Random Pic: Doctored Locks

I dunno why I didn't post this sooner...
Doctored Locks, where I get a lot of my hair stuff, did this neat feature-y thingy w/me. I was shocked when they asked. I love the graphics on the pic to bits. I thought it was super nice of them.
I also think it's pretty apropos that they put "reinvent yourself"on it, which is an ongoing process with me... I just keep adding and evolving. There was a time in my life I was hiding behind my clothes and I needed to do something to shake things up...find myself again, but take bigger risks. So, I did.
True story.

The Things I Come Across...

And so goes the tale of the business...
What d'you reck?

Random Pic Just Because

Peace is also involved with Bare Naked Bakesale. I brought him with me to the launch party/fundraiser for the site, and he got in front of the camera, and...oh, my.
Anyway, they had a neat little Facebook event where people were invited to take pictures with their mobile devices for one of the campaigns, "Give Cancer The Finger".  One night after we came back from an appearance at Majesty, we decided to snap a few to upload to the album.
This is one of the shots...and pretty much how we feel about the heat we've been getting for simply existing. This was taken Feb 3rd, 2012.
It also reminds me of something one of the photographers said of a similar picture he shot of Peace and me:
"You know why you always take pics like this? Because you two generate something so powerful most of us mere mortals can only hope to find in our lives. As I recall, I didn't ask you to pose like this. It was just instinctive for the two of you. And then for it to transcend the lens the way it did, this is all you. I just fired the shutter."

Random Pic Again; This Week

Wow. I'm actually doing this.
This is a pic from an event recently held by Bare Naked Bake Sale, who I am involved with in a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to contrib to various causes. Peace donated a training session to the fundraising; I donated my cd and picture and stuff, which I pawprinted later. This is a picture of the winner and his swag, and one of BNakedB's  founders, the lovely and talented Justina Walford.

Photo Credit: Jeff Wickliffe Photography

Music's Heart/Soulprint...

It is really amazing how much music can affect how you feel, how you perceive the world, how much your life can be echoed by another person's lyrics. It's no small feat that hearing a song, whether you liked it or not, can take you right back to where you were, what you were doing, and who you were with when you heard it...when you lived it. Especially if you are an artist who either makes or uses music on a regular basis-- I don't mean just listening to it; I mean IMMERSING yourself in that shxt like it's a bath...wearing it like your favourite shirt. Breathing it. Carrying it.
We all have at least one song that, to put it mildly, eviscerates you, rips you from asshole to scalp and makes no apologies for it. It feels like swords sliding through your heart all at once....right up to the hilt, and you are dead in the water, with no-one to put it in a box for you so it beats forever...sorry. Too many viewings of POtC: Dead Man's Chest.
In my "past life", I had SEVERAL such songs. I couldn't listen to any of them w/o nausea, dizziness, and my heart beating a mile a minute. My gut felt like it had been kissed passionately by a steel-toe boot. I ached soooo much. I felt like I was bleeding out. You know the feeling. I even had a whole album like that. So for years, I avoided such songs like the proverbial plague.


The song here was one of those songs.
I associated this and many other songs with a time in that life that should've been happy, but which really was an out-and-out lie. I carried that burden with me, couldn't even hear the first two notes of the song without diving for the radio or the tv to kill it DEAD before it could get going. It hurt too much.
At some point, in the new life, I decided that I would do an exercise that I learned called "blowing pictures". The pictures the practise is referring to are embedded in your auric field, and can affect your life heavily. You may not even know why. You basically destroy that picture, and heal that spot in your aura. Some pictures are stubborn and you have to do the task over and over to make it stick.
I combined this technique with a cord-cutting visualisation and another technique involving connecting your timeline to change things in your past. It is S T R O N G work, lemme tell ya. And it WORX.
I am happy to say that this beautiful song (and that aforementioned album, for that matter) does NOT NOT NOT have the effect it had before. I can listen to it with no ill effects. It's so freeing to be able to listen to WTH I want w/o feeling imprisoned in pain.
It's wonderful.
How cule is that? I'm freakin' ecstatic about it!
The song has a different energy; a different heart/soulprint for me now. I'll say it again: it's. WONDERFUL.
I can breathe...

Random Pic of the...Whenever

...since it seems I can't be consistent with this shxt!
I recently did a short local gig at a place called Majesty Loft. They had a small fashion event called Cat Fight (how apropos), and asked me to do a few ditties...
I like this one because it really captures both the intimacy and the energy of the place and what we did there. Catherine is a damned good photographer.
Till next time, GNOtaku.

Photo Credit: Catherine Payne

Happy Birthday, Jason Mizell

When one-third of one of my biggest influences from the hip-hop culture was suddenly lost to us, I admit it: I wept. Hard.
I couldn't believe it. It made no sense. He couldn't be gone. He was immortal. Run-DMC and Jam Master Jay were fxcking immortal. A part of the bedrock, the infrastructure. There's no way.
I remember that the day after, the streets were filled with nothing but the best that these men gave us: "Rock Box". "King of Rock". "It's Like That". "Raising Hell", a song I still need to play before a show, like a ritual. And someone, in a drop-top, in Brick City, no less, was actually blasting "Jam Master Jamming". I was having an "oh, shxt!" moment right there on the bus. It was beautiful.
It's Jay's birthday today. I still wonder what it would be like, how much further would the East Coast have come, if he were still here. Would the sound have reshaped? Would Run-DMC have made us a slew of more stuff? Would they have toured? Would Jay have hit us with more skilled djs, well-trained in the art of scratch? Would he have turned out something to turn the whole rap world upside down? I like to think so.
Happy Birthday, Jay. You're still in my heart and on my mind. Thank you for helping to make me what I am.