Online Journal. Carlagirl Photo.

©2004 Carla Williams. All Rights Reserved.

27 April 2004

I have been consumed lately (surprise) with this discussion of the representation of black women so I put this on the site's What's New page:

I don't know how many of you have been following the whole Nelly "Tip Drill" video (in which Nelly apparently runs a credit card through the crack of a black woman's butt, among other things) vs. Spelman women debate, but here's a good perspective on it by Jelani Cobb, who teaches at Spelman. It's titled "Past Imperfect: The Hoodrat Theory." Here are a few more links to articles about it:

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1380.shtml
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/living/8522692.htm
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/auto/epaper/editions/friday/opinion_0488854096bdb1b200ed.html
http://www.jsonline.com/enter/tvradio/apr04/220549.asp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4499-2004Apr11.html

I think the one that really started me thinking about the reality of the perception of black women and girls is "The Height of Disrepect" by Thulani Davis which was in the Village Voice. I'm really glad to see this discussion of the representation of black women's bodies brought into the forefront (obviously) but where is the voice of the women who performed in the video? Does no one want to speak with them? It's a serious oversight that everyone wants to talk around them and about them but no one wants to acknowledge that these women have names, opinions, choices, and voices that are just as valid as every other black woman's in this discussion.

Relatedly, I've also been hooked on the Kanye West song "All Falls Down," and since I don't have a television or the CD I went online to see if I could watch the video. As the kids say, I've been feelin' him. I'm really interested in this whole "college dropout" thing because I find the lyrics really smart and evocative, and there's been condemnation of his anti-college rhetoric on the Black Ivy listserv I'm on (yeah, I am). Nobody really seems to want to engage the hard truth of the lines highlighted below in the first verse. On top of that, doing the web search I came across at least two people who were looking for the sunglasses Stacy Dash wore and the Louis Vuitton purse she carries, truly, it seems, missing the point of the song.

Man I promise, she's so self conscious
she has no idea what she's doing in college
That major that she majored in don't make no money
But she won't drop out, her parents will look at her funny
Now, tell me that ain't insecurrre
The concept of school seems so securrre
Sophmore three yearrrs aint picked a careerrr
She like fuck it, I'll just stay down herre and do hair
Cause that's enough money to buy her a few pairs of new Airs
Cause her baby daddy don't really care
She's so precious with the peer pressure
Couldn't afford a car so she named her daughter Alexus (a Lexus)
She had hair so long that it looked like weave
Then she cut it all off now she look like Eve
And she be dealing with some issues that you can't believe
Single black female addicted to retail and well

Man I promise, I'm so self conscious
That's why you always see me with at least one of my watches
Rollies and Pasha's done drove me crazy
I can't even pronounce nothing, pass that versace!
Then I spent 400 bucks on this
Just to be like nigga you ain't up on this!
And I can't even go to the grocery store
Without some ones thats clean and a shirt with a team
It seems we living the American dream
But the people highest up got the lowest self esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings
We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us
We trying to buy back our 40 acres
And for that paper, look how low we a'stoop
Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coop/coupe

I say fuck the police, thats how I treat em
We buy our way out of jail, but we can't buy freedom
We'll buy a lot of clothes but we don't really need em
Things we buy to cover up what's inside
Cause they made us hate ourself and love they wealth
That's why shortys hollering "where the ballas' at?"
Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack
And the white man get paid off of all of that
But I ain't even gon act holier than thou
Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob with 25 thou
Before I had a house and I'd do it again
Cause I wanna be on 106 and Park pushing a Benz
I wanna act ballerific like it's all terrific
I got a couple past due bills, I won't get specific
I got a problem with spending before I get it
We all self conscious I'm just the first to admit it

Now, I'm used to the edited version because I listen to the radio. Instead of hearing:

Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack
And the white man get paid off of all of that

I get:

_____ buy Jordans, _________ buy _____
And the white man get paid off of all of that

So I found the video at http://www.nme.com/features/108173.htm and watched it and was really surprised to hear the following edit:

_______ buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack
And the _____ man get paid off of all of that

Now, since when did it become an obscenity for a black man to say "white man?" Or is it that's it's "obscene" to associate white men with drug dealing and crack? It's more than a bit odd and troublesome. (I just found out that apparently Viacom-owned MTV and BET both edit out "white man" but since I don't have a TV I didn't know that. I learned it from an article on this very subject that I would give props to but for the homophobia expressed in it.) Is this the post-Janet breast scandal world we live in? Is this where censorship is headed, even though on any given day I can turn on the radio and hear lyrics like "I ain't a punk, man, I don't sweat vaginal fluid" or "...and love to get her p***** (barely bleeped) licked/[by another bitch]'cus I ain't drunk enough to do that?" But we can all see what's going on there, the double standard, the fear of critical voices making any kind of mainstream inroads.




There is a growing underclass of college-educated poor due to the increasing debt that many students graduate with. back.

                         


13 March 2004

I've been having conversations with numerous friends recently about the ungenerous people we know in this relatively tiny field of art/art history/photography. We all know who you are, but I'm not so independent or stupid that I'm naming names. Every one of my friends seems to have had the same experience with them, and we all know the types: folks who you've met a dozen times but who always act like they don't know who the hell you are (to whom I always like to say, 'oh sure, we've met many times before' just to embarrass them, though these types don't seem to get embarrassed); folks to whom you extend generosity or kindness only to be met by an attitude of entitlement or indifference; folks who actively sabotage someone else's success just because they can; folks who are just plain snotty. I've talked about it here before—people I've sent resources and information to only to have them not even acknowledge receipt of it, but they go ahead and use it. This field is too small for that kind of behavior, you think, but more often than not these are the stars, the successes, and they couldn't care less what I and my friends think, anyway.

Now, I admit, I did some kooky things early on in my career, so conflicted was I about being an artist. From the beginning I really hated every aspect of it, but at the time I didn't know how to gracefully reconcile that. I announced my "retirement," which in retrospect must have sounded really pretentious. I told people works had been destroyed in a flood when they hadn't been (to those people in particular, I apologize for my weirdness!) This last week I've spent an inordinate amount of time readying some old work for an exhibition and all of those feelings are resurfacing with a vengeance. But these conversations, and the reality behind them, have been really depressing of late. I often feel like my work and career are one big battle against the tendency toward snobbery and elitism that permeates art history and especially anything remotely associated with higher education, but sometimes, like now, I feel like throwing in the proverbial towel and leaving them to themselves and their insular, incestuous little world. There are more important battles, but then I remember that I love this work, too, and I'll be damned if I let those kinds of attitudes win out. So I keep plodding along.

Another part of the conversations I've been having have to do with black women photographers in particular and why the only two who ever get any attention now are Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. I mean, I could rename this site "Beyond Carrie and Lorna...There Are Some Other Black Photographers." Now, I love both of their work, but really there are many more really interesting, important artists to talk about. There was this moment when they emerged in the 1980s and there were many more names discussed along with them—Clarissa Sligh, Pat Ward Williams, Coreen Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, to name a few—then they entered the art world mainstream and all the others gradually disappeared from the discussions. Multiculturalism had its moment but that's gone now, two representatives were anointed, so no one wants to hear about all that anymore. That's the distinct impression I'm getting, anyway. So again, I keep plodding along, hoping to change a bit of that, hoping to keep a broader discussion—and access to more work—alive.

                         


25 February 2004

This morning, in the midst of a torrential downpour, my sweetie and I went to San Francisco City Hall to be witnesses for her sister and her partner who were getting married. They had already had a commitment ceremony a couple of years ago (before I knew them), but decided (I like to think with our prompting) to make it legal. What a complete thrill and honor it was to be there for them, to participate in such an historically yet personally triumphant moment. We got to City Hall; their officiant met us and explained that they could choose any spot within the rotunda where they would like to get married. I got to choose; I ended up selecting the spot on the 4th floor where, it turned out, the officiant and his partner of 37 years had been married. While we waited for them to get their license, we watched several other marriage ceremonies taking place at various spots below us. To say that it was beautiful, overwhelming, and a privilege to be there to witness these weddings would be an understatement, and we weren't even there at the height of it all, when the rotunda was filled with couples and families and volunteers during that first week or so. Every few minutes two men or two women were being joined together for no other reason than that they loved each other and wanted to make a formal commitment to each other in the eyes of the law. While we waited their officiant married two men who'd come from New Orleans; in the past few days he'd married people who had come from all over the country. I'm not even going to comment on the idiocy of Bush and Schwarzenegger and all the right-wing Christians who want to claim this is wrong and deny gay people the right to marry. Why they're so invested in what someone else does has never made sense to me. Mind your own; is that so hard? Instead I'm going to give mad props to new S.F. mayor Gavin Newsom for making a whole lot of people extremely happy, for making a whole lot of dreams come true, no matter what the ultimate outcome may be, legally. I was extremely honored to be a part of that, to witness it, officially and unofficially.

So were we tempted, my sweetie and I? We've only been together a bit under 5 months now, not very long in the scheme of things, a lifetime by lesbian U-haul standards. We've talked about it, danced around it, acknowledged that it's both way too soon and we don't want to be clichés but, yeah, I would marry her in a heartbeat.

                         


02 February 2004

Oh, what you would change if you could go back! I appeared last night on the ultra-conservative Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor (if you click on this the download will take a long time; it's 64 MB) because I had written an article about the whole Janet Jackson/Super Bowl breast scandal and was asked to talk about it. I've gotten a fair amount of feedback mostly from friends and family and a few strangers who are very supportive (thank you all!), and some from strangers who are, well, not. You can read a couple of them on the site's message board, though I have to say it makes me rather glad they didn't mention my URL on air, as I'd asked them to (too late, though). Not that I don't welcome different opinions, but I suspect that would have created a lot of administrative work for me to keep up with! At any rate, these are my thoughts on the interview with Bill O'Reilly:

I would have made more eye contact with the camera. (This, though, has always been my way and I suspect will be a rather hard habit to break, though, admittedly, I was told not to look too much at the camera.)

I would have disputed his claim that Janet Jackson admitted she'd set up Justin Timberlake. (I think that's what he said. It was something to that effect. I don't really remember, and don't have a tape of it.)

I would have said more about the aggression and violence inherent in Timberlake's action, simulated or not.

I would have said that, in fact, I bet the images that Playboy ran of Naomi Campbell in December 1999 simulating anal sex with a fake leopard were not quite the same as the images they run of white women but, then, I don't look at the pictures in Playboy enough to really say.

I would have said that the footage they ran of a blond Tyra Banks looking whiter than I'd ever seen her was about a whole separate set of issues. (I couldn't see anything or anyone when I was being taped so I had no idea of what images they were intercutting.)

I would have elaborated on his example of Vanessa Williams because, indeed, it was also certainly no coincidence that it was the first black Miss America who also became the first one stripped of her title, and for posing nude, of course.

I would have said that I suspect his African American viewers probably already share his viewpoint on most issues, as my friends and colleagues do with me, so, really, we were both right on that point.

But, you know, I was nervous and I had a finite period of time and I kept getting interrupted and I knew this guy can be wildly rude and combative so I thought it best to just maintain my original position and my poise. What kind of debate or discussion consists of "I think X" and "well, I don't agree," anyway? I'm really not entirely sure why they needed to have me on the show. He could have just mentioned the article briefly and dismissed it for all the dialogue we had. All in all, the anticipation and talking with all of my friends about it was great fun, but the experience itself was kind of boring, though the driver they sent for me, he rocked! I had a much, much better—and more interesting— time talking with him on the way to and from the studio about race and representation than I had on the show.

                         


07 December 2003

In March, when I was still a Fellow at Stanford and beginning to get rejection letters for the fellowships I'd applied to for this year, I wrote in my journal:

"I would like to remain in the Bay Area and meet a nice woman and fall in love and write."

Well, that put things in perspective—it's December now and I actually got exactly what I'd hoped for. I don't know what next week or next month and certainly not what next year will bring, but I can now at least have faith that sometimes you actually do get exactly what you want. The trick, it seems, is to know what to do with it once you do.

                         


03 December 2003

A friend has been reminding me that I haven't written anything here for a while. It's been a really busy fall, and generally I only write here when something has really struck me. It seems I've been accumulating a few things, though, so here I go.

BWMW: The VIBE awards took place November 20 and aired November 21. I subscribe to VIBE and had seen the list of nominees and call for voting, including the category of Sexiest Video Vixen. From the winners list:

Sure there are a million video girls out there, but these women have star power. Sexy, sensual, and sublime, these ladies clearly held their own next to the big dogs. They keep our tongues wagging. [the winner] Jeanette Chavis (“Excuse Me Miss,” by Jay-Z)

(I wanted to link to some more information on Jeanette Chavis, but I couldn't find any. I'm always curious in this day and age when I can't turn up any information on someone, particularly a public figure, on the Web. Her name is all over now, but it's as though she exists only because of this nomination/win.)

Now, I've done my fair share of ranting about the voicelessness of all of these mostly unclothed black women in music videos, but I had to wonder if this is really what I've been calling for. Is this truly giving props to the women who certainly are more complex than these adolescent male sexual fantasies of music videos, or is it samo, samo objectification, albeit with a name attached? It was funny even initially seeing the category because, well, who even knew these women's names to vote for them (for clarification, they're listed by the video in which they appeared)? Are they ever credited elsewhere? Maybe so and I'm just not consuming the right media. After all, the VIBE website is currently featuring an image of R. Kelly in a bandit mask (well it's appropriate, he is a fucking criminal, and it creeps me out that people are still buying his records) so are they really the arbiters of anything I genuinely want to support? Nevertheless, I thought it was worth noting.

p.s. (December 11): I got the January 2004 issue of VIBE yesterday, and they had a feature on the VIBE awards, but, interestingly, the Sexiest Video Vixen category wasn't included.

Speaking of the display of sex, I was at SFMOMA a couple of weeks ago to see the Diane Arbus show (didn't really like it) and I got through looking at it before the people I had come with so I reluctantly went downstairs to see the Reagan Louie exhibition, "Sex Work in Asia." I figured I would be predisposed to hate it—I hated the cover of the book/catalog—but it was the first time in twenty years (which is how long I've been studying photography) I have ever been in a museum or gallery where I just couldn't look at the images on the wall, they were that offensive to me. I wonder—would a show of sex work in Holland or England or even Idaho have made it onto the walls? (Okay, I have to include this aside here—the first time I went to SFMOMA they had a kind of "greatest hits" exhibition up and out of the entire group of images (maybe 100 or so there were exactly 2 of black subjects [none by black makers] and in each they were holding guns or simulated guns. Coincidence? Surely they didn't mean to imply that this is usual for black people and thus representative.) I literally couldn't look—I studiously averted my eyes as I raced through the gallery to get to the Yasumasa Morimura photograph Futago. (I adore his work.) You know, thank jeebus I didn't get a job there.

Earlier this week I volunteered at a museum fundraiser in San Francisco. I'm not one for socializing in a work context, so I was happy to have something to do since I had to be there. It was a surreal evening for many reasons, not the least of which was the presence, in the midst of a bunch of fancily dressed, well-heeled, mostly black San Franciscans, of a cleaning woman, straight out of "Eastern European peasant woman" central casting, moving throughout the crowd the entire night sweeping up after everyone. It was almost like a performance piece so incongruous was the juxtaposition. I was probably the only person there that evening who even acknowledged her, aside from the building facilities person who came around with her at one point making sure she was cleaning what needed cleaning but oh-so-generously letting her know she didn't have to worry about sweeping outside that night (it was raining).

I and another woman were assigned to be greeters at the door. I was already a little concerned because SF mayor Willie Brown was being honored that evening, and I think he's reprehensible, but I was unprepared for just how awful he really is. When he walked in we greeted him with good evening, but he barely glanced at us as if we were just so beneath him that he couldn't bother to speak. Then he slowly removed his leather duster and hat and essentially dropped them on the poor lackey who was assigned to him in a gesture so condescending and imperious that I nearly gagged. I'm sure my mouth was hanging open. What makes people so drunk with power and their own self-importance? Soon after reporters arrived looking for him and yuppie scum mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom. Ugh. Was I in the right place because these were certainly NOT my people! Thankfully I wasn't still greeting when he arrived. The weirdest part was there was no one there with whom to snarl and commiserate—my fellow greeter was excited by them both and made a point of talking to Newsom, no one was wearing any Matt Gonzalez buttons, and I felt woefully out of my element. The unfortunate bedfellows of art/cultural institutions and ostentatious money can be really very disconcerting. I know virtually nothing functions without it and in a very real, if removed, way I depend on it to earn my living but still, it's not a pretty picture, not a happy thought.

On a completely different note, one last thing I'm bursting to share—I am hopelessly, helplessly, head-over-heels crazy in love. Wow. "The babe who lights up my life," she told me to call her when I said I was mentioning her on my site. All true. It's very, very nice. I'm incredibly fortunate. Then again, so is she.

                         


02 November 2003

I write a quarterly newsletter for a theater group in Los Angeles. For the recent issue, I had to interview six people and write blurbs on a couple of others. I don't know if this just hasn't happened before or if I never noticed it, but every person went to an Ivy League school. Now, I went to an Ivy League school, and I've often contemplated what that means, or is supposed to mean, in practical terms. Am I supposed to be more of a success than the average college graduate because I went to such a lofty, selective place? I think that is a commonly held expectation, ridiculous though it is. I'm not particularly lofty or successful; I merely do ok. For the time being, at least, I'm lucky to earn my living in the field of my specialty, especially because what I do is so bloody narrow. Nothing stops a casual conversation with a stranger more quickly, I've recently found out, than saying that you're a freelance photo historian. Folks don't know what to do with it. What the hell kind of job is that? you can see registering on their faces. Some will even say they didn't know that was a job. Maybe it isn't really. Maybe without the academy or the museum one doesn't exist. I struggle with this a lot because I don't have the "proper degree" for what I do, and certain friends are often advising me to go back to school to get a Ph.D. I've toyed with the idea, at times somewhat seriously, but mostly I just stubbornly resist, sticking to the argument that the process and validation of receiving another degree isn't going to make me better at what I do. I work constantly at what I do. I can't imagine why I need this imprimatur of respectability.

But it bothered me inordinately that all of these people—filmmakers, writers, playwrights, performers—all of the presumably successful enough, at least this month, to warrant a profile in our little newsletter, all of them had this privileged education to their credits. Is it just a coincidence, or do they really have a special leg up on the competition, so to speak? Had they—we—purchased a guarantee with our educations? I'm trying to write an essay right now, and am running smack up against the whole Yale photography program graduates and their almost guaranteed immediate success in the New York art photography world (except for a friend of mine, a wonderful photographer who endured that program and, not being a "chosen one," was essentially discouraged from continuing to work in what was perhaps the most ungenerous and petty atmosphere I'd ever encountered). Surely it's no coincidence when the same year that you have your MFA show your former instructor includes your work in a show in New York, with a catalog, that gets covered by the New York Times. Privilege.

                         


17 August 2003

If I were more organized I would create a "black women media watch" on this page that I would automatically update every time there was another transgression against black women in popular media (although, if I were comprehensive, that would be more than a full-time job). Like, for instance, several months ago a cable station was running commercials for an airing of the movie The Craft. It had to be TNT, because it's about the only cable channel I watch regularly (Law & Order reruns) aside from TV Land (Sanford & Son reruns). Now, I never even saw The Craft, but I knew it starred four young actresses: Rachel True, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, and Robin Tunney. Now, as far as I know, Rachel True is the only one of them currently starring in a television show (UPN's Half & Half) but, hmmm, hers was the only name not mentioned in the station ads. Oversight, maybe? Yeah, well, she's the only black one. The only working one (well, I'm sure the others have jobs), but for sure the only black one, so just forget her, right? She wouldn't make anyone tune in.

Okay, that one's off my chest. So the other night my friend Adrienne and I went to see the new movie Camp. It's in the 'hood, and it was just what we both needed—a good laugh. And laugh we did; it was one of those bad/good movies, with a couple of really, really funny scenes. But what in the hell was up with the plot development (okay, I'm about to give something away, so if you plan to go see that movie and don't want to know in advance what happens, don't read on) in which the gay guy, Michael, in order to win over the straight guy, Vlad, has sex with the black girl, Dequina (or is it Dee?), who, when confronted by Vlad about it (while doodling and drawing swoony pictures of Michael, thus implying some emotional connection he doesn't feel for her), replies that she can't remember the last time a guy who wasn't gay showed any interest in her (and since when is this a line tossed-off for laughs)? And when Vlad forces himself on her, she basically shrugs and kisses him back, taking what she can get? So, once again, why does the black girl have to be the repository, literally and figuratively, of these fucked-up male fantasies of sexual availability? She wants it, right? She's the understood go-to girl for sexual but not emotional gratification? But then, the black girl has been given no emotional development. She never is.

                         


16 August 2003

Oh, so many thoughts swirling around in my head of late. And listening to Cat Stevens, sparked by watching Harold and Maude over the past two days, probably doesn't help. I discovered Cat Stevens as a freshman in college. My RA, Amy, whose last name I can no longer remember, was this hippieish vegetarian religion major who was a fairly significant influence on my 16-year old developing mind which was for the first time ever away from home, having new experiences. I was intrigued by her politics, by her righteousness, by her peace-loving vibe. By and large, there is a lot of her in me now. And she made me tapes of Cat Stevens records, well, it was either her or Jon Blake, the guy across the hall, but at any rate that was my introduction to him and it was probably at around the same time that I first saw the movie, which I love and which, I guess, I hadn't seen since. I suppose I'm in one of those evaluating moments, taking stock of my life, my choices and where I am, how I got here. On a certain level, I'm where I always wanted to be, living in a beautiful place, surrounded by friends and family who love me, doing freelance work and managing somehow. And on a very fundamental level, I am happy. I don't have "everything," whatever "everything" is, and I know how precious and fragile it all is, that any of it can turn on a dime, but I feel like in some karmic way I am reaping the benefits of seeds I have sown over the years of working very hard to be a good person.

At the same time some of my very best friends are going through some tough trials right now, and I am lucky to have the strength and energy to be there for each of them. But applying the same logic they could not possibly be experiencing any karmic payback for past transgressions, because as far as I know neither has ever transgressed enough to deserve what they're going through now. So what's fairness, and why do we all— because I don't delude myself, it used to be the running joke in my family that if it weren't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all—have to endure these periods of pain so awful that we doubt the meaning of it all?

So in a way this is an open letter to my friends, to say I love you and that I cannot provide you with answers and I cannot explain your difficult circumstances and I cannot remove your pain, but I can love you and support you and feel lucky to count you among my friends even when you're sad and even when we talk and all you can do is cry and even when you're in a downright shitty mood because, you know, I've been there, too, and I will be there again and I will need you and look to you for support and when that happens I hope that you will be able to be there for me, or at least the strength I give you now you can give to another friend who might come to you one day in need. And I want to let you each know that, because I know you both occasionally read this journal, and maybe I can say here what I cannot always say to you when I talk to you. Your pain is very, very hard for me, no matter how strong I seem. Yes, when you feel hurt I feel hurt, not in the same degree that you hurt but in my own way because you are essential to me and I empathize with you and ultimately all I want is your happiness, too. This life is very short, and no, it isn't fair, some of us get more crap than others, or so that is our perception, but please recognize the goodness in yourself, the fundamental beauty, and please love yourself at least as much as I love you. And know that I am always here for you.

Wait a minute—it was Scharf. Amy Scharf. Thank you, Amy.

                         


07 August 2003

I can't stop listening to the same melancholy song over and over again, killing time, wasting time, procrastinating while trying to meet all of these overwhelming deadlines and to keep my heart from breaking again. Stranded on the Club Girl's Terrain, by Stew. "...'cause you're Venus of the wandering insane...," my favorite line. I think. Well, the whole song is so wrenchingly exquisite. I do love the way that some writers can put together words that just sound so perfect to hear and to say. I finally got to see Stew in concert, in a 5-day stretch that also included Les Nubians, Zap Mama, and Tom Waits. Not bad, and certainly reassurance for myself that I made the right decision to live here. Ah, that decision...I've been a fan of Stew's for a long time, dutifully subscribed to his mailing list, until now missing every show, being perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When I was 13 a strange man I encountered in a store predicted that I would break hearts someday. For whatever reason I never forgot that, wondering what this random stranger thought he saw in me then. Probably something not altogether savory, a grown man saying that to a 13-year-old girl. But to a 13-year-old mind you think, yeah, I'll be so beautiful and charming and irresistible that I'll break their hearts. Well, he actually cursed me, I think. Me of the perpetually unrequited romance have proceeded in the 24 years since really only to have my own heart broken, my hopes perpetually dashed regarding romance. It was never really my goal to fulfill his prophecy, though, although now I guess I've done that, too, and it isn't at all cool like I might have imagined. In fact, it sucks, causing someone you love pain.

Music has always been my salve, my inspiration. When Tom Waits stood on that stage last Thursday night, the countless hours I have spent with his music as my company, far more time than I've probably spent with almost any other human being, all things considered, came flooding back to me. But I've already covered this territory, haven't I? So right now I have mingled up lots of emotions related to moving, to leaving Santa Fe for good, and the real, real final ending of a relationship, and the non-beginning of any others, and the fear related to flying blind, and the fear related to playing it safe, and the prolonged state of flux as I try to settle a new home with most of my things and all of my history residing elsewhere for now, and who knows what other factors at work in addition to this very eloquent, very sad music that I need so much to hear. So, I'd better get back to work.

                         


13 June 2003

I remember when Tracy Chapman's first album came out. I was spending part of the summer in Bedford, New York, visiting a friend visiting her sister, and I remember driving with her through that impossibly lush and privileged landscape listening to "Fast Car" and marveling at the talents of this young black woman, our age, and that beautiful brown-toned cover photograph of her short-dreadlocked head, eyes cast down, and the elegantly spare video for the song that I never got to see all the way through because I didn't have access to cable. And this friend had a friend who had friends who went to Tufts with her and wanted to dish about her sexuality, and I secretly (at the time) liked her even more, marveled at her guts to make such a record, to expose herself to becoming a "star." I also remember years later reading Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale and being amazed that she wrote about the main character listening throughout the book to Chapman (whose voice predictably didn't make it onto the Babyface-produced soundtrack to the film version), as though this was another thing that girlfriends did that we, the readers, would automatically understand, and believe. McMillan's black female protagonist in the equally unlikely 'hood of Phoenix, Arizona, was Chapman's audience, as was I.

Tonight I went to see Tracy in concert in San Francisco (now her home town). I had seen her only once before, and as before she was luminous, mesmerizing, and sounded as good and fine as the first time I'd heard her. Yet there was hardly a black face in sight--maybe three others besides me (I think there were more at her show in Santa Fe, which is saying something, because in Santa Fe they'd have had to come from out-of-town). Her repertoire was mixed with old and new songs, and the overwhelmingly, straight, white, yuppie crowd sang along to almost all of the songs from that first record, giving extra emphasis, inexplicably, to the line in "Talkin' 'Bout A Revolution" where she sings:

poor people gonna rise up / and get their share
poor people gonna rise up / and take what's theirs

Now, these are powerful songs, songs she wrote as a teenager, but since when does hoisting a five-dollar beer at a concert you've spent $35 (face value) to see show solidarity with poor people rising up? I have to say it was one of the creepiest experiences I've had at a concert, listening to and watching a bunch of drunk yuppies singing "across the lines / who would dare to go / under the bridge, over the tracks / that separates whites from blacks / choose sides / and run for your life" and yet seeing little recognition from them that the words had any real meaning in their lives. (This was far beyond the knee-jerk solidarity of erstwhile Trustafarians whenever they hear a Bob Marley cover and feel empowered to stand up for their right to fire it up and not comb their hair--how many of them even know who Marcus Garvey was?) I swear Tracy started changing up her vocals to get them to stop, or so I wanted to believe.

And it made me think--maybe the revolution shouldn't have been set to music (especially for those of us who can't even find the beat). Maybe we can't dance and think at the same time. To paraphrase Sarah Jones paraphrasing Gil-Scott Heron, the revolution is not about the freedom to get so wasted you have to be carried out of the venue.

                         


24 March 2003

I'm ranting about black women again, about black people in general. This time it's the Oscars I'm talking about, which were last night, but first I want to mention something that has been driving me crazy since I saw it, but please tell me how so many reviewers have mentioned the very steamy sex scene between the characters of Frida Kahlo and "Josephine Baker" in the film Frida but NOT A SINGLE ONE HAS BOTHERED TO MENTION THE BLACK ACTRESS'S NAME?????? So here we go again--the black woman's body can once again become the signifier of unbridled sexuality (manifested by the length and explicitness of this sex scene compared with others in the film), but she never speaks (she does sing, or perform) and we don't even need to acknowledge her name? If I were feeling remotely generous I'd say it's hard to fault the reviewers since the actress's name wasn't included in any of the official material for the film, at least it wasn't on the official Miramax film site or on Salma Hayek's site for the film. I should have been more vigilant watching the end credits and they should have been, too. But really it wasn't so hard, either--it's right there on the Internet Movie Database: Karine Plantadit-Bageot, a dancer, in the role of "Paris Chanteuse." Oh, so, not officially Josephine Baker, but what other black chanteuses were there in Paris in the 1920s? I will say this is a film I really liked, too, mostly because Maudelle lived with the Riveras during the period covered in this movie and it gave me a chance to visualize the world she inhabited there. But for chrissakes, give a sister her props! If the scene is that "memorable," then her identity should be, too.

But back to the Oscars, which I readily admit to loving and watching every year, although I can't ever say the films or actors I really like get acknowledged. I was predisposed to hating Steve Martin (see below) and he didn't disappoint--did he and the writers really think a joke about Afghanistan's impoverished state was funny? Why not take at potshot at the Iraqis, too, while we're at it? And please tell me how a man convicted of having sex with a 13-year old girl gets a standing ovation? Excuse me, I don't care how much his victim exonerates him as an adult. If he were the postman down the street no one would be standing and applauding him. They'd be running him off the block. So-called talent doesn't excuse pedophilia. The highlight, of course, was Michael Moore's anti-Bush acceptance speech for the billion+ audience. Go, Michael!!! You make us proud. Many of us agree with you wholeheartedly. But two things really bothered me about the show. First, how can Nell Carter get included in the montage of Academy Award ceremony dance sequences but not be included in the memoriam? They already had a clip! She died two months ago, plenty of time to include her, and she was at least as well known as some of the very obscure people they did include. Second, what was up with the two best actor winners slipping tongue to Halle Berry and Denzel Washington? First Adrien Brody, and I have to admit though I liked him I found what he did to Halle rather aggressive and creepy, especially with her husband in the audience, and then Nicole Kidman kisses Denzel on the cheek and then says something to him and kisses him on the lips, and then gives a little expression/gesture like 'woo, I got a kiss from him, too!' with his wife in the audience. Did anyone else notice this? Like, what's up with that? I've never seen two white actors targeted like that for their presumed sex appeal, like their accomplishments and the respect they were owed were nothing compared to the fact that they're just plain hot. AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH! It never ends.

                         


17 March 2003

This is an open love letter to Dana Owens, a.k.a. Queen Latifah,
and I'm writing to say I love you because, girlfriend, you must don't love yourself, and you must don't love the rest of us black women, and you must really hate us larger women, and I'm not even gonna go there with you being a lesbian, though we all believe it even if you can or will never say it.

You must don't love yourself because if you did, you would never have agreed to play a black woman who, by virtue of her "natural" blackness, brings sexual freedom to uptight white people in exchange for, well, apparently only the chance to grin at them and improve their lives and be treated like a servant, a criminal, and a fool.

If you did, you would have understood that the vast class inequities between these characters makes it impossible for them to be sharing the "jokes" and you would have seen that, even though the white man is a weak buffoon, he still walks away with all the privilege and the joke's on you.

If you did, you would never have agreed to be part of a movie in which the central conceit is that of course we will all understand how absolutely "funny" it is to think a wealthy white man could ever be attracted to a fat, lower class black woman like you (kinda like why folks can feel smug laughing at Anna Nicole now that she's big, 'cause someone who looks like Halle Berry wouldn't automatically be so ridiculous, right?).

If you did, you would never have used what little power you have in Hollywood to co-executive produce (yes, you did!) a film in which you insist that a rich, drunk white man twice your age grab your breasts in order to "teach" him how to seduce his wife, and then you get on top of him on the couch and "ride" him 'til his kid comes home and sees you.

If you did, you would never have acted in a film that dresses you up in a pink maid's dress that he just so happens to have lying around so that you can serve dinner to his family so that he can make money off a racist old white woman who sings a "spiritual" about 'massa, please don't sell my family' while you can say nothing to her because you have to stay in your place and no one who can defends you.

If you did, you would never have allowed the only character who finds beauty in you to be known as "freakboy," calling him that yourself, because he finds beauty, however fetishized, in you.

If you did, you would never have allowed a white man who was seduced by what you wrote to him to turn around, once he realizes you're not the skinny blond white woman of his fantasies, and tell you you're only "probably intelligent" and ask you why you just don't "learn to speak English."

If you did, you would have never befriended a character who shrugs off the raging racist next door by letting his child play cards with her.

If you did, you would never, could never have found any of this funny.

I went to see your new movie because you are you and I want to support my sisters even though I knew I wouldn't like it because the previews alone were so offensive. I couldn't imagine just how bad it would be. But I was also desperate for any opportunity to see a beautiful, bigger black woman on screen, even if the plot was fucked up, just like I used to watch Ricki Lake and those other shows because it was one of the only opportunities to see real! live! butch! lesbians! on TV even if they were fighting each other or being made over into 'aw-don't-you-feel-prettier-in-that-dress' "girls." I was one of only two black women, the only black people in the theater that afternoon, and more than once I wanted to stand up and shout "THIS IS NOT US!" but instead I just sunk further into my seat, trying to disappear. I knew why I was there; looking around, I had to wonder why the rest of the folks were there, some with their kids, and as I was listening to the couple next to me seriously play along with all of the insidious Coca Cola Screen Shit I knew why--they wanted to be entertained by the #1 movie in America, the largest opening ever for Steve Martin, and they got what they came for, as I exited the theater to choruses of 'that was really cute' and 'I really liked it.'

And here we are, week two, and your little movie is still number one at the box office, merrily chugging away on its way to the $100 million+ club, Hollywood's minimum wet dream standard. Congratulations, Queen. You're a success, you made it. What a shame for the rest of us.

                         


30 January 2003

It's one of those wake-up-with-a-headache days but I get past that, past the last-minute lecture with lunch attached I don't even blink at the buffet anymore
past the have-to-extend-my-deadline procrastination but it's hard to think with a hurting head
past the not-really-worrying-what-to-wear because I only have one black dress
past the directions that don't mention Van Ness Street so I spend an extra half hour cruising the length of Mission to Embarcadero
past the crackhead showing me where to park for a dollar
past the porn palace on the corner endorsed by Playboy
And I get to the venue
Wrong about jazz fans not standing in line
It's one of the strangest venues I've been in
Once I get inside I realize I should have come early
I'm seated off to the side, far side, against the wall
and they're serving food I'd rather not smell
But it's okay, because I can see the stage
though I'm not in a good mood
yet
And there's 37 minutes 'til showtime
And I resist the urge to call a friend to pass the time
because even though I'll never see these people again I don't
want to become one of those people who can't pass time
alone without whipping out the telephone
People come up asking 'is this chair free'
and I manage a barely civil 'yes, it is'
what's wrong with me?
sitting there thinking that San Franciscans are so unreconstructed, like they're from another era
or maybe it's just the Victorian whorehouse saloon decor
and the Bay Area Black Wimmin sit next to me
just like the klatch at Jill Scott they know everyone in the venue
the folks up front, the ones to the side
and in the back
Haaaaaay!!!
'cept the brother in the back doesn't want to be here by himself so he picks his chair up and joins them
and I spot the table of hip lesbians, dead ahead, feel righteous, and then a little envious
And then a white couple comes and asks me really nice if those chairs are free and I say sure, think nothing of it
But after they take them he leans over, confidentially
No, I couldn't have missed him: dark skin, bright white jacket, complete black and white ensemble
down to the polished two-tone shoes
the Original Pimp
And he begins to tell me 'white people are weird
they're just so rude, like they own the place'
and, you know, I'm offended, and surprised, but I'm also bored
so I smile and nod
because just a few minutes earlier I'd heard him and his lady fighting, it didn't sound good
she stormed off and I didn't think she was coming back
I thought, girlfriend knows about a catching a bus, hailing a cab
especially when she's that mad
so A.J. (that was his name) nursed his 7-up while her Cosmo just sat there
and he proceeded to tell me the degree to which he just didn't like white people
Oh, Europeans--Swedes, I believe he singled out--were okay
But the American-born ones? Nuh-uh.
And Asians were okay, they warmed up to you once you came into their restaurant a few times
and he got along fine with them, with Latinos, with Indians, with everybody else
but he just didn't like white folks
'cause even when you dressed like this
they sit you by the bathroom, by the kitchen, never up in the window
and this waitress here, she didn't even bring napkins with the drinks
and I'm thinking, the waitress looks like she started the day overworked, give her a break
and I know the white girl on the other side of him could hear everything
and how would that make you feel when you're out for a good time and the guy next to you sounds like a potential hate crime?
but I wanted to hear more 'cause I'm perversely fascinated and I'm thinking he's as incongruous here as that Confederate flag license plate at the Amy Ray concert
his vibe is all wrong in this nice, mixed crowd
and why my ear?
And then it really comes out, why he's mad, who he's mad at
Today's his birthday, and he's 50
and his lady friend, Deborah, who he seems certain is coming back (though I'm not) took him to dinner at Crustacean
trouble is, says him, she didn't scout out the place ahead of time
call ahead, go 'round to check it out
wouldn't I do that if I were taking my mother out for her 50th birthday?
(um, A.J., it's not the same thing)
and clearly they'd had a falling out over it
So I gotta defend my girl, after all, she was wearing cute shoes
and he was wrong
and he asks me, what's your animal sign? and I say, 'I beg your pardon?'
and he says, 'you know, like year of the monkey, year of the rabbit'
monkey, rabbit, hmmm, I think it's snake
A light goes off and he says, '1965?'
And I say 'yeah' and he says, 'yeah, you're snake, just like her!'
So I say 'just because that's the way you do things you shouldn't get mad at her because she doesn't'
And he's about to argue with me when, sure as shit, Deborah comes back, still pissed off
and I wanna make sure she knows I ain't trying to talk to her man
'girl, I'm gay, I don't want him'
She sits down and he tells her I think her shoes are cute and he tells her I'm a snake, too, and he tells her she can see the stage if she sits against the wall
'It's not about me seeing the stage,' she spits back
And she asks me if he told me it was his birthday
and that they weren't speaking
and why
And she tells me she's been out in her car crying
because she'd planned this for so long
and to make nice he tells her I'm on her side
but he's still not getting it, not even listening, determined to ruin everyone's night
So he gives the waitress shit about the napkins when she comes back
Determined to make a white person apologize to him this night
And Deborah orders another Cosmo, and as the lights go down she tells the waitress
'in five minutes bring me another one, please'
and then Cassandra takes the stage
and she is luminous and golden and honeyed
beautiful as I remember her
someone has placed gardenias in a bowl on the stage for her
and she is happy
honeyed and golden, wearing one of those silk or linen or silk/linen tunic and pant ensembles like the one in the picture that I'd cut out of Oprah
I still want to be her
I lean over to tell Deborah I hope she enjoys the show
and hey, look, beautiful Brandon's back, I'll have to tell Kate
Kate, who was with me the first time I saw Cassandra at that little club down by the beach
And for the next hour and a half I'm enraptured, hoping they're calming down back there
and I still don't much care for the drummer's showy solo, though I know the singer needs a break
and I'm not the only old-timer in the crowd
'Sanko-fa, Sanko-fa!'
And as we stand up to applaud for the encore
A.J. and Deborah get up to leave and we make eye contact
'Take care' I mouth to her
waiting for Cassandra to retake the stage
to bring us home
and saying a silent prayer that my car is still there

                         


29 January 2003

Memory is a funny, fleeting thing (and procrastination is something else, too--that's probably why I'm writing so much here lately. I've got deadlines!). I've been rereading some of the earliest entries in this journal, and it's a damn good thing I wrote them when I did, because in many instances I can barely, if at all, remember the context in which I wrote them. And I'm not that old (nor is this journal). Now, I often like to take a point of reference from my immediate experience when I'm writing about something. Like, and, see, I nearly forgot this, I am writing (procrastinating on) an essay about black women and photography and I was going to work in a reference to Pam Grier's Friday Foster, which I watched recently on BET, who was a photographer. Okay, hold on, lemme toggle back over to Word. (and another aside--was Godfrey Cambridge not the oddest-looking black man ever on film? He should never have done that movie Watermelon Man--I still cannot resolve his ethnicity. It's really, really unsettling, but kind of fascinating!) Okay, so, now the cable would be tax-deductible if I were paying separately for it, but anyway, as I wrote in an earlier entry, when I went to my high school reunion this past spring I could not remember a thing about those years, not the people, not the place, not anything. Wiped clean. I didn't have a bad high school experience, I didn't have an exceptional one in any way (this might explain it). But no memories of it? That can't be right.

I can, however, remember every time I was ever corrected publicly, I can remember every negative comment I ever received about my photographs or my writing, and we're talking back to grade school. Uh huh. Let go. Praise? It all runs together as something vaguely nice--no, that's not true, it's very nice. I'm always very moved, very touched by that gesture of complimenting. Oh, and I can remember every cheesy come-on every directed at me mainly because, well, there've been about three.

But for someone who writes about history, who is, essentially, an historian, it's a little odd to me that my own powers of recall are so sketchy, so weak. Imagine trying to reconstruct someone's life and being frustrated that there just isn't enough, there just isn't enough documentation, she didn't remember it all to write it down, and now who's left to recall? Why didn't Maudelle just keep a journal, make my life a bit easier? But, of course, this is the fun part of what I do, too. The detective work, the sleuthing, trying to glean meaning from a bit of a newspaper clipping (newspaper unknown, date unknown, author unknown) here, a rejected proof photograph there. I don't know if memory is an improvable thing, or one I even want to mess around with. I think probably I don't. I watch my grandmother--95 now, or rather, I listen to the stories about her fading in, fading out, her memory finally giving out on her. Or is it? I suspect that her memory isn't really failing at all, all of what she ever knew, and retained, is there, but rather that she's simply entering into different conversations in which the rest of us can no longer participate. My grandmother, less than a year older than Maudelle. I can't think of two more different women. When I put Maudelle in that context now, I really wish I were in on my grandmother's new discussions, these dialogues with herself. Sigh. What she could tell me. If only I knew how to ask.

                         


28 January 2003, late in the day

Okay, so here's the thing, and maybe it's just me, but lately I find myself constantly evaluating myself in terms of my potential attractiveness to other people. Women. Potential dates. Potential partners. Let's be real--potential sex. Someone other than friends and old men telling me I have a beautiful smile (though, hey, for lack of any other attention I'm grateful to you, brothas!). Now, currently, I am very happy with myself, generally. There are a few things I'm working on. 1. Losing weight/becoming more fit. The perpetual one, no? But I'm healthy, and strong, so I like that (and besides, you gotta have sumpin' to hold onto). 2. My hair--my god, don't ever cut all of your hair off if you ever plan to grow it back. In-between hair is the worst, and I am often rather amazed, if not bemused, at the hairstyles I am content to be seen sporting in public these days. I mean, some degree of vanity is a necessary thing. What can you do? But overall, I like myself, which every psychologist agrees is a good thing. I assume one's attractiveness is some kind of universal/fundamentally normal kind of preoccupation, since we all want to be desired on some level by someone (this, I have to point out, is not the same as subscribing to any particular or popular definition of beauty).

So as I am evaluating myself I also spend a lot of time thinking about what I find attractive, what my "type" is, so to speak, and it's an interesting thing to ponder. (Truthfully, I find people who do have "types" kind of repellent and creepy. It's so predetermined.) What I have concluded, which, actually, many people have concluded before me, is that confidence is the sexiest thing in the world. It really is. Unfortunately I don't think that I quite possess the kind of confidence that I find so attractive in, say, Toshi Reagon, or Animal from Bitch and Animal. They couldn't be two more different physical types but they each possess a kind of balls-out (pardon the term) confidence that just, like, makes me weak in the knees (and yes, I'm conspicuously leaving out the one individual I'm particularly enamored with of late, we'll call her X, who's nothing like either of them and who makes a lot more than my knees weak). And their humor. A good sense of humor, I think, goes hand-in-hand with their rather bawdy charms, because you know you would happily let them totally charm you out of your good sense and your clothes, all the while making you laugh out loud, forgetting yourself and all your inhibitions and the reasons you had any in the first place.

That said I don't really have a type (sure, you could easily map the similarities between Toshi and Animal and X and draw some conclusions, if you cared to and I were more forthcoming, but, ah, I do enjoy a good crush. Even if nothing ever comes of them [and nothing ever does] they're so full of possibility). But while I can happily fantasize could I actually stand up to these women? Could I handle them? In reality and in person, I'm much more likely to notice the totally shy woman in the room, the one trying hardest not to be noticed, eyes down, trying to fade into the background, possibly because I am more often that woman, so I relate to her, the shy one, not entirely trying to fade but certainly trying not to be noticed (as in 'don't look at my hair don't notice my arms don't notice that I really do want to be noticed because nobody wants to look hungry, even if they are'). I don't quite understand why what I find most attractive in others is not what I find, or cultivate, necessarily, in myself although, really, why would you be attracted, essentially, to yourself? And then I think, do I want someone who is attracted to the self-conscious person I project rather than the relatively self-possessed person I think I am? Are they one and the same? So maybe it's not the GeorgeWashington/Quaker Oats-guy hair or the sudden allergic reactions to citrus fruit or the fact that I'm turning gray (not my hair--me!) or the extra pounds that have refused to budge for the past few years (wow, I can make myself sound pretty grotesque with just a few words, which, um, may be part of the exaggerated problem!). Perhaps it is my unknowing which undermines me, my ignorance of what it is or how it's done when it comes to meeting women, which is why no one ever approaches me as though they're interested in me, except for, well, old men. Or maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right places.

                         


20 January 2003

I have two fantasy projects that I'd love to write--a book about Indigo Girls, and a book about Grace Jones. Perhaps unlikely bedfellows, but, as the kids say, they fuckin' rock. I'm like in this weird biography phase with my current project and these others that I'd love to do. I was never a huge fan of biography, I think the only one I ever read was Truman Capote's, so I never imagined I would write one, but there you are. I guess what I'm conceiving are not really bios, not in the traditional, personal and invasive sense, but more like career biographies. You know how you can get an idea in your head and it just seems suddenly clear and logical to you that this is the work you have to do right now and beyond that who knows? For whatever reason these are the projects that have coalesced in my mind as the ones I would want to spend years the next years of my life working on (I even had the thought that then maybe I would go back to creating, that I will understand something more about that process and my role in it once I've studied these other artists' works). Perhaps because I'm really interested in telling stories, in women's life stories being told, being validated by being made known. Anyway, Grace, if you're out there...

The book I am working on this year deals, in part, with the body in performance. I am writing about a woman named Maudelle, who was a dancer and artist's model beginning in the 1930s. She's my heroine, and I am essentially writing her biography, so she jumpstarted all of this. I have spent much of this fellowship year so far researching, which has been a blast and incredibly productive, so I really haven't begun to explore this whole notion of performance and how race and gender are encoded by the body's movements, its appearance, etc. I'll get to that (hopefully before I have to teach my course next quarter, which is essentially about that!) So, I just got back from North Carolina/Georgia, going to Amy Ray and the Butchies shows. Ahhhh. Nice. (and big props to A Small Victory. You boys rock!) I've been to a lot of concerts in all different genres. Now, for as long as I can remember, my m.o. has been to sit (or stand) absolutely still in order to visually absorb every gesture, every nuance of the performance in front of me. I never could understand folks who would go to a concert and thrash around, essentially missing all the visuals. I can do that at home with the cd, you know? And yeah, so it's probably a little weird and ungratifying for the performer to look out and see some fan just, basically, staring at them (imagine if we all did--freaky). I acknowledge that. For some reason this weekend I really started to think about it, probably because there was a really annoying fan who kept trying to chide me (and others) into participating as she was, dancing exuberantly, as though her experience of the show was somehow a better one than the one I chose. But I held my ground. I always do.

Dancing. When I was in junior high--what was I, 11, 12?--heavily into Queen and Rod Stewart and consequently something of a social misfit in my largely black, Catholic school, I had all these dumb, adolescent ideas about being black. I used to tell my family that I was adopted, that my real parents were British, and white, and were coming for me (okay, I was an Anglophile because I thought Freddie Mercury was god. Basically, I was in love with all of the men who looked like women). I also eschewed anything that related to a stereotype of blackness--wouldn't eat watermelon, or fried chicken (I'm serious!) or dance. My first clear memory of being very conscious of myself dancing was at a birthday party my sister was having in our rumpus room. Okay, we're not talking house party; I'm pretty sure it wasn't even at night. I just remember standing in there, in my brand new orange and blue sneakers, and refusing to move my body in the presence of other people, of boys. I don't exactly know why, but that is when I first remember being really conscious of moving my body around with other people and I wanted no part of it. So I never danced, not then, not in high school, not in college.

My next real consciousness of it was as a grad student; I had taken these photographs of myself dancing in an empty apartment in Manhattan when I was visiting a friend, and I remember during my crit my instructor suggesting I needed to take dance lessons because somehow the movement in them was inauthentic and therefore the pictures were unsuccessful. From that criticism I developed a very clear (defensive) notion about my body and my unwillingness to place it in motion in public. There seemed to be something entirely too intimate about that act; I could do anything I wanted in a photograph, but that was between me and the camera, no one else. But I began to think that the movement of my body, unlike photographs of it, was private, even though, obviously, I moved among people every day. Instead of worrying about race and stereotypes (okay, by this time I had long abandoned the whole Anglophile thing) I saw it somehow as self-preservation, as a conscious decision not to share body/movement/pleasure as if it were a casual thing.

I love to dance. I dance by myself all the time. I love to dance with my nephew. I danced at my sister's wedding, almost, almost lasting the whole 17 minutes of the long version of Knee Deep. My ex used to always laugh that every time we went grocery shopping I would start dancing when I'd get to the rice aisle in Whole Foods. It was probably true; I noticed it myself a few times (the rice aisle was only two aisles into the store, after produce). But I still won't consciously move in public, particularly, oddly, when it is "appropriate" to do so. I just can't do it. I feel horribly conspicuous. But now thinking about my project I'm having to revisit my whole reasoning, the one that has served me so far, and my own relationship to this idea of movement, and particularly dance, as a signifier of something else. Maybe there really isn't a connection; maybe it's just coincidence that I am most interested now in what I am least willing/able to do. I'm really curious to know, as I work on this, what I'm going to figure out, to learn about myself.

                         


Valentine's Day is coming. I know; I subscribe to a jillion magazines, and they all remind me. I like it; corny and commercial as it is, at its core it is a celebration of love, of happiness, and, you know, nuttinwrongwitdat. I used to write reviews for the Santa Fe Reporter and I wrote one about some Valentine's shows that I had to go see. The editor at the time was someone I really didn't like; she was hoping for some kind of nasty, cynical piece about hearts and schmaltz but I would never do that, I would never disrespect some other artist's work like that just so I could sound hip, disaffected, and bitchy. Basically, I'm not a critic. I don't really understand their roles, their value. Anyway, probably because I am single once again, yet happy, I am overly affected by all the love songs on the radio (and gotta love the Bay Area radio with its near-worship of oldies. Where else you gonna hear the Isley Bros.' "Harvest for the World" followed by Luther singing "Never Too Much?") They're all suddenly so profound to me for the simple beauty of their messages--Love is good. Love is good. I hope we all get some.

                         


14 January 2003

Sometimes the world is just a difficult place of which to make sense.

I'm in a good mood, have been in a really good mood since the start of the year. One of the reasons, I know, is that I have made a very good friend here who inspires me and makes me laugh and who I am just thrilled and proud to know. She's an activist, and with her passion and given where we are and the opportunities that come here I have frequently had the amazing opportunity with her of getting to hear speakers and attend events where the ideas espoused perfectly coalesce with mine. Like all good friends, she makes me a better person. In just this past week, I attended an anti-war march organized by high school students, I saw Sweet Honey in the Rock perform with Toshi Reagon (be still my heart, she's hot!), I heard Angela Davis speak about the current state of our nation and its role in the world, and I got to do all of this with my friend(s). My research is also going great, so I'm flying high.

But then the petty ugliness and brutality of life inevitably insinuates itself. A colleague makes ethnic slurs to two other colleagues at a department party; a decent, incredibly hardworking man is run down while walking his dog by a driver who didn't even respect his life enough to stop--each time you experience such things it's like a punch in the gut, a reminder that the world isn't only a place where your friends are dear and your beliefs are validated and you can find simple joy in befriending a teenaged waiter at a Persian restaurant (which happened to us, too). I don't know, it just has me thinking, mourning a death, pondering our fate...but I remain optimistic.

                         


8 January 2003

An online journal is a funny thing. I wanted to create a space for myself where I could just blather on, or pontificate, or reveal my deepest, darkest secrets, embarrass myself, gossip, whatever, but the trouble is that, in fact, there's nothing anonymous at all about being on the web. You have friends, family, and coworkers to whom you wouldn't necessarily tell this stuff, people whose feelings you wouldn't want to hurt, jobs you wouldn't necessarily want to lose. So you censor yourself--I censor myself here. Constantly. It's weird. And kind of disappointing. But what can you do? With a voice comes responsibility. I'd rather be a decent person than totally free to say whatever I feel whenever I feel. But in other circumstances, I don't hold anything back. I've been interviewed now a few times for articles, and I just open my mouth and speak. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do so, to be given a forum, any forum.

I'm really interested in this notion right now, that it is incredibly important for us, particularly us women, us black people, us lesbians, to use our voices. Speak. Be heard. Let folks know we're here and we have individual points of view. We are living through a particularly scary and repressive time in this country, where we're all (as a nation) allowing ourselves to be forcefed an agenda that strips any semblance of humanity and real freedom from our collective lives. Backed by some misdirected Christian zeal, we've been anesthetized by television, and the product marketing it was created to promote, and the belief that somehow we're the ones chosen to be the world's consumers, to squander its resources because we can. What pathetic aspirations we have. Big cars, big houses, and junk to fill them with. This is the sum of our lives? Make your choices, but make them from an informed point of view. Mainstream media does not inform us. Trust your common sense. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Make change.

Okay, off the soapbox (though you know I'll climb back on when I take a notion.) On the flip side, happy 2003. A new year. I love where I am right now. I love that I get to wake up without an alarm clock and I can walk to work, work which consists of just doing my own thing, nurturing my own ideas. It's amazing. I've worked hard for a long time to get here. I've had more jobs than probably all of my friends combined. I've been a child actress, pot scrubber, food server, photocopier, stock person, housewares salesperson, temp secretary, data entry operator, medical transcriptionist, cashier, photocopier again, bank teller, preparator's assistant, private detective, intern, photography instructor, curator, private curator, archivist, office assistant, slide librarian, editor, and writer, among others. I've earned my stripes. At the same time, a friend of mine recently pointed out that I have decades of work, photography work, behind me. Decades. He was right--I've been working at this now for 20 years. Two decades. I think he thought the realization would depress me, but it makes me incredibly proud. At 37, I can say I have two solid decades of work behind me, and who knows how many more in front of me. I've taken my own path, for the most part. I am independent. I am healthy. No, I don't have a retirement fund, nothing materially invested anywhere, no securities for the future, not even a permanent home, but I have my independence, my freedom, my voice. I have the most amazing friends and family who love me, and I love them. I am suddenly, finally, the wealthiest person I know.

                         


11 November 2002

I have started to resume this online journal about 4 different times since I've been here in California, and each time I delete what I had begun and start over. I've been wanting to write, both here and in my private journals, but I seem to be in one of those moments of paralysis when I just cannot make myself sit down and commit words to paper, or cyberspace, or any place beyond my fleeting memory. Who knows why that is; maybe it's just plain old procrastination. It occurred to me this weekend, though, that I really have been having some extraordinary experiences since I've been here and though I'm starting late to the game I figured one way for me to take stock and make a record of this experience was to just say what I've been doing, virtually none of which I could be doing were I still in Santa Fe, which I steadfastly and stubbornly still consider to be my home.

I have been here nearly 3 months; so far I have heard Paul Auster read the smuttiest part of his new book to an audience of shocked yuppies and their children at a small bookstore in a neighboring town (but missed Dorothy Allison reading with Jewelle Gomez just this past Saturday--ack!); I've seen the papery-thin disintegrating Lucybelle Crater mask encased at a gallery in San Francisco along with a full suite of those Ralph Eugene Meatyard photographs, which I'd never seen before; I've participated in an anti-war march where I saw the Radical Cheerleaders and walked alongside thousands of people who think, at least politically, like me; I've had three friends visit, including my ex and one dear one I hadn't seen in 8 years; I've been bored by a Meshell Ndegéocello concert in San Francisco but the next day inspired by an Ani DiFranco one in Santa Cruz that kept me buzzing for days; I've walked along the beach, watching seals lounge in the sun and crabs scuttle along sideways in the shallows; I've gone to a spa to celebrate my sister's birthday; I've chatted on the phone with an Oscar winner (and one nominee); I've celebrated my birthday at Chez Panisse (finally!); been stirred to action by the radical old-school politics of Amiri Baraka; I've met someone who actually met Maudelle; I've ridden my bike, and yes, it's true that you never forget how but you can sure get rusty; gone to a green festival in San Francisco where I blew my budget doing the right thing; rejoined and fallen off of Weight Watchers; gone to a dinner party; learned to endure daily buffet lunches (it's the buffet thing that I would have sworn I'd never do); I went to a bluegrass festival and became addicted to kettle corn; I've consistently found parking, mostly for free and very near the front doors of my destinations, in San Francisco; I've continued to go to San Francisco, something else I would have sworn I wouldn't do; gotten a parking ticket in San Jose; I've been photographed by a legendary photographer; I've laid around watching television and felt no guilt or shame; I've bought more clothes and accessories than I have in the past several years, trying to reclaim something that was once very important to me; I broke down and got a cell phone (but don't yet know how to use it, still resisting becoming one of those people); I've barely spoken with my mother, which is and isn't a good thing; I've memorized the way to San Jose; I've made friends. I've been inspired.

I know I'm forgetting something.

Tune in next week.

                         


29 July 2002

I have been traveling a lot this summer, mostly promoting my book and doing research, and I have reached a sobering though not entirely depressing realization—I am passé. The kind of research and writing I do about the body and identity and race and gender and all of that stuff—minus the theory, which I never understand and in which I don't traffic—is no longer what's being talked about in the "academy" (and it was never talked about anywhere else, either). I'm kind of bothered by it and kind of not. A big part of me figures I do what I do and it will cycle around again like everything does and that this is a good time in which to just focus and get work done. Another part of me wishes I could consistently earn a living at what I do. Doing this I can't have much of an ego, that's for sure. Deb and I had a booksigning at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta this past weekend (again, thanks to everyone who showed up to support us) and we were set up at a table with David Driskell. Now, admittedly, in terms of drawing power I'm no Driskell or Willis, but more than one person who came up to the table looked me straight in the face and said, "Who are you?" One guy thought I was just sitting there to sign for Deb when she was otherwise occupied. No joke. Good thing I'm not sensitive.

So this is it. I leave Santa Fe August 9. Maybe I'll be back. Maybe I'll finally get that house at the beach where I can just write. Maybe I will fall in love again. Maybe I'll just be seduced. Maybe I'll write a bestseller. Maybe I'll become an in-demand ghostwriter up to my ears in gloriously second-rate Hollywood gossip. This year has certainly reminded me how life can turn on a dime, how nothing is guaranteed. It's a life lesson that we have to keep getting reminded of, I think, because we so stubbornly prefer the familiar even when it isn't all that great. Maybe I've left behind for good my pattern of excrutiatingly unrequited crushes. Maybe I'll finally lose all the weight I've gained in the past 10 years. Maybe, hopefully, the spontaneous crying will finally cease. Maybe I'll get everything I've ever wished for. It's good enough for now to just be standing on the threshold of possibilities, of the unknown where anything is possible, good and bad. Every time I face a finite period of time, I have to remember how quickly it goes by and how no matter what I anticipate it will bring I will blink and it will be behind me and I'll hardly remember what I expected it would be.

Maybe I'm feeling introspective because I'm facing a very real life change in less than 2 weeks when I move to California. I still cannot quite comprehend that, at least for a year, I don't have to get up each morning and work at a job from 9 - 5. I'm extremely excited for the opportunity and to be back in my home state, especially in a part of it in which I've never lived, yet I'm still more than a little sad at leaving behind a life I really thought would last. (Though mostly I'm anxious to move on.) I still toy with the thought of dropping this site and selling all my art books and starting over as something new, but I essentially like what I do and I feel like, for the first time, I finally have a clear view in mind of what I want to do coupled with a strong belief that I can get there. So though these entries have been sporadic this will be the last one before I resettle. I hope to be more regular with them next year.

                         


30 April 2002

Sunday night I went to hear Marlena Shaw sing here in Santa Fe. I can't believe she came to Santa Fe, and I was thrilled. She's one of my favorite jazz vocialists and she was just fantastic. For her encore, she sang one of my favorite songs, which I knew from Shirley Horn—"Here's to Life." See, "Here's to Life" was going to be the first song to which I danced with my husband. I had it all planned.

I was never one of those women who dreamed of her wedding. I could never even envision a wedding, getting married, falling in love. I figured it wasn't for me. (How true that was). But there was a moment in my life, when I still believed that I like men, when I put together the whole picture. I was living in Los Angeles, living with my grandmother who was increasingly cruel to me, working in Santa Monica. I'd left a position as a curator in New York to be a part-time office assistant back at the Getty. Talk about humbling. I had been desperate to get out of New York. I suppose I was fairly unhappy—well, I was glad to be out of New York, but I hadn't returned to the most ideal situation. I had to drive a lot to and from work and I started listening to KLON, a jazz station. It was soothing, good for nerves that had to endure traffic. Anyway, during this period I developed a crush on a man at work. I ain't gonna name names—it can't much matter (and he's still in the arts). He was beautiful, or so I thought—deep brown skin, mesmerizing voice, and he'd gone to a "good" school, which at the time I was weirdly convinced was essential—I thought we were a match made in heaven. He became the sweet embodiment of Cassandra Wilson's version of "Tupelo Honey," a song I love and would later sing along to using the feminine pronouns about no one in particular. I used to try to time it so we could ride the elevator together; I worked on the 7th floor. KLON began playing Shirley Horn's "Here's to Life," a kind of bittersweet, melancholy song that I felt summed up my understanding of love and relationships, scant though my information was at that point. I began to fantasize and soon I had it all worked out. Well, not all. Some. I would wear a mud-colored gown by Lola Faturoti: a simple, slip-style, floor length dress with a sheer, long-sleeved dress over it. Mud. I loved the earthiness of it, even though the picture I had torn out of Essence magazine (and which I still have someplace) was in black-and-white. I couldn't reconcile the perfect shoe, though, and in keeping with the earth theme I figured I'd go barefoot. And my husband and I would dance to our song, and I would be radiant.

I got up the nerve one day to ask him to lunch, to my then-favorite place. As we sat there eating the magic slowly ebbed away; reality began to set in. He certainly didn't feel the same about me (and I later found out he had been interested in a gorgeous woman who would later become my friend but who dismissed his affections like a nuisance.) He was a noisy eater, too, he smacked, and I think that was the writing on the proverbial wall. So much for wedding fantasies and happily ever after. Within a year I realized that I was gay and I never fantasized about marrying men again. I still love the song, though, and I rather love the image I had created for myself, however misguided.

It was a very different experience of the song Sunday, though it still brought tears to my eyes. I know now that Carolyn has a crush on someone, her new "friend" 13 years her junior with whom she's been spending much of her spare time. A woman she tried to get me to befriend about a week before she dumped me. I saw them together Friday night, tortured myself through "happy hour" with them, and Carolyn beamed when she looked at her in a way I haven't seen in a long while. So now the hurt is resurfacing. She denied it about as weakly as she could, I guess because at this stage it apparently isn't reciprocated, claiming not to know what "having a crush" means and saying only that this woman was too young, but never that she wasn't interested, and also saying "what can I do?" as though she had no control. I was doing very well but wow, this hurts. Sigh. Crying at work again. Humiliating. I never anticipated this but then I guess no one does.

                         


22 April 2002

This weekend I did something I never imagined I would do; I went to my 20th-year high school reunion (and I'm not the only one who couldn't imagine it—someone wrote me in as least likely to ever return for a reunion.) When I got the e-mail telling me about it my immediate thought, much to my surprise, was, I'll go. I've finally figured out that that there is no such thing as perfect or ideal and no one really cares what you weigh or who was foolish enough to leave you and just being here is reason to celebrate, especially when you're healthy. Maybe I needed the comfort of familiarity, even 20-year old familiarity, but I did not hesitate. In part it was my need to start fresh, to begin anew with my life, even by revisiting the past. I'm not even really a sentimental person. But everyone to whom I'd mentioned it said they'd been to theirs and had fun. I ended up having a lot of fun, too. Never say never.

Saturday morning I sat in the hotel half-watching a Valerie Bertinelli movie and trying to get up the courage to just get in the car and go. I did, and it was the oddest thing. First (and not especially odd), I immediately recognized everyone from my class—these women have aged gracefully and beautifully and I guess I knew more of them than I thought. They made me feel proud to be among them. Second, and perhaps a bit odd, I recognized and remembered little or nothing about the place itself. I remembered it was white and brick, but I could not remember an instructor's name, the location of any classroom, nothing. Touring it didn't bring anything back—no memories, no recollection, nothing to connect me to it; it was as though I hadn't gone there at all. In twenty years what will I remember?

         

I will remember their loss.

The two whose husbands had died suddenly and young, a heart stopped and a brain ravaged; the young mother of two who showed photographs of her beautiful family and explained that she and her husband were separated and she said everything was fine and yet moments later she muttered that she didn't have to ask him what he thought any more, as though she were finally free and could say it; the maid of honor who drifted away within a year of standing up for you on the happiest day of your life and no longer wanted to stay in touch; the one who didn't come but who wanted the one who did to tells the others how much they had hurt her and she hadn't forgotten; sad head-shaking rumors of heroin addiction and prostitution and Shellie was right, after twenty years we even out, we equalize; everyone has a life story now and everyone has triumphed and suffered.

I connected with the loss as I am still struggling with mine. I might have imagined going back to my reunion single but I don't guess I ever thought I would be newly single. Why does that make such a difference, feel like such a failure? And I paid special attention to the lengths of time, made note of how many of their relationships were the same age as mine, though mine now had a termination date. No one asked so I didn't tell. I have taken to wearing decorative rings on my ring finger because I was so used to feeling it there and it is clear that carved blue lucite isn't a lasting band.

Some were very much the same and I thought I was not, couldn't even remember that girl with the big hair on the video, but in moments I am, I was, disconnected, anonymous, me again. Unlike twenty years ago, though, it doesn't matter, for I am still this me, of my own construction, as we all are now, our own women.

I will also remember the power of friendship to rekindle after twenty years and how fabulous everyone looked as a testament to taking care of one's self. Take care. My pithy advice for life would be, belatedly, love yourself, make peace, and have no regrets. I think I am there.

                         


1 April 2002

Why can't I relinquish hope? She does not want a relationship with me she does not want to try she has told me in no uncertain terms and I have verbally accepted this, so why can't I let go in my heart? I know it has hardly been any time and that time heals all of this kind of stuff but I'm not terribly patient. I did turn to my paper, private journal, so that it could be with me any and everywhere I go and when I get overwhelmed and start to break down I can turn that into something other than convulsive tears. Oh, sometimes those entries end up here or somewhere else. It's amazing what a comfort writing can be, how expressing yourself can be a purging and cleansing and all that necessary stuff. I'm an inconsistent journal keeper, both electronic and paper. Mostly I just like buying nice-looking blank books. I must have about 20 now, only one of them was ever finished. It was one that a dear friend gave me, and she had gone through and pasted words and phrases and images and various intervals and I'll be damned if, as I wrote in it over the course of several years, her choices weren't absolutely prescient of the words I would eventually write on each of those pages. It is my favorite. I recommend journals. Record your thoughts; at times you will need them again and they're all but impossible to recall in memory. Re-reading the entries I made when I was at low points over the last couple of years I guess I could see that our relationship had serious problems, but I thought they were all normal and transcendable. It's embarrassing and painful at times to read how, just a few months ago, even, I believed I was totally cherished, loved unconditionally, and that was my whole foundation for dealing with everything else. Did I really think that was true? Did I misread everything? It's fairly stunning how far off I often was, how utterly clueless. All the while she was disintegrating, my so-called rock was crumbling. I'm clueless now, though, in a different way—I'm now no longer privy to any information to help me figure things out.

So I have my moments when I look forward with anticipation to all of life's possibilities and all of the wonderful things that are happening right now in my life and in the next blink I remember my life before her, when my journal was filled with longing and loneliness and a crippling shyness that precluded me from meeting anyone. Is that still me? Is that still there? I can see so many ways in which I have changed and yet I feel that person very present in me, the one who loathes, more than anything, to eat dinner alone and yet does, must, night after night, phoning very dear friends who have to eventually grow tired of listening. I'm thirty-six now, no longer as young as I once was when I sat wondering, endlessly, if I would live my life without a partner. The thing that is so hard, so difficult to accept is the loss of love, of shared hopes and plans for a future. They're simply gone, and it's virtually impossible to get one's mind around, how what was so central to one's life is just suddenly not there and not going to be there again. Life's so different than it is in your dreams.

                         


27 March 2002

Well, what a difference four months can make, huh? I haven't written an entry in a long time. Maybe I had nothing to say. I do today. I need a release, I guess. My relationship of six years is over. Poof. About three weeks ago my now-ex-partner, Carolyn, finished school (she had been going full-time plus working full-time for two years, nearly the whole time we've lived in Santa Fe), turned 40 the next day, and our relationship fell apart. I'm stunned, sad, devastated, hurt, mad, depleted. I love this woman. She was my life.

I think both things are true--you never really know people and people change. I think that everyone thought that if either one of us flaked it would be me, but in truth if there was an anchor in the relationship it was me. You know, it's the black woman's curse, but we are strong. I am strong. Perhaps too strong? Did I just overbear her to death? I don't know; she won't talk about it. All of our friends thought we'd be a couple who endured. Hell, I thought so. Well, I finally gave up. I can't keep falsely hoping, so I told her I love her more than anything and I gave her my ring back. She said that she just gave everything, all of herself, and now she feels like she doesn't know herself and has nothing of herself to give to a relationship. I wish we'd known sooner that this was happening to her, before it got hopeless. It's funny--until last month she had never done a single thing in this relationship without me because she wouldn't or didn't want to. I used to tell her all the time that she should and she just never did. I think this contributed to her now not having a sense of herself-- she didn't maintain enough of her independence. Maybe one day she'll decide she wants me and this relationship, but I can't pretend we're going to fix things, because she is not trying to do that right now. What's so hard is that I think the fundamental reasons we were together have either remained the same or evolved together but she is just totally shut down right now. No matter how much you love someone you do reach a limit when it isn't being fully reciprocated and you just get tired. For months while she was busy finishing school and I was feeling thoroughly neglected I just kept telling myself, 'wait, when all of this external tension is eliminated then we can refocus on us' but just the opposite was happening with her and her feelings were just going numb.

So I'm reading my Iyanla Vanzant and starting with a therapist tomorrow because I don't want to repeat the mistakes I made. Wow again. I'm alone. I have a very broken heart. And I probably should be keeping this journal privately but I'm not, I'm keeping it here. Maybe it will help me, maybe it will help someone else. I'm not much of an advice-giver, but if I can give any it's this: Communicate. Constantly. Don't ever let that lapse in a relationship. Sometimes it can't be recovered.

                         


11 November 2001

Carolyn, my partner, has been bugging me to write a positive entry. Is today a good day for that? Yesterday, we weren't even speaking, and I was trying to figure out what we were going to do because surely this was the end and we had just renewed our lease for another year. But this morning, after all that angst and tension, we just looked at each other, started to speak, and laughed. And then I spent the day catching her up on all the little things I'd noticed the day before that our stubbornness wouldn't allow me to share. Like that a book I co-wrote was included in a layout in the new Restoration Hardware catalog. I don't know why, but I've come to believe that having one's book included in the fake domestic scenes in home furnishing catalogs or magazines is the pinnacle of success, sort of, as though the chic people who live there—rather than the art directors who went to art school and therefore have these books lying around—would be reading your work while sitting in their $2000 leather club chair. (Maybe if I were actually the book designer this would be more true, but I still get a kick out of it.)

Relationships—all meaningful relationships—are life's real work—compromise, sacrifice, negotiations, all that good stuff. I think everyone in a romantic partnership fantasizes from time to time about having that freedom again—eat Chinese take-out everyday for a week and no one says you're spending too much and not eating nutritiously, stay up 'til 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday to watch movies and no one complains that you really shouldn't because you need a regular pattern of sleep to function properly and there's work the next day, flirt with everyone who comes into view (wait—no, I never actually did that), dumb shit like that. The problem is, was any of that stuff really fun when you could do it? Did you really do it? The grass is always greener, right? But, you know, there's nothing like simply having some grass of your own for someone else to envy and long for. I'm a control freak, my family is nuts, I complain about the world constantly, I get stressed and cranky beyond belief and reason when I am past a deadline, so like every human I am far from perfect, and, yet, someone loves me. Wow. At times this simple fact just gives me pause. I remember so clearly the many years when I assumed that I would live my life alone. That was okay, too, but a small part of me wanted to know what it would be like if that weren't true. And now I know. It's better and different and more complicated than I ever imagined, I guess, during all that time when I would just script relationships and conversations for them in my head. But, to borrow a favorite phrase from my hero, life's so different than it is in your dreams.

Yes, it was easier being an artist when I was single because of the way I worked and it would be easy to say that I don't make art now because of my relationship, but that isn't true. I don't because I don't, but I think every creative person knows, especially those who work regular jobs, that in order to make that work, to find that selfish time alone, that you have to take it from somewhere and that somewhere is usually time spent with loved ones. You're extremely lucky if you do not have to make that compromise, that choice. I make it, to be sure. But at least I am in the position to get to make that decision. Many people cannot, because life and its responsibilities make those choices for them. I was reading the other day that Lorraine O'Grady basically stopped making art for 7 years because she became her mother's caretaker. It's amazing to me, because she did such terrific work before, stopped to handle her business, and then came back to make equally powerful, very different art after. That takes a lot of courage, strength, conviction, and security in your ideas and ability and desire to express them. Life intervenes for many reasons in that mythical "path" that some of us put ourselves on and I, for one, have to constantly reminded myself, it's the journey, not the destination. I am, unfortunately, one of those destination-oriented people. The forest has too many trees.

So, where am I going with all of this? Hell, I don't know. Life's short. Be happy. Appreciate what you have instead of bemoaning what you don't. We've all heard that before. I just came back from a week of helping my parents move from their home of 17 years into separate apartments after 46 years of marriage. (They didn't divorce, just separated.) My sisters and I have helped them constantly since January to get themselves organized and on a budget. We cleaned their old house to sell it, found them apartments, moved them to their new places, and yet all they've done is complain that they've had to get rid of all the junk they'd accumulated simply because they had had the means and the space. (Well, it's debatable whether or not they actually had the means.) My father has literally hundreds of watches and cameras that he will hoard as though they mean something and they will be put in the trash at his death. At least half of the stuff my mother moved went promptly back out the door to charity. I don't want to be like them. Genetics scare me. At 69 and 70 have their lives and love really been that meaningless that they have been reduced to things, to junk that even they can't say why they want it? I want to be able to recognize all that I have and be grateful, truly grateful for it. And what I am most grateful for, and what they both (especially her) seem to have lost sight of in all of their disappointment and bitterness, is how lucky they are to have people who love them. Daughters who were willing to leave their jobs and lives for weeks at a time to help them. Daughters who still call to see how they are even though the impulse is to grab them and shake them, hard, until they come to their senses. My mother actually said to my sister, the mother of 2 of her grandchildren, that she would rather not live if she couldn't bring all of her craft paraphernalia with her to her new apartment. When I called her on it, she couldn't even see what was wrong with that statement. And now that she's about 3 miles away she has yet to even go see those grandkids.

Recently, my partner and I went to Atlanta for a brief vacation and we encountered unusual friendliness and kindness from total strangers—people who we'd just met offering to open their homes to us and to spend time with us so that we would have a memorable visit. As much as I frequently disdain my fellow persons (and you SUV-driving, flag-waving, clueless, selfish ones, you know who you are), I find that this is more often true than not. Many, sometimes unlikely people are kind. They're good. Years ago I was working as a cashier in a clothing store and I was bemoaning something horrible that was happening in the world, and a woman I worked with pointed out that there is just as much, if not more good being done at any given time but it isn't newsworthy, so we never hear about it, but she assured me that it is there. I want to believe that still. So, go out and do something truly good. Help someone. Smile. Bring happiness to this life into which we are quick to bring hostility, misery, anger, and cruelty. Tell someone you pass that they look beautiful instead of cutting your eyes at them in jealousy. Make eye contact with and speak to the homeless person who speaks to you. They are human and they are equal to you and they deserve your respect. When you're driving, yield to the pedestrian or the cyclist. Their fragile bodies are no match for you in your thousands of pounds of steel, but their lives are more precious than the time you think you're losing by just waiting for them to make their way. Get off the phone. Pay attention. Someone loves that person you're not looking out for. (yeah, traffic safety is my soapbox.) You know, these are the transgressions most of us witness, or enact, on a daily basis, mostly without even thinking. But just remember the goodness in yourself and bring it forth into the world. I, myself, am trying, if for no other reason than I don't want it to take months for me to be able to conjure up something positive to write about. That simply shouldn't be.

                         


2 September 2001

Does no one do something for nothing anymore?

I have a friend who is talented, extremely hard-working, successful, and generous to a fault. She has worked tirelessly to help other people and it never fails that, no matter how much she does, people always come back asking for more. What should be a simple "congratulations" or "thank you" to her when she achieves something invariably turn into "and can you do this for me?" or worse, people will call her up and bitch at her because they don't think she's done enough for them, like because she has been good enough to help them in the past she perpetually owes them something. Some shameless shit. I'm constantly astounded by the lack of genuine generosity in others. Whatever happened to just giving kudos to the other person? To being grateful? To doing it yourself rather than bitching about how someone else is not doing it the way you think it should be done? Why does there always have to be a "gimme" attached? It's really appalling, and it really makes me question human nature. Are we that desperate for our own successes and our own props that all of our relationships and interactions are calculated to maximize benefit to us? Are those that do it even aware that they do it? Do they even care? Is the subsequent success sweet after you've clawed and gnawed your way to it?

I have experienced that to some degree with this site. People will write and ask for research information and I gladly copy materials I have and send them or E-mail information to them. I figure information does not belong to me, I just sometimes have access to it. I'd say that at least 70% of the time I never even get an acknowledgement that they received it, let alone a "thank you." While I'm disgusted by this behavior I hope it never prevents me from wanting to share information with other people. I'm not perfectly selfless, either, I don't openly share dream project ideas, for example, but I never ask for anything in return, not postage, nothing. At the same time I just want to call out some names of the offenders to publicly shame them. I don't care how busy you are or how important you think you are, show some common courtesy next time someone does something for you. The first time this happened a friend asked my to copy some Venus Hottentot materials for a colleague. I did, and mailed them to her, and she never once even acknowledged that she'd gotten it, but she, in turn, copied the information and distributed it to her classes. I was undone. I could not believe that she would behave as though this was due to her and that she needn't bother herself with trivialities such as thanking the person who'd helped her. She, consequently, is on my permanent shit list because, well, she acted shitty. (There's a clue hidden on this site as to this rude offender's identity 'cause I was so pissed at her behavior.) It happened again recently with another friend of a friend who was asked to do something for the friend and instead kept responding with requests for the friend to do something for her. At first I thought it was just me, but the friend noticed it, too. And it isn't just so-called professionals who do it. Parents, teach your children some manners. I sent two books I had written to my nieces, and could they be bothered to get on the phone to utter a thank you? My sister called, but I had not sent the books to her, which I pointed out. Next time there won't be any freebies from Sucker Aunt. Bitch Aunt is tired of it.

Sigh. Maybe it's me. Is expecting a simple, verbal "thanks" defeating the purpose of my own supposedly no-strings-attached generosity? If so, then color me guilty. I don't think courtesy is too much to ask. But maybe we all need to check ourselves and our behavior from time to time. That "me first and only" mentality is ridiculous, divisive, and unnecessary. Our communities and families are relatively small in the scheme of things. There's no hope for the planet if we can't even manage to be decent among our own.

                         


16 August 2001

I like labels. I've never been one of those persons who doesn't want to be categorized. As an artist cultivating an audience on the Web, I use all the labels I can think of to make me accessible:

black photographer
lesbian environmentalist
woman artist
researcher archivist
womanist self-portraitist
feminist Californian
African American historian
Westerner sister aunt

Oh, you know, my own private metadata.

I have never found these to be limiting but rather they open up avenues of access to approach my work. I rely upon them not only for locating my work but for going out and finding work that is relevant to me and the dis