FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Thursday, March 1, 2012

I REMEMBER HIP-HOP


there was nothing hip-hop could not en-rhythm as its theme…
it loosened the black-mans-magic as lyrical ornamentation for a desperate cityscape
splashing newly crafted meter onto a riot-ravaged world
... soulful as the last viscous drop of pig-foot pot liquor
we put our fingers into the pot, tasting and in turn
explicated the clear and subtle differences between chitterlings and hog-maws…
and that is how I remember hip-hop…
 



its form was the instantaneous mitosis of pure artifice…
a genealogical riot, a Darwinian mutiny
a cosmological hymnal celebrating every particle that was fortunate enough to be
translated from the traditional-southern-gospel-African-American-vernacular-post-slave-dialect,
to the neo-Duboisian-bourgeois-post-pantherian-retro-bee-bop/beat-revivalist-afro-urban-post-motown-dialect,
its what Dunbar would have written being mused by Ellington on the eve of April 4, 1968
it is how I remember hip hop…



 Written By D. Vollin 2-12-10
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