Cripple and the Starfish
...o00O00o...
How Queer a Sound?
The Independent Weekly, July 6 2011
I was sitting close enough to Justin Vivian Bond, performing at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro last month, to look into her mouth and marvel at its unbolted reveal, its size, its fearless ability to stretch open. Her throat curled around the cries, rasps, whispers and stops of "22nd Century," a Nina Simone song she covers on her new album, Dendrophile. Working the larynx with teeth, tongue, diaphragm and lungs to shape air, she sang, "Gods and goblins walk this land ... when the soul is gone and there are no more babies being born ... when there is no one and everyone." The lyrics evoke a future full of catastrophe and possibility, but I was struck by something deeper than her words.
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