“Salvaging such defiant beauty from scraps of resilient black, rubber provide a compelling metaphor of African American survival in the modern world.”
Matthew Guy Nichols, in an Art in America article on
Chakaia Booker
Acid Rain
2001
rubber, tires, wood
(Source: whos-afraid-of-postblack-art)
Interviewing the Oracle : Octavia Butler
Here is an interview from 2006, just before her death in February of that year:
“Octavia Butler’s conversation style is like her prose: lean and to the point. Not that she does not have a lot to talk about. She has written eleven novels including Kindred, whose heroine keeps falling back in time to save her white slavemaster ancestor, and Parable of the Sower, a richly-imagined tale of a small band of survivors founding a new earth-centered religion in the midst of a post-apocolyptic America.”
You can read more of the interview: http://www.indypendent.org/2006/01/12/interviewing-oracle-octavia-butler
Happy Birthday to ya Stevie Wonder!!! My favorite musical genius was born 63 years ago today as Steveland Hardaway Judkins (his last name was later changed to Morris) in Saginaw, Michigan. In this 1974 photo, he is performing his classic “Living For The City” on “Top Of The Pops” in London. Photo: David Warner Ellis/Redferns. In the comment section, let me know what your favorite Stevie song is (Is it possible to have just one?)
Sophie Okonedo and Zoe Kravitz in After Earth.
Sophie Okonedo will be playing Will Smith’s wife and Zoe will be playing their oldest daughter.
Pictures found here x
I’m always wary and suspicious of any mainstream attempts at adapt Octavia Butler’s works. Hollywood is known for turning dark-skinned, kinky-haired black folk into light-skinned, straight-haired black folk—especially if they’re women. And they also have a penchant for bleeding the anti-establishment, anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-queerantagonistic messages out of the works in an attempt to get straight white dudes to buy into it.
So yeah, I regard this with severe trepidation.
