Blog

Spending the week locked away in Selma writing a new TV show where two young black men discover a body that leads them down a rabbit hole of history through Jim Crow, lynching and slavery til they end with a present day truth that makes them advocates for reparations.

Soaking in the town, the history, and mostly reconnecting back to an important time of my life when I lived in Alabama for 7 years.  #Blessed.

You can’t walk straight up the hill.  You have to walk the long path, past the plaques and statues, forced to take your time, you may not make the journey too quickly. Once at the first flank of the memorial, you can’t walk straight through. You have to wind your way and turn your shoulder sideways to get past the markers, which are actually bodies, large and iron.  The names of those lynched marked on each.

When you get to the end of the first flank, you are forced to turn. You may not like what happens next.  As you walk forward the ground begins to drop from beneath you. As you continue your descent the markers/bodies begin to lift, slowly at first, but soon they hover in the air around you, by death or resurrection, you do not know.

The third flank, the bodies are now above your head, hanging from the rafters. Here the signposts for your journey begin: “Seven black people lynched near Screamer, Alabama in 1888, for drinking from a white man’s well;”  “Charlotte Harrison lynched in 1878 in Rockingham, VA after a white man’s barn burned down;” “Parks Banks lynched in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a picture of a white woman in his hat.”  There is now no ambiguity about what you see above.

Turning to the fourth flank, you pause, for a plaque of remembrance, and then you turn and meet water.  Water, a market of those not named, a further remembrance, a possible release, a cleansing, the indication of the possibility of movement.  The bodies now far above your head, ascended into the sky.

EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice was built just down from my old home in Montgomery, AL, on a street I walked most nights, talking with my neighbors, breathing the smells of trees and heat, listening to the stories of black folks on their porches. Up ‘til now I had always thought myself crazy, so did most others, a 23 year-old Harvard white boy who plopped himself down in Montgomery, AL for seven years. But now, speaking here with a fellow writer, all becomes clear. Montgomery is the crossroad of the United States, the belly of the beast, the Cradle of the Confederacy and the cauldron of the civil rights movement – it has a magnetic pull: from the bus boycotts, to freedom riders, to school desegregation, to decades of work for economic and racial justice. Standing with thousands of others pilgrims who have made the journey I see what I should have known all along: those who promote bigotry and hatred are the resistance, not us: they are the ones desperately fighting, while we are the ones journeying forward, slowly and at times in great darkness, but always moving.  We are the movement, we are love, we are heart. I weep as I call and remember those only momentarily forgotten, finally home.

 

The last time we came to Detroit we learned how to count the dead. A woman in a second hand suit explained the methodology: always go in teams, block by block going west, get a simple inventory, report back. After the explanations Jeff, Juan, and I drive through swaths of neighborhoods: burnt out and abandoned homes, survivors only here and there. Jeff and I silent, Juan offers a running commentary from the back seat, his favorite character Sherlock Holmes, a ramble of hypotheses on what the hell happened. After awhile I have to look away from the living and dead so I mostly watch the dogs, packs of them, they said 10,000 roaming the city. I watch them from the car window, always on the move, as if they await the city’s imminent collapse, at a moment’s notice ready to move in droves across the bridge into Canada.

This time, five years later. Detroit is strangely alive, or as the man in the t-shirt shop says “Detroit got high-falutin.” Money streaming into downtown, a new GM center, high tech work spaces, new york fashion in renovated factories . . . .the downtown artists? . . . .well I think they’re all gone. You break out of the downtown renovation and it’s more the Detroit we saw before. Jeff and I spend most of our days chatting in these hinterlands:

– We stop at a gas station / converted into a corner church / now a thrift store. The old man in track pants and a parka gives us a flier and I scour the junk for old Aunt Jemima cookie tins, complaining why they sold the last ones. Jeff knows me well enough to just stand back and watch.

– We wander through a neighborhood of polka-dot houses and households items made into sculptures. We talk to the artist Tyree’s sister who tells us for decades that tourists came until the neighbors got jealous and burned most of them down. She tells us how Madonna was there last week, sitting in the road meditating with her new 32 year old boyfriend, but that didn’t stop her from hollering at the brothers on the corner which made Tyree’s niece mad ‘cause one of them was her fiancée.

– We wader through an outdoor African sculpture park and bead store. “Iron teaching stone to rust” it’s a metaphor about colonialism, the artists tells us, “’cause stones don’t’ rust, those are African, but Europeans keep trying to show them, it’s a metaphor about assimilation.” Jeff ooh and ahhs, and I don’t’ get it, I query the artist at length, but I mostly get an explanation of how mirrors don’t appear in nature.

– And then, my favorite place, an old haunt from last time, worn red carpet, a roaming DJ, a smoky mirror dance floor. After a few misses, we connect with a professional lesbian hydroponic weed grower who sits on a stool by the dancefloor. She shows me pictures of all her girlfriends: one in Detroit, one in ATL, one in LA,. . . Jeff says he got a woman for her in DC, Greek, nice hips, she says good, she only likes them light skinned. I ask her where all her woman are tonight, she says she pays for her pussy, so they be thinking about her. . . . We roll joint after joint, at first Jeff and I think we should hide in the bathroom, but she doesn’t care. We close down the club. I haven’t done this since I was 20.

 

 

 

 

 

What a nice surprise . . .

A friend named Sally, saw a play I wrote years ago and said “I think comedy is the highest art form, much harder to write than tragedy.”  Perhaps it was a not so subtle hint – my play was about African immigrants being killed in London in the mid 19th century. But I didn’t think too much about the comment and went on with life.

I’ve watched over the years as my taste has changed. Now I mostly watch comedies on TV, I love a good joke, I’m most attuned to the unusual, the startling, the unexpected in life. My friend Vice said to me once “the world is depressing enough, when I write,I want to bring hope.” And I thought of course, it’s true, shouldn’t we all?

For years I have had a Congolese fetish statue on my desk (pictured above).  I bought the statue because it spoke to me, and I thought myself brave for showing this truth: down with hypocrisy! Show the nails and arrows!

But thanks to a change encounter in Dakar last week,  my little man has been replaced by three green riders on horseback. Phew. . . why’d it take me so long?! I look at them each day and I literally laugh.  Who are they?  Why have they all clambered onto the same horse?  Where the heck are they going?  I have no idea, and they bring me great joy.

Sally and Vice are right. The funny, the unexpected, the possible, that’s what matters. Let’s climb on the green horse and go for a ride!

LA musings 4 weeks in . . .

I’ve landed in my new home Los Angeles: just me, twelve boxes and a bicycle. A skinny pregnant sister arrives at the airport in a truck to pick me up. Since then I’ve found a place to live (6^th floor, Larchmont Village), bought me a car (a Lexus Hybrid named Bessie) and settled in just a little.

LA is as foreign to me as any country I’ve lived in – some moments so far:

• A fundraiser at the home of an A-list Hollywood director. I almost don’t go because I’ve seen all the photos on the internet of his pool filled with naked barely legal boys, but at the last minute I decide I will go on the advice of my mentor here “never turn down a meeting you haven’t gone to yet.” Tonight the boys are all smiling and dressed in suits – dozens of them, as if they are all in on a secret (that isn’t).The other guests are a Cypriot priest, the eighty year old wife of a politician, some producers and artists, a sprinkling of celebrities. I eat all the hors doevres and chat it up big time, this is not so hard.

• A Christmas and then a New Years party in Baldwin Hills (the black Hollywood) with people I know. Smoking weed on a terrace and looking out over city (this is legal here, right?). Dinner is collards, ham, mac and chesse and black eyed peas – but skipping over fried tofu and vegan collards. The other guests are all black, mostly transplants from the South – a musician here, a set designer there, some kid just who just got fired from his social work job for losing it and beating up a transgender homeless teen. He gives me long warnings about how to deal with people living in “survival mode” and I realize I’m living, way beyond just getting by.

• A networking event in the valley at some chain Irish family restaurant that I end up at because of a brief flurry of saying yes to everything (which has now ended). The host is an aging white homosexual who between sipping on two for one daiquiris with a side of potatoes skins dolls out advice interspersed with a steady stream of celebrity name-dropping. Us attendees all stand up and tell our stories: a 60 year old Asian man with gold teeth and a pony tail who says he can’t find work but one of the other guests recognizes him and can’t contain his excitement. An awkward 20 year old from Omaha who says she is having some trouble out here, can’t really find her any work, “you know how it is, comedy is really hard for women and people of color.” A black guy who pitches his movie (Hollywood Square) which is about a man (him) who arrives in Hollywood (we’re in the valley) and is square (doesn’t drink or party). A bald white man who brags about his film which stars the neighbor on the Brady Bunch, the substitute bus driver from the Partridge family, and host of extras of shows 40 years ago. A transgender woman who fiddles with her pearls and says she won the award for best artist in LA but can’t make a living. Once we get 30 minutes into her speech which at first I am very moved by, but once we are 30 minutes in  the aging white homosexual has gone on another side story about talking to Steven Spielberg or some other mentor or some studio that he opened for 700,000 by just picking up the phone, or how we should be friends with the guy in the Xerox room because he will be running the network soon – at this point I just walk out.

• Other than that I’ve had a few work meetings, writing a bunch, made a couple friends, and may have landed my first gig. Mostly I spend days wondering: Who are my people? all the while feeling oddly confident and that things are unfolding as they should.

South Africa’s Political Drama – 90 Plein Street (the address of Parliament) Season 5 began airing last week.

I head wrote Season 5 for awhile (’til I had to move onto another project). I took the project through breaking the story overall and many of the episodes.  I remember vividly our discussion and debates in the room – how do we make it inspirational and hopeful and yet reflect the increasingly dark reality that is South African (and global) politics.

I’m proud that it seems we hit the mood right – we wrote this six months ago, but managed to anticipate the scandals of the moment (State Capture) and still give people a reason to believe in and fight for political change.

A joy to work on these . . .

 

 

Back from an amazing 2 weeks in Mongolia with IFC. Working on a program which focuses on bridging conflict around water between mining companies, local herders, and government.

Shot some video in Ulaanbataar (the capital) then in South Gobi desert. Love the juxtapositions of the country – ancient and modern, Soviet and Chinese influences, old ways of life and new . . . sometimes love my life and what I get to see.