Harlem Renaissance with Eagle Academy (HS)

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families. This was the first Great Migration, seen in photographs, art, poetry and music. Many African Americans moved to industrial cities; their children were born into a world that was different then those of previous generations, shifting from more rural to urban communities which inherently created the rise of a new black identity. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). The largest concentration of African Americans who migrated during the Great Migration moved to Harlem. From the 1910s to mid-1930s, the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City became a hub of African American culture, with an explosion of literature, music, theater, and the arts. This time is considered a “golden age” in African American culture. 

Artists, musicians and writers were telling a specific story about the working person, survival, the environments they existed in and the multiple aspects of self that were contained in each person's experience: artists in this time were illustrating the struggles that Black Americans face.

Art Assignment: Tell me what you see - coloring/creating our landscape.

Ink and shadows share a common ancestry

I think poetry is an act of translation.

I thought about this after choking on my high school French as I engaged with the owner of this tiny sweet crepe and coffee shop I recently discovered in my neighborhood, one of the many businesses that have sprung up in the pandemic like mushrooms after the rain. Something about tasting the nuances of our different native languages as we wove them together strikes me as a particularly naked experience - ripples of pink embarrassment when I run out of knowledge, admittance of dreams deferred by reality, to explore and be explored by an encounter with foreign landscapes. Would I even recognize myself on the streets of Paris? What parts of myself would be revealed to me when removed from my context? Am I attracted to his foreign-ness or his openness in the face of it, the way the angle of the sun makes his brown eyes look like gold or amber, or maybe that he is about to hand me something delicious?

Poetry exists in the aftermath of the exchange, as much as it did in the experience of it. The residue of noticing the fleeting shadows and transitions, minute shifts in our perception that hold their own effervescent gravity, where the words used to mark them become pregnant with meaning before being washed away by the next rhythm of needs and realities asking us to respond.

Thresholds of emergence

During the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Pandemic, a bad situation finally broke. Like a storm, a drenching sigh of relief after the build up, fraught like a headache from the increased barometric pressure and the static shock of touching everything because the positives and negatives in the atmosphere are all fucked up and you can't brush your hair or get dressed or touch your animals without being reminded the something is coming. Being hyper prepared can be as impotent as being zero prepared it turns out.

I was riding my bike out to Bayridge, Brooklyn everyday for two weeks in august, to finish the mural I had developed with the students before the schools shut down. An hour each way, through Hassidic and Italian neighborhoods, the morning ride smelled like rugelach pastries and the evening ride home smelled of calamari. The morning I finally pulled the plug on this relationship nightmare, I remember whipping through Prospect Park, from top to bottom on my way to paint and being flooded with all of the rich shades of green, and so many verdant smells, too many to count or name. It felt like a revelation I've been chasing for years, through studying art and later meditation and finally falling in something like love - what it was to be filled with my own experience.

I only recently started gaining access to the heavy combination of tired and sad that I'm realizing is Grief. A lifetime of previously ungrieved moments have overwhelmed me while I desperately try to figure out how to deal with everything coming up and in the process I'm also discovering the previously elusive concept of Self-Care. Something I had always associated with obsessive pampering by people who could afford to prioritize getting their nails and hair done, or endless venti starbucks frappes, or like my mother, who always needed a latte, but the quality never mattered, it could be the locally roasted kind made by an artisan or from Dunkin Donuts for all she could fathom - and especially in the pandemic its been on blast in every instagram ad and hashtagged on every yoga person's post like its a permanent lifestyle for the unoppressed and people who aren't familiar with real stress or hard work. But in the waves of mourning that rock me daily, I've discovered how incredibly stabilizing it can be to let everything go, take my dog for a walk, ask someone to make me a coffee while I stand there, tender as a bruise, held by small acknowledgements and familiar motions - and just how important it can be to go sit in an empty forgotten park with my dog on a bench, writing or speaking into the wind, as my thoughts and feelings bubble up into the space I've made for them to be witnessed, tasted, explored in the sunshine.

The students that I work with are doing the same thing, and I am helping create a space for all of those things to transpire both verbally and artistically, and I'm slightly embarrassed that I have prioritized that experience for everyone but myself. And as I am starting to understand the shape and flavor of my grief, I'm hearing all the different ways it is manifesting for these students - some talk about sadness, or disappointment, or anger, in big ways and in tiny moments - and somehow the word Grief seems too small and distant to contain the richness of the experience. A 2 dimensional word for a labyrinthine process that I am only in the beginning of my journey through. Who am I to offer guidance to them along their paths through similar and different swampland? How do I hold my own process while also trying to help them hold theirs? If I have a history of pushing my own needs aside to hold others, how do I do this work safely, or not see my reflection in all of their experiences, rather then be the mirror they need at the developmental stages they are currently swimming in?

Maybe it isn't about holding at all.

Maybe there is some clue in my bike ride through a million shades of green, which left in their wake the heightened awareness of my capacity to be filled by them briefly and none of the weight of carrying any individual shade with me. Maybe its about becoming more adept at something other then growing dense with gravity, like everything is somehow my responsibility to carry with me. A gross misallocation of muscles that has shaped my body and responses and lenses and sense of selfness. Fleshy distractions and a confusion of resources like an emotional and developmental synesthesia left over from becoming an adult too soon.

I guess the shades of green and grief are not me. The capacity to be filled and then emptied of them however... maybe that's the real story. 

Cracks form in materials to relieve stress

Value dictates alignment
Support precedes movement
When do you stop reaching?

transitional place vs resting place

reaching without a sense of my intention
not knowing the shape of what i'm grasping to pull

the difference between reaching for something
because we are curious
and reaching to do or have something
because we feel insufficient

the difference between weight and force
the relationship between force and words

learning to move is about wanting something
not being able to change means not being alive

however big the tree will be
so must be the roots

the gathered in place might be a resource we carry with us all the time

parts don't hold meaning
the relationships between them hold the meaning

move to learn
learn to move

using space as a playmate
surrounded by requests all the time
letting myself be filled in turns
with down-ness
left-ness
right-ness
back-ness
forward-ness

we all have the capacity to be sensitive
but do we have the tools to process the information coming in?

In Italian the verb 'to feel' is the same as 'to hear'
so to ask in Italian 'How are you feeling?'
directly translates into English as
'How are you hearing yourself?'

The Structure and Development of Cyclones

Performance #1

Watching someone play their computer is really distracting from the content, what does it mean to be a performer in this context, or to be entertained? To be blindfolded or led along some kind of projected or virtual reality pathway seems like it would be really helpful to the partial experience I'm having. How is this series of sounds, this ambient textural landscape any different then listening to the night time street outside, with fragments of conversation and an occasional vehicle like a deep thundering undertone, except all of those observations offer clues and a mood that arises from our observation of it, the sound helps organize our sense of it. I'm not sure where to look, but I know seeing is distracting from what he is offering us, so I close my eyes and try to allow the sounds he is sculpting on his glowing laptop call something out of me.

How much are words lost, when dropped into the expanding universe, without visuals to hold their meaning in our mind's eye? A computer voice recites rich imagery, maybe even story filled poetry, but so disjointed and monotone, I can't follow it, and as soon as I hear the next word, the one before it is lost, unrelated in time or space or my perception. Listening to this deluge of computer generated noises, I wonder what it is we are supposed to connect with here. Algorithms can't replace the sounds we make to communicate with each other, or the desire to hear a response, to feel the resonance of human effort fill the room, to fill us.

What can he offer us? Story fragments? Flooded senses? As the landscape shifts to Raptor noises it seems like an imitation, like offering a robotic animal to an affection starved child - but I imagine that like our advanced skills of finding faces everywhere, we have the potential to connect with this too, electronic animal noises that may somehow speak to some primal part of ourselves.

As the music shifts into nightmare noises, I wonder what he wants us to take away from this performance other then a vague memory of something like the soundtrack to a horror film.



Performance #2

I stood outside for this one, and it sounded like the vocalist screamed from the same place in his body the entire time, an angsty, rage filled, raspy monotone that was a mix of vocal chords and belly. I wonder if his capacity to let himself speak from that place I had no interest in listening to was supported by the energetic quality of the other band members. Were they all in some way reaching to say the same thing? Did they all believe that monotone cry? What is the purpose of lyrics we can't hear - who do they guide in the process of manifesting a song? Maybe they provide something for the music to wrap around, maybe they inspire the emotional quality of the vocals, maybe there is no real difference between voice and guitar in some elemental way - maybe we created instruments to mimic the human voice, and like all tools found a symbiosis around pattern and tonality.



Performance #3

The sound hit me before I got to the place I wanted to stand and the wall of soundwaves felt like trying to walk into an ocean wave, I had to slow down to even function. I wonder why my response to the speed was to become really deliberate in my movements, like I was struggling to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. There is a quality of held breath, like playing with such focused intensity leaves little muscular room for the action of breathing, but maybe that was just me forgetting how to inhale. Stretches of fierce repetition so clearly mirror in my mind the chanting or fervent prayer of devout believers in whatever style of religion you could look into, and it amazes me to watch the drummer at the edge of disorientation from such impassioned repeated muscular actions but never quite losing himself in the process. The vocalist has a higher pitched quality to the sound he makes then I am used to expecting from a metal band, and it reminds me of what I imagine a Grecian siren to sound like singing men to their death, or that of a Banshee, who in Irish mythology heralds the death of a family member, usually by wailing, shrieking, or keening. Sound overwhelms my ears, but I am becoming aware of the deep vibrations spilling out of the bassist and pouring through the worn floorboards up through my body as well. There is an obsessive quality to some of the song parts, like singing the sign of Virgo into being, but also uplifting somehow, in a way that seems totally unrelated to what I know of the Metal genre. I am being held on all sides, like floating in the ocean, or stepping into a medieval church to feel your spirit guided upwards towards the light by the lofty architecture, even as you are wading through the heaviness of our earthly selves in a conversation with hundreds of years of traditions and history and bloody wars and pseudo-spiritual family trees.

Just the guitars and the bass lead into a song that reminds me so strongly of a church service that I am landed in my childhood for a moment, where I grew up in the bible belt, and the Baptist services my mother was filming for something too vague for me to remember - grown ups falling in muttering ecstasy to the ground, the women covered with frilly pink satin blankets on their lower half to keep their skirts down. I can't believe that's where their sound took me.

The guitarist's hand is a blur, and draws a sharp contrast to the profound stillness of the rest of his body for the moments of most intense playing, the stillness possibly as a support for the deftness and concentration required to bend time and space in that particular way. I am suddenly thinking about the computer generated noises I heard earlier, as well as the folktale of John Henry, who's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a machine - I am compelled by the vision of a man made sound that has a heartbeat a computer can't yet produce, but is in no way overshadowed by technology at the same time. Is it math? Feeling? Does he have to hold his breath to be available for these specific movements? Does the movement originate in his wrist? Shoulder? Center of his chest?
The vibrations coming up through his feet from the floorboards? Where does his generator live and what is it connected to?

More so than any band I have ever watched, the intensity of engagement required by each member to produce the power of their individual sounds, it seems incredible to me that they might possibly have the space left over in their awareness to entertain listening to each other at the same time. Like performing Kriya, like in the practice of Kundalini, I feel like a humming vessel waiting for something to arise out of this throbbing listening state. There is a temple quality in the shape their sound makes, we are all baptized in it, by it, in a way other bands may aspire to fill a space with enough noise to feel like this - and I wonder how each band member visualizes the architecture being created by their addition to the structure of the textural landscape. I forgot to breath again, and it feels like some of my unconscious functions are arrested by the sound my body is inundated with, while things like my heartbeat are suddenly dictated by their fast paced tempo.

What do they hope will fill the void of their absence when the music is over?

don't talk to me before I've gazed into my abyss

Reflections from one of the schools I'm working as a teaching artist at, as required by the program. These are some of my experiences working with about 140 4th graders at a school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn for 6 hours every Friday. The theme for the mural we are developing with them is games, and the ways we play with each other.

Class #3
It's all still quite a lot to take in, and I feel less like an adult and more like a pair of lungs and eyes and a heart, beating and breathing and seeing out of habits I'm so glad exist independently of my conscious choices. Stuff is happening, drawings are being made, and connection is manifesting, there is just so little time to do anything but constantly respond rn, with so many classes and hungry faces stacked back to back to back. I'll find the rhythm, I know I will.


Class #6
Gosh where do I start. It feels really clear how much the kids need a space to make their own rules, and something about today's task really gave them a container to explore that. Split into groups where they could pick and choose how they were involved, what they were interested or felt they had to offer, letting them organize themselves was devastatingly beautiful to watch. A few of the more intense students really embraced the role of petite community organizer, one of them expressed a kindness and respect for his peer's abilities that was so different from his usual antagonistic tone. It was also interesting to realize that for every shy student that felt helpless but didnt know how to reach out, there was another student excited to work with them to come up w something together. I feel like I've had the equivalent of a religious experience today.