Good Thoughts & Great Tunes

from my friends, the SWAMP SOUND SYSTEM

My good bud Colin Miller has been stirring your senses for years with a number of talents. Now, there's a fine hub for the creative activities of KALI, his sound collective of sharp minds and funky ideations.

I love it. Hope you will too! Go check out Kali and get lifted.

Their audio feed is podcast. Nice.

Latest Project: My own Calender!

Meet Gaia. Aka, Mother Earth. She's one in a new series of folk art figures that I'm printing as full-color calender -- producing for sale in October. GAIA appears in the calender as the month of"January".

This calender will be full of the gods, demons, orisas, and ancestral spirits that rattle around in my head all day - singing their songs...

It's been a busy month, but I'll return with a heap of artwork and ideas very soon.

Gratitude

"Into the Blank Where Life is Hurled,"

cover for Starship Sofa. July Issue. 

Mamase Mama mamakusa, mamase mamasa mamakusa...

The great entertainer is gone. From earliest memories, he made me walk and think and dream, and sing and make images differently, and everyone around me. All of us together were imprinted with the most profound pride in our potentially endless creative energy, in a time when we had good reason to doubt ourselves. 

In my tapestry of memory I cannot find a single lawyer or zoo animal or shadow or trace of the tragic anywhere near that shy young handsome entirely marvelous dude. 

Time will flatten his narrative, and judge his walk in the world as a success. 

I don't think this thread of thought is finished. The well runs deeper than I expected. We get older, find darker Princes to worship, in my musical landscape. But MJ is always a pulse you can hear in your chest wherever you go on the planet. MJ made me connect with strangers in foreign places, just by being there, on some shop speakers, bass heavy cinematic grooves calling down some gospel interconnectedness. I have no memory any longer of a glove, though. I grew up wanting to make Michael's feet become my feet. Studying the sharp determination on his face. Riding the boogie with that invisible girl he sang to. Love was still a honey sweet flavor in my future body. Romance's soundtrack has changed a lot since he and Quincy laid down the bedrock layer.

..."It's this magic in your eyes, and in my heart... Break of dawn..." 

..."Lay back with me..."

..."There'll be no darkness tonight," Cuzz my love will light it right, right? 

But it was more important for us first hip hop generation boys to romance his massive ambition. Our aspiration starts here with Ali Cosby and MJ. His swagger and focus onstage.Some kind of ethic of surpassing expectations. Wowing your audience. All the world is your stage, young man. 

With that kind of love of self one could get oneself out of one's small town existence, one's perceived poverty of the good life. Just imagine yourself doing your thing the way Michael did his... And nothing could stop us

Everybody get up and moonwalk. Make the panels on your kitchen floor light up again. You know what what I'm talking about. 

More to come. Love to hear your thoughts, impressions. 

Starship Sofa Cover

I love the Starship Sofa podcast, as I've said, so I did a cover for one of their stories that will be out in May. "Vinegar Peace" is the chilling story of a new kind of orphanage constructed by a State at war: An orphans' home for the PARENTS of soldiers lost in the ongoing hostilities "over there". The story makes the READER the protagonist, makes us gape in wonder at the way a society might compartmentalize it's widowed-- those beyond age of conception that is, into some kind of internment camp full of modern conveniences, and a clear message about how much meaning your life has to the State when young bodies have to renew the theater of battle year after year. I know, mad dark, right? But it's so full of emotional truths, absurd humor and awesome scifi inventiveness. The world the writer created here is so rich, inside the walls of Vinegar Peace. Please pop over and listen in a week or so if you like dreamlike, intelligent scifi, as I do.