in september, i entered my thirty-fifth year. i made a playlist for the last birthday party i’ll throw myself for a while because…birthday anxiety. as 2021 comes to an end, i’ve been listening to it often. thought i’d share. play on shuffle and enjoy the tunes y’all.
all the shades.
m o o o o o d + color palette #amen.
Killmonger hair goals in the stu this week.
#mood as i move through the world in 2018
Orisha my alter. #mood
i'm in New York for the holidays. seeing family, friends, and art. i caught another excerpt from Kahlil Joseph's Shadow Play at the New Museum. per usual, i was blown away.
having watched Black Mary throughout last month, i am so full off this iteration. i can honestly admit that I have a reverence that borders on jealousy for film artists/makers. where and when the visual and the sonic meet is everything. Kahlil has certainly mastered that space while leaving room for the viewer to float, bounce, rock, melt, soak...and BE in that in between.
i could've watched this short film all day. i might go back, before i leave for cali, and take it all in again.
here are the sounds for Fly Paper. read up on the exhibition and more here.
Black women certainly are at the center of my stories. I think part of this is from my personal experience of growing up with women who are very powerful—to me—but very vulnerable in their society. That duality has always struck me, watching how people have to live in these situations, live in the bodies that we live in, and have to contort who we are in different spaces. Especially if you are poor and female in very stratified society. I think that as vessels of memory, of people who carry their stories, I see that as more than symbolism, I see that as survival. When you attach migration to it, there is a hunger in people like me to know everything from the story tellers, the story carriers in my life, because I absolutely need those stories. I desperately need them. I especially need them for the next generation of my family. I need them for daughters and nieces, and for my nephews too. I need them to know how we lived before they knew us. I need them to know who we were before we came here. I need them to know how we managed to survive, how we managed not to die. I need them to have these stories as tools for their future. In migration it becomes even more important, because you are so afraid to lose all that. You’re separated from the physical space where you were born. You can go back but it’s always changing. You’re always changing. What you are left with are the stories, and these stories come in bodies. And for me, it’s often a black female body like mine.
+Edwidge Danticat, “The Past Is Not Always Past:” A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat
Black Mary - A Film by Kahlil Joseph
y'all, i'm floored...#foreverinspo
To coincide with Tate Modern's exhibition 'Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power' Tate commissioned filmmaker Kahlil Joseph to create a new and exclusive film inspired by the haunting black and white photography of Roy DeCarava.
Part 1 (of a two-part film) featuring Alice Smith's haunting rework of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "I Put a Spell on You."
studio daze.
new ideas.
new works.
#amen.