May 2013
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Seeing Naomi Campbell As We Do Not Usually See Her
1. Seeing the darker skin at Naomi Campbell’s joints is the reason for this post.
2. Here Naomi Campbell communicates some feeling / atmosphere / affect that fabulous and fierce Naomi Campbell is not usually invited to communicate.
3. This is skin usually evened out for editorials to create smooth lengths of mahogany and ebony. Here we’re confronted by the skin’s life and...
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April 2013
13 posts
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Lordy, the Tribeca Film Festival is white
There are a thimbleful of black/brown exceptions: a doc on Richard Pryor; another on Muhammad Ali; one on C. Vivian Stringer, called Coach (about the time that idiot slurred black woman Rutgers basketball players); a doc on oil in Ghana (looks bad); and another by Whoopi Goldberg which looks good.
And these two:
UPDATE!:
caitsmeissner replied to your post: Lordy, the Tribeca Film Festival is...
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“To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems...”
– J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
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mizoguchi said: herzog is such a trip have you ever read the story about him encountering joaquin phoenix? lmaooo
no! I’ll add it to my morning reading tho.
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Morris left for Napa Valley and began working on the film that would become his first feature, Gates of Heaven. In 1978, when the film premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary by Les Blank. Herzog had promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the project, to challenge and encourage Morris, whom Herzog perceived as...
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buddhaspalm said: Your blog is so good. Forgive me for prying, but are you a Brit living in the States?
thanks for the love! and yes, you’ve got me pegged. what about you?
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akilamantado said: When there was this amazing fuss about Beyonce in the media all I could think was, When is Mvula’s album gonna be out? I dig her music + perspective.
I hear you, am pretty obsessed w/ Mvula’s music myself. I guess the fuss about Beyonce is that she’s Beyonce; also I thought Bow Down was fyah
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caricapapaya said: i get so much new music from you! always adding stuff to my fully calculated to impress “oh what this old really really complicated recipe, no biggie” casual dinner party playlist.
haha! I’m glad I can contribute to the ambiance of your dinner parties which look - if your food blog is anything to go by - absolutely delicious.
p.s. also glad that you haven’t...
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“I think the way America is set up makes it really difficult for people of...”
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in Interview with Jon Snow, Channel 4 News, Wednesday 10th April 2013
I love Jon Snow but he really asks some whack questions on this one.
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March 2013
10 posts
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“As a class, you and I and our friends who comprise the elite are incredibly...”
– Chinua Achebe ‘The Trouble With Nigeria’ 1983
Thanks for everything Chinua Achebe. Rest in Power
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“Art will not create social change, but it can provoke thought and prepare us for...”
– Elizabeth Catlett (via blaublueblah)
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“If this is so—and let me emphasize how speculative this claim is—what we have in...”
– Keguro Macharia on the Kenyan election, Lauren Berlant & Kenya’s ‘growing middle class’
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“Migrants as would-be citizens are thus increasingly bound by the happiness duty...”
– Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (via cesaire)
February 2013
15 posts
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“Affirmative action is not a threat either to standards or to individuals. It is...”
– Nelson Mandela quoted in Karima Brown ‘Is Ramphele Capable of Leading?”, Feb 2013
h/t @bongani_kona
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“I had decided to go to Paris when I was thirteen, but I didn’t realize what that...”
– Interview with novelist Abdellah Taïa
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#MyMedia: Dear Women, Last month my TEDx talk... →
mymediaproject2013:
Dear Women, Last month my TEDx talk about luck, legacy, and access to media went viral. I think it would be amazing to keep the momentum of this conversation going and shift it into a larger discussion of women in media. So here’s an experiment: can we reroute this press deluge—the…
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“As Western capitalist democracies in advanced postindustrial decline, the UK and...”
– Kobena Mercer, ‘Introduction: Black Britain and the cultural politics of diaspora’ in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, p.6
“People will urge you to go to school. They’ll tell you an American education is...”
– E.C. Osondu, Debriefing (a satirical take on African immigrant life in the U.S.)
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Two years ago I was obsessing over Kenyan-born visual artist Mutu’s work and writing gushing tumblr posts from my bedroom in upstate NY. This week I did a short Q&A with Mutu and asked about her work as artistic director on Pegasus Rising’s latest music video.
As you’d expect her responses were rich and thoughtful. She talks about the way the ‘sensual black...
“Yet the persistence, the long life of “the joke” that transcends time, raises...”
– Keguro Macharia | ‘Post-Humour, or Without Evidence’, Gukira, 1 Jan 2010 (via derica)
Thinking about the above in relation to Jimmy Kimmel’s recent prank
January 2013
19 posts
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“Depending on who we were talking to, we were as likely to say we were Bajan as British. If we were at home, and Mum was chiding us for being too ‘English’, then we were Bajan. If we were at school, and someone was telling is to go back to where we came from, we would say we were British - somehow Englishness was never something any of us rushed to claim - and had as many rights...
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“But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted...”
– Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
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aaron swartz, private property, intellectual... →
“In July 2011, [Carmen] Ortiz said in a statement about the case: “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
On Monday, academics paid tribute to Swartz by putting PDFs of their copyrighted work from JSTOR...
