Jaxon Willard brought the ‘World of Dance’ judges to tears with this routine about his anger towards his birth mother
“It’s about my feelings towards my birth mom and how I was angry and felt abandoned by her,” said teenager Jaxon Willard about what inspired his contemporary solo routine during The Duels on “World of Dance.”
The black competitor, who was adopted into a white family, has struggled with his feelings about the family he came from and how to express those feelings to the family he now has, but he channeled those feelings into the highest scoring performance of the night.
~Ne-Yo~
“I’m looking around at the crowd – you got people in here crying, brother … [Jaxon’s adoptive mother] should be so proud of this guy. I understand the concept of being humble, and I can tell you’re so humble and there’s so much humility in you. But I need you to walk with your chest out and your back straight, brother. There is so much power in you. Listen, I’ll get into the performance now. You are the epitome of power and vulnerability. It’s like you jump in the air and you float. It’s like an effortless thing for you. You are amazing at what you do. I need you to walk in that.”
~Jennifer Lopéz~
“For me, God gives us a set of circumstances in life. Everybody has their story, but then he gives you so much. He gave you so much talent. Honestly he gave you the ability to fly. He gave you wings on your back by giving you your mom, by giving you your family, by giving you this talent, and without your story you wouldn’t be able to be the artist that you are today. There is an elegance to the way you dance, and it is just an honor to watch it.”
~Derek Hough~
“Jaxon, you are a master storyteller. Your ability to own a moment in stillness is unbelievable. You are in tune with yourself, and when you’re in tune with yourself you can create magic, and that’s exactly what you did on this stage. Thank you so much for that performance.”
Alexa Meade (born 1986) is an American Installation Artist best known for her portraits painted directly onto the human body and inanimate objects in a way that collapses depth and makes her models appear two-dimensional when photographed. What remains is “a photo of a painting of a person, and the real person hidden somewhere underneath.”
She takes a classical concept – trompe l’oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representational painting look like a real three-dimensional space – and turns it on its head by doing the opposite, making real life appear to be a painting.
~Wikipedia~
~~Your Body is My Canvas~~
~~Published on Sep 6, 2013~~
Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, she selects a topic and then paints it – literally. She covers everything in a scene – people, chairs, food, you name it – in a mask of paint that mimics what’s below it.
In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of the more outlandish results and shares a new project involving people, paint and milk.
From a Facebook Member, Josie Fletcher … had to share!
Prince isn’t dead … he just hopped on his “Little Red Corvette” … with his “Raspberry Beret” … drove off through the “Purple Rain“, over “Graffiti Bridge” … under the “Cherry Moon“, partying like it’s “1999” … because this is what happens “When Doves Cry“!!
Steve Sack is an American cartoonist who won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
With Chris Foote he draws the cartoon activity panel Doodles and he is editorial cartoonist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he started in 1981.
How Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Indicts and Challenges Its Audience
The controversial new music video by Donald Glover and Hiro Murai has amassed millions of YouTube views while exposing viewers to the horrors of the black experience in America.
~IRA MADISON III~
Have you ever been grateful for something that you find aesthetically revolting?
The caustically violent “This Is America,” Donald Glover’s latest single and video under his musical moniker Childish Gambino, is exactly that.
The song, which blends jazz, hip-hop, and South African melodies to deliver a scheming-up mantra of “get your money, black man,” takes on an entirely different tone when paired with its Hiro Murai-directed music video that depicts Glover maniacally dancing while simultaneously murdering black people in pastoral tableaus.
Informative video but there were some other things I picked up/read about:
1. His pants are supposed to be similar to the basics of confederate army uniforms
2. SZA (the women at the end) is representing lady liberty passively watching this all going on, which is ironic since she’s the symbol of freedom.
3. The horse followed by the police car is a biblical reference “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” – Revelation 6:8 “
4. The cars shown in the video are all 80s-90s make. They’re not like the typical rap cars you see in videos.
5. Kids on their cellphones represent how passive we are when things happen in front of us. There has been many occasions when something fatal could have been stopped, but people were too busy recording it on their phones.
Anyways! That’s a few takeaways I’ve had.
Good art always provokes thought and conversation.
It’s a sad day in any country when the dealings of its governance can be fully explained through mockery, satire and cold humor.
This is the current reality of American governance!
Maybe it’s always been like this. The only difference now is that the mask has fallen off and all can see the ugliness, decay, hypocrisy, destruction of the values ‘they’ pretended to have, portray and defend.
With the FBI listening in, Michael Cohen (Ben Stiller) fields calls from Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin), Rudy Giuliani (Kate McKinnon), Melania Trump (Cecily Strong), Ivanka Trump (Scarlett Johansson) and Jared Kushner (Jimmy Fallon) and Stormy Daniels.
Team Alicia Keys rocks out to ‘Gimme Shelter’ on ‘The Voice’ results show:
Britton Buchanan, Christiana Danielle, Jackie Foster
Tuesday night, May 1, 2018, on “The Voice,” Team Alicia Keys took a break from the competition to rock out to The Rolling Stones‘ “Gimme Shelter” during the live Top 11 results episode.
Britton Buchanan, Christiana Danielle and Jackie Foster accompanied their Grammy-winning coach Keys in an energetic rendition of the rock classic in front of the other judges and the lively studio audience.
“Gimme Shelter” was written by the Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, the band’s primary songwriting team. Richards began working on the song’s signature opening riff in London whilst Jagger was away filming Performance. As released, the song begins with Richards performing a guitar intro, soon joined by Jagger’s lead vocal.
Of Let It Bleed‘s bleak world view, Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone magazine:
Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t like World War II, and it wasn’t like Korea, and it wasn’t like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it.
People objected and people didn’t want to fight it …
Alicia Keys joins Britton Buchanan, Christiana Danielle and Jackie Foster to sing “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones during the live Top 11 eliminations.
The Beautiful Trauma World Tour is the current seventh concert tour by American recording artist P!nk, in support of her seventh studio album, Beautiful Trauma (2017). The tour began in Phoenix on March 1, 2018, and is scheduled to end on September 8, 2018, in Auckland.