I'll never forget the time --- so much confusion between race and love still pent up in the glove compartments of our experience who knows what might come out with it's hands up---- we were in college at UC Berkeley, probably had studying to do, but on one of our ritual who-cares-what-night-it-is we need to find this music, excursions in San Fransisco dreaming up ways to sneak me into a DJ Shadow show since I was 'underage.' The rest of the crew had made it to 21 but I had a year to go. A previous attempt to sneak into a performance by Wesley Willis at a benevolent Berkeley pub fittingly named the Starry Plough, had been unsuccessful. Unless you call success being turned away with your other too-young homie and drowning your f.o.m.o. in greasy Chinese food. So we were feeling like we needed to be a little more bold and strategic this round. We drove up and down the hills of sf for what felt like hours looking for parking, playing Bjork remixes on repeat and singing I miss you but I haven't met you yet in unison like a prophecy for all the coming into our own we wanted to be doing collectively and as individuals. We were earnest about it. Pre-race, not post race. But what is pre-race in the context of an elitist United States university, a group of friends in a safe German-built vehicle, mostly white, one mulatto (innocent as charged), and an Asian and an Indian, bumping an Icelandic pop diva's anthem about the something missing. Is pre-race the feeling of something missing that spawned the hostile, voyeuristic, rampage that we name colonialism in the first place, or first degree? The reason we were all able to be earning our first degree in the same American empire. When we parked and got out of the car and headed for the club, my tall blond homie took a prideful survey of my fro and outfit and exclaimed, don't worry about getting in, people should have to pay to look at you. What naive nobility to see our shared pride in one another as casual and not remote, as a finger wiped across the sil of the subconscious, Intruding on the Dust. That's the part that started me thinking I'll never forget... It made me feel proud and sold out at the same time. A little righteous, a little trite, a little light, a little bright, a little lightbright, a little bit, shit, you're right. A lot suspicious of what it meant to be right. I didn't manage to sneak into the show, but my fear of missing out had been assuaged on the spot, almost for good, cured in the shadow world.
But then there was the time in Portugal with a white boyfriend. We'd ventured into a small town on the outskirts of Lisbon and my fro, and the outfit I chose were just as Commodify you Dissent like, common but bright like a diamond, and this time, as we walked around the town, me being the only one who could speak the language, cars halted and honked, people pointed or stopped on the street to try and touch my hair like I was a walking museum. I thought of Josephine Baker, I thought of my father, I told my boyfriend we needed to go back to Lisbon immediately before I became a scene from Dave Chapelle's When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong and told these curious, invasive neo-colonial or pre-race Portuguese village people about themselves. His response: why are you complaining about getting attention? Right then I knew, you could almost queue that hip hop anthem, He's not the one. But the feeling uniting and severing these two events in my mind, the way the bind into a continuum and sometimes a vacuum where screams and silence are mutually primal, that feeling lingers and lures me into the heart of difficult discussions, and shoots beyond the droopy wings of left-brain analysis into the well of well sheeeit, I guess I should listen to the Velvet Underground and think about it and remember the time I realized again, how we never forget.
I initially sat down to make a list of divas and collectives of all races creeds and colors, everyone and other I could think of off the top of my head or from the crux of my soul, and this came forward first. This must be version one of my list of divas and collectives, toward a more detailed meditation on the border that separates the gaze or the 'looking at' from love or solidarity, and at the same time the ways that being looked at can feel like love or compensate for the something missing, or how what's often missing is a mutual understanding of the devastatingly subtle difference between praise and parade or between feeling praised and feeling preyed upon. And the common questions will maybe create a common bond. Questions like, What is entertainment? Why does blackness seem to be so intimate with Western models of entertainment or, my favorite euphemism, expressivity, in our synapses and associative minds? Isn't the Black experience rife with uninhibited intimacy? I can hear people wondering behind the semantics of their own minds and mine. What are they doing to Lauryn Hill? What did they do to Michael Jackson? What did they do to Tupac Shakur? What are they doing to Antoine Dodson? What aren't they doing to Charles Ramsey? Who are they? What about your friends? What about you? How come? How come that's entertainment?
