My immersion narrative

"Forget punk posturing, forget Jim Morrison's poetic superiority complex, Simone is the real thing ..."

So begins a review of Nina Simone: Love Sorceress which I saw last week at BAM, along with a packed house of sorcery enthusiasts. Our rapt attention to Simone's every gesture in this documentary of a 1976 appearance at Montreux Jazz Festival was only matched by our bewildered hostility to the bizarre French orientalist who kept interjecting a running on-screen commentary about Simone. He actually made some worthwhile points about her work but it was hardly the appropriate moment ...

Jet-setter that I am, the following day found me in Charlotte, NC, screening Raymond Gayle's black rock documentary Electric Purgatory. Its an earnest, Fishbone-centric tribute to the tribulations of artists who fall between the yawning gaps in the marketing departments' nets, but my considered opinion of it now is that rockism is frustrating and limiting even when its black rockism. In particular, the doc fetishizes the guitar as the summum bonum of rock, ignoring the ongoing relevance of piano from Little Richard onwards, but also of the rhythm section and, of course, the vocalists. Thus Tina Turner is absent from the doc, and Prince present only as a guitarist who gets props only when he became "a man" and stood up to the recording industry in the mid-1990s.

There was in other words a pretty unreconstructed masculinism at work throughout the doc, fretfully fingering the electric guitar as its throbbing tool of reassurance ...

After a brief waylay in Hotlanta I am currently holed up in Macon, GA, home to aforesaid Little Richard and some killer Soul music radio stations.

Something New

On Valentine's Day I went on an interracial date with my sweetie to see Sanaa Hamri's debut feature about interracial romance, Something New. Come to think of it, coming from a black/white background myself, I could have taken myself on that interracial date.

Now I usually avoid such 'race problem' films, filing them under "too close to home." (What am I saying? I always watch them, paranoid fashion, on DVD, just to make sure that the plot to eliminate the mulattoes has not advanced too far) But a trustworthy voice in my ear from Charlotte, NC persuaded me to give this a try, and as always, that voice was right on point. The movie is the best tearjerker I've seen since, well, O.K., since Brokeback Mountain. But before that, since ages. It is the anti-Jungle Fever, (Guess Who and Bringing Down the House don't even figure) and not just because its told from a women's perspective. I love me some Spike Lee, to be sure, but his dystopian vision of black/white romance always struck me as entirely far-fetched; more an ideological idee fixe than actual close observation of the way black people live and love. Lee, until recently, has often strung himself out on the "conscience of a people" trip, with uneven results (Bamboozled and Do the Right Thing: great. Jungle Fever and She Hate Me: toilet). Hamri is wisely post-agitprop, settling into what looks like a long groove of accessible, sophisticated observations of how we live now. What, like black people don't deserve that, too? Or does it have to be all feature-length comedy routines and Black History Month documentaries about our noble toil?

I keep hope alive for the trickle of great post-Spike Lee black movies like Charles Stone's Drumline to somehow turn into a stream, but what tends to keep flooding out of Hollywood is either Tyler Perry/Ice Cube-style chitlin' circuit films, or glass-ceiling shatterers like Tim Story's Fantastic Four, "cross-overs" that only prove that black directors can pasture the flock as sheepishly as white ones. Ms. Hamri is cut from a different mold. Her laserbeam dissection of the neuroses, melancholy, and quiet triumphs of the black bourgeoisie makes her film matter. This may sound over-the-top, but if Spike Lee was the black Orson Welles -- the maverick genius who proved it was possible -- I really think Hamri could be the black Woody Allen: the poet laureate of the comedy and ambiguity of "arrival" in American society.

Brooklyn arriviste

So my really good excuse this time is that I have been moving: to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. I had my last Miranda-leaving-Manhattan panic attack on Tuesday, and now, sitting in Grand Street bar/cafe chilling out to smooth jazz and free wi-fi, its all good.

Apparently I got into my neighbourhood just in time. The papers say apartments went up 31% in price last year, so basically, if I had waited any longer, the only apartment I would have been able to afford in New York would have been in, I dunno, Albany.

Making it to Fort Greene park yesterday morning before 9 AM, when dogs run free, I felt like I was joining a cult. But a good one. It felt good and Nico Icon is still singing my praises for letting her off leash. Come to think of it, walking around an actual neighborhood, with trees, parks, and brownstones, and not the 24-hour madness of downtown Manhattan, I kinda feel off leash myself.