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Here is the first of many-to-come videos of snap shots of some of the brilliance and deep complexities that we hold individually and collectively, as a people. We must leave evidence.
Recently, I met up with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ellery Russian for an evening and got to capture some of our musings, sharings and stories. Whenever i get to hear crip stories, i am entranced. i love hearing our words (all of them, in whatever way they come tumbling out) and feel ever-so appreciative, especially knowing how long i went without ever hearing any of our voices tell our own stories and stumble through sharing and asking and loving. It's so important for us to tell our stories–to each other. As much as we can. There are so many different stories that we have to tell about (queer) crip sex and about our relationship to crip sex, to sex period, to sexuality and more. Our stories are so different and complex and they all have value–we have value. Much love and gratitude to Leah and Ellery for sharing some of your stories, knowing that it's not all of your story.
Click here for the transcript of this video: Crip Sex Video Transcript
Donyale Luna photographed in 1966 by Richard Avedon for Vogue. She was a Detroit native and the first black supermodel. She was also the first black model to appear on the cover of Vogue, on the May 1965 issue of British Vogue.
Dear Janelle Monáe,
I've been a fan since forever, like since before you and I existed in present forms. The dorm tour, Dark Tower days, a jam session at Chuck Lightning's… for real a magical night that is the stuff of grandparent "when I was in college…" lore.
Its been amazing to see you come into yourself, like the magnificent sculpture that emerges from a lustrous wood and the work of a fine crafter. You were/are before your time.
Having a wonder twin and twin myself, I really love that way of naming your relationship to Erykah Badu. Where as she sometimes gives an audience a thread to hold onto in the way of a sample or familiar phrase while gently pulling us by the heart and third eye to the future, you ask that we take a risk and jump; sink or swim, fall or fly. Well luckily I am properly prepared, newly reminded that I'm 20 feet tall and I can jump up in the air and stay there.
You reached my heart.
With Love,
Moya B.
P.S. I loved your interview on 106 & Park! Also like your wonder twin, you seem to short the circuits of conspicuous consumption and groupthink. I love that you wear that tuxedo to honor your family and the girls who look up to you; A uniform for the cold war. Thanks again for reminding us to reevaluate.
Good morning, and congratulations to the class of 2010. I kno
I may be a no-count sad excuse for a graduate student, but attempting to keep my adulthood in forbearance along with my student loans is not the only reason why I'm still in school: It's a big bad world out there, and that diploma is your one way ticket into the fracas. Yes, reality bites and I do not envy you. You're being released into a world where many of us cannot tell that the recession is over. A country where racism is still passed as law. Where the environment is treated as a nuisance and not something we should take care of. And careless corporations testify to an equally and nefariously irresponsible government acting as if the Earth just keeps spilling oil on itself. I imagine the only thing scarier than the federal deficit is the reality that your student loan payments start in about six months. Both debts are so deep the money owed is theoretical. Good luck with that.
I'd tell you to start therapy now, but some of you don't have decent health care. And that totally sucks because technically you have until you're 30 to blame your parents for everything that has, can and will go wrong. Instead, I suggest you keep the peace with your parentals. Assuming their home has not gone into foreclosure, this might be the best time to move out of the frat house and into mom and dad's basement; hone those Xbox skills. Right now, Call of Duty may indeed be your only call of duty. Until they get that professional Wii bowling league started.
Perhaps you might want to start auditioning for reality television shows. It's a hard business to get into, but one you're in, you're in. For the athletically inclined, I'd suggest pro sports, but odds are if you were going pro you would have dropped out of school already, hired an agent, and donned a really tacky suit instead of an itchy cap and gown. Ladies, there's still time to attach yourself to a pro player. Get to work soon, though. Basketball Baby Mamas will begin casting in a few months. Of course, you black women out there needn't bother. The John Mayer Rule is still in effect in the province of pro sports. Not that they were checking for you anyway; as CNN, Nightline, and Steve Harvey warned chances were already slim that you would marry a black man. Now that you have a degree, consider yourself overqualified–for everything except a starring role in Terry McMillen's new book and a condo in Atlanta.
Perhaps six months from now, this cruel, yet ordinary world has beaten out of you any hope you had left over from the 2008 election. Yet the great Huey Freeman reminded us, "Hope is irrational," so maybe that place in you where youthful optimism once resided will be replaced with a logic that refreshes your view of the world. Maybe you begin to rationalize that the world can't keep spinning in the way it has. Maybe you take your degree in sociology, or economics, or English (God forbid) and not only imagine but move to midwife a whole new world. Maybe you think about your criminal justice degree and wonder if jails might be all wrong, and conclude that punishment when filtered through the capitalistic prison industrial complex almost always negates rehabilitation. Maybe after law school your inevitable goal becomes arguing the case that leads to the outlawing of autotune. Doesn't T-Pain v. the state of Georgia have a nice ring to it? Perhaps those classes in political science not only showed you how limiting the two party system is, but maybe also helped you realize that career politicians are part of what's wrong with this country, and that maybe those who represent us should have actual day jobs. Did that minor in international relations confirm for you that the United States is a big old bully, and that as long as we make war, we make terrorism? I hope it did.
We can't keep doing it like this. If we keep this pace, with this hubris, we create our own 2012. No conspiracy theorists need apply. Hopefully the skills you had to acquire in order to cop that diploma not only help you navigate your way through this cold, cold world, but equipped you with the wherewithal to warm it up a little and the endurance to keep up the fight–power and privilege are never, ever relinquished very easily. How much worse does the world have to get before we decide that we no longer want to participate in it the way things are now? Don't let that 8:30 history class, where attendance was 20 per cent of your grade, go to waste. You may not have seen this movie before, but you presumably had to read about it to pass midterms. Don't let it end the way it did decades ago.
Despite my ivory tower weary cynicism, I know that many of you, even when you're feeling overwhelmed and powerless will hold a bit of optimism and faith in your ability to make this place better. Good. Get to work. It's best to change the world while you still believe you can. Good luck. You'll need it.
zuky:
i think it would be helpful if we disconnected the words 'nonviolence' from 'peace'. then we could stop talking about how an absolute position toward using nonviolence tactics fulfills the mandate that a 'peaceful end can only come through peaceful means'.
yes
You beat me to the reblogging, so I'll just say this is so much a whole-thing kind of post.
I've been meaning to write about nonviolence for years and never have. Obvously this is my narrow male perspective and experience, but hopefully it's also a bit more than that.
I'll put it bluntly for now, in the hopes of expanding on this later: I don't believe most people who describe themselves as nonviolent. Nonviolence, to me, is not a label you can just pick up and stick on yourself. It's a spiritual and martial achievement, like a black belt, not some self-congratulatory excuse to feel better about yourself for being too chicken to fight.
I'm a lifelong Buddhist, but I'm not a pacifist. I've studied and practiced violence most of my life. I believe in armed resistance and self-defense. I can't possibly, at this point, claim the word satyagraha. But I can say that, over the years of growing up and growing older, I've learned a lot about the power of restraint, and the power of sacrifice. These are not ideological labels or concepts, they are life lessons hammered into my spinal cord during the act of living.
To me, satyagraha means that you've come out the other end of the violence tunnel and have seen through the power of violence, to a higher power, to soul-force or truth-force or, to draw on the highest and most abused word on the planet, love-force. In my world, impotence to commit violence is not the same as nonviolence. Nonviolence is a choice that cannot be made out of fear of violence. Nonviolence is not shirking from violence, but transcending it.
i really hope that you will expand on this when you get a chance. i am very interested in your view and trying to understand it. right now, this bit, it's a little over my head (who knows, i might re-read it tomorrow and think i get it).
—oh kai, reminds me of this quote by gandhi: Better far than cowardice is killing and being killed in battle.
Commencement Season: Summer M.'s Graduation Address | Black Youth Project —
—read the whole thing. really. do yourself a favor. we all could use a serotonin boost about now.
june 2009
photographer - kwesi abbensetts
stylist- pamela shepard
model - khay muhammad
Combining the fearlessly experimental, quirky soul disposition of Erykah Badu, the Afro-futurist bent of Parliament/Funkadelic and OutKast, along with a complete mastery of an indefinable, genre-jumping form of pop music (ala Prince, Michael Jackson), Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid will at the very least impress the hell out of you.
Clocking it at about 70 minutes, and pulling from practically every and any genre you can imagine, what is initially stunning about Monae is how capably she bends and contorts her voice and persona into such varied musical settings, and yet crafts an album that is cohesive and meticulously organized. The ArchAndroid is a sprawling, jaw-droppingly fresh and relevant debut album from a young artist possessed with an intense reverence for her pop and soul forbearers, as well as the kind of raw talent, charisma and ambition that may see her reach those same heights one day.
It's hard to call something an instant classic when it's only been out for a week. But fuck it, I'm calling it now: Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid is an instant classic, and I am almost sure that it will be massively influential on the future of popular music.
Once you get past the downright epic vision and scope of The ArchAndroid, the next thing you'll probably notice is how easily you're falling in love with Monae herself. She's a vocal shape shifter, fully capable of busting a rhyme ("Dance or Die," featuring Saul Williams), howling away with punk rock abandon like a soulful Patti Smith ("Come Alive (The War of the Roses)"), stopping you in your tracks with evocative spoken word breaks, or bringing the house down with steeple-shaking, gospel vocal runs. There are plenty of artists that seek to stake claim to these capabilities, but Janelle Monae is different. And I won't even make the obligatory Lauryn Hill comparisons, except to say that in the same way that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was hugely influential in delineating the next ten or so years of pop music in the wake of its 1998 release, Monae's The ArchAndroid has all the depth, imagination and sheer matchlessness in the current landscape of popular music to do the same for the coming decade. It's that good.
The album is a sonic thrill ride, filled to the brim with bizarre, unexpected twists and turns stylistically; and they all work perfectly. Monae channels a lot of Prince on The ArchAndroid, particularly his Around the World in a Day and Parade era, with tracks like "Mushrooms and Roses" possessing psychedelic, almost lazily funky grooves and atmospheric production. Then there's the all-out, booty shaking funk jams, like first single, the Big Boi-assisted "Tightrope" and the energetic and super-infectious "Faster." Some tracks are ridiculously and deliciously weird, like the dreamlike Of Montreal collaboration "Make The Bus," and the defiantly-eccentric, Badu-inspired "Wondaland." We float along with Monae on the trippy "Neon Valley Street," she takes us on a spaced-out, folk trip with the haunting "57821," and then we reach the end of our journey with the sweeping drama and noir-like mystery of arguably the album's most stunningly "out there" track, the almost 9 minute "BeBopByeYa."
Janelle Monae typifies a shift in current soul and hip hop towards an adventurous, conceptually-complex, indie-influenced aesthetic. Kanye's 808s & Heartbreak, as well as recent work from Drake and Kid Cudi, certainly speak to this, but The ArchAndroid is probably the most accomplished artistic statement to arise from this phenomenon.
It may be too complex to top the charts; too challenging to find a mass audience.
But if you're a fan of adventurous, forward-thinking pop music, The ArchAndroid is essential, and my current prediction for the best album of 2010.
