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January + February Edition
It happened and here we are.
Here we fucking are.
Others have addressed what I’m feeling better than I can at the moment.
Toni Morrison, for example:
“I get angry about things and then go on and work.”
“How do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”
Here’s to getting angry and then doing the work.
Here’s to fearlessness and beautiful action under completely impossible circumstances.
Here’s to coming to terms with our mistakes, to imagining a togetherness that will allow us to prevail and to fighting — always fighting for a better world.
All of which, for me (as you well know), begins with solidarity and with art.
That’s what helps sustain and reconstitute me, in the face of impossible struggle.
And towards that aim, here is some of what sustained and reconstituted me during this difficult month.
READ
Imani Perry’s BLACK IN BLUES: HOW A COLOR TELLS THE STORY OF MY PEOPLE
The competition is over: Imani Perry’s Black In Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People is the book of the year. Black in Blues might also be the book of the decade, but either way it’s the read for any of us going through it after the election. At its simplest Black in Blues is a mediation on African-Americanidad through the lens of the color blue, but this pat description is sorta like saying love is an emotion. Black in Blues is a transcendant book and Perry is so smart, so vulnerable, so wise vis-a-vis pain and hope that despair would not last a round with her. I could quote this book endlessly but I will leave you with this one:
There was a relation between the habits that the enslaved held on to for themselves—habits that anchored them spiritually, as well as ones that met desires and allowed for people to mark themselves as individuals and bring some joy and laughter and delight into the day-to-day—and the ability to hope. Self-regard takes many forms, and it is the precondition for seeing to a future not yet realized but deeply yearned for—that is freedom.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/black-in-blues-imani-perry?variant=42524955443234
Hanif Kureishi’s SHATTERED
Hanif Kureishi has been a part of my life since 1985 when I first saw My Beautiful Laundrette, a film that is among the nerviest and most 80s films the 80s ever produced. Kureishi’s novels and stories followed me all through my artistic life and helped me in every way imaginable. If you aint read The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, Intimacy, Love in a Blue Time, I envy you, to be able to read Kureishi for the first time.
Anyway: In 2022, in Rome, Kureishi suffered a horrific fall that left him unable to move his limbs. This is his memoir of the fall and the aftermath. Shattered is many things, but mostly it is heartbreaking perfection.
Hanif Kureishi also has one of the best substacks around and he wrote something a few weeks that I cannot forget.
I envy my younger self. There he is, getting off a plane in London, back from L.A and the Oscars, sun-tanned and confident, flush for the first time in his life, everything in front of him.
The day after, he can be found at a bar in Dublin, at a film festival, with a woman he has just met. She is Irish, the lover of a well-known Irish playwright. She tells the young Hanif she has to return home to Derry where she works for a theatre company.
“Would you like to join me?” she asks.
They talk all the way from Dublin to Derry. It goes without saying that Brits are not particularly welcome in this part of the world.
“You’re lucky you’re Indian,” she tells him.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/shattered-hanif-kureishi?variant=42395268448290
WATCH
The Spook Who Sat By The Door
Based on the Sam Greenlee titular novel and directed by Ivan Dixon, The Spook Who Sat By The Door imagines the first Black CIA recruit using his “special set of skills” to trigger a revolution agains the US government. My favorite capsule review is laugh-out-loud perfect: “This movie is the blueprint on how to Kill Whitey.”
But The Spook Who Sat By The Door is much more. The film has a lot to say about affirmative action, tokenism, the Black middle-class, Black cops, and so much more — but it was its incendiary vision of a Black urban insurrection that nearly got it disappeared.
As Greenlee explains in an interview: "The film opened on Labor Day and, I, just as it was about to become profitable, they pulled it off the market at the behest of the FBI.... [W]hen it opened on a second run at the McVickers Theater on State Street, I went down there and spoke with the manager... He sat me down in his office and said that the week before, two FBI agents had come in to advise him to close the film."1
The Spook Who Sat By The Door was nearly lost, as all copies were destroyed and only a single one survived in a vault owned by the director, Ivan Dixon.
Fortunately for us all, The Spook Who Sat By The Door survives free on YouTube.
PLAY
RUN-DMC ON READING RAINBOW
What else you need to know? Plus a young LeVar Burton …
Snake Eyes – Arthur Verocai / No Voo do Urubu
Brazilian compose extraordinaire Arthur Verocai hits…always.
FEAST
La Fábrica
If you’re in the Boston area and in the mood for some Dominican-Puerto Rican-Cuban cuisine look no further than LA FÁBRICA in Cambridge. Come for the mofongo, stay for the live music. The club is also the real deal but I’m too old to line up like that any more.
Le Corbusier: Synthesis of the Arts 1930-1965
Not to be missed at the Panasonic Shiodome Museum in Tokyo. Whoever the curator is deserves an award. If you only know the architectural side of Le Corbusier this exhibit will introduce you to the visionary artist whose paintings, sculptures, found works, and tapestries are wonders. Plus, I’m still mulling over his concept of “acoustic architecture.”
Le Corbusier also viewed his architecture in relation to acoustics, much like his sculptures. A prime example of this is the Chapel of Ronchamp, which he conceived as a "visual echo." He articulated this concept In his text "L'espace Indicible":
"The action of the work (architecture, statue, or painting) on its surroundings: waves, cries, and shouts (like those emanating from the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens), arrows bursting forth like rays, as if triggered by an explosion; the near or distant sito is shaken, touched, dominated, or canessed by it." (from the exhibit)
Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection × MOHRI Yuko–On Physis
Yuko Mohri appeared in this article in the NYT: Japan Once Dominated the Art Market. Is the Country Ready for a Comeback?
“Opportunities are very limited,” Mohri said, explaining why only a few Japanese artists find an international audience. Raised in a family of teachers an hour outside of Tokyo, she joined an experimental punk band during college in the 2000s, taking part-time jobs serving meals on the bullet train and catering to businessmen in a hostess club to support her career. “I really enjoyed the conversation, and mostly I learned about human desire,” Mohri, now 44, said with a raised eyebrow.
In 2014, when she participated in the Yokohama Triennial, her artistic career began to gain traction. She taught herself English — rare in the insular Japanese art scene — and started networking with international curators, which helped raise her profile around Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 2015, she won the Grand Prix at the 2015 Nissan Art Awards for “Moré Moré (Leaky),” a kinetic sculpture that was inspired by the improvised ways that Tokyo subway stations patch leaks with anything on hand, including plastic tubing, umbrellas, tarps, funnels and buckets.
The sculpture was included at the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale alongside her moldy fruit installation, “Compose,” which featured more than 400 rotting oranges, watermelons, grapes and apples.
The article lead me to Mohri’s super-weird super-brilliant exhibit at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo. Remember, the whole thing is something of an exploded view diagram.
https://www.artizon.museum/en/exhibition/detail/581
AND ALSO: TIME FOR ANOTHER OFFICE HOUR!
If you have any questions regarding building stories or the creative life in general — if you have any questions about anything we’ve been discussing — please post them in the comments section below or message me directly.
I’ll try my best to answer them. If I don’t answer it’s because I need to think a lot more before I can provide any insight at all.
AND FINALLY—
infinite gratitude to all our subscribers. Thank you for hanging and for putting up with all my nerditry and for helping to make this substack better with your presence and participation. I hope these posts are helping someone.
The plan here remains the same: deeper tools for deeper work.
See you later this weekend!
Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 2018, by David C. Wall, Marilyn Yaquinto, Michael T. Martin
Office Hours Question: You write engagingly about depression. How do you do that? Depression is brutally BORING to experience and hardly leaves one with much to report when in the grip of it, but when I read your descriptions of depression in fiction or nonfiction I feel invested. Is there a secret to writing depression in a way that leaves readers with something to grasp?
God, that Imani Perry quote. How do office hours work? Is it zoom thing?