On Continuities

#calltocreate2019

process notes

In the 1st place:

Generationally (if such things truly exist), I was born on a cusp, on the edge, on a cliff. That sharp line has situated my intellectual and cultural understanding of Black: I belong to the post-soul, Trey Ellis-era of young black capacity (though that concept suffered its own limits) and the nebulous, clearly misunderstood object of obsession that is this long Millennial™ moment. This edge is chafing and difficult and leaves me specifically worried about black cultural and political futures. As a cultural studies scholar, and like, as a grown girl that came of age bathed in thick cultural coherence (even in my white town and my white school), I think about this all the time.  After a decade and a half puzzling through black cultural existentialism cast in even wilder color by the active cultural incoherence of the San Francisco Bay Area, this worry has ballooned into a plague. This matter plagues me.  I’m wrestling, I think, with the teetering discomfort of a cultural cliff.

2. I don’t usually like the movies, preferring much more to experience the slow built drama of television or the plowing rush of feeling one catches at the gallery. Recently though, something drew me to watch The Last Black Man in San Francisco.  Maybe it was sentimentality.  I’m leaving Oakland soon.  

The quiet surrealism of the film was supposed to be the exciting part I think. Or maybe it was the tiny incision into black disappearance (by death, displacement, destruction). Maybe it was the small everyday life things (bruising betrayals, huge, echoing traumas, sweetness, dependence, family) that made the movie a triumph, affecting.

But it was Tichina Arnold’s face on the screen, and Mike Epps too, that made me cry. Not (at least not only) their characters. I mean, like, them. 

3. I’ve been thinking a lot about black cultural aesthetics and the differences between continuity and homage, between dynamic, oceanic authenticity and cultural cuts.  My collection of mini-essays (#UntitledCultureProject) isn’t aimed at reconciling the differences or at punishing myself for fogey-ism, pathetic and protective of some kind of blackness that couldn’t be captured as cleanly as I think. After I release my boredom and frustration with the aesthetic falter of “untethered,” incoherent black culture, I want to find the sites and instances of continuity that I know are holding this thing together, that receive empty homage and weld and burnish it into the things that make our culture(s) sustainably great. These instances are aunt and uncle moves, like my uncle Milton who always bought the latest tapes at the Saturday flea market but made sure the stereo spent most its tired Friday time spinning The Gap Band (on those evenings I learned funk, rhythm. I thank him for this every time I see him, but I think it embarrasses him. I wonder what to say to reach his understanding of my esteem and the critical importance of this education). These aunts and uncles live on the edge of cultures (even if, like Gen-Xers Tichina and Mike, they weren’t born on this edge). They tie them together with the genius of knowing. I’ve seen Tichina and Mike act as cultural connection before (RIP Survivor’s Remorse): brilliantly funny, studied, seasoned, tested, easy, but precise, reminding everyone how well their aesthetic choices fit with the quirky new work that, well, ain’t new at all. I’m enamored with the magic I see there, how they infuse *that thing* into a piece of culture, to make it hold up well in years to come. 

4. As I write this, I’m thinking in grand narratives that I’d scarcely allow myself to think if I weren’t being “creative.” I’m thinking of things like spinal columns and true North (though I know better) and wonder how to represent what I think is happening with people like Tichina and Mike, wondering how I can represent what they do comedically and otherwise in my essays and their visual elements.  I hope soon to reveal. For now, thank y’all for listening. 

“The peace is already out”

- Big Rube (who ought to have been appreciated long before The Internet hollered at eem).