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Join us! In partnership with our members, the SOI Consortium is co-organizing and participating in two key SOI events coming up in China over the next few weeks. On May 18th, we've put together an SOI Forum at the World Semiconductor Congress (WCS) in Nanjing. And on May 23rd & 24th, we've teamed up with our members SIMIT, Sitri and Leti for another in our series of SOI Academies, including an FD-SOI Training Day. (The last one this past winter was a terrific success – read about that here if you missed our coverage at the time.)
At WCS, the SOI Forum (sub-forum #8) is part of the afternoon Innovation Summit. We'll cover the broader SOI ecosystem, including both RF-SOI and FD-SOI – from wafers to design through manufacturing. Presentations will be given by members of the SOI Consortium team, and by leaders from our membership, including Simgui, NXP, Incize, ST, IBM, Cadence and Xpeedic. Click here or scan the QR code for the full program and registration information.
Also at WCS, SOI Consortium member VeriSilicon will be participating in a morning session on AI and IoT Wireless Communications (sub-forum #4). They'll be giving a presentation on their low-power Bluetooth design platform for GlobalFoundries 22FDX, and their CEO Wayne Dai will be moderating a round-table discussion. You can get more information on that (in Chinese only, tho) here, or follow VeriSilicon on WeChat.
The SOI Academy in Shanghai is an opportunity for experienced designers to gain solid expertise in FD-SOI. The event begins in the afternoon of May 23rd with a series of informative plenary talks by members of the SOI Consortium team, and by experts from our members Leti, Soitec, VeriSilicon, GlobalFoundries and NXP. The FD-SOI Training starts the next morning, on May 24th.. This is a hands-on event lead by top experts from Leti. The morning is devoted to digital design in FD-SOI, and the afternoon to RF design (including for 5G) in FD-SOI. Attendees will get a comprehensive understanding of design techniques for low-power chips leveraging the multiple benefits and flexibility of FD-SOI technology. Get more information here, or from the WeChat QR code.
We've got a busy schedule! To keep up to date with where we and our members will be promoting the SOI ecosystem, be sure to check our Events page regularly.
Key takeaway #2: If you need a Goldilocks process node – where you'll get just the right balance between active power, unit cost and investment – look to FD-SOI. And, btw, the IP landscape has improved dramatically. Those were just some of the great points made by Huibert Verhoeven (shown above), GM/SVP of Synaptics' IoT Division in his talk at the recent SOI Symposium in Silicon Valley.
BTW, if you missed part 1 of our coverage —Silicon Valley SOI Symposium a Huge Success. Key Takeaways (Part 1) Here. – you'll want to be sure to read it, too. Almost all of the presentations are now posted on our website – click here to access them.
In this post here, we'll cover presentations by Synaptics, GlobalFoundries, STMicroelectronics, Anokiwave and Dolphin Integration. It was a really full, day, so be sure to stay turned for Part 3 of our coverage to follow shortly: it will highlight the remaining presentations and panel discussions.
Synaptics' Verhoeven's presentation Revolutionizing User Experience Through Secure Neural Network Acceleration at the Edge was about Smart Home and using SOI. Synaptics is a human interface (HMI) company that's been doing neural networks since 1986. They've always been on the leading edge, from their first shipment of PC touchpads to becoming a dominant force in all things HMI today: they now ship over a billion units annually.
They currently have SOI products shipping with dedicated neural networks for voice, he said. European [privacy] regulations have played a part in driving their use of SOI, as have challenges regarding power and heat. Things are getting smarter at the edge. For example, not only do users want their coffee machine to offer the usual morning espresso, Synaptics says that the next step is for your coffee machine to recognize you're looking extra tired and ask if you might want a double?!
For them Smart Home and multi-modal applications are the primary area of interest, as well as some automotive. Although their biggest customers have resources, others need guidance. Voice is a critical component, but now you also need video and display.
Why SOI? Their HMI vision requires low power, significant computation and dedicated neural network hardware, explained Verhoeven, so FD-SOI with RF meets their needs. "22nm SOI is a Goldilocks IoT Process Node," he proclaimed. It gets the combination of active power, unit cost and investment just right. What's more, he said, "The IP landscape has improved dramatically. Our choice of SOI was not an accident." Be on the lookout for more products leveraging FD-SOI over the next six months, he concluded.
At this point on SOI, they've got 1 TOPS products with dedicated NPU for speakers, soundbars, Wi-Fi mesh, appliances, STBs and smart displays. These products have voice and sensor real-time (RT) AI. Next up is >4 TOPS on SOI with dedicated NPU, targeting STBs and smart displays with voice, video, imaging and RT AI.
"Our clients are at the forefront of changing the world," declared Mark Granger, VP of the Automotive Product Line at GlobalFoundries. His presentation, Capturing High Growth Market Opportunities with SOI, detailed how mobility, automotive and IoT are the growth markets for SOI. So not unsurprisingly, GF's 22nm FD-SOI technology, 22FDX, is seeing particular traction in mobile, edge, wearables and automotive.
They've got twice as many tape-outs this year as they did a year ago, he noted. GF's SOI portfolio includes 22FDX®, 45RFSOI and 8SW/7SW RF SOI for 5G/mobility; 22FDX for automotive (fully qualified for automotive Grade 2, with Grade 1 on the way); and 22FDX, 130RFSOI and 8SW/7SW RF SOI for IoT.
GF has announced a stream of good news recently:
You might have heard about the Dolphin Integration news, as we covered it recently here at ASN (if not, be sure to read it here). Dolphin's IP and methodology solutions address energy efficiency challenges. Automated transistor body biasing adjustment can achieve up to 7x energy efficiency with power supply as low as 0.4V on 22FDX designs. At the Silicon Valley event, Dolphin Integration CEO Philippe Berger provided additional information in his talk, FD-SOI IP Platform for Energy-Efficient IoT SoC.
In another GF-related talk, Nitin Jain, the CTO of longtime GF RF-SOI customer Anokiwave presented Unleashing the mmWave Phase Array Using SOI for 5G & Satcom. Anokiwave is a fabless semi IC company (you'll find a good technical discussion of mmWave phase array written by their Chief Architect here). They do active antennas (aka phased array), something the military's done for a long time, but now Anokiwave is bringing it to new markets and applications including radar, satcom and 5G. What they've been able to do is planarize the active antennas. They use GF's 45RFSOI process technology for phased array systems because of the cost, performance, scalability and system enhancements it enables. 45RFSOI, he explained, is ideal for beam-forming FEMs (including the switches, LNAs and PAs). The move to 5G/mmWave is going to require a lot of antennas, so these Anokiwave ICs are headed to high volumes, concluded Jain.
As Roger Forchhammer, Director of Business Development at STMicroelectronics pointed out in his presentation, Automotive FD-SOI Microcontrollers with Embedded PCM, ST pioneered FD-SOI (and that was almost a decade ago, btw). Then in February 2019, they announced a world first: they'd begun sampling 28nm FD-SOI microcontrollers (MCUs) with embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) based on embedded Phase-Change Memory (ePCM) to 10 alpha customers. These MCUs target powertrain systems, advanced and secure gateways, safety/ADAS applications, and vehicle electrification.
(In case you want technical details, the breakthrough ePCM eNVM was first presented at IEDM in December 2018 – you can get the presentation that accompanied the paper, Truly Innovative 28nm FDSOI Technology for Automotive Microcontroller Applications embedding 16MB Phase Change Memory, from the ST website.)
In his Silicon Valley presentation, Forchhammer said they're now doing Stellar, a whole family of automotive products on FD-SOI. To do it, they'd taken an existing device and moved it to 28nm FD-SOI with ePCM, which they manufacture at their fab in Crolles, France. A major advantage for automotive he cites is that in software updates it's bit-level programmable. "ST is fully behind FD-SOI," he concluded, adding that we're see more automotive as well as IoT products coming soon.
Well folks, that's all for this post. We'll finish up our coverage of the SOI Consortium's 2019 Silicon Valley Symposium in the next ASN post (there was so much to cover!). So please stay tuned.
FD-SOI for RF and mmWave communications is a hot topic. In high-data rate communications like RF and millimeter-wave devices in particular, FD-SOI delivers high-performance with numerous unique advantages, making it most likely the fastest RF-CMOS technology on the market.
If you'd like to take a deep dive and learn more about it, Soitec and Incize are sponsoring a free, full-day workshop in Grenoble on April 4th, 2019. Click here for registration information. The workshop follows the day after the IEEE/EDS EuroSOI-ULIS conference there (you can read about the full conference in a previous ASN post).
This technical workshop will cover the FD-SOI technology platform with a focus on its compatibility with RF & mmWave communications. Attendees will hear from notable FD-SOI leaders and experts from leading industry and research institutions presenting updates on key developments and building blocks across the semiconductor value chain. Topics will include circuit design, device fundamentals, simulation and characterization of RF devices, test, CMOS technology and substrate technologies enabling FD-SOI. In addition, the workshop will include an overview about how FD-SOI technology is benefiting current and future end user applications.
Here's the agenda:
Following the immense success of last year's FD-SOI training day in Silicon Valley, the SOI Consortium has another one planned for the end of April this year. If you want to start learning how to leverage FD-SOI in your chip designs, this is a great place to start. Click here for information on how to sign up.
ST Fellow Dr. Andreia Cathelin has put together another great line-up. World renowned professors and experts from industry will deliver a series of four training sections of 1.5 hours each, focused on energy efficient and low-power, low-voltage design techniques for analog, RF, high-speed, mmW and mixed-signal design.
You'll learn about design techniques that take full advantage of the unique features of FD-SOI, including body biasing capabilities that further enhance the excellent analog/RF performances of these devices.
Each section of this training day will take you through concrete design examples that illustrate new implementation techniques enabled by FD-SOI technologies at the 28nm and 22nm nodes – and beyond.
The design examples will cover basic building blocks through SoC implementations. A global Q&A session will close the day.
Here's a little more info on how the day will unfold. Click on the slides to see them in full screen.
FDSOI-specific design techniques for analog, RF and mmW applications – Andreia Cathelin, Fellow, STMicroelectronics
Andreia Cathelin is ST's key design scientist for all advanced CMOS technologies, and is arguably the world's leading expert on leveraging FD-SOI in high-performance, low-power RF/AMS SoCs. Her course will first present a very short overview of the major analog and RF technology features of 28nm FDSOI technology. Then the focus moves to the benefits of FD-SOI technology for analog/RF and millimeter-wave circuits. She'll give design examples such as analog low-pass filters, inverter-based analog amplifiers and 30GHz and 60GHz Power Amplifiers, as well as mmW oscillators. There will be particular focus on the advantages of body biasing and special design techniques offering state-of-the-art performance.
Circuit Design Techniques in 22nm FD-SOI for 5G 28GHz Applications – Frank Zhang, Principal Member of Technical Staff, GlobalFoundries
Frank Zhang has designed chips using GF's 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX) process for WLAN, 5G cellular and automotive radar applications. His course will focus on how to take advantages of FD-SOI's high-frequency performance at relatively low-current density to design high performance RF/mmWave circuits. Examples circuits include a 28GHz LNA, a 28GHz PA and an RF switch for 5G applications. The FD-SOI advantages such as low capacitance, high breakdown voltage and high-output impedance will be exploited in these design examples. This course will also discuss how to extend these techniques to applications at higher frequencies and/or higher current densities that are subject to extreme temperatures and EM requirements.
Energy-Efficient Design in FDSOI – Bora Nikolic, Professor, UC Berkeley
Borivoje ("Bora") Nikolić is known as one of the world's top experts in body-biasing for digital logic (he and his team have designed more than ten chips in ST's 28nm FD-SOI.) If you missed it, his team's RISC-V chip was cited as one of Dr. Cathelin's "Outstanding 28nm FD-SOI Chips Taped Out Through CMP" – read more about that here. His talk at the training day will present options for energy-efficient mixed-signal and digital design in FD-SOI technologies. He'll explain how to generate body bias and use it to improve efficiency, with examples in RF and baseband building blocks, temperature sensors, data converters and voltage regulators. The techniques will be presented in the context of UC Berkeley's latest RISC-V-based SoC, designed to operate in a very wide voltage range using 28nm FD-SOI.
mm-Wave and Fiber-Optics Design in FD-SOI CMOS Technologies – Sorin Voinigescu, Professor, University of Toronto
Sorin Voinigescu is a world renowned expert on millimeter-wave and 100+Gb/s ICs and atomic-scale semiconductor device technologies. His lecture will cover the main features of FD-SOI CMOS technology and how to efficiently use its unique features and suitable circuit topologies for mm-wave and broadband SoCs. He'll begin with an overview of the impact of the back-gate bias and temperature on the measured I-V, transconductance, fT, and fMAX characteristics. Then he'll compare the maximum available gain, MAG, of FDSOI MOSFETs with those of planar bulk CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS transistors through measurements up to 325 GHz. Next, he'll provide biasing, sizing and step-by-step design examples for VCO, doubler, switches, PA, large swing optical modulator drivers and quasi-CML circuit topologies and layouts that make efficient use of the back-gate bias to overcome the limitations associated with the low breakdown voltage of 20nm and 12nm FD-SOI CMOS technologies.
With over 100 attendees filling every chair in the auditorium, last year's training day was sold out. Although it was in Silicon Valley, people actually flew in from all over the world to be there. During the Q&A at the end, most everyone prefaced their questions by saying, "Thank you. I really learned a lot today."
2018 will be no different – except that it's sure to sell out even faster. Please note, though, that this is not a free event, so only the attendees will get copies of the slide decks.
Here's key info you need to sign up. See you there!
What: SOI Consortium's FD-SOI Training Day
When: 27 April 2018, 7:30am – 5pm.
Where: Crowne Plaza San Jose, Milpitas CA (parking is free)
Registration fee: US $485.00 (includes training book, breakfast, box lunch and refreshments during breaks)
How to sign up: Click here to go directly to the registration site.
This is the second part of ASN coverage of Day 2 of the recent SOI Workshop in Tokyo, which was dedicated to the "Convergence of IoT, Automotive through Connectivity". Many of the presentations are now posted and freely available – click here to see the full list.
(In case you missed them, Day 1 and Day 2 – Part 1 were covered in previous posts.)
Peter Rabbeni, GlobalFoundries' Sr. Director of 5G BizDev and Product Line Marketing focused on mmWave and why/how 5G. In his talk, Delivering on the Promise of 5G: Semiconductor Solutions for the Next Wave of Data, he pointed out that there's not one solution for all use cases – but there is an SOI solution for all the opportunities.
You need mmWave for latency, simultaneous connectivity, energy-efficiency and mobility, he explained. mmWave addresses the trade-off between distance and data rates. In a phase array, the beam is steered, but because of atmospheric absorption, you have to do multiple beams at high frequencies.
RF-SOI technology is already found in virtually every smartphone in the world. Now, he sees two main benefits in RF-SOI (a partially depleted technology that uses "trap-rich" substrates, btw) in the move to 5G and mmWave. One is device stacking, which you can do in SOI to overcome the Johnson Limit (a tradeoff between breakdown voltage and frequency). The other comes from the benefits inherent in the substrate: high-resistivity, high-Q and isolation. It means you can have smaller arrays for each element, and fewer chips per array. That's key: you need those smaller arrays for handsets and customer premises equipment.
Different designers are taking different approaches to RF, he notes. There are those doing FEM-centric designs, which integrate from the antenna back toward the transceiver. And then there are those that are doing integration-centric designs, which target integration from the transceiver/BB toward the antenna. The first approach is being driven by those customers with unique IP and presence in the front-end module space. The other is being driven by folks with IP and presence in the SOC space. Both will exist in some form, he contends. 45RFSOI is well aligned with the first case and focused primarily with FEM leadership performance and integration. 22FDX, on the other hand, is very well suited for transceiver/baseband ADC/DAC integration and can integrate the FEM functionality as well. Pathfinding on the FEM integration component is on-going for 22FDX.
SOI is "…the perfect solution to our needs", said Steven Yeung, Design Manager with MIPS/Imagination Technologies in his talk, MIPS Leading Heterogenous Compute in Automotive & IP. The cost of failure is increasing he noted, citing the ISO standard 26262 for functional safety in road vehicles, and SOI "helps a lot".
As noted in the presentation title, research powerhouse Leti sees that the Future of the Automotive Industry is Paved With SOI. Vincent Roger of Leti's Corporate Business Development made convincing arguments as to why FD-SOI is the right solution for automotive:
you need advanced digital circuitry for all computational tasks in the automotive environment
the 3-generation node gap between automotive and consumer is closing
FD-SOI is more power efficient than planar bulk (both at 28 and 22nm) or FinFET (16nm)
it's simpler in terms of design and IP portability than FinFET
it's a proven solution, with better reliability and lower design costs
it addresses all performance levels and communications
it simplifies integration of control electronics for distributed sensors
Leti is actively working on getting RF capabilities in FD-SOI adopted more quickly. For example, they are developing RF models for their UTSOI-2 modeling suite for FDSOI, including back bias effects. And they're also developing innovative basic design blocks that prove the technology validity and add new functionality.
He also sees an even bigger role for RF-SOI, the technology of choice for RF Front End Modules for connected vehicles and 5G applications. With Soitec, they're working to keep improving existing substrates and introduce new concepts.
SOI wafer suppliers (Soitec, SEH and Simgui) are expanding capacity, said Soitec EVP Thomas Pilisczcuk. His talk, The Role of Substrates in Accelerating Mass Adoption of SOI Technologies, reviewed the various SOI substrates and partners across FD-SOI, RF-SOI, photonics, power, image sensors and more.
Soitec is launching a program called FIRST (for First Integration Ramp of SOI Toolbox) to help customers reach competitive yields fast. They are also help customers facilitate SOI integration into design and manufacturing.
There are still more talks that are now posted on the SOI Consortium website. IHS/Markit made a very interesting high-level presentation on LIDARs & Sensor Fusion ECUs Advancing ADAS Architectures Toward Automated Driving, which called for chipmakers to integrate more features. Nokia Future X Network for 5G & IoT looked at infrastructure (they use their own chipsets). ST looked at smart cities in Sensor-to-Cloud Connectivity for IoT.
Equipment makers are also eager participants in the FD-SOI ecosystem. Screen's presentation was entitled Full Participation Within the SOI Consortium. The Applied Materials talk, Enabling SOI and IoT: An Equipment and Materials Engineering Perspective, covered how they're working with their customers and their customers' customers to understand the trends and enable the device roadmap.
Mark your calendars: the next workshop sponsored by the SOI Consortium will be in Shanghai this September 26th and 27th (one day is all about FD-SOI, the other about RF-SOI). You can now register or ask for an invitation: see Events on the SOI Consortium website. Last year's Shanghai event was really dynamic and absolutely packed, so you'll want to make sure you register early. (But if you can't make it, you can of course read about later it in ASN!)
GlobalFoundries has announced availability of its 45nm RF-SOI technology (read the press release here). Dubbed 45RFSOI, the company says it's the first 300mm RF solution for next-gen mmWave beamforming applications in future 5G base stations and smart phones.
The technology supports mmWave spectrum operation from 24GHz to 100GHz band, 5x more than 4G operating frequencies.
Skyworks' CTO Peter Gammel says that the 45RFSOI process, "…is enabling Skyworks to create RF solutions that will revolutionize emerging 5G markets and further advance the deployment of highly integrated RF front-ends for evolving mmWave applications."
The news was quickly picked up by publications across the industry, with EETimes noting that RFSOI has been a big GF success story.
Production will be at the company's East Fishkill fab. The PDKs are available now.
The 45RFSOI news follows hard on the heels of GF's announcement a few days prior that the company is teaming up to build a fab offering 22nm FD-SOI in western China, that it's expanding its Dresden FD-SOI capability by 40 percent, and that it's adding new RF-SOI capabilities to its fab in Singapore.
GlobalFoundries is a member of the SOI Industry Consortium.


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Whoever coined the saying that only death and taxes are certain was definitely not a system or cluster administrator. As certain as death and taxes are software upgrades. How many software packages that continue to be useful don't change? Even when a package is stable, the environment around it constantly changes, making new versions necessary to fix new issues derived from this evolving environment.
The scope of the impact of a software upgrade can vary tremendously. At the low end are upgrades that do not affect other software packages on the system, such as the version of a particular numerical library. At the high-impact end are distribution upgrades that change the version of libc, the standard C library, which can have a ripple effect through many of the software packages on a system, and a large set of in-between upgrades that can affect a varying number of users and applications.
Upgrading software on an individual cluster machine is similar to upgrading software on non-cluster machines. In many respects clusters should be managed like non-cluster machines. If you are dealing with a production cluster that servers a large user community, then all the standard practices should be followed, such as pre-change testing and a carefully planned and communicated migration path.
One of the most critical reasons to upgrade cluster software is to address security vulnerabilities. If your cluster is reachable by the world at large or by potential hackers you should keep a close eye out for security advisories for your kernel, system services, and any other software component that could be used to compromise a system. Some of the most useful resources to keep an eye on for software vulnerability and fix information are:
the vendor supplying the kernel and distribution you use,
the U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability, also known as CIAC, which can be found at http://www.ciac.org/ciac/, and
the CERT Coordination Center: a federally funded Internet security research and development center which can be found at http://www.cert.org/.

subset: commoncrawl


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Seve: The Long Goodbye/
Norman Dabell in the Telegraph:
It is the news that many were expecting long before now: Severiano Ballesteros, winner of five major titles, Ryder Cup inspiration on and off the course, and once the world's most revered golfer, has announced his retirement.
Don't have to be playing actively to retire? Sorry, continue Norman...
However, before Seve's fans go into mourning, he won't be hanging up his clubs until 2011, when he will be 54. By that time, he reckons, he will no longer have that legendary desire to beat the world, especially Americans, he has had for over three decades.
He's announcing his retirement five years in advance? Cher's farewell tour wasn't this long.


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Chiropractic Care
Chiropractic is the art of adjusting the joints of the body or the spine to allow the normal, innate expression of health.
The benefits of chiropractic care are many. The immediate benefits, of course, are less pain and better movement. Did you know research shows chiropractic care can also help you sleep better, think more clearly, experience healthier aging, take fewer medications and have fewer hospital visits?
Techniques and Services
We use a number of highly-effective adjusting approaches to help improve spinal biomechanics and reduce nervous system interference. The approach we use is based on our clinical judgment and years of experience.
Manual Adjusting
The objective of this chiropractic treatment is to reduce the subluxation, with the goals of increasing range of motion, reducing nerve irritability and improving function.
Instrument Adjusting
While most adjustments are delivered manually, an instrument may be introduced to provide a gentler, lower force adjustment when needed. Instrument adjustments move bones using the same corrective technique but with less force. Dr. Monroe uses the Pettibon Multiple Digital Toggle. You might have heard of the Activator Methods®, which uses a similar technique.
If you've been to a chiropractor before and prefer to be adjusted in a particular way, let us know. We want you to relax, enjoy and fully benefit from your chiropractic care.
Additional Modalities
Dr. Monroe uses a variety of therapeutic modalities to enhance your chiropractic care. Some of our most commonly used modalities include:
- Accelerated Recovery Performance Trainer (ARP), a specialized type of exercise and electrical muscle stimulation protocols to increase range of motion and strengthen surrounding muscles
- Ice therapy to reduce inflammation and pain
- Intersegmental traction to relax muscles and reduce muscle spasms
- Electrical Muscle Stimulation to reduce inflammation and increase blood flow
- Massage therapy including deep tissue and relaxation massage
- Rehabilitative strengthening to stabilize and improve function of injured areas
- RockTape® kinesiology taping to reduce inflammation and pain
Patient Concerns
You may be apprehensive about being adjusted, and that's perfectly normal. Dr. Monroe will develop a personalized treatment plan with you and explain it thoroughly to help put you at ease. He likes to say that he is like an old shoe with his patients . . . "it just fits!"
Most adjustments are very gentle and not at all painful. You might hear a cracking or popping sound, but the adjustment should not be painful. Occasionally, an adjustment might leave you with a temporary sting, but rest assured it is only temporary and won't last long.
If you are still nervous, Dr. Monroe can start with instrument adjusting until you become accustomed to chiropractic care.
Dr. Monroe and the staff at Morris Chiropractic Clinic want to ensure you receive high quality care tailored to your specific needs. We invite you to browse our site and contact us with any questions you might have about our approach to care or chiropractic in general. Get started today with a free consultation and find out how you can be feeling better soon!


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Eazy-E's Final Album Straight off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin' Compton | Review
Classic Rating: 4 / 6
Released: January 30, 1996
1 Final album. 14 new songs. This was the tagline when Eazy-E's second and final album, Straight off tha streetz of Muthaphukkin' Compton, was released posthumously on January 30, 1996. It dropped some 10 months after Eazy's passed away from AIDS in March 1995. Originally the album was intended for a 1993 release under the title of Temporary Insanity, but was shelved in favor of the It's On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa EP. This allowed Eazy to capitalize on the brewing beef with Death Row Records. That EP also gave Eazy the chance to get back at Death Row and co. for the heavy dissing (towards Eazy-E and Ruthless) going on in the intro to Dr. Dre's The Chronic album.
Straight off Tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton begins with a spoken intro "First Power" which has religious overtones despite Eazy's proclamation that he is not religious. So it's safe to say that the intro is tongue-in-cheek. Next up is the mid tempo "Ole School Shit" which features many other rappers such as Gangsta Dresta, B.G. Knocc Out, Sylk-E. Fyne who show up on three tracks. DJ Yella (from N.W.A.) produces this track and 8 tracks in total. The next track, "Sorry Louie", begins with a movie snippet featuring a murderous psychopath talking about killing his "friend" before the ominous Bobcat beat kicks in. The track features a lot of instrumentation such as horns, walking bass, and various sound effects.
Now we get to the highlight of the album, "Just Tah Let U Know" produced by Stone Tha Lunatic. This track has a smooth gangsta groove with wicked vocal chants and a dope chorus. It's also one of the last tracks Eazy ever recorded before his death. A music video was made featuring cameo appearances by MC Ren, DJ Yella, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Too Short, Above The Law, BG Knocc Out, Gangsta Dresta, The Pharcyde, Rudy Ray Moore and many more.
"Sippin on a 40" is a funkafied song about drinking 40 ounces of beer which were popular for their large size and cheap price. The beat has a strong 70s vibe and has a live instrument feel to it. On the next track, "Nutz on Ya Chin", Eazy gets some production help from Naughty By Nature who were a very hot east coast group at the time. While on "Tha Muthaphukkin Real" Eazy gets a visit from his old N.W.A. partner MC Ren who drops a verse on this slow track.
"Lickin, Suckin, Phukkin" is pornographic spoken word track featuring Eazy talking dirty over female vocals and moaning. Next is the violently titled "Hit The Hooker" which features a melodic, uptempo, keyboard-infused beat produced by Naughty By Nature. On this track Eazy really shows an improved vocal ability, even rapping quick and snappy like Treach (from Naughty By Nature). On "My Baby'z Mama" Eazy addresses his frustrations in dealing with his baby momma. The track itself is very repetitive while the chorus is uncreative and sounds aggressive. "Creep n Crawl" is very slow as the title implies, unfortunately, it "creeps and crawls" in a boring manner with a beat that is too uneventful.
On "Wut Would You Do", Eazy once again takes aim at Death Row Records, even addressing each member individually during a spoken word part
Dr. Dre
Straight busta
Never broke a law in his life
Besides beatin' up Ricky Harris' wife
Snoop Dogg
From a high top fade to sportin' braids
Now he's laid
Fame no fortune
And gettin' played, not payed, played
Treated like a prostitute
And we all know who's doin' the pimpin'
Daz, don't be a follower, be a leader
And stay off the next man's nuts
Kurupt, the Kingpin, sticks with the 6-0's
Cause you don't need those other hoes
Cause they're about to go up in you
But only if you let 'em
At the end of this scathing diss track there is a skit where Eazy-E approaches a house-party and shoots whoever his target is. The next track, "Gangsta Beat 4tha Street" is the total opposite as it is a laid back track with a fun vibe.
The last track, "Eternal E", is a farewell track produced by DJ Yella which he completed after Eazy's death. It's a ultra funky beat featuring the legendary Roger Troutman (founder of the Zapp Band). The track sees Eazy-E address a few issues in a spoken word format. One topic being police brutality in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King beating and the other being the controversial subject matter of gang activity.
All-in-all this album has good/solid beats, and Eazy's vocals are at times impressive, showing dramatic improvements since he started in '85. Although the way the album is mixed prevents Eazy's vocals from standing out on many tracks. Overall this album is a great listen for fans of Eazy-E and it went platinum upon release.


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The Blue Moon and 'One small step for a man...........'
What is a Blue Moon? According to the more recent definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. For a blue moon to occur the first of the full moons must appear at or near the beginning of the month so that the second will fall within the same month (the average span between two moons is 29.5 days). The full moon on August 31, 2012, was this type of blue moon; it was the second full moon in one month, giving sky watchers their last chance to observe this celestial phenomenon for nearly three years.
The August 31, 2012 blue moon also happened to fall on the day of late astronaut Neil Armstrong's memorial service. Armstrong, became the first person to set foot on the moon who on July 20, 1969.
Over the next 20 years there will be about 15 blue moons. The next blue moon occurs on July 31, 2015. We get two blue moons in 2018 when they fall within January and March.
"Blue moon" appears to have been a colloquial expression long before it developed its calendrical senses. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a blue moon comes from a proverb recorded in 1528: 'If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true.'
Saying the moon was blue was equivalent to saying the moon was made of green (or cream) cheese; it indicated an obvious absurdity. In the 19th century, the phrase until a blue moon developed, meaning "never." The phrase, once in a blue moon today has come to mean "every now and then" or "rarely"—whether it gained that meaning through association with the lunar event remains uncertain.
Upon taking the first step onto the surface of the moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong uttered what would become one of history's most famous one-liners, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
The image above was captured from the backyard of my home in El Dorado Hills on August 31, 2012. I used a Canon Zoom Lens EF 70-200mm 1:4 L USM, at 200mm, attached to a Canon 1.4x, which was then attached to a 2x Extender.
I dedicate this to the courage and honor of first man to set foot on the moon over 43 years ago ~ RIP Mr. Armstrong!


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The Skinny On Organic Gardening Like A Pro
There are a lot of places to find information related to gardening. You could use all of your time to find useful gardening information, but then you wouldn't get much gardening done. Luckily, everything you need to help you in your garden is right in this article. Read on to find out what they are.
Find some plants that will give you a higher yield. Hybrids are usually hardier in terms of disease and weather resistance, and are designed to produce more.
Choose the varieties of plants that will produce a higher yield. Hybrids are usually hardier in terms of disease and weather resistance, and are designed to produce more.
In the cold winter months, you can salvage certain plants by bringing them into the house. Choose the plants that are most likely to survive. Dig around roots carefully before transferring to a pot.
Save some plants in the winter by bringing them indoors. Your best bet would be try to save the best or most hearty plants. Remember to be gentle when digging up your plants; carefully dig away from the roots and gently place the plant into a container.
Using boiling water to kill weeds is both efficient and organic. A boiling pot of water is one the best and safest herbicides you can find. Literally pour the water on the weeds, avoiding any wanted plants near them, and watch the weeds die over time. The extreme heat of the water will cause damage to the weeds' roots, which will stop them from growing any more.
Fertilizing your garden is essential. Use commercially composted products in your garden to help your plants grow. This will reduce the chance of pathogens. You can choose from many different fertilizers. Do not worry about the kind of fertilizer you end up using but definitely put down something.
Carefully plan your garden first. This is a good way to remember which plants have been planted in each area before they grow. You can also avoid losing the smaller plants, or in larger gardens, the small plant groups.
Growing your garden at home might not be the most convenient thing for you, but you will save a lot of money and always have the confidence that what you're eating and feeding your family is as fresh and as healthy as possible. Use the tips you've learned here and get started on your garden today.


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Important Components That Your Home Solar Power System Should Have
In the event of a power outage, solar power panels Monterey residents buy come in very handly. These units draw power from the sun, and as such, you pay nothing for using them, reducing energy costs. Likewise, solar energy is environmentally-friendly, and harnessing it poses no known threat of green house gases (GHS). With solar power, the advantages to a household are difficult to exhaust, in particular when a configuration has all the essential elements as illustrated in this article:
1. The Panels
To turn sunlight into electricity that can power up a home, solar modules or panels rely on their photovoltaic cells. The panels are the main component of your solar power system, and the number you require to power up your entire home depends on the maximum load and the length of time to be in use. So, start by determining the power consumption of each appliance that will use solar power in Watts, and use the total for all such appliances to determine the number of panels you need for your entire home. First thing is: know the wattage (in watts) for each device that's intended for solar power, sum up the energy consumption for the said devices, and use the information to buy the right number of panels.
2. Battery Bank
A home battery backup system is always integral to your solar power setup. You might need several batteries, the number of which also depends on your energy consumption needs. Similarly, the length of time electricity interruptions usually last where you live can inform the number of batteries required for power storage.
3. A DC-to-AC Inverter
An inverter, which changes DC to AC current is important to have, with the exception of when battery-powered DC light bulbs are the sole users of solar power. The inversion system wastes as little as 5% of the energy output, but the remaining 95% is available for use. Be sure to note the efficiency specification for an inverter type for a guarantee that most of your solar-sourced power will be used on intended appliances.
4. Input Transfer Switch
Set up a transfer switch for the swift switching of power source from the grid to the battery system. Certainly, you don't want unexpected outages ruining your time on TV or other electronics, so make sure to install a switch that's built for an immediate shift of power source.
5. Charge Regulator
Install a charge controller to draw the highest amount of current sourced from your solar modules. Ensure that the switch comes with an auto-disengage feature to disconnect solar power supply from the batteries each time they're 100% charged. It's important to avoid damaging your batteries by overcharging them, or letting current flow back to the solar panels when they're idle.
Adding the abovementioned elements to your solar panels in Monterey guarantees consistent access to eco-friendly power for your residential use.
Why not learn more about Installation?


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Get your mind-body chill pill
Got stress?
Stress is like the baking powder in the recipe of life. Add just the right amount, and we rise. Without that leavening agent, our existence would be too flat. But you may be stuck in a lifestyle that's more like a baking soda science fair volcano -- erupting on the daily.
Let's get you some help with that.
Yoga and mindfulness help you re-calibrate the ingredients you're baking into your day-to-day life. Add a pinch more breath. Decrease the amount of over-committing. Substitute for allergies. Stuff like that. Incremental adjustments can create a whole new flavor of living.
Below you'll find lots of ways to re-calibrate. See you on the mat. May you thrive,
Upcoming workshops:


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Happy Feature Friday!
We're so inspired by today's feature with Becka from Everduring Designs. We love how much meaning goes behind all of her products and even into the name of her brand itself! Her custom journals and handlettered wood signs all focus on some of life's most important things and are perfect pieces to celebrate your marriage, new baby, or faith! Becka loves to use her pieces to connect with others, and we think it's amazing that she really thinks about the person or family that will be enjoying one of her creations. Keep reading to hear about her artistic process, why she loves to create, and some advice she has for anyone looking to start journaling or even pursue a creative endeavor or their own!
: Tell us a few things about yourself!
: Hi, there! My name is Becka and I am from the Houston area. Currently I am a master's student studying health promotion and nutrition. I opened up my Etsy shop as a creative outlet and a much-needed break from staring at computer screens. I have always loved writing names, scripture, and quotes in an aesthetically appealing style. Now I feel so privileged to be able to create personalized journals and wooden signs for homes, weddings, nursery rooms, etc.
: We love your shop name, Everduring Designs. We know how tough it is to create a brand name! Explain the meaning behind it, how it came to you, and how you think it fits in with what you create.
: In college I had a professor that shared something that impacted my perspective on the meaning of words. He said that every soul was eternal. So then when we speak to another person, our words do not have a temporary effect but rather an eternally significant impact. This helped me realize the weight of words and the necessity for compassionate thoughts and intentions behind our words. With this everlasting significance of words on my mind, I sought out the find a meaningful name for my shop. I knew I wanted to hand-letter words onto products that would exist as keepsakes or a meaningful piece in the home. I wanted the shop name to reflect the importance of those words. I took a chance and searched for some synonyms of "everlasting". I found the word "everduring" which is an archaic form of everlasting. It is obsolete and we no longer use the word "everduring", which I found to be ironic. I actually loved the irony that word which was meant to signify "never-ending, everlasting, and enduring" was not enduring in our modern language. I loved that it was rare and unique, so it was definitely a keeper!
: You're a fairly new Etsy shop owner! Give us a look into some of the most exciting moments of it you've experienced so far!
: I love receiving custom orders because I get the chance to reflect the personal stories of the person who is ordering it or the stories of the person who is intended to receive it. These orders can be very exciting but sometimes the stories behind the design, the Bible verse, or the quotes they choose can be absolutely heart-breaking. I have created journals and signs for people who are dealing with the loss of a loved one, with the pain of saying goodbye too soon. As much as it makes my heart ache to hear these tragic stories, I cannot help but hope that the journal or the sign would be a sweet reminder of hope and truth; that heartfelt letters to a person who may never read it may be a way of healing for the writer. Receiving orders like these definitely shape my perspective on life, loss, healing, and hope. This reminds me that my shop is not just a business but a way that my life can intersect with people I may never meet face to face – what a privilege that is!
: Your pieces all have a lot of meaning – whether they're family-related, marriage, or God-centered. What made you decide to pursue work that has this essence?
: I pursue work that seeks to integrate meaning into the products because I see these journals and signs as a reflection of the customer/recipient's character and story. I know that I am encouraged by the values and stories that customers attach to their pieces. Whether the messages are relationship or faith-based, I like to reflect on those messages which I believe to have eternal significance. I like to imagine what our conversation would be like if I could sit and have coffee with the customer. I would ask them "What's your story? What does this quote/Bible verse/song lyric mean to you? How has it shaped you?"
: How did you craft your skill of hand lettering and what are some of the challenges and joys of perfecting your work?
: Like any artistry, it is part skill and many many hours of practice. Designing these products have definitely exposed my inner perfectionist and control-freak. I am learning to design my products with excellence but to also not obsess over miniscule imperfections. It is easy to fuss over designs that turn out differently than the way I've planned – but plans tends to turn out differently, don't they! It is definitely a challenge to be comfortable with your work especially when you notice all the tiny flaws. But I am often reminded of the joy of creating these products and that their value and worth is so much more than the tangible qualities.
: The reclaimed wood you use is so beautiful! What made you choose this medium and what is the process like for working with it?
: Thank you! Reclaimed pallet wood has been a trendy medium for quite some time. I also see the value in repurposing used items. Recently I have started working with other woods that are not reclaimed but are light-weight and easy to hang for decoration. I chose this medium because of the practicality. The process starts with cutting the wood and sanding down rough edges and removing layers of impurities if it is reclaimed wood. Then I pre-condition the wood and stain it with wood stain. After a day or two, the product is ready to be designed. I roughly sketch the design on paper and then mark out the spacing on the product itself. I use a combination of brushes and brush pens to paint the words onto the product. Each product takes about 3-4 layers of paint. This is definitely the most time-consuming part, but the time in ensuring precision and quality is worth it!
: We love the journals you create, especially because you're a big journaler yourself! For some people, writing doesn't come so easy. How do you find what to write in your personal journaling time and do you have any suggestions as to how people should fill the pages of your books?
: My personal journals are filled with reflections, prayers, and notes from Bible passages or books I'm currently reading. I write my thoughts because internal silence is seldom possible (I am quoting C.S. Lewis loosely). It is a way of expressing my inner thoughts instead of stuffing them deep inside. My suggestion to anyone who wants to fill the pages of the journals is to 1) be honest and totally transparent – there's nothing to hide from yourself, 2) trust that the words you share are not wasted – journal entries document lessons learned and growth in your life, and 3) learn to embrace your voice – no one else can share your thoughts and feelings the way you can.
: What is the biggest realization you've had since starting Everduring Designs?
: With being a full-time student, it can be difficult keeping up with the shop as my side gig. I've had many instances where dealing with deadlines were all too overwhelming. I'm realizing the reality in balancing my priorities. I'm also learning to be faithful with my work as well as not allowing stressful deadlines to rob the joy from my work.
: What are some of the upcoming things you're working on for Everduring Designs? What do you hope to do in the future with your brand?
: I am currently working on orders for spring and summer weddings. I hope to have a few of these products listed for other Etsy shoppers soon! In the future, I would like to explore other media and products. I love exploring new techniques and ways to express myself artistically.
: Any advice for other creators out there?
: Take risks. Be kind to yourself when you make mistakes. And use your art to connect meaningfully with other people.
Follow Everduring Designs and see what she's up to next!:
Etsy (www.everduringdesigns.etsy.com) | Instagram (www.instagram.com/everduringdesigns ) | Facebook (www.facebook.com/everduring.designs)


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Picture the scene: My son (eight) and my daughter (three) are running around outside a mall, chasing each other and laughing and "getting their sillies out." This is something we do when they've been asked to sit for too long, be still for too long, act like a grown up for too long. We'd been visiting with family, and the kids sat through a long, kinda boring (for them) grown up chat. They needed to burn off some energy. So outside we went, where they could safely run on the grass and squeal and giggle and be, well, kids.
I saw them coming. I saw their orthopaedic shoes and their flowered blouses and their slow, painful gait. If I'd paid closer attention to their faces, which were pulled in like sour old prunes, maybe I could have stopped what happened next. But I didn't. I was too busy watching my kids, soaking in their joy and laughter, feeling grateful for their good health, just spending a mommy moment watching them with love.
And then ...
They passed my kids and moved on to their car. And my daughter ran to me, her face crumbling, her cheeks wet with tears.
"Mommy, that lady told me I'm a bad girl," she sobbed.
"What? What lady?" I asked, and she pointed her out. They were climbing into their car, and I had a flash of utter fury mixed with indecision. Do I go over and give that woman a piece of my mind? Or do I care for my daughter's hurting heart?
I chose my daughter. I held her while she cried, reassured her, cuddled her and wiped away her tears. It was the right thing to do, I know it. But I wish I could have split myself in two at that moment, I wish I could have spoken to that woman. I wish I could have shown her the damage her words had caused, and asked her what in the world gave her the right to speak unkindly to my child. And trust me, there are a lot of other things I would have liked to say, things that I wouldn't have been proud of later, but things that would have satisfied the mama-bear in me quite nicely in the moment.
Most of all, I wish she hadn't gotten away with it. Because she hurt my little girl, and I wish she knew. I wish she could feel it, for just a moment. And yes, I can speculate on the kind of pain and disappointment someone would have to experience in their life to justify verbally assaulting a child, but I'm not going there. I recognize it, but I don't excuse her behavior. I don't. I can't.
Because she did damage to something I've been desperately trying to repair.
Oh, my daughter. She's the kid who runs from morning to night. She laughs and dances and yells and screams and kisses and loves and riots and lives harder than anyone I've ever known. It's like she was given extra doses of just about everything, like her insides are on fire. She's shockingly strong-willed, which is challenging - but she's also painfully sensitive. She's desperate to please, and scared of making people mad. She's so afraid of disappointing us when the strong-willed part of her wins out. And she's also a three-year-old who looks like she's six, so strangers expect more of her. It doesn't help.
We're working so hard to let our daughter know we love and appreciate her for exactly who she is, while still curtailing the most outrageous or unsafe of her behaviors. We fight, every day, to parent her calmly and lovingly. To focus on behavior that needs correcting, rather than giving her the feeling that something is wrong with her as a person. We never, ever, tell our children they're bad. That cuts them down, and we're trying so hard to build them up. But all this time, all this parental effort - and a few cruel words knock us back three steps.
My daughter's only three. I doubt she'll remember this moment in her life, at least not consciously. But another part of me is certain, absolutely certain, that those words cut a permanent little wound on her sense of self. I can see it in her. I can see the damage I'll try to repair.
And though she'll likely forget, I never will. I wish I could go back in time and drop a bomb on that woman, truth be told. But I guess I'll have to satisfy myself by writing her into my next novel. So I can kill her off.


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J'Lyn Chapman - collection traces the uncanny coincidences and resemblances of the wilderness, mourning, the archive of natural history, the voracity for human flight, and apocalypse
J'Lyn Chapman, Beastlife, Calamari Press, 2016.
BEASTLIFE contains the out-of-print BEAR STORIES, a chapbook published by Calamari Press in 2008.
At once far and nearsighted, visionary and intuitive, this collection traces the uncanny coincidences and resemblances of the wilderness, mourning, the archive of natural history, the voracity for human flight, and apocalypse.
"We could nurse the wound of it or adjust. Beauty wants to replicate itself, and so I understood my craving to chew the blooms of flowers and to reproduce. It involved me and I was dripping with it, but when I reflected on my thoughts I found so much disfigurement. It was not so much that the bush burned without expending fuel but that the world provided endless fodder."
When this little book arrived and I stripped it from its packaging, it almost hummed in my hands—electric and charge, something I'd felt once before, when I accidentally and fortuitously discovered Margaret Wertheimer's quirky A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space and it turned out to offer the structural underpinning to a project I was writing. So even before I opened the cover of Beastlife, my hopes for it were high. The Table of Contents alone is tantalizing, with section titles like "The Good Beast: Five Essays," "We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy," and "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled And Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds." I was drooling after just a quick flip through.
Living in Europe I don't often get the physical weight and page of new, English-language, small-press books in my hands. And Chapman's book, as it unfurled its pages and the words tripped and tilted in the dust-mote haze of afternoon sun, proved the perfect complement to the heavy summer fields as they drape this Dutch landscape: golden where the wheat has already dried, green where the small shoots of corn are only just beginning. The muscularity of the ruddy horses as they sprint, nuzzle, wrestle in the fields across from me. The clouds of blackbird that swirl up at evening, swell and narrow and tunnel across the sky. But this book is also the decaying worms, driven by flood to concrete, now feasted on by clustering dark slugs. The humid stench of things dying, rotting, and growing all at once. The swarms of small biting flies hovering at head-height, glinting in the sun.
Beastlife is also a dense and philosophical book, heavy with language and concept, at the same time as it is bursting with fecundity and fetid detail, with lush green overgrowth and the stench of death and feathers. Chapman's stated influences range from Derrida and Celan and Barthes, to taxidermy magazines and Charles Darwin and The Iliad, and beyond. (And the Notes section is lengthy, perhaps even overly-assiduous at times, but ripe for the reading and inspiration.)
The book's first section, "Bear Stories," opens with writing that is immediately rich with sound-play:
The blur of fur caught in the image is coincidence, emergence. Scaffolding becomes architecture. Intentions double like light lost in folds of fabric. Palimpsests, our lack of focus. Two palms crack wasps nest. Oracle of entrails tells us nothing about the way to live, what to do when we meet crescendo and it is over. (7)
Chapman's language here is high-lyric: light, fur, palms, dusk, filament, pond, "the auspices of bones and chalk." There are birds everywhere. Minnows are "early moons," "flashing by my thighs," and the "wood floor is soft with moss." This is a world of grasses, green water, ticks and deer and bear and fish and blood. Bones and sky-constellations. Dying, seduction, rapacity. This is a piece to dip into, over and over, as one dips into the glossy cool of pondwater at night, beneath the moon, knowing there are leeches but also there is the silk of the water against your skin. It is romantic, in a fecund, heavy, earthy sort of way—replete with dead fawns and doves' rib cages, ticks and blood—but there is an edge of the brutal, of emptiness or violence, present from the start.
From the first section we travel to "The Good Beast: Five Essays," with its recurrent motifs of wings and flight, the distortions and bending of light, and the slowing of time. The section opens with the 1969 Soviet Union film by Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev, and the poet makes a curious turn into we, taking us with her and the Daedalus-like character as he lifts off the ground beneath a skin-sewn air balloon. Later, she freezes us in one of Tarkovsky's agonizingly slowed moments: a horse that is shot and falls down a flight of stairs, forcing us to endure the view of a "contorted beast / pain in the prolongation of a single moment."(31) "All of this life is the reflective index of a shimmering substance," she writes, and light bends, refracts, scatters: "we see through distortions of atmosphere and ice"(30). We are carried forward from Tarkovsky to da Vinci and then to the temple of Ba'al in Syria, through "field[s] of red-throats, marbled teals, and black-wings,"(37) where "whole cadences are swallows tethered to one another / flying a circuit around electric light"(36)—this last line an echo from "Bear Stories," and as we continue reading, we realize there are many echoes in this writing, some full phrases, but most imagistic: light is broken, light burns branches, light reflects like a ghost or scatters on opaque surfaces.
The rest of the book continues to weave in the threads of repeated lines and images, as it trips through an exploration of Eros and Thanatos, of metaphor and symbolism, nature's violence versus tenderness in the imaginative "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled And Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds;" then races across themes of silence, mortality, and time, past dry clinical archives which "fail to tell us how it feels to be animal," to the anxiety of belonging to a body, and the necessity of movement and travel, in "We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy." Finally, as though settling into a small pool at the end of a sprint, we come to "Our Last Days," a beautiful, personal, more narrative section of the book whose pace is slow, rich, expectant with summer and hope.
Overall, one of the most intriguing sections in Chapman's project is "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled And Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds," which makes up the middle point and arguably the heart of the book. In the book's meandering between prose and poetry, this one tips toward the essayistic; it is interwoven with quotes (from Catullus to Tennyson to Sebald and on) that seem to mark turns or transitions in the writing, and speckled with photos of dead birds collected by various other writers for Chapman's project. This piece is every bit as playful and quirky as its title, and the metaphorical frame Chapman has set around it is a pleasure to investigate and find one's way through, trying to make meaning of all its layers. The piece opens on a personal note, with the anecdote of a road trip:
We drove, once, along unkempt highways, and the field doves flew into the beam of our headlight. It could have been a moth the way it flickered white, the way it was made small in the breath of our speed. But we did not stop in that summer night. We might have been crying, the complications of sorrow and a merciless machine. And we were alone because no one came when we waited, and no one chased us when we moved. (42)
Quickly, then, it lays out an identity for this "we" that is the Ministry:
We are secularists who believe in the charity of attention. We question if there is a god who knows the number of hairs on our heads. And if we are not watched, then neither are the birds. We count the birds in the way we would want to be counted—to remember the way we would want to be remembered. . . .We reason that desire is violent because it is predicated on absence, and absence is the only absolute. We believe in science and absence, the subconscious and minor losses. . . . You believe death is repugnant, but we do not or we no longer do. We concede our dynamism in the archive. We transform being into history. (42-5)
There is an undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek here, flashes of humor resting on the framework, the bureaucracy and impersonal distance of a "ministry" contrasted against the thread of sorrow, mourning, loss and death.
From there, we travel to a commentary on metaphor versus symbolism: "Metaphor is a slip not to be avoided. Say, for example, a sparrow flies in one window and out the other of an open room. It is the soul passing through the world briefly. Not like the soul. It is the soul, but not exactly. The house finch is not exactly a house. But it is approximately a small comfort." (47) The tone slips into confession: "We were unprofessional. We lacked scientific objectivity, our bulwark and bastion. We came to the body of a bird as if to a lover's. We came with humility. We came for grace." (50) The essay then moves to transcend its own framework, stripping the "we" of its plurality, by exposing it as a stand-in for the singular: "We wore a black sweater and you a plaid shirt." (52) It takes a final turn into a question of semiotics, using the bird poems of a rather obscure writer named John Clare as its vehicle: "What is the difference between the dumb bird in a glass box and the word bird performed on the space of a page?"(56), and then exploring the role of the poem itself:
The poem is a way to stimulate and protect, to provoke and secure. It flirts by supposing that danger has boundaries, then draws near to softly jerk away. . . We are drawn to boundaries and the danger of boundaries. Flirting a boundary we resist our own death. Not the dissolution of the corporate, but of the corporeal. (58-9)
Though I found these last few pages an odd turn—the tone and language more of scientific reportage than of poetry or word-play, the idea of boundaries a new element in the essay, and the introduction of John Clare a bit abrupt so close to the end of the piece—I realized after re-reading that there were echoes here from both the first page of the book ("I regard my flesh, my tongue as stubborn boundary") and the last: "We smelled water. We were corporeal and dissolving. . . . The air was saturated in the damp and light of it. We risked everything to touch this way." (96) Though this did not entirely quiet the sense of an abrupt turn at the end, it at least made it seem more deliberate, as though eventually everything ties together. Despite the slight unsettledness of its ending, overall this essay constructs a delightfully-playful frame around an interwoven exploration of language, semiotics, and philosophy and a subtle narrative of personal experience.
Our journey through this book is similar to that interwoven exploration: it uncovers a vivid, occasionally brutal depiction of the natural world, wound into an understated and at-times surreal exploration of the personal, including relationship and its dissolution. The overall structure of the book is symmetrical: the first and last sections, "Bear Stories" and "The Last Days," are the most similar to each other in style and voice, though the former seems to place a layer of mythology (replete with the symbolism of death, life, nature) over the personal, surrealizing and thus making it more distant. In contrast, "Last Days" is much more intimate, more grounded in the "real," even mundane, details of a contemporary life, referencing the airport, political events, children's classrooms, a friend bringing cake—a level of detail you would not find in "Bear Stories." And the middle section, "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled And Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds," though overlaid with a playful, quirky structure related to its title, also feels grounded in a personal voice, a speaker who is in concrete relationship to others and to the world around her.
In contrast, "The Good Beast" and "We Continue to Unskin," the offset sections between the three pieces mentioned above, are much more abstract, complex with idea and concept, referential to things external to the speaker: film, books, paintings, a Syrian temple, and the theory and practice of taxidermy. While they may weave in some of the larger themes referenced in the other three sections, they feel almost more like an ontological commentary, a philosophical exploration of the meaning of being, than like the personal narrative found—even if fragmented, buried—in the other three pieces.
The book moves between pieces that accrue, even if only slightly—at times what accrues is only a sense of the speaker herself—and pieces that offer little constancy, even between their small sections. The overall effect of this is intriguing: though the book's use of pronouns is almost always slippery—never clear whether "you" references the same person, even within the same section—or at times using "I" for a singular speaker and at other times using "we" for what eventually becomes clear is a singular speaker—and any clear, coherent narrative is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down, there is always enough detail to be enticing, to keep us reading in pursuit of what meaning will accrue. And along the way, the beauty of the language and the thinkiness of the philosophizing are more than enough to make for a rich read; they alone make this a book worth returning to over and over again.
Chapman, who teaches at Naropa University, wrote this book over a number of years—the section "Bear Stories," was first published as a chapbook by Calamari Press in 2008, and several other pieces in the book were published multiply in both early and later versions—and perhaps it is this slow reworking that has led to the creation of such a layered and deftly, densely worked project. Whatever it is, treat yourself and pick up this little book for one of your winter reads: the lush and gorgeous language, delicately and greenly layered with so many smells and tastes and shades and textures, will tantalize you with memories of summer, while the project's intellectual complexity provides plenty of delightful exertion for your brain. - Arianne Zwartjes
In a recent lecture by J'Lyn Chapman at Naropa University entitled "The Emergence of Consensuality," she announced, "I want to hold space for all of it." And maybe she did not define her "all," or maybe I busied myself with frantically scribbling in my notebook rather than keeping an ear open to memory, but I cannot recount what exactly her "all" encompasses. In saying this, I acknowledge that every "all" entertains boundaries set for it by personality and accountability—I am a person, and I feel accountable to blank. Thankfully, however, Chapman's "all" is explored in her book, Beastlife. It begins by nerving a more generally adopted definition of "all," a definition which burns on an overwhelming gust of ideas and desires longing to come to fruition. Chapman says, "It is a cold sound and you standing at the foot of the bed knee-deep in green water, telling me, this is the water from the ladle in my chest for you." In this quote, the ladle overflows, the chest aches, and there's too much love to contain within a subjective everything. This want to "hold space for all of it" causes the body to feel ill and project its love as unrefined flood, ironically threatening the things it wishes to protect. However, as the text travels through five sections of nature-logue, body play, and beastly attention to detail, the "all" is purified into a healthy and resonant breadth of concerns. I am a person, and I feel accountable to…
Beast and life frame the wings of the spectrum and maintain a range of evolved ideas: animal on one end, man on the other, and a beastlife middle ground. The cue to separate these stems from the quote, "To understand how men and animals live, we must witness how a great number of them die," which recognizes men and animals, even though we harbor one and the same instinct. Consequently, one has to be named beast and the other life. An exploration:
Man as beast / animal as life
- Chapman says, "What is a lie if it can be corroborated by books?" Given that lies invite judgment strewn with criminality and danger, any form of life intelligent enough to write fiction–and through writing fiction, to validate lies–casts a beastly light.
- In speaking of Darwin's affair with observing nature, Chapman states, "…A detail he notes then strikes." Although seemingly contradictory to the statement condemning fiction writing, since noting observation can be seen as an event of inception, this particular statement only deepens man's relationship with beastling. "Striking" is unnatural to the act of observation; either one sees something or one doesn't. Therefore, Darwin's practice reeks of editing, which can easily equal lying.
- The quote, "I watch the hunters leave their cabins in a line of bravest to new," immediately paints man as hunter as beast, but it also does something else, more subtly. Although "line" initiates an image of strict order, an unbecoming business for a beast, the way in which the hunters line up depends entirely on fear. Beast acts on instinct, on fear.
- Categorizing the human as predator and animal, as prey, parallels human as beast, and animal as the life that feeds it. The quote, "My mouth is full of rabbits. Their taste is dust and grass. The sensation is moths," projects these roles through the transparent, electrifying, and also papery taste of its image.
- The quote, "…Hormones smell supple as a bed," delivers the part of life or life-giver to the human whose furnishings for a mating call rely on the devout comfort and physicality of a bed. An animal's furnishings for a mating call, on the other hand, are much more primal and in this case, unmentioned.
- To compliment another human by saying, "You are so good. So pretty like an infant," portrays the human as a child and again suggests a capability to bear children—"Bear Stories"—yet refuses one the ability to communicate ravaging, beastly desire.
Throughout its five sections, the book commits to a prose form that's interrupted solely by parts in which dashes signify line breaks. When I think about why this project thrives in prose, my mind reaches to what I find most interesting and critical to the form: the decision to compress in order to unfold. Chapman unites lines comparable with how she unites the creatures of this world, so that she could unfurl a beastly desire narrative in the wake of human intelligence. This narrative, which can also be extracted as her "all," calls for the extension to peak beast and to peak life, affording fertile grounds for a planted fever. - Karolina Zapal
J'Lyn Chapman's Beastlife is a collection in five distinctly different parts; two of these parts are prose, or perhaps prose poems, and three are essays. Some of the passages concern nature (human and animal). It includes illustrations, and among those are photographs of birds (some dead on the street, others dead and mounted in 19th-century museum displays). Beastlife is enigmatic.
The first part, "Bear Stories," begins: "Once, I stood at the window and said, birds, come out of the ivy. They wouldn't and they still don't…" The narrator's command or conjuring meets with refusal. We see glass again in the essay titled "We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy": the exhibit barrier that separates us from the specimen. We see birds again, too: observed, dead on the street after a storm; collected, preserved by the taxidermist's art. In the essay titled "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled and Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds," Chapman alludes to the poet John Clare's bird poems: "What is the difference between the dumb bird in a glass box and the word bird performed on the space of a page?" The tone turns pleading, ashamed: "And when we photographed the finch with red on its breast and the soft, round head (slightly larger than our thumb), we felt greedy, and that we should make excuses." The essay acknowledges that "…we are, in turn, satiated by our photographs, our lists, our elegies." But those birds, the ones in the ivy, keep refusing to come out. Natural history museum exhibits of animals, those grand halls of taxidermy, "fail to tell us how it feels to be animal. The rest is unknown, a privacy so radical in its impossibility that the only response can be wonder."
This statement may guide the reader of Beastlife toward a way of reading Chapman's enigmas, written in elegant declarative sentences. The concept of wonder acknowledges the human gaze and the human desire to catalog, collect, and preserve, while not taking away the animal's radical privacy. This may be why, in this collection, Chapman so often presents us with fur, feathers, or skin, a wing, an eye, or a snout. When she refrains from scientific names, the beast remains more itself.
Chapman gives so much weight, however, to antique forms of collecting and exhibiting animal nature (taxidermy, old-fashioned museums) that I wondered how, or if, her archive accommodates the beasts of modern social media and viral videos: the bear in the swimming pool, the bear in the dumpster, the bear walking on its hind legs in New Jersey…
If the life of animals is unknown to us, Chapman suggests ways for us to speak as human animals. Perhaps Beastlife as a title can be understood as a way of saying autobiography or memoir, (bringing to mind the ZYZZYVA anthology of autobiographical works, AutoBioDiversity). But the self that calls through a window to birds can't make that barrier go away. In one of many visionary moments, Chapman observes: "Someone drove half a house down the center of the highway." So what do we do inside that house, on our side of the glass? Perhaps the answer is suggested in this serene passage: "…I take on the attitude of February. That is, I become something quiet and waiting." Is this a radical attempt to shift point of view, to get outside the house? It's also uncannily impersonal, almost as if she's become that glass barrier, mirroring the world and time.
Puzzling over the enigmatic Beastlife, whose title evokes medieval bestiaries, this reviewer thought of how some of the earliest writings in English literature are Anglo-Saxon riddles (called, in Latin, enigmata). In this riddle, the animal narrates its own transformation into vellum or parchment:
A certain enemy robbed me of my life,
stole my world-strength; afterward he soaked me,
dunked me in water, dragged me out again,
set me in the sun, where I swiftly lost
the hairs that I had. Afterward the hard
edge of a knife, with all unevenness ground away, slashed me…
This would seem to contradict Chapman's idea of the animal's radical privacy—in the riddle, there's both a direct assault on the animal and the claim to speak as that animal. Perhaps the difference is that in those days there was no glass. Beastlife seems an ambitious attempt to get back to the skin of things. - Erica Olsen http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/BeastlifebyJLynChapman
Once I became aware that this book existed, I knew I had to have it. So I ordered it immediately.
When it arrived and I went down to the bookstore to retrieve it (that is, release it from the bookseller who could not refrain from glancing through it as if he was regretting having to let it go), trusting some odd intuition that it might hint at something I was looking for. But, to be fair, I had little idea what to expect.
J'Lyn Chapman's Beastlife is very small, fitting into the palm of the hand, or better yet, a pocket. An ideal companion for a walk in a park or natural area. I bought it with the idea that it might offer an unconventional provocation for a process of loosening, prying open, the closed window between my loss and the grief that I cannot begin to touch yet. At this point, in the first months following my parents' deaths, mourning feels more like an empty space. Written of the body, mine and theirs. Confused. Contorted. Corporeal.
Not everyone would look to a book containing photographs of dead birds (albeit small, grainy black and white images), to find a voice for sorrow. For me it makes a strange sort of sense. It sounds morbid, but hopefully, if I manage to put to word the images that haunt my memories of my mother's last month and days, I will be able to illustrate the beauty. If I have learned anything yet in these early days following the first significant losses of my life, it is that making sense of the death of those closest to us is at once universal and specific. And I lost both parents. Two very different relationships, two different circumstances, two separate yet entwined experiences of grief.
Of course, there is much more to Beastlife than photographs of birds.
This collection of essays—poetic meditations—on life and death, birds and beasts, and our human interaction with the natural world offers evocative, yet insistent reminders that we should strive to observe, engage with, and exist in this world with grace and compassion. Not that we, as humans, always succeed. Sometimes we are careless. And sometimes we are unthinkably cruel—inhuman even.
Death is a theme throughout, up close and afar. And violence too. Chapman explores the ways we intersect with nature—as hunters, naturalists, observers of atrocities, and, most fundamentally perhaps, bearers of new life. This tiny volume challenges the readers to reflect on our place in the cycle of life, in the beauty and the pain.
For me, at this time, when death is very much on my mind, there is an odd comfort in these pages.
The volume opens with "Bear Stories," a series of very short pieces; raw, visceral prose poems that draw on the intimate complexity of our connection to the natural world. Bound with water, blood, fur, and feather the beauty is shocking, brutal, sublime. Drawn from an earlier longer form chapbook, these "stories" invite us to consider the world at gut level.
In the dark, a body is a pond. The night birds make hollow sounds, and then there is a sound of the mouth, pulled back, curled out. And so on. Fur catches the moon as it comes out barbed and dark. A vertical cut whines under the ribs, and the long grass keeps it from you.
The micro essays and meditations that comprise the central portion of Beastlife are remarkably rich, drawing on a range of literary and critical resources. "A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled and Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds," for instance, takes inspiration from Ovid, Heidegger, Barthes, Sebald, Tennyson and more. Despite its seemingly whimsical name, this is a more explicit meditation on death and dying framed against images, photographic and descriptive, of dead birds. The ministry of the title is an imagined institution dedicated to a form of archival lamentation, an understanding of death and mourning through the collection of photographic specimens. They seek and gather images into a growing chronicle of sorrow:
We were stopped, and looked down, in the walk by the bird, flies, cigarette, glint of coin. We saw the futility in keeping—the ornaments in hydriotaphia and their obsidian speaking something of its keeper. But the detritus we die alongside or do not die alongside, the litter jettisoned from our death and dying bodies or we die too quickly to regard, utter the currency of living things.
And there is this discomfort: the spectacle. Its hard edges. We have bodies too, we say, and we want them wrapped in webby husk, a film, a membrane huddled into self. But our bodies are still over-looked by our own flânerie, in which the world, and its subtle schism of that which is alive and that which is dead, becomes our final coup for all we have lost in the leaving. All the unmeasured ether, it flames with our light.
In death we are confronted with the fragility of the body—the body of the one who has died and, in reflection, our own. In her next essay, "We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy," following Truth's advice to Petrarch to constantly meditate upon his own mortality, Chapman contemplates mortality and the miracle of immortality which, paradoxically involves an engagement with death. Structured along lines from a poem by Paul Celan, this journey takes us through the a more familiar archive of natural history. From the delicate art of the taxidermist, preserving the form and imitation of natural life in the animal's natural habitat, to the narrator's own relentless search to find her place in the urban spaces she inhabits, the promise of immortality lies, of course, in language.
And yet every sentence has its beginnings and each animal, posed as it is in flight or in fright has its past-tense. Beauty, eternal gesture. I want to write sentences that stretch on toward desperation, as in the fugal voices that become discordant but still lovely, then recollected in harmony. At the apotheosis of the desperation, the line would break into clause or new sentence and the break would be the point of discord rather than calm, and still the dissolution would be reprieve, as when the healthy mind refuses any more annihilation and in its descent decides to rest. But there must be sentences that travel toward the desperate one. There must be travel.
The last entry, "Our Final Days," echoes in form the contained short prose pieces of "Bear Stories," but here the brutality is decidedly human—dispatches of cruelty, violence, and injury are played against the hope that some semblance of beauty in nature may preserve us. It's a faint hope, a lament of an entirely different order. It's too easy to get wrapped up in the disheartening news that floods our lives through our TVs and news feeds. Sometimes I find myself relieved that my parents will not see any more of the potential darkness that seems to ever loom on the horizon. But then I remember that I have two children. Life goes on. I reorient myself to the future again.
There is a woeful inadequacy that washes over me when I read more conventional memoirs of loss and explorations of grief. I keep peeking into odd corners, turning over rocks to see what crawls out. Reading books like Beastlife.
I keep the other poetic evocations of grief, the books I am amassing, close at hand. I read them to stir up and open the gates that are still secured against the flood of choked tears, the barricades of numbed sadness, that do not seem to be able to allow more than a slow leak in occasional shuddered gasps. At the moment mourning feels more like emptiness. I feel a need to find a starting point with death, with these particular deaths, with watching each one on their deathbeds, before I can find and begin to work through the grief. - https://roughghosts.com/2016/09/01/a-meditation-on-life-and-death-beastlife-by-jlyn-chapman/
Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?
— Texts for Nothing, Samuel BeckettMeditation, in literary terms, is a much obscured word. No doubt this has more to do with the word in wider use at present—where once it signified a reflective, contemplative, even philosophical or religious book, now we are more likely to be presented with it in terms of neo-spiritualism and the cult of wellness. So within a few pages of J'Lyn Chapman's Beastlife, it struck me as quite powerful that meditation was the word that seemingly sprang from nowhere in the full, classic literary sense.
This is a presentation of nature as reflection, told in stories, essays, and fragments—of what we are and are not as humans, a complex contemplation of life and death rather than a linear observation of other species in the style of Pliny's Natural Histories. More than anything, it shows us as longing for the animal in life, but lacking life in death—reaching for some understanding of how to maintain a kind of motion that will carry us beyond, even though we cannot define it. Perhaps that is the reason I found myself going over and over the sections "We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy", and "Our Last Days". The concept of something from nothing—specifically the greed for life when it balances on the edge, the rush to understand in a fragile handful of last moments, the obsession with capturing a movement or breath so that it may save life, bring to mind both Beckett, and DeLillo's most recent novel, Zero K.
The Beckett will come as no surprise to anyone who reads Beastlife—indeed, the author references the "zero" of Endgame (amongst many others: Barthes, Derrida, Sebald) as well as the idea(s) of transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is the attempt to understand transformation in the grey area of life and death, as the maintaining a grasp of the former while in the state of the latter—a kind of un-state, that is so fascinating. "There is nothing so artificial as resurrection, but artful preservation suspends our repulsion" says Chapman. Because we are not bound by instinct alone as humans, there is a need to suspend both that repulsion and fear, as well as seeing beyond as another horizon to travel towards. But in order to suspend, we must first come to an acceptance of the silence inside, the one that is to fill us completely when our eyes flicker for what might be the last:
"when you become quiet, you experience all that is empty within you, the absence that has accumulated since light. … But until you understand that life is spent as if it is held in a delicate husk and that the sound of this husk is zero, then you will never find peace in the time that you contain."
Likewise in Zero K, as Artis is slowly brought into cryogenic sleep—a kind of metamorphosis from something to nothing in the hope that there will be a return, a beyond—she contemplates in half-conscious fragments:
"Why can't I know more. Why just this and nothing else. Or do I need to wait.
… Is this what makes me whatever I know and whatever I am.
… I listen to what I hear. I can only hear what is me.
… But am I who I was."
She is, as Chapman says, "going deep"—examining her life via death-in-progress. But what of the body itself, prepared for the known-unknown? It is distinctly human that we preserve ourselves in the utmost rigidity, a present from our past selves to future ones. From mummification to cryogenics, the reverence applied to the physical body seems more for the benefit of the thing we cannot define—or rather, define with scientific proof instead of mythology. Yet in Beastlife, the difference in our death-treatment of beasts and birds is markedly different—here the reverence and emphasis is on imagined movement: "cognitive dissonance connects changes. We call this animation … our love for one another is connected to movement"—the display of death-as-life, a hope that a motion stopped is not permanent, a reminder of wildness/wilderness. But unlike our treatment of each other, it is held in a specific living moment: extended wingspan, an open beak, a specific perch. There is an element of wanting to transfer ourselves into the animal body to realise what it was in life, and in doing so, reconnect with the feral, break free of the rigidity of human ritual.If we care to listen, there is an innate need to go back to the natural world in times of crisis, observe that which has survived on nothing but instinct for so long, relatively untouched by the artificial state of man. In it we find zero, and realise how small and static our created world seems in comparison. That insignificance does indeed bring its own peace: "[w]e could feel ourselves come apart, disperse and circulate … [t]he look of things has great power: stippled shadows, a cooling breeze." Here is the metamorphosis, the movement, the meditation—where we are perpetually balanced on the cusp of this life and beastlife, one moment televised destruction, the other bone talismans and musk. We shed our voice and use the ones of those that fly and crawl around us instead, wrap ourselves in the wings and fur that show us wisely how to live and die. - Tomoé Hill https://minorliteratures.com/2016/08/12/beastlife-by-jlyn-chapman-tomoe-hill/
When we are in bed and you are on top of me, I think about the painting of the bear hanging over the great stone fireplace. I say to myself, bear, tell me a story about your tooth and your hide, about the three dogs that bare their teeth, and about the one dog that is so brave, he takes your flank in his jaw and hangs from it. Bear, tell me about the time it takes to put a sweater on. I want to know what it means to lie down empty. And bear answers, I have always been ashamed. I put on fish skin. They sometimes call the bear a lonely monk. The bear's habitat is the gorge, the tree, the cleft of rock. If you open the bear's stomach, you will find a rubber doll and a piece of canvas. I tap my upper and lower eye-teeth together. I refuse to eat. You laid yourself beside me, and I realized I was cold in my hairless skin. I wear wool in the rain so I will smell like bear, so that she will kiss my shoulder as I kiss the wood of our cabin walls.


text:
There's a new controversy brewing.over an app that gives online access to birth control, even to pre-teen girls. Monique Green said she was shocked to learn her teenage girls could receive birth control without a parent's consent. "She had the right to tell them and not tell me and so that really made me say 'wow,'" said Green. It's called Nurx. It doesn't cost anything to use. You just answer some medical question
inside the app and provide payment by credit card. Nurx employee Maryam Fikri says they are only trying to help young women. "Despite the current political landscape, we are providing another option to make it easier and more affordable and more convenient to access contraception," said Fikri. Even someone as young as 12 can be considered for contraceptives. Monique Green wanted to check it out herself. READ MORE


text: This Nigerian Nollywood Movies is about Mike and Queen. They are young and talented and are both from a poor home. They are determined to see themselves through school despite their challenges. How much of a fighting spirit can they put up? Enjoy! Cast: Mike Ezurunoye, Queen Nwokoye, Walter Anga, Joyce Kalu, John Oamen


text:
Here we are, the day after the solstice, when our world literally becomes a little brighter. This metaphor makes so much sense to me for the darkest times in our lives when things are bleak and despairing. If we get through the pain there is a light at the other side. We may have no sign of it, no inkling, but it will eventually come.
In early November I had one of these nights. A night as a parent, when time stops and the world around you ceases to exist. The doctor gets disturbed by a phone call at 9pm on a Monday night. We floundered our way through and eventually the morning came. The kids were safe.
But mental health is sneaky and hard to predict. Sometimes it feels too much to bear. If I am the one who is supposed to hold the hope and the hope isn't there… what happens then?
A week later I sat down for Thai food with a close friend. I let it all out, baring my soul over green curry. I didn't couch it with, "I know it's going to be ok." She listened. Like, really listened. She said yes all of this is true and here are the things that are still amazing in your life and steady, too. She held the hope for me.
Who can hold your hope for you?


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text:
Sunshine In The Rain
Start Up Art Fair SF
I will be participating in the Start -Up Art Fair at Hotel Del Sol this weekend.
Date : April 28-30, 2017
Venue: Hotel Del Sol 3100 Webster Street, San Francisco, 94123
Room 217
Tele: 415 921-5520
Fair Hours
Friday April 28th : Noon - 10pm
Saturday April 29: Noon - 9pm
Sunday April 30: Noon - 7pm
stARTup Art Fair is a unique contemporary art fair for independent artists. It provides artists and art enthusiasts with direct access to the art world, fostering new relationships and creating a new exhibition platform for thought-provoking contemporary artwork in three major cities across the country: San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
With the dawn of the internet age, consumers are experiencing artwork unfiltered and direct from the artist via social media. More and more artists report building a thriving client base by selling works straight from the internet. stARTup Art Fair is forward thinking--mirroring this shift in the art market by creating direct access between consumer and artist without sacrificing quality. Each fair assembles a panel of curators, gallerists and professional artists to vet our exhibiting artists, ensuring a thoughtful and dynamic group of artists that will impress and inspire our attendees.
Founded by artist and educator Ray Beldner, and former gallery director Steve Zavattero, stARTup Art Fair's mission is to provide a professional exhibition venue for independent artists where they can present and sell their work on their own terms and the public can acquire amazing art work from some of the best independent artists working today.
Serenity Art Exhibition
Serenity Art Exhibition is on-going till May 10th . My work is displayed on the 7th floor
UCSF Women's Health CenterPhone Number: 4159029863Address:2356 Sutter Street,San Francisco, California 94115
Where art has been incorporated into the healing process. I hope you will have time to check it out before it's de-installed
When the rain falls hard on me, when the wind shakes up the puddles of water in pavements and pot holes , I embrace its beautiful reflections, I see the light that bounces off the wet slippery floors, I become the light, I soak up the sunshine in the rain.
Thank you for your patronage
For more updates on my work, visit my website:www.ninafabunmi.com
Like me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/NinaFabunmiFineArt/
Follow me on instagram https://www.instagram.com/ninapicasso/
Follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/Ninartz