Monthly Archives: August 2020

Morality is a Creative Endeavor…

A link to my latest essay, “The End of the Imagination” — an updated, refurbished, and almost completely re-written exploration I had begun to explore in 2016.  This is an essay I am not only proud of…The_End_of_ Imagination_1200x628 but, sadly, one that seems to crystallize how I feel now and how I have felt for a long time.  Thank you to Brian Alessandro and Lupe Rodarte for once again having the courage to publish work that is challenging, personal, and radical.

“The critic discusses the medicine, the artist administers it.  It is neither the job of the creative artist nor the creative critic to make you feel good.  It is not our job to provide hope, but truth.  The artist gives you truth at all costs.  The critic – merely interprets and records what is before him and tries to illuminate certain things we prefer to keep in an artist’s shadow.  Or his closet.

Once you have usurped true creativity with an eye towards consumerism and advertising culture you have turned your back from the North Star and have settled on the ethos of Madison Avenue. When banks become proselytizers of culture instead of the individual artist you are in a wasteland.

And wastelands are living death brought to realization by inability to imagine.”

http://thenewengagement.com/literature/the-end-of-imagination

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As an Act of Protest: The Funeral Scene

With another Black man murdered by police racism, it is no wonder this particular scene still gently resonates and affirms what I continue to feel, alone, at after midnight in the twilight hours while trying to both calm myself and keep myself agitated.  Wonderfully interpreted by Che Ayende (Luis Laporte) – we shot this scene in Harlem in the dead of night, January 2000.  Still drunk on the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo murder, we knew we could all be victims…and we knew just by making this film we were engaging in something special.  We just didn’t know how special.

 

Keep the anger, let it fuel you.  If you’re a revolutionary, by all means – find a new prescription for literal guerrilla warfare and share it with us all.
If you don’t at have the acumen for literal artillery:  don’t shoot bullets,  try shooting films.  Perhaps the creative uncharted territory of your soul must be explored.
The outraged  must make outrageous art.
Creating is even more dangerous than destroying. Some write songs. I wrote scripts. And when I was crazy and 24 and eternally angry I made a film about it. Now I am 44 and crazy and eternally angry.  Still crazy after all these years.  No folks. Things don’t change.  They simply get worse as we get older…
Rest in peace my murdered brothers and sisters.  And remain ever conscious my living brothers and sisters.
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