Brooklyn Diasporist Newsletter | August 19, 2020

Item 1: Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was a sight to behold. As I recall, plans to close it were already in motion by the time I moved here in 1997 but it was at that time still very much in use, and very much part of the landscape, especially crossing the Narrows from Brooklyn. The New York Times did an extended piece on Fresh Kills’ evolution into a planned network of parks and reclaimed wetlands.

Item 2: Bandcamp Daily posted an article on composer Julius Eastman. Seemingly and perhaps largely forgotten until the last few years, Eastman was confrontational and fearless, a social and cultural provocateur, expressing matters of the Black struggle and the LGBTQ movement of his day.

Item 3: Wired recently ran a feature on Afrofuturism discussing what it can teach us in terms of ending and recovering from the ongoing and established cruelties and injustices of systemic racism. The article reiterates that Afrofuturist work distinguishes itself from other speculative art by maintaining its focus on Black lives and consciousness, asking not only “what tomorrow’s hoverboards and flying cars are made of,” for example, but also “who will build them? And does their commercial use fall out of their utility in military or law enforcement?”

Item 4: Tommy Orange, author of last year’s extraordinary collection of stories called There, There, had a terrific pandemic-related piece in The New Yorker last month.

Item 5: I recently re-watched Bush Mama, a film by Haile Gerima made in Watts, Los Angeles in 1975. The film is a fine example of the work known collectively as the L.A. Rebellion, and tells the story of Luann, a woman with increasingly few choices and less relief from the pressures she faces as a single mother with a wrongly-incarcerated husband and a young daughter. The film is comparatively raw, shot in 16mm black and white and in a sometimes quite direct (the use of close-ups on Luann’s face) and other times experimental (the scenes of T.C., Luann’s husband, in prison) style. I picked up the DVD (which also contains two of Germia’s early short films, including “Hourglass”) but you can watch the film on YouTube.

Item 6: Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.” ― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude