(Romar Bearden’s Flowers Around the World)
When on I-95, as a passenger in a vehicle, I tenaciously fancy the seemingly endless split-second wardrobe changes of the green trees and shrubs whisking by on the highway from New York all the way to South Carolina. It siphons a natural high for me and is heightened with any passing outdoor breeze.
Plants and trees can delicately to heavy-handedly punctuate artistic work. Vibes are conjured from their presence. The received moods and emotions oscillate from person to person. They’re an “Invisible Touch,” as foreshadowed in a song by Genesis.
And now, I need your help, please. I’d like to play a matching-aloud game. I have included a mood word phrase bank with 5 mood expressional phrases below. I kindly request that you predict and match the mood phrase each artist’s visual work might evoke in me; all the while, consciously influenced and concentrating only on the presence of the plants and/or trees in each artistic construction. I will share my 5 answers at the end of the entire writing piece. By the way, when you complete the matching-aloud game, if different imagery words arise for you in this exercise, do share them.
My Mood Word Phrase Bank:
1. electric euphoria
2. thankful unity
3. minuscule melancholy
4. creative sensuousness
5. invisible safety
(Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers)
Let’s begin with Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: What do you think is the mood phrase from the word bank that I chose? My immediate musing is “the struggle is real!” If there were ever flowers that wanted to truly live, I think Van Gogh is showing them to me right now. I feel cautioned that the petals might be dropping from some of these sunflowers, before I can even finish writing these words. But yet, there is a remarkable intermittent pride radiating from the center stalks from the top to the bottom to balance the fading that is hovering elsewhere. That’s an incredible strength despite an incredible reality.
(Black Iris by Georgia O’Keefe)
For the rest of the article click here: Greenery Punctuates Mood
SLICCBAE AND BORIROCK - BABYROCK
By Ryan Feyre
SliccBae has only officially released two tracks to her name, but the Boston artist has already solidified herself as one of the coolest and calmest rappers in the region. Her early spring debut single “How I Move” exuded the type of confidence a 10-year veteran would have after releasing their magnum opus. She dictates the room with candid swagger, rapping stoic lines over a terrestrial Jord4neverdied beat,”I do what I wanna do/You do what you can do/Move how I how I wanna move/Go where you can’t go.”
Meanwhile, Dorchester rapper BoriRock continues to be one of the hardest workers and most important voices in the Boston DIY scene, releasing three albums in 2021 to go along with a bevy of features with the likes of CAEV and Van Buren. On Bae and Rock’s newest single “BabyRock,” the duo talks spicy back-and-forth over a head-cracking beat courtesy of in-house Van Buren Records producer Ricky Felix. The video, directed by SliccBae and Troublshooting, utilizes split screens and other visual edits to exemplify a rare beautiful day. The setting fits Felix’s tranquil backdrop, as well as SliccBae and BoriRock’s effortlessly free-flowing deliveries. “They call me top two, but I’m one not two,” BoriRock claims with a stark sincerity. SliccBae is similarly poised in her approach and even makes subtle and straightforward references to her collaborator, “baby, it’s me/shawty so clean like a fresh white tee/shawty, it’s you/baby wanna Rock so Bori in the booth.” Her knack for earworm hooks will surely make her a sing-along favorite for years to come. Both her and Bori make the most mundane lyrics feel like the suavest.
SALEM HORROR INTERVIEW:‘BRAIN DEATH’ CO-DIRECTOR WL FREEMAN
By Oscar Goff
For longtime Hassle readers, the name WL Freeman might ring a bell: from 2016 to 2018, they were a regular contributor to the film section and one-half of our much-loved Promotion Pals team. In early 2019, Freeman reached out to let me know that they would be stepping away from the site for a while, as they were working on developing their own feature film. That film, Brain Death, is now complete, and it is a glitched-out nightmare for the terminally online age. Following a run at the First Hermetic International Film Festival in Venice (where it won the Ficino Award for Best Editing), it can currently be seen closer to home as an official selection at Salem Horror Fest. On the eve of Brain Death’s free in-person screening on Monday, October 11th (before joining the festival’s online program on the 22nd), I caught up with Freeman on Brain Death’s origins, the inspiration to be found in record store customers, and the practical realities of constructing a pigman.
BOSTON HASSLE: This is a question I often lead with as a way of easing into the conversation, but in this case I’m genuinely curious: where did the idea of Brain Death come from?
WL FREEMAN: This is a tough one to pinpoint. In August 2018 my co-director John and I got the idea into our heads that we should make a movie. If I recall correctly, we first set out a general structure we liked and then came up with ideas that we thought were both ambitious and do-able with little to no money. Most of the genre elements started here – with us somehow landing on this idea of a woman entering into a parallel dimension and fighting a Pig Monster and an Ancient Alchemist. Why exactly that became the idea is not too clear to me any longer.
We knew early on we wanted the film to be a character study focusing on a certain type of internet-poisoned city-dwelling millennial, and we knew we wanted to try to honestly reflect what it felt like to live in our chaotic political reality and have a brain that was very poisoned by constant doom-scrolling on Twitter — the question became, how do we entwine these very disparate elements?
While we did eventually make a script out of this thought process, it changed so much during filming and even more so during the editing (for example the “Flesh Orbs” which is a phrase that makes sense if you’ve seen the film, didn’t become an idea until almost a year after filming wrapped) – so because the project was so amorphous, collaborative, and malleable, it was constantly changing, to the point where now I’m not even sure myself where almost any of the ideas came from.
BH: The film is very much steeped in the ugly side of the current political environment, as well as the more troubling aspects of online life in general. Did you find writing the movie to be therapeutic (or perhaps the opposite)?
WLF: Writing the movie was pretty therapeutic – shooting it was very much not so! The stress of scheduling the shoot compounded with living in this paranoid reality of the film was very de-stabilizing. We were always talking about conspiracy theories on set, and when Jeffrey Epstein died during filming it definitely felt like we were actualizing the world of the movie onto the world outside — which was not a healthy way to feel!
Check out the rest of the interview here: SALEM HORROR INTERVIEW:‘BRAIN DEATH’ CO-DIRECTOR WL FREEMAN
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