DEFYING THE LINEAR: TALES OF IDENTITY

Four spoken word videos shot in LA, London, Paris and NYC circa turn of the century

I can now admit that I was an underground spoken word artist. When the scene was percolating in New York circa turn of the century, I would never have said I was writing pieces in verse or striving for poetic imagery. I was a journalist, a critic and historian. I didn’t go to the Brooklyn Moon, a legendary Brooklyn performance spot on a Friday night, and get up to speak alongside Carl Rux, Sarah Jones, Mos Def or the many other gifted voices who’d go on to make records and star in plays. Yet I did quite a bit of essay-like spoken word writing. It started with a piece in the Village Voice called ‘To Be A Black Man’ that I later made into a short film with Samuel L. Jackson.

In its wake I made several other spoken word pieces that, for the most part, I didn’t really show folks. Most of them grappled with questions of racial and cultural identity that were outgrowths of traveling to Europe.

London is my favorite non-U.S. city, a place where I’ve made good friends and witnessed a lot of great art. It is also a site central to the tangled tale of colonialism and is still rife with symbols of the British Empire. It was the first place I visited where I really felt like an American in my ambition and entitlement. Paris has treated me with both love and anger. I’ve stayed in posh hotels with lovers and nearly gotten beat by a multi-cultural posse of homeboys. To me the City of Light is a glorious museum with an undertone of anger just beneath its elegant surface. Los Angeles is a where I’ve lived out Hollywood dreams, contemplated selling my soul and then ran back home, because of the town’s anxious desperation and poolside pretension. I’ve had good times in Tinseltown but there’s an air of dissatisfaction (with status, income and power) that’s on the menu of every Beverly Hills bistro.

I didn’t write ‘Defying the Linear.’ It was penned and recorded by Akure Wall, who is now a nurse practitioner, but was bold enough to record her spoken word pieces. I was so impressed with this one that I made video. I shot this largely at the now shuttered Standard West Hollywood when she was pregnant with her daughter Soa (who just recently attended Columbia University!)

Thanks to Henry Adebonojo, Belinda Becker, Tamara Taylor, Zofia Moreno, and my nieces Amber and Jade for appearing in these no budget turn of the century exercises. Though they played a few festivals, ultimately these shorts were experiments in visual storytelling that have informed by career as a director. Part film school, part visual art, these videos took me to Europe and then back inside my head and remain, surprisingly, relevant in an era when identity is fluid.