Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to you beautiful Nia, my your day be as beautiful and with purpose as you. ❤️

The Best Vegan Soul Food Restaurants Across the Country

Vegan soul food restaurants are popping up across the country as the demand for plant-based food grows. Check out this list of our top picks!

Source: The Best Vegan Soul Food Restaurants Across the Country

From The New York Times:
David Mancuso, Whose New York Loft Was a Hub of ’70s Night Life, Dies at 72
By WILLIAM GRIMES, November 18, 2016
David Mancuso, a self-described “musical host” who revolutionized night life in New York with weekly dance parties he gave at his downtown loft, beginning in 1970, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.
The New York City medical examiner’s office said it was investigating the cause.
Mr. Mancuso, called “the most influential figure in night life history” by the British music journalists Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in their book “The Record Players: D.J. Revolutionaries” (2010), brought to his Saturday night gatherings the values of the 1960s counterculture, an audiophile’s fascination with sound technology and a voracious appetite for all styles of music.
The parties at the Loft, as Mr. Mancuso’s apartment came to be known, became a near-religious rite for the city’s underground.
From midnight until 6 a.m., Mr. Mancuso’s top-of-the-line sound system delivered an eclectic musical mix to an audience that one tenant in his building, talking to a New York Times reporter in 1974, called “some of the more bizarre segments of our society.”
A Mancuso party was a ’60s dream of peace, love and diversity: multiracial, gay and straight, young and old, well-to-do and down-at-heel, singles and couples, all mingling ecstatically in an egalitarian, commerce-free space.
“Don’t forget, you had the civil rights movement going on, you had gay liberation going on,” Mr. Mancuso told the website Red Bull Academy Daily in June. “You had all these movements going on. All this music that was coming from all different directions, it was all over the place. As long as you had a neutral place where people could come and just enjoy themselves, there was such incredibly good music.”
The parties provided the model for dozens of clubs to come, notably the Paradise Garage in Manhattan and the Warehouse in Chicago, and decisively influenced the culture and musical styles associated with them, from disco onward to the worlds of house, acid, techno and dubstep.
“D.J.’s started to gravitate to the Loft when they were finished with their own parties for the night, and it was there that some of the most influential D.J.’s of the future — Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, François Kevorkian, David Morales and many more — would learn about the sonic and social potential of the party,” Tim Lawrence, the author of “Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79” (2003), wrote in an email.
David Paul Mancuso was born on Oct. 20, 1944, in Utica, N.Y. His mother, Catilana Mancuso, known as Kathleen, placed him in an asylum for children two days after he was born. She took him back in when he was 5. He was the product of a love affair his mother had had while her husband, Karl Hajdasz, was serving in the military.
Mr. Mancuso dropped out of high school and in 1962 moved to New York, where he worked a variety of jobs before renting a loft, on Broadway near Bleecker Street, in 1965. He enjoyed playing records for friends and invested in a high-quality sound system that featured two pairs of Klipschorn speakers, known for maintaining clarity even at high volume.
Economically pinched, Mr. Mancuso decided to issue invitations and sell tickets for what were essentially rent parties. The first, on Valentine’s Day 1970, bore the title Love Saves the Day, whose initials were significant.
“By the end of 1970 you couldn’t squeeze anyone else in, and it stayed like that for four and a half years, regardless,” the D.J. David Depino told Mr. Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, for his website in 2013. “I remember when we had the first blizzard and people walked from over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Mr. Mancuso did not call himself a D.J. He shrank from the limelight. His goal was to disappear into the music and allow its power to transform the audience.
A purist, he played records from beginning to end, untouched and unaltered. Responding to the energy of the crowd, he orchestrated a seamless, interruption-free wave of sound, with an integrated light show, that lasted until dawn.
Evenings were structured in three “bardos,” a term that Timothy Leary had taken from “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” to describe the phases of an LSD trip: a peaceful embarkation leading to Dionysian frenzy, followed by a calm re-entry into the real world.
Mr. Mancuso’s musical tastes were adventurous. “I would play everything from jazz to classical and everything in between,” he told the website Discomusic.com in 2003. As the parties caught on, his nod of approval could move a record commercially. “Soul Makossa,” by the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, became a hit after Mr. Mancuso began playing it, and he gave early exposure to dance records like “Cherchez La Femme” by Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Ralph Macdonald’s “Calypso Breakdown,” featured on the soundtrack of the film “Saturday Night Fever.”
“It was amazing to go to a place that was playing records I’d never heard before and putting them together in a way I’d never heard before,” said Vince Aletti, who covered the disco scene for The Village Voice. “He heard connections between very different songs and musics and could put them together over a period of time, creating a sense of movement through the night that was nonstop.”
In 1975, Mr. Mancuso helped create the New York Record Pool, for distributing hard-to-get promotional records among the city’s growing population of D.J.s. It would then send information on how the records were being received back to the companies.
“The feedback would be just two things, personal reaction and floor reaction,” he told Discomusic.com. “From that, the record label would go back and redo it or whatever until they got it right.”
The Loft shifted location several times. After trouble with other tenants and the city’s Buildings Department, Mr. Mancuso moved to Prince Street in SoHo in 1975 and, when that building was sold, moved again in 1985, to the eastern fringes of the East Village, where the dangers of the neighborhood discouraged attendance. Rising rents and gentrification chased him from one location to the next for several years.
Mr. Mancuso later limited his parties to five or six a year in New York, at a rented location, and collaborated with organizers in Tokyo and London to present Loft-style parties.
There was no immediate word on survivors.
Mr. Mancuso’s approach remained the same. “It’s to support a lifestyle,” he told the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun in 1998. “It’s that simple. It’s nonprofit, self-supporting. I always like music, and I always like people being together.”

The Artist’s Struggle For Integrity by James Baldwin

Even in today’s instagram society, the artist continues to struggle…
The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin

Mojùgbá

Mojùgbá- A Yoruba prayer recited to give homage to the Egun or an Orisá.

MOJÙGBÁ, a Yoruba word for GIVE HOMAGE. ECLECTIC, CREATIVES GIVE HOMAGE to the ANCESTRAL SPIRITS through FOOD, ART, MUSIC, & DANCE.

MOJÙGBÁ, began as a monthly gathering where the diverse, the eclectic, the soulful, the artistic, the holistic, the spiritual, the creatives of positive vibrations can come together giving homage through food, art, music, dance on the foundation of ancestral spirituality. MOJÙGBÁ was birth Friday, February 15, 2013, in a small 1,000 square foot vegetarian/vegan restaurant in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. those who attended and participated were treated more as guest in your home as opposed to customers. For the vibe was more of community, tribe, family. An eclectic blend of danceable music, ranging from the familiar to the obscure. Feeling like a welcoming, warn hug, the music tells a story or more so takes you on a journey, of your mind, your body, and you spirit.

There is a GATHERING coming forth. A GATHERING of ECLECTIC, ARTISTIC, CREATIVE BEINGS of varying MEDIUMS emitting POSITIVE VIBRATIONS. Coming TOGETHER in the name of LOVE, PEACE, FREEDOM. Giving HOMAGE to the ANCESTRAL SPIRITS through a CELEBRATION of FOOD, ART, MUSIC, RHYTHMIC MOVEMENT. The GROUND has been CONSECRATED, the SEED has been PLANTED, the FOUNDATION is SET. This GATHERING will BLOOM in the PEAK of SPRING. BROTHERS, SISTERS of all RACES, ETHNICITIES, CULTURES, ORIENTATIONS, SPIRITUALITIES, let us come TOGETHER accepting ONE another as WE are, accepting OURSELVES as WE are in the BLESSINGS of LOVE.

The Most Sacred of Space

The mat is one of the most sacred of spaces. It is a space of balance and stability, peace and tranquillity, calm and stillness. Before stepping onto the mat, one should and must be cleansed of negative energy, be it fear, doubt, anger. Acknowledge first that these feelings are there, because the first step towards balance, stability, calm, stillness, is acknowledgement. Once one has done this, LET IT ALL GO. Then leaving only a clear, open, free mind, when one steps onto the mat.

New Music from Renee Neufville of Zhane

Been a minute, well maybe not that long, but we have new music from the beautiful, the gifted, the talented Renee Neufville. Many of you remember her as one half of the duo Zhane, who gave us such 90’s classics as “Hey Mr. DJ,” “Sending My Love,” and one of my favorites, “Crush.” Renee has been keeping busy with Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor as well as various other projects. Now she has returned with some absolute heat of a track titled “Watching Me,” and it is just that, ABSOLUTE HEAT. I just gave it a listen and was like whoa this joint right here is HOT! I will definitely spinning this into my DJ sets without a doubt. Here it is, give it a listen for yourself. “Watching Me,” by Renee Neufville… Enjoy.

To Practice Yoga

“To practice yoga, one should go to a secluded place and should lay kusa grass on the ground and then cover it with a deerskin and a soft cloth. The seat should be neither too high nor too low and should be situated in a sacred place. The yogi should then sit on it very firmly and practice yoga to purify the heart by controlling his mind, senses and activities and fixing his mind on one point”

The Bhagavad Gītā VI.11

She Watches Me

Each moment as I walk passed the window I can feel her watching over me.

Though as I peer through the window to get a glimpse of who she is, I see, nothing.

However I feel her presence cold but warming, bright but dim.

She continues to watch, observing from her viewpoint.

I continue to peer beyond the window and still I see nothing.

I then begin to feel her calling out to me, beckoning for my attention, directing me to look up, into the heaven.

Finally I see her, and discover who she is.

She is…

The Moon.