I'm a singer/songwriter/poet/thesbian/vegan culinary goddess/blanket knitter/lay herbalist/aspiring farmer. Most of the time, my name is Megan. I lack focus, but I make up for it in joy. So far, I am mostly a recording artist by trade. Sometimes I have jobs, like teaching preschoolers or working as an indentured servant at a health food store. My music comes out on Ankh Ba Records. To date I have released two solo projects & one group project as a member of The Tao of Slick. Everything I am working on now sounds better than what I've already done, so I guess I'll be growing indefinitely. Feel free to watch, listen or read about it.
Son Little “Your Love Will Blow Me Away When My Heart Aches”
Another song from this guy named Son Little. The first song I heard him on a bluesy reggae song called "Cross My Heart". Looks like he’s back with another song, that he describes being about, a man overboard, and in over his head. Pretty much being afraid of what you’re already feeling. I dig how he sounds like he’s in a lot of pain. You don’t hear these type of vocals in contemporary music. He seems to revolve around very emotional type of songs, which leaves me curious to hear his full album.
"Your Love Will Blow Me Away When My Heart Aches" by Son Little Download the song on iTunes: http://bit.ly/1gCDpE5 Director: Marc Lemoine Editor: Aaron Morri…
Dariss painting an Ara,a bird native to Senegal during a day of massive wall painting in the Medina. #festigraff 5 #instagrafite @instagrafite #dakar #senegal #streetart by marthacoopergram http://ift.tt/1li82gA
Gynecology Invented Through The Torture of Black Women
In the 19th century, the father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, conducted his research experiments on enslaved Black women. Sims performed the invasive and torturous procedures without anesthesia. J. Marion Sims’ justification for choosing not to anesthetize his test subjects was that he did not believe Black women felt pain at all. In an 1857 lecture, he stated that it was “not painful enough to justify the trouble”.
The Tuskegee Experiment
The Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service began a study of the natural progression of syphilis involving 600 Black men (399 with syphilis, 201 uninfected) in 1932. The infected men involved in the study were never made aware of their condition upon diagnosis and believed they were being treated for “bad blood”. In exchange for their participation, the men received free medical examinations and burial insurance. They were never treated for the disease. These trials went on until 1972 when the study was exposed by The Associated Press. The remaining victims and their family members won a $10,000,000 reparations settlement which guaranteed them lifetime health coverage and burial insurance.
The Pellagra Incident
Pellagra is an ailment commonly caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B-13) in the human diet. The symptoms include skin lesions, sunlight sensitivity, dementia and ends in death. At the turn of the twentieth century, millions of people in the United States died from this disease. Scientists claimed that the cause of the disease was a toxin found in corn. In 1915, the U.S. Surgeon General ordered government funded experiments on Black prisoners afflicted with pellagra. Poor diet and niacin deficiency was found to be the cause. However, these life-saving findings were not released to the public until 1935 because the majority of Pellagra-induced deaths affected Black communities.
The Ebb Cade Experiment
In 1945, African-American Ebb Cade, a 53-year-old truck driver, was secretly injected with plutonium, the substance used to make nuclear bombs. After breaking several of his bones in automotible accident, he was rushed to the emergency room. Unbeknownst to Ebb Cade, he was in the care of doctors that were also U.S. Atomic Agency employees. For six months, he was held in the hospital under the belief that they were treating his injuries. During that time, he was injected with more than 40 times the amount of plutonium an average person is exposed to in a lifetime. The doctors and researchers collected bone samples and extracted 15 teeth to monitor the effects of his exposure. Ebb Cade grew suspicious of his broken-bone treatments and escaped from the hospital. Unfortunately, Cade suffered from the brutal effects of intense radiation until he died from heart failure eight years later at the age of 61.
Weaponized Mosquito Experiment
In the early 1950′s, the United States government conducted an experiment to see if mosquitoes could be weaponized. The CIA and the U.S. military released nearly a half million mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and dengue fever viruses into several Black communities in Florida. In the predominantly Black community of Avon Park, dozens of Black people became ill, eight dying as a result of this government-issued mosquito attack.
Infants Injected With Test Drugs In Los Angeles
In June 1990, more than 1500 six-month old Black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles were given what seemed to be a standard measles vaccination. The parents were not told that this particular vaccine, Edmonston Zagreb measles vaccine (EZ), was still in its research phase and not approved by the FDA. The EZ vaccine already had a reputation in Senegal, Guinea Bissau and Haiti, triggering an increased death rate among infant girls, most not living past the age of two. The Center for Disease Control would later confess that the infants were injected with an experimental vaccination without their parent’s knowledge. Presently, it is believed that many of these families are still unaware that their babies were used as guinea pigs.
The Toxic Sludge Experiment of Baltimore and St. Louis
In the year 2000, Federally funded researchers from John Hopkins University, the EPA, HUD, The Kennedy Krieger Institute and Department of Agriculture spread sludge from a sewage treatment plant on the lawns of nine low-income families, and a vacant lot in Baltimore and East St. Louis. The families and residents were told the sludge was safe and not informed about the toxic mixture of human and industrial waste the sludge contained. The research was conducted to see if the toxic waste absorbed into the water supply could effectively reduce lead levels in children.
Children Forcibly Vaccinated in Chad
In December 2012, at least 500 children in Gouro, Chad were forcibly given the MenAfriVac during school resulting in dangerous side effects including convulsions, and paralysis. Parents were not notified of any plans to vaccination their children at school and parental consent was never requested. The forced vaccinations were part of an aggressive healthcare initiative sponsored by several internationally revered organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn’t make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.
Junot Díaz, “The Junot Díaz Episode" (18 November 2013) on Fan Bros, a podcast “for geek culture via people of colors” (via kynodontas)
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Kerry James Marshall. The National Gallery of Art just opened "In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall," an exhibition that explores Marshall’s Great America (1994), which the NGA acquired in 2010. It will be on view through December 7.
This fall, Marshall will be the subject of a career survey organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp. Titled “Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff," the exhibition will travel to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Denmark, the Antoni Tapies Foundation in Barcelona, and to the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Last fall he created new work for an exhibition at the Secession in Vienna titled, "Who’s Afraid of Red, Black and Green" (see more images). In 2010 the Vancouver Art Gallery organized the only North American survey of his work.
This is a detail from Marshall’s 2012 exhibition at the Secession in Vienna. For more fantastic images from the show, see Contemporary Art Daily!
Other ways to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. See dozens of images of artworks discussed on this week’s show. Also:
I just read a blog post that began with, "Here is a tribe in Africa where" and proceeded to gush about x-indigenous practice that is, you know, magically (as opposed to tragically) cool and free of Western values.
Nowhere in the post is the name of the tribe, the region of the continent, the identity of the woman and child in the photo that leads the piece. Why are these details not important? How can we know if anything written in the post or associated with the post is actually true? The better question is, do we care? I'm going to venture that no, we do not care.
The tags on the post are "Africa" and "dope," although the ritual described has to do with health, family, childbirth, sexuality, community, music, voice, knowledge of self, and more. There is specificity here, but it is apparently uninteresting; there is a laziness to fetishism. Indigenous bodies are imaginary creatures from a far away land called our bored and stifled minds.
I am so sick of this shit.
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