Ben Heine Art and Music Blog: pencil drawing

The CocoRosie Sisters

Note: This is a pencil drawing on A3 paper

CocoRosie is an American duo based in France and formed by sisters Bianca Leilani "Coco" and Sierra Rose "Rosie" Casady in 2003.

Sierra mainly plays the guitar, piano and harp, and contributes vocals. Bianca sings and manipulates various children's toys/electronic & percussion instruments as well as other exotic noisemakers. CocoRosie performed strictly as a duo early on but in recent years they have appeared with various backing musicians at live shows, usually a bassist, synth player and beatboxer. They have been a very active touring group, playing a seemingly endless stream of dates across Europe and making several trips across the US and all points beyond.

In late 2006 they appeared as a featured act at the Touch and Go Records 25th anniversary block party at the famed Hideout club in Chicago along with a reunited Big Black, Scratch Acid, Killdozer, The Ex, Uzeda and many others.

In 2007 they appeared at the annual Coachella art and music festival in California.

In early 2008 they performed together with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

More on them. Also check out their website with photos, full bios, events and videos

Ilaria La Commare

My tribute to Ilaria La Commare. She was an Italian writer, editor of cafebabel.com (a most renowned multilingual European magazine) and an anti mafia activist. She commited suicide in Paris in March 2009. Rest in Peace. This is my tribute for this woman full of life.

This is what appeared on cafebabel.com a few days after her death:

Correspondent since autumn 2005, Ilaria has left us at the age of thirty. It happened the 17th of March in a blaze of desperation or courage, leaving her friends and family immersed in grief. Her life was full of activism, the latter being channelled predominantly through the medium of journalism. But Ilaria La Commare was not only a journalist. She was also an accomplished writer and a fine poet.

From her writing you can deduce a vein of nostalgia for her home region of Sicily. The simplicity of the words in her poetry bring us to regard her island just as she did. Colourful, with a maritime presence, lights, sounds and silence. These silences, graphically expressed in the spaces that she deliberately leaves at the beginning of some of her verses, are the most loaded.

She will be missed.
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