This Year Halloween Fell On A Weekend...*

*10,000 cool points to whoever finishes that line first.

Here are the tame pics of me and Crabby gettin' crunk and holy for Halloween. This was the best Halloween ever. In addition to Father and Sister Gem, there were Riley and Huey Freeman from The Boondocks, a sexy cop and baseball player, a monster, zombies, pirates, old school basketball players, a French maid, a woman in male drag, a hunter, a prisoner, a hood vampire (complete with jheri curl), a pimp, Wonder Woman, vampire queen, 2 doctors, and some other assorted fuckery.

Also, October 2009 marked 4 years since I did the "Big Chop" and went natural on all you hoes. Here's a pic of my growth 4 years out.

This is unstretched length, stretched, my hair reaches almost elbow-length. Feel free to hit me up if you have any hair-related questions (bohemianbahamian@gmail.com).

-Also, I was asked to be a bridesmaid in a wedding next year; I'm super crunk over that.

-I love my Crabbypatty (he's going to kill me for that nickname, blame KB).

-Check my Tumblr page for some pictures I took in October. Skies, sunrises, sunsets, and rainbows.

-'Chall do this weekend?

Corinne Bailey Rae Emerges

Corinne Bailey Rae's debut album is still in heavy rotation in my household. Her songs are like moonlight. I was saddened to hear when her husband died of an accidental overdose in early 2008. Not much had been heard from her since then, but an interview has surfaced with her. She looks lovely as ever, beautiful hair growing out, sad eyes with fleeting smiles. She's working on her 2nd album, and I am very excited to hear it. Here are some excerpts from the interview:



Corinne went home to her house in Leeds and began writing songs, just her and her acoustic guitar. One of the first she finished was called The Sea, a powerful elucidation of loss that was based on a family story that had been passed down to her about her grandfather's death in a boating accident. It climaxes with the lines, "The sea, the majestic sea, breaks everything, cleans everything, crushed everything, takes everything from me."


She says now, "I don't know if there was something in the air or what, but the songs seemed different, a bit darker. With The Sea, I was just thinking about loss, about the impact losing your father would have on you as a child, how one event that big could colour your life, bleed into everything else and force you into a certain shape."

Another song she wrote around that time was called I'd Do it All Again. It was written after an argument with her husband, Jason Rae, a gifted jazz musician who often played saxophone in her band. It was a testimony to the strength of her love for him, a song about how nothing, not his restlessness or the occasional rows it precipitated, could ever make her question that love.


"It was written literally just after me and Jason had this massive disagreement, a big argument, a bad one," she says now, faltering. "Almost as he was leaving the room, I just sat down and wrote it. It's just about how I felt about him at that time. Even right in the middle of the worst times, I remember thinking that I would choose this exact life again, that I would do it all again. It was me saying, I'm not wishing myself out of this situation. I'm 100% committed to this person. I don't have any regrets about this relationship even though there are all these difficult times."


I'd Do it All Again begins: "Oh, you're searching for something I know won't make you happy/Oh, you're thirsting for something I know won't make you happy…". It sounds now like a plea, a calling-out to someone to accept the life they have been given. "I just wanted him to be content," she says.


She wrote I'd Do it All Again in January 2008, and "just kept on writing and trying out ideas". Then, on Saturday 22 March, she was in a taxi in Leeds when her phone rang. A voice she did not recognise said that it was the police, that they had been trying to contact her all day, and that they needed to speak to her in person.



The police asked me to meet them at a certain place so the taxi had to do a U-turn and go back the way we came," she says now. "I always think of that moment when I had to turn back. My life was going in one direction, then, in an instant, it was turned around."



The coroner's report found that Jason Rae, aged 31, had died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol. The coroner described Rae as "a naive user", which brought a strange kind of comfort to the young widow who was struggling to make sense of a death that seemed so random, so senseless. "The word 'naive' jumped out at me," she says. "It's like Jase was playing with something he didn't know the consequences of. He was impulsive, I guess. He liked to have a drink, have fun. It could easily have turned out to be one of those stupid, drunken things you do that you get to talk about afterwards – 'You'd never guess what I did when I was pissed?' – that sort of thing. It's unbelievable that this one didn't turn out like that, that this was the drunken, curious thing that went wrong."



In the living room, she picks her way through guitars and amplifiers, and sits down at a piano in the corner with Steve Brown. As he plays a slow meditative melody, she sings I'd Do it All Again. It is breathtaking; sombre but defiant, and imbued with a whole other layer of meaning – and longing – since Jason's death. It feels almost as if I am listening in on someone singing to herself.



"A year ago I could not have imagined going out and playing these songs live," she says afterwards, "but now I'm looking forward to it. I want to play live as much as possible. I want to get to that place where it's just coming through. It's not a performance, it's not self-conscious, you're outside of time, outside of yourself."


Later, I tell her that the "before" songs have now come alive in a different way, maybe because she is singing differently, inhabiting the songs in a much more forceful way than before. "They have," she says, "they definitely have. What surprises me most is how the songs I wrote before it happened resonate almost as much as the ones I wrote after. The circumstances have cast it all in a different light. It began as a 'before and after' record, but it's become an 'after' record."



For a long time, she continued to refer to her late husband in the present tense, seemingly unable to grasp that he was gone for ever. About three months after his death, she tried to record some of the songs she had written, even turning up at a studio to meet a producer. "I laugh now at how deluded I was," she says. "I felt like everything would somehow go back to normal if I got on with things but, in reality, I was still in shock."


Then came the strange inertia that grief instils in those left behind, the long, terrible numbness that is, in itself, a kind of death. "I didn't do anything for a year. I mean, nothing," she says, still sounding as if she can barely believe it. "Everyone was asking, 'What have you done?' But I had nothing to show them. I didn't go anywhere. I didn't write anything. I didn't work. I sat at my kitchen table for a whole year, people came and people went, life drifted by. It was just bleak. Bleak."


Did she think that she might give up music altogether? "I did think that I could never do this sort of thing again because if anyone asked me about Jason, I would just explode. For a long time, I didn't even try and write. It was just too big a thing, too raw. It was just too destructive to make anything creative out of. All I wanted to do was destroy things. And I'm really not that type so it was all these emotions that were totally alien to me. It was just a bleak, empty, hollow nothing."

Earlier this year, though, Corinne began tentatively recording again. She had started writing after playing a few low-key club gigs at the end of last year. The intimacy of that set-up had led her to Limefield Studios, where she has worked at her own pace for months now.



Most poignant of all, though, are a pair of songs written in the wake of her loss: the plaintive Are You Here? and the slow-burning I Would Like to Call it Beauty. The first is a love song, or, more precisely, a lost-love song. It begins, "He's a real live wire, he's the best of his kind, wait till you see those eyes!" When I ask her about it, she says, "I actually don't remember writing it. That was one of the songs that just came through. It was like I was wishing him here. It's a song about grief and loss and that's really what the whole record is about. It's like I want to tell people about this thing, this thing that I could not make sense of and could not find anything I could read, or listen to, that would help me make sense of."



Anyone expecting the same kind of well-wrought, if hardly challenging, pop songs that made her debut such a big seller is in for quite a surprise. In her place is a singer of immeasurably sad songs, someone who has transmuted her well of grief and anger into something beautiful and raw. "I definitely feel more serious," she says. "I feel more impassioned. I have total belief in these songs and when I sing them in front of people, I want to pass that on. I don't think there is anyone of my generation saying these things, singing about these things. And it happens, you know. It can happen to anyone at any time. I want to be out there on stage with my hands out going, does anyone else feel the same way? That's what it's about, too."



Full interview and a video clip here.

Surfside Sunday

For some reason I keep forgetting what a wealth of treasures Texas has to offer regarding nature. I went to Surfside, TX today with Crabby and our friends and friend-family. We had a blast! (Blast is one of those words that always makes me giggle because it's so over-the-top) The water was shallow very far out and the waves were awesome, so we were just a-frolicking to our heart's content. I'm definitely going to keep exploring this big ass country state.

Stuntin' and mermaiding on all you hoes

Me and Crabby saltwater'd up

My hair post-oceanwater. The salt defines and separates the curls so crazy-like.

Oh yeah, I saw District 9 on Friday. It was weird. Like, hella weird. I don't even know what else to say about it. I enjoyed it overall, but wouldn't want to see it again. The beginning was really blatant with comparisons to current world issues and that annoyed me. After that, it was just weird man. Has anyone else seen it yet?

NATURAL HAIR PORN EXTREME!!!*

*Imagine me saying the post title in a monster truck rally type voice

Click the following link for natural hair inspiration MOTHER *BLEEP BLEEP* OVERLOAD!

http://lecoil.tumblr.com/

Discovered through Get Togetha.

Interview with Black Girl Long Hair

In my continuing quest for natural hair world domination *insert unnecessarily long evil laugh here* I was interviewed by the blog Black Girl Long Hair, which is a wonderful, glorious blog community centered around natural hair, about my experience being natural. Read the interview here! Drop a comment there if you like. You can also use this post on my blog to ask me any questions about natural hair in the comments. I know some people from there are now following my blog here, so welcome to you! Thank you for reading!

Hair Conference

I have been so busy this week, so many apologies for the lack of blogging. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I was at a conference from work. I got into a few conversations about natural hair. One that stuck out the most was when a co-worker from a different department approached me about my hair routine. She was sitting behind me in a seminar and was staring at my head, I guess. She has two daughters, the oldest one had hair that she compared to one of our white co-workers who has kind of loose curly hair...the co-worker seemed proud that her daughter's hair was like that (she said it was also long, "down to here"). Her younger daughter apparently has hair like mine but "frizzier" and she doesn't want to perm/relax the hair. "She's only 3, so I don't want to perm it." This disturbed me a bit, the way so many (black) women automatically consider the perm because they don't feel like/know how to deal with their daughters' hair. I was bothered that (it seemed) only because of the daughter's age was she not getting a perm, while the daughter with long, loose curly hair was obviously prized. Another thing that bothered me was that she kept touching my hair and flipping it around with her fingers like I was her fucking 5-year old.

Since she asked, I went into great detail about conditioners, braiding, air-drying, de-tangling, everything because I wanted to convey that she had many options and that my hair routine is so low-maintenance. I plan on e-mailing her too once we get back to the office. I am a kinky/curly crusader, what can I say? ESPECIALLY when it comes to the wee ones.

I just wish more women would at least be open to keeping the hair natural; there are tons of resources/products available now and it can be lower-maintenance, healthier, and cheaper than maintaining a relaxer over many years.

Here is how my hair looked today: (Disclaimer: I literally just took this picture after a long day at work/school and I had it in a bun, and un-bunned it for the picture so it's a little frizzy. I'm also at the end of my hair-week meaning I will wash tomorrow or Sunday, so the curls are looking frizzy at the front...but check out those back curls, lol!)

Trust me, I feel as tired as I look in these pictures, lol. The weekend won't bring a respite either, but you just gotta keep on truckin' (my Texan is showing).

Notes From The Weekend

Jesus Christ on a cracker. Back to your regularly scheduled blogging program.

*So I up and caught the flu for no reason. Or at least, "flu-like symptoms". How the hell do you know if you have the flu or flu-like symptoms? I am at the end now (I hope) and I thank you all for your well-wishes, especially ChocolateOrchid for checking on me periodically!

*I am the Natural Belle of the week over on Hairspiration, check me out! Thank you again for featuring me (it says natural for 4 years, but it's been 3 years and some change)!

*I watched The Wrestler, Bubba Ho-tep, and Pineapple Express over the weekend.
The Wrestler: Good movie, wonderful acting.
Bubba Ho-tep: If this isn't one of the brokest movies of all time, I don't know what is. That's what the appeal is though. I met my demise toward the end of the film where the villain/mummy starts cursing in hieroglyphics.
Pineapple Express: This movie was a tad over-hyped (and so unnecessarily violent, lol) but it did have its funny moments. "FUCK THE PO-LICE (in slow-motion)!"

*I have recently been in awe of all the big-ass pickup trucks I see driving around Houston. I mean like unnecessarily, Canyonero big. I am in awe because:
1. I wonder why I'm just now noticing all these big-ass trucks because
2. This MUST be a Texas thing right? MrsMaryMack, Tanijoy, Desiree, TheHoustonGirl, any other Texas lurkers help me out. Are ya'll seeing these too?
3. It makes me realize that not only does one country have a unique culture, but regions cannot be under-estimated for their own culture. Like seriously, you wouldn't see this in New York, California, Oregon, etc.
4. THAT makes me then wonder how much we underestimate other regional cultures of other countries. Vesper, does Canada differ noticeably in culture depending on region? What about England? I know Italy and South Africa do. What about Australia? Anywhere else?

That's all my congested ass can---wait that sounds gross. That's all my congested self can think up right now. Blogging shall resume! Have a magical day!

Natural Hair Inspiration-Esperanza Spalding

I am adding Esperanza Spalding to my Natural Hair Inspiration Hall of Fame (can be viewed on the sidebar). For my previous post on Esperanza, click here. Also, click here for the best article I have read on her so far. To sum it up, Esperanza is a singer (in English and Spanish), song-writer, composer, bass-player, and professor of music. She is a formidable talent. Look up her songs Espera, I Know You Know, and Precious. If you like those, check out her whole music catalog; she is very smooth.

Natural Hair Inspirations

If you are natural (or are considering going natural) and have any questions for me, visit my Fotki here. I have been natural for over 3 years now (October 2005) and I love helping other women discover their own roots. I have collected images of my favorite natural-haired women in the spotlight; I have also made a slideshow out of these images that you can view on my sidebar. I will update as I come across more images. So far I have (in no particular rank/order):

1. YaYa Dacosta

2. Wakeema Hollis
3. Sabina Karlsson
4. Nik Pace
5. Lorna Simpson and daughter Zora
6. Kelis

7. Amel Larrieux

Also, for those who want to be natural but also want the option of staight hair, look no further than our current First Lady and daughters! If they can be natural, so can you! Be inspired.

New President, New America

How lovely and wonderful was yesterday? It was such an awesome moment to see all the people there to witness the swearing-in in person, and even to think of the millions who tried to catch the live feed on the internet at work (like me). I work at a university so it was nice seeing all the students standing up for the national anthem and just enjoying the moment. Also, seeing the faces of some of the older folks in the crowd and what this moment meant to them; I could almost feel what they were feeling. I am really excited about my country's future.

In natural hair news, did ya'll know Michelle Obama and her daughters are natural? They get presses instead of relaxers. I think this is just icing on the cake of being role models for black beauty in our country. I hope this inspires that certain number of women out there who want to go natural but still want the option of straight hair. Believe it or not, this option (though I don't personally recommend straightening hair) is healthier for your natural tresses than putting the harsh chemicals of the relaxer in your hair year after year. Look at how many of our older women either wear wigs or have thin, brittle hair. *steps off soapbox*

Michelle Obama was a goddess at the balls last night. That dress was beautiful on her. Again, I cannot stress how hopeful I am about this country's future (that was a complete non-sequitur, but just roll with it).

Janelle Monae

Janelle Monae

What a wonderfully unique artist. I love her voice. I love artists who use their voices as instruments. Also, her lyrics and melodies are so fresh and dizzying. Look up her Many Moons video too; it's outrageous. It is so nice to see up-and-coming trailblazers in genres of music. She is the future; her image reflects that. If you like what you hear, visit her website.

I am loving the Sincerely Jane song. Smile showcases her lovely voice, the falsettos, the throatiness, the ethereal. You Are My Everything presents lyrics that many relate to with a nice groove. My Favorite Nothing and It's Not Fair have awesome melodies.

She has been nominated for a Grammy as well. I truly think she deserves it.

Hair Idol!

This is Sabina Karlsson of Swedish and Gambian descent, my hair idol. My hair wants to like her hair when it grows up. I am three years in to the natural game, and my current length is almost mid-back when stretched. My texture is somewhat similar to hers. No red hair though (that is SO AWESOME). My hair progress can be found here. Anyhoo, this girl is gorgeous! I love seeing people of multiple races/ethnicities being represented in a (somewhat) mainstream fashion.

Picture peeped at Mane & Chic.

Esperanza Spalding

Esperanza Spalding is awesome. Listen to more of her music here. Oh, and you know that I'm loving her hair too!

I Know You Know

I know that you know but I'll say it again, I love you baby nothing will take me away
The way you look at me when you think I'm not lookin'
I look at you that way too, you just don't know that I do

I gave this post a foreign language tag because she also speaks/sings in Spanish.