New videos

"For the Midnight"

from my new album, PASTICHE

(this actually went down. crackhead, ambulance!)

"Just You"

from PASTICHE

(Shout out to Darryl Dickenson, and Julia Smith on the cameos)

a time for . . .

alot of people come through my house all day. rarely do they call before coming, and always seem to stay long enough to take something- 

a magazine, a book, (some try and take records) a dookie. stuff like that. beer, mary j uan a - yep. 

it makes me laugh cuz there is always a sneak element to it. especially when it time to take a dump. i caught L boogie

on the toliet in this shot. pretty ambiguous i think, but if you look real close you can see that is a person sitting on the toliet!

with her quiet pooping, an vegan diet it is the most unobtrusive poop out of the range of poops.

j. dixxx is the worst offender though, cuz since he once lived here, he assumes he's entitled to the full range of poop situations. not the oh, i got to take a small poop. but the "oh shit i haven't dookied all day and i need to take my power poop right the fuck now. and because he's an alien, and expels anything he consumes immediately - the dookie is deadly. if the guy drink a ton of beer, he smells like beer for three hours and then he is no longer drunk. you get the picture, which is why he stay so trim even though he eats everything. and i do mean everything.

my rule is- if i have known you for sometime i will blow out a dookie at your house, but if i just met you, or am trying to get to know you - no dookie. hold course until home- then dookie shards flying. but at my house. 

yep.

PASTICHE ALBUM VIDEO and notes

live and direct. that phrase sums up what i love about HIP HOP music. its what spoke to me when i made my first pause tape, its the layers really- the double meanings and interactive message of the thing. like any art its up for the interpretation but with HIP HOP if you say - "blast your face with a laser beam" you may just mean just that. or perhaps you wish you could do it.

i used to wait for producers to make me beats, the process was slow and frustrating. usually they just give you whatever, never considering how your voice would sound with the track- its always been a you fit the beat and figure it out sort of relationship. while the MC seems to get all the shine now days, its the beatmakers, who i really love. its beats, the digging for sound collage of it all that is the butter for me.

so the virtual publicist said this about the new record, 

RA Washington's producer/mc alias LeRoi Da Moor is at it again with a new project straight off the two inch tape at the Zombie Proof Studios. Produced/arranged by ra, mixed by Paul @ Zombie, PASTICHE is a nod to the art of collage and the once golden era practice of sampling.

this is a medley of three songs off the album, the first being "ROMERE BURDEN'S SIC". the actual Romare Bearden is an amazing collage artist of serious fame.  check his stuff out, while it is not the most post modern shit- its a very early example of what you can do with the collage medium. here's what his foundation has for a bio. i flip the spelling because i was just riffing off the idea that prevails now that collage is a child's game, and the continued bull-ish that sampling is not an excepted musical form. "if you sample you are not a musician." that kinda logic burns me up for alot of reasons i'm not going to even discuss at the moment. perhaps i will write it sometime, but for now consider this, if you are a painter, do you make your own brushes? your own paint? and since we all know most folks do not, and since that argument seems a tad off how about this,  - when you mix your paint, and make a new hue is that creation yours? 

Romare Howard Bearden was born on September 2, 1911, to (Richard) Howard and Bessye Bearden in Charlotte, North Carolina, and died in New York City on March 12, 1988, at the age of 76. His life and art are marked by exceptional talent, encompassing a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, performing arts, history, literature and world art. Bearden was also a celebrated humanist, as demonstrated by his lifelong support of young, emerging artists.

Romare Bearden began college at Lincoln University, transferred to Boston University and completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in education. While at NYU, Bearden took extensive courses in art and was a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the monthly journal The Medley. He had also been art director of Beanpot, the student humor magazine of Boston University. Bearden published many journal covers during his university years and the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and later, the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, Bearden became a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American, which he continued doing until 1937.

After joining the Harlem Artists Guild, Bearden embarked on his lifelong study of art, gathering inspiration from Western masters ranging from Duccio, Giotto and de Hooch to Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, as well as from African art (particularly sculpture, masks and textiles), Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese                                          landscape paintings.

From the mid-1930s through 1960s, Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of Social Services, working on his art at night and on weekends. His success as an artist was recognized with his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in Washington, DC, in 1944. Bearden was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited during his lifetime throughout the United States and Europe. His collages, watercolors, oils, photomontages and prints are imbued with visual metaphors from his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Pittsburgh and Harlem and from a variety of historical, literary and musical sources.

In 1954, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, with whom he spent the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he and Nanette established a second residence on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, his wife's ancestral home, and some of his later work reflected the island's lush landscapes. Among his many friends, Bearden had close associations with such distinguished artists, intellectuals and musicians as James Baldwin, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Joan Miró, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey and Jacob Lawrence.

Bearden was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. Active in many arts organizations, in 1964 Bearden was appointed the first art director of the newly established Harlem Cultural Council, a prominent African-American advocacy group. He was involved in founding several important art venues, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery. Initially funded by the Ford Foundation, Bearden and the artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow established Cinque to support younger minority artists. Bearden was also one of the founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.

Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968. An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden's Contemporary Dance Theatre.

Among Bearden's numerous publications are: A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which was coauthored with Harry Henderson and published posthumously in 1993; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983); Six Black Masters of American Art, coauthored with Harry Henderson (1972); The Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, coauthored with Carl Holty (1969); and Li'l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, a children's book published posthumously in September 2003.

Bearden's work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), as well as numerous posthumous retrospectives, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (1991) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2003).

Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime. Honorary doctorates were given by Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College and Atlanta University, to name but a few. He received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City in 1984 and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan, in 1987.

book reviews

anybody read any nice book reviews?

i'm on the hunt. or new magazines that you would recommend.

shoot them as a comment.

magazines and other shit people don't buy for themselves

most of my friends, while very nice, and intelligent for the most part (hmmm.) don't really buy media. or incense, or paper, or sugar. things like that go missing from my house all the time. the kicker is the magazines. what the fuck? if you like the read mags, which i do- buy some then. its fucked up. LDC he and i have shared media for years, but he buys media. so he has something to offer back, for my poor friends- i mean stupid poor, not arty poor- i dont mind it, but when you come in the house with 300 dollar boots, but never once bought a book, or a record, or a fucking magazine, and you want to borrow one, or both, i find it completely annoying. further more- i'm gonna start kicking motha fuckas in the ass if they even ask. get yr own steez, and media would help fucker!

this may be happening to you, so here is how you know.

the following conversation is fictional.

- editors.

hey man, how's it going?

fine. what up?

you watching the game?

yeah. 

i'm a stop through?

can you pick me up a couple of vitamin waters? formula 50.

oh, i ain't going that way, but i will see you in a few.

(minutes later, then two hours later.)

what up, who won?

cavs.

that's what's up. you got any beer?

yeah, some pabst in the fridge. did you bring the vitamin waters?

i told you i wasn't going that way. you want a beer?

or.

(its hazy from the cigs and mary jane. time: 2 am)

what's this?

oh, that's this new mag i'm checking out, got it from bank news.

word. man you being having the joints.

(flipping through mag)

man, this magazine is amazing. how much was it? oh. yeah its right here.

you spent 20 bucks on a mag? what the fuck dude?

i love my media man. sometimes you buy shit so when you broke, you will have something to do. i buy media so when i can't go out cuz i'm busted i can read my 20 dollar magazine.

you feel me?

yeah, but that's crazy.

(a few minutes later.)

man, i'm beat. i'ma get out of here. you mind if i borrow this mag?

yeah, but what happen to the last one? (insert wimp sticker here.)

oh, i still got it.

mothafuckas.

flicks

neighbors kids.

mirror

this picture was the keeper. it was as if i had not been in front of a mirror before- had not noticed the buddha belly. not really.

 sure i knew that i was smoking and sitting at my typewriter with a samwich. so a lady i know challenged me to eat vegetarian

for a month. i was salty about it, just cuz me like the bacon, but the gut, although perfectly round, and hard like a six pack, more like a 18pack actually- is a nice prop i cannot stand it anymore. its lifestyle change time.

and it sucks.

no more poet claus!

i'd rather make a tape.