THIS PLANET IS DOOMED serves up a traumatic torrent of future shock from Afrofuturist Sun Ra’s deeply personal and critical commentary and unsettling advice to the people of Earth, who fail to acknowledge this planet’s role in the universe. These lost poems, culled from the vaults by Sun Ra Music Archive director Michael Anderson, are available for the first time in this hip pocket paperback from KICKS BOOKS. Poet Amiri Baraka’s estimable foreword, together with science fiction historian Bhob Stewart’s revealing introduction, set the stage for the heavy dose of the real and the unreal, which are delivered in the pages of THIS PLANET IS DOOMED.
Sun Ra (1914-1993) was an innovative bandleader, a potent pianist, an electronic keyboard pioneer, a visionary Afrofuturist poet philosopher, an inventive composer and prolific recording artist, releasing more than 100 albums totaling over 1000 tunes. Downbeat called him “the prophet of modern jazz”. When the avant-garde arrived, they found that Sun Ra had already been there. “I’m a troubleshooter for the cosmos,” said Sun Ra, “sent here by the outer space beings from my home planet, Saturn.”
Há tantas e tantas pinturas da Remédios em que animais estão presentes. entes fantásticos meio-humanos meio-pássaros, gatos e mais gatos - às vezes como pequenos figurantes às vezes como personagens principais - cavalos, pinguins, mosquitos e muitos outros. Acredito que a obra de Remédios ainda precisa ser mais estuda para que compreendamos os significados desses seres todos. Para mim, eu arrisco dizer que Remédios tenta nos lembrar que somos apenas uma espécie dentro de um reino de diversas outras criaturas.
There are so many paintings of Remedios in which animals can be seen. Fantastic beings, half human half bird, tones of cats - sometimes as no more than little details and sometimes as the main characters - horses, penguins, mosquitoes and many others. I believe that Remedios’ work needs to be studied so we can understand the meanings of all those beings. For me, I dare say that Remédios tries to remind us we are only one species compounding a whole kingdom which is made up by many other creatures.
Himba women of Namibia cover their braids in otijize, a mixture of butterfat and ochre pigment, which gives their hair and skin a deep orange or reddish tint. The paste is often perfumed with the aromatic resin of Commiphora multijuga (omuzumba). The color of otijize symbolizes earth’s rich red color and blood, the essence of life, and is the Himba ideal of beauty.
Otjize is also used for hygienic purposes due to water scarcity. Over time, otjize flakes off, removing dirt and dead skin. Wood ash is used to wash the hair.
The annotated composite image shows the newly discovered exoplanet HD 131399Ab in the triple-star system HD 131399. The image of the planet was obtained with the SPHERE imager on the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the first exoplanet to be discovered by SPHERE and one of very few directly-imaged planets. With a temperature of around 580 degrees Celsius and an estimated mass of four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly-imaged exoplanets.
The picture was created from two separate SPHERE observations: one to image the three stars and one to detect the faint planet. The planet appears vastly brighter in this image than in would in reality in comparison to the stars.
The artist’s impression shows a view of the triple star system HD 131399 from close to the giant planet orbiting in the system.
The wide-field image shows a piece of the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur) centred on the position of the triple star HD 131399. It was created from images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. HD 131399 itself appears as a star of moderate brightness exactly at the centre of the picture.
Credit: ESO/K. Wagner et al./L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/Digitized Sky Survey 2
