what i just read

i just read, or saw, or watched something that i need to remember ...this is how i'm doing it... - interested in blackness as a concept - interested in music, sound and sonic histories - interested in mapping, networks and lines of force

[whatijustread]

Hammond B-3 Church Musicians - Please Help!

Hammond B-3 Church Musicians – Please Help!

Hello, I am Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at University of Virginia. My research is in Black Religious Practice and Performance. I am researching a book project about the Hammond B-3 Organ and its use in Black Churches in the United States and intentionally as well. For one phase of my ongoing Hammond organ project and research, I am reaching…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

On Loneliness from The Lonely Letters (Excerpt)

On Loneliness from The Lonely Letters (Excerpt)

Dear Moth, […] I’d been lonely as a kid and teenager just trying to figure out my relation to church and life and love. I’d prayed and cried and searched and read looking for connection even when I felt the most connected to what I thought god to be. I went to church, you know, all of the time. Remember when I took you to my parents’ house and showed you that gray tape recorder? That’s the one I…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Kim Burrell and Feeling Ugly

Kim Burrell and Feeling Ugly

Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. I tell my friends that the older I get, the more emotionally raw and vulnerable and available I seem to be. It’s as if feeling were no longer worn on the sleeve but is now the very skin of flesh. Not like cloth that can be removed, emotion – the range of affective possibilities experienced through a weird simultaneity – is sensed much more expansively. It…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

#FreeBresha: Anti-black Racism and Anethical Blackness

#FreeBresha: Anti-black Racism and Anethical Blackness

**The following brief notes were delivered at the Anti-blackness and Christian Ethics Roundtable at Boston College, September 14, 2016. I reproduce the remarks here, particularly, to be in solidarity with Bresha Meadows and to urge against her ongoing incarceration. If you would like to learn more about Bresha Meadows, click here and here. May we all pursue justice.**  Three Things.            …

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

#NotYourMule Thoughts

[this is a really brief note, some ideas, that i’ve been thinking about for some time. i’m not interested in it being right nor wrong as much as i’m after a way to think about things.] I think organizing against the current and pernicious systems of domination cannot have us saying that race belongs to us in any sorta easy way. [I have not talked about this publicly but] one of the things that…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Young Bernie Images

I’ve been pretty weirded out by the search to show Bernie Sanders was a progressive youth, particularly through images. I was hella self-hating, hyper conservative, homophobic and transphobic, pro-capitalist and imperialist, until i started being confronted with the wrongheadedness of those claims right through college. Many of us that claim a leftist politic testify likewise. And many of us now…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Deformation, Information, On Formation

Deformation, Information, On Formation

Noise matters. Ever tried to have a conversation on a phone with poor reception, snaps, crackles and pops interrupting your ability to hear? It’s a Wednesday and you’re waiting for a friend to arrive. This friend is on a train or a subway or bus. And each time you almost hear there was perhaps an incident. But you are unsure because the noise made itself intensely felt in the conversation, it…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Against Islamophobia (A Black Christian* Response)

Against Islamophobia (A Black Christian* Response)

Silence will not protect… There are times of laughter and frivolity. There are times of tears and melancholy. But these are not those times, or not those times only. These times demand that we stand up for what is good and right and just. The times, our times, are indeed urgent. We cannot sit idly by as brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles — kith and kin alike — are beholden to all…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Neoliberalism

Remember Blackplanet? Remember how you wanted to add swag to your page by animations and images, changing the background from the standard selections to personalized HTML possibilities? Remember the animated dollar signs that some users would place on their pages, animated dollar signs that would be placed at varied intervals? Those dollar signs were supposed to show us that, yes, this person…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

neutrinos and social life

neutrinos and social life

one hundred trillion neutrinos pass through each of us every second, yet we cannot feel them with sensual registers already discovered. there are things so very small, so small that even the word “small” is too imprecise. yet. we are so minuscule. we are so very tiny in comparison to the expanse of the universe. every time i worry about the perniciousness of our world, the ridiculous inequity and…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

a brief ramble about identity, spiritual identity and empire.

a brief ramble about identity, spiritual identity and empire.

story time! so when i was first deciding to come out as a gay [yes. said. just like that. lol], i really thought that the most important thing to do was to reconcile my spiritual life with my sexual desires and orientation. i thought that once that work was done that the work of justice would be complete, that i’d have a clear way to think about the world and how to interrogate it. and that…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Blackness and Performance: Black Performance Theory (course)

Blackness and Performance: Black Performance Theory (course)

Blackness and Performance: Black Performance Theory ETST 243E-001, Winter 2015 Monday 12:40-3:30pm, INTN 4043 Professor Ashon Crawley [email protected] Office Hours: Mondays 10:30am-12:30pm

  The purpose of this course is to introduce students to Black Performance Theory, how it has been figured in past and current studies, and how we might anticipate the futures of such a field, such a concept.…

View On WordPress

[tastefullyoffensive]

[andrewclifton]

My Nephew is awesome.

[whatijustread]

we continue [fictive]

from: a to: mp 

Monday November 30, 2009, 1:45am

Subject: you ever heard 

of the movie La Petite Vendeuse De Soleil? it’s this excellent film i stumbled on while reading through blogs about foreign movies. the blog linked to this review on New York Time’s website:

Senegalese avant-gardist Djibril Diop Mambety’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil is the second in a trilogy of shorter films, called Tales…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

Against Water Shutoffs and Occupation: The Omm Bomm Ba Boom

Against Water Shutoffs and Occupation: The Omm Bomm Ba Boom

i The urgency to write has never felt more acute. To attend to, even through what seems to be utter powerlessness and fatigue, the atrocities being felt globally on both large and small scales is necessary. But how to do so, how to respond with a precision and clarity and depth and nuance and rigor. And, most importantly, care. To want to respond with care. And yes, as a modality of care, to…

View On WordPress

[whatijustread]

The "Biology" of the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative

The “Biology” of the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative

i

We have been named from the outside, yet remain unknown. Needed for coherence, we have been disavowed for our fleshly capacity to derange normativity. We – us Blacks and queers and women and trans* people and and and – are varied, many, intersecting varied modalities of identity. We – us that are not white, cis, heterosexual, male folks – come in many forms. We have been marked as marginal and…

View On WordPress