sweetbakwas-blog

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En El Séptimo Dia

Watch it if you can. You’ll laugh, feel tense, empathize and look through a window into a world you share paths with everyday.

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BOOM for REAL

Jean Michel Basquiat [JMB] - I felt he lived in my head before I was born and after he was dead. I see his work and it’s like he’s taken the chaos in my brain and the anguish in my heart and translated it into something tangible, something you can touch. Wherever I see it - on a postcard, in a gallery, on a canvas taking up the whole of an already extra-tall, extra-wide wall, or randomly on a NYC street - like on Great Jones, where’s you’ll find a permanent landmark of one of his studios, it’s like I’ve found him, but before that, he’d found me. 

I hated that he was an addict and to heroin of all drugs. I despise that drug and have no sympathy for it’s users. Those who know me well, know that the latter is not true. It’s the deep empathy and closeness to heroin users that has made me so averse to it. But even before then, somehow it was a drug I knew I could never forgive. 

More than heroin I detest the rhetoric that great artists were great because they were big users. More than 65,000 people died of drug over-dose in 2015 in the United States. 66% of them were opioid related. Yet we know hardly any of their names or stories. Many more commit suicide or die from related causes. Yet we only hear about the celebrities and consequently the great work they did, presumably because of the drug - not, as I would suspect, because the despair, pain, anguish from the state of world fueled them to create, and ultimately use.

Somewhere inside me I understand addiction and the angst of an artist wanting to escape from the world to finally feel free to create and express emotions that have no home except your canvas - whatever that may be. I struggle with pain and I struggle with dependency. And my biggest takeaway from BOOM FOR REAL was that Basquiat was dead, but his friends - who are magnificent artists, too - lived. They’re the ones that lived to tell his story. 

Who do you want to tell your story?

-sb

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We’re ok with Beyonce/Kendrick selling “Freedom” to Apple for an ad but not Pepsi giving a cop a can. 

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Work in Progress

Excerpt:

��Some days I wake up and wish we never met. I never wanted to interact with the mean girls of the world who pick away at your scabs, deconstruct your face and alter you until you don’t recognize who you are. These women probably bear the greatest weight of unsolicited scrutiny of their beauty so they can’t help but rip you to shreds, too. This way they’re not alone in the ruthless bidding, valuing and devaluing of a woman’s worth.

I trembled watching her walk away from me with another woman. The same women she spent the next evening telling me all about. How much she adored her, her ways, her tact, the calm cool façade this women maintained – even at the cost of her own happiness – she loved that about her. She loved her sob story and her popularity. Her wealth and her status. I’d never hated capitalism more. I was never good in competitions and this was one I would lose. 

Now she wants to meet her mother.

I listened to it all, stitching each detail to memory. I’d convinced myself I had to, in the name of understanding why my love was leaving me. Each month she drifted further and further away. Each day I sunk lower and lower. She separated herself from me. First harshly, then slowly. Whatever way she pulled the wax strip, it was going to hurt. I withstood the pain with as much grace as I could muster. Mostly I stumbled and stuttered and made a fool of myself. In these moments she distanced herself some more and I felt weaker. But stubbornness prevailed and somehow I managed to stand firm, face forward and watch as she shot daggers at my heart.

What else could I do? If I turned my back and walked away I would forever regret that I didn’t fight for love. I was convinced this was it and I had screwed up. It was me who let this beauty slip from my embrace. Besides, I had to know. I had to see with my own eyes where she would go and who she would see. I couldn’t accept a world where she went off and loved who she wished. I forced her to tell me everything and it did me no good. She told me about this woman and another and another. They were all better than me. I felt smaller than I ever had. More insignificant than I already was. Worthless in a soulless city.

Eventually I stopped going back for the beating. No one wanted to hear my sob story anymore. I was the one at fault. I was the one who kept going back with expectations for a change she had told me wouldn’t come. The pain for some reason didn’t go away. The bruises are just as fresh and the flesh wounds even tender.

She’s back around now. She says she’s not sure whether or not she made a mistake leaving me. I hear this and a lioness roars inside my chest. All the pain comes flushing back like it never left. I am livid. The audacity! She betrayed me. Hit me where she must of known it would hurt. Yet all I’ve longed for all these months was for our love to resurface and for the joy to reappear between us. But now all I see is blood. I feel the rawness of those cuts and the soreness of bruises like I was beaten yesterday. The only response I can muster is to fight. This time, together we can burn this shit to the ground and destroy whatever is left of our love. Perhaps then we’ll be able to move on. To nothing.”

- broken heart

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JFK airport is a protest site right now. The airTrain is no longer transporting people to terminals in an attempt to crowd control and cab drivers halted pick-ups at JFK from 6-7pm in solidarity. Beat chaos with chaos.

The 45th President came in like a tornado and ended his first week with a four-month ban on refugees who were already approved for entry by the United States and a 90-day hold on travelers from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen - including green card holders. 

And so here we go again exerting our energy on pulling bodies from the shipwreck. Lawyers, community organizers and reporters at the helm. Though it’s unfortunate things are like this, seeing the crowds has my heart exploding with love and pride. Each confrontation with the establishment I remember that we have leaders all over ready to organize the people into action and together we get results. 

This is what democracy looks like.

- sb

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President Obama’s final news conference is live. No more of these for the next 4 years. Political engagement won’t be the same. I’ll be listening less to presidential speeches and organizing more instead.

I’m grateful he was transparent and straightforward about the Palestine-Israel situation: no road to peace without a two-state agreement, Israel moving more and more right, every action has a reaction. Thank you for not calling Palestinians terrorists.

Also, he just called himself a person of merit. There’s nothing more correct in this speech.#ObamasMyPresident

- sb

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The Handmaiden

Why are we still calling over produced male fantasy films “work’s of genius”? 

When you need women having lots of sex, naked, with cameras shooting every angle and crevice to make your film a hit and fill the theaters...you should just fall back and quit your job.

Call me a hater but someone had to say it.

I think the lesbians are rolling their eyes and mostly saying fuck you.

- sb