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A Brief Summary of A Mind Unwinding in Class

I have this inherent problem with raising my hand too damn much. From middle school ruined the discussion experience by adding a penalty for not saying anything whether it was in the form of adding additional work or destroying the hell outta of the participation. So my fuses are flat out broken. When the question’s barely of the teacher’s lips and I’m ready to give an answer.I feel the air of annoyance in the room when my hand goes up but my self-preservation urges are higher. I literally will count 30-60 Mississippi and leave the floor open and a lot of time I hear crickets the entire time. I can see the teacher start to get impatient and that unnerves the hell outta me. I don’t like being the one to start the conversation. I trip over my words and thoughts. All my thoughts flood and mix with over-complicated vocabulary. Even after that’s over my stupid hand raises to rebut the real-life trolls that bait entire classroom in with shit bombs and relish every second of it.

I don’t enjoy it for even a second and thought I’d buried it permanently. JULY! Puleeze make this be over then! 

I didn’t sleep at all last night

 50% of it was the heat and 50% was sheer frustration of being unemployed.

There is no escape from living at home. There is no funds to pursue unorthodox solutions. There is no money to maintain the cost of transportation to places that unceremoniously left the door hit you on the way out.

There is however tons of accusations of laziness that accompany full days of filling out applications, writing cover letters, and making a thousand variations of resumes for the same scant credentials and references. There is the blame of personal appearance that you make the darnedest to appease with your sheer lack of fundsThere is the constant barrage of advice from people who haven’t had to find a new job since Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall. There is the simple shrug off that maybe everyone should become entrepreneurs as you stare down years of disinfecting and salvaging hard drive, selling consumer goods, changing diapers, tutoring, painfully taking portraits with impatient, difficult-to-work with clients, doing a thousand revisions and being prodded to do the proven impossible on design work with meager underpayments that cap out at $20, when they actually decide to pay you that can’t even render a couple thousand a year when your hair styling buddies can demand $100 in one sitting. You convince yourself that your art and skills are not for sale, but shake off that foolishness when you know that you can’t support yourself on thin air. You’re constantly prodded to pull thousands of dollars out of your ass to invest in equipment like you haven’t just pulled thousands of dollars out of your ass to go to school. You’re thrust to pursue additional education and unpaid labor as if those options don’t have financial burdens attached to them.

You keep try to treat every experience as a lesson but you can’t piece together what you’re supposed to be learning. You go from one opportunity to the next searching for a rung in the ladder that pulls you from rock bottom. You do not wallow in self-pity and keep your head high most of the time, but when the reality hits you, it goes for a KO. You pick yourself up and search for the next option, but wonder how many next options you can take. You keep trying to be a shining beacon but have no legitimacy when you’re glued to the floor.

I’m getting really sick of screening and discussing “Exit Through the Gift Shop”

It’s like it’s been considered canon now. I have now encountered it in three separate classes and each time my cynicism grows. It makes me drag my feet, throws my neck to one side, and groan “Again!”. I really now consider it the “Romeo and Juliet” of the film world. With “Romeo and Juliet”, a larger majority of the audience strangely self-identify with the characters and romanticize the fact that the offspring of a long-suffering rivalry fall in love than realize that there is a dark humor to the entire play. Regardless of whether Romeo and Juliet fall in love, few seem to pick up on some details worth considering: Romeo licks his wounds from just being dumped recently and Juliet is actively being forced into a relationship with someone her parents. It’s a very familiar story. They are quite literally a couple of people who met each other at a party and elope. Their people fatally brawl with each other, Romeo gets royally screw when he get involve, and nookie commences in her household. They each think the other is dead and commit suicide. **snore**  The fact that some people aspire to be either of the romantic leads is thoroughly disturbing but anywho.

Similarly, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” elicits self identification and romanticizing elements that are not fully articulated. A lot of spectators come away all starry-eyed at the premise of street art. The documentary creates a dichotomy between Banksy and this Thierry Guetta (Mr. Brainwash) character. The anti-hero of the film is the ever elusive Banksy who has a reputation for statement art telling the (possibly fictional) story of his brushing with a fanboy with a camera that became so enamored with the artform that he thinks he is one. Banksy basically gives him the gun and tells him to go crazy by rescuing the guy’s footage to make a real documentary out of the “experimental” mayhem the guy’s film project ends up being and sending him to create his own show. Thierry just basically is show making a mess of himself physically, spending excessive cash, and having to reel in help do his work for him. With these so-called crimes, he still manages to become profitable. Much of the film makes no sense like who’s filming the camera man and the uncited footage and the implausibility of the overnight sensation.

Almost universally, the audience becomes enamored with what they think street art is from seeing the iconography of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and the like and wag their fingers at the much-maligned Thierry Mister Brainwash. I cannot in good faith really take a moral standing on either party. Thierry consistently being a team of graphic designers is no different that single musical artists being the composite of record label execs and management teams. Or when you find out how many things you’ve attributed to person’s artistry have been ghostwritten by someone else. Art always finds its audience whether you consider it legitimate or not. I cannot relate to how this audience takes can be that mortally offend and worship a faceless titan that still monetarily profits from his work. His elusiveness could come from the fact that he has a real reputation to protect and quite possibly could be a guy that his audience hates. People do not know in good faith know who Banksy is, his origins, or whether he is indeed one man, but people are in his pulpit. He’s being paid and hosts shows, so legal documents and financially documents are being signed thus he isn’t exactly the stuff of legends.  I’m willing to bet a large percentage of the people aspiring to be Banksy are more consistent with Mister Brainwash.

The film reads like a rock and roll doc where the featured are assumed the creators of the artform and the audience goes nuts for them. Banksy is neither the first nor last political street artist and most certainly not an innovator. He merely lives in the house that was built centuries ago and leveraged powerfully by marginalized parties. He seems kinda like the Elvis or The Beatles of the street art world. I do give him some credit for overcoming the lot of the starving artists and enough of an artist to have a chokehold on the the artist community so much so that he’s engrafted into coursework.

Eh…

fyeahkerrywashington: Kerry Washington, Viola Davis Set For Adaptation Of Blaxploitation-Set Third Girl from the Left Originally a book, here’s the synopsis: Third Girl from the Left is the story of the other side of Hollywood in the 1970’s, of what it means to be black, sexy, smart and full of dreams in a land where “blaxploitation” is as literal as it sounds. Yet this is not a ‘black’ story. This is a vivid and dynamic story about families, all families; and not just the ones we’re born into, but the ones we make for ourselves. It is a compelling saga of love, family secrets and the ambitions of mothers and daughters. It is also a story about the movies and the hold they can have on us, sometimes even despite our better judgment. Angela Edwards, is the shining center of the film, around which we deftly shift points of view, weaving the stories of her mother Mildred and daughter Tamara. Angela and Mildred clash in the way mothers and daughters often do, but manage to forge a bond during many afternoons spent together at the local cinema. Angela yearns to be onscreen herself and eventually leaves her stifling hometown of Tulsa for Hollywood in 1972. It does not live up to her imagination. She does not make it big. Instead, she lands bit parts in campy blaxploitation pictures. In a world where sexual favors to men in power are commonplace, even roles like these require young actresses to offer up more than talent in order to get the gig. Angela dutifully complies. Angela doesn’t become a star, but the allure of movies has marked her for life, just as it did her mother, and just as it will her own daughter. No word yet on who will play which roles. Read more I could only speculate that Viola would be Mildred and Kerry would be Angela just based on their ages and someone in their mid-twenties be brought in for Tamara. I really liked this novel but I don’t know want to get my hopes up too far on account of its subject and it strongly featuring very liberated women. I immediately came off of this book thinking it would eventually be a great premise for a movie but knew that the characters would be sanitized and flattened by filmmakers. Already the article does even mention much about Mildred. I was utterly fascinated by complicated relationship with film: Mildred and the traumatic burning of her city and its beautiful theater during racial animosity and her affair with the projectionist, Angela’s growing pains from small town living that brought her to  Hollywood engaging in sex work as a means of survival and to gain roles, and Tamara, the fatherless daughter detached from her extended family and raised under the taboo of lesbian parents coming from the brunt of failure in film school and a relationship that has gone awry. This story is more up the alley of “Pariah” than Tyler Perry fare since it deals strongly with womanism and LGBTQ issues. The story would lose much of its integrity if Angela’s bisexuality and the open sexuality of either woman is undermined. Audiences largely seem to have a problem with black women exercising some agency and being proactive about their sexuality when it doesn’t involve traditional romantic arcs that end in a  blissful marriage or some side chick that gets her comeuppance.
fyeahkerrywashington: Kerry Washington, Viola Davis Set For Adaptation Of Blaxploitation-Set Third Girl from the Left Originally a book, here’s the synopsis: Third Girl from the Left is the story of the other side of Hollywood in the 1970’s, of what it means to be black, sexy, smart and full of dreams in a land where “blaxploitation” is as literal as it sounds. Yet this is not a ‘black’ story. This is a vivid and dynamic story about families, all families; and not just the ones we’re born into, but the ones we make for ourselves. It is a compelling saga of love, family secrets and the ambitions of mothers and daughters. It is also a story about the movies and the hold they can have on us, sometimes even despite our better judgment. Angela Edwards, is the shining center of the film, around which we deftly shift points of view, weaving the stories of her mother Mildred and daughter Tamara. Angela and Mildred clash in the way mothers and daughters often do, but manage to forge a bond during many afternoons spent together at the local cinema. Angela yearns to be onscreen herself and eventually leaves her stifling hometown of Tulsa for Hollywood in 1972. It does not live up to her imagination. She does not make it big. Instead, she lands bit parts in campy blaxploitation pictures. In a world where sexual favors to men in power are commonplace, even roles like these require young actresses to offer up more than talent in order to get the gig. Angela dutifully complies. Angela doesn’t become a star, but the allure of movies has marked her for life, just as it did her mother, and just as it will her own daughter. No word yet on who will play which roles. Read more I could only speculate that Viola would be Mildred and Kerry would be Angela just based on their ages and someone in their mid-twenties be brought in for Tamara. I really liked this novel but I don’t know want to get my hopes up too far on account of its subject and it strongly featuring very liberated women. I immediately came off of this book thinking it would eventually be a great premise for a movie but knew that the characters would be sanitized and flattened by filmmakers. Already the article does even mention much about Mildred. I was utterly fascinated by complicated relationship with film: Mildred and the traumatic burning of her city and its beautiful theater during racial animosity and her affair with the projectionist, Angela’s growing pains from small town living that brought her to  Hollywood engaging in sex work as a means of survival and to gain roles, and Tamara, the fatherless daughter detached from her extended family and raised under the taboo of lesbian parents coming from the brunt of failure in film school and a relationship that has gone awry. This story is more up the alley of “Pariah” than Tyler Perry fare since it deals strongly with womanism and LGBTQ issues. The story would lose much of its integrity if Angela’s bisexuality and the open sexuality of either woman is undermined. Audiences largely seem to have a problem with black women exercising some agency and being proactive about their sexuality when it doesn’t involve traditional romantic arcs that end in a  blissful marriage or some side chick that gets her comeuppance.

fyeahkerrywashington:

Kerry Washington, Viola Davis Set For Adaptation Of Blaxploitation-Set Third Girl from the Left

Originally a book, here’s the synopsis:

Third Girl from the Left is the story of the other side of Hollywood in the 1970’s, of what it means to be black, sexy, smart and full of dreams in a land where “blaxploitation” is as literal as it sounds. Yet this is not a ‘black’ story. This is a vivid and dynamic story about families, all families; and not just the ones we’re born into, but the ones we make for ourselves. It is a compelling saga of love, family secrets and the ambitions of mothers and daughters. It is also a story about the movies and the hold they can have on us, sometimes even despite our better judgment. Angela Edwards, is the shining center of the film, around which we deftly shift points of view, weaving the stories of her mother Mildred and daughter Tamara. Angela and Mildred clash in the way mothers and daughters often do, but manage to forge a bond during many afternoons spent together at the local cinema. Angela yearns to be onscreen herself and eventually leaves her stifling hometown of Tulsa for Hollywood in 1972. It does not live up to her imagination. She does not make it big. Instead, she lands bit parts in campy blaxploitation pictures. In a world where sexual favors to men in power are commonplace, even roles like these require young actresses to offer up more than talent in order to get the gig. Angela dutifully complies. Angela doesn’t become a star, but the allure of movies has marked her for life, just as it did her mother, and just as it will her own daughter.

No word yet on who will play which roles.

Read more

I could only speculate that Viola would be Mildred and Kerry would be Angela just based on their ages and someone in their mid-twenties be brought in for Tamara. I really liked this novel but I don’t know want to get my hopes up too far on account of its subject and it strongly featuring very liberated women. I immediately came off of this book thinking it would eventually be a great premise for a movie but knew that the characters would be sanitized and flattened by filmmakers. Already the article does even mention much about Mildred. I was utterly fascinated by complicated relationship with film: Mildred and the traumatic burning of her city and its beautiful theater during racial animosity and her affair with the projectionist, Angela’s growing pains from small town living that brought her to  Hollywood engaging in sex work as a means of survival and to gain roles, and Tamara, the fatherless daughter detached from her extended family and raised under the taboo of lesbian parents coming from the brunt of failure in film school and a relationship that has gone awry. This story is more up the alley of “Pariah” than Tyler Perry fare since it deals strongly with womanism and LGBTQ issues. The story would lose much of its integrity if Angela’s bisexuality and the open sexuality of either woman is undermined. Audiences largely seem to have a problem with black women exercising some agency and being proactive about their sexuality when it doesn’t involve traditional romantic arcs that end in a  blissful marriage or some side chick that gets her comeuppance.

About that post on Father’s Day last night

I felt like I came across somewhat bitter but Father’s Day is holiday and like most family-oriented holidays, it does not come and go without hurt feelings. On Father’s Day, I cycle mainly through these main emotions: 

  1. Frustration: Adult family members that are constantly plugging their latest projects suddenly ghost away during a once yearly occasion dedicated to the 72-year-old patriarch that has turned his pockets inside out and emotionally honored his parental commitment for three generations of offspring.
  2. Complete enjoyment: The day is often an exhibition of seemingly decent fathers (mostly younger ones) that are patient, interact more, and are more attuned to their children than the ones you were used to seeing growing. They are less afraid to be sensitive and express their emotionsThe proactive fathers who enjoy children give me some to aspire to find.
  3. Irritation. There are two people that completely ruin the day for me. The self-righteous and the self-congratulatory always come out in full force. They don’t need an invitation to hop on a soapbox, they just instinctively climb up there and take names. When you really have your stuff in order, you don’t have to continuously announce yourself, people recognize and send their accolades accordingly. The things you do don’t mean anything if they don’t bear their own fruit. You can brag about the seeds you sowed, the special, name-brand water, soil and fertilizer but if what the ground yields isn’t healthy and glowing, you can’t force praise from anyone. People have a way of knowing when things aren’t the way they seem. Don’t glorify yourself like you were the one that did everything right and step on the necks of people that do not have the quality of life that you have. It isn’t all that you’ve done everything right and are exemplary. It’s partially environment, community, luck, and exposure. That is not granted to everyone. Give advice when it is requested or pitch in when you see lack. Your pointed words bring no progress. Don’t ever think for a moment you can force a broken relationship that does not involve you back together because you think it’s proper. You must acknowledge that most times there is a legitimate reason for brokenness and things have to heal themselves in their own way.

Father’s Day Lament

Much love to all the fathers out there doing their best, thank you. Don’t stop doing what you do.  I can’t say that I’ve sat longingly wishing for a father to spend Father’s Day with (although I’ll admit that in my wild child imagination I consider the possibility of hospital mix-up where I was with a family that matched my weirdness and mother ended up with a child that made her happier). I don’t extend part of my heart to someone I’ve never met, but I do praise to the ones I do know that make an honest effort. I don’t eliminate the possibility of doing so if our paths aligned and a proper effort was made. I can’t reiterate enough that I have no hatred for him. I do look forward to sharing this day with a beautiful soul and our children someday.  

But to all of the people making this Single Mother/Children of Single Mother Callout Day, fuck you. We’re making it quite nicely, thank you. Please stop offering us unsolicited advice from situations you’ve never been in. Please stop placing sole responsibility for the bad things that happen in the community. Stop drumming us out as a negative comparison to heteronormative nuclear families. Don’t act like we are responsible for tarnishing the American Dream. Don’t demand apologies. Stop beating us over the head with our choices like we’re not remind of them everyday. And stop acting like the grass is greener. I’ve seen more than my share of married single mothers.

While attempting to enjoy the day with your extended family fathers you reflect on some of the bullshit thrown your way. Today I heard from a pulpit women chided for the statement, “I am the mother and the father” and told that it was irresponsible not to surround their children with grown men. It’s just simply not that easy and it sometimes can’t be help. Sometimes there’s the fear of hurt and what could happen. Do the situations of Sandusky and the DC sniper not ring a bell? It’s hard enough to find good company for oneself but even harder to find someone that will inevitable rub off on an impressionable mind. People don’t recognize the bad fits that you come across even in blood relatives:

  • You have seemingly presentable ones that do not want anything to do with you or your community
  • You have nomadic ones that are not stable enough for even themselves
  • You have ones that have their own families that treat you like plebes or stepchildren and act like you should feel previleged to be dignified with your presence.
  • You have unadulterated perverts that talk a good game but only you notice that wandering eyes and hands
  • You have ones that seem perfect on paper but are just nasty in inexcusable ways like sneakiness, bigotry and physical abuse.

I am one to admit that I’m kinda messed up. I think having an unstable father would’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back. I demanded more than just a stayer or a payer. I needed patience and long-suffering. I see things that would’ve crushed me because they crush me to witness. I watch toddlers suspended in the fray of their parents animosity clinging to each other for support. I see fathers that merciless beat their children until they are afraid to mess up or confess their mistakes. I see fathers that are horrible to the mothers of their children in front of the children. I grew up with siblings with different mothers in the same classes. I see fathers who have to be begged to be present in their child’s life. I would’ve probably died.

I can’t believe I’m back in school again. Damn!

At least I had a month of summer this year. College is a fucking shackle! I’m in disbelief that a fraction of a point just wiped out my entire summer. I just traded independent art projects for arguing with middle to upper class hipsters about authenticity and validity of art in generally apathetic classrooms. Hurray! Essays for everyone!

I better get my diploma this time. Got me commencement-in’ and I don’t get the paypahs! Receipts, gimme them!

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