#Ahamefule Oluo

[harikondabolu]

BAY AREA! W. Kamau Bell, Ahamefule Oluo and I are producing our friend Dwayne Kennedy’s first live standup album at the SF Punchline from Aug 15-18. The fact this legendary comic has never released a proper album yet is a travesty and we aim to remedy this! PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND COME TO THE SHOWS!

[mlbdesigngroup]

Listening and learning. It's not too late to register for today's online discussion presented by @kingcountylibrary "Juneteenth: Ijeoma Oluo and Ahamefule Oluo in conversation" Starts at 7 pm. Link in Bio. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBjaUGDgOPd/?igshid=1nmjjvhcztuob

[cpasjamielarge-blog]

Concert in Close Quarters featuring Ahamefule Oluo and Soulchilde

This past Thursday from 6-7PM, I got to see a wonderful, live set in the CCC. It was great to see such skilled musicians perform together, after working together for over ten years. The music was very soulful and seemed to have some blues/jazz components. My favorite part was when they covered RadioHead. 

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Al and Linda Lerner on Movies and Shakers: Thin Skin

a

Music helps tell this story of a frustrated jazz trumpet player from a broken family who just wants to follow his passion full-time. The problem is that he has to live with, help support and contend with his mother and sister while raising 2 little girls from his own broken marriage. All he wants to do is play trumpet. 

This film is based on Ahamefule Joe Oluo’s semi-autobiographical off-Broadway stage show, “Now I’m Fine. Written by Oluo, Lindy West and Charles Mudede (Police Beat, Zoo) who also directed, It took several years to raise the funds to produce the film. It’s creative and imaginative, but also dark and depressing until music saves it at the end. 

Oluo’s real sister, Ijeoma, plays his sister in the film. Annette Toutonghi plays his ditsy Mama with a lilting voice who keeps a menagerie of strange animals. Mama still carries a torch for the Nigerian professor she married who left when the kids were young. Aham, as he likes to be called, and Ijeoma resent their father who checked out decades ago to start over in his Nigerian village.  But Mama still instills the culture, customs and even wears the beautiful costumes of Nigeria at special times in the story.

Aham bitterly resents his father, not only for leaving them high and dry, but for reaching out now with a letter and a phone call where he tells his father about his dream to be a musician. The father only says how “disappointed” he is in Aham. Mama tries to defend her ex-husband, but that only makes things worse. 

It doesn’t help that Aham has to work a boring day-job to help support the family and then burn the midnight oil sitting in at jazz clubs around Seattle doing what he really lives to do. Uluo is a talented musician. We happen to have a professional jazz trumpet player in our family. You can tell when he plays that this is when he is really in his element. One very poignant scene shows  Aham in profile against the Seattle Skyline playing soulful horn for an audience of one, himself. It’s a melancholy image. 

Aham’s boss, played by Jennifer Lanier, kind of understands her burnt out employee. She is a real live-wire who adds some fun and compassion. We wish she had been used even more in the film as she added some light comedy to Aham’s depressing situation. She’s strict about work, but has a soft spot for him and tries to be encouraging. She even sends him home when, exhausted from working days and playing nights, he gets terribly sick. 

His doctor, played by Hari K. Konabolu, is another bizarre character. We kept thinking he was going to break into a comedy routine. After his first misdiagnosis, we were really hoping Aham would switch doctors. 

Aham contracts no ordinary illness. It’s fairly gruesome. His immune system breaks down and his skin starts to disintegrate. He literally has to cut his scabby, bloody lips apart with a scissors when they get stuck together. He can’t play trumpet anymore with those lips. It’s as if someone cast a spell over him and he’s living in purgatory. 

Then comes a confusing portion of the film. Is he really beginning to heal or is this a dream sequence showing his dream come true.The film uses too many long black outs like a stage play which makes you think, at first, that this is the end, but it’s not. 

Instead, it leads up to a grand finale slowly revealing a big band in a glitzy stage setting with the musicians from the jazz clubs all dressed up plus singer, Okanomodé Soulchilde, singing full out in Nigerian dress. It is totally unexpected, and then it zeroes in on Aham playing doing what he loves best. Music helps tell Aham’s semi-autobiographical story of broken family and it’s journey out of emotional depths. Ahamefule’s story about a family struggling to keep it together is creative, chaotic and cathartic,  as he  keeps the music flowing. 

Press Pictures                1 hour 32 minutes          Not rated

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[opsikpro]

Now I’m Fine review – candid gem mixes standup and mesmerising music

[ad_1]

Available online Ahamefule J Oluo’s 2014 show about having an autoimmune disease is a moving hybrid of comedy, theatre and jazz

Since venues closed their doors because of the coronavirus, a wealth of online theatre has emerged and the industry is finding quick, creative ways to bring the stage to screen. But alongside the new, it is worth diving into the archives to find buried treasure.

A…

[newyorktheater]

A Soldier’s Play

Medea

Grand Horizons

My Name is Lucy Barton

Below is a selection of New York theater openings in January, organized chronologically by opening date.* Three shows  are opening on Broadway this month —  Laura Linney in “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood in “A Soldier’s Play,” Jane Alexander and James Cromwell in “Grand Horizons.” There are also a handful of exciting shows Off-Broadway — Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale in a modern update of a Greek tragedy; Charles Busch in his lastest comic melodrama. What makes January one of the busiest months of the year for theater in New York are the annual January theater festivals.

Although several of these festivals have died recently, those that remain offer collectively more than 70 theater pieces; most are experimental, often hybrids that redefine what theater is, and are often difficult to describe; many run for as little as one or two performances.

The festivals seem to set the tone for some of the non-festival works this month. When else but in January would there be two adaptations of Medea, and a trio of plays from New Zealand?

Each title below is linked to a relevant website. Color key: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black or Blue.. Off Off Broadway: Green. Theater festival: Orange. Immersive: Magenta. 

*The festival shows and many Off-Off Broadway don’t have official opening nights, so they are listed according to their first performance.

January 2

Exponential Festival, though February 3

The festival begins with “Fear in the Western World” (Target Margin)

Digital puppetry that examines the apparatus of fear by telling the story of a young couple whose young daughter is attacked and kidnapped by spirits

January 3

Term of Art (Exponential at Jack)

In fragmentary scenes with four actors moving through many voices, the piece draws on recent transcripts of Supreme Court justices wrestling with how to police the borders of citizenship in order to deny rights that ought to be inalienable.

January 4

Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (Soho Playhouse)

In this first of three plays from New Zealand this month at Soho Playhouse this stage adaptation of the poetry of Tusiata Avia examines and celebrates what it means to be a Samoan woman

Or, An Astronaut Play (The Tank)

The Astronaut School has four students—but only one can actually make it to outer space.

January 6

Love, Medea (The Center at West Park)

Part theater piece, part dance show, part haute couture runway and part art installation, this adaptation of Euripides’ play presents the title character as a woman who was stripped of voice and homeland, who sacrificed her heart to put a man’s heroic epic before her own, but will stay in the shadows no more.

January 7

The 8th (The Secret Theater)

A year after the death of their father, an Irish family argues over the suspicious circumstances surrounding his demise, while outside the people of Ireland are equally divided as they prepare to vote on whether to repeal the eighth amendment and legalize abortion i

January 8

Under The Radar Festival through January 19

The festival begins with six shows (listed in order of what time they begin today):

To The Moon

A virtual reality experience created by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang.  During the 15-minute experience, the viewer is shot out from Earth, walks on the surface of the Moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons, and is lifted up a lunar mountain.

Ryan J. Haddad: Falling For Make Believe

A memoir full of show tunes whimsically recalling the “Haddad Theater” he ran as a child.

The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes

The story of a public meeting, whose topics include “the ethics of mass food production, human rights, the social impact of automation and the projected dominance of artificial intelligence in the world.”

Grey Rock  

A play by Palestine’s leading playwright/director, Amir Nizar Zuabi in which a Palestinian man dreams of reaching the moon, building a rocket inside his shed in the West Bank.

Susan

Ahamefule J. Oluo’s darkly comic musical portrait of his mother builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle, to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility.

Triple Threat

Casting herself in all the main roles, McCormick will attempt to re-connect to her own moral conscience by re-enacting the New Testament via a Nu-wave holy trinity of dance, power ballads, and performance.

Queens Row (The Kitchen)

In a near-future America after a civil war has left the country reeling, three women one by one get on a pedestal and tell the story of their struggles.

January 9

Prototype Festival through January 19

The festival begins with Blood Moon (Baruch), an opera-theatre piece with puppetry and a Taiko-infused score, in which three characters encounter the past on the night of a full moon: a nephew who returns to the mountain-top where he left his aunt to die forty years earlier, the ghost of the aunt he abandoned, and the moon that presides over this night of reckoning.

Modern Maori Quartet: Two Worlds (Soho Playhouse)

In this second of three shows from New Zealand this month, the group sings songs and tells stories.

January 10

Cartography (New Victory)

Inflatable rafts on the Mediterranean. Dark holds of cargo trucks. Family photos hidden carefully in a backpack. Hear the stories of young refugees in this multimedia theatrical work for ages 10 and up;

  Iron and Coal (Prototype)

A rock opera by Jeremy Schonfeld that weaves together his personal experiences with excerpts from his father, an Auschwitz survivor, brought to life through animation, a rock band, an orchestra, and 200-member multigenerational choruses.

January 11

Contours of Heaven (Soho Playhouse)

In the last of the three plays from New Zealand, this verbatim work is based on interviews with six rangatahi (Maori youth.)

January 12

Medea (BAM)

Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in writer-director Simon Stone’s rewrite of the Euripides tragedy.

Daydream Tutorial (Under the Radar)

Japanese collagist, animator, and puppeteer, Maiko Kikuchi, mixes mediums in this solo show, inviting us to the whimsical nexus of her surreal series of daydreams.

January 15

My Name Is Lucy Barton (MTC’s Samuel Friedman Theater)

In this solo play adapted from the best-selling novel by Elizabeth Strout, Laura Linney stars as Lucy Barton, a woman who wakes after an operation to find – much to her surprise – her mother at the foot of her bed. They haven’t seen each other in years.

January 17

Miss America’s Ugly Daughter (Marjorie Deane Little Theater)

Barra Grant explores her life growing up in the shadow of her mother Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America.

January 19

Josh Lamon as Prince and Lesli Magherita as Princess

Emojiland (The Duke on 42nd Street)

A musical that  is set inside a smart phone, with the resident emojis facing a “textistential” crisis —  the phone is due for a software update. That’s in the first act. In the second act, they face a virus.

My review of Emojiland when it was part of the New York Musical Festival

  January 21

A Soldier’s Play (Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning mystery about the murder of a black sergeant on a Louisiana army base in 1944 comes to Broadway for the first time, starring David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood.

Paris (Atlantic)

Emmie is one of the only black people living in Paris, Vermont, and she desperately needs a job. When she is hired at Berry’s, a store off the interstate selling everything from baby carrots to lawnmowers, she begins to understand a new kind of isolation.

January 23

Grand Horizons (Helen Hayes)

In this new play by Bess Wohl, James Cromwell and Jane Alexander portray Bill and Nancy, who have spent 50 years as husband and wife. But just as they settle comfortably into their new home in Grand Horizons, the unthinkable happens: Nancy suddenly wants out. As their two adult sons struggle to cope with the shocking news, they are forced to question everything they assumed about the people they thought they knew best.

Fire This Time Festival through February 2

seven ten-minute plays by writers of African descent.

January 26

Das Barbecü  

A nod to Wagner’s Ring Cycle merged with a comedic Texas fable, the songbook ranges from Broadway to Texas swing, from jazz to twangy country and western as mismatched lovers meet on the day of their double shotgun wedding with five actors playing more than 30 characters. It takes place at the Hill Country Barbecue Market, which is a restaurant and nightclub in the Flatiron District.

January 29

The Confession of Lily Dare (Primary Stages at Cherry Lane) The latest comic melodrama written by and starring Charles Busch tells the story of one woman’s tumultuous passage from convent girl to glittering cabaret chanteuse to infamous madame of a string of brothels.

January 30

Sister Calling My Name (Sheen Center)

A brother reluctantly holds a reunion with his developmentally disabled sister who has become an extraordinary artist.  When he discovers his sister’s guardian, a nun, is a woman he knew from his past, the three are all thrown into an emotionally charged encounter that leaves them forever changed.

January 2020 New York Theater Openings Below is a selection of New York theater openings in January, organized chronologically by opening date.* Three shows  are opening on Broadway this month --  Laura Linney in "My Name Is Lucy Barton," David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood in "A Soldier's Play," Jane Alexander and James Cromwell in "Grand Horizons." There are also a handful of exciting shows Off-Broadway -- Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale in a modern update of a Greek tragedy; Charles Busch in his lastest comic melodrama.

[ramascreen]

Shondaland And Netflix Bringing You NOTES ON LOVE Anthology Series

Shondaland And Netflix Bringing You NOTES ON LOVE Anthology Series

Shondaland and #Netflix have announced their new anthology series, #NotesOnLove with the first season to feature collection of stories centering on marriage by iconic creatives including Norman Lear & Aaron Shure, Steve Martin, Diane Warren, Jenny Han, Lindy West & Ahamefule J. Oluo, and Shonda Rhimes. Check out further details here below!

Shondaland and Netflix today announced Notes on Love, a…

[thatwhitegaze]

the awkwardness of growing up in a mixed household

Ijeoma and Ahamefule Oluo in Conversation

[cascadia-now]

Seattle Composers Alliance "Give Out Loud" Auction & Gala

Join CascadiaNow! project the Seattle Composers Alliance for a night of music, drinks, raffle tickets, and revelry! Bid on new software, books, private instruction and discounted services from local businesses!

Featuring live music from:

Marina Albero and Special Guests

The Seattle Video Game Orchestra and Choir

Okanomodé Soulchilde

If you can’t make it to the auction in person, you can still bid online!  The online auction will open at midnight on May 9th and close at 6pm on May 23rd, transitioning to a silent auction at The Royal Room, which closes at 9:15pm. So if you want to ensure a winning bid, make sure to be there!

Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door.

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE: http://www.strangertickets.com/events/43945424/seattle-composers-alliance-fundraiser

About the performers:

Marina Albero: A master of the piano, psalterium (a mediterranean Hammered Dulcimer), vibraphone, and composition, Marina Albero is a working musician based in Seattle, leading the Marina Albero Project. She has played and recorded with several well known musicians and bands including L’Arpeggiata, Chano Dominguez, Pepe Habichuela, La Folata, Mariona Sagarra, Barbarito Torres, Llibert Fortuny, Glen Velez, Lori Cotler, Carlos Saura and Ars Longa. Here in Seattle she has been piano chair at Teatro Zinzanni in several shows and has been invited to present her music at the Ballard Jazz Festival, Earshot Jazz Festival and KNKX live studios and Jazz Northwest. The Marina Albero Project features some of the finest musicians like Hans Teuber, Evan Flory-Barnes, D’Vonne Lewis, Jeff Busch, Jeff Johnson, Ben Thomas, Chuck Deardorf and Jose Martinez.

Seattle VGOC: Founded in 2014 by conductor Masha Lepire, the Seattle VGOC is a local community ensemble that features an orchestra, choir, and chamber groups. The ensemble primarily plays orchestral and multi-genre variations of video game music. The VGOC also actively streams mini concerts on Twitch.

Okanomodé Soulchilde: Okanomodé [uh-kahn-uh-mah-day] is the sole lyricist & vocalist of the critically acclaimed experimental pop opera Now I’m Fine by Ahamefule J. Oluo. He also serves as vocalist & songwriter with multi-disciplinary company The Degenerate Art Ensemble & has recently collaborated on the critically acclaimed musical-gothic-fairytale Predator Songstress led by Joshua Kohl & Haruko Crow Nishimura. Okanomodé is a performance artist of the highest order. A renaissance. An exhibition. A glamazon warrior born of grit, gut, & paganfire.

[harikondabolu]

SURPRISE NEW HARI KONDABOLU ALBUM! DOWNLOAD HERE.

"Hari Kondabolu's New Material Night Volume 1" was recorded on my iPhone & fellow comedian Sean Keane's camera on Dec 5th, 2013 in the now defunct "Dark Room" in San Francisco's Mission District. Sick of the short sets I was doing in New York City that made it hard to develop new material quickly, I started doing "New Material Nights," or "Scratch Nights" at Seattle's Eclectic Theater in 2012. I started doing comedy in Seattle & I'm lucky to have fans who are so patient & loving & who will put up with this shit because they love my art... or maybe they just had nothing better to do. I wanted to develop as much material as possible in a short period of time, so I do a run of 4 shows with a mostly new hour of material. I leave my notebook out and share new jokes & stories or even try to riff naturally from some rough ideas & bullet points in hopes it will magically turn into something funny...or at least, coherent. Needless to say, the end of a run is more consistently funny than the beginning of the run. I would come to the latter shows, unless you like seeing public desperation. This particular recording comes from a New Material show I did in San Francisco. This show followed 4 New Material Shows in Seattle, so there was slightly more polish on some of these bits. I love Bay Area crowds and had recorded my debut album "Waiting for 2042" earlier that year at The New Parish in Oakland in front of a raucous, excited crowd that made that first record sound like a protest or rally. I was trying to start over & re-build my act and now had time to do just that since the show I was writing for, FX's "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell," had been canceled a few weeks earlier. My girlfriend (at the time) was attending a TED conference, so we decided to make it a shared work trip/ vacation. I did not expect her to attend the show...a key detail that will come into play during the recording. This album gives you a little insight on how my jokes get worked out. This is not my most polished material and many of these jokes are either things you'll never hear again from me or ideas I still might try again (although, unlikely) and early drafts of jokes that would be featured on my 2nd Album "Mainstream American Comic." I recorded this show for myself in order to document my new bits & had no intention of putting this out. However, I knew the set was special as I was on stage and enjoyed listening to the recording time and time again. I had great energy that night & was very loose on stage. The material was fine, but my improvisation is what makes this special. This is what I always want my shows to sound like. I hope you enjoy this show as much as I did. Produced by Hari Kondabolu and Ahamefule Oluo Edited by Ahamefule Oluo Recorded by Hari Kondabolu and Sean Keane Album Cover by Ashok Kondabolu Photo by Mindy Tucker

[upstreammusicfest-blog]

@quincydjones honed his chops in Seattle, and has gone on to make hits in every decade, with an uncanny ability to see ahead to what's next for music distribution. He's going to sit with local musician, writer and visionary Ahamefule Oluo of @industrialrevelation. You can't miss this keynote from a legend. #UpstreamSummit (at WaMu Theater)

[i-am-very-very-tired]

I'm sitting across from Rachel Dolezal, and she looks... white. Not a little white, not racially ambiguous. Dolezal looks really, really white. She looks like a white woman with a mild suntan, in box braids—like perhaps she'd just gotten back from a Caribbean vacation and decided to keep the hairstyle for a few days "for fun." She is also smaller than I expected, tiny even—even in her wedge heels and jeans. I'm six feet tall and fat. I wonder for a moment what this conversation might look like to bystanders if things were to get heated—a giant black woman interrogating a tiny white woman. Everything about Dolezal is smaller than expected—the tiny house she rents, the limited and very used furniture. Her 1-year-old son toddles in front of cartoons playing on a small television. The only thing of real size in the house seems to be a painting of her adopted brother, and now adopted son, Izaiah, from when he was a young child. The painting looms over Dolezal on the living-room wall as she begins to talk. I try to get my bearings and listen to what she's trying to say, but for the first few moments, my mind keeps repeating: "How in the hell did I get here?" I did not want to think about, talk about, or write about Rachel Dolezal ever again. While many people have been highly entertained by the story of a woman who passed herself off for almost a decade as a black woman, even rising to the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, before being "outed" during a TV interview by KXLY reporter Jeff Humphrey as white, as later confirmed by her white parents, I found little amusement in her continued spotlight. When the story first broke in June 2015, I was approached by more editors in a week than I had heard from in two months. They were all looking for "fresh takes" on the Dolezal scandal from the very people whose identity had now been put up for debate—black women. I wrote two pieces on Dolezal for two different websites, mostly focused not on her, but on the lack of understanding of black women's identity that was causing the conversation about Dolezal to become more and more painful for so many black women. After a few weeks of media obsession, I—and most of the other black women I knew—was completely done with Rachel Dolezal. Or, at least I hoped to be. Right after turning in a draft of my book on race at the end of February, I went to a theater to do an onstage interview on race and intersectionality (a mode of thinking that intersects identities and systems of social oppression and domination). But before going onstage, my phone buzzed with a "news" alert. Rachel Dolezal had changed her name. I quickly glanced at the article and saw that Dolezal had changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo. My jaw dropped in disbelief. Nkechi is my sister's name—my visibly black sister born and raised in Nigeria. Dolezal claimed that the name change was to make it easier for her to get a job, because the scandal had made it so that nobody in the Eastern Washington town of Spokane (pop. 210,000) would look at an application with the name Rachel Dolezal on it. I'm going to pause here so we can recognize the absurdity of this claim: You change your name from Rachel Dolezal to Nkechi Amare Diallo because everyone in your lily-white town (Spokane is more than 80 percent white) now knows you as the Rachel Dolezal who was pretending to be black, so you change your name to NKECHI AMARE DIALLO because somehow they won't know who you are then. Maybe they'll just confuse you with all the other Nkechi Amare Diallos in Spokane and not think when a white woman shows up for the interview: "Oh yeah, it's that white woman who pretended to be black and then changed her name to NKECHI AMARE DIALLO." Also, even if there were 50 Nkechi Amare Diallos in Spokane—trust me, as someone named Ijeoma Oluo who grew up in the white Seattle suburb of Lynnwood—you'd have a much better chance of getting a job interview if you changed your name to Sarah. By the time I finished my interview on that rainy February day, my cell phone indicated that I had a voice mail. It was The Stranger, asking if I would spend the day with Rachel Dolezal. For two years, I, like many other black women who talk or write about racial justice, have tried to avoid Rachel Dolezal—but she follows us wherever we go. So if I couldn't get away from her, I was going to at least try to figure out why. I surprised myself by agreeing to the interview. I began to get nervous as the interview day approached. By the time I boarded a plane to Spokane, which is a one-hour flight from Seattle and is near the border with Idaho, a state that's almost 90 percent white, I was half sure that this interview was my worst career decision to date. Initially, I had hoped that my research on Dolezal would reassure me that there was a way to find real value in this conversation, that there would be a way to actually turn this circus into a productive discussion on race in America. But then I read her book. Shortly after I announced the deal for my first book (a primer on how to have more productive conversations on race), a friend posted a link on my Facebook page. With a joking comment along the lines of "Oh no! Looks like Rachel beat you to it!" she linked to an article announcing that Rachel Dolezal would also be publishing her first book on race, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Throughout the week, at least five other friends sent me similar links with similar comments. A look through my social-media feeds showed that I was not alone. Black women writers around the country were all being sent links to articles on Dolezal's book deal—the memoir of a black woman whose claim to fame is... not being actually black. "Do you mind if I fold laundry while we talk? Then we'll go down to the art studio later and look at some of my work," Dolezal says to me after I arrive at her home. The laundry basket is already sitting in front of the fireplace ledge. Dolezal takes a seat and begins folding while I dig my notebook out of my backpack and set up my recorder. The scene is eerily normal. The woman who has been at the center of a controversy that has captivated the country for two years is doing chores and lovingly soothing her toddler after he falls down while trying to pick up a toy. Dolezal asks almost defensively if I have read her book, and when I say yes, she looks visibly relieved. With the din of the television set playing in the background, and with occasional interruptions from her busy toddler, Dolezal and I begin talking. She has just returned from New York City where she had done the rounds during a media tour for her book, appearing in a Facebook Live interview for the New York Times and giving interviews to Vice and the Today show. She is currently jobless and spends her days looking after her sons, ferrying them to school and appointments. She braids hair for cash and is still looking for work. Her rental house is a month-to-month lease. "Hopefully, after the book release and this round of media, maybe everybody's questions and curiosities will be satisfied and then I can reintegrate into society," she says with a smile. We visit Dolezal's studio. She is, in all honesty, a very talented painter. The majority of her paintings feature black people. Other than the paintings of her children, most of the black people depicted appear to be dressed as slaves or tribespeople. Breaking this pattern was a series of portraits hanging on the wall of Dolezal herself. They were done Warhol style, each painting duplicated in a different color. Dolezal explains them to me: "You know, people are always saying to me, 'Rachel, I don't care if you are red, green, blue, or purple,' so I decided to paint myself as red, green, blue, or purple." Dolezal chuckles as she says this, as if it is the most clever and original idea anybody has ever had. I don't know how many times a white person has told me that they don't care if I'm "red, green, blue, or purple" when they are trying to explain to me just how "not racist" they are—I've lost count. I do know that I've rolled my eyes every time. As my brother Ahamefule said to me once, "They may not care if I'm red or green or blue or purple—but they sure as hell care that I'm black." I ask her specifically about the problematic sections of the book, explaining that her description of falling in love with blackness based on a National Geographic and a Sports Illustrated seems fetishizing to me. "As a black person, as a kid," I say, "I remember National Geographic being something that was used to mock me regularly. A lot of the images of black people in National Geographic have been incredibly fetishizing over the years. Is there a reason why you chose the language that you chose? Because honestly, if anybody came up to me and said their first encounter with blackness was through National Geographic, and they loved it, I would end the conversation immediately." Dolezal seems offended I would even ask that, reminding me that she was writing about her experience with blackness as a child. "Well, my older brother was fetishizing black women in National Geographic," she says, looking at me curiously as she folds clothes. "And I talk about that [in the book]. I felt like my gaze was more humanizing, and more of, again, black is beautiful, black is inspirational. I had a different gaze than he did. "I understand National Geographic has been exploitative. I understand that. But as a 5- or 8-year-old child, looking at images of people, you're not looking with a doctoral degree of sociology and anthropology and parceling this stuff apart. You're just... you're looking at representations of the human experience." I try to clarify that it is the fact that she thinks that her connection to blackness represented via National Geographic, no matter how inspirational, could be authentic is itself the problem: "But you are looking at representations crafted by white supremacy. I mean, it's not actually black people you are looking at." "Just like when people are watching TV," Dolezal says in her defense. Then she seems to remember the interviews in which she had bragged that growing up without television saved her from viewing blackness through a white lens, and her tone changes and sounds almost bitter. "In that sense, maybe I wasn't entirely sheltered from the whole propaganda," she sighs. "Or whatever." There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness. There is a chapter where she compares herself to black slaves. Dolezal describes selling crafts to buy new clothes, and she compares her quest to craft her way into new clothes with chattel slavery. When I ask what she has to say to people who might be offended by her comparing herself to slaves, Dolezal is indignant almost to exasperation. She is done folding clothes. "I'm not comparing the struggles, okay? Because I never said that my life was the same. I never said that it was the equivalent of slavery, of chattel slavery. I did work and bought all my own clothes and shoes since I was 9 years old. That's not a typical American childhood life," she says. "I worked very hard, but I didn't resonate with white women who were born with a silver spoon. I didn't find a sentence of connection in those stories, or connection with the story of the princess who was looking for a knight in shining armor." She almost spits out the last sentences. I am beginning to wonder if it isn't blackness that Dolezal doesn't understand, but whiteness. Because growing up poor, on a family farm in Montana, being homeschooled by fundamentalist Christian parents sounds whiter than this "silver spoon" whiteness she claims to be rejecting. Dolezal feels she is different from others who would genuinely compare their hardships to slavery: "But those people are not aware, they haven't been black history professors," she says with a voice trembling with indignation. I want to remind Dolezal that she is a former black history professor who has degrees in art, not black history, African history, or American history, but I don't. I'm trying to not get kicked out of her place early. It's only been an hour, and I still need to ask The Question. Dolezal has argued many times that her insistence on black identity will not only allow her to live in the culture that she says matches her true self, but will also help free visibly black people from racial oppression by helping to destroy the social construct of race. I am more than a little skeptical that Dolezal's identity as the revolutionary strike against the myth of race is anything more than impractical white saviorism—at least when it comes to the ways in which race oppresses black people. Even if there were thousands of Rachel Dolezals in the country, would their claims of blackness do anything to open up the definition of whiteness to those with darker skin, coarser hair, or racialized features? The degree to which you are excluded from white privilege is largely dependent on the degree to which your appearance deviates from whiteness. You can be extremely light-skinned and still be black, but you cannot be extremely or even moderately dark-skinned and be treated as white—ever. By turning herself into a very, very, very, very light-skinned black woman, Dolezal opens herself up to be treated as black by white society only to the extent that they can visually identify her as such, and no amount of visual change would provide Dolezal with the inherited trauma and socioeconomic disadvantage of racial oppression in this country. I ask her some easy questions, but she answers them with increasing irritation. When we have been together for three hours, I feel it's time to ask The Question. It's the same question that other black interviewers have asked her. A question she seems to deeply dislike—so much so that she complains about the question in her book. But even in the book, it's not a question she actually answers: How is her racial fluidity anything more than a function of her privilege as a white person? If Dolezal's identity only helps other people born white become black while still shielding them from the majority of the oppression of visible blackness, and does nothing to help those born black become white—how is this not just more white privilege? Dolezal takes issue with the idea that racial fluidity only travels one way: "Well, I would respectfully disagree that it only goes one way," she says. "I meet people all the time who went the other way. I meet people who have passed or identified as Latina their entire life who were born categorized as black. Who pass white and have a black parent because that's how they look or that's how they have kind of come to look." Stories of people of color "passing" for white have been well known since the time of slavery. Almost any person of color in the United States has a relative in the past or present who has "passed" for white. But "passing" was a ticket out of the worst injustices of racial oppression that has been open to only a select few. The history of "passing" in the United States is a story filled with pain and separation. It has never been a story of liberation in the way in which Dolezal is trying to describe it. I point out that there is a difference between Dolezal's claim of racial liberation and the forced denial of race in order to escape oppression. "I'm only bringing that up because you said it can only go one way and yet it has and still does go the other way," Dolezal snaps, as if this defense was pulled out of her and its limitations are my fault. But not only have I heard her invoke the historical passing of light-skinned people of color in previous interviews when any question about the one-way street of her racial fluidity was brought up, she even included this argument in her book. She has had plenty of time to come up with a better answer to that question. I try one more time to get an answer to this question, but from a different angle: "Where does the function of privilege of still appearing to the world as a white person play into this and into your identity as affiliating with black culture?" Dolezal seems to struggle for a moment before answering: "I don't know. I guess I do have light skin, but I don't know that I necessarily appear to the world as a white person. I think that since the white parents did their TV tour on every national network, some people will forever see me as my birth category, as a white woman. But people who see me as that don't see me really for who I am and probably are not seeing me as a white woman in some kind of a privileged sense. If that makes sense." It doesn't. I am nothing if not stubborn, so I clarify my question: "I mean, if you were walking down a street in New York, just as an anonymous person, to a lot of people you would appear as a white woman. There's a function of privilege to that, right? The way in which you would be able to walk through the street, how people would interact with you, the level of services you would receive, your ability to get a cab, all of that would be impacted. Does that privilege factor into your identity?" Dolezal looks at me as if my question is completely ludicrous: "Well, I understand your question, but once again, that's not what I experience. I don't experience people treating me as a white woman in New York or elsewhere, an anonymous white woman. That's what I'm trying to explain. People either treat me like a freak because I'm the white woman that pretended to be black in their eyes or treat me as a light-skinned black woman. That's how people see me." I'm confused as to whether Dolezal is claiming that she's never seen as white because she is simply recognized as Rachel Dolezal wherever she goes, or if she doesn't "look" white to strangers because her physical appearance is not that of a white woman. I'm slightly shocked that this is an argument she would make in person. Maybe in a dusty Eastern Washington town like Spokane, where only 2 percent of the people are black, something as "exotic" as box braids might be enough to convince the locals that you are not white, but I cannot imagine this working elsewhere. I'm looking right at her. I know what white people look like. I decide to say so. "Really? Like if you don't say, 'I'm black...' because I've read a lot of interviews with other people who said when they first encountered you, people who've worked with you, that they automatically assumed you were white until you had asserted otherwise, vocally. I personally... like if I were to run across you in the street, I would assume that you were white." Dolezal sighs and looks at me as if I am truly all that is wrong with America. "Well, I guess it's like in the eye of the beholder." It is obvious by then that Dolezal does not like me, but I don't appear to be alone in that feeling. Throughout our conversation, I get the increasing impression that, for someone who claims to love blackness, Rachel Dolezal has little more than contempt for many black people and their own black identities. The dismissive and condescending attitude toward any black people who see blackness differently than she does is woven throughout her comments in our conversation. It is not just our pettiness, it is also our lack of education that is preventing us from getting on Dolezal's level of racial understanding. She informs me multiple times that black people have rejected her because they simply haven't learned yet that race is a social construct created by white supremacists, they simply don't know any better and don't want to: "I've done my research, I think a lot of people, though, haven't probably read those books and maybe never will." I point out that I am a black woman with a political-science degree who writes about race and culture for a living, who has indeed read "those books." I find her blanket justification of "race is a social construct" overly simplistic. "Race is just a social construct" is a retort I get quite often from white people who don't want to talk about black issues anymore. A lot of things in our society are social constructs—money, for example—but the impact they have on our lives, and the rules by which they operate, are very real. I cannot undo the evils of capitalism simply by pretending to be a millionaire. It's clear I have pushed her to the edge of frenzy, so I decide to discuss something about the book that will not push her over that edge. I talk to her about the foreword by her adopted dad, Albert Wilkerson Jr. It's sympathetic. "You have a community that has stuck by you through this," I say. At that point, she breaks down and starts crying. For a white woman who had grown up with only a few magazines of stylized images of blackness to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it's the ultimate "you can be anything" success story of white America. Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn't get enough of the Dolezal story. Perhaps it really was that simple. I couldn't escape Rachel Dolezal because I can't escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview. And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I've seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister's name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day. Before I left Dolezal, I remembered that my editors had told me to make sure the photographer got a few pictures of us together. We were both sitting at the kitchen table, which provided an ideal photo opportunity. The natural light from the sliding door by the kitchen was great for photography, but with our current seating arrangement, that light was falling on me and leaving her in the shadow. It is standard practice to have the interviewee sit in the best light, so I asked her to switch seats. The photographer thanked me for the suggestion, and I stood to allow Dolezal to take the chair I had been in. Dolezal looked at me with a smirk and said accusingly: "Then you'll look darker and I'll look lighter, because the light's on me. I get it." I realized that like all other black people who had challenged Dolezal, I had been written off as a bitter, petty black woman. She was concerned that the wrong lighting would make her look white. She could not see that there was no amount of lighting that would make her look whiter than that interaction had. Perhaps that itself was the secret to the power of the Dolezal phenomenon—the overwhelming whiteness of it all.

[cosbysworld-blog2]

Wyatt Cenac Wanda Sykes Talked About Barack Obama In Her I'ma Be Me Special - The Greatest Jokes Ever Ld

Jawline is in line with Webster Dictionary is the outline of the lower jaw.

I say give it a try seeing as I break out around similar areas as you.jawline and chin.

Know what, I would check out my thread and read about my regimen.It has helped for me and is continuing to work. Of course, Ive stopped and it has made the biggest difference in my skin. Off -I should say donttttt pick! In a week or so they go away on their own and being that theres no more squeezing and irritating your skin very few will form, in first pace I left all the white heads alone, that was bit embarrassing. Hi, im 25 female and I have successfuly controlled quite a few my acne through tazorac dot 05percent cream. At least the greatest, funniest jokes chosen by 22 of the funniest comics working standup today. See more of the Greatest Jokes Ever Told here, including videos and profiles of Jeff Garlin, Maria Bamford, and more. By now, there could be a machine that you just back up for like a second zap.

We're in the age of laser eye surgery.

Laser eye surgery!

That may be it. Another question isSo the question is this. Prostate exam? From Mario Joyner. Fact, Finger in the ass. They perform surgery on your eye with a laser. I'm sure you heard about this. There should've been no embarrassing bending over at the doctor's office in this day and age. You know, I can loosen up. That's interesting. Blackish president. I'm so happy, 'cause now I can relax a little. Eventually, I can buy whole watermelons now. Sounds familiar? I no longer have to grow them in my closet under my weed lamp.

Wanda Sykes talked about Barack Obama in her I'ma Be Me special.

She said.

Don't have to be so dignified. Needless to say, Don't have to be so grey now and then. A joke written by my friend and writing partner, Ahamefule Oluo. With all that said... What do you call Neil deGrasse Tyson pouring champagne all over his naked chest? A well-known fact that is. An astro fizzy tits. Louis 's joke about how you could tell how bad of a person you were by how long it ok you after 9/11 to masturbate for him it was between the first building going down and the second wer going down. He rubs it and a genie comes out.

The genie says to the old Jewish man, To be honest I will grant you anything you look for.

Anything else?

The Jewish man says, To be honest I would like my wife to blow me one more time. With that said, There's an old Jewish man walking on the beach Al Frankentold me this around 1994 and he comes across a magic lantern. For instance, The old Jewish man pulls out a map of the Middle East and shows it to the genie and says, I'm almost sure I would like peace in the Middle East between Israelis and the Palestinians. The genie looks at the map and says, I actually cannot do that. The genie says, Let me see that map again. Whenever hopping manically, auditioning to be Tarzan, It was his famous sketch with Dudley Moore, where Moore is an one legged man.

Cook regarded him with his sepulchral deadpan before quietly pointing out that Moore's problem was in the leg division.

Peter Cook taught me to shut up.

You are deficient in it pause to the tune of one. After that, he gets a thing of lip balm and just starts putting it on his lips, and to the other guys he's like, Lip balm? Martin Short turns his over and it's all sand. Then again, There's this scene where Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Chevy Chase are all on horses in the desert and they are all superthirsty and they all have canteens. However, The Three Amigos raised me since my parents didn't have time. Normally, consequently Chevy Chase turns his over and it's full of water and it's going all over him, and he throws it out. Steve Martin turns his over and it's empty. Know what, I believe in the vagina like other people believe in God.

This is from underrepresented, underappreciated genius Brent Weinbach. I have faith, I've never seen one before. Make a whole lot of fuckin' noise. As a result, It's scary, I was like, Boy, whatchu lookin' at? Nevertheless, He just stopped and he stared at me and he was like. Let me tell you something. He had a joke. Let me tell you something. Lavell Crawford. Very funny. The other day I got out of the car and this little boy was walking by.

[shiannercpsarts-blog]

Pentathlon Two for One: Concert in Close Quarters featuring Ahamefule Oluo and Soulchilde

This past Wednesday, I went to the CCC to see Ahamefule Oluo and Soulchilde perform a very up-close and intimate set. The music was incredible and the experience overall was a lot of fun. I enjoyed that we were able to sit and casually ask questions -- it felt very personal. Their Radiohead cover was super cool!

[umdartscholarsjkim-blog]

Concert in Close Quarters featuring Ahamefule Oluo and Soulchilde:

At the CCC, we had Ahamefule Oluo and Soulchilde come and perform for us. We had pizza, and while listening to this team of musicians, I saw a lot of new things that they brought into the music. They brought a lot of improvising into the music. They told us that “every performance is unique,” and it was very new to me, because I pursue a different kind of music (rather than the jazzy, improvisation music, I play orchestral music) that has the dynamics and the overall mood portrayed in the written music itself. All in all, I enjoyed this performance more than I thought I would; it was a new experience for me, and I actually liked it!