someone asked me if i was still updating daily and i realized its been a while. so here’s a lot of little stuff:
song of the week: faithful, common with john legend and bilal; particularly the last bridge where they go to church about being faithful, which i have recently realized might be my number one skill.
movie of the week: the original bonnie and clyde with faye dunaway and warren beatty. watch this movie and listen to testify on common’s album. nothing is easy, live boldly. their last look in this film is worth the creation of cameras.
emotion of the week: for myself and a few of my closest – surviving with a smile, cause sometimes you have to push yourself all the way into the corner before you can see the walls. you know when it hurts so much you wince and it becomes a smile cause if someone were to ask you it hurts so much that you’d drown trying to explain it – as my girl said, can we put a moratorium on people asking how you are? like when your feelings have been discarded so thoroughly that you know to speak of them would have the opposite effect of your emotion. when you can’t see the end of it? i keep talking to folks and we’re all there at the moment, for a variety of reasons, and we’re all gonna be ok but harder afterwards, that saddens me.
lyrics of the weak: google the lyrics to ‘ghost’ by indigo girls. one of my girls passed this along to me, i don’t even know the melody. wrenching and accurate.
hopeful thought of the week: god is real. not particular, but on a meta scale god is happening and few see it for real and most only in glimpses but something about the purity of my current darkness has allowed me to see a light. and i am reporting back, something divine is furiously alive right now, expressing its hope in lightning and thunder and rainstorms and intense heat and long nights and moments on a stoop and my dreams. i keep having these sudden moments of prayer come over me – talking to other activist types and we keep concluding that our work is god’s work, gods are who we are, fragments of god.
activist thing of the week: check out the bloc network – http://www.blocnetwork.org/
good night of the week: last night i went to the fundraiser for tchaiko omawale’s latest film project – sita, a fairytale love story with mia herndon the lovely as a fairy. lots of fabulous and lovely sparkly people – tyler askew, tchaiko, shonali, chelsea peretti fabulously drunk and elegant, ejikeme uzoigwe uzoigwe, fanon, natasha the best dresser on the planet, and johnny and b-polite from the second2last crew, nzinga, mad folks plus a fetish show! kat aaron and josh breitbart, two cutting edge media activists, were my companions for the evening and both are remarkably humble and brilliant, always good company. we stayed at the fundraiser for a while and then bounced to anna lappe’s house – i mentioned a few posts ago about her father’s passing, so it was good to see her smiling. the spot was popping with the brightest – ibrahim abdul matin, bryant terry, jee kim, gita drury, shalini kali, andrew boyd, shane and rose, tony and adriana, this chick jesse that made sure my drink hand was occupied at all times, sharif corinaldi, lots of lovelys. i drank spiced rum and the conversation was all so compelling that i was drunk before i noticed, woke up this morning with a plastic party cup by the bed and a headache. i’ve needed a night like that for a while. i slept like a drunk. today was overflow, lots of good folks in town for the weekend, namely toki wright from the twin cities – he’s going to be on mtv soon teaching folks to flow. he rolled thru the home spot with terry from oakland and nikki from the bk, all block network folk. and then taz ahmed, who founded south asian american voting youth (saavy) last year. and my road dawg sofia, who’s mama is in town, dipped out for a brief moment of not being a daughter. they filled up the house with some nice looking-for-a-good-time energy. maybe i’ll go dancing tonite. maybe i’ll just dance right now.
peace
dre