I seem to be getting better at this whole food photography thing. This meal was delicious, but it looks even more so in these pictures. Poached Eggs, Goat Cheese Grits, Kale Sauteed with Shallots, Sliced Tomato. The tomato was actually a late addition to the plate. I’ve found that my desire for color in my compositions is doing wonders for the vitamin content of my meals.
Yummy.
Yours Truly
Naima
I seared this center cut, bone-in pork chop with a combination of canola and sesame oil, and then sauteed sliced almonds and chopped pears in the same pan. The pears and almonds went over greens that I drizzled with a bit more sesame oil and seasoned rice vinegar. This is a rare meal that I make just for one because Kristina doesn’t eat mammals. Her loss.
Dear Readers,
For those of you who know me well in the real world, you won’t be surprised to find out that I rarely see the day before 9am, so the fact that I was up at 7am this morning to make breakfast for my special lady friend is quite the feat. I have gotten into the habit of photographing almost every meal that I make, and this morning was no exception.
This particular meal is one of my favorites, though I haven’t indulged in quite a while, mostly because grapefruits are somewhat expensive to come by. The eggs are over hard, which my lady friend didn’t appreciate so much, but made me quite happy. The photograph is pretty good, don’t you think? I think I’ve got the whole DIY food design thing down pretty well. Doesn’t it all look so casual, yet perfect, yet appropriately rough around the edges? Yep, just like everything else in my life.
The photograph doesn’t show that I attempted to read a conversation between Miranda July and James Franco in the Panorama Book Review over that meal. While I am not afraid to admit that I think they are both swell, I found the article far too precious on so little sleep. (Like, we get it. You’re artists and you dropped out of college and you’re quirky because you’re artists. Oops Naima, that’s really snarky. I’m supposed to be all earnest and stuff here.)
Anyway, I made it half way through the article before I decided to start editing the photos I’ve been taking. I’d like to be a really diligent performance artist or whatever and show you how exhaustive my work has been, but I really only want to show you the ones that came out well. Because, you know, I like things that are pretty.
This one of strawberries was taken on Boxing Day, Jan 26, and was one of the first that I took. I discovered early on that my kitchen, while small and often dirty, is a pretty good place for taking photos during the daytime. The light is quite nice. This meal is sliced strawberries with plain yogurt, quinoa, and maple syrup.
I got the idea to start photographing my cooking during a fit of creativity brought about by the fever and clausterphobia while I spent 10 days sick in bed with an ear infection that wouldn’t die. Some of the ideas that I jotted down during those late night sweaty revelations were entirely horrible, but this one is pretty good. I like making food, and I like taking pictures. This is by no means original. I also like looking at pictures of food, especially on the internet. There is also another project in the works related to this that may be more original, but I’m feeling content with the simplicity of joining the ranks of online food enthusiasts.
The baked acorn squash was part of a dinner that I cooked for me, the lady friend, and two friends who came over for a “double date.” I’m not used to such things, so I went all out with the cooking. Also on the menu was: Baked Tilapia, Beet and Greens Tossed Salad, Hoppin’ John (minus the pork), and Portuguese Green Wine. I think we had ice cream for dessert. The baked pear in the middle is covered in cinnamon and garnished with plain yogurt and maple syrup. Winter makes me want to bake. Last but not least are my famous chocolate chip coconut peanut butter cookies. Winter makes me want to bake a lot.
So dear readers, please enjoy the fruits of my labor and stay tuned for more.
Yours Truly,
Naima
I showed my History of Race and Ethnicity in US Cinema class Six Degrees of Separation towards the end of this semester. I saw this film when it first came out, or very soon after, as a teenager. I understood it on a deep and visceral level, as it accounted the story of a fraudulently affluent young black man who found his way into the worlds of wealth white New Yorker’s by pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier. More than that, he affected the tone, gestures, poise and intellect of a black person who lived as both insider and outsider to worlds of privilege. I identified strongly with this message, and with the central character, but found myself strangely angry with the film. It seemed that while Will Smith’s character, Paul, had extraordinary power over the white characters who took him in, he was ultimately just a tool of the narrative. I remember having a similar anger when I read my first post-modern novel Thomas Pynchon’s V., around the same time. The title character is a mysterious dark-skinned woman/entity who means so much to so many people; an exotic foil fulfilling all necessary sexual and intellectual needs for the distraught white characters who so deeply crave connection to the visceral, to creation, to the “real.” I remember reading it in my prep school dorm room (yes, I’m that girl), loving the eloquence and complexity of the prose so much that I couldn’t put it down at 3am, but periodically throwing the book across the room as my only possible reaction to my frustration with its profound symbolic exploitation of dark-skinned figures.
In Six Degrees, Paul is a charismatic, young, gay black man, who predictably disappears and is presumed dead by the final act of the film, which leads to an (unnamed, it’s an art film after all) epiphany on the part of the central character, Ouisa, played by Stockard Channing. Paul, like so many black characters before and after him, is the catalyst and vessel of change and learning for the white characters around him, rather than someone who is able to achieve viable change for or within himself. They chase him, learn from him, take comfort in and learn lessons from his dark and mysterious wisdom…
He is the epitome of the Magical Negro.
Now, arguably, John Guare is making some level of commentary on this very phenomena within the film (and in the play on which the screenplay is based), by attributing Paul’s sublime manipulative powers to his ability to recognize the white guilt of his wealthy white targets. It is not an accident that he chooses Sidney Poitier to impersonate. As Ouisa points out, Paul’s father isn’t just any movie star, he is Sidney Poitier, “Barrier breaker of the ’50s and ’60s.” He is the son of Sidney Poitier, a man with such poise, such grace, and such quiet rage. He is always in control, until someone pushes him just a little too far. He is always well dressed, well spoken, tough, stoic, intense, searing, and always ALWAYS so incredibly dignified.
Soon enough, my dear 5 readers, I’m going to embark on a project of watching every single Sidney Poitier film I can get my hands on, chronologically, from Now Way Out 1950 to The Jackel 1997. I’ve had a quiet obsession with Mr. Poitier for quite a while, so I figure now it is time to make it a bit louder.
Sidney Poitier originates so many things, and I can do nothing but marvel at his star image. From a distance, I’ve imagined him to be something of the original Magical Negro (or at least of the Civil Rights Era), as he fulfills so many extraordinary needs for his audience and white co-stars, but does so with this constant sense of quiet frustration. Interestingly enough, his Oscar Winning performance for Lillies of the Field came out in the same year as Pynchon’s V., 1963, when my parents were teenagers struggling to become the kind of intellectually well heeled black folk who could send their daughter to prep school on scholarship 30 years later so that she could have the profound opportunity to throw a Thomas Pynchon book across the room.
Naturally, this makes me want to look closer at Mr. Poitier.
I worry constantly (not just in this project, in everything I invent) about creating my own Magical Negros. I need mythic figures to carry meaning for me just like everyone else. I’ve imbued sexless drifters with magical wisdom to central characters. Granted, the first and last time I did this overtly, it was in the form of a giant purple hippopotamus named George, and thankfully no-one ever saw that play. I’m trying to look closely at this phenomena, but I sometimes fear that I’ll just become more clever in ability to exploit. As I chase down Sidney Poitier, I will try not to cast him as the placeholder in my need for emotional or spiritual wish fulfillment. Our Sidney is more than just a placeholder.
This weekend I finally saw the film, Children of Men. This dystopian action/road movie stars Clive Owen as a sort of “everyman” named Theo who gets dragged into a quest to protect and transport a young woman named Kee to safety in 2019 Britain. The particular apocalypse that’s slowly bubbling around the characters has been brought about by global infertility (of unknown origins) that has caused mass chaos and civil unrest. Britain has one of the only functioning governments, and refugees are flooding borders constantly seeking safe haven, only to be placed in jails and atrociously violent refugee camps. Kee, a refugee from an unamed part of Africa, turns out to be pregnant, and her unborn child represents incredible power, hope and possibility for the future. The ensuing story is deftly told, and one can’t help but notice that virtuosity of director Alfonso Cuarón‘s use of long-takes in complex action sequences. He is a very very clever exploiter.
For you see, one can’t help but notice that Kee is an extraordinary example of the Magical Negro. She’s literally carrying everyone’s hopes and dreams in her belly. She thankfully doesn’t die or disappear at the end of the film, and she does manage to have some personal will distinct from the needs of those around her. She doesn’t impart too much magical wisdom, though that role is generally given to the males of the Magical Negro species. Men impart and occasionally heal or protect. Women are vessels, and often unknown carriers of their magic.
But I digress. The point I’m making here is that Kee isn’t a particularly egregious example of the Magical Negro. She’s no Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, or Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost or Morgan Freeman in almost every role he’s had in the last 20 years (other than his Black Detectives, ‘cus that’s a whole different story.) The Green Mile actually had me laughing through most of the film, despite the fact that it’s largely a melodrama, because Michael Clark Duncan’s John Coffey is such a Magical Negro that he has the power to literally remove the suffering from a white man’s penis with his beautiful black bare hands. He teaches them all such wonderful things about themselves. And he saves a little white girl if memory serves.
And then he dies.
Luckily for me, Sidney Poitier is neither dead nor actually Magical, though I have as much chance of meeting him as I have of curing all of my weird middle class black kid anxieties just by watching his movies.
Yours Truly
Naima
For the last few years I’ve had that iconic image of a man sitting in his basement apartment illuminated by 1369 light bulbs from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I have been thinking about ways to interpret that image or use it as a jumping off point for some new work. Still pre-occupied, as I am, with using (or else losing?) my hard earned skills as a photographer and cinematographer, my first thought was to stage the image in some way, and then take a photograph or make some sort of short film. Alas, someone smarter and more famous than I has already done so.
Jeff Wall "After Invisible Man, The Prologue 1999-2000"
Moments like these inevitably make me curse my ignorance when it comes to contemporary art (apparently Jeff Wall is famous), and cause me to massively doubt my ability to avoid being derivative. Which is funny, given that the project inherently asks for such scrutiny as a remake/re-rendering of one of the most famous works of African-American literature.
Today while doing my research, I didn’t give up entirely, though my pluck seems to have diminished. I’m not surprised or overly annoyed that I’m so sensitive to such things. I’m a young, struggling artist and while wide fame and fortune aren’t my largest goals, I do have to consider my work in relationship to those working in similar fields. I’m more bothered by the fact that I’ve started to think about potential project in the context of how they might seem to people who might hire me to teach. Again, I’m not naive; I know that this matters. But academics are a small corner of my already miniscule audience, and if I’m going to focus outward in any way, it seems more pragmatic to think about my creative, political, social, personal and academic circles as a whole.
But even as I read this, I’m struck by this whole concept of “audience.” What do I need from an audience? Validation? Press? Feedback? Funding? Love?
Not to worry my five whole readers. I haven’t given up hope. I’m just trying to gently nudge myself out of this creative slump that I seem to have entered since leaving the not-so-gentle embrace of graduate school. I think that the only way to do this is to get over myself and just keep making things.
Easier said than done.
Yours Truly
Naima
Ah, Thanksgiving. Another U.S. holiday celebrating mass slaughter, filled with made up traditions (it was duck not turkey), and grotesque consumer tie-ins. I’ve always thought that the term Black Friday derived from the various plagues given to indigenous people after eating with the colonists. Apparently the term was an invention of the Philadelphia Police in the mid 1960s to describe all of the traffic and chaos in Center City. Leave it the Philadelphia Police to come up with all the best stuff.
However, my dear readers (there are now 5 of you! That’s something to be thankful for!) Thanksgiving is the only one of the thoroughly imperialist/quasi-Christian holidays that my family has ever had any use for. There was the occasional trip to see Fourth of July fireworks on the Charles River when we lived in Cambridge, but I always just forget about Columbus day until it comes up and bites me on the ass. I don’t recall anyone trying to convince me that Santa was actually real, or that our lives were especially influenced by the birth of Jesus.
But as a child, Thanksgiving often involved a trip to see relatives or a big dinner with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese, and pie. We’re sweet potato people, not pumpkin people. And we prefer talking and maybe going to the movies to watching football. We thank each other for our blessings for the year, which include good health, proximity to loved ones, creative abundance, and many moments of pure joy.
Our gathering will be small. Just me, my mother, my great-aunt, my sister, my niece and my girlfriend at my mother’s 2 bedroom flat in Cambridge. My mom will do most of the cooking, and it will be good. After major turkey take-in, the girlfriend and I might go to a movie. Over the rest of the weekend we’ll visit my father in Somerville and we’ll visit my girlfriend’s family in Rhode Island. There will likely be some sort of minor family drama to observe/participate in through a haze of white wine. My niece will be overwhelmed to meet her “cousins,” my girlfriend’s 6 nieces and nephews. I will make the sweet potato pie, from my grandmother’s recipe.
Have you noticed the snide tone melt away, my 5 whole readers?
Yes, me too.
Yours Truly
Naima
In the last six months or so, I’ve heard the following phrase several times from several different people, and it has made me thoroughly cranky: “In a way, we’re all Artists.”
Now, all three of you reading know that my art practice features a mix of more rarified, highly skilled pieces and things that explicitly reject the idea of art as something created outside ones everyday existence. The three of you may also know that in the realm of “media arts” I’m thoroughly interested in understanding the impact of various institutional modes of creation and how they shape/are shaped by the creative people around them. As in, I’m just as amazed by YouTube celebrities as I am by Julie Dash as I am by Peter Greenaway as I am by Kara Walker delving into film and video in her recent work.
I’m also invested in debunking the notion of “artist” as a category reserved for cultural elites (I am in this category, so this is a tricky thing to debunk), and those who otherwise have “time to kill” while normal people are stuck getting real jobs. And I’m often exhausted by reminding myself and others that ideas of “good art,” bad art,” “fine art,” “political art,” “trained art,” “outsider art,” “community art,” “conceptual art,” “craft,” etc etc are entirely coded by class, access and cultural hegemony. Each of these modes of cultural production has their own sets of institutional norms and practices, and are impacted by the flow of capital and aesthetic/political position relative to the cultural elite.
And yet, when I hear people say “Well, we’re all ‘artists’ in our way,” I get annoyed.
Perhaps I’m overly sensitive because I’m trying to pay off my art school loans on a working artists’ salary, (actually, on an art teacher’s salary, because most artists actually get to also be at least three other things in order to stay afloat). But the statement “We’re All Artists” feels so disingenuous at times, especially when I hear it from people who have well-paying, middle class/upper middle class jobs in specialized fields that require their own type of training and experience. What would happen if I was talking to a civil rights lawyer about their work and said, “Well, we’re all Civil Rights Lawyers, in our way, right?” or “We’re all Labor Organizers in our way” or what about “We’re all Cardiologists, in our way”?
I get that there is artistry and creativity in everything that we do, but I also feel protective of those of us who bust our asses on the daily to operate as artists. In capitalism, most artists are expected/have to more or less give their work away. There are a few who become art stars, receiving critical and financial success within one of the various art markets. But most of us essentially create work in the interest of being able to continue to make more work. Our labor is vastly devalued, regardless of whether we’ve received specialized training, had lives of privilege, or feel entitled to the word “artist” in the first place. And unfortunately this model is just as prevalent (if not more so) within progressive circles. How many times have we heard people talk smack about the amount that artists charge for their work, or about having “sold out” by getting a contract with a major record label or film studio? Or how often do we, as people interested in social justice, expect our artists to only speak from a very specific polemical political position, or to otherwise justify their existence by the work’s ability to be commodified by the movement?
So yeah, it feels like a slap in the face to hear that everyone/anyone gets to be what I’ve (and many many many others, who have had even fewer tangible markers of success than I have) fought tooth and nail every day to become.
And perhaps I’m overly sensitive because in the interest of making a decent living, I’m using the creativity and artistry of teaching as my main source of actual income, and this work takes up more of my time than I’d like to admit.
So tell me, my three dear readers. Am I just being a snob with a chip on her shoulder, or should I start to find ways to address this issue among my peers?
Yours Truly,
Naima
There’s an article today in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Adjunct Awareness Week at Temple University. The actions are organized by the Adjunct Organizing Committee. I am theoretically a part of this organization. As in, I’m an adjunct at Temple University, and I am interested in fair labor practices, and I’m on the email list. However, I haven’t been to an action or a meeting in for as long as I can remember. I get pangs of guilt every time I hear about the paltry protests, because I know that this matters, and that I am as frustrated as many of my peers about the poor working conditions. But it’s a total Catch-22, because going to those meetings and seeing those protests can almost make me feel even worse, because they are so poorly attended. It is hard to make the case that Adjuncts are demanding better conditions when only (according to the Inquirer article) 10 people show up to the protest. Cue the guilt.
For those of you who don’t know, as an Adjunct, I have no job security, no benefits, very little access to professional development, no office, no real support from my department, and the pay is well… BAD. I do it because I happen to like it, and because, frankly, even though I’ve applied like hell to all manner of other full time positions, this is what I’ve got going on in this economy. I don’t think I’m alone in this particular scenario. So I’m well aware that as an adjunct there are, in fact, very poor working conditions and I know that the University depends on my willingness to work for cheap to maintain its bottom line. The confusing irony, of course, is that while more and more adjuncts are hired to teach, and more and more lay-offs of full time staff occur, tuition keeps going up and up. Read that Chronicle article I linked to in this paragraph. The author explains this stuff way better than I do.
But I digress. I’m concerned with why I, and perhaps other Adjuncts, find it hard to get involved in organizing for better pay and benefits withing our chosen profession. For one thing, I think that there’ s a certain complacency built into this system. People enter the land of the “Adjunct’ with the expectation that they will move on to something bigger and better eventually (that’s certainly what goes through my head), and so getting involved in organizing for better pay and benefits feels sort of problematic/a waste of time. Part of the reason that this system of grossly underpaying large portions of the teaching workforce at a University stays in place is that many of us see it as a necessary evil or stepping stone. Our professors and peers with full time positions all did it, and then found better jobs, so why make a fuss? Of course, many of them got those jobs (and are holding on to them for dear life!) before the current over-crowding of the academic marketplace with highly qualified candidates.
I also wonder if we Adjuncts, who are largely people with advanced degrees (MAs, MFAs, PhDs, etc) find it difficult to think of themselves as “workers.” I know that I often internally cringe when I talk about the problems involved with my jobs (yes, multiple, as is the case with most Adjuncts, unless they are independently wealthy). On the one hand I was raised as a good quasi-socialist progressive type who sees the essential flaws in capitalism, supports unions, abhors the treatment of the poor and working class people in our economy, and thus (with requisite middle-class guilt) wonders how I can in good conscience put my over-educated, culturally privileged self into the same category. I know, I know. This analysis is rife with problems, but I think there’s something to it! I imagine that many adjuncts have a similar mix of political left-ness, class privilege and (thus) guilt about their position in the world. And I think that my “guilt” may also be a mask for not WANTING to align myself with whatever f*cked up stereotype I have about people involved in labor unions. My family, supposedly, ascended beyond “worker” status, onto become full fledged intellectuals, artists, activists even! And so now, even though I’m nominally employed, and other members of my immediate family are unemployed, underemployed, riddled with debt, facing evictions, etc, I can’t help wonder how my ambivalence towards taking part in Temple’s organizing is related to my sense of shame in having all this amazing cultural capital, but very little actual capital to show for it.
What should I do my 3 dear readers?
Yours Truly,
Naima
This past Saturday I dealt a serious death blow to the video tape.
I ended up having a room filled with 50 people screaming “I am Fat!” and doing Richard’s moves in a beautiful art deco movie theater as part of the Flickering Light Film Series.
I think that I may have had a better time at film school if I was asked to watch and consider these, instead of all the 1960s/1970s American “realism” that gave my professors a hard on. Oh well.
Yours Truly, Naima 