Aberjhani's Blog: Notes of a 21st Century Digital Scribe, page 2

Shakespeare's Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Rocky Bettis

(“Shakespeare Considered Sepia” 2024 digital painting by Aberjhani based on original 1623 First Folio engraving by Martin Droeshout.)

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”
​– Stella Adler (from Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights)

​1. Different Times and New Places Have you ever noticed how that ultimate icon of English literature, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), sometimes pops up in places where you might least expect to find him? That w...

Days of Midnight Madness 30 Years On

(“Mad Days in Savannahland” art by Aberjhani 2024© for Bright Skylark LP) There are not too many living writers who can claim to have authored books which had the kind of impact upon a city which John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has had on Savannah, Georgia (USA). The boosts it provided for Savannah’s tourism and film industries have been well documented. Appropriately enough, during this 2024, 30th anniversary, of “The Book’s” publication, a commemorative edition wit...

Surrealistic Poetics of Jazz and the Confederate Monument

​Surrealistic is, undoubtedly, one of the better words to describe a crowd of people gathered near the Confederate Monument in Savannah’s Forsyth Park with their attention focused on something which the figure portrayed atop the structure likely would never have imagined possible. The crowd’s collective passion on Saturday, September 23, 2023, was surging to the sounds of jazz flooding the air as the week-long Savannah Jazz Festival began its weekend wind-down.

Up on his memorial perch, if th...

‘Songs’ eBook Supporting Suicide Prevention Rises in Three Amazon Categories

​It is true that reaching number 6 on the list of Amazon’s best-selling eBooks in the category for Contemporary Fantasy Fiction, plus number 28 in the Superhero Fantasy category, and number 35 in Metaphysical Fantasy eBooks is not exactly the same as hitting number 1  on the New York Times best-sellers list. In the case of Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player, however, I’m grateful to accept these numbers for two very important reasons:

The first is because the f...

AI Flips the Interview Script with 5 More Questions for 1 Author

(“Genies and Fancy Bottles No. 2” art by Aberjhani ©2023)
To read the first seven questions of this AI interview conducted by AILC Contributor 444 with author-poet-artist Aberjhani, please visit LinkedIn.com at: AI Flips the Interview Script with 7 Questions for 1 Author. The final five begin now with number :8.ILC CONTRIBUTOR 444: Your collaboration with Luther E. Vann on ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (2008) was a unique fusion of poetry and art. How did this collaboration influence yo...

Music, Hope, and the Transformative Power of Love

This special post of “The Black Skylark Sang a Prophecy,” from the novel Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player,  is shared at this time in celebration of the publication of the first-ever Kindle eBook edition of the book. These particular lyrics are sung by the musician-healer character named Ruzahn. They are followed by reviews from readers who first read them on the AuthorsDen website more than a decade ago. Additional posts discussing the relevance of “The Black Skylark Sang a...

Conversations with the World 113: Return to Harris Neck, Georgia

While Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, undertaken in partnership with the New York Times and Hulu streaming service, was on its way to becoming a multi-media phenomenon, I was focused on completing texts and artwork for my Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone initiative. It was not until I joined an impromptu watch party with millions of others and watched ABC’s (partnering with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios) 3-hour network TV broadcast of the 1619 Project, on May 31, 2023, that I m...

The Art of Beautifying America’s Infrastructure

Detail from "Henry Street Underpass No. 2" by Aberjhani. Complete fine art photograph art print by Aberjhani available for purchase on Pixels.com and Fine Art America.com. The need to repair, improve, and some would say beautify America’s  aging infrastructure, helped U.S. President Joe Biden score some major political points with the passage of his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill in November 2021. It will be a while before the majority of Americans get to experience actual phys...

Text & Meaning in These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

("Silence of the City" Skylark Art by Aberjhani c2023) An important difference between the introduction to These Black and Blue Red Zone Days (ISBN 979-8-218-17561-0) and the planned art book edition, currently titled Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone, is the absence of a definitive discussion on the meaning of the term Red Zone. Some prefer the intrigue it evokes without a precise definition. For those more drawn to the opposite, presented here is condensed version taken from the i...

Revisited: Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode 2023

("Midnight Magenta Skylark" art by Aberjhani) Writers, poets, and artists often draw creative inspiration from each other in ways that produce memorable moments. Such was the case in 2012 when Death of a Bebop Wife author, Grange "Lady Haig" Rutan, happened upon a post of my poem, “Philosophy of the Midnight Skylark in a Jazz Suite Mode,” on the former Creative Thinkers International community website.

I was slightly familiar the music of her former husband, jazz pianist Al Haig. However, I...