
George Washington’s Chef
Oil on Canvas
60 x 48 inches
©2015 Titus Kaphar
Truly masterful… love it!
________________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

George Washington’s Chef
Oil on Canvas
60 x 48 inches
©2015 Titus Kaphar
Truly masterful… love it!
________________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

Frida Kahlo
Oil Painting
©2016 Bradley Theodore.
Sourced: Maddox Gallery, London, England.
https://www.instagram.com/maddoxgallery/
Bradley Theodore.
https://www.instagram.com/bradleytheodore/
et moi!:
https://www.instagram.com/arvin_da_brgha/
Happy birthday Shaman! Gosh I love Bradley Theodore’s passionate attack!
______________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

The Teacher.
Oil on Canvas
©2004 Wim Heldens.
Provenance: Private Collection New York City.
This was Wim’s first painting of Ariq Robinson his lover… truly glorious.
______________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

Prince 7/6/58<O>21/4/2016
The fragment who is most commonly known simply as Prince has also had an illustrious past as a performing artist. However, his first life in the music world was as one of the many children of Johann and Barbara Bach.
This child was female and did not become a musician but was surrounded by the musical life. She was particularly close to her brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and this started the fragment’s interest in music as a vehicle through which one could perform.
Although this fragment has enjoyed many stellar performances as an actor, a dancer and a singer of opera, it is this fragment’s immediate past life that is most pivotal to his current endeavours.
As the composer/pianist Scott Joplin, this fragment popularised ragtime as an art form that did not have its foundations in European music and was uniquely American.
Prince is a fifth level mature sage in the passion mode, with a goal of rejection, mostly functioning in the positive pole of discrimination, a sceptic in the moving part of emotional centre.
He has a Mercury/Saturn body type.
Prince’s primary chief feature is that of impatience, with a strong secondary of arrogance.
He was sixth-cast in his cadence and his cadence is fifth in the greater cadence. He is a member of entity two, cadre four, greater cadre 43, pod/node 414.
___________________________________________




________________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

What a lovely drink for the dreamquesting soul…
Yesterday, I caught Don Cheadle’s, Miles Ahead, with an old friend from Montréal. We both thoroughly loved the film. The concert at the end of the film was phenomenal and it was good to see Esperanza Spalding joining Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Robert Glasper and Don Cheadle for, What’s Wrong with That.
More than that, I lost a tear when seeing this at the end of the film: May 26, 1926 – . Yes, indeed, Miles’ genius has no ending.
Life without Jazz is hardly living…
Photo: Esperanza Spalding ©Tom Allen
Video: One. Esperanza Spalding: Emily’s D + Evolution ©2015-2016.
Video: Blue Haze Miles Davis ©1954-2016
______________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.
By far, one of the funniest Academy Awards Opening monologues. Leading up to last night’s awards, I was a bit apprehensive about how the whole race row would pan out. I think that Chris Rock did a fantastic job and steered the entire controversy in the appropriate direction.
The beauty of the monologue in 1999 is how pure and wonderful it was. So much has transpired since then and we are all a very different human race post 9/11, post Barack H. Obama’s presidency – racism has become since then so in-your-face and toxic… most of all, the problem of climate change is undeniably upon us. So very good of Leonardo DiCaprio to have spoken so eloquently as he did.
Finally, regardless the diversity controversy in Hollywood and the facts being what they are, it matters little when this beautiful world is slowly becoming less viable for human civilisation… Merrily we besottedly chug along like dopey lobsters denying that it is getting tepid under the collar.
Finally, Whoopi and her opening monologue got it right, it was the best #OscarsSoWhite! ever.
__________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

Just as powerful as Michael Jackson releasing “Remember The Time” during Black History Month in 1992 so, too, Beyoncé slays by dropping Formation during Black History Month and on Bob Nesta Marley’s birthday no less. Love it… Love her!
Happy Black History Month!
____________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.




Cole, Natalie 6/2/1950<O>31/12/2015
Michael: This fragment was a fifth level mature artisan – 3rd life thereat. Natalie was in the power mode with a goal of growth. She was a sceptic who was in the moving part of intellectual centre.
Natalie’s was a Saturn/Mars body type.
Natalie’s primary chief feature was stubbornness with a strong secondary chief feature of self-destruction which was primarily internally focussed.
Natalie’s casting is in the fifth position of the fourth cadence in the second greater cadence – she is a cadence mate of Richard E. White (he is in fourth position). She is a member of entity six, cadre one, greater cadre 7, pod 414 – another entity mate.
Natalie’s essence twin is a discarnate artisan and her priest task companion was known to her.
The three primary needs for Natalie were: expression, freedom and power.
There are 12 past-life associations between Natalie and Arvin whilst there are 16 past-life associations with Merlin.

I am so devastated by this loss that I don’t even have the time to do the usual due diligence of listing credits.
So poised, elegant, admirable, fabulous, fantastic… could scat/vocalese just as stratospherically as Ella Fitzgerald.
From seeing her at Ontario Place’s Amphitheatre in the ’70s, whilst she did her funky soul diva incarnation, to the sheer brilliance of her sophisticated Jazz syncopation, there was no one else who could make me feel more fuck-all fabulous pride and take seriously this joint call being Black.
Natalie got to the very essence of who we, a proud noble people, truly are. Her album: Take A Look (1993) literally afforded me the grace and dignity to get through the most hellish experience of being in a workplace surrounded by people who haven’t a clue that they are crazy – a people who collectively render us as invisible and who relish at every opportunity the racially predatory thrill of talking about us and openly ridiculing us as though we were a weeble-infested bag of flour in the corner. These marvellous people for whom the gun is g_d incarnate and for whom it has never once occurred that we possibly could perceive them as crazy – crazy as in having invented something as absurd as Apartheid, crazy in openly gunning us down because well… one can, crazy as in busing, crazy as in building latter day landlocked Mayflowers whose hull hold a cargo that staves off the flowering of the next Coltrane, Tatum, Monk, Ellington et al… crazy as in harvesting a most strange fruit from poplar trees whilst crazily dressed up in the coward’s garb from pointy head to toe, crazy as in then having the fuck-all temerity to squat all over the culture and ape, ape, ape like crazy every thing we do culturally, creatively…. alas, who else but the crazy would openly hate you then turn around and ape everything you do from Jazz, to Hip-Hop, to Rap and all the while, like the truly crazy then somehow think that we never notice that they never ever have personal relations with Blacks… la Krall, Bublé and Eminem to name but a few readily come to mind.
Every day in Vancouver, for having survived and gotten one day closer to triumphantly getting through 24 months of workplace probation, it was to my lovely art-filled West End apartment that I retreated where this lovely beauteous-eyed goddess, Natalie Cole, would greet me with a voice that would truly embalm the soul from the bilious dissonance of the racial predator – those who haven’t a fucking clue that they are crazy… And how the crazy people love to laugh at everything.
Sweet and blissful dreams dear Natalie, you proud noble griot who came to remind us that we are the most beautiful lotus to have flowered from the hellish swamp known as the semi-feral well-armed racial predator’s paradise. What a positively rich, layered, textured, august life you accomplished…
A better place this world, a more grounded people we are, for you having chosen to be focussed herein at this time, in this place.
_________________________________
*As I had always planned on doing Natalie Cole’s Michael Overleaves, they had not been done at the time of her passing and my having penned this impassioned tribute. A couple of weeks later when her overleaves arrived, it was one of the rare times that on receiving someone’s overleaves that I broke down crying. I always felt strongly connected to this woman – she was family. Here then, at this juncture, though they have been added previously and subsequent to this original post – it is now December 2016 as I change the copyright time stamp – are Natalie Cole’s rather august Michael Overleaves – Natalie’s overleaves are now listed above.
There are these little things that bind us for being entity and cadre mates… at the end of the video for Route 66 which accompanies this tribute post, Natalie Cole can be heard saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” This is precisely what fellow artisan and entity mate Attila Isaksen and I would repeat to each other as a greeting or when slipping out of inner musings after long pleasurable sexual play. END..
___________________________________________________________________________________
©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.
© 2009, Roy Hargrove Quintet.
Trumpet: Roy Hargrove
Piano: Jonathan Baptiste
Bass: Ameen Saleem
Saxophone: Justin Robinson
Drums: Montez Coleman
Pushing Black High Art forward!
_____________________________________________________________________________
© 2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.
Hand-blown and sand-blasted glass.
19 x 7 x 7 Inches
© 2004 Preston Singletary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Singletary
http://www.dorothygrant.com/product/collection/glass-wolf-hat/
__________________________________________________________________________
© 2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.