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.

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”.

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.

I went to the library today and I got a couple of books that were on my to-read list. One was by Larry McMurtry, noted author a quite a few books about the Wild West and cowboys and such, called “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.” It’s a book of his recollections of his growing up in the context of storytelling; where he grew up, everyone was working, and there was very little time to sit around and tell stories. Part of his point (I’m on page 70 at the moment) is that storytelling loses a lot in a society where everyone is either too busy to listen or have nowhere to go to laze around and listen.

When I started the book, I was put off a bit. Here was this white dude, speaking of a country long gone, of a people who inevitably vote Republican and proudly don’t go more than 20 miles from where they’re born. The kind of people for whom work is a currency, and social issues boil down to “I have it bad, and no one else should really have it better than me.”

Anyway, what drew me in was our community. He spoke about the stories of his childhood, and I saw a ton of parallels. He was made to do the manual work of a rural life, but everyone sensed that he just wasn’t good at it. He got ahold of some books and was sold; these Anglophile writers wowed him with their language and their storytelling. He saw how he could apply those lessons to the stories he wanted to tell.

The difference, which became glaring to me, is that he wanted to immerse himself in that Anglophile world. The world of European writers, who he was introduced to and were soon lifted up as examples and roadmaps to follow. I’m a bit different, and I hope others are, too. The key is a saying that I’ve heard over and over – “if you know better, do better.”

I cannot imagine a list of inspirations that doesn’t include James Baldwin or Audre Lorde. Pablo Neruda and Amy Tan. Alexander Chee and Ta-Nehisi. And I mourn the people who look to Europe for these classic writers but don’t see the talent under their regional noses because “woke” or “diversity writer”. What treasures he missed!

The book was published in 1999, and now I have to wonder if he didn’t read the older writers because he didn’t know about them, or they weren’t “as good” as the people he names as influences. And that’s the rub with being a non-white person consuming media; you are surrounded by such great talents, see them every day, seek them out, read them, wonder at the sentence structure and ways to turn a phrase…and find out that there are people who are so hung up on the European artists that were allowed to publish and be lionized those many years ago.

But at the end of the day, the urge to read, to consume, to be influenced by all that the world has to offer is its own reward. I grew up in a different Wild West, but while I can struggle with questions of representation and who gets to be the big name and who can’t, I can connect with him on essential questions of environment and telling stories. You know, human traits and qualities that can shine in my writing just as they do with his.

I believe that the law should apply to everyone.

If your crime is payable by a fine, then that’s just the going rate for doing a bad thing.

I believe that we are not put on this earth to work.

I believe that those without still deserve a place to live, food to eat, and all of their human rights met, and not at their minimum.

If more police is the answer, then the question is stupid.

Racism is stupid logically, in theory, and in practice. All the isms, actually, are roadblocks to a better society.

Real change isn’t comfortable, and a lot of people have found comfort in the status quo.

Travel is the number one thing in realizing that you are a citizen of the world.

Old people need to be taken care of.

Young people deserve a chance.

Fear is a helluva motivator and plot point.

A twitch of your right index finger can kill multitudes of people, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Let’s start where we are. We may not have much time left.