music art film review - REDEFINE magazine
Four Corners Film Review (South Africa, 2014)
The narrative of Four Corners is equal parts Tsotsi and City of God, set in the sprawling South African ghetto of Cape Flats and following the people that struggle to survive it. At times, the dialogue is sparse and the acting is relatively wooden, but the overall message, and the despair of the situation, makes it an engaging film worth noting.
Selected as the official South African submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, Four Corners missed out on a nomination, but remains a bold undertaking by director Ian Gabriel, who chose to tell the story in Sabela, the secret language of certain gangs in South Africa), Tsotsi taal and Afrikaans.
Four Corners Theatrical Trailer
Four Corners takes a myriad of characters struggling to make their way in the Cape Flats neighborhood and eventually works it until everyone in the film becomes interwoven in some fashion. The story begins with Farakhan (Brendon Daniels), a member of the notorious 28 gang, who is released from prison and attempts to reclaim his old life. He returns to the house he grew up in, brutally murders the person who has taken it over, and burns off his number 28 tattoo with an iron. And that is just the beginning. Much of the story revolves around the battle for supremacy between the two rival gangs -- the 28s and the 26s. In a land like South Africa, where murder and violence are the norm, 13-year-old chess prodigy Ricardo (Jezzriel Skei) tries to stay away from the 26 connections in his neighborhood, but poverty and the allure of money take an easy hold. Other storylines also circle around the Flats: a police captain chases a serial killer, and a young doctor ends up in Farakhan's life. Neither of these two storylines do much to further the story, outside of showing that even the best of people can get caught up in terrible situations. The real story is the connection between Ricardo and Farakhan, who come from very different circumstances and have different outlooks on life, but are forced to see the world from each other's lenses. 
Skei offers up a convincing performance of a young deer caught in the crosshairs, especially considering it is the first film he has appeared in. He has chess as an outlet, but chess doesn't give his grandmother money to survive, and it doesn't give him money to impress local girls. Irshaad Ally, who plays the local leader of the 26s that recruits Ricardo, also offers up a convincing performance as a charismatic gang leader.
Underneath a backdrop of South African hip-hop and the flash of money, Four Corners does a surprisingly successful job of showing how complex and interwoven life is, even if you have a gun at your head. It shows the vulnerability of all parties involved in gang warfare, and even if some of the plot devices come across a bit heavy-handed, the idea that the street swallows who it wants, when it wants, shines through brightly.
Ωmusic art film review - REDEFINE magazine
Four Corners Film Review (South Africa, 2014)
Roughly 1.6 million African-Americans left the South and moved to cities in the North during the 1920s. Chicago was one of the most popular destinations, due to its economy and the city's reputation as an industrial city. As most of the migrants were from the rural South, they had little relevant work experience that applied to urban trades, and even those with work experience found themselves excluded from most jobs by discriminatory union practices, which left them with the lower-paying and more difficult jobs in stockyards and factories.
These advertisements are replete with visual images and imaginings of the South and the harshness of the North. The ad for Ida Cox's "Chicago Bound Blues" is a good example, as it depicts a man leaving his girlfriend or wife to head to Chicago. This was a common plight for people living during the Great Migration as families were separated and relationships dissolved when people left. Songs were described in these ads in deliberately ambiguous ways, almost as though as the ending or story was being concealed. It was an effective hook, which spoke to familiar problems that the targeted audiences had experienced.
A number of blues songs give us insight into the nostalgic reasons that migrants looked back to the South, often using a number of loosely connected images that build to convey a singer's feelings rather than a firm narrative. Papi Charlie Jackson references the cold of the North in "I'm Going Where The Chilly Winds Don't Blow", where he sings of getting off the train in Jacksonville; Blind Blake's "Georgia Bound" begins with him mentioning he too wants to catch the southbound train and that he's "walked out my shoes over this ice and snow." Later, he says that, "The South is on my mind, my blues won't go away," and he concludes the song with images familiar to Southern listeners -- of "watermelon on the vine" and wanting to "get back to that Georgia gal of mine."
Of any musician, however, Blind Lemon Jefferson perhaps best embodies the desire to evoke Southern nostalgia. His first appearance in an advertisement pitched his music as "real old-fashioned blues by a real old-fashioned blues singer" and emphasized the "Southern" style of his playing. Of course, as music historian David Evans notes, Jefferson's music was distinctive and innovative; Evans goes so far as to speculate that Jefferson's unusual harmonics in his songs was the result of him adapting jazz techniques to blues music.
Concurrently, much of the same phenomenon was happening with so-called white "Hillbilly" music, which we now recognize today as country music. As railroads and textile mills were being built in the South, industrialization led to an influx of poor whites seeking work in rapidly expanding cities in the Carolinas, such as Richmond, Durham, and Charlotte. Many of these people were coming from Appalachia, one of the poorest and least developed parts of the United States.
The migration and subsequent settlement in urban areas created a new class of consumers who were familiar with traditional music and formed a record-buying class as well as a class of musicians. Though the marketing of white country music was similar to that of blues music, as it depicted familial displacement from a traditional way of life. In an advertisement for Fiddlin' Powers and Family, Victor notes that "Fiddlin' Powers and his family come from the mountains of Tennessee with some records of old-time American music-songs and dances." Likewise, Gid Tanner's music is advertised as "Old Familiar Tunes."
For a long time, contemporary white musicologists and folklorists insisted on viewing blues music as a form of music that was pre-modern and "old timey."13 White audiences began to come around to country blues music by the end of the 1930s, after the genre had been surpassed by new forms of blues music. John Hammond, a record promoter and civil rights advocate in New York, hosted an influential concert series in 1938 and 1939 called "From Spirituals to Swing." Designed as a showcase of all forms of African-American music, from gospel to blues to jazz and hosted for a racially integrated audience, the concerts were groundbreaking for their time. Initially, Hammond wanted Robert Johnson, but after discovering that Johnson had died, Hammond decided Big Bill Broonzy would be the best fit. However, white audiences had their own notions of what an "authentic" bluesman would look like, and Hammond had Broonzy appear in the costume of a sharecropper -- despite the fact Broonzy had lived in Chicago for years and was, by the standards of the day, very successful.14
The white fascination with the "primitive" in music was sparked by prominent folklorists like Alan and John Lomax, who wanted to find musicians untainted by contact with popular culture. The Lomaxes were genuinely interested in preserving undocumented folk culture, and their work helped in part to spark an interest in "authentic" African-American culture that was untouched by popular culture. Blues music, along with country music, was a place for white Americans to criticize and escape from expressions of popular culture, contrasting the supposedly "authentic" blues music with commercial or corporate music. Yet this view was simplistic and ignored the complicated origins of this music, and we as listeners cannot understand the music if we don't understand the context in which it was created.
Even as blues music changed substantially, its nostalgic impulses never really disappeared. The popularity of "I Feel Like Going Home" by Muddy Waters and "Going Back Home" by Howlin' Wolf are records of a time when blues went electric; though the musical world changed substantially, the songs show that nostalgia in the blues hadn't really diminished at all.
University of Mississippi journalist Mark Dolan recently noted that one of the most common license plates he sees in Mississippi are those from Illinois, as people still drive down to see family members in the South. Even after the passage of ninety years, understanding the role and prevalence of nostalgia in blues music is important to understanding how it was created, why it was created and the history of African-Americans in the twentieth century.
"I would spend many of my mornings and afternoons assisting and helping with the resident scientists field research; this spanned anywhere from counting flowers in a given plot that populations are measured from over time to collecting bee samples from hives set up in a certain area, or even tagging hummingbirds in order to track their migratory patterns," recalls Dorf. "Through these experiences I was given a glimpse into how the landscape is broken down, dissected, and reassembled into other forms within their studies."
When Dorf begins a new body of work, it typically comes from a specific interest that he finds himself researching continually over a span of time. Before he knows it, though, he gradually begins to create new work based on the subject he has been researching.
MARK DORF - EMERGENCE SERIES
MARK DORF - AXIOM & SIMULATION
MARK DORF - //_PATH SERIES
expert team true believer, 2013, pen and ink on paper, 3 1/2 x 2 ½ inches
embracing the dark, 2012, pen and ink on paper, 3 1/2 x 2 ½ inches
The weather, too, wasn't exactly cooperative. An outdoor concert in a Northern city in October is always going to be a gamble, and had Modern Sky taken place a weekend earlier, it would have basked in unseasonable warmth. Instead, less fortunately, the barometer ended up taking its first real dip into fall teh weekend of the festival, and a long Saturday morning rainstorm left puddles across Rumsey Playfield -- some of which were still lingering after everything wrapped up on Sunday evening.
A) He/She will (most likely) be a solo artist. Easier to digest. Even domestically, groups are harder to sell than individual personalities.
Hajooj Kuka's short yet powerful Beats of the Antonov is a poignant documentary on the war-ravaged border between North and South Sudan, set against the backdrop of refugee communities who have only one another to cling on to. Yet thanks to Kuka's insistence on giving the refugees a voice to speak, Beats of the Antonov is an optimistic film that shows how communities can thrive even as people actively try to destroy them.
It’s tempting to think of 
Presented by Elizabeth Lee -
Presented by Alvin Huang,
Presented by Mark Palmer - Machakos, Kenya - 
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Presented by Rick Archer -
Presented by Elaine Morales-Diaz -
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Once owned exclusively by enormous universities, such as the 
Moog's synths, the most famous and iconic electronic instruments of all time, achieved widespread popularity thanks to Moog's decision to attach the familiar black-and-white keyboard instrument everyone knows. Musicians could work the Moogs like futuristic organ wizards, playing intricate baroque counterpoint with one hand while performing the signature filter sweeps with the other.
He began by establishing a firm set of stylistic ground rules for himself. First, he opted to never use National Geographic or any magazines that were glossy -- "I just hated that aesthetic," he admits -- which automatically dismisses a large amount of his potential source material. He also vowed not to make pieces just to be "psychedelic", which is often the tendency for other artists.
Diverse histories belonging to numerous cultures and populations are found throughout Craven's work, and perhaps what fascinates him most is how disparate civilizations -- many of which lived thousands of miles apart, and at different times -- often had similar ideas. Yet Craven is an American Caucasian male, and as such, naturally faces judgments about making ethnically-sourced work. Over the years, he has received enough skeptical feedback that he realizes his work can trigger some viewers in ways that he does not intend, and in fact, finds rather disheartening.
