I wanted to post about Gift Of Gab, who died the other day. He was in the underground hip hop group Blackalicious, whose music helped spark my interest in hip hop, which is now my favorite genre of the last 20 years. I’ve always used Blackalicious music to convert my friends who think hip hop sucks into thinking it might be something they could actually appreciate if they knew where to find more real talent like it. You can’t listen to Gift Of Gab and say “Anyone could do that.” He was brilliant, and it was a sad day for me that even led to tears as I thought about how shitty it was that he was so underappreciated and that most of the world had no idea what a brilliant artist we lost. I didn’t see anyone except my friends from the Hip Hop Vinyl Spinners group even say anything about him that day. It’s sad, and he was young. It’s a major loss. I found him to be a Top 5 rapper. Without a doubt, one of the best… so I’m gonna share this photo of my Blackalicious record on my turntable and recommend a few songs to check out. RIP Gift Of Gab!
This first one is especially cool and one of their most well known, partly because Daniel Radcliff rapped it on Jimmy Fallon once, but Daniel Radcliff picked the song to impress.
This one samples the song “Me and My Arrow” from the animated film “The Point“, sung by Harry Nilsson.
and this is just one more I like…
I hope you took the time to watch these. Goodbye to one of my biggest influences.
It’s been a busy few days. There’s been some stress over the possibility of Out Of the Blue Gallery losing our space at The Armory, and so I’ve been posting about it and yesterday I wrote letters to the mayor and the art council in Somerville to urge them to take a look at the new gallery and the time and effort put into it. I also mentioned how OOTB has helped me as a disabled person who otherwise had no access to the art world, and how far I’ve come in the last few years because of the gallery.
Today was my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. They also have the same birthday…
I’ve been trying to set things up for when I put out my next book, including making a new LinkedIn and Twitter account. You can find all of my links here…
I also made new business cards with my web site on them
I was gonna use this image, but it would have been too small…
I didn’t get out for a walk to take photos as I hoped, but here is a photo of my cute cat…
and a photo of the chair with the canvas that I’ve been staring at for weeks, trying to figure out what to do with it…
Of course, as usual, I forgot to take a picture of the old painting before I painted over it. It was basically just the background. I added the hand and arm today, as well as a few minor editions to the background.
I’m calling it “Holding Onto My World”
I also recently decided to try the free app Duolingo to learn Spanish in memory of my good friend Randy who I recently lost to suicide, and he was big into taking online classes for all kinds of stuff, including many languages.
I’ve been practicing the keyboard, eating healthy, put some of my records that I wanna show Koda into chronological order, I met with my mental health worker yesterday and played the Igor album by Tyler the Creator for her on the record player because it’s one of her favorite albums and it’s one of the many albums that sounds a lot better on vinyl. She wanted to know what the difference was between vinyl and just listening to an mp3, so I wanted to show her, and now she wants a record player of course, haha.
Last but not least, I got some much needed sleep today and wasn’t even too grumpy.
I’m grateful for my day… Here’s a random video from the early days of Youtube that is still the first video to pop up on my YouTube page because I need to edit it, but it’s cool…
I just saw Nomadland tonight. It won Best Picture this year and starred one of my top 5 favorite actors, Francis McDormand. The director was the first woman of color to ever win. I wasn’t sure if I’d like it, because I knew it would be somewhat depressing, and I heard it was slow, but it kept my attention with so many brilliant details about the unique people in the world we meet day to day.
While a few scenes led me to tears and there was an overall sadness to the situation everyone was in, as most people don’t become nomads if life is going great, there was a positivity to it as well… real people, just doing their best with whatever they can get their hands on, and surviving. I have friends who live this way. I talk to them when they have internet access, but they live in vans in little communities and it’s a real kind of life. The movie sort of reminded me of the 2014 Oren Moverman film “Time Out Of Mind”, starring Richard Gere as a homeless man in New York City. Ben Vereen was also in that, as was my friend Billy Hough, who played a street performer and his song rolled over the credits. “Time Out Of Mind” was a lot more depressing though. There was not much hope in that film at all, yet it was extremely realistic to the life of being a homeless addict in the city. There is one scene in “Time Out Of Mind”, which I would say is kind of the climax of a very slow film, where Ben Vereen, who played a homeless friend of Richard Gere’s character, tells Richard Gere’s character a story while they are out for a walk, discussing what it’s like to be homeless and invisible. Ben’s character tells him that he had a friend who he met on the street, and they were out drinking in the winter and his friend peed himself. Vereen’s character said he helped his friend change into some other pants so he wouldn’t freeze, and he was helping him take off his boots, to find that his homeless friend who just wet himself had several checks made out to him for hundreds of dollars each, tucked into his boots. Vereen’s character said he asked his friend “Why don’t you cash these? Get an apartment! Why are you on the street?” and his friend replied with something like “I’m not worth it. I don’t deserve it.” The story was sort of a peak in the movie, bringing it all together, and that story is actually a true story of someone both Billy and I once knew, who was homeless for a long time. The guy who had the checks stashed into his boots and who told our friend that he didn’t deserve the money actually killed himself the day after our friend found the checks. That part wasn’t mentioned in the film, yet that movie was a lot slower and more depressing than Nomadland. The characters in Nomadland were brilliant glimpses of real people who all still seemed to have a spark left inside them, even if depressed. My friend informed me tonight that many of the characters were played by the actual people they were based on, and I think that definitely added something powerful to the film, because they did seem a lot more real than Hollywood actors usually do.
The relationship between Francis McDormand’s character and her sister in the movie reminded me a bit of my relationship with my sisters and the sadness and guilt I have for going crazy and doing that to all of us in some sense. I also related to the part about how we end up seeing people we lose down the road; maybe months later, maybe years, maybe in different lifetimes, but we always catch up with the people we’ve met and who enter our hearts. It made me think about my mental health worker and how she’s leaving, and I’m still so sad about that, but I’ve lost touch with others who have come back into my life after a few years. Sometimes it takes 25 years before someone is meant to come back, sometimes more than that, but they do. My papa has came back to me after his death… my nana too actually, and some of my friends who died as well. They just leave me little messages in some way or another, and they’re always out there somewhere, to meet again. Everyone we meet is. It’s part of how the universe operates.
There was also something in Nomadland about a woman who was dying. She hoped that people would remember her. It made me think of what it’s like to die when you don’t have anyone to remember you. I think to some degree, being remembered is hugely important to me. It made me think about how I’ve published my trilogy, and soon an autobiography about my life, and how once I do so, it’s out there in the world, for people to read and to remember me and my story. That made me feel good. Obviously I hope I’ll get more readers for this next book, and I know that’s gonna be hard to do since it’s not my debut. A lot of my potential fans have already given up on me since my trilogy didn’t blow up and this next book is struggling to find representation as well. I do feel fairly confident that people will see improvements in the writing and story telling, but will it be enough to get me to the next level of being able to do it for a living? I don’t know. Either way, it will be read, and it will be around, probably long after I die, and that’s kinda awesome and helps me feel better about those fears.
I would give Nomadland a solid A rating. I might not re-watch it many times, but definitely worth seeing.
I got some bad news today that I kind of saw coming, even though it might not be as bad as I thought, it might be. My favorite mental health worker is leaving her position and moving to a different position on the same team. It may end up being that nothing much changes between us, but it might mean that we won’t be working together anymore. I’ve sort of been waiting on this news and somewhat prepared to hate her for hurting me if she went about it the way others have, after we’ve become so close. I went through several workers in a few short years, and one worker who left around this time five years ago who absolutely broke my heart because she promised to keep in touch, but didn’t. It was a messy thing though, I won’t lie. It was partly her fault for all the boundaries she was breaking at a time when I was extremely lonely and broken, and I thought she cared about me and maybe even liked me in a romantic way. Obviously that was where things were partly mine to blame, although I never did anything inappropriate, but I think she knew how I felt and I honestly thought she felt the same, because of how close she got to me… but that was 5 years ago, and I went through several workers since her and tried so hard not to allow myself to fall for one ever again. And I’m not in love with my worker who’s leaving now. I don’t feel romantic feelings towards her and I know she doesn’t for me, but I still kind of love her as a person in a way that one would grow to love anyone who helped them so much in 3 years time, nevermind a person like her, who I clicked with immediately in our first phone call. I knew after our first 15 minute conversation that this day was going to come and it was gonna feel like hell, and I’ve been sobbing all day. I don’t know what’ll come of it though and I know the last thing she wants to do is hurt me or even leave me. She is fighting to keep me, so I appreciate that and don’t hate her, but I’m feeling a lot of sadness. When we first met, I was stepping out into the world for the first time as an adult, just about to turn forty years old after a life of being broken, and I was doing great, but within just a couple months of us meeting, I fell into a deep psychosis that lasted months. I was on bed-rest, completely miserable, and we texted every day and she came to see me every week. She was the first, and still the only one of my workers to read my first book in its entirety, and she was the one to encourage me to publish it, which was something I severely feared for far too long. She helped me through 7 months of feeling so fucking terrible that I was almost ready to give up, but she encouraged me every day and she loved my art and my songs and let me practice in front of her. I could tell that she was honestly impressed by me and that I made her job more enjoyable and worth doing, to see me recover and publish my books and perform and show my art. It made me feel good to have someone in the system that actually believed in me and who saw the artist I was and thought the world would wanna know me too. She helped me believe in myself and helped me survive one of the most difficult times of my life. I’d just achieved so much of what I always wanted after a life of being broken, and doing so broke me again, and it looked like I might lose it all, but I came back even harder and I have her to thank, but I don’t know if I’m losing her and I don’t know how to feel about it, except sad that this is how it always seems to be. I still think about Stacey and Elisa, Celie, Miss K, Robin, Michelle, Joanne, Leah, Caitlin, Leslie, Ana, Pat, etc. There are so many people who once saved me and meant the world to me as teachers and therapists that I’ve lost and my heartbreak is real. I miss them terribly. I hate that I’m forced to let go of so many great people. I felt like when she left, I was gonna tell her to fuck off, and that I’d hate her and even possibly quit therapy, because I can’t keep taking this kind of loss… but maybe she’ll be one of the ones to stick by me, as I do also have a list of people who once meant the world to me and are still in my life in a different way. They still mean a lot to me, but since they’re no longer employed to work for me, I have good boundaries and they’ve become like other friends in my life who I just talk to once in awhile. It still means a lot that they’re out there and part of my world. I hope she’ll remain in my world because she’s an awesome person who I’ll always have love for. It’s hard to think about getting to know someone else, and I’m sad and hurt but I’ll be okay.
I decided that for a little food therapy, I’d try the macaroni and cheese pizza from Za. There are two pizza places in my town that put pasta on pizza, and I thought it sounded like too much carbs and not particularly appealing, but some people love it and the one at Za has caramelized onions, which I also like, so I thought I’d try it. I mean, I do like macaroni and cheese and pizza.
It was good, but I probably won’t get it again. They have a great chicken and veggie pizza I like there too. Just as good, and probably a lot healthier, but this was fun to try.
As for the good news, my mom got her blood-work back today and she’s still cancer-free for 5 years now! That is definitely happy news! And while it’s not looking great for my memoir being published, I haven’t heard from everyone yet, and even if I self publish again, it has a chance to succeed if the right people read it. I know the writing is better than The Godchild books and it’s getting even better as I do more edits. The big craft fair at my mental health center will be a perfect place to sell the book along with some stickers and prints and stuff. Life is okay. I’m grateful for getting through it.
