Black Music and Black Muses

Black Music and Black Muses

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Black Music and Black Muses
Black Music and Black Muses
The digital clones of our long dead

The digital clones of our long dead

Ennui and jouissance in the archive

Harmony Holiday's avatar
Harmony Holiday
May 20, 2024
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Black Music and Black Muses
Black Music and Black Muses
The digital clones of our long dead
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It’s Malcom X’s birthday as I write this, a year ahead of his centennial, and we’re in James Baldwin’s centennial year. In many ways they are brothers so it makes sense they were born a year apart. I’m reading Jimmy’s 1972 article about being hired by Columbia Pictures to write a script for a Hollywood film on Malcom only five years after Malcolm was murdered in Harlem, on Nina Simone’s birthday. Baldwin explains that he absconded the project because he didn’t want to be a party to a second assassination of his friend Malcolm. Now that I’m a writer myself, unlike when I first read this article and I was a student of writers longing to become one professionally; now that I’ve crossed over into the most ecstatic version I can locate of professionalism ( I play too much on purpose to keep it ecstatic) what Baldwin describes about abandoning the film had to have been less flippant than the corner of a sentence he lends it. There’s something cryptic in the half-recountment that no archive or record by way of evidence or hearsay can reconcile, though the Spike Lee film on Malcolm does help Baldwin make his point. Cinematic objectification of a black hero turns him into a pin-up, all countenance no substance and leaves him dangling there like a beautiful orphan. Did you bring him home?

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