Yesterday, my friend Leila and I went over to the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea to see Wangechi Mutu’s newest collages, curated under the the title “Hunt Bury Flee”. It was the first time I’d seen a Mutu collage in the flesh, up close. I was floored and moved.
Read MoreFor Colored Girls: Holding Everyone Accountable
What I find more fascinating, though, is the reactions I’m reading from all corners of the black community–from self professed cultural critics to around the way girls–to Perry’s film and how, in most instances, people have found it astonishingly easy to separate Shange’s work from what Perry ultimately presented in movie theaters. So is the power of rabid love and selective memory.
Read MoreJimmie
I love James Baldwin for giving me: Just Above My Head and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, two of my favorite books that, in language aching with grief and love, explore familial and romantic life without being sentimental or pretentious.
Read MoreBook: Nothing to Envy
Chronicling the lives of a doctor, a school teacher and her much richer secret lover, a fervent communist mother, an orphaned boy, and a rebellious daughter (all having defected to South Korea), Nothing to Envy takes its title from a children’s song taught throughout North Korea with the lyric, “We have nothing to envy in the world.”
Read MoreBirthdays, John the Baptist & Me
Today is my 35th birthday. If that number is meant to invoke panic about approaching middle age, sagging body parts, and introspection about where my life is as opposed to where I wish it to be, it has certainly failed.
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