Sur Mesure: Journeys in Transpersonal Haberdashery

THE HATISTA BEHIND THE HATISTA



It's been a while since I reported on It Donned on Me's Journey into the 48 hour film abyss. I've been very busy studying MultiMedia at Cal State East Bay this past school year, while still creating short films with the Crew.

A shout of gratitude to all those who showed up and voted for this film, and all those who viewed it online. After putting the word out to the artists in Paris, France to New Orleans and the Bay Area, and all those places in the tweens (between) I've received many calls and emails from people who saw the movie and thought it was da bomb and are still laughing!

Another very special shout out to the people of Oakland who showed up and showed out. Brenda Usher-Carpino won for us the Audience Choice Award at the Roxie Theater Screening in San Francisco and also the Best Actress Award for the San Francisco 48 Hour Awards Screening. I knew from the get go that this multi talented improv acting Diva would throw down hard... and she did! It started a couple of months before when I ran into Brenda and Angela Wellman http://www.opcmusic.org/ on Piedmont Avenue sipping coffee early one Saturday morning at Gaylord's Coffee House during a very serendipious rondevous. We ended up hanging out for a couple of hours as I listened with open ears to stories about Brenda. This beauty hails from San Antonio, Texas and has lived for many years in the Bay Area in Oakland, CA. She's a writer and a scholar graduating from University of California, Berkeley, with a Doctorate from Stanford University and recently returned to school at Mills College in Oakland working towards her MFA in Creative Writing. Although the list of the Diva is too long for my blog entry, I just knew like I knew like I knew that she would be the show stopper she was. I even told her in advance that once the audience recognized her, they would be all over her like white on rice. So who channeled the Hatista?!?! Figure it out for your self...

Gordon Parks, Photographer

This summer I've been studying Digital Photography with Scott Hopkins, at Cal State University, East Bay. This week we're learning about black and white photography. I love black and white photography because of it's very emotional and poetic nature. I love how it exhibits such great examples of texture. For me it is poetry in motion and the perfect example of a narrative told without spoken words. This week we're looking at some of the great photographers and writing papers on one of our favorites. Being an independent filmmaker and studying digital photography, the first great photographer to come to mind is the infamous Gordon Parks, the only photographer that Malcolm X allowed to photograph him and the Nation of Islam.




November 30, 1912- March 7, 2006
Gordon Parks was a groundbreaking american photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life Magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft.

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/gordon_parks/

The son of a tenant farmer, Parks grew up in poverty. After dropping out of high school, he held a series of odd jobs, including pianist and waiter. In 1938 he bought a camera and initially made a name for himself as a portrait and fashion photographer. At the age of 25, Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine and bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brilliant, for $12.50 at a pawnshop. The photo clerks who developed Parks' first roll of film, applauded his work and prompted him to get a fashion assignment at Frank Murphy's women's clothing store in St. Paul. Parks double exposed every frame except one, but that shot caught the eye of Marva Louis, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis' elegant wife. She encouraged Parks to move to Chicago, where he began a portrait business for society women. After moving to Chicago, he began chronicling life on the city's impoverished South Side. These photographs led to a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and in 1942 he became a photographer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). While with the FSA, he took perhaps his best-known photograph, American Gothic, which featured an African American cleaning woman holding a mop and broom while standing in front of an American flag. Parks had been inspired to create the picture after encountering repeated racism in restaurants and shops, following his arrival in Washington, D.C.. In 1948 Parks became a staff photographer for Life magazine, the first African American to hold that position. He remained with the magazine until 1972 and became known for his portrayals of ghetto life, black nationalists, and the civil rights movement.

Also know for doing photo-essay about a child from a Brazilian slum was expanded into a television documentary (1962) and a book with poetry (1978), both titled Flavio.

Parks also was noted for his intimate portraits of such public figures as Ingrid Bergman, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Muhammad Ali. Parks' first work of fiction was The Learning Tree (1963), a coming-of-age novel about a black adolescent in Kansas in the 1920s. He also wrote forthright autobiographies—A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn (1979), and Voices in the Mirror (1990). He combined poetry and photography in A Poet and His Camera (1968), Whispers of Intimate Things (1971), In Love (1971), Moments Without Proper Names (1975), and Glimpses Toward Infinity (1996). Other works included Born Black (1971), a collection of essays, the novel Shannon (1981), and Arias in Silence (1994).In 1968 Parks became the first African American to direct a major motion picture with his film adaptation of The Learning Tree. He also produced the movie and wrote the screenplay and musical score. He next directed Shaft (1971), which centered on a black detective. A major success, it helped give rise to the genre of African American action films known as “blaxploitation.” A sequel, Shaft's Big Score, appeared in 1972. Parks later directed the comedy The Super Cops (1974) and the drama Leadbelly (1976) as well as several television films.

Japanese Big Head Painting

Jacques Davis - Murdim Project

This past year my blogging slowed down a bit due to school projects. As some of you may know, I've been a student in Multimedia at Cal State East Bay. As I've been busy enjoying the journey, one of the most challenging things for me has been to work for a grade. Educational institutions require student to make "A's" and/or "B's", for me as an artist as well as a human being, I work from my heart and soul.

During the spring I took a class called "Currents of New Media" which explores the history of new media art which has only been in existence the past 20-30 years if that long. This is a piece I wrote on a new media artist who's work inspires my heart and soul to keep on creating. I also wrote my first short Wikipedia article on the artist. So if you check Murdim Project or Jacques Davis...I'm the author.


February 27th, 2009, 11:37am – created February 14, 2009

Artist: Jacques Davis - murdim

Rhizome Terms: Social classes, Video

Artist Terms: individuality, strength, togetherness

With the rise of new technology, large moving images are starting to cover the walls of our cities and even our living rooms. Some examples are: “The Thing” (1991) founded by German sculptor Wolfgang Staehle, an electronic bulletin board system that functioned as a forum for artists and cultural theorists. The Ars Electronica Center at Linz, Austria, exterior view. However, what most of us in the United States are used to seeing that resembles these pieces are New York Times Square’s large ads. When viewers look closer and pay more attention, one realizes these are only huge blow-ups of a regular movie.

One of the most recent displays of new media art to hit the scene last year and this year is the murdim Project, (Global Village, Marathon, Mobilisation, Paris Plage). Reminisce of the Neo-Dada art movement, also known as Fluxus, in particular the artist Nam June Paik, the murdim Project is about "contenant et le contenu". In the world of moving images, it represents the container and what’s inside.

The murdim Project consists of several 20-minute organic waterfall like totem pole murals echoing the sounds of the crowded streets of Paris. They range between 2 and 7 meters high of moving images that are always the same and yet always different. It allows viewers to see at the same time thousands of people all together, and one by one as they come closer.
http://www.murdim.com/earth.html
The images have a meaning when you see them from afar but not necessarily the same meaning seen close up and personal. It also allows you to think of images in terms of not being part of a “movie”. For instance, like every day life in Paris, with similarities to Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera, the Artist of the murdim Project captures everyday scenes from daily life in a city. Only these images are not part of a typical “movie” in that you do not have to sit to look at. These are in fact images that go far beyond the usual A3, 16 x 9 and other 1080 sizes. Or, even to think of images that go further than kaleidoscopic computer graphics.

Jacques Davis, the artist behind murdim Project uses crowds and nature as his subjects. Living and working in Paris, France, Davis worked for 35 years as a photographer doing mostly large slide shows, later with video, and video walls. Be it swimming pools, demonstrations, political meetings, markets, and other gatherings as his subjects for the camera, crowds are the main focus. To view the crowds from afar as a totem, the viewer sees the strength, will and force of a crowd while at the same time one can see close-ups of thousands of very individually unique people.

Davis uses 10 to 20 HDV cameras on each totem. Totems are stitched together and broadcast on LCD screens, with each camera aiming at a different part of the scene the same way one would shoot in panoramic photography. Davis states that “It’s time consuming and pixel consuming, my movies are huge”.

In a recent correspondence via email from Jacques Davis, he states the following:

“You take a computer, Illustrator, Photoshop, you get 32 millions color graphics that you animate with After Effects or Flash, you buy 2000 LCD screens and you cover the front of CSU East Bay. You've just invented video wall murals technique; and your name is Nam June Paik ...2.”

Research Sources:
www.Rhizome.org
www.murdim.com
Multimedia Artist Jacques Davis info@murdim.com
New Media Art by Mark Tribe/Reena Jana pages 22 and 24
Wikepedia

Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah in...a place like this...

Funny how sometimes we realize how our dreams become experiences that come full circle. Who would of thought that an act of kindness on the part of Angela Wellman, almost 20 years ago would lead to the making of a short documentary film on her creation as the Founder and Director of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. I always say, "you don't always have to know where you're going in order to get to where you need to be". When you put a lot of good energy into what you love, the Universe will conspire to manifest your highest ideals.

It was 199?, I was standing in a very long line at "Concepts Cultural Gallery" in downtown Oakland with my young son thinking that my name was on a guest list to see the "Sun Ra Archestra", featuring Sun Ra himself. The lines were long, the show was a sell out and anticipation was in the air. All the real hip patrons of jazz were there for the show of all shows.

Out of what appeared to be nowhere two women were standing before me offered to usher my son, Hasani and I in to a front row table right smack in front of the stage while others waited in the longest line hoping to get in. Some of the local bay area great musicians performing with the Archestra were, Cash Killian, India Cook, Kamau Seitu... to name a few. The Archestra performed and after a few songs into the show, one of the women, who got me in, Angela Wellman, picked up her horn and went on stage. I had no idea who this person was, but she blew the roof off the mutha. I was like WOW! It's not every day you come across a musician who spots a single mother and her child and manages to get you front row seats. It was my son's very first jazz concert. After that time, we'd spot her around Oakland all the time at the grocery store or the Berkeley Flea Market and different festivals. My son always referred to her as "the Lady with the Horn".


After years of experiencing Angela's music around the Bay Area, our paths started crossing quite frequently over the past two years. I'd heard she started the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and I started attending some of her Sunday afternoon concerts and Monday night jam sessions. At other times, I would see her at Peet's Coffee & Tea on Fruitvale Avenue in Oakland.

Let's talk about Divine timing. After we received the "Music" genre with the theme of "Hope", I immediately tried to contact her. I just had a feeling again, just like I did with "Stick & Pound", that we (It Donned On Me) could pull off something absolutely fabulous...and we did.

In the past it was fairly easy to contact Angela Wellman. We'd spoken on the phone and emailed a few times. But this time it was not the easiest thing. So I called a few of musicians
friends to see if they could contact her directly, but no one could. So I just went to the Conservatory. It was closed. I was anxious before my meeting with the crew later that evening and just decided to stick a note on the door. My cell phone rang within the hour, right after I'd ordered my cup of tea at Peet's. It was the Horn Diva herself. The trombonist hails from Kansas City, has performed with McCoy Tyner big band, Joe Williams, Al Gray, Slide Hampton and many more. http://www.angelawellman.com/about.htm
I was so delighted. I explained the process to her and she was in agreement with having a documentary done if we pulled the music genre.

Would you believe that later that evening in a round table discussion of our esteemed team, I presented a pretty good layout of who Angela Wellman was and how the Conservatory had been a dream of hers, I introduced her into "the mix" and from there it was on.

From there I scheduled a shoot for noon the next day and the rest is "HerStory".

For more information on Oakland Public Conservatory of Music visit:
http://www.opcmusic.org/

QUILTING WITH JOY

In honor of Black History Month I've decided to honor and pay homage to Ms. JOY.

Joy E. Johnson, Quilt Maker and Storyteller, has been making quilting most of her life. Ms. Joy teaches quilting, conducts workshops and lectures on the Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad. After experiencing a railroad trip by way of her quilts through storytelling, I realized there is so much to be learned from the two art forms. The work itself is a canvas of narrative stories all patched together to perfection. Each patch can represent entire chapters in history of the African and African American experience. I see her work as the construction of individual windows of a world the ancestors experienced in the form of stories to be passed on to generations still to come. Spending an evening with her was a delightful treat. I was amazed at her craftsmanship, no, more like blown away. Her quilts very colorful, creative and educational. Her quilts have been exhibited at the De Young Museum of San Francisco, CA, the Alameda County Fair, Pleasanton CA and various other venues throughout the Bay Area. She is a member of the Association of African American Quilters Guild in Oakland, CA.

Ms Joy loves all things quilting and updates her skill base by attending Quilt Conventions and taking classes. She has an extensive library of books devoted to quilting and assures that she can make anyone a quilter and recommends quilting as a form of meditation. She attributes quilting handwork with getting our foremothers through the storms of their lives.

Check out Ms. Joy