Category: books (page 1 of 3)

a comic book panel from "March" by John Lewis. While young activists sit on the floor listening to Hosea Williams, a woman stands up to sing, "They say that freedom is a constant struggle"

February 26, 2025 / 0 Comments

Fortunate

“They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must be free.”—a freedom song

Almost exactly ten years before I was born, a young John Lewis and thousands of others who grew weary of waiting for their freedom crossed the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. With unparalleled discipline, unwavering resolve, and profound love, they refused to be denied. Months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed in direct response to their courageous actions. It chokes me up to think about those sacrifices that allowed me to live half a century without enduring those harrowing battles. No one has ever attempted to suppress my right to vote. Bigotry holds so little power over my ability to succeed that I have largely forgotten its sting.

I can count on one hand how many times I felt someone else’s racism had negatively impacted my life. I have achieved everything I have set out to do with my skin color rarely being used against me.

I’m fortunate.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve immersed myself in the three-volume graphic novel collection “March” by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. This autobiographical narrative reminds us of our nation’s history and the relentless pursuit required to bend it toward the ideals we profess to hold dear. Illustrated in stark black and white, the story unflinchingly recounts how a boy from Troy, Alabama, became one of the architects of the civil rights movement and what it took to even glimpse equality.

“By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.”—John Lewis

I’m fortunate.

This leaves me with an important question: What do I do with this good fortune? How can I repay the sacrifices made by those who had so little and gave so much?

How can I help foster a society where love reigns as the highest virtue?

The answer is simple: ultimately, you stand up.

In her acceptance speech at the NAACP Image Awards, Kamala Harris declared:

“This organization came into being when our country struggled with greed, bitterness, and hatred. Those who forged the NAACP knew the forces they faced and how stony the road would be. Many see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, and the shadows over our democracy, asking, ‘What do we do now?’ We know exactly what to do because we have done it before and will do it again.”

Despite the suffering, chaos, and anxiety that permeate our world, I still choose joy. I commit to the resolute ideals championed by those who paved the way before me. You can take many things from us, but you cannot take away our dignity.

Those who seek to deny us genuine justice and equality cannot steal my sunshine.

“However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long… because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fortunate may lament going through this administration’s nonsense, but making good trouble in service of those in its crosshairs is how I pay forward what was done for me long before my birth. I would consider myself fortunate to lead a life that echoes just a fraction of the good accomplished by John Lewis and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

Fortune favors the brave.

March.

A cropped image of the book jacket for L.A. Weather by María Ampara Escandón. It depicts mountains in Los Angeles experiencing a brush fire. The view is from a hillside home with a pool and palm trees.

July 14, 2024 / 0 Comments

L.A Weather (16 of 26)

María Ampara Escandón loves Los Angeles. More importantly, she understands it. Her novel, L.A. Weather, is about family and the subtle nuances within each relationship. It’s also about identity, the hold that secrets can have over us, and how we handle the crises that can face a family unit in any given year. Los Angeles is where the Alvarados happen to live in this story. This city I love is both the setting and a key player in the plot.

As Storygraph‘s personalized preview of the novel suggested in more polite words: this kind of yarn is my shit.

Throughout the novel, characters describe their visions of L.A.

Compared to New York, we’re like ducks in a pond.

“They glide effortlessly on the tranquil surface, but you can see they’re frantically paddling when you go underwater. […] To survive, you have to keep your cool. Angelenos only sweat in public at the gym.”

One of the Alvarado daughters, who thinks in Instagram captions, believes the city to have been developed horizontally so that it could be projected in Panavision. She goes to the Griffith Park Observatory frequently to remind herself:

“[T]hat because she lived in the wealthiest city of the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, she had been bestowed with the ultimate responsibility: to thrive in her endeavors many times over on behalf of all the immigrants who hadn’t been given a chance.”

The patriarch of the family shares my perspective on the City of Angels:

“Every race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and food preference was well represented within Los Angeles County, and this is what [he] loved most about his city: how it welcomed everything and everyone.”

Threads has become my social media app of choice over the last year, and recently, there has been this regular drumbeat of new residents of L.A. starting conversations in which long-time Angelenos on the app feel the need to step in and correct their incorrect assumptions. I try my best to stay out of these engagement traps. Los Angeles doesn’t require you to love it. Few will demand that you give up your hometown allegiances or suppress that identity to succeed here. I’ve known people who have lived here for 20 years and still claim Chicago, New York, or wherever. And the city is cool with that.

But, as Escandón seems to know, magic happens if you fall in love with this place—with the parts of it that truly make this city and county shine. This place and its people will love you back. You will find a home. You will find family. You will believe anything is possible when we come together.

L.A. Weather is L.A. County Public Library’s summer read. If you’re a fan of women of color writing about complicated families, intriguing women, and how they make their way through seemingly impossible situations—usually with wit and humor—this is also for you.

January 15, 2023 / 0 Comments

Ancestry in Progress

When you first enter the back exhibition halls at the Resnick Pavillion, you are met with Hank Willis Thomas’s “A Place to Call Home (Africa-America).” It is a map of the Americas with the continent of South America replaced by Africa. It is also a mirror. As you take it in, you see yourself in the piece. At my height, I appeared dead center of the hybrid continent. This is not just history. It is your history. Not in the abstract; these displays are about you, specifically. Experience it as such.

The Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit at LACMA is a powerful and thought-provoking display of art and culture that explores the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the African diaspora. Curated by Robert Farris Thompson, the exhibit features a wide range of works from artists of African descent, spanning centuries and continents.

Scheduled on a lark by Tiffany, the visit felt serendipitous, as if guided by otherworldly forces. To spend nearly two hours with these works during the same week that I was reading and, candidly, struggling through Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts felt heaven-sent even to my apatheist heart. And that’s not to mention that we arrived before the heavy rain and the LA crowds looking for something to do during a downpour. Thank the ancestors.

In Wake, Rebecca Hall writes:

Living in the wake of slavery is haunting, and to experience this haunting is to be nothing less than traumatized.

This “haunting” was my primary challenge in making it through her graphic novel before I spent the morning with these works. The exhibit features pieces I’ve seen before from Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Betye Saar, along with many artists from Brazil and the Caribbean that were new to me. It was overwhelming to walk from room to room, each with its theme meant to make the enormity of the black experience in the Americas digestible. Digestible even if it goes down bitter. Digestible even if you have to swallow hard.

Americans are myopic and self-centered, and I am no different. When I grapple with the realities of slavery, I think of it as a uniquely American problem, a United States of America problem. This curation, though, makes plain that the impacts of the transatlantic slave trade were similar and terrible throughout both North and South America. This horror-as-commerce, of course, rippled back to Africa and the countries that brought themselves into the modern world on the backs of Africans for hundreds of years.

In Afro-Atlantic Histories, this sober reality is expressed by displaying art from artists that seem to be conversing with each other, like Kara Walker’s “Restraint” and Sidney Amaral’s “Neck Leash—Who Shall Speak on our Behalf?” In Wake, Hall highlights this by recounting her trip to Great Britain while researching her dissertation. She makes it to archives of Lloyd’s of London—an insurance company that exists solely because of the need to insure the cargos of slave ships hundreds of years ago—only to be denied access to their records out of fear that a proper independent accounting of history will also come with a bill long past due.

While Wake’s tagline sells the graphic novel as a deep exploration of the women who rose against these supposed enslavers, these stories are unavailable. Historians of the period seem biased against the idea that women could do such a thing. Perhaps they would kill their masters in a domestic dispute but lead an insurrection? Arm and inspire dozens or perhaps hundreds of others? Surely not!

To which, and this is not a joke, can someone get those old codgers a copy of The Woman King?

Hall and her illustrator explore the idea of captured Dahomey warriors on a slave ship and how they would have taken advantage of being underestimated.

Or invite them to the Afro-Atlantic Histories portrait room, where Dalton Paula’s Zeferina is on display. Zeferina was an abolitionist leader who joined with formerly enslaved people to lead a rebellion, killing enslavers to establish an independent community of free black people. She was executed for her crimes against the Portuguese crown. A woman king, indeed!

We must use our haunting to see how black life truly is and see how it could be otherwise.

The closing chapter of Wake is titled Ancestry in Progress, referencing the Zap Mama album I loved at its release. It’s playing now as I write this. I feel the throughline of the graphic novel, the art, and being a descendant in my bones. Staring into artwork that demands you reckon with these horrors—our shared history, even if you don’t yet recognize it as such—has had me on the verge of tears.

But I am here. Many of my ancestors survived these incomprehensible circumstances and found ways for their spirits to thrive. To swing out. I am here with Zap Mama singing along as we make it past the rain to the sun on Ca Varie Varie. I am here with portraiture that conveys all we might be as we exist today. We are our past and our future. And sometimes, I am overwhelmed by how improbable and beautiful that is.

To crib a bit of how Firelei Báez describes one of her paintings, black joy amazes and I will not relinquish it.

January 5, 2023 / 0 Comments

Shades of Black

BLACK IVY: A Revolt in Style

BLACK IVY: A Revolt in Style by Jason Jules and Graham Marsh is a coffee table book. That’s precisely where it’s been in the year since I received it as a Christmas present. I’d browsed the photographs several times over the year but had yet to stop to read the accompanying words. Until now. I’m mad at myself for not getting to it sooner because it was a delightful and inspiring read and a fitting first book of the new year.

I’d put the book on my list for Santa in the fall of 2021 after reading several articles that used it as a jumping-off point to discuss masculine fashion in broader or more contemporary terms. I’m not a fashionista, but I think about my outfits, the pieces I like, and what goes well together. One of my seldom-used boards on Pinterest is called Sartorial Game. I save hip sweaters and shoes that come across my Instagram feed in a collection. I get dressed for work even when that means taking just a few steps into my home office.

Through BLACK IVY, I can contextualize the clothing that resonates with me and why it feels so cool. I love a short sleeve button-down popover shirt. I prefer a cub collar on my full-length dress shirts if I can find one. Give me a beautiful sweater with a visible tee poking out of a collar. I want to pair these items with fresh sneakers, though the style’s originators would’ve likely preferred a hat as their touch of flare.

I felt both affirmed and encouraged by the stories and clothing of those civil rights-era cats. I wrote notes to learn more about Ted Joans, Noah Purifoy, and Jacob Lawrence. Images of Dignity by Charles White will likely be another read shortly. Thelonius Monk will be my Throwback Thursday music this week. I sought out the A Great Day in Harlem documentary.

I’ll soon be re-injecting Malcolm X (in both book and movie form) into my veins. I’ve got a date with Jazz on a Summers Day this Sunday, which will be a fitting end to my winter break.

And as I return to my routines next week, I’ll be thinking about which pieces go together. If clothes make the man, what is in my closet representing all shades of me?

Understated. Observant. Thoughtful. Clever. Kind. Undeniable. BLACK.

January 5, 2021 / 0 Comments

Chasin’ The Bird

“Salt peanuts, salt peanuts.”

— Dizzy Gillespie

Dave Chisholm‘s graphic novel about Charlie Parker’s time in Southern California is the first book I’ve read released during the COVID-19 pandemic. It acknowledges that timing in the foreword by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Jabbar—the long-time Angeleno—wonders whether much has changed between Jim Crow in Parker’s 1940s America and last year’s Black Lives Matter summer of anguish. My gut reaction is to say, very much yes, even through the book’s lens where Bird must stay at an all-black hotel and permission to book an integrated band is seen as a great gift or concession. But a character in the story—a white one, no less—extols us never to trust LA cops, and 2020’s refrain of “defund the police” rings in my ears, and I question my gut’s optimism.

Despite growing up in a lifelong jazz musician’s home, I am not knowledgeable in the greats. My appreciation for jazz records comes via hip-hop connections: Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Mohammed’s frequent bebop sampling, and Madlib’s Shades of Blue. My dad is a founding member of the Blackbyrds and, yet, I didn’t give much of a listen to Donald Byrd until J Dilla and Erykah Badu gave me an entryway I was willing to take. Even then, my explorations have been solely into the music with very little understanding of the people or those moments in time that made these tunes possible.

Chasin’ the Bird provided a new kind of door for me. The first chorus is told in Dizzy Gillespie’s voice, and he gives form to what it was like being a jazz cat in 1947. The book makes that Los Angeles and that club real for me. He name-checks a few songs, Salt Peanuts and Koko, and visualizes what it might have felt like to hear Bird blow his horn in person for the first time. I immediately went to my preferred music streamer and pulled up a Charlie Parker playlist. My toe began tapping. My eyes closed for a while, and then I opened them again, hoping to have been transported. I wanted to be looking around the darkened smoky room, searching for someone else’s eyes with which to lock. I’d shake my head as if to say, can you believe this? We’d chuckle together. I’d wipe my brow and return my attention to the stage, enraptured.

The story continues from there, taking on the perspectives of several others who encountered Bird during his time in my beloved city. Ultimately, the goal is to unravel the mystery of what happened to the man in Los Angeles, especially during his six-month-long disappearance from the scene. What we don’t get is the man himself in his own words. While Parker casts such a long shadow over the music of his time and what followed, he didn’t make it past his 35th year. He never gave himself the chance to tell his own story.

And while that’s a loss that this story can’t fill, it hits all my other sweet spots. It’s an LA story. It’s noir. It’s moody and sexy and a puzzle. The art sings. There are pages—the outro most intentionally so—that I’d swear I could hear. And the words are just as mesmerizing as the visuals and the jazz.

In Coltrane’s section, the illustrated Bird says to him:

The Universe we live in don’t waste nothin’. Everything has existed eternally. Every piece of energy is recycled. Every piece of motherfucking matter. You know what else is eternal?

Fuckin’ soul.

My soul stirred.

I highly recommend.

December 27, 2020 / 0 Comments

How To Do Nothing

I’ve been off from work since Tuesday, and I’ve got two more weeks before I return to slacks and emails and zooms and the pandemic remote work struggle of balancing work and personal time.

“As far back as 1886, decades before it would finally be guaranteed, workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.’”

— Jenny Odell

During this extended leisure period, I’m still thinking about work or, more accurately, I’m thinking about how we spend time, how we value time, and how I show my team that I respect theirs. To show proper reverence for our most valuable commodity requires me to appreciate my own time and what I do or don’t do with it.

“Ah, let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device.”

Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing opens with a Twitter quote that encapsulates how I often feel when I’ve spent too much time scrolling. Despite efforts to better manage the experience, the algorithms are better than I have been, and I will find myself in the doom loop refreshing and refreshing to find some new nugget that will spark a reaction in me. Joy is rarely the return on investment of that time.

Yesterday, though, I made some different choices with my time. Instead of endlessly swiping through tweets, I read up on the squirrels that roam the trees outside my home office window. That led me down a path to understanding more about the San Fernando Valley ecosystem. Later in the afternoon, when I opened The Wild newsletter from the LA Times, I read it more deeply, identifying things that might help me feel more grounded. Odell writes about having a stronger connection to the physical world around you is more real. It is an actual reality.

Our social media spaces generally lack the contexts necessary to feel real. They present distractions and solicit reactions but rarely in a meaningful way. Odell is quick to point out that she’s not suggesting quitting them all and never returning. “We have to be able to do both,” she says, “to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.”

Which raised for me this question: what do I go to each of these spaces to do? On Twitter, I most want to interact with my friends and acquaintances. Occasionally, I want to be entertained by digital culture (though maybe I’m getting that dopamine from TikTok more these days) or be in the mix of basketball chatter or Los Angeles happenings or catch up quickly on breaking news.

However, I rarely am looking to do all those things at the same time, and that is the social media platform trick. I come to see what my friends are sharing, and now I’m lost in covid news or trying to understand a meme or reading a trending topic. There’s no context. It’s a noise storm that I willingly walk into and remain for far too long.

I have different specific intentions for other platforms yet haven’t treated them with care or discipline either. I’d love an algorithmic reset button for Facebook and Instagram, but I will settle for revisiting my follows and actively thinking about my purpose when I enter them.

And to get engrossed in more soul-satisfying pursuits, including the act and art of doing nothing.

There is so much more to Odell’s book than merely a discussion of dealing with social media. It’s part philosophy, part history, part naturalist, part adventure. It is not, however, a how-to book.

It kept my mind ablaze throughout.

I highly recommend.

June 2, 2019 / 0 Comments

If Beale Street Could Talk

“We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. ”

— James Baldwin

My favorite scenes in If Beale Street Could Talk (both the film and the book) happen at home. The first—though, chronologically, the second—is in the apartment Tish shares with her family. She reveals that she is pregnant to her mother, who creates a small celebration around the dining table with Tish’s sister and father to bring them into the joy and fright of a possible new life.

Then they invite Fonny’s parents and siblings over so that they might also enjoy and live in the news. It doesn’t go as well, but in it, we learn about the power and limits of hospitality and the malleability in the definition of family. It’s instructive for all that will follow in the story.

The other setting I love is the one quoted above. Fonny has a place in the world that is his, and sometimes it is also Tish’s, and they can invite an old friend into it and share a meal and fellowship. I do not know that I’ve read words more beautiful than Baldwin’s in describing that feeling of being able to provide respite to another. To sit around a table, break bread, drink a little, and talk. The intimacy and hope and security it brings, even if only for a few hours.

It builds us up. It fortifies us for whatever the world might throw our way.

We are in the process of buying a place right now. After figuring out if a space fits us, the next question on my mind is will it meet the needs of our people. We aren’t constant hosts, inviting others into our residence frequently, though we consider doing so often. Last year, my family tried to establish a new tradition of monthly dinners at each of our spots across the city. We were pretty good for about half the year, and I very much enjoyed the times we hosted including a Mother’s Day meal that had more people seated at our table than ever before. More common, though, is for us to have a single guest over, like Fonny and Tish, and we put on some music and pour some liquor, and we treat each other with kindness and sincerity for as long as necessary.

Lately, I’ve taken to watching home tours on Architectural Digest’s YouTube channel. People seem to take a few different approaches to make the home of their dreams: to impress, to nest, or to welcome (occasionally, a home contains all three).

What I’ve learned watching those tours, especially while I’ve been reading Baldwin’s words is that if we get nothing else right, let’s do the last. Let’s make it so that our family—blood or chosen—feels welcome and that from the time they enter and until they leave, they will know that something wonderful happening is always a possibility.

April 1, 2019 / 0 Comments

The Cooking Gene

It took me six weeks to complete Michael W. Twitty’s part autobiography, part narrative history, part cookbook. It’s only 400 pages long. My slow burn through rate is not a reflection on the writing which is often beautiful and lyrical and always well-crafted and considered. No, my pace is a common occurrence when faced with the grim reality of slavery as a lived experience. If I’m not taking it in small bites, I’m avoiding it entirely. Black grief isn’t for me, which is why I haven’t seen 12 Years A Slave or Hotel Rwanda or made my way to the end of Fruitvale Station.

I made it through The Cooking Gene, though, with my heart bruised but intact. Twitty makes plain what it must have been like for his specific ancestors and thus, the kin of many of us for whom enslavement was our forced entry into these United States. In the lived experience, we can feel in our bones the back-breaking work of picking cotton under the crack of the whip. We must consider the soul-crushing work of toiling in hot kitchens for our enslavers (who might also rape us on a whim and treat the children from the villainous union as property). In the papers from the time, we might understand the cruelty of the middle passage, the diet built on malnourishment (which plagues the genetic makeup of black folks to this day), the crimes of family separation. In the sober hunt for and re-telling of our shared history, we might stew in anger at the willful ignorance of those who would like to pretend slavery was something other than it is, and who endeavor to revisit those sins on people living today.

In the food, we might find where hope was found and resiliency fortified. In the food, we might find where the roots of true American cuisine began. In the food, we might see even more nuanced ways in which wealth, power, and culture were taken from black bodies, black hands, black ingenuity. In the food, we might find threads of our family trees back to Louisiana or Virginia or the Carolinas.

I don’t know my own history beyond a few generations on my mother’s side, but through The Cooking Gene, I can imagine my people were first brought to this country in the rice growing lands. Perhaps my love of the food comes to me from my ancestors, deep in my bones, in my DNA. What might I learn if I go wherever that thread takes me? What parts of Africa and Europe might I land?

Tiffany is cooking a true Southern meal today of smothered chicken, collards, and mac & cheese (macaroni pie, in the old words). If I get my gumption up, I might whip up a batch of biscuits to sop up the gravy and potlikker. It smells like kitchens of my youth in our house today. Like my grandma’s and great grandma’s homes in the summertime. It probably smells like the kitchens of their youth. And the kitchens our enslaved kin toiled in as well.

They only rarely would’ve been able to make such a meal for their families, producing it instead on the regular for Sunday dinners for the white people who had bought their bodies and claimed to own them.

It took me six weeks to finish The Cooking Gene. To move any faster would’ve felt like disrespect to the memory of the spirits Twitty stirs. To go more quickly would have removed the emotional release valve I require to process America’s terrible history.

In retrospect, a month and a half is a short time with Twitty’s tales. They will stay with me for much longer.

Recommended.

February 4, 2019 / 0 Comments

Heavy, California

“They say heaven’s waiting for you, so I’m headed for California.”

— Jungle

My freshman year of college, I was part of a particular dorm called Roots which focused on giving the 24 of us that lived on the floor a foundation in the backbone of western civilization. Those eight months have been the only time in my life when I’ve actively thought about philosophy critically, clinically, academically. I think about ways of being often. Hell, this blog is a collection of essays about me considering how to be in the world and yet, I haven’t built upon that structure from my first year of Higher Education oh those many moons ago.

Windows to the Will: Anomalisa is an essay in Zadie Smith’s collection, Feel Free. In it, she reviews Charlie Kaufman’s animated film through the prism of philosophy, specifically Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom, Kaufman is clearly—to those who are scholars of the subject—a fan. It’s a brilliant essay, knowledgeable and smart and witty and fun in ways well beyond me, and it got me both to spend a few dollars to rent the film on YouTube and to think back on my Introduction to Logic class that was part of my year in Roots.

The film is exceptional in form and function even though I found the protagonist, Michael, insufferable. Smith seems to find some way to identify with him and his struggle to escape boredom and sameness. I had no such luck. There’s a very tender sex scene—amongst puppets, mind—and I think here is when you’re supposed to feel something for Michael as he shows such care and compassion for Lisa, a woman who he believes might save him from his dispassionate life. A woman who is different, until she sleeps with him. A woman who is special until he attains her. A woman whose fleeting uniqueness give him permission to cheat on his wife and be rude to everyone around except her. And then, it passes, and he loses this compassion for her. She becomes just like everyone else, and we see that he has no moral center at all, just an endless want for something more than all he’s been given.

Le sigh.

I got an A in my Introduction to Logic class, yet I don’t know how. I found the work challenging and the philosophers, like Michael, mostly insufferable. I guess I understood the “math” of logic, but I couldn’t stand the dudes that came up with it. My assessment then was that these were men who couldn’t stand that they were merely human and not mythical heroes. Men for whom the human condition was a prison.

Get over yourselves, is what 19-year-old me must have thought.

I’m not sure that appraisal was wrong, but I’m thinking about spending more time with the great (?) philosophers this year.

Though, they all seem to be such jerks, maybe not.