To all my CHICAGO friends...

Here's my first show out in Chicago this week on December 2nd. If you're around please support the show!!
2109 S. State Street
Chicago, IL. 60616
Doors @ 7:30pm
Show starts @ 8pm
17+ to enter/21+ to drink
ONLY $8.00

Tomorrow Kings - http://www.myspace.com/tomorrowkingschicago
Tomorrow Kings is a group of seven emcees and one DJ with a wealth of musical styles and artistic directions at their command. The central aim of the collective is to break the typical mold usually prescribed to Hip Hop artists through creative deviations that shed light on life in a globalized and postmodern world. With several distinct styles of delivery and cadence along with their own varied influences, each emcee plays their part. These roles range from traditional storytelling and skill rhymes to vivid hardcore imagery and avant-garde soundscapes and lyrics reminiscent of John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. Tackling subjects like religion, social change and global politics, each member expresses themselves in their own unique way, yet display a colleagueship which results in multidirectional and electrifying musical rawness. You would need to witness it to get a glimpse of what's happening here. Composed of multitalented creative technicians known for taking the mold, shattering it, and representing several facets of reality for what they are, Tomorrow Kings is self destined to release an aesthetic ethos so universally transformative that life as we know it would fade into black if it failed to imitate their art.

BBU - http://www.myspace.com/binladenblowinup
BBU, the politically correct abbreviation for Bin Laden Blowin’ Up or Black Brown and Ugly. No Not terrorists, and not your average cool guys thinking of the latest band name with the most shock value. Rather,BBUis a Juke infused, B-More inspired, Punk influenced trio of Hip-Hop activists landing somewhere between MIA and Dead Prez in the middle of Chicago, IL. The group started in the DIY Leftist basements and underground spaces of West Chicago and have grown to find themselves on stage beside the likes ofDiplo,BurakaSom Sistema, Dead Prez, Hollywood Holt, DJ Sega, Wale, and more. Their viral hit “ChiDon’t Dance” was given an “8.0” of best new tracks and declared a “bonafide summer jam" by Pitchfork Media which garnered much praise from many other media outlets as well. BBU's approach to Hip-Hop digs deep into its roots, combining the old with new to bring the fans 110%.“We’re here to educate and celebrate,” says Epic of BBU. “We all come from harsh backgrounds, but we’ve stepped above that,” exclaims Illekt. When asked why BBU does what they do, Jasson Perez states that for BBU it is about “making a connection to the culture, to the movement.”

Black Orchard - http://www.myspace.com/blackorchardgroup
Black Orchard is a hip hop fusion band coming out the Southside of chicago. Bass, keys, drums, with a singer and two mad lyricists. You couldn't ask for much more. The band’s strong point beyond the music is simply the live show, something you don't want to miss.

Aja-Monet - http://www.myspace.com/aja_monet
Aja-Monet is a Cuban-Jamaican poet originally from East NY, Brooklyn, residing in Chicago, IL. At 22 years old, she is currently the youngest Grand Slam Champion of the Lower East side's legendary Nuyorican Poet's Café. Her work is classically surrealist, engaging altogether Hip Hop, Soul, and literary audiences. She dedicates her time and energy working with inner-city adolescence, providing performance poetry workshops and opportunities. Aja-Monet received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently working on her MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Inkslam Los Angeles Poetry Festival

Earlier this month, I was invited to conduct a poetry workshop for the 1st annual Inkslam Poetry Festival in Los Angeles, hosted and produced by good friend and poet, Shihan. The festival consisted of a series of workshops as well as a Poetry Slam. My workshop took place two of the festival days and it was an incredible experience. I plan to add along with this blog an audio clip that was recorded and sent to me from the workshop as well as some of the writing produced by the participants. First I think I should provide the description for the workshop to help you gain a bit of a clearer perspective on what it is I am working on and with, when teaching this workshop. It was created when I was asked to teach at Omega Institute a center for Holistic studies. The workshop has been extremely successful with people and their personal artisitic walks in life. It has been humbling to be reminded of what the workshop has meant to people over time, it seems to participate and function as a spark for life changing realizations where participants find themselves reflecting on the world around them differently. I do not guarantee any type of results with the workshop but it has proven to take a life of its own always. Because the work that I do as a poet and teacher is such a critical and crucial part to my own process as a bettering human being, I am often amazed by some of the results of certain artistic scenarios I often find myself in. Particularly with this festival, it was a cornerstone in much of my growth, and in spite of all the personal issues I was confronting during this time, my consolation came in the work, in the connecting with individuals. The workshop and performance, provided a framework and context for me and my life. I have come very far in the grand scheme of things and often times I am continually reminding myself, if the little 13 year old Aja from Brooklyn could see the 22 year old Aja now, my, would she be amazed. Often times I forget the range of my experiences and the conditioning it has provided me to be an all around transformative being. I am a testimony for many young women and men. I take responsibility for my art and hold myself accountable to the person I am. This is not a gimic, this is my life. For example: It would be hypocritical for me if, as a woman, I hope to inspire the greateness in other women and speak to them of never lowering their expectations in certain scenarios, and then in my own I prove to be an example of a weathering individual who continues to allow herself to be mistreated etc. I am always working to be a better person but am aware of my own flaws. This is a process and the workshop speaks to us surrendering to our own process while also learning how to find alternative processes. Poetry has always been for me, a means to get through, to understand, and to reliquish control. I have been horrified by some of the things I have come to share and open up about, but its real, its raw, its thorough. The expression has been where I have found freedom and this is where I would love to input Audre Lordes; "For women, then, poetry is not a luxury..." Anyway, here is a description of the workshop:

Surrendering to the Metaphor: A search for meaning
Humanity fears the void, fears the in ability to reconcile experience through communication. Through poetry, hip hop, theatre, etc. as a vehicle of traveling, we explore creative inhibitions and the human need to create meaning of experience, the importance of vibration, of sound, and the performing body. What is metaphor and how do we use it in these mediums? How does observation and emotional observation carry a poet into a realm of something utterly other? What do words mean to us and how do we exude meaning from them? These are some questions we will raise. Let us begin with the things we can say and remember the ways we feel them in spite of what we can not.
Here are two posts by particpants:
by April Rose Rojas:
this was after we did an energy exercise and read an excerpt of discrimination during the Surrending to the metaphor workshop at inkslam.

Maybe if I could feel like this I wouldn't be so numb. If every cell was alive in my life... Maybe I'd feel I deserve to live. I want to kiss you into existence. In the morning light lets shake and shimmy until we can breathe a little easier. Lets dance our way into a good mood. Lets yell out frowns until our smiles are resurrected. I want to feel anew. lets rebirth ourselves, live through me. because that is the only way. I will be, you can witness and draw from me. I am your life or your downfall. You chose what I am to you. Silence is not always bliss. The quiet unerves the locked doors hybernation is over, issues come out to play. The stagnant is making my scars and scabs itch. They never healed properly. I want to scratch them open and bleed problems. Maybe they will heal on their own. Meditate on nothing... so I can feel everything. Listen to silence, it has more to say than you think. Close your eyes to see... stop talking to be heard. Go deaf and dwell on what you know, to listen to what is really being said. Can you hear life calling attendance? Don't let distractions make you absent. Conscious takes effort. But something you have to let go to be aware. Create yourself. Not what the world is leading you to be.

The workshop was really great and vulnerable. Thanks to everyone who contributed to it and allowed themselves to be as open as they were. I am sure the Eye Exercise was something we all hold dear to our hearts and I appreciate everyone for being apart of it. Hope you all are well.

by Def Sound:
Some of this makes sense, some of this doesn't much like life, make of it what you will. I experienced an Aja Monet workshop on surrendering to metaphor about 2 weeks ago (Shouts 2 Ink Slam) I was prompted to write down the first 50 words (Which I capitalized in the piece) that came to my mind in 3 minutes then I was asked 2 piece together a piece with those 50 words in 5 minutes (Only 39 of the 50 were used) here is what was spawned. Enjoy.

Men Live Unrealistic Lack of Serious Lessons Create Casualties Everything Evolved Fast Q-Tip's Influenced Argentinian Instruments Fancy like Fiona Currently my Mind Sights Imus Splattered Vibrant Simply looking pretty ugly Idiosyncrasies Please Masonry Wack Collections of Noble Plastic Zombies twilight zoning permits permit Insurmountable Imaginations we Exercise Excitement Earthlings Click Ignore.

-Def


Here is an excerpt recording from the workshop:

Aja-Surrendering 2 Metaphor by Defsound84



I would like to thank everyone that participated in the festival and also a special thanks to Shihan who was incredible throughout the whole week. Much love and respect. I was also sent a link to one of my performances at the slam. It was a very unexpected poem written solely for the purpose of my own sanity and therapy. It was the first piece I had written in a long time that came to me like a running faucet. I do not plan to perform the poem again. But since I have received many messages, phonecalls, and conversations regarding what it has meant to other women and men. I figured I'd post it up here. It provided a strange source of freedom and healing at a very necessary time, when I believed I truly had given up on myself. Thank you to everyone that kept me together throughout the week. I am learning more and more about myself each day and hope to never be solely defined by any given moment or time. I am a compilation of experiences and I am learning to find my voice in the most oppressive of situations. My spirit has learned resilience and love in such profound ways. Enjoy...


....

Saul Williams writes for Essence Magazine...

As an artist and alumnus of the historically Black male institution, Morehouse College, I was dismayed, ‘though not surprised, to learn of their recent decision to ban cross-dressing on their campus, along with do-rags, sagging pants, and headwear (grills?), as part of it’s new ‘dress code’. Morehouse is a private institution that has worked tirelessly at uplifting the image and esteem of African-American men for generations and thus has every right to enforce the codes of conduct and expression that it sees as beneficial to its’ student body, yet it’s conservative/traditionalist ideology is sometimes at odds with the progressive awareness that it would seemingly hope to instill, or even more importantly, nurture in it’s students. Furthermore, it’s stride to maintain a highbrow mystique seems to lie solely in its preparation of young men to enter the Fortune 500 or some ministerial fellowship, with little and waning interests in the arts or the importance of creative expression.

My first day at Morehouse was the last day I combed my hair. I couldn’t wait to twist and lock what my father had insisted I comb, while sleeping in his house. I knew that my time away from church and home was specially suited to be just that: My time. And I planned to use it wisely to express and explore all that I was on the verge of discovering. Here was where I ‘d be given the space and, perhaps, the inspiration to question aspects of my upbringing, harness new disciplines, pursue my passions, and, quite simply, mature. I didn’t find it particularly bothersome when, during that first week, my freshman brothers and I were told, “Morehouse men do not wear locks”, that I’d have to cut my hair to sing in their prestigious Glee Club (this about the same time that my father told me I should cut my hair to be in my sisters wedding), and that, although I would declare myself a philosophy and drama major at Morehouse, I would have to take all of my drama classes at another historically Black institution, Spelman College, across the street, because Morehouse (although it offered the major in it’s course book) had no drama department of it’s own.

No drama, no dreadlocks, did little to curb my enthusiasm or stop me and other classmates from expressing new growth through hair and hip. Young men going to school to find themselves, who, in turn, find themselves suppressed by the short-sighted mandates of an authority that has a simple task of nurturing rather than negating, will simply blossom despite rather than because of their administrative elders. And, although being pulled aside by a school dean and asked how we expected to fair at a job interview might officially intimidate some, for others, like myself, it simply confirmed that they were old school and had not yet come to accept the world that we were crafting. This was not new news. We had all grown up with parents who questioned our musical taste and renderings reflected through fashion and slang. A confidence and swagger that simply didn’t exist in the era of our elders defined our generation, so we were used to explaining La Di Da Di to frowning grandparents and professors.

I, personally, had no problem leaving my all-male campus to enter the all female institution across the street for drama classes. It was on Spelman’s campus that I acted, danced, recited poems, added formative layers to my creative process, and even received compliments on my hair. While Morehouse in both real and symbolic ways represented more and more of the world I had gone to college to escape; a world where I saw hypocrisy and tradition intertwined, then neatly placed under the bureaucratic robe of authority.

The fact that my college seemed unprepared for me and the generation of artists that I've grown to be a part of, says a lot about the social climate that followed my graduation. A time when Hip Hop aligned itself with bankers and gangsters and would be artists found greater merit in referring to themselves as businessmen than as artists. The transformative power of art was harnessed and used to knock down the walls of the music, fashion, and film industries, while the art itself suffered. Music no longer pushed against the status quo, rather, it upheld it. Movies amounted to soup’d up church plays. Public schools lost their music and art programs. Colleges and universities, such as Morehouse, found bank and business CEO’s to manage their affairs and became little more than product assembly lines turning out the latest in a conservative male model that simply saw art as escape.

Freedom of expression is Art Appreciation 101 and a tenant deeply rooted in American democracy. The fight for those freedoms has placed American arts and artists in a category all their own. The role that art plays in shaping American society is unparalleled and quite often unpredictable. And the role that African American artists play and have played in defining exactly what American art is, is undeniable. These lessons, which for me, came as a male visitor on Spelman’s all female campus serves as the basis of the sort of dialogue that has all but skipped a generation born after the Black Arts Movement.

So what happens when prestigious institutions, like Morehouse, overlook the value of expression and instead choose to align themselves with the merits of an elite business school? And what do the cross-dressing students that were recently made to change clothes by Morehouse’s administration have to do with my wild hair and me? Everything. Until these institutions acknowledge the inseparable links between freedom and expression, the same forces that suppress free thought and progressive change will suppress art and the evolving consciousness surrounding it. And when our universities align themselves with forces that suppress free thought and progressive change, they get more like churches and less like schools.

All this to say: I decided to wear a skirt to my alma mater, last week, and they weren’t too happy about it. Diligently Southern in its hospitality, the administration congratulated me on my merits and asked me kindly to leave its premises. They said that they had to enforce their new dress code on campus so that their students would follow suit. As I was leaving, an openly gay student government member approached me in a suit. He told me that he exemplified how a Morehouse man should dress because he was prepared. “Prepared for what?” I asked. “Prepared in case someone wanted to interview me for a job.” he said. Before speaking he had signed the waiver that the cameraman beside me was holding. He knew he was being filmed as part of a documentary that Afro Punk was making as we crossed the country. “Perfect!” I said. “You get the job.”

c. Saul Williams

i heart q tip

wooord. shout out to Amanda DIva and Shanelle Gabriel!!!!

Random free rite

As of late, I have been writing endlessly/am burdened by the games my mind plays with words/with ideas. I have let my hands loose on the page/I find myself quoting scripture again, returning to the gospel of my childhood/the other day I began a novel/felt the sentences cowering like sirens growing into song/there is a ghost that visits me in my dreams and offers me coffee and cigarettes/shows me secret passageways/ I am recognizing my strange source of freedom/how it can anger and confuse/makes it impossible for anyone to ever control a woman so in love with God/so amazed by the intricacy of our concentrated love, the construction of our existence/ I've been writing useless poems about our suffering, our loss of love which confronts our suffering/I have been creating magic, haunting these poems with the worship of love/I am no longer disappointed but remembering my own embrace/I store my laughter all around my home/in cabinets, on shelves, in the shower faucet, underneath the staircase, in the arch of my roof/ I'm not sure if people are intrinsically good or bad, am neither here nor there in my understanding of others/I am trusting that I know nothing and yet I know everything/I am okay with being a woman, both emotion and mind/I no longer fear the hysteria of our honesty, am disgusted by those who mock our fountain of intelligence/but I am a lover of men most honest with themselves, therein with us, those most intent on loving in spite of suffering and insecurity/I have always been a child most intrigued by broken things/and my poems are only dark to people that hide themselves in shadows and night/call my technique feeling and emotion/call my genre spirit and soul/ but remember me a woman who smiled/it is because I have spent time with my tears that I most love the way the corners of my mouth spread in joy, how the dimples deepen and sink into my cheeks/some days I am annoyed by the ramble of my yelling giggle but boy, is that girl beautiful when she laughs/more and more as I am writing, I learn that God is teaching me how to navigate this world of boxes and fear, the woman I am learning to become/surely I have never met a woman like the one I believe I am and will become but I have found her in the shadows of other women/I am trying to find an effective mode of communicating my strangeness/ but trust that I will be understood/i want to be articulate and strong but not at the expense of my need for support and tenderness/simply because I am wonderful in my struggle does not deny the mystery in my fragility/ if God is change than I know holy like a tornado narrative/somethings are absolute, should be less frightening than we make them/ I rather a more profound life but it is never in opposition to the comedy of our paradox/the writing is helping make sense of the horror/ it is the horror of our self affliction, of our loss and our undeniable longing/here is a woman transformed by her process and learning to be honest, no matter how brutal, no matter the revelation.....

Always,
Aja monet

(i am experimenting on a new media approach to spoken and written word for an independent project I am working on in my masters program here in chicago. being that we are working on bridging the gap between the spoken and written fields, i am now planning to provide audio of me reading all and any of my written work on this blog. and would appreciate if people could perhaps comment on what the audio does that the words dont and vice versa. hopefully that is clear. feel free to speak freely and openly always.)

random free rite 11_16 by aja_monet

i think robyn is so flyy...

share a poem

Continual Conversation With A Silent Man
by Wallace Stevens

The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die--
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.

missing home...

SHOUT OUT TO BROOKLYN!

strength

Rihanna proved to be incredible in this interview on 20/20. I admire her confidence, her discernment, and her compassion....

i performed in Bermuda!!

Okay, so around a little less than a month ago, I got the incredible opportunity to perform in Bermuda, thanks to an incredible Bermudian fan of my work, ms. Yesha. She was a complete sweetheart and took care of everything while I was out there in Bermuda. She also booked friends; Shanelle Gabriel, Rafael Casal, Mayda del valle, and Jason Reynolds. The entire experience was pretty incredible and I really enjoyed myself. Shanelle kept a video camera with her the whole time and put together some footage so I am going to post that along with some photos from the trip. Shout out to all my Bermudian friends and fans! You guys truly know how to treat a lady... (fyi thanks to shanelle I plan to get my video blogging game up. keep posted for those soon) all my love, aja










FOR MORE PHOTOS ON OUR TRIP IN BERMUDA, CLICK HERE