ALLISON BOLAH

It’s been some months since I’ve run like a runner, but I still remember certain things about that sequence of behaviors. I remember the early wake ups, the efficient preparation of clothes and balms and water and fruit, the drive in the dark to the track or the beach. And I remember the focus, my mind, moments before the first steps of my last in a series of runs before rest day. I have always planned my last run before rest day as a long run. Seven miles at the beach. Most weeks, that run fell on relentlessly sunny Sundays.

My Saturday runs are always joyful, filled with a sense of liberty (my springy limbs, my spirit abuzz with energy…) If I run seven miles on a Saturday, at the end, I’m exhilarated. That feeling has everything to do with the work week and reclaiming my time, my life. A Sunday long run, however, requires a different state of mind.

By Tuesday, we will know the result of Hurricane Irma in South Florida. I have spent the better part of my life in this part of the world. When I was a child in Grenada, I remember the electricity going out and the hurricane lamps my parents lit to light our home. I remember Gilbert and my family’s reports from Jamaica. I remember evacuating to REDACTED, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked, for Andrew (and, later, surveying the unholy, unbelievable destruction throughout Miami visible from I95 on the way to visit REDACTED in Kendal). My father still lives with the damage caused by Ivan. I remember Katrina and Kanye’s correct analysis of the government’s response in the aftermath. I remember Wilma and our forced return to community and collaboration during weeks without power.

This storm is nothing like those storms. The only storm remotely like this that I know of is Harvey, and that was, what, two weeks, a week-and-a-half ago?

I love it here. I don’t want to live anywhere else. Hurricanes are a part of the deal. Climate change, however, is not. And in my admittedly unprofessional opinion but from my lifetime of experience, the currently unseasonably warm surface temperature of the Atlantic that feeds Hurricane Irma is a direct result of climate change.

We have to want different things.

Anyway, after I post this, I will set my mind the way I do in the moments before the first steps of the long run before rest day¹.

It is a blazing Sunday morning, not a cloud in sight, but this is the run.
And I run the whole thing.

There are so many American cities that I love: Pittsburgh has got to be located in the be most fairy tale/textbook ideal spot on the continent; Gallup is a dream I can’t shake; Baltimore and DC are more Janus than the Twin Cities; St. Paul in the late spring (right now) is temptation; New York, much like Miami, is a pain in the ass but for entirely different reasons. And then there’s Los Angeles, Jason’s home town and a city that – for the last 20 years – beguiles me like no other. If I stray from Boca Raton, it’ll be to cheat with LA.

Which, Angelenos don’t say ‘LA’; they say ‘Los Angeles’. I think that’s nifty. The air is dry. What the hell!? People just pick up and hike the the canyons. Everyone seems to be casually eating at some great little spot all the time. The city rolls out of and into bed. And, underneath all that apparently unstudied ease… things get done – without the Midwest’s self-righteousness or the East’s harshness or the South’s weird defiance (or South Florida’s garishness, sheesh).

I muse on American cities in general and Los Angeles in particular because of Dope, a wonderful movie wherein one specific scene caught my attention. Midway through their misadventures, Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy arrive at AJ’s house. AJ’s son, Jaleel, invites them in to wait for his father and raps for them in his home studio. The three friends haze Jaleel a bit for his unique, self-diagnosed dyslexia, and, in so doing, in-joke a line from one of their own band’s songs. Without missing a beat, Jaleel invites them to record a song. That moment is ‘so LA’.

There’s a way in Los Angeles that people can seem to ride out minor humiliation because a more attuned portion of their consciousness continuously scans for ‘that thing’. In New York and DC, people always on the make come across as smarmy but are typically tolerated. In the Midwest (and Canada, interestingly enough), such behavior is undignified and its perpetrators can wind up pariahs. In South Florida, it’s how anything, everything gets done. But in Los Angeles, it is a Zen art guided by a spirit of possibility.

That scene reminded me immediately of a parallel moment in American Dreamz, another fantastic – although far less well-regarded – movie. American Dreamz is a satire where Dope is a fable packed with some of the painful and amazing things that can happen in that part of the world. American Dreamz handles adjacent themes with cutting humor rather than Dope’s absurdities. But both films are gimlet-eyed and do not insult the reality of their characters’ or their audiences’ lives.

In American Dreamz, Omer surreptitiously goofs around on his cousin Iqbal’s home stage as disco lights and Casio beats roll only to be ‘discovered’ by the movie’s eponymous TV show’s scouts. Omer – rather than Iqbal who’d initially submitted an audition tape – is selected for the star-making singing contest. When Omer delivers the news to Iqbal at dinner, Iqbal shouts, “Do you know how hard I’ve worked to get on this show!? You’ve stolen my dream!!!” and flounces out. In their next scene together, however, like Jameel in Dope, Iqbal, with happy self-satisfaction and confidence, decides to coach his cousin to prepare him to win American Dreamz.

Now, Iqbal (portrayed by Tony Yalda) lives in Orange County, not Los Angeles proper, and, unlike Jameel (played by Quincy Brown), he is wiry and shrill. But proximity matters, and Iqbal has keenly internalized the neighboring Angeleno’s sharp eye for possibility and ability to instantaneously overcome slights in service of bigger things.

Jameel is Black and Iqbal is Arab, and this matters. The actual and stereotyped-perception of violence that shape and mark both of their communities serve as interesting juxtapositions to their willingness to move past humiliation toward the possibility of success in the entertainment industry. Jaleel is clearly pulled between Ladera where he lives and “doesn’t have a set” and Inglewood where “my heart is… even though my body’s right here.” He’s hard to a fault, but clearly has a talent for music that is as true to him as his father and uncle’s roots in the Bottoms. In opposition, Iqbal who appears to simply tolerate his family is in reality very comfortable with himself and in his environs – and is very welcomed and supported by his loved-ones.

I imagine that in Chicago and Atlanta people similar to Jameel and Iqbal are checking the lower frequencies for possibilities. But, the nonchalant, dare I say, grace with which these two characters handle it is a faithful representation of how things get done in Los Angeles, a testament to both actors’ and sets of filmmakers’ attention to detail when it comes to that city. The American Dream, like the American Condition, is founded, as Fitzgerald put it, on “an infinite capacity for hope.” In Los Angeles, that hope is realized and monetized and capitalized with elegant, matter-of-fact company town industry.

angry

It’s back!

I like bright people. And by that I mean, I like people whose main focus is ideas. So I don’t mean that I think there are intelligent and unintelligent people – far from it; I can’t think of one person I’ve met that I would characterize as inherently stupid. I know narrow-minded people and lazy thinkers and thoughtless people. I know people who are so rooted in protecting some aspect of their identity or their experience that they refuse to think beyond it. I myself am often all of the above. But I’ve yet to meet someone who was, beyond faults of intellectual character well within our control, innately stupid. For me, bright people are interested in following a thought through to its terminus and make the space in their minds and their lives to do so.

But lately I’ve noticed that there is a way that gender shapes the way ideas are engaged. It might be something else, but it feels like gender. I am right at this moment reading Men Explain Things To Me so that I can position the following without recovering that ground, because there is something particular that I want to get to, and it is this:

1. I and most women I know treat most encounters with others as opportunities to find out.
2. When someone and I are in conversation, my interlocutor’s biography bears heavily on pretty much everything that person says.
3. I practice critical thinking, and can and will entertain most generously and genuinely proffered ideas.
4. Perhaps it is because I am a Black woman and within my Black communities my well-reasoned point of view is expected, perhaps it is because my early sense of self was shaped by my parents’ insistence that I clearly and rigorously and consistently explain myself, but I have very rarely ever felt the need to silence my perspective.
5. If we are in conversation and I haven’t said anything for a while and you find yourself droning on, you should probably ask me what I’m thinking because those are the moments when I am withholding from you critical information.
6. I rarely withhold when I’m in conversation with women.

There are among my friends a handful of bright men from whom I occasionally withhold information because, at that moment, they are more interested in being the ‘expert’ rather than having a chat between equals.¹ This can happen even when the field of conversation is something like American public education or contemporary conceptual art. And, it’s funny, I’ve noticed that in their minds, my own biography plays against me as though I don’t know that or how my experiences have shaped me. In particular, they don’t see or dismiss as mere identity politics that I actively use my experiences as a critical foundation for my thought and action.

As a person for whom ideas are both pleasure and practice, I’ve found humility and sensitivity rather than territoriality and one-upmanship help flesh out new thoughts and move projects along. Because, for as much as I trust my own thinking, I enjoy people who think for themselves; other perspectives do expand individual horizons.²

My favorite thing about Get Out is the way that it taints the “Good Things^TM“. It questions – as we should – the provenance, purpose, maintenance, and significance of leafy suburbs, interest in Black lives, and everything (milk and cereal, tea services, slacks, basements, hats, TV sets, law enforcement, the UNCF slogan… What signifies a poppet?) in between.

I’ve seen the film twice. Thankfully, it wasn’t spoiled for me the first time, so I went in pre-terrified; although I am my mother’s daughter and she is “more afraid of the living than the dead”, the paranormal can still keep me up at night. From the trailers I’d seen, I expected the supernatural consequences of the Americas’ Original Sins to provide the movie’s thrills and chills. I wasn’t disappointed.

The second time I went to see it, I watched to assess the way the corrections come to bear on the film’s cinematography. Toby Oliver does a fine job, I think, presenting all of the characters in their visual fullness. The movie looks like now, like this moment’s most sophisticated version, in fact, in terms of range of tones, shifting white balance, and depth of field. The way the camera handles Chris, the main character, is especially skilled: in scenes with other characters, there’s just enough distance between Chris and the viewer so that the viewer feels like something of a removed observer, but the camera is close enough for that removed observer to catch Chris’s micro-expressions as he processes his interactions. Thus, when Chris or other characters are in extreme close up, the viewer is sucked into the characters’ emotional vortices. Although close ups of Chris emphasize his red, distressed eyes, his face isn’t freakishly distorted by weird angles or try-too-hard lenses; he remains human, so the viewer remains empathetic.

That, the empathy for Chris the filmmakers engender in the audience, is remarkable. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris’s reticence, his self-awareness, his vulnerability, and his willingness to ‘give it a try’ with nuance, and, the filmmakers, through camera work and through narrative pacing, support that performance so that the viewer ends up caring for Chris in a way that parallels the viewer’s care for Chiron in Moonlight; we want both Chris and Chiron to be safe and loved. In Moonlight, Juan’s nurturing, protective presence guides the audience through their empathy for Chiron. In Get Out, while Rose might seem to serve the same function because she listens to Chris and appears to defend him throughout the film, there’s something cool and patronizing – and perfect – in Allison Williams’ performance that undercuts the validity of Chris’s sense of dread. The audience has to come to feel with and for Chris some other way, and the filmmakers achieve that with brilliant technical choices.

As with Moonlight, however, as far as I can remember, Get Out doesn’t pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test. Does a movie have to pass the Test? Why is the Test even a thing? It’s a joke from a comic from a specific period of time with specific reference to particular women’s positionality in the culture. But, I’ll be damned if that basic three-part question doesn’t make me challenge my initial read of everything. First, I look for women characters, then I look at their interactions with one another, and, finally I run those interactions through the movie as a whole. What do they call that in art? Gestalt. In movies like Moonlight and Get Out that feature Black women, I am particularly keen to consider how we of varied experiences of this culture are portrayed. Get Out is very, very, very interesting to me in this regard with particular reference to my take on Hidden Figures and Lorna Simpson’s 2003 piece, Corridor:

 

In (a version of) that space, this face in Get Out is distorted:

Which, whoa… Horror movie, indeed.

Twenty years ago today, or, rather, tonight, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on The WB. Amanda made me start watching Buffy maybe two seasons in. Up until that point, my favorite TV shows were Daria, Aeon Flux, The Simpsons, South Park, and Ren and Stimpy: nothing live action and certainly not anything called ‘Buffy’. But, Amanda assured me in that unassuming, take-it-or-leave it way that she has, “You’ll like it.” It was love at first sight, and I still love Buffy. Funny, sad, morbid, optimistic, there’s a rhythm to the writing that feels like work to me. I think that’s the thing that’s kept me devoted to the show all these years. The mission – even in the face of personal drama, family responsibilities, financial burdens, and social issues – is the thing. I get that. However, the reverse is true, too, which is why I respect Buffy; the mission isn’t a life in and of itself, either.

Buffy has its flaws: race is one; gender, interestingly enough, is another. As when dealing with a family member I love but who refuses to self-reflect, I wince when I think of the portrayal of Blacks and other people of color in the show. I ‘get’ that Buffy and the other female characters’ ‘traditional’ women’s appearances and actual agency in the narrative are intentionally juxtaposed, but all that leather and fluff and pink and lace and hair, eh. As a result, my favorite episodes spoof identity or are reflexively aware of the show itself:

• Lie to Me 2.7
• Band Candy 3.6
• The Wish 3.9
• Dopplegangland 3.16
• Pangs 4.8
• Something Blue 4.9
• I was Made to Love You 5:15
• Life Serial 6.5
• Tabula Rasa 6.8
• Doublemeat Palace 6.12
• Him 7.6
• Storyteller 7.16
• Lies My Parents Told Me 7.17