Real J. Wallace, Freeway Cypher
January 31st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
“Posted on the third planet from the sun/realizin’ that you are what you have done.” – Real J. Wallace, Inerstate of Mind
Place, identity and work. Being and doing on Planet Earth. It’s all been passing through the intrigued mind of San Diego MC Real J. Wallace as he makes his way through the city via the freeway 94. His current project, The JAHfather of So(u)l Cal, is a multi-media documentary in which Real J. turns his mind both honestly inward and immediately outward, exploring his own life and the place-history of San Diego’s Martin Luther King Jr. freeway. His approach is timely, as more and more of this generations young artists, activists and entrepreneurs are discovering and emphasizing the relationship between personal well being, community health and social development.
Beginning with himself and his own backyard, Real J. takes a hip-hop snapshot of the life and times of his environment. Because of the nature of his craft, he isn’t what you might normally consider a folk artist to be, but with hip-hop’s roots in connected community, shared struggles, storytelling—and given Real J.’s developing mastery of that tradition—it seemed appropriate to ask the San Diego MC:
Would you consider hip-hop a folk form?
“Yeah. The homie Bam (Circa 86) and I came to that conclusion after listening to a lot of Bob Dylan. His music basically sounds like hip-hop to me. The subject matter as well. I remember that Public Enemy said that hip-hop is the CNN of the hood. If you take down the box of only being in the hood, you have the CNN of the people.”
“Art is my choice. And it happens that I grew up in a hip-hop culture. So this is the filter that my experience has to go through. And I’m very much trying to keep my grassroots throughout this thang. So all the things that define folk music apply to what we do. We are just trying to master our craft and contribute as much as we can to the immediate culture.”
“It’s all about taking what’s immediately around in your environment and making the best out of those resources. I believe that the mind and the spirit align thru art. So if people can be spiritually resourceful, it only follows that they will be mentally resourceful and in turn be more welcoming to new ideas, but first you have to push people minds with art.”
Dig the album here and download it for free. If you’re in San Diego, Wallace says of his album, “The JAHfather of So(u)l Cal is meant to be listened to on the MLK Highway (94 West). So I intend to make the tape the length of the MLK Highway. The JAHfather of So(u)l Cal is a modern day dream with a soulful scheme.”
Abigail Gordon’s Sense of Place
September 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Abbey Gordon is a Californian painter and printmaker living in the oak-woodland mountains of San Diego county. Her paintings are vivid, sensual expressions of sight, sound and touch. They are dry ocotillo air, desert silence and the presence of crow.
Both expansive and intimate, her paintings are threaded with an everyday personal understanding of her place-moment on this planet. The edge of the Anza-Borrego desert is just a short, downhill drive from her home.
“I run in the desert in the mornings early. The crows are just something I started to notice, I mean, I try and notice all the animals, but crows I’ve just got this connection with. At times, they’ll fly along with me for miles.”
Ms. Gordon earned her B.A. in art practice from UC Berkeley in 2003 where she was drawn to woodblock printing. Her block prints range from striking still life, to lovely hand-carved narrative frames, to her unique large format chainsaw-ripped texturescapes.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
“The prints are a much different thing for me than painting,” says Ms. Gordon. “Something about the ability to reproduce them. Painting is this very free form thing that I do, that I put a huge amount of myself into… And it’s not that I don’t put myself into it when I’m making prints, but that’s scary: if what I go through in a painting was able to be reproduced an infinite amount of times…”
Currently the associate director at a camp and retreat center just outside San Diego, place regularly inspires Ms. Gordon’s work. It isn’t unlikely for bits of her physical environment to become part of her art: corrugated steel paneling for canvases—left over from a construction project on the premises—charcoal—the camp was at the epicenter of the 2007 Angel fire—and coffee—as a wash—are commonplace.
Ms. Gordon’s work celebrates the sensuality of earthliness with insight that looks deeply into the textures of an instant and reveres the passing moment. It is truly phenomenal art —perceived, not by the mind, but by the senses.
Sailonsailon.com proudly presents Abigail Gordon as the first in a select series of featured artists. Her work is available through this website. Inquiries please be in touch via email: sailonsailon@yahoo.com
Misha Marston Johnson, Farmer
August 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Interview With Misha Marston Johnson, Farmer
Misha Marston Johnson is a Vermont to San Diego transplant who has taken it upon himself to put down real roots in his new home. His work is to relate to his home in a way that few born and raised San Diegans ever do. Of course, his job is to cultivate the land and produce food, but Mr. Johnson cares to cultivate beyond a purely productive relationship with his fields and is of the opinion is that much of sustainable agriculture and wise stewardship to be learnt from the land itself; its materials, its processes, and its systems. Fittingly, Mr. Johnson is the Farm Manager at Wild Willow Farm & Education Center, an establishment that produces food and runs agricultural education programs to school groups of all ages throughout San Diego county.
How long have you been involved at Wild Willow?
I’ve been here since the beginning. Since, about June of last year and I’ve been working this whole time also at Suzie’s Farm, next door.
What’s your role here?
I’m the farm manager. I sort of…do everything. A lot of different things.
So you’ve begun to feel pretty connected to this place, to this land.
Yeah, absolutely. A year is hardly anything in the scheme of things so I think there’s so much more to be in tune with and to understand, but I feel like I’ve been able to experience quite a large variety of different things: the fact that we were able to see flooding here this past year shows us the potential of what that river can do. And that was definitely not a hundred year flood. It wasn’t the peak floodwaters that we could have, but it gave us an idea of the impact that that can have on our farm.
What kinds of things make this place active in your mind and in your heart?
Everyday there’s something happening that I feel it happening, you know? The breeze has shifted, or I see a new bird species flying through…like today, early this morning I saw an Egret and I haven’t seen an Egret in a few months…These things are happening and it’s really nice to be in tune with the cycles and that’s what I tell our interns; the more you can come down here, the more you can experience the farm—it’s not necessarily even the work you’re doing, it’s the experience that you’re having, whether you notice it or not, you’re getting in touch with the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of farm life. If you’re just doing it one day a week you don’t really get a feel for it.
Also, I come from Vermont where we have really strong seasons, and here they can be a little bit more…mild. I mean in terms of how they shift. Still, to see how the seasons shift—what looses leaves, what goes dormant at different times of the year—a lot of things go dormant through the summer as opposed to the winter here and it seems like instead of the cold having a great impact, it’s much more the sunlight. The shift of where the sun is in the sky and how much day-length we have is important.
Also, seeing how fast all the wild things going on here just move without our help. I like to encourage the wild things that are happening here to keep doing their thing. I like to let weeds go and see what happens. I think there is something to learn from everything that’s going on around us. Like that weed in the middle of the road, there’s a reason why that’s growing there. Sometimes we’ll have tomatoes in the middle of the field—nobody planted them there. That tomato is telling me, ‘this is where I can grow without your help.’ And it’ll grow through the entire season without any water.
And they make good tomatoes?
And they make great tomatoes. They got these concentrated sugars that pretty much just burst when you eat them.
How often are you down here?
Everyday.
Has any kind of ritual played into your personal experience here?
On a volunteer day, the first thing I do is grab a clipboard, walk around the field, figure out what we’re gonna do that day. If it’s not, I come out here pretty much unconsciously. Just to be on the field, hang out with the animals, hang out with the plants, mosey around—
Mosey? That’s a ritual?
Yeah. Not really have any goal in mind. Just to let the farm assimilate into my body and into my mind. That’s really important. One of the things I try to talk to interns and visitors about is the value of just, well, when you’re working there’s so much more that you assimilate than what you may realize, that just being on the farm is really important to understanding things.
Sometimes I’ll walk out into the willows and wander through there. I think that the willows are the species of this area. They’re so dominant almost everywhere around us so watching how they grow and do different things is important.
And every time I walk through the field out there I find something new; guilds of native species or those wild tomatoes. It’s just really cool to watch what goes on without our help. I purposefully let things go wild. Let the wild do its thing and we can learn a lot from that.
The photography in this article was provided by MMJ himself. Find more of his work at Microcosmic Dreamscapes.com
