Anybody who’s followed the exploits of the Parliament-Funkadelic crew over the years knows that the inner shenanigans are more strange than fiction. So this news about seminal cover artist Pedro Bell is not exactly new or surprising information. I hired Pedro Bell years ( I mean eons) ago as a cartoonist for a magazine. At the time, TV writer David Mills was doing a P-Funk- inspired zine that featured Pedro’s work also. To say that it was not an easy thing to coordinate both deadlines and payments is putting it mildly. Pedro was legally blind then, worked only through a third party, and I seem to remember writing money orders to some woman with a nickname like “Moonshine” or something similar. It’s all fuzzy now, but it was always fascinating and the work was spectacular. But yeah, on the business thing, this is not a surprise at all. Nevertheless, he needs support and whatever works out to facilitate that support, we should all help out. His work set a milestone in black music culture and helped us all imagine a world “out of our constrictions”.

From the Chicago Sun Times

Artist behind Parliament Funkadelic art struggles to get by
Chicago’s Pedro Bell was the artist behind some of music’s most iconic album covers. Now his life is anything but a pretty picture.

BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter/kspak@suntimes.com

Thick dust covers the gold lame shirt and silver leather coat in Pedro Bell’s closet.

The clothes are remnants from a brighter time when Bell, a rainbow Afro wig on his head and platform shoes on his feet, strutted through Chicago as a charter member of the ’70s funk revolution whose sound is heavily sampled in rap songs today.

“It was psychedelic from a black perspective,” Bell said.

Bell, 59, designed the cover art for more than two dozen George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic albums. Under the name Sir Lleb (Bell backward), he wrote the albums’ liner notes, peppering them with cartoonish drawings, clever puns and names like “Thumpasaurus” and “Funkapus” that remain synonymous with Clinton’s music.

“George Clinton gets a lot of credit for the conceptual dimension of P-Funk, but actually Pedro Bell was a big part of that with his texts and imagery,” said Pan Wendt, co-curator of a gallery exhibition in Toronto called “Funkaesthetics” which featured Bell’s work.

Now, as Bell’s art receives increased recognition in the art world, the artist struggles to survive.

Almost totally blind, Bell can’t see the dim hallways of the Hyde Park Arms, the shabby SRO he calls home. His ankle is swollen from a wound that won’t heal. He receives dialysis three times a week because severe hypertension damaged his kidneys. He recently beat an eviction order on a court technicality.

And despite the commercial success of Clinton’s music, Bell said he didn’t profit from it.

He’s broke.

“He should be well-taken care of,” said his younger brother Maillo Tsuru, who has been flying back and forth from his Denver home to help his brother find affordable assisted living. “He has work that is very famous.”

Bell first heard George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic on the 1970s underground Chicago radio station Triad, he said.

“I found the record company and sent a letter and said I wanted to do stuff,” he said.

He started designing concert posters and playbills for the group’s Chicago performances, then branched out into national press kits and promotional material.

Clinton asked him to do the artwork for his 1973 album “Cosmic Slop.” During most of his collaboration with Clinton, Bell worked jobs as a postal worker, security guard and for an auto parts manufacturer.

Despite the day jobs, he lived the funk philosophy, popularized in the music of Clinton, Sly Stone and Funkadelic member Bootsy Collins. Their creed was “free your mind and the rest will follow” and “when you’re going down you’re still up,” Bell said.

“We believed where the funk was going to take us,” he said. “We’ve got philosophy to back up the music.”

Museum of Contemporary Art curator Dominic Molon featured Bell’s work in his traveling exhibit “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock ‘n’ Roll since 1967.”

“They looked somewhere beyond to find alternatives to the kind of weak realities of African-American life in the ’60s and ’70s,” Molon said of Bell and Clinton’s collaboration.

Wendt noted that Bell’s creations weren’t meant to be “high art.”

“They were business, they were funny, part of life, meant to be spread around widely and shared,” he said.

He says he thinks Bell’s original paintings, stored at a friend’s house, are worth “a lot of money for sure.”

Bell said he thought his involvement in the funk movement would sustain him beyond a falling-out he had with Clinton more than 15 years ago. Clinton’s agents did not respond to requests for comment.

“We really believed that if we [did] this, we’d be able to support ourselves,” Bell said.

Bell’s financial situation, though, is increasingly bleak.

“We’re just looking for collectors at this point,” Tsuru said. “There’s no reason a world-class artist shouldn’t have patrons.”

From HuffPo:

A Pittsburgh man in town to watch the Steelers play in September says he had to be rushed to the hospital on the verge of death after accepting a drink from a Bears fan.

Police are investigating whether Zack Heddinger was drugged or whether his drink was spiked at Kitty O’Shea’s bar where he and some friends went after watching the Steelers lose to the Bears 14-17 at Soldier Field Sept. 20.

Heddinger said he doesn’t remember exactly what happened, except that he accepted a drink from a Bears fan after an argument.

“Basically, I guess, my buddies had gotten into an altercation and they offered a drink as a peacemaker from what I understand,” Heddinger told ABC 4 Pittsburgh.

Not long after, he says, his friends had to rush him to the hospital. Heddinger could not see and his heart stopped and had to be restarted four times.

At first, doctors thought he had had too much to drink, but eventually they feared something more nefarious was at work, perhaps antifreeze or toxic grain alcohol.

Writer/musician/auteur Greg Tate is curating a very interesting musical performance, FIRE & FIRE, a collaborative examination of the parallels between Black Americans and The Rom of Romania and Hungary (aka gypsies). It’s a fascinating subject as societal study alone but the manifestation of that it into music takes it to another level. From the Fire & Fire Facebook page:

The story begins in Hungary when three New Yorkers: Eisa Davis, Melvin Gibbs and Greg Tate take a summer field trip to Budapest with Jakab Orsos, Director of the Hungarian Cultural Center New York. They are in search of the Hungarian Gypsy experience, with a mind to investigate the synergies between the Black diaspora and Gypsy culture. For three days and nights they wine, dine and jam with fellow performers and musicians, discovering new territories of expression. Back home in New York, these encounters continue to percolate, creating Fire + Fire.

Fire + Fire features an historic meeting of musical sympathies when nine Hungarian Gypsy musicians meet with seven of their Black American counterparts to interrogate a history of mutual oppression and silences. Part of the yearlong Extremely Hungary Festival, Fire + Fire delves into the synergies of two cultures, melding musical and political expression—this taking the shape through the story of star crossed lovers caught in a weft of cultural clash and political dialogue. The ensemble employs an experimental fusion of spoken word, movement and full on “jam sessions” to create a brand new vernacular that will spring this tale of two cultures to life. Fire + Fire will be presented at Symphony Space on November 19 and 21.

“There are compelling parallels between the Gypsy and African-American experience, that energy and struggle is reflected in jazz and Gypsy music—both are intense, explosive, individual and raw.”
–Greg Tate, Co-Curator FIre+ Fire

A cosmic victory for all funkheads upset about the deteriorating state of modern music.

From reports:

The phrase “bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yea” belongs exclusively to funk legend George Clinton, a panel of federal judges ruled this week.

Bridgeport Music, the company that administers Clinton’s work, sued Universal Music Group for copyright infringement over those words in 2001. At issue: the 1998 release of “D.O.G. in Me,” a song by hip-hop and R&B group Public Announcement, one of Universal’s artists. In the song, Bridgeport claimed, Public Announcement wrongfully used the words “bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yea,” as well as a repetitive use of the word “dog” in ways that infringe on Clinton’s copyright.

Clinton and two other songwriters first penned the phrase in 1982 while writing “Atomic Dog,” one of Clinton’s best-known works.

A federal jury agreed with Bridgeport and awarded the company about $89,000 in damages. The amount was based on the sales of Public Announcement’s album All Work,No Play, which included the song. Universal Music appealed the ruling, but this week the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original decision.

Editor’s Note: There is no standard agreement on the spelling of “Yippee” or “Yay”

If we digital people are supposed to have some degree of glee about the death of print then I can’t join that chorus. Once again I’m stunned and saddened by the loss of yet another of my favorites - Metropolitan Home. And just when I was moving out of my Darryl Carter-influenced “New Traditional” phase into things a little more modern. What will my wife cut out and take to Restoration Hardware now?

I sometimes make a game of guessing which movie people in the popcorn line are there to see, and it was in the midst of that game that I noticed an extraordinary number of seriously obese women (both black and white, but mostly black) who seemed to have come to the theater together to see Precious. When I say an extraordinary number, I mean traveling in packs of five or six going up and down escalators, waiting for hot dogs, exiting the restroom, coming in the front door. It was like a Big Girls pilgrimage.

I say all this with no judgment in my mind, it’s just an observation and reflective of something I clearly missed in the run-up to the release of Precious. I had always considered it a story of poverty and abuse, and obviously some degree of triumph from tragedy. But I also saw it as a fairly individualized character piece. Certainly something that could resonate with a lot of people, but still a singular character within a singular framework.

I guess somewhere in there I missed that this was being seen also a story of empowerment for large women in general. That of course speaks to my maleness and my relative (but fading) thin-ness but also to the fact that the debate about the movie has focused squarely on images and black movie-making and the stories we tell, but never deeply focused on the subject matters at hand and their impact on real people and real communities.

Maybe I was missing something that was obvious, but miss it I did. Glad to have been educated in that observation.

“Looking at half the paintings in the Louvre, it’s like “Who died?” Then you go “Oh right - Jesus”

“Kids movie sold out, took 5 yr old daughter to ‘Precious - in 3D.’ Loved it. Great effects, story. Abuse flies off screen“

Sadness will mix with anger again. Soldiers killed by fellow soldiers is never easy to accept. This isn’t friendly fire. It’s not a mistake - but what is it? Look for the media to fan the flames or not ask the right questions. Notice how after Ft. Hood we begin to suspect the air around Virginia Tech must have a virus. Notice also how it doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen but your features and accent says you’re from somewhere else. Folks will once again blame things on Islam - oh boy! If you look like a Muslim or have a Muslim name - duck and cover again. If you’re Palestinian you won’t get any breaks. Folks won’t even want to give you a uniform now. How can you discuss land?

So this is our inheritance as Americans. We struggle daily to live together and understand one another. We still see people as belonging to groups - even though the big group is American.

Oh, and someone will complain about guns - but we can’t take away guns from soldiers. Can we?
Oh, and so the gunman is alive and not dead. Will we ever hear his story? Will his friends talk about how kind and gentle he was? Do we ever know our friends? What secrets do we all have?
How many of us are living on the edge?

It’s going to be strange to ask a psychiatrist for answers, when the gunman is also playing by the book.

After the days - we will fail to see the families forever destroyed. What scars must they try to love?

There are no easy answers.  We just need to be strong enough to avoid the easy lies.  — Ethelbert

While I’m talking about the Latino community, I want to turn you on to a great magazine that’s celebrating its one-year anniversary. It’s based in Chicago and called CAFE.

The managing editor, Gina Santana, and I sat on a panel a while ago and struck up a friendship. It’s been enlightening to hear how they are addressing a whole new generation of professional Latinos, most of whom don’t speak Spanish but still embrace their culture in unique and wholly different ways than their parents.

The parallels to the Black community are amazing, but it’ s still a very singular and unique story. I’ve been reading the latest issue closely and been circling every cultural reference that I’m not familiar with. I’m missing all kinds of nuances and I love that I am, because it just goes to prove the need for ethnic media and voices that reflect the culture in the way the culture speaks.

It also makes me wonder how white kids can listen to hip hop and assume they are now experts on Black culture. I admit I’m an idiot when it comes to Latino culture, but I want to know more. We’re going to be working with CAFE to do a series on the “Blacktino” experience. I hope you’ll tune in. In the meantime, check out Gina and crew on their site.

I was intrigued by a recent article comparing the ratings for CNN’s “Black in America” to CNN’s “Latino in America”. It may have been a surprise to some, given the demographics, that Black in America did much better than Latino in America. Part of it, as Geraldo Rivera suggested, may have been the Hispanic community’s reaction to Lou Dobbs strident attacks on immigration and what was viewed as CNN’s hypocrisy in saluting the Latino impact on America while paying the salary of a guy trying to keep them out. I can’t speak for that community so I can’t say if that’s true or not, though it certainly makes sense.

Nevertheless, the results are not a surprise to me at all. There’s a precedent for all this, also at Time Warner, and in which I was personally involved. 2009 marks the 10th anniversary of the publishing of AMERICANOS, a book you may or may not know about. The book, a photo essay using 30 prominent Latino photographers, documented over a Summer, the breadth and depth of the American Latino experience. It was also an exhibit that opened at the Smithsonian and traveled to 20 cities in the States. A documentary version launched the HBO Latino cable channel. The actor Edward James Olmos was the most visible lead on the project, but the concept was guided initially by journalist Manny Monterrey. It did OK numbers, but not off the charts, at least not in comparison to its inspiration, SONGS OF MY PEOPLE, a similar book on black life in the US.

The connection here is that both were sponsored by Time Warner (which owns CNN) and that I worked on both, on the latter as a creator and on the former as guru/editor/project director. But to the point of this post, here’s why I think there was a substantial difference in the results both times.

READ THE REST OF THE ENTRY

Despite the size and increasing influence of the Latino community, aside from the issue of immigration there has not been the common experience or common political agenda historically that has connected that community psychologically in the same way thhe Black community is connected. As disorganized as Black folk perceive themselves to be, the Latino/Hispanic community can be even more disjointed. And having been on both sides, I can attest that we take what little unity we do have for granted.  The black fraternity system, the HBCU system, multiple natinal civil rights organizations, the Black church - these are all institutions that exist because of our unique history but do not exist in the Latino community or many other communities.

In regard to AMERICANOS, this became an issue in even figuring what workd to use, HISPANIC or LATINO? Also, which communities to cover. Are Brazilians Latinos? Should Chicanos get more weight than Cubans because of numbers? What of Dominicans, Panamanians, Puerto Ricans?  Which photographers do we use, and what is their nationality? Can a Cuban shoot the Puerto Rican community and do it justice culturally?

And then, what of Black Latinos? Do you include them in the general mix of photos or do you lump them together in the final edit as an anomaly (which was done to my great protest)?

These were all questions that were asked during the process of putting together AMERICANOS. That is in marked contrast to SONGS OF MY PEOPLE, where the concept of who was Black and who was not was never an issue. America had already made it clear that skin color gave us a rallying point around which we could unify. As a result the course of the project was clearer, the stories were clearer and most importantly the marketing mission was clearer. We knew who to reach. how and where.  The result: a book, exhibit and documentary that traveled to 200 cities globally and did much better in bookstores that its Latino-focused counterpart.

If you follow the two communities, that dynamic seems pretty simple but TV programmers and marketers never quite seem to get it. Of course now the dynamic is reversing. Black folks are losing the “common rallying point” and dividing into interest and demographic areas that are disjointing the community while Latinos in turn are slowly developing pan-cultural institutions and finding glimpses of unity within the broader nationality-focused culture. That change is going to play itself out in some very very interesting ways in years to come.