Friday, July 31, 2009

Birthday 49! An Evening To Remember



































Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Exclusive From Detroit's Hotter Than July 2009!


Curtis and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing!

Members of the LGBT community meet Detroit Mayor Dave Bing during Hotter Than July! picnic at Palmer Park on July 25, 2009.. (l to r) Alicia Skillman, executive director of Triangle Foundation; Curtis Lipscomb, executive director of Kick - The Agency for LGBT African-Americans; Mayor Bing; Reynaldo Magdaleno of Karibu House, and Hank Millbourne president of Black Pride Society.

Curtis, Wille and friends...

Thanks Curtis for the great pics!
Note: All images by Titus Lassiter and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Birthday 49! How The Hell Did I Get Here?


I seem to be fascinated with numbers of late.. all kinds of statistical information trying to but my life and some of the work I do into some kind of context. To be honest I feel allot of different things lately, For one I am an accomplished person, I have been in love several times and been loved back and for all of that I just don't understand how the hell I got here? And how did it happen so fast? This Thursday morning just after 11 AM I will be 49 years old.. 2557 weeks, 17900 days old! What have been doing with all of those days? Why am I not smarter and wiser after all this time?

Let me say this, I am not stupid..in fact I am fairly smart and uber creative yet it seems to me that after all this time I should at least be as smart as Einstein... no? Perhaps it was the age I was born in... the space age.. technology in full effect... by the time I was in school the calculator was beginning to take some of the mental burden off of me and my class mates(for the life of me I can no longer do long division on paper... sorry I have simply forgotten it) I simply go to the calculator thats on my iphone! Ha! Half of all that important to me is on my phone! When I look back at some of the things I grew up with out its astounding... there was no zerox for the first 12 years of my life... we used something called mimeographing(highly toxic as I remember) There was no such thing as video tape for the public until I turned 14! and even then it was so expensive you would laugh... Personal computers came when I was around 21! and I was even older before they became anything truly affordable... CD's came out around the same time and I bought my first player when I turned 23! before that I played tapes and records! 33's and 45's! As I started out in the design and illustration field I remember laying out type in large sheets called galleys and photo retouching was done on film and prints using paint through an airbrush... As a photographer I have about 150,000 film negatives compared to today with as many digital files! I know have complete control over all of my creations thanks to technology... I've seen so much change in my life time and yet the subtleties of life still have me confused as to how I got to this point!

Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe I am just reflecting to hard on what was and maybe its about whats to come... I do know that that is a cool concept to accept as I love life and it complexities and I am sure all of my experiences are going to use somewhere, some how.. so watch out world... I ain't even close to done!

Ok thanks to the folks at WolframAlpha I can tell you that I was born on the 212th day in the 30th week of the year. The sun rose at 5:23 am and set at 7:54PM which made for a 14 hour 31 min day! The temperature that day was a mild 67 degrees F with about a 70% cloud cover. There was a waxing crescent moon that night looking over the city of Detroit who's population was 1.67 million people on that day!

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

By The Numbers: 480 Posts 100,000 Unique And Fabulous Visitors!


Epiphanynoir is growing now in leaps and bounds as we reached 100,000 unique visitors today. Averaging over 50,000 hits a month and thousands more page views! Here are some other stats via Google Analytics......

Top 20 country's:
1. United States_________11. Belgium
2. Canada______________12. Mexico
3. United Kingdom_______13. South Africa
4. France_______________14. Sweden
5. Germany_____________15. Australia
6. Brazil________________16. Japan
7. Spain________________17. Austria
8. Italy_________________18. Saudi Arabia
9. Netherlands__________19. Norway
10. Switzerland__________20. China

Some of the other stats are indicative of the user: 65% of my visitors use Google with another 21% using Yahoo and only 1.9% using Bing the rest is caught by other search engines around the world.
54% use Internet Explorer, 28% use Firefox, 15% use Safari with Chrome and Opera both pulling around 1.5%
41% use DSL, 34% use Cable, 17% are Mobile, 4% use T1 and finally 3% use dial up (sorry for the heavy page loads! But I still love ya for coming on!)

According to blogshares.com my blog is valued at $3019.92 which is down from an astounding $35,000 early last year when the blog market was generally out of control and over valued... I bet many of you didn't know there was a Blog Market... Its actually pretty cool for gagging possible ad revenue if one were to add ad sense or some other kind of advertising to their blog. So far I have not added advertisement to the blog because I do not have much control over what would be shilled in my name;-)

When I started this blog in September of 2005 I had no idea where it would go. The blog took awhile to gel but started its upward trend in October of 2007. In Blogging its about establishing readers who them selves are Bloggers and who will set up a link to your site from theirs. 75% of my success is to these kinds of links! And I really want to say thank you to all of you who linked my Blog! As an Artist it has introduced my work all over the world and it is very gratifying to see people come to the site! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! Please come again and come often..and please tell your friends!

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Friday, July 24, 2009

A Warm March Day In 1996 - Memories Of E. Lynn Harris

It was an unseasonably warm March day in 1996 and Men of Color Detroit had co-sponsored an evening with E.Lynn Harris where he read from then latest book "Just As I Am", his follow up to "Invisible Life" a book original self published in 1991 but picked up by Doubleday's Anchor Books in 1994. I had first learned about the books from several women I knew at Ford Motor Company... It seemed at one point that every woman in Ren Cen's tower 400 had a copy of it... I was also aware of the quiet chatter about the books content and being intrigued by its story line. I quickly read each book and fell in love with the characters of Raymond and Nicole and even more by Raymond's friend Kyle. Kyle was a big hearted, live life to its fullest character who by most standards would be considered a flamboyant queen. His every description reminded me of my friend and lover Perry Hamilton. Kyle dies from AIDS in the second book and It fully brought back all of my feelings about my recent loss of Perry for the same reason. It was as if E. Lynn had ripped a chapter from my own life!

E.Lynn Harris and my friend from work Kinnet who was simply thrilled to meet the author!

But that was the whole success of E. Lynn Harris's books, they reminded each of us about our own lives as the characters were every day people caught up in the insanity of relationships in the big city! I had been to Keller's and Two Potato's on Christopher Street in New York... Again I feel as if I had walked in the shoes of many of the people in his books. E. Lynn went on to pen 14 books(many which appeared on NY Times Best Seller List) that dealt with relationships that spanned the spectrum, straight, bi, gay... His writing of these complicated interactions were some of the first to define the down low way before the overly sensationalized and stigmatized versions by J.L. King. Harris's subject matter was an un-afraid conversation, an approach that side stepped creating negative stereotypes about bi-sexual and gay men of color. No matter who you were you fell in love with each of the characters in the book and I would say that in doing so E. Lynn build many bridges of understanding between straight and especially the black gay community.

Charles and Mark were caught up in the mood of the day...


Given how his work affected me, meeting E. Lynn was definitely a highlight in my life. So it saddens me today to find out that his literary voice has been silenced as E. Lynn Harris passed away yesterday at the age of 54. The Los Angles Times Obituary called E. Lynn Harris, a pioneer of gay black fiction and a literary entrepreneur who rose from self-publishing to best-selling status. Publicist Laura Gilmore said Harris died Thursday night after being stricken at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, and a cause of death had not been determined. She said Harris, who lived in Atlanta, fell ill on a train to Los Angeles a few days ago and blacked out for a few minutes, but seemed fine after that. Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said only that a man matching Harris' name and date of birth had died Thursday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

An improbable and inspirational success story, Harris worked for a decade as an IBM executive before taking up writing, selling the novel "Invisible Life" from his car as he visited salons and beauty parlors around Atlanta. He had unprecedented success for an openly gay black author and his strength as a romance writer led some to call him the "male Terry McMillan." His writing fell into several genres, including gay and lesbian fiction, African American fiction and urban fiction. But he found success in showing readers a new side of African American life: the secret world of professional, bisexual black men living as heterosexuals.

"He was a pioneering voice within the black LGBT community but also resonated with mainstream communities, regardless of race and sexual orientation," said Herndon Davis, a gay advocate and a diversity media consultant in Los Angeles. "Harris painted with eloquent prose and revealing accuracy the lives of African American men and the many complicated struggles they face d reconciling their sexuality and spirituality while rising above societal taboos within the black community." His 1994 debut, "Invisible Life," was a coming-of-age story that dealt with the then-taboo topic.

"If you were African American and you were gay, you kept your mouth shut and you went on and did what everybody else did," he said. "You had girlfriends, you lived a life that your parents had dreamed for you."

Harris was not living as an openly gay man when "Invisible Life" was published, and could not acknowledge the parallels between himself and the book.

"People would often ask, 'Is this book about you?' I didn't want to talk about that," he said. "I wasn't comfortable talking about it. I would say that this is a work of fiction."

Harris said that the courage readers got from the book em powered him to be honest about himself. He continued to tell stories dealing with similar issues, to tell black middle class readers about people they knew, but who were living secret lives.


Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

July 24th, 1969... Home Again

The Mission was over... all that was left of the massive Saturn V was this small capsule containing 100 pounds of moon rocks and the lives of the three astronauts. Re-entering the atmosphere at more than 26,000 miles per hour this capsule heated up to several thousand degrees on the outside... soon it was cooling off in the Pacific Ocean as the USS Hornet steamed to pick them out of the sea.

You can see that some of the surface of the capsule has burned away from the intense heat. Now encapsulated in a covering of Plexiglas to preserve every detail for the world to see at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. Standing next to all the history in this complex has always left me in awe... but its this exhibit that most inspires me as it represents an enormous feat in human history. Not something from decades gone by but something that happened in my life time.

The Lunar Lander that would have been Apollo 18 had the project continued to its full extent.

Equaly impressive is this F1 Saturn Engine... Still the largest in the world! The combustion chamber in this engine could easily handle temperatures equal to those on the surface of the sun!

One note of interest... The folks of Google Earth have launched a great addition this week with Google Moon where you can fully find all of the Apollo landing sites and a plethora of great information on each mission!
Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.