Singer Aretha Franklin said, “I just can’t talk about it now. It’s so stunning and unbelievable. I couldn’t believe what I was reading coming across the TV screen. My heart goes out to Cissy (Houston’s mother), her daughter Bobbi Kris, her family and Bobby (Brown).”

Dolly Parton, who wrote “I Will Always Love You,” said, “mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston. I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‘Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.’”

Another entertainment legend, Quincy Jones, said he was “absolutely heartbroken” by the news. “She was a true original and a talent beyond compare,” he said.

via Singer Whitney Houston dies at 48

Oh god, i just heard, she was so young! An artist who can really sing like her could have been performing for decades yet :(

ETA: with so many iconic singers/artists of her generation passing, who are the next ones gonna be? Where does a WOC artist like her, who starts young, who’s really talented and doesn’t put up with being completely appeasing and trend based marketed in their work, get any support/sustain their career now?

Something’s Got A Hold On Me (by SassyGirrrl420) Etta James 1962

..it was in 1979 that Robinson began forging her indelible mark on an emerging art form that began taking shape at clubs and dance parties in New York. Inspired after listening to people rap over instrumental breaks, Robinson formed the Sugarhill Gang. Comprised Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, the trio rapped over a rhythm track that sampled Chic’s 1979 R&B/pop hit “Good Times.” It was the first commercial hit for the burgeoning rap revolution and for Robinson and her husband’s post-All Platinum label Sugar Hill Records, named after Harlem, NY’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.

via R.I.P. Sylvia Robinson (1936-2011) [Voices] | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture

The Slits - Typical Girls (via Nemova)

Typical Girls, try to be typical girls, very well.

Typical Girls, are looking for something:

Fall under a spell!

Buy magazines

Feel like hell!

Worry about spots and unnatural smells.

Typical Girls try to be Typical Girls very well.

Typical Girls, don’t create, don’t rebel.

Can’t decide what clothes to wear.

Ah, sensitive typical girls!

Oh emotional typical girls!

Cruel..b..bitching typical girls!

She’s a femme fatale, typical girls. Stand by their man!

Who invented the Typical Girl?

Who’s bringing out the new improved model?

There’s another marketing ploy. Typical Girls gets the Typical Boy!

Proto riot grrrl song, RIP Ari Up.

curator-of-curiosities:

Jill Johnston, chronicler of Jasper Johns, Village Voice dance critic, Art in America contributor, and radical lesbian feminist, died yesterday.  Johnston’s brand of feminism which, she outlined in her manifesto-like book Lesbian Nation, was never one which I was philosophically in-line with; but her method of avant-garde debate is one which the feminists community has all but, sadly, dispensed with.  

Take for example her participation at a debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971, with Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos which was moderated by the oh-so-lovely Norman Mailer.  Greer, Trilling, and Ceballos debated but Johnston refused to engage with the charade.  Instead, she recited a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and was joined on stage by two women - they, of course, began making out and simulating sex. Mailer was appalled. His response:

Come on, Jill, be a lady. 

Johnston’s feminism was informed by an avant-garde understanding of dance and performance - one in which all movement is dance - and, in many regards, it’s a form of feminism which was too avant-garde for the moralizing of Greer and Ceballos.  Which is more than unfortunate - Johnston’s approach engaged with the foundations of culture and was much more pertinent than, say, endlessly blogging about Mad Men and Photoshop.  Feminism today is empty: It asks the wrong questions and thus exists in a feedback loop.  Johnston knew that, and her strategies engaged with Dada-like sensibilities in order to show the hollowness of surface critique.  

But alas, any hope of realigning feminism with the strategies of avant-garde performance - a methodology that would shed light on the real problems of sexuality and gender - seem to have died with Johnston. 

Read Charlie Finch’s “The Extraordinary Jill” 

wolfandfox:

prostheticknowledge:

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 98.

Full article here

woc365:nezua:larebelde:curate:

Loni Ding — documentary filmmaker, university teacher, and media activist – died on Saturday, February 20, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She exemplified the best in the way social documentarians can expand the public sphere. She did this by working to create public institutions to showcase underrepresented voices in American life, and by creating work that not only raised awareness but encouraged meaningful discussion and debate. Her film work had immediate and long-lasting impact, including influencing Congressional action on redress for Japanese-American internment during World War II.

A tireless advocate for social issue documentary, she played a central role in the creation of the National Asian American Telecommunication Association (now Center for Asian American Media), ITVS, and the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, and trained a generation of mediamakers in the Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley.

Starting out as a community arts activist in San Francisco, Loni became a media maker in the early days of community television as a producer of programs made with, for and about the people she met. From her earliest days, the lives of “ordinary people” and their struggles for social justice was the passion of her life and subject of her films, which connected past and present, and which she saw as tools for education, legislative change, community mobilizing, and public understanding.

Island of Secret Memories is a short film made for middle school children. It is a story of Asian immigrants detained on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay that is told from the point of a young boy looking for his family’s past -one that resonates with immigration debates today. At the other end of the spectrum, Ancestors in the Americas is an epic account of how Chinese, Asian Indian, Japanese, Filiipino, and Korean immigrants have challenged and overcome legal, economic and social exclusion – and how their experiences are part of larger movements claiming civil rights and social equity for all Americans. (Loni was working on the third episode of the series at the end of her life.)

In an interview I did with Loni in 1992, she said, “I am interested in people’s voices and faces and their own, distinctive way of being. Coming forward, being seen, being heard and given a vehicle. A vehicle that, on one hand, is realistic and shows them as they are but that also has the transforming quality of art. That gives them a frame in which they can be appreciated.

“I remember someone saying, ‘If you stare at someone long enough, you could fall in love with them.” That seems to me to make a lot of sense, because mothers have children who are not all beautiful! I say that the camera can do the same. The camera can and does do the same, depending how you frame people and how much time you give them and the attitude with which you approach them.”

She also said, “Working in the media is not any different than other areas which have significance for the general public. It deals with power and has an effect on revealing what power relationships are like, or allowing people to get enough consciousness of what is going on that they could make some important choices.”

Working with Loni over the years, I began to think of her as a kind of warrior - always going into action for what she believed in. So I asked her how she thought of herself. She was, she said, still the little girl shuttling between her parents’ herbal medicine shops - one in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the other downtown - on the trolley. Going between two worlds with wide-open eyes, registering the faces, gestures, and scenes all around her. A warrior with open eyes and and open mind - that’s how I will remember Loni.

Loni knew the power of public media “to inform, connect and convene” from the start, and she worked for public media open diverse voices and for the media policies necessary to sustain it. She was a leader who spoke truth to power and believed that media was a tool by which communities may realize the power that resides in them. We will miss her.

(via News from the Future of Public Media — Center for Social Media at American University)

butnotmine:

A trans friend of mine in the performance art world just sent out an email about a trans artist who was running an arts center in Haiti and died in the earthquake.

This linked interview with the artist, Flo McGarrell,  gives an interesting take on his process of moving to Haiti, engaging with the art world and economic reality there there, and being an out trans person in a small creative town outside of the capitol.  It added, for me, an interesting dimension to my understanding of Haiti’s life, culture and struggle, and how incredibly impossible it must be there right now, with a crumbled infrastructure that barely was held together before.  At any rate, I thought I would share for those interested.