Jet Set Radioooo.

Jet Set Radioooo.

This is my favorite ink piece from last year, ‘Unknown System’. 

“Bridge” 2015

A Nausicaä watercolor.

a moment (in time)

I work in a series of sustained bursts, with either music or movies on in the background. It gives me something to semi-ignore so I can focus or absorb and understand while I write. When I’m cooking, it’s a dead sprint. No breaks and no brakes until I hit my goal. When I’m doing something that needs a little more TLC or instant editing, I allow myself breaks. I’ll read my way through an article over the course of a few hours, coming back to the work once my mind has had a change to solve a few problems in the background. I’ll watch documentaries, action movies, anime, whatever whatever. Yesterday, it was The Black Kung Fu Experience, a PBS documentary on Netflix about the intersection of black American life and Chinese martial arts. I obviously have a vested interest in the subject, and the documentary did a great job of exploring what different people got out of the intersection and influence. I’ve also been mulling over the idea of cultural appropriation and the black kung fu experience, where the line is for that and why. I’ll read whatever comes across my desk from friends or via Twitter, as long as it sounds interesting. A homey sent over Max Fisher’s VOX piece “It’s not just Trump: Islamophobia in America is spiraling out of control.” I made it about to the first sub-headline before tapping out. It’s well-written, but I know where it’s going, and I had to choose between being mad all day and…well still being mad all day, but not being even more mad at a bunch of people I’ll never meet. I read and watched these concurrently; black excellence and cultural exchange on one screen and white supremacy-driven hate on the other. The contrast left a sour taste in my mouth, because one is quite obviously the way forward, and the other purely hate speech. People treat Tump like a joke, but he isn’t, not really. He’s only a joke if you’re not brown. To me, he’s a threat. A clear and present danger. It doesn’t matter if he’s ever president. He’s legitimizing poison while you point and laugh at his toupee and dumb quotes. He’s enabling and justifying violent acts from the ignorant. I had a conversation with myself this year, that “I don’t think I want to have kids any more” conversation, as a direct result of the black condition in America. Everybody I know—to be specific, every brown person I know—that’s paying attention to the struggle is more down than up. Even if you aren’t a victim of state-sponsored violence or homegrown terrorism, you still gotta pay a tax for existing. You gotta set up filters on Twitter so you don’t see it when some idiot retweets yet another picture of dead black people, you gotta deal with schmuck white dudes talking big about police brutality online and in person, you gotta deal with people being given a national platform to use coded language to encourage the death of those you love and respect. You tell yourself it’ll get better in time, but then you see your friends reacting with surprise to a reality you’ve known since before you could read and you realize that it might get a little better, but you’re still vastly outnumbered by people who are perfectly happy with the way things are. There is a gap. And all the self-care in the world ain’t gonna change the fact that you’re barely even human to so many people, and their hate will continue to define you and everything you do until you drop dead.

Improved version of the Nausicaa watercolor.