Hero origin story.

So, today, I had a Christmas Story moment.

At a bookstore close to where I work was an author event. Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, was in conversation with Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and a number of other books, to promote Young’s latest book, an anthology of Black American humor, called That’s How They Get Ya.

The event was delightful; there was a reading, there were jokes, there was introspection. While waiting for the event to start, I read the introduction and a few more pages, and I had to try not to laugh out loud in the store. It was funny, it was poignant, it elicited a response I hoped my work would.

After the reading and Q&A, there was a line to get the books signed. I got in line to get my book signed by Damon, and , well, I’m not proud. I had a total Christmas Story moment. Minus the shooting your eye out, of course.

Basically, what I wanted to ask was tangentially related to how I work. He name-checked a lot of people who contributed to the anthology, willingly praising them as the best of their genres. “Who would I want to do short stories? She got that covered. Why would I want to do poetry when he’s one of the best at it? Let me find my lane and stay in it.” I wanted to know how he persisted amongst his friend group who were so great and talented; why write at all? How can you manage to put pen to paper when it wouldn’t measure up? What if you don’t know your lane?

Instead, I asked something in such a way that was not what I asked and not what he took the question to be. It wasn’t quite “you want a football? How about a football?” but it was damned close.

But, what he did tell me wasn’t completely useless.

When surrounded by greatness, you elevate your game. Some days, you ain’t got it, he admitted. But some days he makes art worthy of the company he keeps.

And that’s what I’ll take with me.

To Kiese’s credit, I mentioned the town where my mother was born, grown up in, and lives south of the Jackson, MS he knows, and he knew what I was talking about IMMEDIATELY. “Oh, she in the COUNTRY!” I thanked him for putting his words down; I’d never read something like Heavy from someone in my age group, and to know that there were cats writing with the same cultural markers, of the same time period I came of age in, and with such force and deftness made me want to write.

And write I shall.

Posted on by ~tbg~ 0

Losing paper.

Went to see my fellow Comptonite Kendrick at Soldier Field last week, and while I enjoyed the show, what I was left wondering was that, fi I didn’t buy a shirt, would there be any tangible reminder of being there? If I didn’t spend $60 for a T-shirt or $130 for a sweatshirt, was there anything I could point to and say “I was there”? My ticket was electronic, as is what I suspect is the move these days in the live music space.

Going to see Damon Young tonight at an author event. He’s doing a Q&A and book signing for his second book. His first one, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker”, was great, and I’ve reread it more than twice. But it’s an ebook. Nothing he can sign.

I found my old ticket stub book, and while I haven’t put anything into it for years, I can still leaf through the pages and remember shows and games I’ve been to. Tangible memories, of paper creased and folded and smoothed over, bringing up questions. Who did I go with? What did I eat beforehand? Did I stay out the rest of the night, or did I take my ass home afterwards? Next to the pocket of the ticket in a few places, I’ve written some notes. “Homecoming.” “Went to Big Star after”.

We’re losing something with a move to digital. I’ve talked about the move from tangible to the digital in music and entertainment, but this weekend really brought home that there is so much more that were possibly missing, that those records of not only what we own but where we were, what we felt, what we did aren’t for putting into a cardboard box with “Memories” written in Sharpie on the side, but as a folder on our computer desktop.

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“Black fatigue”.

I read this.

And got incensed.

I’ll ignore the non-art application of that term, which I’ve seen in response to Black people being alive in spaces and demanding rights and such – “we are so tired of the Blacks!” – but we’ll move on and drill down to the subject this article tackles, Black art and Black people in art specifically.

The article itself does a great job in pointing out examples of such “fatigue” and the reactions to it. (I personally cannot type “fatigue” without rolling my eyes, reader, so just imagine that as you read.)

With the success, not only monetarily but culturally, of this year’s Met Gala, where Black dandyism was out and in full effect, it is noted that the very existence of Black people is enough to make folks roll their eyes. We are making art, we are contributors to the work..but folk are…tired of us.

And it is not a overexposure of theme, a rote stereotype. It boils down to erasure. Not “I’ve seen this a lot lately” to “I don’t want to see this again.” An instruction to be quiet, to not be so loud, to not be in those spaces anymore.

This isn’t a failure of Black art; it’s a design. Fatigue, in this co-opted sense, is a release valve for market pressure — a justification to discard Blackness when it no longer serves the public’s appetite for righteousness. In this way, the art world’s fatigue isn’t symptomatic of real exhaustion; it’s strategic engineering.

We are decried…until it’s politically expedient, or we cannot be ignored, or we speak up and deny the action. As Zora said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” If we say nothing while we shuttle in and out of “what’s cool” and “what we should pay attention to”, then they’ll have none of our contributions and be free to say “there went an unoriginal, barbaric, primitive people”.

Posted on by ~tbg~

When there’s nothing there.

I remember visiting my old block.

I hadn’t been back in more than 20 years, but I was back in LA for a high school reunion, and I begged my then-girlfriend to drive me to my old house. I had planned this trip out meticulously; who I’d see, what I’d eat, things I needed to reconnect with after a long time away from the place I was born and raised.

We parked across the street from my old house, in front of a neighbor’s house which had housed a lot of the kids I played with from ages 6-16. Their house was up for sale, I could see, but the lawn I used to roll down was still evident. I resisted the urge to roll down said hill at my age and looked across at my old place.

I took pictures to send to my mother, so she could see that they cut our cypress trees. Had taken down our basketball rim. That our lawn now had a bunch of kids toys on it. I crossed the street, wondering how I could play football on it. This wasn’t the wide avenue of my childhood, it couldn’t be.

We left there, and I was…sad. Sad not for what was, but for what wasn’t. My childhood home now had a family in t I didn’t know making their own memories, and any hint or trace that we were even there was gone.

Evanston, Illinois, has a special place in my heart. Besides going to college there, a lot of my formative memories as a young adult were made there. I met some great people, did a lot of things in an environ that was a great incubator for me.

It’s also where my wife was born and raised, and after we got together, she shared with me a lot of Evanston I had previously been unaware of. The history of its interracial marriages. The mixing made possible by their high school. The places she’d go I had never heard of or couldn’t make it to because I had no car.

And in Evanston were her parents, still living in the same house that she and her two sisters were raised in. It was tiny by any standard, but we’d go once a month to visit her mom and dad and eat and talk and laugh with them, and small or not, I could see that house for its charm and the love contained within its walls.

A lot has happened since then; that may be an understatement.

The house was sold to another family making their own memory. The parents’ bodies are committed to the earth, memory still aflame in the personage of those they lived by and worked with.

We were talking the other day, my wife and I, and she mentioned that she had to go get an emissions test, and she was going to go the Evanston one, since it was off the beaten track, not many people know of it, and it takes less than 20 minutes.

She sighed, and said “There’s no one left to visit up there anymore.” And we got incredibly sad.

Trips to do stuff on the north side of Chicago or on the North shore was an excuse to drop by and see her parents. Even as they endured their last physical days, were still in the area making hospital visits and runs to their senior living apartment.

Now, no more. Her folks weren’t there any more. Her house was someone else’s house.

We’re not one to visit their graves often, and all the business that we had to take care of is long settled. What now? What is there besides memories, the old joyful ones drowned out by newer, rawer, sadder ones?

What is there?

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Hitting a moving target.

A few weeks ago, I began work on another edition of my newsletter. I usually start with some subject headers I want to talk about, then come back to them and fill them out as I’m thinking of them and thinking what to write. Rough outline, then more specific, you understand.

Of course, I wrote about the very large effect our political reality is having on our lives right now.

I went back to it last night, and those concerns I so lightly touched on, so delicately brushed over…are now moot. We are in a fresh NEW hell compared to just two or three weeks ago. That I was concerned about in the last of March now is cookie dough ice cream compared to now in the first weeks of April.

This is untenable.

Posted on by ~tbg~

An afternoon on the other side of the city

Woke up with the thought to run around the city a bit, but decided to go back to my old neighborhood. After my divorce, I got myself a one-bedroom apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, a densely populated area with a ton of retail and public transport options on the north side of the city.

I ended up walking about 4 miles today, and as I always notice when I’m up there, I enjoy the vibes and what I’m able to do while I’m in the vicinity, but the reality is that those kinds of resources don’t exist on the south side where I live.

I had a list of things I wanted to do, but three were most important. One was to find a bottle of bourbon we can’t seem to find on our side of town. Two and three were more of my vices, namely, going to Unabridged Bookstore and visiting the Chicken Hut, both on Broadway.

I lived in that neighborhood for three years, in the days before Apple Watches and even Fitbits, and while I have no idea how many miles I walked, I stayed fit. The Belmont el stop was about three quarters of a mile away, there was a Walgreens two blocks away, a record store down the block, and a Chipotle on the corner. It was kinda perfect.

People who live there are very jaded with regards to having access to the stuff they have access to, but the old adage of “you don’t miss it til its gone” is pretty stark.

I walked into Unabridged with joy in my heart; I really enjoy bookstores in general, and I really enjoy that they cycle in art books and graphic novels, and their numerous placards explaining why a staff member likes some book or another litter the shelves. It feels like it’s run by people who like books, want you to like books, and will probably be first on the chopping block when neocon assholes decide to target independent bookstores that won’t bend to this anti-intellectualism/anti-“DEI”/anti-queer wave that’s permeating political America.

Anyway, I took my time there, and ended up buying a book and a tote bag with a great pen-and-ink drawing of the distinctive front of the building the bookstore is located. What happened next really made me happy…and sad at the same time.

Outside the front door, is a bench. An actual bench. An actual space where I could sit and rearrange my bags. There is a growing paranoia in urban areas that free seating attracts homeless people; how dare he homeless want to sit down! How dare they be outside! The side effect of this was that no one could sit, no one could rest without buying something in an establishment and basically buying the right to rest.

So I got to sit on that bench, unbothered and unfettered, and I thought about my present. Here I was, years removed from my home being a few blocks away, years removed from Obama and a new uncertain for me in a ton of ways. But my present is also populated by being cognizant of circumstances that made my present possible. Why are there so few benches? And to my wonderment, why can I not have this where I live now?

I got up after taking a breath, and went to Chicken Hut. Chicken Hut is on the corner, and specialized in roasted chicken served with a side, some salsa, and hot pita bread. My half chicken with fountain drink costs $18, and I sat and watched a Spanish broadcast of some soccer game. The fountain machine had Pepsi, and I had multiple cups of a fruit punch/pink lemonade mix.

It was the same meal I had had many times years ago, and when my parents came to visit me, I proudly paid for their quarter chicken with rice meals. It was a link to my past, and it was completely nourished my stomach and my soul; sometimes the good guys win, and in a neighborhood where the Chipotle is gone and a number of avant-garde spots have popped up, their success makes me happy.

As I rode home with my wife’s Chicken Hut order, traveling down Lake Shore Drive through downtown, I am thankful for the opportunity to do what I do, move how I move, and how I got to this point in my life.

Posted on by ~tbg~ 2

The Art of War

Explosions rocked the grassy terrain, kicking up huge clods of dirt and plant bits and critter offal into the air. Jeremiah’s tanks rolled on unaffected, taking up a flanking position to infantry on the ground advancing in the west. Behind them, artillery boomed, huge things that belched smoke and fire.

Jeremiah watched from his perch high above the fighting. He was curious as to the nature of war and, for all the books he had read about it, it seemed easy. He remembered Jonah, the bully in his third grade class, who had told him something totally meaningful. “It don’t matter how much heart you got, or whatever it is grown ups say,” he spat through three missing teeth. “It’s how hard you punch the other kid in the face. Heart don’t have shit to do with that.”

As Jeremiah looked upon his army, he noticed that he indeed had the capability to punch the other kid in the face pretty damned hard. He had read about flanking, and feints, and shock and awe. He listened as his dad, a veteran of what he called “The Keyboard Wars” wax poetic about psychological warfare, and of being right all of the time, and all of the wars he had participated in and won.

But here before him was war. Bombs and bullets and some lasers too. He imagined the drone jockeys in some far off bunker remotely controlling instruments of death from the comfort of their own work-from-home chairs.

He remembered a time where he had scrimmaged against his older brother Dion, who had moved on to greener pastures to civilian life. It was only once, but it had left a huge mark. Dion had left his army in shambles after only a few tactical maneuvers, putting his younger brother on the defensive quickly and tragically. Jeremiah remembered being angry in the moment, then wondrous, then accepting that he had much to learn.

But those lessons had a indelible effect. And now, while pitched battle raged below, he sat satisfied as divisions of man and machine plowed their way forward. 

So intent was he on the battle unfolding below that he didn’t hear the person coming up on him. Finally sensing someone else, he jumped and whirled around.

“My, you’re really into that,” his mother said, hugging him and getting down on the floor with him. “You playing war again?” She took care not to sit on any of the green plastic army men, the plushies, and assorted Legos. She did notice, however, a few of her hair rollers and a rubber ducky that had gone missing some time before had second lives as members of Jeremiah’s army and air force.

“Yeah!” Jeremiah exclaimed, eager to show his mother of plans well laid and battle well met.

rev2 – 3.12.25

Posted on by ~tbg~

Joy of Art, part one.

Recently, I was in Miami, and I got a hankering to go do art stuff. There is a Museum of Graffiti in the Wynwood neighborhood, and a Taschen book store.

I’ve been to Miami just once before, and we didn’t stay long enough to really do much. This time, we had a couple of days, and so I was relaxed in figuring out how I wanted to move and what. wanted to see.

First off, I was amazed by the vibe in Wynwood. The vibe was great, and the amount of street art everywhere was unlike anywhere else I’d been. The colors, the variety, the sheer volume of it all! I was snapping pictures out the car consistently.

The Museum of Graffiti is small but mighty. A relatively small space, given it’s expansive subject matter, but it is a must for fans of the art. Graffit has expanded past the aerosol on the walls; now we’re doing corporate disruption, billboard “adjustment”, and spotlighting writers from oppressive regimes around the world. We suffer from a sense of the art world (among other things) revolving around us as Americans, and graffiti is truly a worldwide expression. I dropped some good money in the gift shop.

In the same block is the Art of Hip Hop museum, and it is also small, but the exhibit on view was one that opened my eyes. Cey Adams was the art director for Def Jam Records in their Golden Age, when they were making serious cultural inroads from Run DMC and the Beastie Boys to the ascendancy of Jay-Z and 50 Cent. I had no idea who he was, but I knew his work, and they had a collection of work he’d done, along with videos, shirts, and other designs he was responsible for. Illuminating, and a great use of time.

I was asked, as I was walking out, if I’d been to the art gallery which handles the works by both museums. The two spaces have a cooperative set up, and I was very interested in the work at that intersection of graffiti and hip-hop. The gallery was situated between the two; I had walked by and missed it. So I stopped in.

I spect the next two hours in that gallery.

Thing is, I don’t get to talk art a lot. My friend group and I look at art, and I talk about particular pieces with others, but I got to sit and talk about art, specifically modern art. Where is it going, who are the main players, what we really thought of their work and their reach.

While having these talks, I was able to look at works from a Graf artist I’ve been knowing about since my beginnings. To be in the room with works that were selling for six figures were….not humbling, but definitely an eye-opener. There is room to talk about art as a vehicle for money laundering, and room to talk about art as a function of a soiety beset by AI and work demands and growing poverty, but right then? I was immersed in what I saw and what I felt and dusting off the vocabulary to describe it all.

Afer I left without buying anything, I made my way back to the hotel, snapping pictures as I went. Murals, bright colored characters, wall burners – I was amazed at the work it took not only to make them, but the efforts the city put into maintaining it.

It was a great trip, and I came back energized and ready to make things. Which is the point, right?

Posted on by ~tbg~

After.

In my planner, I called it “After”.

That’s it.

I’ve written about the stuff we’ve been going through, and I am constantly amazed and grateful for the kind words and extra-squeezy hugs that have come my way. Over the past year, I’ve lost my father- and mother-in-law and two uncles, so Death and I are quite familiar.

But now, is the After.

Now we’re trying to see what is normal, what will not trigger those memories which make us pause and tear up. All of those home projects we had on the docket, which were on hold while we watched this all play out, have to be done.

Or do they?

The normal winter urge to nest, to make the house as comfy as possible, is starting to recede as spring and summer approach, even in the Upper Midwest. Change is happening.

We’ve had too much change here lately.

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Weary.

One thing about death is the thoughts that happen after it has touched your life. Memories, wishes, hopes, can all be hyper-analyzed and second-guessed til the cows come home or your blood pressure spikes, whichever comes first.

Over the past year, I’ve had to talk about death a lot. I’ve lost a lot of people in the past 8 months, and I’m still not right, but I noticed something that, well, isn’t the most socially acceptable thing to say out loud.

Death is a release in many ways. Not only from the mortal coil, but, amongst the living, the..relief? And that’s hard to say and admit, but it’s true.

For the past two months, I’ve been in a holding pattern while my mother-in-law declined. Watching that was painful, and to see someone I had so much respect and love for come closer and closer to death ate away at me. My wife, watching her mother encounter one medical hurdle after another, made a habit of driving an hour each way to be there for her, being her advocate in the hospital and in her hospice bed. Many a time I came home to an empty house, watching my phone for text updates.

With her gone, things are drastically different. No more hospital runs. No more light sleep, dreading the 3am phone call from a medical professional. The house projects could be scheduled again, knowing we’d be home for the AC man or the cleaners or the plumber. Possibilities opened back up, and that feels weird to say.

Of course, given my druthers, I’d rather have my mother-in-law still here. But quality of life is really important, and she decided she wanted no more parts of hospital beds and intubation, and I think to be able to go out on your own terms is a blessing we all won’t get to have.

But the collective exhale…she’s in a better place, free from pain…and the world, for the living, can start spinning again.

Posted on by ~tbg~