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*Growing up, I remember seeing shows like Sabrina The Teenage Witch or movies like The Craft, and wanting to see women of color as witches (although The Craft did have Rachel True). If I did see women of color as witches or magic(k) women, they were usually stereotypically portrayed in a degrading manner, like Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean or Tituba in the recent show, Salem. That is why I am happy to find out about MisSpelled, a show featuring witches of color, and written and created by Lindsey McDowell. I wish I found out about this show earlier, but they have a Kickstarter where they are raising funds to continue producing more episodes. See the Kickstarter video and promologue below:
*Black Girl Dangerous’ “Reclaiming the Sacred Black, Indigenous QTPOC Science of Sustainable Living and Survivor-Ship Magic:” “When most people think of scientists, they think of white, cis, non-disabled, heterosexual men in lab-coats cooking up ways for other white, cis, non-disabled, heterosexual people to survive sci-fi horrors like dinosaurs—but who, for what ever reason, can never think of ways to sustain the world’s need for electricity without stripping the earth of vital minerals. These Ivy-League educated, so-called genius scientists who send people to the moon and other planets and calculate the distance between this planet and our neighboring planets in order to speculate the probability of a select few humans living in those other planets, are the same ones who can never seem to figure out and implement ways of making this planet safer for ALL its inhabitants…So many people look to “modern (see western, imperialist, eurocentric) science” as the one true signifier of human brilliance—people who berate Indigenous wisdom as folklore and imagination, people who believe African science to be nothing more than superstition, people who look for “cold hard facts” and never ponder or consider the amount of suffering, exploitation, and oppression that has gone into garnering those facts. These are people who, somehow, believe that western, modern-day science happened in an “objective” vacuum and that it has not consistently worked, hand in hand, with white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism.” (Reading this reminded me of Elizabeth Nunez’s When the Rocks Dance.)
*Amazing Stories’ “Interview: Kaitlyn McKnight YA Author of a YA Novel:” This 12-year-old is the author of her own book, The Zodiac Saga 1: The Search fpr the Temple, Friends, Foes and the Zodians.
*The Guardian’s “The black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years:” “’The portraits were last shown in the London Illustrated News in 1891,” says Renée Mussai, who has co-curated the show at London’s Rivington Place alongside Mark Sealy MBE, director of Autograph ABP, a foundation that focuses on black cultural identity often through the use of overlooked archives. “The Hulton Archive, where they came from, did not even know they existed until we uncovered them while excavating their archive as part of my PhD project.’ …’Black Chronicles II is part of a wider ongoing project called The Missing Chapter,” says Mussai, “which uses the history of photography to illuminate the missing chapters in British history and culture, especially black history and culture. There is a widespread misconception that black experience in Britain begins with the arrival of the Empire Windrush and the first Jamaican immigrants in 1948, but, as this exhibition shows, there is an incredible archive of images of black people in Britain that goes right back to the invention of photography in the 1830s.’”
*Huffington Post’s “Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s Disfigured Portraits Would Make Even Francis Bacon Shudder:” “Gazing upon a series of Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s paintings feels like staring into a Ripley’s-esque hall of medical oddities and botched surgeries, situated alongside the black sheep and circus performers themselves who’d banded into a cast of outcasts. And yet the multimedia hybrids feel above all truthful. The portraits — bulging, distorted and ripped to shreds — capture something real about our bruised senses of self. Something we often look away from.
Quinn’s series “Past/Present” features large scale works combining black charcoal, oil-paint, paint-stick, gouache, oil pastel and cardboard. Somewhere between Wangechi Mutu and Francis Bacon, the works are as intoxicating as they are repulsive, like a stranger you’re eager to know though already frightened by. Quinn’s images possess a perpetual sense of now-ness, as if capturing a person at a particular moment, tangled up in all the moods, memories and whatever else happens to be lingering in the air.” Click on the link for the interview.
*io9’s “The Greatest Black Women In Superhero Comics (Who Aren’t Storm):” “Whenever anybody asks about black women in comics, the immediate response is to bring up Storm. But Storm isn’t the only black woman to rock superpowers and a costume. Here are 20 other black female characters in superhero comics who deserve more love and attention.”
*Check out Graveyard Shift Sisters‘ website where they write about black women in horror.
*Whether it is you or or organization you are part of, consider signing this letter about Net Neutrality for Commissioners Clyburn & Rosenworcel because taking away Net Neutrality will greatly affect our communities.
*The Indypendent’s “Greening our Desires:” “It’s been decades since astronauts stood on the moon, and now we are being forced to see from the ground what they saw in space. Climate change is shrinking our measure of the planet as the carbon spew of a few nations causes the tides to rise for dozens of others. We are interconnected against our will. Faced with a question of survival, we have only one answer: a new global humanism.
Paradoxically, one obstacle to that consciousness is the environmental movement itself. Looking to the horizon, it sees disasters. It extrapolates from today’s fossil fuel burning civilization the end times, which is why apocalyptic imagery has become its language. But what if the movement escaped its orbit of panic and saw, from a great distance, a sustainable human society? What vision of tomorrow could it offer, beyond solar panels and wind- mills? We need revolutionaries to present a new idea of Earth, a tiny pearl of life that we wear in solidarity.”
*The Guardian’s “The rise of data and the death of politics:” “Tech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance – ‘algorithmic regulation’. But if technology provides the answers to society’s problems, what happens to governments?” As we all know, technology does not operate within a vacuum and biases will go into this ‘algorithmic regulation’.”
*New Music:
–DJ Stiletto‘s Haus of Mu: Birth
–California King‘s Sankofa
–Busdriver’s Perfect Hair
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 