shot some photos of some boys for the swedish magazine people
Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi
As a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist, ‘Maïmouna’ Patrizia Guerresi reveals unique and authentic sensibilities in her narration of the beauty and subtleties of racial diversity and multiculturalism. Over an established career, she has developed her own symbolism, which combines cosmological and ancestral traditions belonging to various European, African, and Asian cultures. Her personal commitment to Baifall Sufism has led her to produce an aesthetic that is able to bridge time, space and civilisations, as well as figuration and abstraction.
The human body is seen as the nucleus and temple of the soul, a place that houses a delicate, higher awareness; the very conduit for encompassing natural and cosmic forces. More about mysticism than any singular religion, her work is visionary in that it restores those elusive qualities of sacredness and unity in our frequently dehumanising and fragmented contemporary visual world. Her classic iconographic style explores the universality of human experience and reclaims the often hidden nurturing powers of feminine energy. Presented as a kind of free flowing epic, the viewer is left to read the significance of her imagery and quietly meditate on its potential to personally engage with its audience. As if her figures were speaking directly to each one of us.
From her earliest experiments with the physicality and archetypal imprinting of the psyche, through to her latest, evermore metaphoric ‘inner constellations’, Maïmouna insists on a cross-cultural discourse and an expansion of the boundaries that normally dictate our individual attitudes. She invites us to see further and to look deeper – past skin colour, preconceptions, and ethnic landscapes – into the wider paradigm of inclusion. She leads us through apparently simple notions of dimensionality into the exquisite, mystical and fragile complexities of life from within. - Rosa Maria Falvo,
You’re not a REAL Gatsby fan unless you’ve read the book. Unless you’ve read every Fitzgerald book. Unless you’ve read their early drafts, mailed to you by Fitzgerald himself. Unless you first read Gatsby when Scott handed it to you in a Parisian bar in 1925, apologising for the cover when he saw you disapproved. Unless you embarked on an intense friendship with him that culminated in rumours that you two were having a clandestine homosexual affair. Unless you once took him to the Louvre so you could prove to him that his penis wasn’t any smaller than those on the statues there. Unless Scott turned up, drunk and uninvited, at your house so many times that you had to move more than once. Unless you continued to exchange increasingly infrequent and terse letters with him for the rest of his life, then missed his funeral because you were in Cuba. Unless you called his literary talent “as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings” and won a Nobel prize and wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s right, you poser, if you’re not Ernest Hemingway you can fuck straight off right now. We’re on to you.
Josephine Baker, later known as ‘Bronze Venus’, ‘Black Pearl’ and ‘Créole Goddess’ was born in America in 1906 and later moved to France to become a singer, dancer, and actress. She was the first African-American woman to star in a major motion picture, and became famous worldwide.
Though she grew up as a maid in wealthy white households she eventually became an exotic dancer in France, famously appearing in next to no clothing, and became a French citizen in 1937.
Ernest Hemingway referred to Baker as ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’ and she received approximately 1500 marriage proposals in her life time. She became a muse for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. She had a variety of exotic pets including a cheetah named Chiquita, a chimpanzee named Ethel, a pig named Albert, a snake named Kiki, a goat, a parrot, parakeets, fish, three cats, and seven dogs.
When WWII broke out, Baker became a volunteer spy for France, and assisted the French Resistance by smuggling messages written in invisible ink on sheet music. She made great efforts to aid those in danger of enemy attack, sent Christmas presents to French soldiers, and smuggled information she gathered in Spain back to France by pinning notes containing the information on the inside of her underwear. She was awarded the Medal of Resistance with Rosette and later named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Baker also aided many civil rights movements by refusing to perform to segregated audiences and storming out of a club in Manhattan with actress Grace Kelly after she was refused service. She worked with the NAACP and spoke at a Washington march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as the only official female speaker. Baker was actually asked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow to take his place as leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, but Baker declined on the grounds her twelve adopted children ‘were too young to lose their mother’.
Baker died in 1975, four days after her final show, attended by such names as Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, and Liza Minnelli.
Oh and she was queer and had a relationship with Frida Kahlo. All around badass.
Philadelphia: High school students walk out of class and march to City Hall to protest severe budget cuts and planned school closings, May 9, 2013.
The budget cuts are absolutely horrific. Here are some of the proposed changes:
- Schools with more than 1,000 students would no longer be required to have librarians or librarian assistants.
- Schools would no longer be required to have counselors, and counselors’ caseloads would no longer be capped.
- Teachers could be assigned to unlimited classes outside their subject area, and high school teachers could be assigned an extra class without pay. There would be no limit on amount of consecutive time taught in a school day.
- There would be no limit on class size
- The district would no longer be required to provide copy machines, or “a sufficient number of instructional materials and textbooks.”
- Counselors would no longer be guaranteed to have rooms with privacy and confidentiality, a telephone, a locked filing cabinet and a door.
There’s more here.
wtf
01. Boy in the Boat—George Honnoh 02. Prove It On Me Blues—Ma Rainey 03. I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl—Bessie Smith 04. You Can’t Tell The Difference After Dark—Alberta Hunter 05. Lay It On the Line—Gladys Bentley 06. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out—Bessie Smith 07. Foolish Man Blues—Bessie Smith 08. B.D. Woman’s Blues—Bessie Jackson 09. (I Want To Go Where You Go, Do What You Do) Then I’ll Be Happy—Joséphine Baker 10. Am I Blue?—Ethel Waters 11. ‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do—Gladys Bentley 12. Worried Blues—Gladys Bentley 13. Gimme All the Love You Got—Alberta Hunter 14. Stormy Weather—Ethel Waters 15. I Want Every Bit of It—Bessie Smith 16. Hound Dog—Big Mama Thornton
‘Tain’t Nobody’s Business: songs by black women who slept with other women, dressed like men, and sang about it. Not every song on here is about women with women or men with men, but there’s a decent amount of queer blues songs out there. (Also, there is one male artist on here, but “boy in the boat” is the best euphemism for the clit and kaboodle that I’ve heard in a while, and any song that blames WWI for lesbianism because all these women were left by themselves needs to be included.)
Listen* | Download Link One | Download Link Two
*(minus tracks 03, 06, and 15 because 8tracks can’t handle my love of Bessie Smith)
