City of Friends
And a film about four friends in a city on the edge of history.
The door opened, revealing some sixteen stone of butler. …
As a matter of fact, it was all I could do to speak at all, for the sudden impact of Charlie Silversmith had removed the breath almost totally. He took me right back to the days when I was starting out as a flâneur and man about town and used to tremble beneath butlers’ eyes and generally feel very young and bulbous.
—PG Wodehouse, The Mating Season
Welcome, creatures! You don’t see it in the delightful paragraph above but one thing I’m learning through reading more Wodehouse is just how many English adverbs have the prefix a-. Athwart, athirst, astir, abaft, agog! Few prefixes are more pleasing.
Cities of Brotherly Love
I’m working on a reported article about urban planning and other ways we make cities hospitable or hostile to friendship. Which features of the urban environment make it easier to meet and make friends, and to spend time with them once you’ve met them? Which features make it harder?
I’m interested in your thoughts. Have you noticed changes in your city, or differences between one place and another, which make it easier or harder to spend time with your friends? Have you ever made a friend because of some aspect of urban design or policy—a shared bus commute, a park, a basketball court, a splash plaza… something else?
Where do you spend time with your friends now, and where did you go with your friends in childhood, or adolescence? What kinds of places have vanished and what new kinds of places have sprung up? Are there choices you wish you could make, that would help you meet people or hang out with friends, which you don’t make because of concerns about safety, comfort (inc. but where will I use the bathroom?), transportation, something else I’m missing? Conversely, are there things you did only out of necessity, which ended up drawing you closer together with someone who became a friend?
Have you made any big choices or changes in order to create or maintain friendships, like choosing communal living? How did that go?
If any of those questions provoke memory, reflection, opinion, howls of execration etc etc, you can drop a comment below or email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . Let me know if you don’t want me to use your name.
One Night in History
On Tuesday I saw a movie in a movie theater, for the second time since, idk, I guess “since I got the vaxx” is as good a summary as any. It was One Night in Miami, and it was good, and you should see it. Let me talk a little about what’s in it—and what isn’t.
Miami is about four men hanging out: Cassius Clay, celebrating his victory over Sonny Liston, teetering on the edge of joining the Nation of Islam; Malcolm X, teetering on the dangerous verge of leaving it; Sam Cooke, the “King of Soul”; and Jim Brown, a record-breaking football player. Over the course of their uncomfortable celebration, its terms dictated by Malcolm’s asceticism, they open several fronts in a fierce argument about the vision of the thing they’re all involved in, a thing which you can call, depending on where you stand, the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power Movement.
The acting is just phenomenal and in terms of “aspects of movies you can name,” it’s the reason to see the film. I already knew I liked Leslie Odom, Jr., who plays Cooke, but here I saw him as a movie actor, not a theater star: Here he gets to play wry, hard-wrung, conveying everything he really thinks with his eyes and subtle quirks of the lip and knowing it won’t matter because what he really thinks isn’t what anybody pays him for. Eli Goree is incredibly endearing as Clay, totally making you delight in all his boasting, his own joy in being young and on top of the world. Kingsley Ben-Adir is pitch-perfect in the difficult role of Malcolm X, who has to do most of the yelling and lashing out. Ben-Adir never loses the youth and sympathy inside that dapper suit. Even the two guys who play NOI security are fantastic. (One is Lance Riddick so that’s no surprise, but Christian Magby is also great.)
Regina King’s direction doesn’t quite escape the staginess of this adapted play, with two huge exceptions: the boxing scenes, where we absolutely get that this man, Clay, is special, that there’s a grace and wit in his boxing that others can’t match; and the prayer scene. I’ve written here before about how much I love movies that represent prayer as a supernatural reality.
In One Night there’s a scene where Clay and Malcolm X are praying together. (And btw, I’m using the names they’re going by at this point in their lives, though of course they became Muhammad Ali and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz respectively.) It’s a scene that captures the practicality and intimacy of prayer, as Malcolm gently corrects Cassius’s gestures—I can’t remember the last time I saw that specific grateful embarrassment, so characteristic of embodied religion, depicted on screen!
And then we move out of the hotel room where they’re praying, and we see the whole world of the hotel move to a new rhythm, caught up in their prayer, the maids heading down a staircase and the palm fronds whispering, now all of Creation moves within prayer, because of two men we can’t even see. Behind the closed door of their hotel room they change the world—it realigns, unveils its beauty, is noticed and blessed. The prayer is the kiss that makes time hold still.
The political vision of One Night was noteworthy to me for how non-political it was. The ways of carrying on the struggle, in this film, are basically three: religion, business, and storytelling. We hear about Black entrepreneurs making money and controlling it; we see Elijah Muhammad build a truly new structure, use it and misuse it; and we see how music and sports inspire people, give hope and urgency, make people see (for those who have eyes to see) the Black imago Dei.
We don’t see or hear about a new idea of society. Nobody argues about how we’re gonna resolve disputes, keep people safe, house people, own things or share things or delegate things; there’s no land, no real discussion of hierarchy, no participatory democracy, no movement-building of the door-knocking, strike-fund kind. The method of justice we see is, if I can be real reductive here, celebrity.
I noticed this because it is something I am really wrestling with in my own novel draft. If the thing you sort of know how to do is tell stories, and a thing you absolutely do not know how to do is organize a movement, or Christianize an economy like opalescing bone, it’s easy to overemphasize the importance of storytelling to political change. You like that image, of Christian ethics reworking an economy like bone becoming opal? It was much easier to come up with that image than to tell you what it means! I went to an Afrocentric elementary school and learned the Seven Kwanzaa Principles and I am not sure anybody once tried to explain to us what Ujamaa might look like.
Anyway this is mostly just a note about fiction about historical movements. The real history almost always has a lot more “politics” in the strict sense than the fiction acknowledges! I’m currently reading Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain, which is the rare novel that attempts to show us new political structures, in detail. It’s weird and sometimes tiring and kind of exhilarating.
icymi
“Velvet and Pus”: “What I found in the Church was at once strange and familiar—and the familiarity, more than the strangeness, was the result of my experience in queer cultures. You may shape your tongue to Church Latin only to find that the words come out in Polari.” Lol I really like this piece and put a lot of myself into it.
Re-reading
“ho for hoggwarts!”: Befor skool dinner of super sossages, pies mash potatos dougnuts pork chops trifle jely roast sucking pig ect ect, all new bugs must attend Sorting ceremony where there FATE is decided. Tremble tremble chiz the battered and frankly unsavory hem-hem sorting hat is lowered upon my beetling brow and after a pregnant pause (coo-er posh prose molesworth) it SPEKE:
“Huflepuf. Also you hav a face like a squished tomato.”
The prayer is the kiss that makes time hold still.
wow. love that. thanks for linking ho for hoggwarts also, and your commonweal piece. can't wait to read both~