What I’m reading: Charm. It’s a play by Philip Dawkins.
The story:
“When Mama Darleena Andrews—a 67-year-old, black, transgender woman—takes it upon herself to teach an etiquette class at Chicago’s LGBTQ community center, the idealistic teachings of Emily Post clash with the very real life challenges of identity, poverty, and prejudice faced by her students. Inspired by the true story of Miss Gloria Allen and her work at Chicago’s Center on Halsted, CHARM asks—how do we lift each other up when the world wants to tear us down?”
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If you’re not watching “Lovecraft Country,” you’re missing the best show on TV. Last Sunday’s episode featured a mind-blowing vivisection of race in America. It starred Ruby in a shape-shifting scene that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
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If you’re at all confused about where you should stand regarding Confederate monuments, read Caroline Randall Williams’ “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” It’s a searing, blistering indictment of America’s penchant for myth-making. She writes:
“You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.”
Read it here.
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In my latest newsletter, I talk about writing blocks, the Warren Ellis controversy, and racism in the porn industry.
An excerpt:
There’s been a lot of conversation lately about racism in the porn industry. It is true: There are ways in which the porn industry engages in systemically racist practices. That is not a good thing at all, and I hope that the porn industry works to rectify that wrong. At the same time, I’ve spent over 20 years writing about the porn industry, and the one forever truth in porn was told to me years ago by a producer: If there wasn’t a demand for it, it wouldn’t be made.
Read the rest here, and subscribe here.
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Book a free 15-minute consultation today.
Make sure to read Sarah Stillman's latest in the New Yorker: "Can Behavioral Science Help in Flint?" It's the story of the water trouble in Flint, the quiet problem of helping people make change that will help themselves, and the stark division between race and state.
"Social science—or, more accurately, in some cases, pseudoscience—has a fraught history when it comes to communities of color. Eugenics; phrenology; the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. It’s easy to grasp why, especially in many disenfranchised neighborhoods, the sudden appearance of two cheerful behavioral scientists doling out help 'for the good of the American people' (a phrase of which Shankar is fond) might be met with suspicion. Such wariness hovered over a morning meeting that Shankar and Tucker-Ray had on their second day, at the Genesee County health department."
Stillman is always a great read. She was my mentor at THREAD at Yale in 2015 and won a Genius grant last year.
Klaus Biesenbach, cooler than you'll ever be, is interested in this new Artforum cover.
He 'grams:
"this picture of the current @artforum i carry around for nearly a week, wanting to instagram it on a special day where there is not much before and after, as i feel this is such an important, groundbreaking piece that there needs to be a bit of distance even on instagram to allow for it to be. william pope. l, foraging (asphyxia version) (detail), 1993-1995/2008, digital c-print, 19 1/8 x 18 1/2" from the series 'black domestic project,' 1993-95"
[Klaus Biesenbach]
"The interview is in Russian, but you don’t need Google Translate to see what everyone’s so offended by. It’s the accompanying photograph of Zhukova sitting atop a black woman chair by provocative ’60s pop artist Allen Jones. Jones’ forniphilic chairs were a source of controversy during the height of their popularity in the ’60s, though it’s Buro who have amped up the cringe factor by selecting one of the few pieces that uses a woman of color."
[Styleite]
