Human Expression

Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”. He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for God Bless America, he penned “This Land Is Your Land”, in February 1940; it was subtitled “God Blessed America.”

“I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani is a man that once lived on the curb sides of Washington Square and created his artwork there on the streets. His favorite mediums were crayon, colored pencil and ballpoint pen because they didn’t smear when left out in the rain. He refused handouts because he was not a beggar; he was an artist and he sold and traded his artwork to survive. If you knew nothing else about him but what is expressed in his artwork, you would know that he was a man with a poet’s soul, and a man who had experienced and lived through trauma.

Jimmy’s motto – Make art, not war.

A true rebel with a cause, Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, and former dissident. He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. He has received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award. He was also voted 4th in Prospect Magazine’s 2005 global poll of the world’s top 100 intellectuals. Can you imagine having someone like this for president? Serving in office for 13 years, he was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (Late 1989–92) and first President to Czech Republic (1993–2003).

“Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.”

“When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.”

Nina, black swan, The High Priestess of Soul, you were lover, sister of coveted skill, raging bitch, graceful midnight dancer, tenacious voyager, pesky school girl, gifted and black minority, bipolar and convoluted woman, a human with faults like anyone, a soul with good intentions, a bringer of strange fruits that would change the world forever with your relentless passion to be you to the fullest. You let no one get in your way as you walked through the obstacles in life as though they were themselves the doorways to your success.

At times her images seemed so crackling with energy that a tornado or bolt of lightning might strike at any moment. This gave them at times a luminosity, or at others an almost drug-induced vividness, as though she was, through the paintings, trying to convey her ecstasy at the beauty glimpsed in shells, bits of flora, sky vistas, trees, skulls, isolated adobe structures, or the kaleidoscope of scenery.

Sri Aurobindo falls into the exclusive category of poet-seers who have achieved the highest realisations and have endeavoured to share that experience with the rest of humankind. The teachings and very utterances that spiritual masters of this calibre offer to the world come from the most sublime realms of consciousness that human beings can attain to. Their poetry transcends the page to become mantra, an invocation to the transcendental consciousness.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact and importance of Fela Anikulapo Kuti to the global musical village: producer, arranger, musician, political radical, outlaw – bands have based entire careers on single strands of his music. He was all that, as well as showman par excellence, inventor of Afro-beat, an irredeemable sexist, and a moody megalomaniac.