Far Too Close

[unrar]

Ash is rubbed on cattle to keep mosquitos and flies away, Sudan, George Steinmetz.

[cineaesthesia]

Insan/Human Being (Ibrahim Shaddad, 1994)

[khartoon]

#Khartoon - Statue of Liberty - #nodapl #blacklivesmatter #ladyliberty #collage #illustration

[safia-elhillo]

3-story mural in Kingston, NY by JESS X. SNOW: “O Wind Take Me To My Country..” for O+ FESTIVAL mural ft. Sudanese-migrant poet, Safia Elhillo & legacies celebrating migrant women and migrating birds crossing oceans in search of home. The composition is inspired by this line in Safia’s poem: “Fact: the arabic word هواء (hawa) means wind / the arabic word هوى (hawa) means love… oum kalthoum said: where the wind stops her ships, we stop ours or oum kalthoum said: where love stops her ships, we stop ours.”

[poetsandwriters]

[thecloserfar]

https://soundcloud.com/abosoundcloud/expermental-reggae

[kingjaffejoffer]

Facebook users saw different Straight Outta Compton trailers depending on their race

“White” and “black” trailers focused on different parts of the group’s career.

Universal Pictures created two distinct trailers for their N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, one targeting white audiences and the other targeting black audiences.

Doug Neil, Universal’s Executive Vice President of Digital Marketing, and Jim Underwood, Facebook’s Global Head of Entertainment Strategy, revealed the radical advertising campaign during a panel at South by Southwest on Thursday, according toBusiness Insider.

Universal took advantage of audience segmentation tools offered by Facebook ads. The trailer served to white audiences focused solely on Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, as Universal believed the demographic was more familiar with the pair’s post hip-hop career (as an actor and founder of Beats Electronics, respectively). In fact, the “white” trailer didn’t even make mention of N.W.A., instead selling the movie as a story documenting the rise of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.

The trailer marketed to black audiences, however, opened with the word “N.W.A.” and featured all members of the group throughout. Universal assumed most African Americans were already familiar with N.W.A., Neil said, adding, “They put Compton on the map.”

Neil called the marketing campaign “a complete success.”

Watch the two trailers for yourself below.

“White” trailer

“Black” trailer

[birlinterrupted]

romance is a brilliant social tool of control because it allows men to act like they are doing something for women when in fact they are imposing emotional labor upon them

[birlinterrupted]

An Elaboration:

What I am not saying is that ever being nice to someone you are dating/having sex with is misogynistic. What I’m saying is that the idea and complex system of romance is for men rather than for women, something that might seem counterintuitive because the brilliance of its cover.

There are numerous ways that I feel like you can show how this is the case. One of which is the similarity and frequent bleed-over of men’s romantic behavior/activity and stalking. Like, the behaviors are sometime identical (see: “Secret admirer”). The fact that stalkers cloak their behavior in romance (’it’s all for you!’) is because romance as understood by men is not actually about women but is about their own emotional gratification and needs.

Another example is my, and other girls, experiences as a sex worker. You would think that if romance is for women and is a burden that men have to do (like MRAs claim when talking abt ‘female privilege’) then men who were paying for sex would have nothing to do with it. But the thing is that actually a majority of my clients use some sort of romantic language, either by telling me how much they care about me or being needy via text in a way that is romantic. This is because they are either trying to get things for free (romance means you owe me sex) or because they are trying to make me perform emotional labor (unlicensed therapy for example) or build their egos up.

Some individual men might be perfectly capable of being nice and ‘romantic’ without these sorts of motives, but the system of romance in our culture is one that is in place for men’s gratification and imposition of emotional labor, rather than for women. It provides a cover for a sort of exploitation of women’s emotional lives.

So what I mean here is that the idea of romance is built so it can plausibly be for women, but in fact is imposed upon us from the outside because it is both seen as a sort of trade (doing a nice thing for a woman means she owes a man sex, or validation somehow) or because the act of giving romance is about the man’s ego in terms of how he sees himself, not because of actual altruism.

[qahwaproject]

It was not until I was in my mid to late teens that I was forced to understand “Black” and “Arab” as ontologically separate. This was as a result of my introduction to the Western concept of “race.” With this new understanding came a new mechanistic sense of self and an acute self-awareness of my skin colour in relation to everyone else’s. Up until then, I had understood one to be Arab only in so far as they were culturally Arab and understood “Black” as a descriptor for a specific skin-tone and not a racial identity. Within this new social schema, “Black” and “Arab” were not only different racial identities but were also competing and mutually exclusive. I embodied both apparently irreconcilable racial categories and my body became the site of a visceral and daily contradiction.

Written by Leena Habiballa 

[weloveshortvideos]

Their dances are lowkey

[allsudaneverything]

Art & Design Magazine

Xpo Magazine is the first online interactive art and design magazine in Sudan. Check out their gorgeous second volume, The Blue Issue, all about filmmaking!

Alternative link to the issue

[adteachings-deactivated20220125]

THIRSTY FOR MORE ADVERTISING KNOWLEDGE?

Then you’ll definitely want to check out the Ad Teachings Starter Kit. It’s a series of links to the items that people have found most helpful over the years:

My free e-book on idea generation can be downloaded here.

My free e-book on how to write headlines can be downloaded here.

You can read The Top Ten Mistakes in Portfolio Development here.

A discussion of the differences between graphic design and advertising art direction is here.

An article on presentation skills is here.

And if you need sample briefs to build your portfolio, you’ll find some here.

Happy browsing!

[acidocasualidad]

From here

[thecloserfar]

[afroarabista]

Abolition Journal's Inaugural Issue - Call for Submissions

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is seeking submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue in topics such as (but in no way limited to): prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. For more information about the journal, please see our website, http://abolitionjournal.org. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, rejecting the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access and actively work to make copies available to persons incarcerated and detained by the state. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to [email protected] by January 15th 2016.

This is really cool. 

[thecloserfar]

Sudanese Artists Bring Songs of Conflict and Redemption to Berklee Signature Series Opener

By Allen BushSeptember 22, 2015

Berklee launches its 2015-16 Signature Music Series with a celebration of traditional and modern Sudanese music. This special event will feature four visiting artists from Sudan, representing the country’s rich musical and cultural diversities from various regions and tribes. Al-Murtaja: A Celebration of Sudanese Music takes place Thursday, October 22, at 8:00 p.m., at the Berklee Performance Center. Tickets are $8-$16 at the Berklee Performance Center box office at 136 Massachusetts Avenue, or at berklee.edu/bpc. Call 617-747-2261 for more information. The Berklee Performance Center is wheelchair accessible.

The concert’s producer and director is Sudanese student Mohamed Araki. Araki has gathered 35 Berklee musicians to perform with guest artists Emmanuel Jal, Asim Gorashi, Mohamed Tahir, and Abu Araki Elbakheet, Araki’s father.

“Sudan is heir to an extremely rich tradition of musical, dramatic, and artistic expression, yet this music has not been well exposed or documented due to civil and political turmoil in the country,” says Araki. “The concert’s title, Al-Murtaja, means the thing or person people are waiting for, and this concert fulfills that wish by featuring musicians from all parts of Sudan to create a sense of shared cultural identity.”

Redemptive themes are common in the lives and music of the performers. Elbakheet, a grand figure of Sudanese song, is an example of artistic resistance during one of the most oppressive periods of Sudan's history. Graduating from the Institute of Music and Drama in 1978, he became a popular singer on Sudanese radio and at festivals. After the rise of Sudan's Islamist government in 1989, he, like many artists, was banned because of the strong social content of his lyrics. He was arrested, and forbidden to sing in public. Undeterred, he went to Egypt and made some of his most popular recordings.

Jal was born into the life of a child solider and overcame unbelievable struggles to become an internationally acclaimed hip-hop artist with a message of peace and reconciliation. He has told his story to the highest tier of several governments and was a face of Amnesty International’s 2010 World Refugee Day Campaign. A documentary on his life, Warchild, won 12 international film festival awards, and he costarred with Reese Witherspoon in the Warner Brothers' motion picture The Good Lie, which tells the story about the journey of four young Sudanese refugees to the United States.

Gorashi considers music to be a ladder that takes him to the highest level of spirituality. This commanding singer combines Sudanese tribal folk music, sacred Sufi melodies, chants, and whistling, which he believes has the power to enter the secret recesses of our hearts. With a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Sudan, he has arranged more than 20 Sudanese folkloric songs in 10 different local languages and participated in numerous festivals.

A recording session has been arranged for all of the musicians in the Shames Family Scoring Stage. A forum and multimedia exhibition including traditional clothing and food and photographs organized by Araki will educate students about Sudan in the days preceding the concert.

The Signature Music Series at Berklee continues this fall with Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, with the Boston Pops performing a new score written by student film composers at Symphony Hall on October 30; Totó La Momposina Meets Berklee, featuring the Colombian singer and dancer on November 5; and Joyce Moreno Meets Berklee, with the Brazilian singer-songwriter on December 10. All concerts feature Berklee students, faculty, and alumni collaborating with world-renowned musicians.

[afroarabista]

Why can’t people be critical of one another without being so mean-spirited and unkind? As long as someone is not an influential or consistent or raging bigot or is not being deliberately obtuse,why drag someone who is trying to learn just because you think they are socio-politically naive or misguided? It’s unnecessary and literally adds zero value or weight to your critique. Theatricals are not a substitute for arguments and analysis.

Whatever happened to dialogue as a way of instigating political reckoning? Being ignorant is not a crime. Shaming people in order to accrue subcultural capital is a neoliberal ruse. If you hold that shitty discourses have achieved hegemonic status within society, why are you so surprised when people you come across try to grapple with these discourses? You can be critical of someone without insulting them. You can have a critical mind without having a critical heart.