WORLD EQUAL MAGBOOK SPRING/SUMMER 2024

MUSIC ART'S & CULTURE MAGBOOK SPRING SUMER 2024

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Events, Magazine, Advertising for all Artist, Genres & Talents. Phone: +44 (0) 07368 973155 Email: worldsequal@gmail.com 2

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Shelley Rodgers Founder & Partner at World Equal ® Editor, Digital Creator Photographer & World Equal Designs

Corinne O'Neill Partner at World Equal ®

Graphic Designer at World Equal. Owner & Founder at Mourneprints.com Corinne O'Neill is an artist with over fifteen years of experience in metal smithing, embroidery textiles, drawing, painting & digital art /graphic design. A multi talented lady .

She runs and owns her company mourneprints.com and Thread designz which specializes in personalized clothing and gifts.

From digitizing embroidery of her own artwork, she runs a popular stall at the famous St Georges Market in Belfast City Northern Ireland nearing ten years.

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Teddy Hayes Co Publisher & Partner at World Equal ®

Skyler Jett Partner at World Equal ® Owner and Founder at musicforglobalchange.com Skyler Jett leads the way as the Global Messenger in his quest to make the world a better place; with his musicforglobalchange.com platform as a driving force.

This is done through songwriting, singing, and inspiring positive lyrical content within the genre of socially conscious music. He is an award winning, Grammy Recognised vocalist and one of the most sought after singer songwriters and vocal producers in the music industry today. Skyler s impressive resume includes some of the biggest recording artists of our time. His accolades include receiving a Grammy Award embossed plaque from NARAS for singing with Celine Dion on her Grammy winning hit song My Heart Will Go On, adapted from James Cameron s blockbuster hit film Titanic. This was also record of the year (1998) and is still the highest grossing movie theme song of all time.

Prior to this Skyler succeeded in becoming the new front man for The Commodores after Lionel Ritchie s departure.

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World Equal ® The publisher of World Equal Magbook takes responsibility for the accuracy but not any inaccuracies of the content placed in its publications. For the avoidance of doubt, World Equal Magazine gives no warranty or guarantee in regard to any information placed in this publication. This publication is proudly designed by worldequal.com Contributors: Teddy Hayes - Skyler Jett - Corinne O'Neill - WMC Construction

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Teddy Hayes A Mulit-Dimensional Creative Dynamo

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Shelley Rodgers Photographer

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Nikkole Hall singer and songwriter

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Brendan McGarity Artist

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What is AI? By Shelley Rodgers

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Curtis Donovan Art with Attitude(s)

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Brigid Sheehan Me and My Bipolar…Forever Together

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Louise Maguire Jewelery Designer Maker

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Robin D Vocal Coach To The Stars

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Frank Orefice Jr Writer

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Sanae Casita Singer Song Writer

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Mavis Rodgers Poet

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When talent and technique intermingle with the soul, artistic magic often happens.

Teddy Hayes:

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Interview By

oday we are talking to Teddy Hayes, a writer/

filmmaker/director/producer. Over the past forty years he has worked in entertainment and media covering a variety of roles with a variety

of famous people and on a variety of different projects. Moving from New York City to to London 27 years ago, he has created a successful artistic life for himself that has resulted in his acknowledgement as a world-wide talent and “Multi-Dimensional Creative Dynamo” Shelley Rodgers : How did you get into the arts?

Teddy Hayes: When I was about 4 or 5, I fell in love with music. It was 1956 and I remember having gone to the movie theatre at the top pf our street which was popular in those days. Every neighborhood had their own movie theatre and there was a film with Little Richard called Don’t Knock The Rock. My cousin took me to see it and after seeing that film I was hooked. I knew that I had to be involved with music and entertainment on a serious level. And also, there was always music in the house because my aunt who lived upstairs bought all of the latest records every week. And I would sit on the stairs and listen to what she played. Because she played all sorts of music, I was introduced to R&B as well jazz and gospel at an early age and because I could sing, I decided that I wanted to be a singer. In fact, I thought that was what I would be. And my grandmother gave me some voice lessons as a birthday present when I was 16, and I studied voice with a classical teacher for a while to learn to sing properly, but then fate intervened and I went to university and became a journalist instead.

Shelley Rodgers : So, then you got into writing?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, University was a really good experience because all of my family worked in factories and I knew that was something that I didn’t want to do, and having worked in temporary jobs in the post office and restaurants, I knew that I wanted a job that would allow me to see things and walk outside during the day. I went to Cleveland State University on a partial academic scholarship and I started working on the student

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newspaper and discovered that as a journalist I could go to nice restaurants for lunch at the newspaper’s expense and talk to people, some of whom were famous and travel around. And then the best part was that as a journalist I didn’t have to be inside an office all day, so what was there not to like? Being the editor of the student newspaper led to my first professional job as a news reporter at the Cleveland Call and Post newspaper owned and edited by the legendary W.O. Walker who was the publisher. That’s when I really started to get a sense of professionalism because Mr. Walker was a great role model and teacher and he instilled the importance of doing the work well in addition to having a sense of accomplishment. He also exposed me to the politics behind the newspaper business which was fascinating and invaluable. I remember one day I went into work and Mr. Walker told me to go to cover a hospital fundraising event where Muhammed Ali was doing a boxing exhibition. Can you imagine? Muhammed Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world. That was like going to see God. Shelley Rodgers : And so, you decided to continue as a writer?

Teddy Hayes: Those experiences at the newspaper played a big part in that.

But the other thing was I changed my major from Journalism to mass communications because the university I attended had a brand-new TV studio and I really wanted to learn to make films. So, in my last year, I managed to get a job working in the professional TV station as a film processor and editor, so when I graduated, I’d already had 2 years professional experience in media.

Shelley Rodgers :That was unusual that you were so serious at such an early age.

Teddy Hayes: Probably, but I knew that if I wasn’t serious, I would end of doing something I really didn’t like. Since I knew I had to make a living doing something, I decided that I would be better off doing something I really liked, so I took a serious approach to my work and studies. I think subconsciously I was listening to my mother’s words. One day I remember she asked me what I wanted to be. I must have been eight or nine years old and I said a singer and then she asked what kind of singer.

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I said I didn’t know. Then I said or maybe if not a singer a musician. And she said something I never forget. She told me that no matter what I decided to be, just be a good one, so somebody would be willing to pay me for doing it.

Shelley Rodgers : nd so, you gave up music when you went to university?

Teddy Hayes: Yes and no. Because even though I was heavily involved with media in the university, I still had to pay for a part of my tuition so I was always looking for ways to earn money, so I joined a band that played cover tunes. As a member of the band we played different small clubs on the weekends. I played bass and sang in the band. I wasn’t a good bass player by any means, but I was able to get through the songs we played which were mostly blues tunes and simple pop tunes. But that experience helped me to understand musical composition even though at the time I didn’t realize how much it would have a positive effect when I became more involved in producing music and theatre years later. At the time, music was something I could do and earn money and supplement my income while I was in university.

Shelley Rodgers : How did you wind up in New York in the 1970’s?

Teddy Hayes: After university, I got a job in the media department of a community action agency in Dayton Ohio, and the organization was offered a grant to make a documentary film. I got the job because having worked in the TV station in Cleveland I knew how to make films, so that experience led to me meeting and working with Quincy Jones and moving from Ohio to Los Angeles. That then led to me meeting writer/ producer Melvin Van Peebles who arranged for me to move from L.A. to New York and work directly with his friend Roberta Flack as a road manager for a year and then to become his assistant in his production office.

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Shelley Rodgers : That must have been really exciting.

Teddy Hayes: Yes, tremendously so, but difficult also because Melvin could be very difficult to work for. In the beginning I felt like walking away many times because he was so demanding.

Sometimes, we worked 12 hours a day for 7 days a week, depending on the project. When I came to work for him, he was writing a lot of TV network specials and theatre projects, so there was a huge volume of work and as his assistant I was expected to be on top of everything and learn everything because there was only him and myself in the creative department of his company. But I managed to hang in, and after about 4 months I was making real progress. After a year I was promoted and then after working together two more years, I decided other opportunities started to show up and he asked me to stay on for another 6 months which I did. The great thing was we became good friends and continued to do projects together and stayed friends for 40 years until he died a few years ago. Melvin was a genius and my mentor and he taught me a lot about theatre as well as film.

Shelley Rodgers You worked on a program that won an Emmy, right?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, that was back in 1978, with Melvin on a project called The Day They Came To Arrest The Book, which was a TV film.

Shelley Rodgers What was the hardest part of being a media person or artist in those days?

Teddy Hayes: Looking back, I think the hardest part was staying focused and not getting disappointed with all the ups and downs and keeping enough work coming in as a freelancer to pay the bills. Everything seemed to always be happening all at once.

Almost every day or night I was going to the theatre or a screening or a musical event or was in the studio producing with a band I had formed or chasing down work as a freelance writer or record producer. Funnily enough, one of those musical acts that I wrote and produced for was a kid named Alfonso Ribiero on Prism Records who became the character “Carlton” on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I wrote and produced a song called r.

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I have been lucky on a number of occasions, but people who sell the idea of there being a formula for success are not telling the truth, but rather saying what they think people want to hear to entice them to buy what they are trying to sell rather than having any validity.

Teddy Hayes:

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They have an idea; they develop it and they put it out into the world and see what happens. I think many talented people can't deal with rejection and stop trying. But I think that is a mistake Teddy Hayes:

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Dance Baby which he performed in 1984. It did Ok in the dance clubs and even made the Billboard chart, but never did anything major in the way of sales. Then in the late eighties music videos came into vogue. MTV had come onto the scene and all music groups had to have a music video if they wanted to compete, so I started producing and directing music videos with my friend Lamont “Liquid” Burrell who was working as a cameraman and editor. And that gave me the opportunity to really get my teeth into filmmaking because sometimes we would produce two or three videos per month. And the money was good so I could really concentrate on developing my craft as a director/producer.

Shelley Rodgers : Lamont Burrell, isn’t he the same person who you just worked with on the recent film you made?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, exactly, we have been working together since 1989. These days he is a Director of Photography for lots of big streaming productions like Netflix and Amazon but he was kind and generous enough to join me in Cleveland Ohio where I went to make a documentary film in January. The funny thing is we have worked so much and so long together, we were having some of the same conversations we’d always had all those years ago.

And we had planned a three days shoot, but because we have such good chemistry, we finished in two days. So, we both were very pleased.

Shelley Rodgers : What made you decide to leave the US and live in London?

Teddy Hayes: By the early nineties, I had worked for so many companies and people in New York I was fed up with working for other people and making success for their projects and walking away with just a payment rather than a piece of the profits. I decided that I needed to work on projects that I owned.

This was a slow burning feeling and that is why in the late eighties I decided that I wanted to create a character that had a long life and that I owned, and that’s when I created the character of Devil Barnett, an ex-CIA hitman who becomes a detective in Harlem, New York.

Shelley Rodgers : Having created Devil Barnett what was the response when you took your book to publishers in New York?

Teddy Hayes: Everyone rejected it. The publishers said that black detective fiction would not sell because their marketing experts said that the main audience for detective fiction were men between the ages of 20 and 30 and since I had a black detective, my core audience would be black men and black guys didn’t read!

And then I told them that writers like Walter Mosley, Chester Himes and Donald Goins all had black detectives and they were selling but they still rejected me. Also, at the time I was hungry to make a feature film, but wasn’t getting any good responses. And even though by this time I was making some progress by getting my plays produced on stage in other American cities, I was still burning to make a feature film, so I decided that I would leave the US. Shelley Rodgers : How did you get established in London?

Teddy Hayes: Things were a bit slow for the first couple months because I didn’t know anyone in London, but then when things started moving, they really took off. At first, I just started singing in pubs. Because I could always sing and having produced music in New York I knew how to work with bands, so I started singing Motown songs in London pubs. After a month or so I met some guys who owned a small production company who wanted to make music videos. I told them I could do it, presented them with my video show reel and got the job. Then I started freelance making music videos for this company on a project-by-project basis which led to me meeting my friend Alan Cutler who connected me with the theatre people who produced my first play at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1998. Then someone else introduced me to the Xpress publishing company who liked my Devil Barnett books and gave me a book deal.

Shelley Rodgers : How were your books received?

Teddy Hayes: The first book got me lots of publicity. In fact, it was because of the first book I attended the London literary festival and met Walter Mosley in 1998. The second book was also well received but it was the third book, Wrong As Two Left Shoes, that turned the tide. For this book I made a music CD

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especially with a detective book. Anyway, as a result, I got a glowing review in The Guardian that attracted an American company who offered me a book deal in America. This was great because that deal put my books into circulation in a different way. As a result, my books went into American libraries so lots more people became aware of the books. This was important because this was before the explosion of Amazon and eBooks Shelley Rodgers : How many Devil Barnett books have you written so far?

Teddy Hayes: So far, I have written 10 Devil Barnett books with number 11 on the way, hopefully by sometime late next year. And all of them are available on Amazon.

Shelley Rodgers : What’s the next step for Devil Barnett?

because the character in the book was a song writer, and I decided to allow the reader to go inside the songwriter’s mind and experience what he was hearing and feeling as he wrote the songs. This was an idea that my publishing company balked at because it would cost more, so I agreed to pay for the CD myself and Xpress published the book and packaged it with the CD. This was something no one had done before as far as I know, .

Teddy Hayes: I am looking to get a production deal with a streaming company. And it’s funny because after the third book a known Hollywood director approached my agent and made an offer to make a Devil Barnett film but I turned it down because I didn’t like the deal. I also didn’t like the work of the director who had previously worked on a great book with great characters that he in my opinion had screwed up, so I declined and am glad I did because now I have 10 books and streaming is alive and well.

Also, I have started to attract top people like Emmy Award winning film editor Oral "Norrie" Ottey who has agreed to work on a Devil Barnett streaming project with me. So now I am just looking and waiting to see who will step up and make it happen.

Shelley Rodgers : Have you got more into producing musical theatre in the U.K than when you were in New York?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, in London I really got heavily into producing musical theatre. My latest one is a country musical that is ready to go as soon as I get around to getting some financial backers.

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Shelley Rodgers : Did you always like musicals?

Teddy Hayes: Not so much. In fact, it’s funny because as a kid I didn’t like musicals at all, because I only saw them on TV, and these were musicals with people like Doris Day. Musicals where suddenly the entire cast would break into song and dance together. And in my mind, it was ridiculous because my thinking was how could these people know the same dance steps when according to the story-line they didn’t even know each other.

They just came together as a result of being in the same shopping area or walking along the same street. But all that changed when I saw West Side Story and My Fair Lady. These two filmed musicals made me look at musicals in a different way because the stories resonated with me. Also, when I went to work in New York, Melvin Van Peebles owned a company that papered the houses of Broadway theatres, so almost every day I came to work I was offered free tickets to Broadway shows; and I went to these shows at least a couple of times a week which is how and when I really started to understand how to write for theatre. Then later on I was involved with three of Melvin’s theatre productions, one of which was Waltz Of The Stork which went to Broadway in 1982, and I really began to understand the business side of theatre production which led to the writing of The Holding Pen which is a musical about 5 women in prison that was staged in Cleveland Ohio in 1987.

Shelley Rodgers : How many musicals have you produced?

Teddy Hayes: To date I have produced 5 musicals Off West End including one called Obama On My Mind and a musical adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story Hound of the Baskervilles called The Baskerville Beast which we staged one year at the Hay on Wye book festival.

Shelley Rodgers : And you make films also?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, in fact I am finishing a documentary film now called Keeping the Dream Alive: A Lifetime’s Journey about an artist named Dale Goode from Ohio. I made my first feature film in 1999 called Her Name Was Amy Tillman and then it kept on from there. Since then, I have made two more feature films and other shorts films as well. But there is no pattern for me. If a film project comes up and if I like the project, I do it, otherwise I do something else like theatre or write books.

Shelley Rodgers : How do you do so many different things?

Teddy Hayes: I do many different aspects of the entertainment or media business but I don’t see them as different or even separate.

To me the different entertainment mediums are like different rooms in the same house because in most forms of entertainment things overlaps each other; things such as story, actors, lighting, music etc. Throughout my career I have been very aware that whatever I’ve learned at one point was or could be an extension of something else I’d learned before.

For example, when I began to write novels I understood how to delve into the character’s mind or tell their backstory as a result of adapting a novel into a screenplay which is what I had to do when working with Melvin. In fact, one of the first successful things we worked on was a story called The Junior Bachelor Society which was a TV movie that we had to adapt from the book.

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Also, my first agent gave me a book and asked me to write a screenplay, so in both cases I knew that the assignment was about storytelling, but I also knew that I needed to tell the story in a way based on the constraints of the medium. I knew that when adapting the novel to a screenplay I could not write about what the main character might have been thinking that took up 10 pages in the book, because film is a visual medium and the story needs to be told in pictures as much as possible. Also, if you are telling a story with film, you can work with various elements to help tell the story including lighting, movement of the camera, the combination of different focal lengths in camera shots as well as effects to help tell a story that has more impact than if you put them into a novel. Also, in novels you can set the scene and then go into the look of the environment and how the character feels about it and how it affects them, but when making a film you have to ask yourself, what part of that of that background information and emotion do you want to put onto the screen visually?

Shelley Rodgers : is it the same for theatre?

Teddy Hayes: In theatre where the action is there all at once in front of you, the storytelling has to be different. It has to address the immediacy of the situation and the audience expectations.

Onstage, you don’t have the luxury of the languid flashback to the beautiful environment that you may even transplant from the novel into the film, because people could get more easily confused or impatient. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but it’s tricky and if you get it wrong or do it badly you risk losing your audience which is sitting in their seats totally focused on your work; and is not being distracted by the phone or the dog, but just sitting there waiting for the emotional and mental stimulation that they are expecting from your work. Therefore, I try to look at the storytelling elements of a work and determine how I can best tell it so that it will connect emotionally with the medium and the audience.

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Shelley Rodgers : You wrote a book about producing theatre am I correct?

Teddy Hayes: Yes, it is called The Guerrilla Guide to Being a Theatrical Producer. It’s for people who don’t have experience producing plays and explains how to do it, from the very beginning with very little money. I wrote it because there are so many people who talk about wanting to produce theatre, even on a local level, but don’t know the various elements or where to start, so I thought I would write a book explaining those things.

Things that I have learned over the years through trial and error.

Shelley Rodgers : And how do you approach composing musical theatre, because you are also a writer of both words and music?

Teddy Hayes: For music, the approach may vary depending on why the music is there. For example, in a film, the music may serve as an overall feeling for the action, or some event about to take place that you want to the audience to react to in a certain way so that the music becomes part of the storytelling. Film composers call this musical manipulation of the audience, the “emotion lotion.” In musical theatre, the music with its lyrics usually has to perform a function like showing something about a character or telling about an event or situation or maybe capturing an emotional moment. So, my musical approach in theatre is to think about and speak to the function of what the music is meant to be doing in the most emotional way possible. I want to make the audience feel something as soon as they can, be that in the melody, the words or the arrangement. I always think that even if the music is subtle it has to touch the emotional core of the listener in some way. I learned this from listening to music on the radio growing up. I remember the film score from the 1970’s film Shaft. Its opening with its Wah-Wah guitar and high-hat cymbal sets the scene with anticipation and excitement for what is to come. Or, the now classic bass line in Michael Jackson’s song “Billie Jean.” Once the listener hears that throbbing bass line it makes them want to move along with it and follow where the music is going. And generally, I think any kind of musical storytelling needs to be like that. Something that makes the audience want to follow the artist, be it writer, director, actor or character, emotionally to where they want them to go.

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I don’t want to sound simplistic or regimented about the creative process, because it is not, but for me there are certain emotional connections from one thing to another that I try to keep in mind as I go from one form of presentation to another. That helps me travel freely from one form of artistic expression to the other like an “everywhere travel card” that allows me to ride buses, trains, airplanes or cars or even the wind if I choose to.

Shelley Rodgers : What would you say is the hardest part of being a writer/producer?

Teddy Hayes: I think the hardest part is getting financial backers or companies emotionally involved enough in your ideas to give you money to make them happen, because it can take years to get a project going. But if you persevere you can make it happen. I think I am proof of that. I also think perseverance is something that has to be developed and honed over time and has to become a part of the artist’s state of mind. I say this because so many people will tell you there is no market for what you want to do, but in reality, nobody knows what the public will like or where the market will be. Therefore, you have to really believe in what you do and continue to do it no matter what. I mean If someone had said 15 years ago “hey I got this musical with hip hop music about this obscure American founding father called Alexander Hamilton, that can be a hit all over the world most people would have turned their backs. But because the writer had had some success with another musical In The Heights someone was willing to give him a shot. But he had to get the success first before he was able to get the backers for Hamilton. And it’s the same for any writer/producer. They have an idea; they develop it and they put it out into the world and see what happens. I think many talented people can’t deal with rejection and stop trying.

But I think that is a mistake.

Even the most successful producers and writers face the same thing. I was recently at the opening night of a new musical in London that was directed by one of the most commercially famous theatre directors in the world. And it was clear that by the middle of the first act that the show was at best under-whelming.

This same director in the audience on opening night with his entourage, and I was thinking that this show was not going to be successful even though it had all the elements of what should

have been a success. It had a famous literary character and good scenery, and money behind it but still that wasn’t enough, the book and the music and the direction were not engaging. In addition, the acting of the lead character in particular was inadequate. And later, the critics agreed with my observations and the musical bombed. It didn’t even make it out of previews.

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But that’s just the way it goes sometimes. In this business you just have to learn to take your failures and move on without letting it destroy your self-esteem and belief in yourself. I had my Devil Barnett book rejected by every company for 9 years before I got my first publishing deal. But I just kept moving forward, not listening to negative comments and keeping positively focused on my goal. I am a firm believer in the famous Japanese saying “Fall 7 times, get up 8.”

Many media companies are conservative and will only go with something if the numbers are in the artist’s or project’s favor, like if the writer has had a hot book, or if there is a hot actor or writer attached to the project. Their thinking is… if someone or something is a success or has enough successful elements they will give it a shot. Then there are other companies will take a chance because they like an idea that brings something new or different. But the truth is, there is no one way of doing things and most importantly there is no formula, which is why people with an idea should believe and keep pushing forward with their ideas no matter what, because no one knows what is going to be successful. And even though many online marketers like to sell people on the idea that there is a formula for making a successful product, there is no formula. There is luck, yes, which can make all the difference, and I have been lucky on a number of occasions, but people who sell the idea of there being a formula for success are not telling the truth, but rather saying what they think people want to hear to entice them to buy what they are trying to sell rather than having any validity.

Shelley Rodgers : What’s your next project?

Teddy Hayes: At the moment I am pretty focused on an art project that will expose new visual artists. At the moment I am pretty focused on an art project that will expose new visual artists. And also, my main project which is of course getting Devil Barnett produced on a streaming channel which I am hoping to make happen sooner rather than later.

Shelley Rodgers : Thank you for talking with us.

Teddy Hayes: Thank you, its has been great talking with you as always.

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I think the hardest part is getting financial backers or companies emotionally involved enough in your ideas to give you money to make them happen, because it can take years to get a project going.

Teddy Hayes:

Wanted experienced contemporary art curator to write monthly blog for London based art website: salary 100 monthly. Send CVs to; Email: valued.artplus@gmail.com

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Nani Vazana is one of the only artists in the world that write & compose new songs in the endangered Ladino language. In her new album ‘Ke Haber’ (What’s New) she captures the spirit of the ancient, matriarchal language and culture and propels it into the 21st century with socially pertinent lyrics, celebrating migration, gender and female empowerment.

The soundscape bridges over tradition and modern life, capturing the sounds and smells of the marketplace and fuses them with raw, flamenco like vocals and surprising instrumentations. Soft chorallike trombones embellish mariachi guitars & percussion with glimpses of piano & cello tracks, make this record a magical realistic mosaic. Nani unveils a piece of history we don’t easily find in other mythology & anthropology.

Nani ranked the Top-20 on the World Music Charts Europe (#13 Ke Haber), represented the Netherlands at the EU Music Festival in Vietnam and performed at the Kennedy Center USA, BBC Radio 3, the London Jazz Festival UK and the Jodhpur RIFF festival India.

Nani showcased at APAP USA, Jazzahead DE and Injazz NL. The held talks at TEDx Amsterdam NL & hosted 3 WOMEX panels. The Dutch NPO network released a mini documentary about her musical work and she also composed music for BBC4 and NPO documentaries.

Nani is a professor at the London Performing Academy of Music and the Jerusalem Music Academy, she chairs of the Amsterdam Artist Collective and founded Why DIY Music and Nova Productions.

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A musical phenomenon Freiburg Kultuurbuerse.

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Vision Beyond the Frame

Interviewed By Teddy Hayes 24

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helley Rodgers is a Northern Irish photographer and digital creator. Shelley is also the founder, editor and partner in World Equal Magazine. In 2016 she founded the ground-breaking Belfast, London Edinburgh and Newry Alternative Fashion Week.

With qualifications including BA (HONS) in Fine Arts and Applied Arts, PGCFHE in teaching further and higher education and an MFA in Fine and Applied Arts (lensbased media). Shelley taught photography over fifteen years with tenure in Northern Ireland’s Southeastern Regional College (SERC).

Shelley Rodgers’ photography work has been extensively published in Northern Ireland with over twenty front covers in the main commercial magazines of the region such as the “Ulster Tatler,” “Northern Woman” and “Ulster Bride” to name a few.

Teddy Hayes - You are a portrait photographer what was your inspiration for becoming a portrait photographer, let’s say as opposed to a nature photographer.?

Shelley Rodgers - I have two influential pioneer photographers that I studied from an early age when I first found photography and the meaning behind it ‘The art of drawing with light’ with the literal meaning of photography meaning, photo meaning written in light and graphy meaning is the ‘drawing or pictures, especially in publishing, industry, or computing’ The first is Henri Cartier Bresson who was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. His use of black and white 35mm film photography was truly outstanding for his time.

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.

- VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

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The second is Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. However, he was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself. I love the work of May Ray and his dedication to his artist character.

Teddy Hayes - When you take someone's photo what do you look for in the subject, and how do you bring out the artistry in your photos?

Shelley Rodgers - Generally I look for certain forms and guides that I follow. The shape of the face the line of the subject and of course the lighting. I also look for different emotions in the face of my subject and Enjoy watching them change and become themselves and comfortable. However, the most important aspect of my work in the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul and being so up close to these fascinating inner windows I try to capture the different and uniqueness of each individual person. My images are also somewhat sculptural and seem to have a signature look which is such an important quality to the work that I have always created, it is perhaps what every artist strives for really.

Some photoshoots are very complicated to prepare with a complexity of organisation. Such as a creative shoot involves travel, location, theme, lighting hairdressers, designers, weather, set design, venue inside or outside, permission etc. Whereas a corporate photoshoot is very controllable with it being in a studio with controlled lighting and environment. I enjoy them all and find the diversity embracing both creative and formal shoots.

Teddy Hayes - How did you get started?

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Shelley Rodgers - From no age I was also very creative using my hands to make to knit, sew and helping my grandmother on my mother side who was phenomenal, she could make almost anything. She made clothes for her entire area in the troubles from all the children to make sure they all had clothes to go to school. She also fed everyone in the street if the needed it everyone love granny Sadie Henry. She was my rock and encouraged me to the follow the path of creativity.

My parents wanted me to study law, but I was always crafting, painting and drawing and then II picked up a camera. That was it I stranger to use the dark room in school which no one really used, and I generally had it all to myself. I sent hours and hours down in the basement of my school Glenlola Collegiate Grammar in Bangor from the age of 12 onwards. I found it so relaxing and from the first minute that I started working in the darkroom I could use it really without instruction. I just came naturally. So, I begged my parents for many years to go to Art school. After years they gave in and said I had to make had the decision myself which was simply put ‘It’s up to you to make the choice. However, if you choose the path of Art, you will be probably skint for the rest of your life, but you will be happy following your passion. It incredibly competitive and statistically difficult to have a career in the Arts (which it was in the 90 being seen as an artist you were seen as a waster, a non-starter) or you can have a career in law and prosperous life with a substantial career’.

I choose the Arts and Art College and never looked back and after meeting various people who work in the Legal profession, I’m so glad I did.

Teddy Hayes - How did the troubles in Northern Ireland when you were growing up affect your photography, if at all?

Shelley Rodgers - The troubles affected everyone and everything in Northern Ireland when I was growing up, I was very lucky moving from North Belfast at a young age to Bangor which is 14 miles from Belfast however both my grandparents remained in Belfast. I was difficult going 27

My idea was that if I took a picture of somebody and years later, or whenever, they would die and if someone wanted to know who this person was, they could take one of these pictures and it would tell who the person was.

David LaChapelle

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Model: Gordon Flynn Photographer: Shelley Rodgers

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to Uni at times because of roadblocks, soldiers on the streets, bombs going off on a weekly sometimes daily based, incendiary devices in the shops, innocent people being killed and ongoing flash points at every turn etc but that was all normal at that time.

During the troubles the creative Arts where drained and somewhat not important in the way that out her majors were. We were starved of the Arts travelling to Norther Ireland such as bands etc didn't travel here, in fact no one travelled here. The south of Ireland was rich in Arts and Culture, so we travel there quite a lot especially for firsthand experience of gallery and workshops. It was like a different world. Most ppl decided to study in Dublin or across the pond, but I was like why should I? I’m staying here besides everything that was going on I believed that Northern Itish Talent should be kept in our country so that we would have an arts community of some of the best artists I'm the North and artists fruition was kept in North of Ireland. However, with most professions or subject’s friends of friends or people with money (powerful folk) no matter what their ability were given places while people with natural talent was overlooked.

Teddy Hayes - You used to teach photography. tell us a bit about that part of your life.

Shelley Rodgers - I started teaching to pay for my master’s and then I completed a teaching Postgraduate in further and higher education while teaching. I loved the students and really wanted to give back to them because I knew I wouldn’t be teaching forever. I taught photograph and art, with subjectfrom kids with learning difficulties called Occupational studies, GCSE, A level, foundation art and design, City and Guilds and HND. I found the college and the policies crazy as they changed all the time. It was the beginning of mass internet and digital, so it was a big transition from traditional black and white 35mm and medium Format film and analogue photography. I tried to keep the old practices alive and the darkrooms running alongside the digital suites because after all that’s where we understand light. Today everyone has a camera but there is little understanding of the science and the origins with many people in the general population.

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.—

Teddy Hayes - You told me a very interesting story about your mother who said she would only help you build a studio once you had attained a certain level with your photography. How did you react to that? How difficult was that for you to achieve?

Shelley Rodgers - I found it a challenge. Which I accepted and achieved within a year. I found my images through a commission on three Ulster Tatler covers in one year and the rest is history. All in all, I achieved over 20 from covers in a few years. The studio that we build from the ground upwards was mine and my mother’s dream, but she unfortunately took cancer at 59 and died within 8 months after a late misdiagnosis. It was a very sad time. Then the studio was lost in an ongoing dispute.

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Teddy Hayes - Who were your influences when you were creating your photographic style?

Shelley Rodgers - I have many influences in my later work with the two main ones being, Nicholas David Gordon Knight CBE (born 24 November 1958) is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nick night (1994) and Nick Knight (2009). In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price.

And the second influence David LaChapelle is an American photographer, music video director and film director. He is best known for his work in fashion, photography, which often references art history and sometimes conveys social messages. His photographic style has been described as "hyper-real and slyly subversive" and as "kitsch pop surrealism". Once called the Fellini of photography, LaChapelle has worked for international publications and has had his work exhibited in commercial galleries and institutions around the world.

Teddy Hayes - What do you look for in a face to make it uniquely photographable?

Shelley Rodgers - If I like what I’m shooting it’s exciting. If I don’t like it just doesn’t flow or work for me, but I snap away but 99 times out 100 no one can tell the difference.

Sometimes I’m just drawn to a person, and I muse a way. I genuinely think every face is interested to shoot, the beauty about life is that we are all unique and each of us have different personalities, face characteristics and personalities and each person has their own characteristics such as bone structure, skin, eyes, mouth, hair, facial structure which makes shoots portrait so interesting and exciting because no two people are the same.

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Teddy Hayes - You are master at lighting; how long did it take you to learn this skill?

Shelley Rodgers - Photography in the 80s and 90s was a man world in the department where I worked for many years, I was the only female which presented it challengeson a day-to-day basis. Especially will EQUAL pay and EQUAL respect. I started working in a studio during my BA to make ends meet and just adored it however most of the male employees got the good jobs regardless of talent and the female staff where in sales and printing and framing.

A plus point was when I started teaching I had access to a studio all the time with lots of equipment which was evolving all the time and replaced to the latest spec every year so I was spoilt for choice during my tenure at SERC and was extremely knowledgeable about all the latest tech which I miss dearly. I was there 15 years - 20 years.

Peter and Larry Coryell published on American web dedicated to Emily Remler.

Teddy Hayes - when you started with photography, lots of people were still using film cameras as opposed to digital cameras, how did you make the adjustment?

Shelley Rodgers - I did not like it at the time because it opened up the photography world to the masses and competition became fierce with the possibility of employment for many people difficult and it still is. Now it seems normal, and AI is the next challenge in the photographic and image world. I’m super excited to see how that evolves but I believe should be licensed heavily.

But it’s out now, it will be interesting to see how it pans out. I’ve a lot to say on this subject but I’ll keep that for next time.

Teddy Hayes - Do you think that because anyone and everyone can be an amateur photographer with their mobiles that the art of photography was suffered?

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Don't be into trends. Don't make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live.

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Shelley Rodgers - Yes and the careers of artists and photographers like me because everyone had access to mobile phones with extremely power camera built in.

After the paps started making money and the internet and cctv in the 90s everything changed. But the evolution of lens intrigues me, and it always will. How far will it go?????

Teddy Hayes - Your photograph often times involves making the subject up, especially when you are creating personalities, how do you come up with the ideas for your creations.

Shelley Rodgers - They just happen. What I see I interpret in my own way. Especially recently. It all comes extremely natural to me. I enjoy the creative shoots very much. To create these shoots sometimes there can be months of preparation for one shoot and sometimes even one image.

I class these particular images created as my personal work, this is ongoing and will continue on God the rest of my life.

Teddy Hayes - You have worked on many different genres on Photography such as Portraiture, Commercial, Creative, Fashion, music and many many others. Tell us a bit about which you feel more comfortable in and which area you are drawn to the most?

Shelley Rodgers - Personally I love studio work and the creative shoots. Generally, I have found that each area of portrait photography is equally challenging however some subjects find it difficult and that makes a shoot very complex, mainly because they are uncomfortable and nervous so It is important make people feel at ease. Whereas others you just sail through. Also there seems to be a lot of inexperienced photographers because cameras are now extremely accessible or because they are friends of friends getting jobs in the industry and trained photographers are being overlooked because of the digital transition which could ‘not have happened with film photography mostly because it was accessible and also it was too expensive, time consuming and complicated for the general public.

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"The brands that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that have purpose beyond profit."

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Donna Kennedy International https://www.donnakennedy.com/

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"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.

It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Teddy Hayes - You are also a very good artist, as in you can draw things on paper, and you have recently created a whole world of characters for one of your books and then made portraits of them. How did this project come about?

Shelley Rodgers - I created Aurora for my niece Maya. It started off with me telling her story’s when she was a baby.

From this I began to draw out characters such as Aurora herself, Astra her guardian and array of friends and tribes in different worlds that they can be accessed through portals.

This process is ongoing and has the possibilities of lasting a lifetime. I get my inspiration from people that I meet and situations that happen in my life. For an example there is a chapter where Aurora meets two sisters one of them represents Life, she is a vibrant, radiant character called Anastasia. The other sister is called Azrael and is a dark character that tries to influence Aurora into making bad decisions. She tries to hurt Aurora in many different sneaky ways, but Aurora outsmarts her and banishes her to a locked world where she can’t hurt anyone else. I absolutely this fantasy world and hope to continue this ongoing work for some time to come. I will be releasing extracts in each World Equal magazine and hope to publish if fully when I’m ready and I get a publisher to pick it up fingers crossed.

Teddy Hayes - I know you are starting to work with AI, how will you use AI to change or take your photography to another stage in the future.

Shelley Rodgers - Once I have the image which I have taken and is my original work. I'm working with various programmes, testing and playing to see how it all works. I'm enjoying it.

Teddy Hayes - What is the most important thing you would reel any young photographer who wants to follow in your shoes and become a professional photographer.

Know your history and it's a competitive industry. Do it for love Interview by Teddy Hayes 41

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Model Kitty Catt Photography: Shelley Rodgers

Sabrana Bewitched Shelley Rodgers

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DRAG ?

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The Chronicles Of

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Like hordes of others, best-selling author Dave Dawson has spent decades crisscrossing the country as a solo full-time professional musician. During his 30 years on the road, he has performed thousands of shows before tens of thousands of people, yet still remains one of the army of anonymous entertainers who literally sing for their supper, as part of the “Never Ending UK Tour” From pubs to clubs, dives to luxury hotels, theatres to gardens, and hen nights to care homes, there’s hardly a live environment that he hasn’t encountered, enjoyed or endured.

Along the way, he’s had brushes with fame and fandom, strippers and stalkers, crooks and colourful characters, hecklers and prima donnas… and has banked a wealth of experience at the brunt of the live music circuit. Winning over tough crowds in a variety of venues is a nightly struggle and tomorrow you have to do it all again.

The reaction from musicians and music obsessives has been astounding so far with many five star reviews. It is also resonating with the general public, completely unaware of what it takes to survive and make a living on the circuit for over three decades. Dave also lifts the lid on the audition processes of the wave of TV talent shows that have hit our screens.

In this, his fifth book, Dave takes the reader with him as he encounters the Great British Public head on with only a microphone stand and an ad-lib to hide behind. Alongside light-hearted and cautionary tales, 'Pop Idle' provides an invaluable insight into the pleasures and perils that await anyone dedicated or mad enough to want to forge a path into the music industry at the bottom rung of the showbiz ladder.

Five Star Reviews for Pop Idle “I adored this book, it was like having a night out without leaving my sofa.” “I've been looking forward to diving into this music memoir and joining Dave Dawson on his journey through thirty years on the road as a professional singer.

And I have to say that I had an absolute blast reading Pop Idle!”

"A laugh-a-minute group of anecdotes with an astute assessment of the music entertainment business. Dave Dawson has seen a lot in his long singing career from gangsters and male-strippers to dodgy agents, stalkers and everything inbetween. A must-read!"

There's not much glamour in getting changed in the pub toilets with all the light bulbs smashed and no lock on the cubicle door Derek Philpott 51

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Nikkole Hall singer and songwriter You just keep going. You just live what you enjoy, and you put that energy out there and it comes back to you.

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ikkole Hall, a Creole-American singer and songwriter, discusses her music career and recent album "Vulnerable" in an interview. She talks about her musical influences, her independent label, and her desire to create social-conscious music. She also mentions her five-octave vocal range and the positive feedback she has received from industry veterans. Hall expresses her belief in the power of music for global change and the importance of unity and healing in today's divisive world.

Tom Bryant: Okay. Welcome to the show, Nikkole Hall. You are a Creole-American singer and songwriter playing the pink baby grand piano from the tender age of two. Your abilities and passion for music continued through school, glee clubs, and school bands. Your inspiration for the music that you produced today stems from your growing up as a child of the '80s. You've had five studio albums since 2001, all of which achieved great success, and you're also building your independent Powerhouse label. Most recently you've been working with legendary music producer, Leon Sylvers, III on your album Vulnerable, which was released last November, so there's loads more to talk with you.

Thank you so much for joining us, Nikkole, and please tell us more.

Nikkole Hall: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and talk about music and all the things that are exciting to me. I'm just really in a good place right now with this fifth studio album, Vulnerable. Just some good things that are happening at this point, the first single, All Mine, is up for a Hollywood Music and Media nomination for Best Original Song, so I'm excited about that. I find out about that on the 16th. We go to the ceremony. It should be fun.

And yes, and the second single, We Can Make It If We Try, is up for Best Video with Hollywood Music and Media Awards. And then to top that off, I'm in the first phase of Grammy consideration for the album,

Vulnerable, in Best R&B Album, along with the dance song I did with Dave Matthias is up, so fingers crossed. You just never know. You just keep going. You just live what you enjoy, and you put that energy out there and it comes back to you.

Skyler Jett: That's right, that's right. Live what you enjoy.

Tom Bryant:Awesome. Congratulations.

Ryan Shewchuk: That's crazy.

Nikkole Hall: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Skyler Jett: I want to ask you; do you write social-conscious music?

Nikkole Hall: You know, I don't have any that's released, but back in the day, a friend of mine, I remember, had a song that we wrote together called Cares of the World, but it was never released. The idea is that, as we all know, and it's so funny because that's like 10 years ago, nothing's changed so much as far as where we are as people, how we need to grow, how we need to work together. But that is something that I'd like to do more of going forward.

My brother does have a music foundation, so we like to help kids and such to try to get into the industry, and people as well that are already in the industry that are maybe struggling a bit or don't know how to move throughout the ins and outs. It does take a certain amount of flexibility, as we all know, to be able to navigate the ever-changing world of music. So to answer your question with a long answer, Skyler, nothing has been released, but have dabbled in that area. Yeah.

Skyler Jett: Do you know why it hasn't been released?

Nikkole Hall: Because we never completed it. It's a demo. It was never put on a project. We didn't do a one-off or anything, but it's a great song, it is. Yeah, yeah.

Skyler Jett: You can have an amazing song and amazing songs at social consciousness, but there's no platform for it. So even if you guys were to finish the song, there's no place for it to go, because the labels in America, as I find it, they're not willing to take a chance on some social-conscious music. Right?

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Nikkole Hall: I agree with you. I do, and I think that if your name value is of a We Are the World type thing, you can do whatever you want to do. However, my mindset is that with being able to have your label these days or make your moves, if you can market things in a way that is substantial so that you get attention from people, you can connect it to influencers. There are all kinds of ways to go about it. But in my opinion, I have to work in a sense of not working from a major label standpoint, but creating my own rules as I go along, which I've been able to do.

Because years ago, when I first started, no one would've said, "You're an independent artist with your label with your brother.

There's no way you're going to be on the billboard charts. That can't happen. You're not going to be up for a Grammy consideration. You're not on Sony." But if you figure out things, you just have to be diligent with anything. Put your all into it, don't give up. You don't take no for an answer. If you get a no from someone, you're asking the wrong person. That's my mantra, and you keep going. But I do think, Skyler, that there's a way, if you want it to happen, it can happen.

Skyler Jett: In social-conscious music, that's music for global change.

Nikkole Hall: Yes, yes. No doubt.

Skyler Jett: If you could write any type of lyrics at all, write some that could heal us and help us. Right?

Nikkole Hall: I think that that's a valid point, but I also think maybe we could sneak some of those global conscious thoughts into our love songs, into our dance songs, giving people something to think about when they're at the club. You know what I mean? If you can sort of mesh those worlds, maybe that's a way to sort of get the ball rolling or open the doors a little more. It's just a thought that came to me.

Skyler Jett: I look at it like this. I believe more people want to get along than people that don't.

Skyler Jett: And that's what we got to encourage and inspire more of that.

You know what I'm saying? I have this feeling that there's going to be some kind of shift happening. Right?

Nikkole Hall: I agree.

Nikkole Hall: it has to be, because we're also, we're going to go.

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Skyler Jett: That's exactly right. And thank you for coming on, first of all, right?

Nikkole Hall: Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Skyler Jett: Tom, you have a question.

Tom Bryant: You mentioned it already. You try and champion independent artists and artists that try and help people into the industry with a label and with what you do. Is that because you find it difficult yourself, getting into the industry, you felt you were trying to give back to people and help people in that sense, because you felt you had issues yourself, or what was the driving force behind why you do what you do with your label?

Nikkole Hall: Well, for me personally, I started my label in 2000, when it wasn't the cool thing necessarily to do to have your indie label. People were like, "How are you going to do this? I don't understand. How are you going to be seen? You don't have the big machine behind you." But my thought was that I need to control what it is I want to say. I am an artist, I'm a creator, so I don't want someone in the marketing department telling me, "That doesn't work for you. You look like this thing that ..." I needed to do what I wanted to do, so I infused that into my music.

My first album was an alternative pop sort of record, which is different than what I do now, but it's music, right? I love music, so I should be able to do all kinds of music. That's another argument. We'll talk about that next. I was telling my friends that this is the way to go. So I would try to help people and give them, I would read books, and I would connect with entertainment attorneys. I didn't have a large budget of money, but the thing I did do, was instilled in me at a young age, I modelled from the age of 12 to 18. I saved all my money to put into it, I didn't know what I was going to do with it at the time. I thought I was going to just use it for something with my career, but it ended up at that time, "Okay, I'm going to do my album." I did do my album. That album was number one out of 25,000 independently released albums that year. From that point forward, the second, and third albums came, and I've licensed 48 songs to MTV. I'm putting it all in a nutshell. Believe me, blood, sweat and tears

were all into it. But the point is consistency. So I try to instill that in friends who are artists and musicians and help them along the way. So that's what my brother and I always wanted to do.

Sometimes, though, you have friends, who you love to pieces, but they don't want to listen, and they think they know more. And not coming from the standpoint of me being cocky, but coming from the standpoint of, "Look at what I've done." Do you know what I mean? So, "I want to help you get to a higher level as well.

Let's grow together."

But what's interesting about that is that a lot of, I haven't talked about this, this will be the first time I'll say this, is that a lot of people that you're friends with in the industry aren't your friends, because it's some sort of a weird competition. And I would say to them, "We're not competing. We're all wonderful artists in our rights. Be you, don't be me. I'm not going to try to be Beyonce.

Let Beyonce be her. Let's be who we are."

And trying to get back to your full question, Tom, the idea still that I have to this day, and I have with my brother, which is why he has the foundation, Live the Dream Tour Foundation, we have our label, LA International Records with Leon Sylvers, is that we want to infuse a place in the market of good music and allowing artists to be themselves or teaching them how to be themselves, but only if you want to learn. If you don't want to learn, I won't waste your time, you don't waste mine, and that's kind of the place I'm at now.

I can smile about it, but I was frustrated for many moons because I could see things, I can see things in other people that need to be, that could be just switched a little bit, and then you can do this, but they won't listen to you. So now I'm at a place just like, "Okay, if you want to come to me to help, I'll help you. If not, we'll still be cool. We'll keep it moving, but let's not waste each other's time." So yeah.

Tom Bryant: Thank you.

Skyler Jett: That sounds like LA to me.

Nikkole Hall: It's the music industry, it is the music industry, and I guess it's entertainment as a whole. Do you know what I mean?

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Skyler Jett: LA is a trip. I mean, everybody, I remember I would ask singers to come over, "Hey, man. Can you come over and sing some background? Just come over four o'clock, just come over tomorrow," and they never show up. Nobody ever shows up.

So I say, "Okay, I'm going to have to start doing them myself."

And so that's why I created a certain type of just everybody, you know your voice, you know your harmony, you know when to cut off the note when to give the note emotion, all of that stuff, you know it better than anybody else that you're going to teach.

Ryan Shewchuk: Yeah. Listen, I'm a product of the '80s too, so who did you want to be with your hairbrush in the bedroom, just singing to yourself? I love how it's us four singers here, just getting to talk.

Nikkole Hall: That's right.

Nikkole Hall: Well, that's a great question too, Ryan. Well, I come from a household where music was just all around us. My brother and I would wake up on weekends to my mom cleaning the house with gospel music playing. That was instilled in us. I was born in North Carolina, so it's in a sense of like, "You're going to go to church on Sunday," my grandmother, but my mom wasn't so pushy with that kind of a thing.

But the thing was that we loved all kinds of music, but she played a lot of the older '70s music at that time. So I was singing songs from the Manhattans at a young age or Earth, Wind and Fire or The Emotions or Natalie Cole. So, I'm going to stick with Natalie Cole for a second, because somehow, even though she was hitting in the early, well, early '70s, her hits were stemming over, as we know, to '80s and forward.

So, my mom would be playing these older songs in the '80s. I was looking at Natalie Cole as this amazing artist who could sing anything. And that was something to me that was there was a light bulb that went off in my head at a young age where I was thinking to myself, "I don't have to stick to one kind of music. I can sing anything. As long as you can sing and you love it and you enjoy it, why put me in a box of, 'Nicole only sings this?' No, a singer sings anything."

So, Natalie Cole was a big artist. I loved Whitney Houston, of course. Going back again, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin, are all the people that I heard growing up, in addition to Jimi Hendrix, and Journey, so your powerhouse groups. The Commodore, of course. And so it's just an incredible musical journey that I had at a young age. My mom even played this album that came out in the '70s by Isaac Hayes, and I think it was a song called I Stand Accused.

Skyler Jett: Right? Background singing is way harder to sing and lead.

Nikkole Hall: Oh, yeah. The blending, the essence of the feel of what you're doing is so important. And if you talk about LA, of course, we can laugh and joke. The flake factor's high here, about 50% flake factor. But some great people are here. I'm not knocking that whatsoever. But the idea is that really because I think people have to be so tough and strong to be in major cities, New York, Chicago, whatever, that the mentality still spills over to friendships. And you're like, "Hey, you're in a safe space with me. All I want to do is help. So we don't have to be rough with each other, because there's nothing to fear when it's all in love."

And I think if you can instil that in more of our artists in the musical community, we could come together and maybe be more of a force to even do more global music like you talked about. But it's a matter of us all coming together and making that statement as opposed to the idea of being separate, "I'm fighting against you." "There's no fight. We're all amazing in our rights." Yeah.

Tom Bryant: Yeah.

Skyler Jett: That's right. Ryan, you got a question?

Ryan Shewchuk: Let's keep talking about the '80s.

Nikkole Hall: I saw you kind of light up when I was like, "'80s"

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Nikkole Hall: No doubt, yeah.

Ryan Shewchuk: Except I'm terrible at it in just karaoke, but I want it to be Prince. Who did you look up to when you were young?

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Skyler Jett: Oh, yeah.

Nikkole Hall: Now, really, what 4-year-old girl in the '80s is into this hot, buttered soul kind of concept? You know what I'm saying? That's who I was, so I was sort of a unique individual, and my brother and I and cousins, during that time, before I moved to Los Angeles at six, we would put together little groups and shows and promote it to our families, and we sold tickets. So, we always had this mindset of we're going to perform, and we would perform these songs, so we would perform songs from these groups. And so going back to the '80s as well, that's where my love of music also with Solo with Leon Sylvers, so we're talking about Shalamar, loved Jody Watley's voice. We're talking about the Whispers, Lakeside, Midnight Star, all of these incredible artists that sort of shaped who I am of this amalgamation of just good music.

Skyler Jett: The bass player of Commodores, Ronald LaPread, wrote Brick House and Zoom, right, I'm doing a song with him right now after 35 years.

Nikkole Hall: What?

Skyler Jett: He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and he wanted me to write the bridge to it, but they're putting all these famous country singers on, and that dude, Ruben Studdard, is supposed to be on this thing.

Nikkole Hall: That's amazing.

Skyler Jett: And it's to give to education in Alabama, right?

Nikkole Hall:I love that, yes.

Skyler Jett: Because 35 years ago, I did a song with Ronald, and we did the same thing. So they asked us to do it again after all these years.

Nikkole Hall: That's amazing.

Skyler Jett:T hat's so cool, right? Well, the fact that we could give back.

Nikkole Hall: Yeah, I love that.

Skyler Jett: Use just a percentage of your ... If you go pay an agent 15%, imagine helping some foundations keep their doors open.

Nikkole Hall: That's the part, that's the part. Yeah.

Skyler Jett: Tom, you got a question?

Tom Bryant: A little bit about, if you don't mind, about your album, Vulnerable. What's the kind of message behind it, and what was the thought process behind some of the tracks that you got on that?

Nikkole Hall: Well, with this particular outing, I knew I wanted to do something different than my previous projects. And so I was just trying to figure out with my brother, who do I want to produce this album? I needed someone who could relate to my experiences, but who also knew how to make a hit. And so, he and I were talking one night at his house, and we're listening to music, and all of a sudden, a Shalamar song came on, and we're like, "What?" And then my brother says, "What about Leon Sylvers?" And I said, "Well, what about Leon Sylvers? Yeah, okay."

So we gave him a call. He was amenable. He came down to our studio, and we talked and we felt like family from the first connection. We decided to because I've sometimes jumped the gun in the past and said, "Yes, let's work together right away," and then shouldn't have said it that fast, but I learned my lessons in this case. I was like, "Let's try it out, let's just try a couple songs, let's try three songs." So, we did, and it was fantastic.

And I knew from that point that the album was going to be called Vulnerable because of some things that I had gone through personally, relationship-wise, life-wise, and I wanted to tell a true story of something that I felt people could relate to and cut through all the BS of material that's out there, but say, "Hey, this is something that I feel the emotions of, and I feel it being organic, and she's telling her truth."

And that's what this outing has been with Vulnerable, wanting to weave a story, telling a story through an album you used to do back in the day. Because now, as we know, people are more about, "What's that hot single? Put the next one out?" And so I didn't care about that. I understand marketing-wise, what that

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means, an algorithm's a whole thing, but this, to me, was a project of love and something that was needed in the music world, and that's what we did with Vulnerable. And to me, it's one of my favourite projects to date.

I know a lot of people say that about the most recent things that they do, but I sincerely mean that. Whatever I do next I'm sure is going to be wonderful and exciting, but this is super special to me. The way we wrote it in the studio, like Leon and I would write on the spot, I would sing, it wasn't like you came in and had a song ready and you sing this song cookie-cutter. It was, "What do we feel now in this moment?" And the other songwriters, amazing people came in and helped on the project as well, and I couldn't be more honoured by Ricky Freeze playing bass and writing a song. I mean, we all know he's with the time, but he worked with Leon on so many projects. So just Ray Parker, Jr. wrote a song with us. It's just all these incredible people that came in.

Ryan Shewchuk: That's amazing.

Nikkole Hall: I know. I'm like, "What did I do to deserve this?"

I'm like, "Oh, my God. This is incredible." But it felt likeSkyler Jett: What? Wait a minute. What? Yeah, cool.

Ryan Shewchuk: Did you get it cool?

Nikkole Hall: Seriously. It felt like, do you know what I mean, that moment of, you know how it is, you look at yourself and you're like, "I'm working hard. I'm continuing to grow." But then when you have people you've looked up to, you grew up listening to, and they're telling you, "Oh, that's hot. I like that." You know what I mean? It's a surreal thing Skyler Jett:I t's like you've arrived, right?

Nikkole Hall:I It is, it is, but you're still like, "Really? Me? You're talking to me like ... Okay." It's that kind of thing, even though you feel, you know what I mean, it's professional and the whole thing, but it's something different when it comes from your idols if you will.

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Skyler Jett: Yeah. Ryan, you got a question?

Ryan Shewchuk: I read in an interview that you have a fiveoctave vocal range.

Nikkole Hall: Yes. It's so funny, Ryan, that you should mention that. I just have to say, that I went to this event very quickly on Saturday for Felton Pilate's birthday, who's from Con Funk Shun, one of the original members of Con Funk Shun. And so I met Hubert Laws.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with him but from the Laws family. Anyway, an amazing artist, Hubert Laws.

Skyler Jett: Yes, Hubert is, yes.

Nikkole Hall: Yes, yes, yes. So, I'm talking to him at the table, he's just talking to me. He's like, "You don't know who I am." I go, "Actually, I do." He just didn't think I would know who he was. I go, "I do." So anyway, we exchanged information. He wants to hear my music. He listens to the music and goes to the fiveoctave range. So my second single, I'm showcasing some of the higher range in the song, and he messaged me and he goes, "Oh, my God, Nikkole. I listened to that song, and your voice gave me chills, and I had no idea that you had such a range and that you were such a soulful singer." Now that, Ryan, I was like, "What?" I can't even believe that. So it touched on the fact that he ... Oh, wait, I forgot about the most amazing part of it. He then equated me to Minnie Riperton, because he worked with Minnie Riperton.

Skyler Jett: Right. Now, she had some octaves.

Nikkole Hall: And she had some octaves, and he's like, "You remind me of Minnie Riperton." I could have just died, I could have just died.

Ryan Shewchuk: You go, "All right." That's all you need.

Nikkole Hall: I have no [inaudible 00:21:08] that text message.

You don't do it just because, "Oh, I want to make money from this," or we'd probably be doing something different. You do it ' love it, and then to have the adoration and the because you

recognition from people that you just are in awe of, it just shows you, "All right, I'm a good student of this, and I'll keep learning."

Yeah. That's the way I'll do it.

Ryan Shewchuk: That's amazing. For those of you out there in YouTube land who may not understand what a five-octave vocal range is, you're talking like Mariah Carey, one of my exgirlfriends. It ended amicably. But you're talking Maria Careytype of vocals here. That's amazing. Wow. When I read that, I was like, "Okay, she can sing."

Nikkole Hall: That's the thing. And Mariah Carey grew up listening to Minnie Riperton, so I'm sure when she's had the comparison, she's been like, "Okay."

Ryan Shewchuk: Yeah, I remember her telling me that. I do remember that, yeah.

Nikkole Hall: Remember when you guys were dating, I remember that, remember that.

Skyler Jett: What a beautiful gift to have.

Nikkole Hall: Thank you, thank you.

Skyler Jett: You know what I mean? What a beautiful gift to have that.

Nikkole Hall: I don't take it for granted. I don't take anything, any of the gifts for granted, but with the gifts, you do apply, the lessons learned, and you continue working and growing and surrounding yourself with amazing people that just open you up.

Skyler Jett: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For us, it's about music for global change. I'm going to keep drilling that if you could see.

Nikkole Hall: You should.

Ryan Shewchuk: Man on a mission.

Skyler Jett: Taking your voice and putting it on a song that's going to change the world could be even more powerful.

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Nikkole Hall:Yeah. I'm certainly open to it. I think it's an amazing gift that we could give back to the world. I think that we should be doing more songs that are of healing energy.

Skyler Jett: What would you write about?

Nikkole Hall: Oh, my God. That's a lot to unpack right now.

There are so many things going on, but one thing I would like to thread back in is not to have this divisiveness that seems to be prevalent in what's going on right now in the world. So, I would like to talk more about the sense that we're all human beings.

Forget this whole race thing. I know we need to know our history; we need to understand where we came from so that we don't repeat things. However, the divisiveness that's happening now that I see is kind of scary to me, and I'd like to heal, whatever we need to do to heal that, I'd like to talk about that.

Skyler Jett:Listen, namaste, namaste, namaste.

Nikkole Hall: Yes. Skyler Jett:Bless you for the privilege of your time to come on and share ...

Ryan Shewchuk: Thank you so much.

Tom Bryant: Thanks for joining us.

Skyler Jett: ... share your feelings with us. Okay?

Tom Bryant: Take care.

Nikkole Hall: Thank you guys for having me. Take care Ryan Shewchuk: Thank you, Nikkole.

Tom Bryant: Thanks for joining us.

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Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts…so keep it ..

Nikkole Hall

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The earth, the air, the land, and the water are not an inheritance from our forefathers but on loan from our children. So, we have to handover to them at least as it was handed over to us.

- Gandhi

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B

rendan Megarity is an Irish artist based in Belfast; he has been. practicing his art full time since leaving art college aged 23. Over the years since leaving college he has been involved in a diverse range of other creative industries such as freelance illustration for design firms, backdrop painting for a few theaters, traditional signwriting, special effects painting for Disney and interior design contractors, teaching calligraphy and drawing night. classes and has done street art busking in the UK, France and Italy. He currently tutors the mature artists of a couple of established art groups in the city and around Ireland, giving demonstrations in painting techniques, color. mixing and aspects of portraiture. Over the years he has taken part in group shows throughout Ireland, in England and in Spain, and has put on solo. exhibitions in N. Ireland, Republic of Ireland and Barcelona.

Corinne O'Neill : What inspires you and how do you stay motivated?

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Brendan McGarity : I get inspiration for my own work by seeing the work of other artists in books or in museums and galleries, artists such as Whistler, Joan Eardley, Goya, early Bacon, Schiele, Frankenthaler and Gauguin. It's rarely them. whole body of work but individual paintings, even a fragment within a piece

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where there's something intriguing about the application of colours beneath and above each other, trying to unravel how it was put together.

I've a studio in an old linen mill in Belfast which I love. It's full of all me. gear and hundreds of CDs and my old bicycle which I will get round to fixing. one of these bright evenings when the sun swings by in the evening. I've the music or the radio on the moment I go in, I'll listen to some topical phone in show for a while get a bit bored with it and put a cd on instead. Depending on my mood I might give The Stranglers or the Doors a listen or even flamenco. guitar which I love particularly Paco De Lucia.

I've amassed all sorts of styles. of music but I have to say I'm a big Beatles fan and especially Lennon's solo work, I've always admired his bravery and honesty. I never work in silence. when I'm there, it's good to have the company if I'm struggling and indecisive. about where to go or what to do with an image.

Corinne O'Neill : How has your education helped you in your career?

Brendan McGarity : Back then in school and even today art wasn't considered an important and serious subject to study, it was something young people with a talent did, a hobby they'll grow out of. Of course this is an absurd notion since every. object around us and everything we use began as a doodle or a drawing and was coloured in before ever coming into being. The odd person will still approach me if I'm out and about drawing and tell me ‘That’s some talent. you've been born with I wish I could do that', I always say how I couldn't agree.

I just showed more of an interest at a young age and as with anything the more you do it the better you'll get much like playing an instrument, I guess. I was very young but can still remember on my mum's knee watching her draw. the outline of a car, following the line of the pen as it smoothly and effortlessly went up and around and over the arches with two circles for wheels, this car. was made just like that! I had the poor woman tortured doing it over and over. again, but I was just fascinated by it.

I was the only pupil in my whole year that did the state exams in art until I left at 18, I had the art room to myself with a very old teacher for company. It was quite a stuffy art education though, I was in my teens and raring to go but being old the teacher had me drawing geraniums meticulously. The best thing 65

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she taught me and has served me well over the years was lettering and calligraphy. I went to art college to study graphic design after a couple of general art. foundation years in another college but was asked to leave after a couple of years having missed too many deadlines; my heart wasn't in the graphics end. of things at the time and I tried to transfer to the fine art dept but was unsuccessful. So out into the big bad world to begin trying to scrape a living. together. After a few years hanging around Belfast and wanting to try. somewhere different I decided to move to Dublin, and it was a breath of fresh. air. I lived there for several years, and it was a very new and exciting time, getting by doing pavement art, freelance illustration and commissions.

I then spent a couple of years in Brighton England after leaving Dublin. and did much the same thing, I got myself a studio and painted commissions. and took part in various group shows there. I'd hoped to make some. connections in London but that proved difficult at that time since Brighton itself. was full of artists and illustrators trying the same thing. Work and exhibition. offers took me back to Belfast and I've been here since, just as I say that I think my feet are getting itchy again!!

Corinne O'Neill : Can you walk us through your creative process?

Brendan McGarity : All my full colour paintings are derived from much smaller back and white sketches, studies of the human figure, people's faces, still life, animals and people as they pass by. These small sketches are done most often with a brush and Indian ink on a type of heavy card with a resistant coating which. slows the drying of the ink allowing it to be moved around. I think I enjoy about sketching in this way is the speed of things, quick observation with quick drying. ink, trying to distil a scene or someone’s face into a bare abstraction, laying. down enough marks through sharp and half-squinted observation that captures something of that moment.

Of course, working quickly there's the chance and hope that some accidental run or bleed of ink will add something intriguing to the overall appearance. Although sketching is part of any artist's artistic endeavour there's something almost throwaway about it, but it has a built-in freedom to it unhindered by any. sense of being precious about a more finished painting or drawing.

I'll rummage through postcard sized sketches and choose

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something that I like. or have maybe half forgotten about but can imagine on a much bigger scale. Having never really enjoyed the spring in any stretched canvas no matter how taught I now only paint on boards which I coat with gesso, it's a lengthy process. using rabbit skin glue and fine plaster whiting.

The surface is sized with the glue and the warmed gesso applied with as many as 8-10 coats on a board, when dried it's a very tough surface but if it's wiped with a wet cloth, it'll turn soft? but for just a few minutes before hardening again. Because I'm working from a black and white source I'll mix up any colour and begin to copy the marks of the sketch, with each layer I'll scrape and scratch the gesso with a variety of tools. such as razor blades, blunt penknives, an old credit card and repeat this. process where fresh layers overlap with the traces of previous colours to suggest additional colours and shapes of marks. In what is often the long middle section of any painting I'll ignore the source. sketch and let the colours and marks revealed by the abrasion of the surface. dictate what I'll do next. Of course, despite the intensive reworking of the painted surface I'm still looking to retain the quality of simplicity within the original sketch.

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Corinne O'Neill : What inspires your work at the moment ?

Brendan McGarity : 'Im now 57 and over the last few months memories of certain artworks. that had grabbed my imagination many years ago keep coming into my head. more and more. There's a Rembrandt sketch of his wife sleeping done with a brush and sepia ink that is just perfect, you couldn't look at it and think it could. do with a mark there or that it would be better without that line. I came across it. as a teenager when like most teenage art students, I was overnight able to draw. and shade exactly what I was looking at and can remember being so excited by it.

Other artworks that grabbed my imagination were Robert Rauchenburg's erased De Kooning drawing, Picasso's Guernica which is vast and still. shocking, Goya's black paintings, Hockney's line drawings of young men showering, Ad Reinhart's black paintings, the evolution of Mondrian's style, an Edward Hopper painting in Madrid for the lush quality of the paint or a large Michaelangelo cartoon in London where you'd think he just finished it and left. the room.

Remembering any of these or other images I suppose it's their daring. and carefreeness that's so striking about them and which I find both exciting. and inspiring.

Last year I entered and was accepted to take part in the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition and despite not proceeding through the competition further it has left me with a real sense of drive and purpose.

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Corinne O'Neill : Describe a significant piece of your work that has opened up new ideas. of approach?

Brendan McGarity : During the pandemic I'd taken up a small room in the house to work away in. I'd begun in the usual way of picking a very abstract small figure sketch and began copying it onto an existing large painting of an awful landscape I'd tried. to paint. It was the first-time using other tools along with brushes such as a variety of blades, lino cutters etc, I was able to draw into the old painting, smear paint across its surface letting it catch in the cracks and crevices and go. about constructing the painting in this way. This approach had given me new. and exciting way of working where these new tools gave me marks I couldn’t. have got by using brushes alone, it was an exciting discovery during the weird housebound pandemic.

Corinne O'Neill :, Can you share an example of a recent exhibition or project that was particularly successful and what the organisation felt contributed to it's success?

Brendan McGarity : In March 2023 I had been invited to put on a solo exhibition in the Engine Room Gallery in Belfast. The exhibition had a total of seventy works in it. ranging from large scale oil paintings to a variety of drawings and sketches. It was very well attended by both fellow artists, gallerists and the wider public and resulted in considerable sales. It was a personal success since I had. undertaken to fill the entire gallery and show the development of my figure. based work from early monochrome works on steel through to my latest full. colour work on gesso. The exhibition also contained a departure from the figure and the introduction of new themes relating to fear and fragility.

Corinne O'Neill :,Do you have a website or Instagram? I'd love to follow you.

Brendan McGarity : Yes, I've a website soon to be published it's brendanmegarity.com and yes, I'm on Instagram @bmegarity

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Interview By Corinne O'Neill 73

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AI will be the most transformative technology of the 21st century. It will affect every industry and aspect of our lives.

Jensen Huang CEO at NVIDIA, 2021

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What is AI? The Origins In the field of arts, AI has been gradually applied in different areas, from music to painting. While the artist is likely to still need to be involved in the direction and interpretation of the final product, this type of art could be valuable as a form of expression for those who may have limited ability to create art by themselves. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what could be possible if computers are allowed to be let loose in the world of creativity and expression. There are people currently in the process of making the creation of music an entirely AI process and other projects have managed to teach an AI to paint digital images in the style of famous painters. I should make comparisons between traditional art making and the use of AI to create art. Furthermore, the breakthroughs that have been made though the assistance of robots in the medical field can be mentioned as well. However, the possibility of AI one day used to create entirely original works by itself in any field is something that has been met with a bit of contempt from some artists. AI generated works, like computer generated works before them, are still a fundamentally different form of art from traditionally human generated art. This provides a definition of artificial intelligence and a brief history of AI in the arts.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.

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The future of artificial intelligence is not about man versus machine, but rather man with machine. Together, we can achieve unimaginable heights of innovation and progress.

Fei-Fei Li Computer scientist and Co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, 2021

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“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web.

It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We are nowhere near doing that now.

However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”

—Larry Page

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The term is usually applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experiences. AI has its roots in the 1950s with the development of computers. The development of AI has allowed machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks.

The essay titled "The Impact of AI on the Arts and its Implications for Artists" explores the influence of artificial intelligence on art creation and art consumption, and the future of artists in an AI-driven society. This research is important because AI is gradually being integrated with many modern technologies including art. We are already witnessing AI-generated art and also developing tools that can help human artists in their work. Therefore, understanding the implications of AI in the arts has a far-reaching significance.

The first step is to analysis, it is important to define exactly what AI is and what it is not.

According to Siraj Raval, a data scientist, AI is "a broad field of study that includes many theories, methods and technologies, as well as following.

It is about making computers smart." He further explains that "intelligence is the computational part of the ability to define a plan or solve a problem." What Raval is underscoring here is the idea that AI possesses intelligent processes to complete specific tasks and solve problems.

However, this keyword - intelligent - tends to cause us a bit of a problem in our definition as when we say that an AI is intelligent, the immediate assumption is that the AI is in some way having an intelligent experience, that it has consciousness or understanding.

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This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans."

— Stephen Hawking

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By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it."

– Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute 84

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This is not the case with the majority of AI that exists now; these AIs are not sentient beings, they do not possess consciousness, and nor are they the products of minds in the same way that we, as conscious beings, understand ourselves to be. Instead, many of the AI used today, including the AI that is employed as part of digital art applications mentioned later in this paper, work under the principles of narrow AI. This is not the idea of reducing the power or range of an AI, rather it is the opposite - it is the idea that an AI is designed to be narrow, or specific to a particular task. This is the currently available form of AI and underpins our experiences with things like personalized advertising and navigational apps on our smartphones. By Turing's logic, given that AI is seeking to use intelligent processes to generate approaches and plans, the role of AI in digital art creation is fundamentally redefining the landscape where modern art is both produced and critiqued. It is no longer enough, arguably, for digital artists to be artists in the sense of conveying messages with a certain level of aesthetic value; modern digital artists and artists interested in creating digital work need to also turn their minds to how they can adapt or manipulate current AI processes as part of their craft and research. This presents an exciting and burgeoning area of inquiry in this subject area.

In the 50s and 60s, we find the first major seeds of the relationship between AI and the arts. AI was defined and tested in contrast with human capacities, thus finding creative tasks an interesting site for this kind of philosophical and technological endeavour. In this historical moment, AI was not considered a subfield of technology, as it is today. On the contrary, it was seen as a mere branch of cybernetics, in charge of the "understanding of what intelligence is and how it may be reproduced in a machine". Although early computational experiments of automatic art were made in this period, the importance

reattached to these activities was symbolic, stressing the historical role of this kind of early experiments. These were primarily demonstrations of technology, staged for the dissemination of cybernetic ideology. By thematizing how creativity and art expression might be simulated by a machine, cyberneticists could communicate their understanding of humanness. Alas, the development of AI in the arts was stalled in the 70s. The main reason for this technological and theoretical drawback was the AI Winter. This period, which can be identified between 1974 and 1980, periodized the discomfort between AI's grand promises and the total lack of technological and practical advancement in the developing field. Lofty expectations and little funding, together with a series of political attempts to criticize the field (like those in the Lighthill Report), deprived the AI community of any kind of significant result for several years. These resources explain why developments in AIgenerated art became totally a marginal concern in the purported "golden age" of symbolic AI (from 1980 to 2011). The arts reopened to AI after the emergence of machine learning and particularly the development of neural networks. In this more recent period, characterized by a growing value of AI in the arts and the development of a distinct subfield of computational creativity, works become more and more complex and decentralized. This also meant that early mainstream recognition was given to AI-generated art, serving to reintegrate this kind of activity into the contemporary cultural debate.

Shelley and AI .

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"I believe AI is going to change the world more than anything in the history of humanity. More than electricity."

– Kai-Fu Lee, AI Expert, Chairman & CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Author of 'AI Superpowers' and 'AI 2041'

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Art with Attitude(s)

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magine a new tennis ball sailing through the air. This ball is meant to tell its story of flying through the air and how it feels. The trajectory is such that the ball is meant to sail over a nearby fence and land into a lush green pasture, a pasture where the sun shines and flowers grow and all there is safe and secure, but suddenly something unexpected happens…

And instead of the ball sailing cleanly over the fence as planned, the ball hits the top of the fence and bounces here and there and down and into a nearby wall, then through a broken window and down a flight of grimy stairs and then out through the door of the house and onto the crowded road where it lands in a puddle of dirty oily water. Now the ball is different, instead of being all nice and clean it is a bit torn with bits of broken glass sticking in it, but wait…something else has happened. The oil in the water has created a rainbow, a rainbow that has imposed its beautiful colors onto the ball and now the ball is not only different in character but in colour as well. Now the ball has a story to tell which is very different from the one it was intended to tell. Instead of a pleasant pasture with sunshine and flowers the ball now can tell of a different journey.

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EQUAL Applying the same principal to the life of a young man born in Birmingham in 1991, in the middle of jungle music genre, you have the story of Curtis Donovan, a child born in the once industrial town of Birmingham England to Jamaican grandparents. As a child Curtis’s natural inclination was to do things with his hands. He made and created things like drawings on paper. And as he grew, so did his ambitions and the scale of the things he made. He managed to graduate from simple drawings on paper to drawings on the sides of buildings. Being a dutiful and respectful son, he wanted to live up to his parents’ expectations, so he finished school, then enrolled at art college with the expectation of becoming an interior designer. This would lead him to university where he studied interior architecture and design. The plan was that he would become an interior designer as well as work with theatre, and other forms of interactive arts. This approach assured his family that he would have an education that would provide him with a profession from which he could make a living. Yet all the while he kept his passion for visual art alive by continuing to paint. Having grown up in the peak of analogue technology he was influenced by the raw gritty, handmade multi-cultural elements of society that he reflected and included in his work. By the time he’d finished University, as fate would have it, the opportunities on offer for him to pursue his original plan were minimal, and did not resonate with him, so like the tennis ball thrown across the fence, Curtis found himself deviating from the original plan.

But deviation was not a problem because as he moved forward to consider other avenues, he kept listening to his inner voice telling him to follow his passion. And as a result, he turned confidently and wholehearted to the thing that his soul beckoned him to do. He moved to London and began his life as a professional artist.

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One of the things he did was to deepen his relationship with his past and his long-time love of graffiti, magazine covers, hip hop music and street politics that had influenced him while growing up in the U. K’s second city. As he reflected on all of these influences and combined them with his formal artistic training that included classical as well as contemporary art forms, he began to express himself in a unique way that reflected what he was and what he saw in a way that resonated with others around him. The result was the emergence of a special way of looking at the world that defined him with an art style all his own.

A style that reflected all of his interests and influences from graffiti, global culture, multiculturalism, mysticism, underground music as well as street politics. His use of vibrant colour and subject imbues his painting with an articulated urban energy and excitement that literally shouts “I AM HERE.” As Because it is so reflective of so many of his experiences and influences Curtis's work is Art With Attitude (s). He is currently in the sights of a number of known galleries in London who are talking about exhibitions of Curtis’s work.

And as always Curtis is ever on the lookout for new ways to express his creativity. One of the projects in the planning stage is called CRASH. It utilizes his skills as a performance space designer as well as his visual talents with those of live dance, music and spoken word in a staged presentation.

Those interested in seeing or buying his work or of working with Curtis can make contact via his agent in London at: valued.artplus@gmail.com 10294

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Brigid Sheehan Me and My Bipolar…Forever Together 98

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don’t know why I was the lucky one among my five siblings to develop the bipolar disorder that had manifested itself in many of my extended family.

Eventually discovering that secret was a real turning point as I thought I was the only one and that it was my fault.

Bipolar has never become a friend but I have learnt ways to manage it reasonably well that suit me and almost to appreciate some of the unique qualities that go with it. In the UK, 1 in 50 people are living with bipolar disorder, which is approximately 1.3 million people. Even with such a high number of cases, 72 per cent of those who are diagnosed with bipolar do not know someone else with the condition. Fear, stigma and the resulting secrecy must play a significant part in this despite more seemingly accepting attitudes in recent years. Writing this memoir was a leap of faith. It was during a Covid lockdown, and I had just retired. It just tumbled out and covered the impact of bipolar on my whole life cycle from childhood through teenage years, friendships, career building, having a family, menopause and onwards. A wry, inevitable manicdepressive sense of humour in the book reflects one of my lifelong coping mechanisms. It is not a prescriptive tale as it is purely my story, but I hope it shines some sort of light on a difficult, poorly understood medical condition.

Writing it made me feel liberated and stepping into the glossy, beautiful pages of World Equal magazine makes me feel that I must be in the wrong place with my modest memoir about bipolar. And yet I wonder if some of the creative contributors have experienced the imaginative highs and lows that I have. Creativity and bipolar are often linked along with the depths of despair. Conventional treatment, which hasn’t changed in decades, produces

numbing conformity and can kick the libido into the back of beyond. For some, it is the only way to manage while others bravely live on the edge. I can only offer my own lived experience and hope it helps.

World Equal magazine chatted to Brigid about the book and when and why she wanted to write it.

WORLD EQUAL: When you first started feeling your depression episodes coming on, what were your symptoms? And what age were you when they started?

BRIGID: I wrote my memoir covering my whole lifespan as I believe my first experience of depression was at age 7 following a house move and the sudden loss of friends and my familiar environment. Children would not have been seen as depressed at that time and it is something that is frequently overlooked today.

My symptoms were deep sadness, acute shyness, detachment and I would talk to an imaginary friend. Things improved the following summer when we were outdoors doing sports and I made friends. I did not have those feelings so acutely again until I was 18 although they would surface from time to time in my teens.

What Do Friends Mean to Those With Mental Health Issues?

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WORLD EQUAL: You seemed to start having episodes in the 1970’s when people were not as well informed about bi-polar as an illness. What were your family’s general response? Was there a stigma about someone in the family with a mental issue?

BRIGID: In the 1970s bipolar was still called manic depression and the term was not applied to me. My GP called it exam depression as I was doing my A Levels and there was no expectation on my part that it would be a chronic condition. I was very ill and, looking back, my mother must have recognised the illness that her sister suffered from acutely, but she must have hoped that it would be different for me. I don’t think it was so much stigma as a determination on my mother’s part to protect me. It was not a secret among the wider family and friends.

WORLD EQUAL: You describe depression as being painful, was it both mental as well as physical pain involved?

BRIGID: From the age of 7 I experienced depression as numbness, hopelessness and a feeling in my chest that many people would associate with grief. This, together with a loss of concentration remains the case.

WORLD EQUAL: When you found that you had family members who also had mental issues, how did it make you feel?

BRIGID: I felt very sad to know that my aunt had suffered horribly. I was fond of her, and she was my Godmother. I wished I had known about this. Her condition was shrouded in secrecy.

From my point of view, I was really relieved to know that there was an explanation, and it was not all my fault. It also seemed to explain some of the behaviour of uncles in my family who self medicated with alcohol but were talented when well.

WORLD EQUAL: How did your friends who discovered you had mental issues treat you, especially your university friends. How open were you with them, about your illness?

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BRIGID: When I went to university it was like a new beginning and I was well. I did not expect to be depressed again and I did not share my depression at that time. My old school friends lived through the depression with me and just accepted it. One of the best things about the book was that they found me forty years later on google and we now meet up for lunch every few months being our old 15-year-old selves.

WORLD EQUAL: In your book you write that while you were in Canada, depression played a large part in your life. After those times, how difficult was it to “get back on the horse” so the speak, and resume your life?

BRIGID: My psychiatrist in Canada always said I had a capacity to “function on automatic”. Other than when I was in hospital for several months I worked and managed with drug therapy plus the support of Canadian friends who were just accepting, and I don’t know why.

WORLD EQUAL: When were you officially diagnosed with a bipolar disorder?

BRIGID: I think it was around 1982. Because my episodes tend to be depressive rather than manic my psychiatrist decided that although it looked like “unipolar” she would trial lithium and it proved to be bipolar.

WORLD EQUAL: When you decided to have a family, how reluctant was your partner Joel, because of your illness?

BRIGID: I was the reluctant one who was worried about passing on faulty genes. Joel never seemed to have any doubts or not ones he shared.

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WORLD EQUAL: How has the taking of medication for many years affected your health, both psychologically as well as physically?

BRIGID: Physically I know that lithium and antidepressants take a toll. I always have regular checks to ensure my kidney function.

Psychologically I could not have managed any other way and I admire those who do. I tend to think of bipolar as a physical condition that has mental health manifestations.

WORLD EQUAL: How do you feel about alternative treatment for Bi-polar disorders. Why would you recommend or not recommend them? e.g. Fish Oil, Golden Root, meditation, Inositol, Choline, yoga, acupuncture etc?

BRIGID: I did once try a new therapist who was against drug treatment, and this quickly resulted in my hospitalisation. I have not tried any other alternatives, but I recommend being active and time spent outdoors. I think everyone needs to find their own path, but I feel it is important to let friends know what you are doing from a safety point of view in case difficulties arise.

WORLD EQUAL: How did your bi-polar condition affect your sons growing up?

BRIGID: I think that only they could answer that. I hope I limited the impact by keeping religiously to my drug treatment, but it must have had an effect, mitigated by Joel. There must have been times when I appeared a bit vacant or preoccupied.

WORLD EQUAL: What inspired you to write your book?

BRIGID: I had the freedom and time in Covid lockdown and having left the constraints of being a social worker I was able to focus on myself for a bit. I didn’t plan to write the book, but I did feel it would be good to share a lived experience that people might be able to relate to. I wish I had had a book like it when I was a teenager.

WORLD EQUAL: In your opinion how has more public awareness of the bi-polar condition affected society’s response to you?

BRIGID: It has really helped that some brave people in the public eye have opened up about their mental health. That said, it is a largely invisible illness and I hear attitudes that suggest beneath the surface there is still a lot of fear, ignorance and mistrust.

Throughout my working life, I have always had to declare my bipolar disorder on job applications, and I have always shared it with trusted colleagues that I know would tell me if they felt I needed help. I see that as an essential insurance.

WORLD EQUAL: In your book you wrote that you don’t recall having many manic incidents or times. That being the case, why did the doctors classify your condition as bi-polar rather than just depression?

BRIGID: As mentioned above, my psychiatrist decided to test a hunch. I did not have many manic episodes, outrageous shopping and so forth, but I was clearly psychotic when hospitalised so that confirmed her diagnosis. I think I would have experienced more manic episodes were it not for the capacity to function on automatic.

WORLD EQUAL: I understand you have just finished a new book. Tell us about it and what made you write it?

BRIGID: This book was inspired by the technological challenges that are frustrating some of my friends at the Bowling Club, which while amusing at times can cause a serious problem of exclusion from aspects of everyday life. It was also inspired by the death of a dog walker in our neighbourhood who was killed by her own Bully XL while walking five other dogs. In the story, sixty-seven year old Lucy wryly charts her daily struggles and those of her friends, with frustrating technological changes that impact increasingly on aspects of life in their charming, albeit 101

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isolated, rural village with its bowls club, pubs, small holdings, church, school, unisex hair salon, care home for the elderly, bank in the process of closing and tiny police station. Lucy would like every device to have a big button to simplify and enable access for everyone to technology. Lucy’s two sons are in their thirties bring an alternative perspective as a dark side to village life shows itself with fight dogs and bait dogs, gambling, drugs and organized crime in a tradition that goes back decades and involved their late father as a child as well as his siblings and grandparents. The vicar also played a pivotal role prior to his suicide, conflicted by his calling and his lifelong addiction to dog fighting. There are comic and bittersweet moments as the story unfolds, and the Dad’s Army of bowlers are key to the life of the community in a setting where age can be seen as an asset, at least by the elderly! It’s called The Big Button and has just been published on Amazon.

WORLD EQUAL: That sounds great! Thank you for talking to us Brigid and I look forward to reading the new book.

Proceeds from the book Me and My Bipolar… Forever Together

by Brigid Sheehan will raise vital funds for Shawmind, a Newarkbased mental health charity and is available on Amazon and through Trigger Publishing

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Inspired by the dark beauty of nature in Northern Ireland, I create hand-crafted sterling silver jewellery using traditional silversmithing techniques.

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ouise Maguire, a designer and maker. My interest in skulls, seeds and plants came from my happy and noisy family piling into the car at weekends and holidays. While my Mum painted the surrounding landscapes, we ran round the forests and beaches picking up skeletons and shapes of the decayed elements and so, my naturally found collections began.

I love nothing more than working in my tiny and fabulous workspace, surrounded with my tools, machinery and music, hand making and finishing the jewelery and decorative pieces using traditional silver smithing techniques. Jewelery is a very personal thing and I am passionate about making the pieces that you want to wear for years to come and that let you say who you are. Having returned to Northern Ireland after twenty brilliant years in Dublin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, I enjoy every weekend selling at the lively and busy St Georges Market in Belfast. Being with amazing Crafters and meeting and getting to know my customers and often entire families. I now have customers from around the world and many have become dear friends.

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I just love being in my tiny workshop with the music or podcasts playing loudly and making jewelery.

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Corinne O' Neill : Hi Louise and welcome to world equal.

How long have you been a sliver Smith and what inspired you to start?

Louise Maguire : 1. I’ve been making silver jewelery full time for 11 years after completing a 2-year jewelery course. Before that when I was working in Dublin, I did a few evening classes and also in San Francisco when our kids were small.

Corinne O' Neill : Where did you train and what was that like?

Louise Maguire : . My main training was at The Belfast Metropolitan College which I loved from the very first day. My Tudor was Heather Mc McFadden and I still go to her every two months to listen and talk jewelery with the other girls:) Heather is always there to advise me on another approach especially when things go wrong.

Which they sometimes do !! I’m still excited because I’ve so much more to learn.

Corinne O' Neill : Where do you get your inspiration and designs from?

Louise Maguire : . From an early age I’ve noticed and loved seeing what jewelery people choose to wear. I think it came from seeing the beautiful silver jewelery that our dad gave our mum that always seemed a little different. Most of my own inspiration comes from Organic matter especially skeleton parts of animals and plants and because of my love for the water and a couple of fun commissions I’ve been making Sea inspired pieces.

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From an early age I've noticed and loved seeing what jewelery people choose to wear.

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Corinne O' Neill : Where can we find your work?

Louise Maguire : Each Sunday for the last 11 years I’ve had my own stall at St George’s Market in Belfast. My pieces can also be found at: Natural Room Emporium, Comber. Cafollas, Newtownards. Gallery 1608, Bushmills. The Doghouse Gallery, Comber and Spence Tattoos, Bremen, Germany. And also, since last month, 20/20 Art in Whitehead.

Corinne O' Neill : What are your favorite tools to work with?

Louise Maguire : .My favorite tool is The Pendant Motor. I bought mine 5 years ago and wish I’d got one 11 years ago!! It’s such an adaptable tool and I use mine continuously. A very close second is my hand saw which I bought 33 years ago in Dublin not knowing then that I’d been using it one day in my full-time job .

Corinne O' Neill : Have you any tips for someone looking to train in your profession and what would you recommend?

Louise Maguire : If someone wanted to train to make jewelery I’d recommend a full-time course. They are so much fun and will help push you to your true capabilities. I’d also recommend other jewelery making classes like those found at Gobbins Crafts because each task can be taught by a different approach and technique.

Corinne O' Neill : .I love your unique designs how long do you spend on a new design and what is your process?

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Louise Maguire : Thank you for saying this :) still after all these years I get a real buzz and appreciate it when people buy and wear my pieces.

Many of my ideas come to me in the middle of the night (I’m a terrible sleeper) I lay there drawing in the air working out the weight, balance and motion of a piece and then frantically trying to get it down on paper first thing in the morning.

Corinne O' Neill : Do you have any other passions that influenced your work?

Louise Maguire : . I’ think all my passions must influence my work from loving our early morning beach walks and being an avid reader. I love cooking and traveling, especially tasting new foods and thanks to my mum who’s a portrait and landscape painter, I also collect found bones, skulls, dried twigs, plants and small rusted items.

Corinne O' Neill : What is your favorite item of jewelery to make and why?

Louise Maguire : . I found this question hard to answer. I just love being in my tiny workshop with the music or podcasts playing loudly and making jewelery. After changing my mind a few times, I kept coming back to The Rose branch hoop earrings, the Blackbird claw pendant, the Skull drop earrings and the Seahorse Pendant because each piece has an emotional and sentimental meaning either from family, friends, jewelery course and our life in California.

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Corinne O' Neill : How do you promote your craft?

Louise Maguire : . I absolutely adore talking to customers each Sunday hearing their incredible stories but I’m shy when it comes to promoting my work. So, I’m very lucky to have two people helping me. Aaron Drain helps me with all my social media, he gives me encouragement and amazing support and advise. I take the photos for my IG and FB pages and pass them to him but Rachel at Rachel McCarthy. picture journal has taken all the beautiful photos on my Website, she really gets what I’m about

Interview By Corinne O' Neill

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We teach people, to realize what chances are out there and what they can make out of those chances if they have the correct or the right strategies Robin D

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Vocal Coach To The Stars

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obin D., a sought-after vocal coach, discusses his work with Grammy Award winners, rock stars, and opera singers, as well as his involvement in shows like Eurovision and Pop Idol. He emphasises the importance of using music for global change and spreading positive messages through collaboration and cooperation. He also discusses the challenges faced by artists in the changing music industry and the need for a shift in mindset. Robin D. shares his strategies for success, including selling gigs to those who have money and building a loyal fan base. He also talks about his experiences working with famous singers and the impact of his vocal coaching techniques. Robin D. mentions his website and social media accounts where people can find more information about his work.

Tom Bryant: Welcome to the show, Robin D. You are one of the world's most sought-after vocal coaches, having trained Grammy Award winners, rock stars, opera singers. You've also worked with sportsmen and board members of huge companies as well. You are a sought-after keynote speaker, lecturer for universities, congress, other companies. You've held workshops and do hold workshops, masterclasses in vocal production among other things. You've trained and supported artists across the world in shows such as Eurovision, Pop Idol, and The Voice, just to name a few. There're loads to talk with you about. It's so fantastic to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us, and please do tell us more.

Robin D.: I'm so honoured to be with you, to get the opportunity to talk to you. And when you tell all those things about me, it feels weird that it's me, that this should be me.

Robin D: Sometimes when people count all my stuff I did in my life, and it feels like this could be another person. Yes. It's really, really cool to be here on the show. I'm so honoured that you invited me, Skyler. And I'm happy to talk to you, Tom. And the idea of music for global change is just, it means so much to me because sometimes as a musician and as a producer, vocal coach, and consultant, you feel lonely if you have this idea in your mind, if you have the idea of doing good things and have the intention of giving forward to people. And because the music industry has changed in the last years, because first we had the change from radio to video, and now we have the change from video to online. And the more it is online, the less quality matters.

Because it matters how big you are on the internet, how big your reach is, and the idea of the whole thing that you invented here is just, in my opinion, something really, really great.

Skyler Jett: Thank you. Thank you, my brother, you know what I mean? I want an open market for everyone, so I want everybody to meet each other and be able to collaborate with each other, and we use cooperation to make that happen. But when you get to write with different people on the other side of the earth, just like we're doing right now in this medium right now, I've written over 30 songs just like this, you couldn't do that before. And it's so wonderful because I'm introducing people from all over the world to each other and asking them to collaborate on some positive music. We're tired of bad news. Let's give them some good news.

Robin D: Yes, let's give them some good news, yes. What do you think what do we need to do to have more good things?

Skyler Jett: I think about the good things because life isn't all bad.

I love those stories where somebody just like an earth angel. So, say a car catches on fire and somebody runs over there and grabs that person out of the car and pull them out of the car, and then they walk off. Well, that was the earth angel. You never knew who that person was. I've just wrote a song about that. So, there's always people doing good things for people, and they never get awarded for that. A lot of people, human beings doing good for each other, but it's not sexy. It's all about the bad news, right?

We're going to give bad news some competition.

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Robin D: Yes, you're right. The good news is much more difficult to sell than the bad news.

Skyler Jett: Yeah. But if you put enough of it out in the open, then people start going, "Wow, this is another alternative. I can go hear some music that's positive, that's not about somebody personally.

These ain't love songs and stuff like that." This is how we can heal each other and educate each other and solve problems, with beautiful notes and performance.

Robin D: Yeah. What I think is also, if we find the right perspective to look at things, helps a lot to solve the daily struggles that we feel. Because the way you look at the things can change everything. Let's just give the example of raining. Many people say, "Oh, it's bad weather. It's raining." But rain is great if you want something to grow, if you want trees to grow. And the same is with the struggles that artists face out there in the business because they get used to the mechanism that's on the market and they learn how to react properly on that. And for me, it's a great pleasure to help young artists doing that and to help them perceive the whole signals that come from outside in a way that they can handle it the best way.

Skyler Jett: Yeah, and music does that. I just wrote a tune called Positive Vibes. And I flew to Ireland to Dublin, Ireland. I put these 12 kids on it with me singing. I called a lady, I said, "Get me a studio where I can get 12 kids in there." And she went and got this woman that all these kids are actors and stuff like that so they can sing harmony, you know what I'm saying? It was already trained. So, when I got them together, man, it was so wonderful because they're like, "Wow, you sang on the Titanic?" They're in Ireland, right? "And I'm singing with you?" "Come on in here."

And I got them in there, man, we are having some fun. And they are just sound beautiful, having these 12 kids on the backgrounds with me. And so, I'm going to take that around the world and make it like a We Are the World kind of song, but different countries and different kids singing on this tune called Positive Vibe. And we're doing it in an animation. So, all the verses are animation and just the hooks are a positive vibe. It'd be different country.

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Robin D: That sounds really cool. I think everybody who has the chance to work with you is gifted because I perceived you as such a humble, such a warm-hearted person.

And for me, it's just, yes, a great luck that you called me the other day to be on this show. And at the same time, I could invite you to our bootcamp, which is running right now while we are doing this show here.

And it's so, so amazing. The last years we had, we had really very famous singers from the German, Austrian, and Switzerland music industry. Lots of them have number ones, and all of them are students of mine... such as Michael Patrick Kelly, Nico Santos, and Jeff Scott Soto from the US, the son of Sting, Joe Sumner. They all have been here as my star guest.

Skyler Jett: Wow. Robin D: And we always combined it. They got some vocal coaching from me, and they gave us a half an hour or an hour to talk to our participants and tell them about their experience. And it was always such a precious thing for our singers to learn from these great artists. And this year, we decided to have the last vocal bootcamp by Robin D, and we decided not to decide to have a star guest. And then it happened that we talked to each other, and now we have a star guest and we have the biggest star guest I could have ever imagined. Isn't that great? Isn't life good?

And I just told them, I gave him them some hints. I said, "It's somebody really pretty huge. And he has worked with two of the most famous singers, female singers in the world." And they were like, "Who could this be?" And I said, "So I'll tell you the name."

Of course they wanted to know that. And I said, "Oh, just to let you know, it's just Celine Dion and Whitney." And they were like... So, it seemed like they were not believing, but they will see.

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Tom Bryant: Well, I just want to talk a little bit about the bootcamps and the different workshops that you run. Has the way in which you run some of those had to change a little bit since the pandemic? Are you doing anything virtually? Is it all physical? Can you do what you do virtually or is that something you've been able to achieve?

Robin D: We were lucky to have, especially for the bootcamps, we always had a slot where all the pandemic situation was a little bit easier and we were allowed to do that. But at the other side, we created a system where everything can be done online. So, this is also, I just talked about that yesterday. I'm really angry about the music industry because they were stupid enough to give the power to Spotify instead of inventing the right things. And the same happened during the pandemic, in my opinion. They could have worked out a system to send, like we do now, concert to the

living room of the people. Instead of cancelling big shows, big tours, losing millions of dollars, they could have just thought a little bit five minutes of brain work, which they were not able. I don't know if not able or just not willing, maybe probably both.

And in my opinion, it's a real pity just to think about that, how much artists lost just because of bad decisions in the music industry. And during the time of pandemic, many consultants, many conservatories, high schools, vocal teachers went broke.

They gave up. They said, "I have no chance to do that," because they have the wrong mindset. They were thinking it can only happen, vocal coaching can only happen in person. And during the time where 90% of our, let's say, competitors, we don't have competitors because that's another story. The business just died and we tripled our sales. And this is what we teach young artists, what we teach people, to realize what chances are out there and what they can make out of those chances if they have the correct or the right strategies. And that's what we do, what I love to do.

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Skyler Jett: Right. I think what's going to happen with the new generation though, they look for another way. I do encourage young people to go play in a live situation. That's the only way you might be to make some money now. It's going to go back to that right now whereRobin D: Absolutely.

Skyler Jett: You know what I mean? But that's great because all the best entertainers ever, it's nothing like being on stage and serving music lovers, right?

Robin D: I'm totally on your page. I would say the biggest chance, it's not in the music industry because the big things, to make something big, you need the industry. It's really, really difficult to grow in terms of superstar dimensions. But to make a living of your music and of your singing is the best way to do it live. And it always depends on, and probably I have a slightly different 122

thinking than you. I don't believe in the fan base too much. I believe in getting the money from the rich. It's kind of Robin Hood idea. Take it from the rich, give it to the poor is the big picture behind that. But I think if you have the right target to sell your music, which means if you sell your gigs to people who have money, so you can afford to do the other gigs that make no money, but give you fun, love, whatever, fans.

And I think this strategy has worked out brilliantly for our participants, for my students, because we have a lot of people who are not known at all. They have approximately, let's say, 1,000 fans. But as you know, the thousand fans rule says if you have 1,000 people who are willing to pay you $100 a year, it's in the end a $100,000. And this is the idea that we give our students. We show them how to do the right steps, how to do the steps in the right order. And yes, so I'm totally with you. Just I think the bigger power to make money and to make a living is to sell the gigs to the people who have money instead of hoping to get enough fans to make, let's say, 100 grand a year.

EQUAL Skyler Jett: That's exactly right.

Robin D: And this is the idea that we give our students. We show them how to do the right steps, how to do the steps in the right order. And yes, so I'm totally with you. Just I think the bigger power to make money and to make a living is to sell the gigs to the people who have money instead of hoping to get enough fans to make, let's say, 100 grand a year.

Skyler Jett: Yeah, yep. That's right. Tom? Tom Bryant: Makes sense. Looking at who you've worked with, how did you get involved with such huge areas like Eurovision and Pop Idol? Did they come to you or is that something you...

Where did that start for you, this kind of global shows and coming to you?

Robin D: It's pretty easy. I developed a certain technique that helps singer to improve within minutes. As anybody knows, time is money, especially in the music industry. People, especially stars who are already really celebrities and selling millions of copies of the music, if they're in trouble and they're losing the voice during a world tour, that's the biggest problem they could face. And so, as they heard of my work, they realized, "Oh, this guy could help solving problems on tour. This guy could help or could make it happen that we don't lose millions of dollars during a tour because we have to cancel 3, 4, 5 concerts." And it was mostly a mouth-to-mouth thing. I didn't do promotion. I had no fancy website.

It started during a TV show for Eurovision, and a singer had to sing this qualify. And the manager called me and said, "Robin, can you please come? The singer isn't able to sing any note at all."

So, I said, "Okay, have you been to the doctor already with her?"

And he said, "Yes, but it didn't help." And I said, "Okay, when does the show start?" He says, yeah, today at 8:15 in the..."

talking, I tried to anticipate what happened in her throat. And I realized, "Okay, I cannot fix that for longer than 5 to 10 minutes." And I said, "Okay, we're going to do that, but we do it 15 minutes before you go on stage." And the manager was freaking out. He was, "Are you crazy? I cannot take this risk. I need a guarantee that this will work. And I said, "I cannot give you a guarantee, but it's the only chance it can work." And then he said, "Okay, okay." And long story short, I came back. I repositioned her whole instrument, her larynx and some other things. And suddenly after two or three minutes, the first tone came. Instead of, "Hello," she was saying, "Hello, hello." And I know this can only last about 5 to 10 minutes. And I had to have the right timing, which we had. And long story short, she sung it. She went to Eurovision and everything was fine. And the people all there were all well-known professionals in the music industry. And they started talking about that. "There was this guy and he was solving the problem, and it was amazing. You won't believe it," blah, blah, blah. And this worked out and got bigger and bigger.

Tom Bryant: Wow. Robin D: "Today on TV, live. Live on TV." And I said, "It's around 2:00 in the afternoon, so if you need me, I need to go now." And he said, "Yes, please do that." And I said, "Okay. I cannot promise that it will work out. I will do my best, but I don't know if it really works." My work is always trying to go under the skin of a singer. It's like closing my eyes and while she was 123

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Tom Bryant: Yeah, to that store.

Robin D: Finally, I had, yes, the chance also to work with Patty Austin, who I met through Skyler. Skyler was the man who connected us. And here again, he connected us through a Swiss singer who recommended me.

Skyler Jett: Yeah, Nubia.

Tom Bryant: Nubia.

Robin D: Nubia, yes.

Skyler Jett: Wow, brother. Listen, man, I love you so much, man.

Thank you for coming on our show.

Tom Bryant: Appreciate you coming on.

Skyler Jett: I want to get all your info.

Tom Bryant: Yeah, just wanted to know how do people see what you're doing? Websites, social media, contacts, what kind of links have you got?

Robin D: You find me on Instagram through robind, official, "Robin D," underlined. Official robinobin-d.com, there's going to be a new website and some new stuff. And if you have viewers who run a business or have a bigger company, we have a site. It's called Business Minus rockstar.com. There we help. We help.

Tom Bryant: Okay. Fantastic Robin D: Business owners to make more money.

Tom Bryant: Brilliant.

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here are a great many subjects in the world that are controversial. Some cause people to wince away from ever approaching them, or outright ignore them perhaps due to deeply ingrained societal bigotry, or perhaps a well-meant desire not to become embroiled in potential points of conflict. Nobody likes politics and religion at the dinner table, or so it's said. Sometimes, the lens through which focus can be brought to these kinds of sensitive subjects is pointed to the arts. Sometimes argument fails, and one has to 'show', instead. After being shown something quite special through a film, an incredibly powerful movie called P.O.V. (Point Of View) we decided to catch up with its screenwriter, Frank Orefice Jr. WORLD EQUAL is delighted to be interviewing Frank Orefice Jr. for this magbook special edition. Frank, how long have you been a writer? Did you study it in your youth or was it something you grew into and when did you begin to consider this as a full-time vocation?

Frank Orefice Jr : The sole credit for my love and passion for writing must go to my wife, Mary Anne. Just prior to our marriage we were in our apartment listening to Karn Evil 9 by my favourite band, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (E.L.P.).

I told my wife how when I first heard the song I immediately envisioned a young man attempting to bring peace to the world through his music. She really liked it and said I should write the entire story.

Never in my life did I ever consider writing as a hobby or profession and I was reluctant at first to attempt such a thing.

Actually, I was slightly intimidated but Mary Anne said to me, "Just write and enjoy it." With that, I took to pencil and paper because at that time in my life I couldn't type at all and suddenly the story evolved into a ten-page manuscript. For me, it was a euphoric experience as I had never done this before but here I am in my mid-twenties and discovering a talent I never knew I had.

From that moment I became committed to educating myself on writing and storytelling.

What do you need in your writing space to help you stay focused?

Frank Orefice Jr : It varies. When I was writing the screenplays for P.O.V. and Tarkus I had the music of E.L.P. on constantly as I find their songs extremely inspiring. For my other works, teleplays, short stories and poetry, my preference is a quiet room with a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door regardless of whether it is daytime or night.

What is the first thing that you wrote as a serious writer and what inspired you to write it?

Frank Orefice Jr : My very first screenplay was titled, Going for the One, a fictional story of a young man who is given the task of managing the absolute worst Pop Warner football team. He instructs them in transcendental meditation and they become better students, and league champions. I am a big believer that youth sports should serve as a learning period for young men and women to develop a structured discipline that will carry over from sports to their social and occupational lives. Unfortunately, many coaches are obsessed with winning rather than building confidence and guiding their players on the right path in their lives. In sports, as in life, you make mistakes regardless of your status - rich or poor - education level, the country you're from, etc. Young men and women should be educated to not dwell on their mistakes but to learn from them and grow as a person.

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What's the main difference between being the author of a book and being a screenwriter, and which do you consider yourself to be - or are you a bit of both?

Frank Orefice Jr : I am a screenwriter. This is the format I am most comfortable writing in. People who I have collaborated with on projects have told me my writing is extremely visual.

This makes it easier to create their vision of the characters, storyline, and environment where the story takes place. I would love to write a novel or a book on historical events but I do not see that happening in the near future.

Your movie P.O.V. is incredible. With the added ingredient of an ever-attentive pair of spying eyes and eavesdropping ears standing behind the actors in the background, the drama was always being tugged along on tenterhooks. What motivated you to make this kind of controversial him?

Frank Orefice Jr : Thank you both for the compliments on P.O.V. I greatly appreciate them. As I stated previously, my favourite band is and forever will be, E.L.P. In 1992 they released an album titled, Black Moon. On that album is a song, Farewell to Arms, that tells the story of man's aggression against himself, with magnificent lyrics written and sung by Greg Lake. My interpretation of the song is how it reveals how the human race continues to recycle tyranny, oppression, hate, corruption, P.O.V.erty, famine, slavery, the Holocaust, etc - for many generations but never confronts these problems head-on to solve them. The ten characters in P.O.V. who are interviewed express their anger towards each other, society, and their governments.

The terrorist observing them sits quietly in the background listening to them argue amongst themselves and gathering information on their weaknesses to use against them. I structured the screenplay to parallel the film, Lifeboat, by the great director, Sir Alfred Hitchcock. The story takes place during World War II when a passenger ship is torpedoed by a German u-boat and only seven passengers survive and swim to a lifeboat. They are later joined by the captain of the u-boat after his boat was sunk by American destroyers. The passengers represented citizens from the allied countries but they continuously fight amongst themselves while the German captain remains quiet. He does not involve himself with their bickering but observes their actions and waits for the opportunity to kill them one at a time.

P.O.V. reminds us of the old ways great stories used to be told face to face, in a small venue in an intimate way. Do you feel the same about this?

Frank Orefice Jr : With this screenplay, yes, most definitely. As with all my writings regarding racism, hate, and prejudice, I come right to the point with no sugar coating. As I said, face the problem head-on and resolve it or it never ends.

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You have won a huge amount of awards for your work with the documentary Lords Of B.S.V. (Bedford Stuyvesant Veterans), directed by Maria Soccor. This fascinating documentary focuses on a group of young men and women that live in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn who does "Brukup" (meaning broken up) which is a new original dance form that they follow like a religion. This dance was invented by Jamaican, George Adams, who brought it to America. Where did you fit into this as a writer and what motivated you to get involved in this documentary?

I met the manager of B.S.V., Shawn Griffith, at a studio in New York City. He told me about the dancers and the Brukup style of dance. Upon researching the history of the dance and viewing their videos I believed this was the genesis of a good documentary. Maria Soccor and I were collaborating on a film project that never materialised. I mentioned the B.S.V. concept to her and, being an established and classically trained dancer herself, she agreed to take on the project. Writing for documentaries completely differs from screenplays and teleplays. Maria and I devoted many hours to formulating questions to ask the dancers in order to construct the spine of the story. It was essential to peel back the many layers of the Brukup universe and the urban environment where it exists.

Once we decided what questions to ask, Maria put on her director's hat to bring out the best conversation/performance from the dancers. Questions like, "How did you all meet?", "When did you decide to join B.S.V?", "How do each member contribute to developing new and original dance moves?" We were guests in the world of the Brukup dancers and we saw how this dance style was not documented accurately. In time we realised the dance form itself saved lives in Brooklyn by keeping kids off the street. Working with Maria was a joyful and educational experience. She introduced me to a new format of writing and instructed me on how to direct a film -which I hope to do one day.

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What advice would you give your younger self and young aspiring writers today?

When you write you are on a mission. What that mission is, is entirely determined by your creativity, your passion for the story and your love for the characters. The best advice I will give to young writers is the words of the great basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, "Don't give up, don't give up, don't ever give up!"

Is there anything you would like to have done differently in your work in the past?

No. I do not have any second thoughts about my work.

What can we expect to see next from the great Frank Orefice Jr? Ha! You both are funny. I will never consider myself great. I am just a down-to-earth "Jersey Boy" from the great state of New Jersey in the United States. Presently my screenplay, Tarkus, which was inspired by the E.L.P. album of the same name is being presented to the major studios by my agent.

Hopefully this year I will be directing a stage play I wrote titled, Whose World Is It?", a comedy of male chauvinism versus feminism.

Looks like more eye-opening jaw-droppers are on the way from Frank, and we look forward to seeing them. From this interview, we can clearly see how as soon as a screenwriter puts pen to paper, there is potentially a huge amount of physical graft ahead down the line if the story catches on.

We don't just close the book and hope a script turns itself into a movie. The seeds of a good story can grow into a giant redwood Sequoia tree and you need to be prepared for that. It's like Frank tells us "The best advice I will give to young writers is the words of the great basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, Don't give up, don't give up, don't ever give up!"

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not to take a cruise or travel around the world. Rather, he was filled with such gratitude that he could now devote all his time and energy to his charity.

Wayne met Cullen while volunteering at a local hospital. The more they got to know each other they discovered they had a lot in common. Basketball, wrestling, sports in general.

All these and more bonded the two into an incredibly close friendship. As the years passed, Wayne witnessed something very special in Cullen. He observed his suffering and the deterioration of his body but yet Cullen would encourage other children with AIDS to never give up the fight. Cullen knew his ultimate fate but he did not let that stop him from living a full life and inspiring others. One day Cullen and Wayne were talking and Cullen asked Wayne if he was his friend. Wayne responded, "You're my best friend!" That is how Wayne came up with the title of the story, My Best Friend Cullen.

Prior to writing My Best Friend Cullen, I wrote a stage play for their charity titled, The Many Faces of AIDS, that revolved around a group of teenagers teaching other teenagers about AIDS and how to navigate their own journey with a different, more mindful perspective. It was performed at Bloomfield High School in Bloomfield, New Jersey with many locals filling the seats. Shortly after the performance, Cullen passed away. Wayne was devastated. It was then that Wayne approached me about doing a play about Cullen's life. I immediately said yes. I never met Cullen but I learned all about him through Wayne's description of their time together.

When I completed the script, it was decided to have students from a local elementary school in Paterson, New Jersey perform a theatrical reading of the script to the student body. The students exceeded our expectations as to the roles they played in bringing the words My Best Friend Cullen to life.

In the following years, we have performed the play to raise money for Free Throws for AIDS to help Wayne maintain his programs for schools. For more information about Free Throws for AIDS go to: https://freethrows.org/.

In our society when a person achieves a certain amount of success, you may hear the phrase, "You really made

something of yourself". Accumulating a mass amount of money or winning a multitude of awards does not guarantee you have "made" it in the world. Using your talents to help people less fortunate than yourself or supporting a worthy cause is what I feel can truly encompass what it means to "make it".

The other project of mine that I love is called, Letters from Heaven. Years ago a friend of mine, I'll call her Sophia, lost her cousin from a drive-by shooting. He was eighteen years old, a high school football player and looking forward to attending college when his life was taken from him. I was so moved by this tragedy that I felt compelled to write something to ease the family's pain. I asked Sophia if her aunt was open to me writing something that would reflect as if her son was writing the words to her, to help ease her pain and anger; to help her heal. She thought it was a great idea so I began asking questions about her cousin, his close relationship with his mother, and any family members who had passed on. With the funeral only two days away I stayed up all night to complete the letter for Sophia so she would have it at the wake. I prayed her aunt would not be insulted or become angry by what I was trying to do and certainly not be angry at Sophia.

Sophia waited until a week after the funeral to give the letter to her aunt. When she came back to work, Sophia told me her aunt was very receptive to the letter and it did give her a sense of closure and comfort. Even though the letter was not directly from her son, she embraced the symbolic effort with an open heart.

Use your God-given talents to help people less fortunate than yourself, comfort their pain and make the world a better place.

This is why I write. I hope this article prompts you to reach deep into your soul at what motivates and inspires you to write and to know how powerful and life-changing your words can be to another human being.

Much peace and love to you all.

Frank Orefice, Jr.

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Sanae Casita Singer Song Writer

Sometimes you don't even understand each other's language, but you make music so you speak that universal language Sanae Casita

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ANAE CASITA; BORN AND RAISED IN THE CALLED

NETHERLANDS TO ANDALUSIAN MOROCCAN PARENTS. CASITA IS TRULY A SOULFUL ARTIST WITH A UNIVER-SOUL SOUND! SANAE CASITA IS CERTAINLY NOT UNFAMILIAR TO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY; SHE’S BEEN ALL ABOUT MUSIC AS LONG AS SHE CAN REMEMBER AND STARTED PERFORMING AND TOURING PROFESSIONALLY AT THE AGE OF 15. BECAUSE OF THAT SANAE CASITA WAS POINTED OUT AS A YOUTH AMBASSADOR REPRESENTING THE NETHERLANDS. SANAE WAS ALSO ONE OF THE FEMALE RAPPERS AND SINGERS OF A HIPHOP FORMAT NAMED THE ‘OUTSIDAZ’ – IN COLLABORATION WITH THE LEGENDARY HERMAN BROOD THEY RELEASED AN ALBUM (1998) UNDER THE LABEL OSM (OUTSIDE MUSIC). SHORTLY AFTER THAT SANAE WENT SOLO. SHE TOURED IN EUROPE, AFRICA AND ASIA AND WON A VARIETY OF AWARDS SUCH AS GROTE PRIJS V NEDERLAND – THE BEST INDIVIDUAL UPCOMING ARTIST, THE ESSENT AWARDS 2004 AND MANY MORE. LIVE PERFORMING IS CASITA’S TRUE PASSION; SHE IS TRULY A STAGE BEAST, AN ENTERTAINER AND GRABS YOUR HEART AND ATTENTION WITH HER VOCALS , LYRICS AND EXUBERANT ENERGY. SHE ROCKED A FEW INTERNATIONAL KNOWN MAJOR STAGES AND FESTIVALS SUCH AS LOWLANDS, NORTH SEA JAZZ FESTIVAL, MADE IN HOLLAND ROYAL THEATRE AMSTERDAM CARRÉ, FRIENDS FOR WARCHILD IN AHOY ROTTERDAM, FESTIVAL MUNDIAL, HI5 EVENT AT THE HEINEKEN MUSIC HALL, METROPOLE ORCHESTRA AND MANY MORE. SHE HAS ALSO DONE THE SUPPORT ACT FOR A COUPLE OF GREAT NAMES IN THE INDUSTRY SUCH AS: BEYONCÉ, ANGIE STONE, OLETA ADAMS, DELINQUENT HABITS, SLUM VILLAGE, SUGAR BABES AND MANY MORE. SHE EVEN PERFORMED FOR THE ROYAL KING WILLEM ALEXANDER AND QUEEN MAXIMA OF THE NETHERLANDS IN 2001 THEY WERE STUNNED BY HER PERFORMANCE AND INVITED HER PERSONALLY TO THEIR ROYAL WEDDING IN AMSTERDAM. LATER ON IN 2016 SHE PERFORMED AGAIN FOR THE ENTIRE ROYAL FAMILY ON NATIONAL TV. SANAE CASITA IS A MULTI TALENTED ARTIST, SHE LOVES TO “INSPIRE” AND BE “INSPIRED”. EXPRESSING THAT THROUGH HER UNLIMITED STREAM AND NATURALFLOW OF CREATIVITY. NOT ONLY AS A SINGER AND RAPPER BUT ALSO IN THEATERS AS A PROFESSIONAL ACTRESS SHE HAVE TOURED SUCCESSFULLY THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY WITH THE POPULAR THEATER PLAY CALLED ‘ENKELE REIS’ FROM 2017 TILL 2019 , RATED 4 STAR AND TWO OUTSTANDING REVIEWS IN THE INTERNATIONAL PAGES OF THEATERKRANT.NL. SHE WILL BE STARTING IN A NEW THEATER PRODUCTION THAT WILL TAKE OFF MIDD 2020.

SANAE CASITA ALSO PARTICIPATED AS ONE OF THE LEADS IN THE INTERNATIONAL AWARD WINNING DUTCH /MOROCCAN FILM DOCUMENTARY CALLED ‘MAROKKO SWINGT’ ALONGSIDE THE MORCCON LEGENDARY DIVA NAJAT ATABOU. THE LIST OF CREATIVITY DOESN’T STOP THERE, SANAE CASITA IS A FINE ART ARTIST WORKING ON HER UNIQUE SERRIES WWW.CASITA-ART.COM SELLING AND EXHIBITING HER ART WORLDWIDE.

Tom Bryant: Okay, welcome to the show. Sanae Casita, you were raised in the Netherlands, known as a soulful artist. You started performing and touring from the tender age of 15 and are seen as a youth ambassador representing the Netherlands. You were a female rapper and singer of hip hop format named The Outsiders. You are now a solo artist and you toured and supported Beyonce, Sugarbabes, Letter Adams to name just a few. There's loads more to talk about with you, Sanae, so thanks for joining us and please tell us more.

Sanae Casita: Music has always been a passion to me. Actually, it's the first thing I can remember when I was young. I remember just singing at home. We had this round table. I would walk around the table and improvise and just sometimes it wouldn't make any sense and I would walk up to my mom and say, "Hey, is it nice? Is it beautiful?" But in my head, in the back of my mind, I always knew that that was the thing I wanted to do. To be honest, I feel blessed that I'm still able to, or have the opportunity to sing every time I'm on stage. Right before I get on stage, I reflect back to the little girl that was me once and I do what I love to do. In between, that whole journey of music, working with people and meeting a lot of new people, going to new places like Africa, to all the way to the US, meeting people, making music, and that's really the most beautiful part of this whole journey.

Skyler Jett:Wonderful. Very cool. Ryan, you got a question?

Ryan: I do. It's not music related, but I looked at your YouTube page, Sanae, and I saw that just about two years ago you were diagnosed with a pretty aggressive form of breast cancer and you decided to document your journey and your chemotherapy treatment on YouTube. It was about 20 minutes long or something and very moving. I was just wondering what made you decide to go to YouTube for that and do you plan on releasing... I'm sure you have a lot more footage. Do you plan on releasing that at some point?

Sanae Casita: Yeah, I do have a lot more footage. A lot. I did record a single as well where there's a lot of new footage incorporated in the new video. Well, you're going to have people ask me like, "Hey, what's going on with you? Hey, what's happening with you?" Things are 137

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changing. Obviously you hear it goes off and you just like things are changing. I thought, "You know what? I might as well just tell people." I don't have anything to be ashamed of. It's a process, it's life, and I wouldn't want to change any bit of it. It is what it is.

At that point, I just looked at it from a positive perspective and hopefully if there is someone else going through the same thing, I could inspire to be okay. I know not a lot of women diagnosed with breast cancer and some of them just are scared to show it or to tell people. I even had a wig at one point in the beginning before I started. After 10 days of chemo, my hair started falling off. Slowly right after that, when I started to get real... I had little spots everywhere and I was like, "I don't care. I'm going to go out and just be, this is who I am." I embrace it.

Ryan:Very moving video. I was trying not to tear up, but it was very cool. You know what? I saw some photos of you even on your Instagram. I was like, "Hey, with the short hair, you look great."

Sanae Casita:Thank you.

Ryan:I'm glad to hear that you're doing much better and you can get back to music and like you said, you released a single in the middle of it.

Skyler Jett:Tom, you got a question?

Tom Bryant:Yeah. You've performed in all kinds of places with all kinds of artists, as we've mentioned. Also, you performed at the King and Queen of Netherlands Royal Wedding, which you were invited to. Could you tell us a little bit about that please?

Sanae Casita:Yeah, actually it was in 2001. I met them for the first time. It was not King and Queen before. It was just him being the prince. They came to Tilburg and at that point, I think I was 19 years old. I was one of the youth ambassadors and they organized all these different youth ambassadors. They all had different skills and me being an artist, they asked me, "We're going to do this thing and this concert place they called [inaudible 00:04:33] and they wanted me to sing." That's when I met them for the first time.

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When they saw me there for the first time, they asked me to be part of their wedding two years later. It was really, really cool to be there and to see them perform.

Tom Bryant:Fantastic.

Skyler Jett:I write social conscious music, but you do too as well, right?

Sanae Casita: Yeah, actually I do. I do. You can write about lost songs all day, but I really love to go a little bit deeper and talk about life, talk about things, master just left and right about consciousness or unity or about life, about anything actually. I actually expand my lyrics to tell a little bit more than just about love.

Ryan:Absolutely. We need more of that, conscious vibes on lyrical content where it heals, educates and solve problems. Music just is not about yourself. It's selfless music. You're trying to help others with your gift. We're musical messengers who can bring lyrical content in the form of consciousness so you can see what we talk about. When I talk about the planet, I show you videos of what I'm talking about. That's music for global change right there that we can fuse the things together.

Sanae Casita: Because of music, I was able to travel all around the world, meet people. Sometimes you don't even understand each other's language, but you make music so you speak that universal language. Being able to touch other people and meet other people, yeah, music has been guiding me in a way and getting to know myself through music and because of music traveling, you get to know yourself. It's a way of life for me. It's not just a career.

It's a way of life.

Ryan:Well, I always ask this question, studio's cool, but which one do you like the best, performing or being in the studio

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Sanae Casita:Performing is my one and only thing. I love to improvise. I can come up with a whole band and I don't even know these people. Let's say they do R&B music or soul, actually it wouldn't matter, they make music, I would improvise on the spot and create that energy and that's my thing. Yeah, performing. I love it.

Ryan:Music lovers, there's nothing like them in the world, right?

Sanae Casita:That's true. I agree.

Ryan:Tom, you got a question?

Tom Bryant:Well, yeah, just off the back of that, it's not just music that you've done and you like to do. You're a singer and a rapper, but you've been or are a professional actress in theater and you've received outstanding reviews for that.

Alongside that, you also are a motivational speaker, a talent coach, working with several youth organizations to inspire with music and art. Is that something you've consciously done, work with youth? I'm seeing a lot of youth-related things that you've done. Is that something you've tried to do through your career?

Sanae Casita:Well, it happened naturally. When I was young, I was in the beginning as a youth ambassador. I was 16, 17 years, 18. You get involved in social situations where... Events, people would ask you, "Hey, would you like to give a workshop?

Spoke a word, rap, singing?" You come across all these different organizations and people, and this is how it started off and you started to create this expertise and methods to use music or acting or anything creative. I draw as well, everything as a tool to motivate people and especially youth because they're the new generation and I have my life experience and I try to take whatever I have to inspire them. You see a lot of youth nowadays, you're looking for their identity, "Who am I? What do I want to do with my life?" I try to use music and that whole creative process as a method to motivate them.

Tom Bryant:Wonderful.

Skyler Jett:You are an amazing artist as well.

Ryan:Yeah, I was going to say that.

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I had this idea that I wanted to walk into the water and get filmed for the video. You just got to buckle up and just do it.

Sanae Casita:

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Skyler Jett:I've seen some of your drawings. Don't even try it. It's so beautiful. Oh, my God, thank you. What are you working on right now?

Sanae Casita:Well, I'm working on this huge piece. It's like nearly two meters by 180. 180, 160 meter. It's also geometric. It's a lot of symbolism. It starts off, you just go, you don't really stop and think about what I'm going to draw. You have a couple of images and you just start drawing it.

Ryan:You should take all those drawings and put a song to them where they fade in and out and stuff like that, right?

Sanae Casita:Yeah, I got some ideas about that too.

Ryan:That sounds like just the right size of a magic curtain, you know what I mean?

Sanae Casita:Yeah, I know what you mean.

Ryan: I watched the music video for your song Magic Curtain, and I thought it was very... Amazing video. I thought it was even cooler that you had some behind the scenes video as well so I wanted to ask you, where was that scene of you walking into the water and how cold was that water? It had to be freezing.

Sanae Casita:I had people standing on the side. They looked at it like, "She's out of her mind." It was October. It was about October, November, and Skyler knows it can get really cold out here. Really cold.

Skyler Jett:Oh no, it's no joke. It ain't no joke. I'm from California. I ain't used to that stuff, you know?

Sanae Casita:You know what I mean? I was born and raised, and I'm still not used to it. But yeah, I had this idea that I wanted to walk into the water and get filmed for the video. You just got to buckle up and just do it.

Ryan: You were walking in there and I was like, "She's freezing right now." No way. And I know where I was.

Sanae Casita:I'm very adventurous and I'm just always like when I do stuff like that, it was really cold. But once you do it, just put your mind to zero. With that said, I wanted to say that I also did a TV show a couple of years ago. It was actually a concept National Geographic did, surviving on a little raft in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the Caribbean Sea for five days without food. You're just drifting. In the night, it could get really cold and I would feel the sharks. I was together with this other dude I didn't even know at first. You just swim and you just try to get in and you're just very seasick for the first couple of hours.

But that was really cold, especially at night. It gets so cold and you're just soaking wet and you feel sharks coming up and it's just crazy.

Skyler Jett:Oh, my God. No, I can't come hang out with you. I couldn't do that.

Ryan:Is that something that I could catch in the states? Is it aired?

Sanae Casita:Well, it's an American concept. National Geographic did that, and then a Dutch production house bought the idea. But I do have the DVD here. I don't know if you can find it anywhere.

Ryan:Yeah, we'll just FaceTime and you just pop it on.

Skyler Jett:Did you say DVD? Ryan:I'll grab some popcorn.

Skyler Jett:DVD? Sanae Casita:Yeah, it was a little bit way back.

Skyler Jett:That's like cassettes and stuff like that.

Ryan:You're like Bear Grylls.

Sanae Casita: It was 2016. It was 2016. Yeah, it was really cool to do. But to get back to your question, that was colder than what I experienced that day.

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Ryan:And sharks, yeah.

Sanae Casita:And sharks, yeah. At night they would come up and you just feel them.

Ryan:I'm tapped out.

Sanae Casita:I love that stuff. I love that stuff. I'm very adventurous. I like to get out of my comfort zone. I do.

Skyler Jett:What's on your agenda for music next?

Sanae Casita:Well, a couple of things. Well, of course, Alan Glass.

We were working on music. We're always working on music, and we definitely want to release a couple of songs. One song related to what I had to go through with the process, the cancer that I had. I'm also working with the orchestra, the composer, Avishai Darash. I don't know if I mentioned his last name properly, but we're definitely doing a couple of things like real life music, making an EP into an album also. And starting up with a couple of singers also with live music. With Alan, it's all productions.

Then there's still a lot of people that I'm working with, featurings, and even dance music. I got this other guy, he makes drum and bass. He did a lot on BBC, BBC Radio 1, and BBC Asian Radio.

I'm working with him on some new stuff as well so it's just always continuously doing music and people reaching out, "Hey, let's do stuff."

Skyler Jett:Are you writing the lyrical content?

Sanae Casita:Yeah, of course. I love to write. I write, I always write. Like I said, I improvise and write on the spot.

Skyler Jett:Yeah, that's where it's at.

Sanae Casita:It is a way of expressing myself. I love to write. I remember when I was 10 years old and I was just starting to learn English because I taught myself how to speak English. They teach you the basic stuff at school, but I used to go watch CNN just to learn how to pronounce certain words and how to articulate, because I was already writing poems, Dutch poems, and I translated them in English.

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Then I start rapping and writing is my thing right now. I write for other people too, and I write for myself as well.

Skyler Jett:Tom, you got another question for me?

Tom Bryant: Just a quick one really I suppose on your process with writing. Where do you get your ideas from really with regards to the raps that you do and the songs that you create?

Where's the motivation and idea come from for some of your music?

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Tom Bryant:It's emotional.

Sanae Casita:Exactly. With me, it works the same way. When I hear the music, it creates, it just pulls me into a story like a feeling. That gives me inspiration to write about something. If you have a happy type of beat, you want to write something cool, something fun, but if you have a melodramatic beat, you think of certain things. It just happens. But sometimes I do sit down and think about if I could work with people and say, "Hey, we'll have to write something about this and that." Then I have a context or something to write about. Sometimes it's just like, "I want to write something about Magic Curtain." You want to talk. Magic Curtain is about illusion, the matrix, basically. I do try to find a very creative way to write about a metaphorical way to tell the story basically. It just happens, Tom, it just happens.

Skyler Jett:It's a gift. It's a gift.

Tom Bryant:Definitely. Yeah.

Skyler Jett:Everybody don't have that gift. You know what I mean?

Sanae Casita:Thank you. It's the same with art. It's the same with writing. It's the same with drawing. It just happens and you just don't stop and think about it too much.

Skyler Jett:Ryan, do you want to get another question before we go?

Sanae Casita:Skyler can relate to this, but sometimes it just comes. I can't tell you where it comes from. It's just like if I hear a beat and it's like... Let me put it this way. If you watch a movie and you take away the music, you can have a really cool scene and you just doesn't catch you, right?

Tom Bryant:Yeah. You lose the emotion.

Sanae Casita:Yeah, exactly. When you put the music underneath, it just becomes so dramatic or it just really grabs you.

Ryan:Sure. You were pretty popping on YouTube shorts last year before a lot of people jumped on it. I saw you freestyling just driving down the street. I was like, "Where's more of this?" Are you a big consumer of social media, especially as a multifaceted artist? Do you post on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube Sanae Casita:The thing is I'm having a hard time with that. It's just like I am a type of artist, I just want to do the creative part.

But nowadays, you got to be a business person. and do your marketing,.

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All those big artists, really big artists, they have a dozen people that do the marketing to do this and do that, and they force you to now you need to take a shot with a new dress. Now you need to... I'm also the type of person that when I perform and I'm done, I just want to go back to a quiet place and be by myself.

Skyler Jett:There you go.

Ryan:Right.

Sanae Casita:That's the mentality of I don't want to... I force myself sometimes to post stuff. When I have something really cool, like you said, like I'm in the car like yesterday, it happened yesterday. I recorded myself. I got post this one day and that happens, and then I feel like doing it. But sometimes it's really hard.

Skyler Jett:Love you, sister.

Ryan:All right.

Sanae Casita: Thank you so much, guys.

Ryan:Have a great night.

Tom Bryant:Take care.

Sanae Casita:Have a great night. Bye bye.

Ryan:Yeah, it can get overwhelming. You have to constantly be in content creator mode in order to stay on people's minds and trick that algorithm is what I always say. Well, I'm ready to hear some more of that freestyle and I was with it.

Skyler Jett:Oh, she could do it again.

Ryan:I'm subscribing, boom.

Skyler Jett:Drop of a hat.

Sanae Casita: Okay, cool. I'm coming up with some new stuff.

Ryan:Excellent.

Skyler Jett:We going to be ready for it. Listen, thank you for the privilege of your time. Thank you for coming on our show. I really want to thank you so much from all of us. Namaste, my sister.

Sanae Casita:Thank you also. Ryan, thank you. Tom, thank you.

Skyler, thank you so much. I'm really grateful for this and looking forward to it.

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Interview By Skyler Jett

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nowadays, you got to be a business person. and do your marketing, Sanae Casita:

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Let us all be friends If only we could stop for a while spare sometime to talk.

Learn to live with each other’s differences.

From each side of the walk’ don't dwell on things That might have been.

Be assured the best is yet to come.

The past is gone we can't bring it back.

And sad things have been done.

Tears have fell from our sad eyes.

We've known each other’s sorrow.

Been in the depths of deep despair.

Just hoping for a new tomorrow We all need someone to lean on unlock the door let U.S. Open our heart. unite as friends altogether! give it a try before we depart. let peace reside throughout this land. for past mistakes make amends this matters most to you and me. but at least let us all be friends send it.

By Mavis Rodgers 146

A Wee Glimmer of Hope Bringing back our memories of a long time ago We carried on the best we could, as a child what I know.

Nice wee cotton dresses, mutton dummies on our feet The food then it was rationed we never got a lot.

My mother did her best, sharing out what she'd got.

War had taken over; these were sad old days.

We understood each other's needs, my Ma always said.

The clothes were also rationed marked with a utility size.

Fashion never changed then to us this was fine.

My Da joined the army he left to fight the foe.

Wondering if we'd see him again letting our feeling show.

Clothing coupons, sweetie coupons, ration books for food Between having and wanting sharing what we could Every house compelled to put up a blackout blind.

Showing just a glimmer of light brought to court we were fined.

Our raid shelters built in our street no one ever used.

After dark afraid to pass then the slasher was accused Air raid wardens with gas masks tin hat and stirrup boots Keeping out of their way for sure you'd have to jump.

Then we had the Beety of course to Belfast it had come.

Bombs and landmines rained on us after home we run.

Homes and families broken up we were evacuated to a place by the sea.

My granny came with us sister Esther’s brother Norman and me When the war came to an end, a reunited family back home.

My Da got demobbed, returned to work vowing never again to roam.

Peace had come once again down in our wee street.

It was known as Cranbrook Gardens and no other could compete.

By Mavis Rodgers 147

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MUSIC ART'S & CULTURE MAGBOOK SPRING SUMER 2024