can’t help it ~*~

White on White like Malevich, Kazimir like Kashmir like Led Zeppelin said. Run it. The beat might be me listeninn to breaks Rokafella gave me aaages ago and it’s like time never begins or ends, like memories of yesterday are  close as can be, and what is forgotten shall be told. That’s Mary Magdalene or so I heard as the wind whispers a secret in the breeze and me with Rumi behind my ear like a perfume of the finest blend, a spicy noiresque scent enticing as fresh baked brownies melting on the tip of the tongue. And me ohh my I lose the thread as I pretend there was one from the beginning.

The wind whispers to others as I rock some Fela and do nothing with my nothingness like Malevich like absence on absence in two dimensions to reveal three only it’s not even one, just a figment of my imagination as the beat switches up and though these are mojito songs, tar beach season ain’t just yet. Til then, without the sun and me under the skylights with the rays refracting across my back and over my hooded eyes and I tilt my head turn my cheek til my cheek kisses the sky and the sun beats down upon me and the breaks be like fiyahh like drums back when we danced round tha campfire like damn the word escapes me but the drums insist I give in and move on to the next thing which is the first thing, where we begin, snake tail combo, sautéed or fried. Steamed with a ginger sauce on the side. Lawd where is this thing takinn me.

See, it ain’t even. Sometimes it just be the need to spill seed, umm is that it. creepy being female and all. Creepy creepy but hey thas sublimation I guess it goes against the Natural and well .. yes. The beat switches up and now they got this diggum smacks kinda ribbit singing and swinging while things get kicking like this beat that’s all it takes maybe that’s it, words, rhythms, vibes, life. Like Tribe said lyrics without tracks is poetry on the page and itdon’t gotta make sense so long as it entertains.

art crush ~*~

j’adore Libri Drago
ciao Paolo ~*~

This Is The Re-Launch

One Night in Beverly Hills. Photograph by Charles Peterson

It’s been a long time… I shouldn’t have left you. Not that you’d know it since I’ve been posting on the regular here for four years but—

Four years is a long time to be lost. Lost and found and back to the beginning that never ended and the end that never began as the ouroburo spins like Dead or Alive, round and round.

I ramble, I often do. I’ll make it short and sweet, cause I gotta go. Today I am pleased to announce the re-launch of my website, MissRosen.us

I created the site when I set forth on my own back in summer 2009, thinking I knew which end was up. I didn’t, but you couldn’t tell me ishh. I was no longer listening. I had long since gone deaf.

But, the Universe being what it is, made sure I got my come-uppance and undoubtedly, yes. It was a mess—chaos in it’s most glorious sense. The other day, Mr. Brown mentioned The Sublime. Then DJ Disco Wiz tweeted, “Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong..”

That’s how it went down. And down it went. Now I’m on the upswing and I begin where I am, starting fresh. I re-launch, remix, rebrand, release, refresh, renew, regenerate, do-re-mi e.t.c.

I thank each and every one who has stood by me through .. this (smile). The clouds are gone. Let the sun shine again.

Peace.

MissRosen.us

Douglas Mayhew :: Inside Favelas

The world is a ghetto. We of the first world forget this but it is everywhere, more common than not, people living below the poverty line in conditions too raw for us to fully comprehend. When we do consider it, we vilify or romanticize; we imagine it not as it is, for rarely do we venture into the world of the underclass. Yet artists venture forth, exploring lands unexamined and unexplored, discovering stories waiting to be told. Douglas Mayhew does just this in his first monograph,Inside the Favelas: Rio de Janeiro (Glitterati Incorporated).

Mayhew became interested in the favelas while doing volunteer work in the recreation room of the children’s ward at the Miguelo Couto public hospital in Rio. A child came in with a gunshot wound to the arm, a wound that had become infected after time had elapsed before the child could be brought to the hospital from the favelas. Needing to understand how such a thing could be so, Mayhew took up with Marcelo Castro as a guide and climbing partner. Together they entered into the favelas with his camera, documenting life as it is lived in a battle zone for the War on Drugs is not fought just at the borders but in the ghetto as well.

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

Björn Almqvist :: Dokument Press

Postscards from NYC Cover by Martha Cooper

 

Independent publishing is born out a passion for print, a love of images and text that demands complete commitment. It is born from a need to tell the untold, to honor the legacy of lives lived by sharing them with the world. Book publishing is a calling, a mission unto itself, an opportunity to spread love for the culture from which we come.

Dokument Press was founded by Malcolm Jacobson in 2000 when he released his book, They Call Us Vandals: Swedish Graffiti. But Jacobson began his publishing career back in 1992, when he partnered with Jacob Kimvall and Tobias Barenthin Lindblad on the famed graffiti magazine, Underground Productions (UP). When Jacobson expanded into books, Björn Almqvist and Torkel Sjöstrand joined the company to handle the publishing program. Dokument has released nearly fifty titles, as well 45 issues of UP, establishing itself as one of the foremost independent publishers of street culture and style around the world today with books by Charlie Ahearn, Martha Cooper, and Alan Ket.

As Björn Almqvist, publisher and senior editor, explains, “Our mission is to publish books that we love, about things that we love. We believe that many of the books that we publish wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Dokument Press, and maybe they makes the world a slightly better place…well, at least for us, they do. To present ideas and phenomena, and make them accessible all over the world is kind of magic. It is also a statement; our culture is important and needs to be taken seriously. If there is a common reference for the body of work that we publish, other than art and street culture, I would say it is tolerance; tolerance for culture and expressions that isn’t the mainstream.”

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

Street Art London, Cover, by Frank Steam156 Malt

Dokument & Martha_Cooper, from left to right: Jacob Kimwall, Björn Almqvist, Malcolm Jacobson, Tobias Barenthin Lindblad, Martha Cooper, Per Englund, Torkel Sjöstrand, Andreas Nejström. Outside Dokument Press’ office. From 2007 when Martha was here, working on her book Tag Town. Photo: Paola Langdal

The Kingdom of Eternal Night

Photograph by Jianai Jenny Chen

The Kingdom of Eternal Night, the first novel by former art book publisher Miss Rosen, has just been published on a blog of the same name, serialized in thirty nine parts, reminiscent of nineteenth-century authors such as Charles Dickens who established themselves by first publishing serialized novels in monthly magazines and newsprint.

A gripping portrait of decadence at the end of the second millennium, The Kingdom of Eternal Night mixes drugs, sex, violence, and degradation with the spoils of a lost generation. The Kingdom of Eternal Night is the story of unlove, of what happens to abused children when they become young adults.

At the age of 25, Jade Fontaine has a Master’s Degree and no marketable skills, a mortgage she does not pay, a drug problem, and an unfinished novel inspired by Oscar Wilde’s last play, Salome. Hell bent for leather, Jade crosses path with Nino DiNapoli—an ex-con, gay prostitute, junkie, and stick-up kid who is swinging from the bottom rung of the ladder just trying to stay alive. He was sexually abused and debased, then abandoned by his mother and raised in juvenile halls and jails since the age of fourteen. Now in his early 20s, Nico is lost and alone. No one ever taught him anything except that love can destroy your life.

Set over the course of three days in New York City during the summer of 1998, the novel moves at a fast pace, with the history of the characters unfolding on each page. It is the fusion of dramatic action, dream sequences, and flashbacks that provide an intense sequence of seemingly unrelated events that culminate in the tragic but inevitable demise of one of the protagonists.

Serialized into 39 parts, each chapter of the novel is illustrated by a photograph as it begins. The photograph is essential, not just to breaking the monotony of the text on the screen but to the energy of the story itself. Many of the gems selected for The Kingdom of Eternal Night came from the treasure troves of artists including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Erwin Blumenfeld, Rene Burri, Jean-Claude Claeys, Bruce Davidson, Sergio Larrain, Daido Moriyama, William Mortensen, Nadar, and Francis Wolff, as well as photographers close to Miss Rosen including Jianai Jenny Chen, Eric Johnson, Colleen Plumb, Ruby Ray, and Lilla Szasz.

Miss Rosen notes, “When I began The Kingdom of Eternal Night, I dreamed of it as a finished book, an object that could be held by the hand, page turned in rhythm with the scene as it unfolds. But necessity dictated otherwise. Intervention became innovation in the creation of the Internet Novel. It is not an e-book. It is not for sale. It is free to be read by anyone fluent in English. What’s more, the form allows for changes to be made, should I be so inclined. ‘Art is never finished,’ as Da Vinci said.”

Miss Rosen, photograph by Cass Bird for Paper Magazine.

Author Profile

Miss Rosen is a writer, editor, curator, event producer, and publicist based in New York. Currently the features writer and book reviewer for Le Journal de la Photographie, Miss Rosen has previously contributed stories to Code (Netherlands), Staf (Spain), Swindle, Telegraph (UK), L’Uomo Vogue, and Whitewall magazines.

From 2000–2009, Miss Rosen was Senior Vice President of Marketing & Publicity for powerHouse Books, a photography and illustrated book publisher now based in Brooklyn. In 2005 she launched Miss Rosen Editions, her own imprint focusing on contemporary urban culture. She published 15 art, photography, memoir, and fiction titles with authors including Boogie, Martha Cooper, and Charlie Ahearn.

As curator, Miss Rosen has organized several exhibitions including the Lucie Awards’ “Best of Show” (2009); “Nature of a City” launching the Timberland store in New York (2009); “That 70s Show” (2007) and “No Sleep ‘til Brooklyn” (2006), both at powerHouse Arena, Brooklyn; “Ricky Powell: Public Access” (2005) and “Peter Sutherland: Autograf” (2004), both at colette, Paris, and at the former powerHouse Gallery, New York.

In conjunction with the exhibitions that she curated for the Arena, Miss Rosen launched powerHouse magazine (2006–2009), a twice-yearly publication organized around a single theme, which was in equal parts a provocative cultural investigation, innovative exhibition catalogue, and sophisticated product brochure.

As Vice President of Marketing & Publicity, Miss Rosen conceptualized and executed campaigns for some 45 books annually. Her career highlights include the Vandal Squad panel discussion at the powerHouse Arena, (2009); “We B*Girlz: A 25th Anniversary Breakin’ Event at Lincoln Center Out of Doors” (2006); the graffiti episode of NBC’s “The Apprentice” (2005); and the Hilhaven Lodge party at Robert Evans’ Beverly Hills estate (2003).

Photograph by William Mortensen

swishh list ~

Lovely Lady Aiko at The Japan Society

Lady Aiko in “Edo Pop” at The Japan Society

Photographs by Jaime Rojo
Full Story at Brooklyn Street Art

j’adore Doze Green

Respect, love and compassion to all sentient beings everywhere.
Enjoy the moments and people throughout your day.
Think introspectively, meditate and radiate your brilliance.
Manifest the world you want to live in, make it happen.
—Doze Green

We’re Desperate :: 2013 Edition

wait — what’s Cassie doinn in here ?

most of these photographs are by
~ Jim Jocoy ~

i love TUMBLR

Happy Birthday Poison Ivy ~

Poison Ivy, Photograph by Jim Jocoy, from We’re Desperate

 

throwback thursday

Blade & Lee 2009! Holding Subway Art, 25th Anniversary Edition featuring original portrait by Martha Cooper. Photograph courtesy of Portia McHenry

circles like spirals goinn round ~

This is two years ago.
When I say 80s x L’Uomo Vogue
Mr. Brown says Crusades and we in the Bronx,
big ups to Cope 2 for the spot and Ari Marcopoulos for the photograph.

~*~

Next Stop :: Namibia

The Herero Tribe
Photographs by Jim Naughten
~*~
stay tuned.
:: nom nom nom ::
i’m like cookie monster with books

the year in pictures :: 2012 edition

Upstairs at Eric’s. Eternal E.

CooleyGotBandz

Janette Beckman Is Everywhere

Ellen Jong / The Invisible Line / Chinatown

Face Your Fear

Set It Free