This blog is a visual articulation of MY views of the world around me. I will present various sides of arguments, and always sum them up with my own personal take.
My more entertaining/diverse/ridiculous/lovable blog can be found at http://mrjdjude.tumblr.com/ and I'll do all of my following from that blog as well!
Thanks and enjoy!
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I LOVE reading Alice Walker’s work. This is a brief section of her essay “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens”, the title essay of her 1983 collection of essays. Reading this essay, you really understand how her own ideologies kept her from being the loving mother her daughter needed her to be. I remember my heartache at reading her daughter’s article (I wrote about it a little here, on my other blog). This essay, combined with the more I read in this book, and the more I find out about the “real” Alice Walker, the more I realize that one can fall victim to their own genius and ideals. It’s the sad truth about being an artist but it’s a truth, nevertheless; your artistry can be both your savior and your executioner.
5 Hollywood Directors Avoid Talking About Race
I might be hella late on this as I’m sure it has made its rounds in the artistic community of bloggers I belong to here on Tumblr but I couldn’t not post it. Shoutout to whomever hipped me to this (I think it was my boo Enchanta [ Dreamhard, don’t throw shade!]).
Like anything, this video and the commentary surrounding it, highlight a larger issue: lack of creativity. Now, more than ever, I am in the “season planning” process at a theater. I am culling through scripts, trying to find ones that match the mission of the theater (a mission I’m VERY PROUD of!). As I read plays, see other productions, go to readings, etc, I’m always amazed at how bland the art we make really is. We suffer from an extreme lack of creativity right now!
Casting outside of the norm opens your art to new modes of interpretation and delivery. What is there to fear about that? Just imagine how different Juno is if one of those characters are of a different race. Not even race. What about ability level (one of the highlights of my career, so far, is doing Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries entirely in ASL)?
You don’t realize the immeasurable possibilities lie within the written word until it is brought to life by an artist. We, art makers, should create platforms that allow for all artists. Understandably, more thought goes into making these types of stories possible but, take it from me, it is well worth it.
Art is about taking chances, showing humanity to humans, and enjoying the vulnerability imbedded in it all. I look forward to seeing more of that kind of art in the future.
I Needed The Help
See what I did there? lol.
Anyway, I saw The Help over the weekend and it evoked a lot of thought out of me. It’s really hard to talk about it. I have a menagerie of feelings. I’m proud to know that we, as a people, have endured the life of the home servant. It makes me SO sad to know that after that, we still have so far to come. It pains me that the movie was more about the white women and their lives than it was of the Black women. I know that the movie didn’t focus on the Black men of the day but I wanted to hear from them. I am both happy and pissed the fuck off at some of the relationships the maids developed with the kids and women they were paid to take care of. I’m saddened that Hollywood will turn anything into a fucking love story! THE ACTING (by some) WAS FUCKING AMAZING! There weren’t that many moments that I realized that I was, in fact, watching a movie, so the production value was good. I don’t love the movie but would add it to my personal collection.
If you know me you know I don’t go to the movies. Before I give you more detailed reasons know that my NUMBER 1 reason is that it costs too much for me. I don’t get paid a lot and I’d rather spend my little bucks on other shit. My other reasons is that I’m just overall dissapointed in what the movies offer. I got so mad while watching the previews (I tweeted, twice! and three times about it and will talk more about that experience later on) that it carried over to the first 20 minutes of the movie. Granted, the first 20 minutes also pissed me off. Those images of Black women having to acquiesce to every whim of these white women irked the shit out of me. It made me uncomfortable, in a good way. I was forced to face my history and I wasn’t able to turn away.
At my new job, I’m working on this play Neighbors that does a similar thing, only with blackface. It makes audiences confront our own complicity and doesn’t let us just shrug it off but makes us sit in it, like a baby who has to stay in their soiled diaper for hours.
Theatre, and art in general, should challenge us, make us think, make us feel, make us talk, inspire us to make change (in ourselves and in the world around us) and entertain. While I disagree, in some sorts with a lot of the plot pieces in the movie, I overall felt like it satisfied my aforementioned criteria.
If you are on the fence on whether to go see this movie or not, please do. If not only to give Viola Davis, Cicely Tyson, Octavia Spencer, Aunjanue Ellis and others credit for their hard word, but to have the experience of confronting your understanding of self in relationship to others, in the context of the experience of Black women working in the domestic service.
I have to do more research on the origins of the movie and the book and will come back on how I feel like the movie did in comparison to the book. I’ll also give my review of the movie. Look out for my post about the previews before the movie and why that adds to the reasons I don’t go to the cinema. Busy week. I hope to write it all…(current history says I won’t…)
If you’ve seen the movie (or read the book) what do you think about the movie?
Article Share: "Top 10 Reasons to Support the Arts"
As if one really needed 10 reasons. THE ARTS ARE IMPORTANT!! That should be reason enough. I think this article does a good job in listing some of the not so obvious reasons why the arts, and the artists who create it, need your support. Check it out and go donate (ideally to my theatre company…)!
