Watch This:

“Dysfunctional Friends”

Trailer, Film to Hit Theaters

February 3

Thursday Jan 12, 2012 – by Thembi Ford

We shared a clip from the upcoming Corey Grant/Datari Turner film Dysfunctional Friends a while ago that gave a taste of what to expect from the movie, which is hitting theaters in New York and Los Angeles on February 3 and spreading to other cities later. The official trailer has just been released and it kind of feels like having every black actor from our generation on demand; just when you’re thinking “what’s up with Reagan Gomez these days,” BAM she appears. As soon as you think “this movie could maybe use a little someone from The Game,” there they go…in spades. Considering how few black movies reach wide-release status and enlist actors we’re already familiar with, it’s interesting to see the trailer take a slightly different direction from the lower quality preview. Watch.

Call me crazy for asking, but has Jason Weaver’s voice changed at all since he was on Thea? No judgement, I’m just asking.

<p>"Dysfunctional Friends" clip from Corey Grant on Vimeo.</p>

What do you think of this trailer? Do you plan on seeing the movie?

Project Unbreakable gives

sexual abuse victims voice

Image: Grace Brown

 

Project Unbreakable, a new photo project from New York-based artist Grace Brown, is working to raise awareness of sexual abuse. The powerful and evocative project shows abuse victims holding up a card with the words of their abusers written on them. Brown aims to bring about healing through the message contained in her art, both for the victims in the photo and for those who have seen it.

Brown has created her own photographs for the project but also welcomes submissions from sexual assault survivors on her blog. According to Brown, “I originally created it as only a photography project, but I soon realized how powerful it is for all these people around the world to come together and post their own images. It is really amazing how many people the project has reached – I had no idea that it would ever do what it has done. And I am honored to have been the one who just had a random idea one day to do it.”

This description of Project Unbreakable appears on the blog associated with the project:

This project was created in October of 2011 by Grace Brown. Grace uses photography to help heal those who were sexually abused by asking them to write a quote from their attacker on a poster and photographing them holding the poster.

Grace plans on photographing survivors for as long as she possibly can. Her goal is to spread light, awareness, and healing for those who have been affected.

From Project Unbreakable

Recently, Brown shared her own story here. This is a self-portrait she created for the project:

Image: Grace Brown

Brown has also created this video to speak about the experience of sexual abuse victims. She tells snippets of true stories of abuse survivors:

From 115grace

Many of the signs that the victims held up contain threats like the one below:

Image: Grace Brown

This message translates as “You can’t tell anyone. It’s our secret ok”:

Image: Grace Brown

Other victims highlighted the manipulative nature of their attacker:

Image: Grace Brown

Image: Grace Brown

Though Brown is used to hearing the stories of abuse survivors, even she seems to be shocked by the power of her subject’s words. In this tweet, Brown was reacting to a post on her blog for a sexual abuse survivor:

Project Unbreakable @ProjUnbreakable

It really blows my mind how many incest survivors there are out there. http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/post/16066036722/thank-you-to-the-reader-who-submitted-this-if-you

2 days ago  Reply  Retweet  Favorite  Profile

New Jersey-based blogger Yvonne Moss recently met with Brown to be photographed for the project. She wrote a post explaining the impact that the project had on victims of abuse:

When a person can be brave enough to write them down… then hold them up for the her to photograph. Either facing the thoughts, the words again or possibly for the first time since it happened. No longer hiding the shame. Because, truly there is no need to hide. It’s the abuser who should feel the need to hide.

From Yvonne Moss

Moss shared her story with Brown and became the inspiration that the young artist needed:

When she was five, her step-father (who she refers to as her father, as he raised her and she had his last name) began molesting her every night. It continued for five years. When she was ten, it escalated to rape. She endured nine years of continuous abuse, and the rest of her teenage years were tumultuous because of the childhood she suffered. But with combination of her strength, her faith*, and her husband of 36 years, she was able to lead an incredible fulfilling life – raising four children, taking in others who needed a home, and being what I viewed her as in the very beginning: a genuinely good person…

I hope if you are ever feeling lost, you remember Yvonne’s story and know that you can heal

From Grace Brown

Moss’s photo is the one below:

Image: Grace Brown

As Brown’s project begins to make its way around the online world, people are having various reactions to the strong images:

Cui @tsuei

Project Unbreakable: photos of sexual abuse victims w a quote their attacker said to them. This one was a kick in gut: http://bit.ly/zd7BPv

a day ago  Reply  Retweet  Favorite  Profile

James @GenericPrimate

Project Unbreakable is one of the most powerfully distressing things I've ever seen. http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com

a day ago  Reply  Retweet  Favorite  Profile

Brown is still looking for participants in her project:

Project Unbreakable @ProjUnbreakable

Are you a DC-based survivor interested in participating in Unbreakable on March 3rd? Email Grace at grace@50extraordinarywomen.com.

Two films show effects

of uranium mining

Friday Film Pick: Don't Mine Me & Uranium

 

by Ezra Winton on January 20, 2012

Continuing with our new initiative of highlighting at least one Indiegogo project each month, one of this week’s Friday Film Pick is Don’t Mine Me – a doc looking at the history of uranium mining on a Navajo Indian Reservation in the US. Since you can only watch the trailer for this film and read about it as it continues production (with generous donations from supporters), I’m including a second film from 1990 that looks at uranium mining in Canada, called Uranium (trailers after jump).

 

About Don’t Mine Me (from the Indiegogo page):

Don’t Mine Me is a documentary about the history of uranium mining on the Navajo Indian Reservation in the Southwest United States. At the end of WWII, the United States encouraged uranium mining production. Several large uranium deposits were found on the Navajo Reservation and many Navajo men were employed to work these mines. Disregarding the known health risks resulting from exposure to uranium, the United States failed to inform the Navajo workers about the dangers and to regulate the mining to minimize contamination. Several mine workers and families on the reservation have suffered with numerous amounts of health problems, some even fatal, from environmental contamination.  For decades the government failed to improve conditions and to inform workers of the dangers.

The effects of uranium mining still exists on the Navajo reservation today and still haunts hundreds of Navajos a year. The health and environmental risks are extremely severe, not only contaminating the men who work in the mines, but numerous Navajo’s in the surrounding areas as well through contaminated groundwater. Approximately 15,000 people on the Navajo reservation live without running water and rely on this groundwater from the wells for everyday life. Although people are finally starting to recognize the severity of the situation, it is still a matter of questioning the humanity of the United States Government and their blatant disregard for an entire group of people.

Visit this Don’t Mine Me‘s page and consider donating at Indiegogo, and visit the project’s site here.

The second film is a 1990 NFB doc by the incredibly productive and committed filmmaker Magnus Isacsson, simply titled Uranium. From the film’s NFB page:

This documentary looks at the hazards of uranium mining in Canada. Toxic and radioactive waste pose environmental threats while the traditional economic and spiritual lives of the Aboriginal people who occupy this land have been violated. Given our limited knowledge of the associated risks, this film questions the validity of continuing the mining operations.

You can download the film for a small fee here.

 

 

Johnny Otis

Willie and the Hand Jive,

 

by the Late Great

 

Johnny Otis

 

 

in Music | January 20th, 2012

One of the catchiest grooves from the rhythm and blues of the late 1950s is “Willie and the Hand Jive,” by Johnny Otis. In this lively scene from his early TV show, Otis performs the song as Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy demonstrate the hand jive. Lionel Hampton joins in on the vibraphone.

Otis, known as “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died Tuesday at the age of 90. The son of Greek immigrants, he grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood of Berkeley, California, and developed an early affinity for African American culture. “Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” Otis said in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”

As a bandleader in the 1950s, Otis helped bring rhythm and blues to a mainstream audience. He discovered a number of important artists, including Big Mama Thornton (Otis produced her original 1952 recording of “Hound Dog”) and the great Etta James, who died this morning.

“Willie and the Hand Jive,” with its infectious Bo Diddley beat, was a top 10 pop hit for Otis in 1958, and was covered by a variety of well-known artists, including Eric Clapton. Otis continued to perform into his 80s, and worked at various times as a disc jockey, an ordained minister and an organic farmer. You can read more about his remarkable life in the New York Times obituary.

You can also watch the complete half-hour episode of The Johnny Otis Show (below) from which the clip above was taken. The Johnny Otis Show was broadcast on KTLA in Los Angeles from 1954 to 1961. This episode features great performances by Lionel Hampton (with the multi-instrumentalist Otis joining in on drums) and other artists, including more from Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy.

Remembering the

Soulful Etta James

 

in Music | January 20th, 2012

“When I’m singing blues,” Etta James once said, “I’m singing life.”

Hers was a difficult life. The legendary singer, who died this morning at the age of 73 after a long struggle with leukemia, was born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, to an unwed 14-year-old girl, and her life was marked by drug addiction and emotional volatility. Through it all, James rose to become one of the most influential and admired singers of the second half of the 20th century.

“There’s a lot going on in Etta James’ voice,” Bonnie Raitt told Rolling Stone in 2008. “A lot of pain, a lot of life but, most of all, a lot of strength. She can be so raucous and down one song, and then break your heart with her subtlety and finesse the next.”

Her greatest hit came in 1961, with the soulful ballad “At Last.” For another side of James’s versatile style, listen and watch above, as she performs the gospel-influenced “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” in 1962. To learn more about James, and to watch video highlights from her career, see today’s article by Ben Greenman on The New Yorker’s ”Culture Desk” blog. And over at the Guardian, see Richard Williams selection of 10 Classic Etta James Performances.

In 1997, James summed things up in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Life’s been rough,” she said, ”but life’s been good. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would live it the exact same way.”

__________________________

Writers’ workshop encourages

new Caribbean literary voices

The seventh Caribbean Creative Writers’ Residential Workshop sponsored by The Cropper Foundation and organised in partnership with the Department of Creative and Festival Arts and the Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, will take place from July 8 to 19 in T&T. Ten writers who have not as yet published a novel or collection of short stories, poems or plays, will be chosen from across the Caribbean to join this year’s residential workshops. The 2012 workshop will focus on fiction, playwriting and poetry and will be facilitated by Professor Funso Aiyejina and Dr Merle Hodge at a secluded writing-inducing setting location somewhere in Trinidad.  

Support for Caribbean writing is an ongoing programme of The Cropper Foundation that seeks to contribute to the development of the Caribbean, on many levels and in different areas of interest. The writers’ workshop is part of the foundation’s effort to encourage new Caribbean literary voices by providing practical advice on the craft of writing. More than 80 writers from Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Commonwealth of Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, T&T, and the Caribbean diaspora (Canada, USA, France and UK), have competed to take part in these workshops held so far in Grand Riviere and Balanadra on the eastern end of Trinidad’s north coast, on Gasparee Island off Trinidad’s northwest peninsula and in Tobago.

From the participants of this workshop series: Barbara Jenkins (T&T); Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Bahamas); and Lenworth Burke (Jamaica) went on to win the Commonwealth Short Story Competition and the Jamaica Observer’s Annual Fiction Award respectively. Ruel Johnson (Guyana) has won the Guyana Literature Prize 2003; Krishna Ramsumair (T&T) has published a number of short stories in local and international journals; Robert Clarke (T&T) received a Trinidad Guardian Writer of the Month award, as well as an EMA 2003 Green Leaf Award for journalism; and Tiphanie Yanique has now published her second book and is an editor with Calabash and Story Quarterly. For this year’s workshop, a maximum of ten participants will be selected from entries only from the Caribbean.

The moderators will be novelist Dr Merle Hodge (Crick, Crack Monkey and For the Life of Laetitia) and poet and short story writer Professor Funso Aiyejina, winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa) for The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories. They are both lecturers at UWI, St Augustine, in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Participants will engage with published authors and professionals from the publishing industry, as well as speakers from a variety of other disciplines including history, culture and political science.

The workshop fee, which includes full vegetarian room and board is US$400 and applicants, 20 years and above, who are Caribbean nationals residing in the Caribbean, are invited to submit application forms and samples of their writing (five pages only) no later than January 25, to the following address: Writers Workshop, Department of Creative & Festival Arts, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. Works of prose fiction, playwriting or poetry, either published or unpublished, will be considered for this workshop.

 

• For application forms and further information, please call Marissa Brooks (868) 645-1955 or 663-2141 at The University of the West Indies, or email: MarissaUWI@gmail.com

Dwight Trible Cosmic Band

Live at the Blue Whale, LA

 

This video features the Dwight Trible Cosmic Band with a notable line up including Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (viola), Mark de Clive-Lowe  (piano), Trevor Ware (bass) and Dexter Story (drums) who all bring you a powerful performance held on Oct. 24th 2011 at The Blue Whale in Los Angeles, directed by George Goad. This video leaves us wishing we were there!

Check out Dwight’s latest Release entitled Cosmic out now.

 

 

 

 

Remembering

Louis Armstrong:

Satchmo, the Documentary

by Maria Popova

 

Celebrating the life, wizardry and legacy of one of the greatest musicians that ever lived.

Forty years ago today, the world lost one of the most influential musicians of all time. Dipper. Satchmo. Pops. The great Louis Armstrong, with his creative cornet and trumpet mastery, his distinctively gravelly voice and his remarkable stage charisma, not only revolutionized the American public’s relationship with jazz, but was also one of the first African-American entertainers equally revered by black and white audiences in a severely racially divided country. He codified the art of jazz improvisation and shaped the course of musical creativity for generations to come, his influence permeating a multitude of genres, eras, styles and subcultures.

To commemorate his legacy, we’re revisiting DVD and, with questionable legality, in eight parts on YouTube, gathered here for your convenience — enjoy.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.” ~ Louis Armstrong

For more on the man and the icon, Terry Teachout’s Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is everything one could hope for and then some.

via brainpickings.org

International Short Story Competition

 

We are looking for entries for this year's annual International Short Story Competition that are well crafted and original - short stories that are original, wonderfully written and captivating from start to finish.

The short story form is an amazing medium where insights into characters are revealed, a moment in time analysed in detail, and where a sliver of human frailty can be exposed. 

This stand alone structure can beautifully illustrate a piece of prose where every word counts and the reader is drawn into the action from the very first sentence.   

Perhaps your skills lie in weaving descriptions through a mosaic use of language that evokes emotions and triggers memories.  This is a perfect medium to highlight and to lay bare, to clarify and to invigorate, to go one step beyond the usual realm and to enlighten.

Entry Fee: £10 per story

Status: Unpublished

Judge: Annette Longman 
Chief Editor at Austin & Macauley Publishers Ltd 

Word Count: Maximum 2500 words 

Deadline: Midnight on Monday 30 January 2012

Prizes: £2,500, £1,000 & £500 plus publication

 The winners, ten runners up and five highly recommended will be published in Chapter One Promotions anthology.

You can submit and pay online or use the more traditional postal method.  Our mailing address is Chapter One Promotions, Canterbury Court, 1-3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE, England.  Please ensure that your contact details are placed on a separate sheet.  All online submissions will receive an acknowledgment receipt immediately.

Payment Options

• Submit and pay online
• Postal payment and online entry
• Online payment and postal entry
• Postal payment and submissions

 

For our guidelines please check out the rules page.  For more information or enquiries, please contact us or call us direct on 0845 456 5364. 

 Alternatively you can write to us, including a stamped addressed envelope, to Chapter One Promotions, Canterbury Court, 1-3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE, England.

GENERAL SUBMISSIONS:
General submissions are closed. We are currently only accepting submissions for our monthly flash contest, literary reviews and art. General submissions will reopen on May 1, 2012.

FLASH CONTEST GUIDELINES:
Each month Switchback provides a prompt and we want you to send us your best work inspired by that prompt. The winning entry as decided by our editors will be featured on Switchback. Contest submissions can be poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or even art but must be 500 words or under. Please send us only one submission per prompt and only previously unpublished works. We accept simultaneous submissions but please notify us immediately of acceptance elsewhere. Make sure your name DOES NOT appear on the submission itself. The deadline for submissions is 5:00 pm on the last day of the month.

 

 

The January prompt is: "No, that's not funny."

LITERARY REVIEWS:
Switchback publishes reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We greatly prefer reviews of lesser reviewed books or works from small presses published within the last two years. Reviews should be unpublished and run between 500-1500 words. In your cover letter please specify to which genre editor the review should be directed. Publicists interested in sending us catalogs and review copies of forthcoming titles are asked to email the editor first at editor@swback.com.

ART:
Submissions for art are ongoing. Please send submissions in .gif, .jpg, or .png format with a resolution of 300 dpi or higher.

 

Switchback does not accept email or hard copy submissions. Please submit using our online submission manager: SUBMISHMASH Online Submission System

If you experience any technical difficulties with uploading your submission, please contact us at: submissions@swback.com

 

 

 

 

Switchback  is a publication  of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program of the University of San Francisco, Catherine Brady, Director. Switchback publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews and displays visual art. Switchback does not publish unsolicited interviews.