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My Little Brown Eye... By The Way, Meet Vera Stark. And @BSlade...

By The Way, Meet Vera Stark is a new play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (Ruined) coming in April 2011 to Second Stage Theater in Manhattan. From Second Stage's website:

A seventy-year journey into the life of Vera Stark, a headstrong African-American maid and budding actress, and her tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. When circumstances collide and both women land roles in the same Southern epic, the story behind the cameras leaves Vera with a controversial legacy scholars will debate for years to come.

I am ALL over this...

In an age of artists who blog and tweet opinions, heartaches and promotional messages on an hourly basis, Sade, predictably, demurs. She is not on Twitter or Facebook, though the band has an official Facebook page. She does, however, search the Web "looking for bricks and railing" for her farm. [Nelson George on Sade in the Los Angeles Times]

Oh, and by the way, meet Brian Slade, or @BSlade, the artist formerly known as Tonex. He caused quite a stir in the gospel music world when he came out of the closet and confirmed the rumors that always followed his career. Now that he is truly being himself, his music reflects that, brilliantly.  He has released several mixtapes in the last year or so, but my favorite is his latest, A Brilliant Catastrophe, which features this FAB.U.LOUS homage to the late, great Sylvester. Listen to BSlade tear up Sylvester's iconic disco jam, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real):

Mighty Real (Sylvester Cover) by supaci

And then there is his "Sylvester Screen Test," the ever hawt Get Over You.  Don't be distracted by the B. Scott silky smoothness of his hair - pay close attention to the run at minute 2:12:

 

That boy wail don't he? Dayum!

But don't try to lock him into the disco fabulous box just yet because he is too many things, darling. He's a singer (make that sanger!), rapper, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and a producer who seems to take on various personas ala Prince's Jamie Starr/Alexander Nevermind/Christopher Tracy-ness with names like BRUCE WAYNE™ and T-Boy.  I could be wrong about that... but I doubt it because the man is a musical chameleon! Check out his anti-bullying anthem BSFF(rated R), released days ago in the wake of recent suicides among gay teens, or Mantra of Zenlake, spoken word genius that speaks his truth about some of his experiences in the church. From Back (You had the best of me, my secret recipes, I gave them all to you and you used them on him, you bastard...) to Going Away (This song explains my exit from my foundational religious organization that I still deeply love and I'm grateful for.), to the reflective Add Me Up (add me up, and I equal 5) to the the title track, A Brilliant Catastrophe, I just can't get enough. He's coming to Joe's Pub in NYC in December and I will be there with bells on.  I highly recommend that you get thee to his website to download his entire mixtape while it is still free - because it shouldn't be for long!

Are We All Really "Team Zahara?"

In the aftermath of Allison Samuels' controversial article, Zahara Jolie Pitt and the Politics of Uncombed Hair, Newsweek asked three bloggers, including yours truly, to write a response to the article and Samuels' rebuttal to the criticism.  I gave my response the title Are We All Really "Team Zahara?" but I am fine with how Newsweek printed it:  Nichelle Gainer: It's Time To Fully Embrace Natural Hair. 

I am also happy to see that Newsweek didn't shy away from asking Roslyn Hardy Holcomb for her response, Hair Don'ts Hold Us Back, after her scathing assessment of Samuels' initial article.  Tami Winfrey Harris of What Tami Said also contributed with Natural Hair Is Not Unhealthy. 

Please let me know what you think.

My Little Brown Eye... The Self-Employed Depression... and A Little Comedy

RIP Ola Hudson: A wonderful tribute to this costume designer for music legends like David Bowie, John Lennon and Diana Ross who was best known as Slash's mom. [Afrobella]

Toni Morrison on writers in the age of President Obama and the internet [Media Bistro]

The Self-Employed Depression: [New York Times] A timely piece on how many freelancers in various fields have taken a financial hit during the recession:

Feuer’s ex-husband pays one-third of her rent, and she had been counting on the money from the after-school classes to pay her share for July and August. “I don’t know how I will make it through the summer,” she said in an e-mail message. The bottom of the note read, “Sent from my iPhone.” The call of semidesperation via a high-tech status symbol is an emblem of the gap between the past and the present for many of urban America’s self-employed. Freelancers still have the trappings of middle-class entrepreneurship. But the downturn is eating away at their livelihoods and the identity they thought they chose when they decided to work for themselves.

Well, I don't know anything about an ex-husband or anyone else paying any part of my rent but... ouch.

Media Just Wants to Be Free: Speaking of being self-employed, the savvy folks at Recessionwire have made a list of free media sources (music, TV, film, etc.) for those of those without blockbuster wallets [Recessionwire]

At Ignite NYC, a "geek-fest for the NYC tech community," I had a chance to catch up with my same name bud, bookkeeper, comedy producer and cupcake blogger extraordinaire Nichelle Stephens and finally meet Jack & Jill Politics co-founder and comedian and vigilante pundit Baratunde Thurston.  The night began with a hilarious (okay, funny...) Ignite Film Festival, featuring the best of over 800 "films" submitted.  The catch? Each film was 15 seconds long! Here is the winner of the Audience Choice Award, "Out with a Bang," directed by Russell Hasenauer and Chad Newhall and written by Chad Newhall.

And yes, my applause helped make it a winner:

Next, twenty people gave five minute presentations and Baratunde's was amongst the best. Here he is explaining how he became @the_swine_flu on Twitter - with hilarious results:

Maiysha is one of my new favorite singers. I had a chance to interview her recently and see her perform live.

In our interview, she spoke about her long career as a plus size model - and subsequently losing 60 pounds, along with her songwriting process. [55 Secret Street]

My Little Brown Eye... BEA 2009 and Girls Write Now

As I mentioned in My Little Brown Eye... at 55 Secret Street, I've been getting out a lot lately.  Of course, that is not an excuse for not blogging here since last February, but I digress...

I went to a panel last week during Book Expo of America featuring Farai Chideya, Lori L. Tharps and Patricia Spears Jones hosted by Up South, Inc. and moderated by their editor Malaika Adero, founder and director of Up South and Vice President and Senior Editor at Atria Books. Each author read excerpts from their books and discussed their work.

My new friend George Alexander, author of Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk About the Magic of Cinema and co-author of Queens: Portraits of Black Women and their Fabulous Hair, sent an email to me about the panel and I'm glad he did.  I had the opportunity to not only meet the panelists but other several other writers like Felicia Pride, founder of Backlist, an organization that conducts creative workshops for all ages and author of 100 Life Lessons from Hip Hop's Greatest Songs and Heidi Durrow (who I "know" on Twitter) author of the forthcoming The Girl Who Fell From the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat.

The bad news is that the panel was my only activity at BEA this year.  The good news is that it was very good and I scored copies of Lori's wonderful memoir, Kinky Gazpacho (check her blog, My American Meltingpot for details) and Farai's brand new novel Kiss the Sky, which is about a black rock musician who decides to make a comeback.

I also had a chance to attend Girls Write Now's recent Spring Soiree at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. Girls Write Now is a mentoring organization where professional women writers of all stripes - novelists, poets, journalists, etc. - mentor high school girls in creative writing.  The purpose of the soiree was to kick off the relaunch of the organization's advisory board.  Lauren Cerand, book publicist extraordinaire and Chair of the Board of Directors at GWN is in the top photo.  Novelists Maud Newton and Tayari Jones (she of slanket and turkey-carving fame) are in the bottom photo.  Tayari is in the orange dress and yes, it's by Cozbi.

My Little Brown Eye... Art Appreciation

You may recognize Nicola Vassell's face from her long career in modeling (she appeared in ads for Cover Girl and in too many women's magazines to count).  She left modeling in 2002 to double major in art history and business at New York University. Today, she is a director at the Deitch Projects gallery in SoHo.  [New York Times]

In this new era of long, and I do mean long unemployment lines, does it make sense to study the “humanities” — languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion? In my opinion, yes it does - even if you don't do so formally. [New York Times]

When it comes to appreciating art, research shows that men and women think differently about it. [BBC]

Could An Actress Have a Comeback Like Mickey Rourke? [Jezebel]  [Cinematical]

Harry Belafonte and Maya Angelou were among 1,000 mourners at at Riverside Church in Harlem to pay tribute to the late singer Odetta, who died in December. Dr. Angelou remembered the days when she and Odetta would meet in coffee houses and cabarets in San Francisco in the late fifties. “We were young and black and female and crazy as road lizards. I think of her as a sister who sang us into freedom, really — because that’s what Odetta did.”  Mr. Belafonte said, “The loss for me has been so deep that words elude me. Who will fill that space? It is hard to know.” [New York magazine] [New York Times]