida and the Fab Four — they’re part of the canon. Institutionalized, sanitized, archived and accessioned. Their faces are in bathrooms and bookshops. But their politics? Those got left behind like a forgotten verse. You won’t hear the Met tell you about Frida's solidarity with the workers, or see the V&A put Marx on the wall next to McCartney. They cropped that out for comfort. Museums and souvenirs like beauty, not bombs. Portraits, not politics.
But out here, in the toilet of a café where the floor is sticky and the espresso’s burnt, sometimes the truth slips through the cracks. Frida’s still wearing her hammer and sickle earrings. The Beatles are still asking you to imagine. And maybe, the revolution is in the restroom.
Don’t forget to tip your barista, question the curators, and listen closely, the walls have more to say than you think.
//all best your always truthful Loana Ibarra
Project stones by stone.
By me and my #iphotos
My composition and observations
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Frontmen—the prowlers, the shouters, the ones who strut, sweat, and seduce their way through the spotlight. You know who I’m talking about.
Today we celebrate Michael Philip Jagger, though most folks just call him Mick, or Jagger.
He's the rooster who never stopped crowing.
Born in Dartford, England, but destined for every stage from Hyde Park to Altamont, from Madison Square Garden to some after-hours joint in Tangier.
Mick didn’t just sing the blues, he wore them like a silk scarf. He and Keith were like the devil and the deep blue sea, one wrote riffs like they were tattoos on your bones, and the other danced like a switchblade in the rain. He wasn’t built like a rock star, not at first. Tall, wiry, with a mouth made for bad decisions and brilliant lyrics. But he learned it. Studied Little Richard, James Brown, maybe even a little bit of Nijinsky in there too. People talk about moves like Jagger, but let’s be honest, there’s only one Jagger. The rest are just karaoke ghosts.
Like watching a cobra charm you. He’s got that look in his eyes like he just remembered something he shouldn’t have done, and might do again.
Now people say rock and roll’s about rebellion but Mick made it about appetite. For power, for pleasure, for rhythm. He sang about girls, drugs, war, class, the apocalypse, and sometimes all in the same song. He was the androgynous Dionysus in leather pants. The English punk who made America remember what it meant to feel dangerous. And let me tell you something, he’s still doing it. While most folks are looking for a retirement plan, Mick’s out there chasing the next crowd, the next verse, the next moment.
So here’s to the skinny kid with the big mouth who never learned to sit still. The man who made swagger into religion. Mr. Mick Jagger.
watercolor, ink on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
A Glitch "Aisha Qandisha ~ Ètude I”
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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