My journey into film

Questlove bemoans the state of hip-hop, “an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective”:

These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer? …

On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion.

He relates an encounter he had with a…

I was twenty-seven, in my fifth year of study in an English Ph.D. program, when the director of the program called me into his office.

At the time I had taken a few creative writing classes and written a handful of poems, three or four of which had been published in minor literary magazines. Recently I had been one of two student readers fronting for a featured local poet at an on-campus reading series. The featured poet was my age and had published over four hundred poems. I had no idea how he had managed to do this—either his prolific output of poems or his massive publications. Most of my poems were short surrealist lyrics, much in vogue at the time. Except for a poem about my grandfather’s tiepin, a gift handed down to me by my father, I had not written anything concerning my identity as a Japanese American…

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I first saw you in the movie Happiness. Your raw-ugly-beautiful performance cut through to my heart in a way I had never experienced before. “This guy isn’t afraid of anything,” I thought. “He’s fearless.” And you did it again and again: in Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Capote, Synecdoche, Jack Goes Boating, A Late Quartet. Balls out, I would call it now, with great admiration.

More recently I saw you at one of the Happy Talks at the Rubin Museum of Art. You sat with philosopher Simon Critchley and were as real and thoughtful and imperfect as I imagined you. The way you dropped your head into your hand to fully consider whatever probing question your co-host had posed. As if you needed to remove yourself from the presence of all our eager eyes in order to touch something deep inside, to find an uncompromising truth.

At one point he asked…

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.

Last week I saw a read-through of a play at The Brecht Forum by Justin Kuritzkes titled “Drones: A Protest Play.” Set in a sci-fi, futuristic, dystopian United States overwhelmed by hyper protective government activities, the play questions social liberties and human rights during a technological “Big Brother” age. Scenarios of techno-war serve as the main scenes, with soldiers and aircraft pilots operating drones oversees rather than physically fighting themselves. This sense of safety is liberating for soldiers at first; they sit in…