by Bob Martin | Aug 5, 2011 | Art, Culture, Directors, Movies
Awkward love stories are not unusual, however they are seldom about African Americans or as elegantly told as this film. The normalcy of the main characters existence, in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, sets the stage for the complexity of racial transformation. The juxtaposition, that some of us want to keep what we’ve got and others want to move on to something new and that reconciliation is both difficult and necessary.
Medicine for Melancholy is a small film which tries to tell a lot and succeeds for the most part. It goes to show that you don’t need a huge budget to make a movie that tells a good story and enlightens its audience.
I am hopeful that the Director, Barry Jenkins, is still working his craft and will get the opportunity to continue to do insightful movie making.
Wyatt Cenac, Tracy Heggins and Barry Jenkins
by Bob Martin | Jul 28, 2011 | Art, Culture
Photo by Robert Capra
We should thank Photo Journalists and others for preserving reality for us. The reality of what life is really like for the majority of people on the planet is 
difficult to comprehend, especially for those of us who live on the outer fringe.
For almost seventy years citizens of the United States experienced themselves as living on the edge and outside of the “fishbowl” looking inward, with occasional concern for the fish in bowl. Earthquakes, floods and other disasters would catch our attention, but it was always someone else’s problem and we would dump money on it like it was water and we were putting out a fire.
In the last ten years we’ve begun to slip into the reality of the rest of the world (our feet are wet) and find it difficult to hide behind Lindsay Lohan’s incarceration or Tiger Woods’ overindulgence and we can hear the utter fear in peoples voices and on their faces as their reality inches closer and closer to that of the rest of the world.
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by Bob Martin | Jul 21, 2011 | Art, Art Travel, Exhibits, Reposted
Window Cleaning 1935 - Aaron Douglas
Currently at the Saint Louis Art Museum there is an exhibit of works by Aaron Douglas and feature three rarely exhibited gouaches from the collection of Anita White. Well celebrated and often referred to as a “Harlem Renaissance painter” and as “African American Modernist”, I’ve grown to love some of his early paintings, that have not received, in recent years , the same attention that his more famous graphic works have. Would love to see a complete retrospective of his work.
The exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum
by Bob Martin | Jul 12, 2011 | music
Just about every version of “People Get Ready” falls short for me when compared to the original 1965 recording, so I was intrigued by Michael Kaeshammer’s rendition, and to my delight, he gives it great respect, possibly because he does not try to sing it. It’s a roaring instrumental. Kaeshammer will be in Phoenix on August 6th at the “Musical Instrument Museum“, it will be worth hearing him play “People get Ready” live.
