Photo By Gail
Artist Beauford Delaney (1907 – 1979) met writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts – intellectual, social, and artistic – the two gay men began a friendship that would last 38 years.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) By Beauford Delaney
Photo By Gail
Writing about Alex Katz’s work, Frank O’Hara identified his wife Ada’s complex role in her husbands iconography: “the heads and figures of Ada give this beautiful woman, through his interest in schema, a role as abstract as that of Helen of Troy; she is a presence and at the same time a pictorial conceit of style.”
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Alex Katz, The Black Dress
Photos By Gail
African American designer Ann Lowe (1898 – 1981) learned to sew from her dressmaker mother, Janie Cole, and her grandmother, Georgia Thompkins. One of her earliest pleasures was crafting fabric flowers, a skill that became one of the defining characteristics of her beautifully constructed occasion gowns for debutante and brides. This Evening Dress designed by Lowe for A. F Chantilly (1968) presents a terrific example of this skill.
Hey what’s up. I hope that you are enjoying your weekend. Now that we have done some cursory bonding, I would like to say that with today’s Video Clip of The Week, which is for the awesome song “Middle Of The World” from LA-based trio Flights Over Phoenix, it is my hope that I am exposing you to a potential ear-worm that is powerfully addictive enough to supplant Ed Sheeran’s quasi-pervy, aural seduction device, “Shape of You” — which, I am sure we will all agree, simply cannot be resisted. You’re welcome.
Filmed on location at Soggy Dry Lake, in the California desert, and visually styled in the manner of, say, a John Varvatos photo shoot, “Middle Of The World” features the band performing on an arid plane punctuated only by inflated black balloons tethered to the dry earth like bobbing, mutant cacti. And speaking of cacti, the protagonist of our story is an anthropomorphic cactus who finds a picture postcard of California and decides to take a cross-country journey to the beach — trading one sandy environment for another, but with a few essential differences that change his world completely. In this way, “Middle of The World” serves as a powerful metaphor for breaking free from your restrictive comfort zone to find what you need in order to attain a state of true happiness, or something like that. Heavy.
Aurally, “Middle Of The World” is guilt-free ear candy. The lyrics convey a universal message of self-empowerment and lead singer Keith Longo has a voice like butter. The band explains that, “‘Middle Of The World’ is a song that explores the feelings of isolation through imagery that one might experience in a dream of that nature. In writing the song, we wanted it to feel like a journey, and so we wanted the music to be up-tempo and have a lot of movement.” Mission accomplished.
“Middle Of The World” can be found on the band’s newly-released EP, Where I Comedown. Like them on the FaceBook at This Link! Enjoy!
Flights Over Phoenix are Chris Santillo, Jordan Nuanez and Keith Longo.
