yep, calling him (and this project) ol' school playery. Terence Nance only made an appearance in GD in some reply Ifresh made in 2015. Now he has an NYTimes feature (hey, I got to showcase the paper my father worked for for most of my life, heh heh).



Now nerds are calling stuff playery. I remember when it was more of a macho thing. hmmm.........


“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” which debuted at Sundance in 2012

https://youtu.be/e7UB0QjTRjA


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/arts/television/terence-nance-random-acts-of-flyness-hbo.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Is America Ready for the Mind of Terence Nance?


Terence Nance’s new HBO series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” looks at what it’s like to be young and black in the United States.

By Reggie Ugwu

July 26, 2018

In late June, the writer and director Terence Nance, who has a luxuriant Afro and a mellow disposition, was facing a deadline to finish postproduction on his new HBO series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” when something in the news emotionally derailed him.

In East Pittsburgh, a black, unarmed 17-year-old named Antwon Rose was shot and killed by a white police officer. The boy had seemed to foresee his own destruction, pleading in a 2016 poem he wrote for school that his mother would not bury him, like the crying black mothers he’d seen on TV. On the news, a protester read the poem through a megaphone, and Mr. Nance, in a windowless, white-walled editing suite in Brooklyn, where he lives, watched through tears.

“It kind of shut me down for the day,” he recalled earlier this month in the same editing suite, flanked by computer monitors, a lonely snake plant and a vacant mini-fridge. The story had made him think of his own young nieces and nephews, and of the children he might one day have. The next day, however, he rededicated himself fully to finishing the show, which he saw as both an act of creation and resistance.

“The main function of white supremacy,” he noted later, paraphrasing Toni Morrison, “is to distract you from your work.”

“Random Acts of Flyness,” a kaleidoscopic, nearly unclassifiable variety show that accentuates the experience of being young and black in America right now, will have its premiere Aug. 3. It’s partly informed by stories like those of Antwon Rose, but its interests are far-reaching and its tone skews toward the surreal and absurdly comedic.

Each of the first season’s six, half-hour episodes explores an array of modern social and political fault lines — gender nonconformity, sexual harassment and assault, police violence — in short segments that are brought to life using an even broader medley of cinematic techniques.


In one segment from the pilot, featuring a mock talk show called “The Sexual Proclivities of the Black Community,” a story of a date gone awry is illustrated in detailed stop-motion animation. In a subsequent episode, a running theme of toxic masculinity culminates in an eight-minute original musical. The effect is a dreamlike carnival of images and ideas that suggests a toothier Adult Swim, or “In Living Color” as filtered through Nell Irvin Painter.

The series’ arrival adds a striking new frequency to the spectrum of black life available on television in 2018. Like “Insecure” (with which it shares a network), “Atlanta” and “Dear White People,” “Random Acts” distinguishes itself by prioritizing the cultural vernacular and subjective experience of black communities over the presumed gaze of white audiences. But partly because of its loaded themes and formal slipperiness, and partly because of Mr. Nance’s sure-footed direction, the show is more raw and freewheeling than any of its predecessors.

“I benefit from what Issa, Donald and Jordan Peele are doing,” said Mr. Nance, 36, referring to Issa Rae and Donald Glover, the creators of “Insecure” and “Atlanta,” and to Mr. Peele of “Key & Peele” and “Get Out” fame. Those artists, he said, had managed to preserve a form of “ontological integrity,” despite the pressures of being black in a majority white industry.

Mr. Nance in a scene from the series.CreditRog Walker/HBO
He leaned forward in his office chair and pressed his bare feet into the carpet. He was wearing a long, beaded necklace and pleated bluejeans. “We’re asserting our centrality and our idiosyncrasies,” he said. “Mt. Fuji just is — it doesn’t care what you think about it.”

Before “Random Acts,” Mr. Nance, who grew up in Dallas in a family of artists, was best known for his debut feature film, “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” which debuted at Sundance in 2012.

“Oversimplification” grew out of his time as a fine arts graduate student at New York University, and to say that it broke the rules of conventional narrative filmmaking would misrepresent the facts, and the movie’s charm, by implying such rules were acknowledged in the first place. In effect a visually rich and meticulously constructed love letter to The One That Got Away, it was elliptical, impressionistic, self-referencing.


The trailer for Mr. Nance's debut feature, "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty."CreditVideo by Movieclips Indie
At Sundance the film won raves from critics even amid competition from other celebrated debuts — including Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Colin Trevorrow’s “Safety Not Guaranteed” — turning Mr. Nance from a 29-year-old fine artist with no exposure to Hollywood into a filmmaker-to-watch overnight. (Among those who took notice: Jay-Z, who later lent his name to the film as an executive producer.)

In many respects Mr. Nance was living any young filmmaker’s dream. But he soon found himself butting up against the realities of the industry. Most troublesome was his discovery that his eclectic sensibility and aversion to genre, praised in Park City, made him defective goods in Hollywood, which more often rewards savvy self-promoters who are adept at molding their ideas into easily marketable products.

“I just didn’t know how none of this” stuff worked, he said, using a more illustrative word. “I didn’t understand how the way the film was being perceived could help me or hurt me in terms of trying to make something else.”

After the festival Mr. Nance shopped another inventive script for a second feature that had little in common with “Oversimplification,” an absurdist political satire called “The Lobbyist.” But while some of his Sundance peers moved on to direct second and third films, agents and financiers in the industry, many of whom had professed admiration for “Oversimplification,” showed little interest in his new idea.

“A lot of people just stopped responding to my emails,” he said, with more detached amusement than distress. “I’m a skeptical person — I walk into most things not expecting help from anyone. But you read stories about what’s happening for people around you, and part of your brain starts to wonder, ‘Why is that not happening for me? How come I’m not getting any of these calls?’ ”

The director Barry Jenkins, a longtime friend of Mr. Nance who endured his own term in the wilderness between the release of his well-reviewed debut, “Medicine for Melancholy” (2008), and his second feature, “Moonlight” (2016), told me that he’d known other directors, especially directors of color, who faced a similar struggle.

“It doesn’t make any sense for a filmmaker who exhibited that skill set, in a film of that profile, to not have made a follow-up feature all these years later,” he said of Mr. Nance.

Mr. Nance at the Akwaaba Mansion bed-and-breakfast in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.CreditBrad Ogbonna for The New York Times
Before the era of industry-shaking blockbusters like “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” myths about the limited commercial viability of black films made it more difficult for black writer-directors to marshal the kind of institutional support that can sustain a career, Mr. Jenkins suggested. “I think if he and I were coming out with ‘Medicine’ and ‘Oversimplification’ today, things would be very different,” he said.

Mr. Nance never allowed himself to idle. At the same time that he was trying to get “The Lobbyist” off the ground, he directed several short films, music videos and live performances. In addition to “Random Acts of Flyness,” current projects include his own solo album, multiple video games and a few other feature film ideas.

“I get the busybody thing from my mother,” he said. She’s an actress, teacher and theater director. “When I got older, I realized that she falls asleep in the middle of an action every night. I’m like, ‘Just go to bed!’ ”


The music video for Nick Hakim's "Bet She Looks Like You," directed by Mr. Nance.CreditVideo by NickHakimVEVO
Clips from many of his earlier endeavors eventually made their way into the pilot for “Random Acts of Flyness,” which shares a visual grammar with “Oversimplification” and some of the surrealist agitprop from “The Lobbyist.” HBO picked up the show in June last year under its loosely defined late-night comedy division.


“I wouldn’t say that they necessarily got everything that Terence was saying,” said Tamir Muhammad, an executive producer of “Random Acts” who commissioned the series as part of a TimeWarner (now WarnerMedia) content incubator program. “But they immediately understood that his voice would be of value to them.”

Nina Rosenstein, executive vice president for programming at HBO, said the fact that the series didn’t look like anything she’d seen before was a part of its allure. “It encourages conversation, and that’s exactly the kind of show we love to offer our audience,” she said.


Mr. Nance developed it with the help of a large group of collaborators, many of them fellow black writer-directors in New York. In the writers room in Bedford-Stuyvesant, they identified shared points of interest — the absence of bisexual black men on television, backlogs of “rape kits” at police departments, gun ownership among African-Americans — and ideas were organized into stories. But Mr. Nance soon found that he was as interested in the dynamics within the group as he was in the issues being discussed.

“I think the show is a portrait of how we communicate with each other, how random it is but connected at the same time,” he said. “We’re not journalists, we’re not approaching this from a fair-minded or comprehensive perspective. But if the entry point instead is feelings and tonality and rhythm, then it can be about the lives of the people who are making it as opposed to, ‘I want to talk about patriarchy.’ ”

One of the taglines for the show is “shift consciousness,” which is both a mission statement and a reflection of Mr. Nance’s psychedelic influences. “He’s a hippie, bruh,” Mr. Jenkins said.

Asked to define what a shift in consciousness might look like, Mr. Nance again brought up his nieces and nephews, the ones that sprung to mind when he read about the shooting of Antwon Rose. By using his platform to ventilate social norms, like those around masculinity, he hopes to influence their understanding of the world.

“Maybe my nephew will watch and think, ‘Oh, if boys hug each other, it’s not that weird,’ ” he said in the editing room, as if he’d had the thought before. “I have total faith that something I had no idea could happen will.”

So I'm excited to see what his show has in store

--

"You can't beat white people. You can only knock them out."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/arts/television/review-random-acts-of-flyness-terence-nance.html?hpw&rref=television&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Review: ‘Random Acts of Flyness’ Is a Striking Dream Vision of Race


By James Poniewozik

Aug. 1, 2018

HBO’s “Random Acts of Flyness” is like almost nothing you’ve seen on TV before. But it begins with a kind of image you’ve seen much too often.

Terence Nance, an artist and the show’s creator, is filming himself on his smartphone, cycling through New York City. A police officer pulls him over for “texting” while riding. Mr. Nance, who is black, tries to defuse the situation. The officer, who is white, isn’t having it. Things escalate. Things get violent.

This fictional scene recalls so many real-life viral videos, the camera jostling, the portrait-mode bars on the side of the screen pushing in suffocatingly. The deaths of Philando Castile and Walter Scott. White people calling the police on black people for using a coupon, wearing socks in a pool, selling water.

Part of the experience of race in 2018 is that people are able to document abuse and discrimination on video. Another part is that it happens again and again anyway. At what point does it all become some kind of horrific, surreal TV show?


This is one thing that Mr. Nance grapples with in the first hypnotic, transporting, uncategorizable half-hour of “Random Acts,” which airs Friday.

It’s tempting to call the opening a “sketch,” but that would imply that the series is a late-night comedy. It’s not, though it has a sense of humor. It’s part video-art installation, part talk show, part dream anthology. It switches nimbly between documentary, animation, music and short film to try to capture a reality for which fiction and nonfiction alone are insufficient.

Probably the neatest category for the six-episode series is Afro-surrealism, a school of art and literature that represents black experience as a kind of waking half-hallucination. We’ve seen this, most recently, in the likes of “Atlanta,” “Get Out” and “Sorry to Bother You.” (Lakeith Stanfield, a common thread among all three, makes a brief appearance in the first episode.)

The first episode’s most unshakable segment is “Everybody Dies!,” a mock version of a cable-access children’s’ show, starring “Ripa the Reaper” (Tonya Pinkins).

Holding a costume-prop scythe, in front of a “murder map” of the U.S., Ripa ushers black children through a door marked “Death,” singing to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”: “You can squeal or whine or pray / Everybody dies one day.”

On paper, it may sound heavy-handed. On the screen, it’s chilling and disorienting. Ripa becomes distressed, and the editing grows agitated. She tries to hurl herself through the death door only to re-emerge through one marked “Life.” Finally, she forces a smile, tears rolling down her face (an image also reminiscent of “Get Out”) and reprises her song. Reality has broken even Death.

The most conventionally sketch-like segment is an extended commercial parody with Jon Hamm for “White Be Gone,” a topical cream for the treatment of “white thoughts.”

That segment is also the one that most explicitly frames and addresses a white audience — Mr. Hamm, he’s told, was chosen to reach viewers who trust his “beautiful beige face.” It ends with a text exchange between Mr. Nance and the assistant director Annalise Lockhart, who suggests that “as ARTISTS we should be addressing whiteness less … and affirming Blackness more.”

The first half-hour flows like this, fluid and self-interrogating. Mr. Nance appears in a short film — based, it says, on a real experience — about accidentally stepping into the wrong car after seeing a movie.

It might be a silly mix-up, except that the terrified woman who sees him in her car is white, and calls the police. “Although it is likely that you, friend, have found this turn of events humorous up until this point,” the narrator says, “I assure you, it is not.”

Over and over, a segment shifts tone abruptly, or a performer breaks character, as if the effort to maintain a persona is too great. The effect is to keep the viewer off-balance, in a tenuous reality, where you — like the victims of violence the show references — could blink from ordinary slice-of-life existence into a horror story.

This is part of what it means to say that a story feels like a nightmare: the sense that you are not in control of your own narrative.

But “Random Acts” is more than an unsettling dream. There’s a talk segment on bisexuality and the black community, which shifts into a stop-motion animated vignette; there’s an entrancing music video from the experimental musician Norvis Junior.

The throughline is Mr. Nance himself, whether as a deadpan presence onscreen or a curious, playful force offscreen, aiming to keep viewers conscious of what they’re seeing.

This culminates in a video essay on the word “blackface,” repeated deliberately (“Black. Face.”) over portrait shots of black subjects, young and old, male and female, until it’s cut by pictures of white people in dark makeup, with the narration: “Not blackface.”

All this suggests that “Random Acts of Flyness” isn’t simply out to provoke or shock. Rather, it’s trying to disrupt and redisrupt your perceptions so that, finally, you can see.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/random-acts-of-flyness-reviewed.html

TELEVISION

Random Acts of Flyness Is a Playful, Radical Exploration of Blackness

The mixed-media HBO series taps into a realness that goes beyond what’s just “fly.”

By MAYA PHILLIPS

AUG 03, 20181:08 PM

Terence Nance describes Random Acts of Flyness, which premieres Friday at midnight on HBO, as “a show about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life,” but that’s deceptively tidy—and purposefully vague. The name of the show is a play on words gesturing toward its focus on blackness: fly being a dated slang adjective meaning “to be stylish,” “to be cool,” “to be clever.” Nance’s show fits all of these definitions, but random is the one it indulges most.

The first of the six-episode series opens with Nance introducing his show, filming himself as he bikes down the street. Almost immediately, a police car flags him down, and he gets into an altercation with an older white policeman. Is this real, or is this a scripted part of the show? The line is immediately blurred, and from there, the show branches off into interconnected segments featuring a horrific ’70s-style game show called Everybody Dies, hosted by Ripa the Reaper with her trusty scythe and “Murder Map” of America, riddled with light-up bullet holes; an infomercial featuring Jon Hamm, as himself, selling a product to help white people fight their “acute viral perceptive albonitis”; and a talk show called The Sexual Proclivities of the Black Community, featuring an interview with a nonbinary black person on their experiences with dating and relationships.


The format’s not entirely unique to Nance; the meta TV shows–within-a–TV-show (complete with faux commercials) concept has been explored by other late-night fare like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!; Robot Chicken; Rick and Morty; and Atlanta. But Nance distinguishes himself in this postmodern, new black surrealist project varying modes of filmmaking—from animation to urban musical updates of classic fairy tales to documentary-style found footage—to match the constant influx of varied media we ingest daily. He refuses to adhere to strictly surreal or satirical modes, and his relationship to fiction is just as flexible. Instead, he incorporates vérité documentary with interviews that are jarring not just for their proximity to his parody videos and infomercials but also for their naked sincerity. “I don’t know how to relate to my gender outside of being made into a spectacle,” a trans woman says in Episode 2, and it’s in these moments of empathy and revelation in respect to the even further marginalized members of an already marginalized black community that Nance taps into a realness that goes beyond what’s just “fly.”


Nance distinguishes himself in this postmodern, new black surrealist project, varying modes of filmmaking to match the constant influx of varied media we ingest daily.
If racial wokeness could be captured in 30-minute episodes, Random Acts of Flyness would be the show to do it; Nance tackles the usual suspects in the traumatic black American experience (police brutality, white fear, appropriation) but also addresses its more nuanced aspects. Queerness, homophobia, toxic masculinity: These are topics not frequently addressed in the black community, but they make appearances here, as in a segment featuring a first-person-shooter game in which a black woman takes down catcallers on the street with a frown.

For all his loud parodies and flyaway surrealism, Nance also takes some moments to scale his thoughts down to the micro level of language and muse about semantics. In one sequence, we see a series of black people, filmed from the chest up, in front of a black background while the narration says, repeatedly, “Black face.” Occasionally, we’ll see images of “blackface,” the act of cultural masquerading, flash across the screen—minstrelsy, a racist marmalade commercial, Julianne Hough’s “Crazy Eyes” Halloween costume—as the unseen speaker declares, “Not black face” with a buzzer noise and a large red mark laid over the image. We find something similar in a segment about the male gaze and the street harassment many women face. A series of black men say, “Good morning” innocently into the camera, but for every man who says it with a flirtatious smirk or a wink or a wolfish lick of his lips, there’s a similar rejection of the greeting. These parts of the show unfold more like performance art than entertainment television. Of course, those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, a point Nance proves with this very project, in the moments when he subverts terms and phraseologies and breathes them back into his multifaceted vision of blackness.


The only problem with his vision, as inclusive as it aims—and appears—to be, is that it’s as flexible and far-reaching as his imagination, which allows for truly captivating and innovative leaps but also risks flying away with all of its grand ideas. The Inception-style meta framing of the show as one featuring Nance being acted by Nance and written and edited and directed by Nance can taste like the particular brand of cheeky self-indulgence favored by film-school art projects, but fortunately it never dips too far in that direction.

Though the series features an impressive roster of guest stars, including Dominique Fishback, Whoopi Goldberg, Gillian Jacobs, Adepero Oduye, Paul Sparks, and Lakeith Stanfield, Random Acts of Flyness feels like more than just late-night television. Untethered by genre labels or traditional television formats, Nance’s show translates as something with roots in entertainment television, art house movies, and journalism—an experimental trip into blackness fly enough to post up in a modern-art museum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYadBZIace4

=======================================
Coolin...

Totallys scratched an itch I did know I had

totally fills in that adult swim hole I've had in my life - kinda feels like Eric Andre paved the way for this show

Still processing what I saw a few days ago

I'm really into this shit. Like...gotdamn.

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https://soundcloud.com/swageyph/yph-die-with-me

http://www.okayplayer.com/originals/terence-nance-random-acts-of-flyness-hbo-interview.html

https://youtu.be/kIzUwpfAl5k

https://youtu.be/Cg4SUZwqG7o

Terence Nance's "Random Acts Of Flyness" Is Following The Lineage Of "Martin" & "Chappelle's Show" (Interview)

POSTED BY ELIJAH C. WATSON 2 HOURS AGO


“Sorry brother, I just want to say you’re making some important shit.”


Terence Nance is talking about his television directorial debut Random Acts of Flyness when a man interrupts to commend him on the show. Nance thanks him before continuing the interview but the brief exchange is indicative of the moment he’s having right now. That this series — which features everything from skits where Black Thought wonders if he’s objectifying Michelle Obama to a vignette titled “Everybody Dies” where a black woman plays the grim reaper who sends black kids to their end — is, of course, resonating with HBO’s audience. But it is particularly and especially resonating with their black audience.

To accurately describe Random Acts of Flyness is difficult. Fans have taken to Twitter to offer numerous descriptions of the show but this is arguably the best one, from user @amiriboykin: “Random Acts of Flyness is a postmodern dystopian negro spiritual.” As absurd as it sounds the description is accurate — in theory anyway. Random Acts offers representations of blackness not often seen on TV. The show also plays with viewers’ expectations and ideas of blackness. When Random Acts of Flyness’ first episode culminates to a standoff with Nance and a police officer, viewers will surely expect the worst. But when Nance commits a literal act of flyness and flies to freedom, the relief is just as joyful as it is humorous, Nance reimagining a common occurrence for black people in a way that’s obviously unreal but wonderfully enchanting.

Random Acts of Flyness‘ origins date back to 2006 when a 24-year-old Nance was studying visual art at New York University. Around this time Nance’s younger brother, Nelson Nance — who goes by his music moniker Nelson Bandela and is a writer on the show — suggested that they try and get in touch with TV One to see if they could take over its block of late-night programming. The pair never acted on the idea and Nance turned his focus to directing and producing several short films instead. One of the most notable of those shorts is An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, a film that foreshadowed both themes and filming techniques that would later be presented in Random Acts of Flyness, as it shifts between animation and live-action sequences to tell the story of an artist — portrayed by Nance — who is stood up on a date by a woman.
In 2014, Nance revisited the TV show idea when Tamir Muhammad — who now serves as an Executive Producer on Random Acts — approached him about making a news show through OneFifty, a mini-studio within Time Warner. With OneFifty, Nance was able to complete a part of the show’s pilot and finished it up after HBO commissioned it. In the process, he hired people he worked with on previous projects to explore the complexities of blackness’ past, present, and future through the lens of Random Acts. Blackness isn’t a monolith, and how it’s examined, explored, and celebrated doesn’t need to be either. Which is why Random Acts is being so well-received. So much so that news of its renewal was announced before the first season’s completion.


Okayplayer spoke with Nance about how being from Dallas, Texas, influences the show, black surrealism, and getting compared to Donald Glover’s Atlanta.


Okayplayer: Throughout the show, you shift between animated and live-action sequences. How do you go about choosing how each part is filmed?


Terence Nance: Generally, it’s shot more like a movie, so we’re doing it in one production breath even though it feels like a like a grab bag of stuff. For the season as a whole, I see it as one big team of people. I’ve pretty much worked with everyone before this show except a few. I think almost everyone who animated on the show, or at least half, also animated on Oversimplification, and that was six years ago. But there are also people I work with on the show that I hadn’t worked with before but we were friends for a long time. The pilot was really the first opportunity for us to work together directly.


OKP: What is it like working with your brother on the show?


Our creative partnership goes back forever. For a long time, he was my go-to editor, even in previous years before he stopped doing that and focused more on music. So I think that it’s a comfort working with him, and not just him but just people who I have worked with a long time where we’d get things done more efficiently than if it was a completely cold relationship.


OKP: Along with your brother, you’re also working with a diverse team of writers. How do you all challenge and inform each other?


This isn’t any of our first trips around the farm in terms of working with each other or making this type of work. We just get in a room together and write some shit down. Like, “OK, this is what we’re here to do in the macro as exemplified in this 30-minute film. How do we sit here in this room and come up with something that’s gonna keep our attention and keep us fed, and keep us feeling good and feeling on the edge of our seat, and at the tip of our tongue, in a lot of ways?”

We definitely saw ourselves as making a film that was broken into parts. It’s episodic but I think that our challenge to ourselves was to make it feel like watching. We wanna reward that experience: if you’re watching the fifth episode or the fourth episode the experience would be enhanced if you’ve watched the previous three. We don’t think it’s a variety show or a sketch show or anything like that. Even the idea of segments was like “Who cares?” We were just thinking about engaging our most free-associative selves and embodying the way we interact in a show.


OKP: Random Acts of Flyness comes up at a time where people are saying a black surrealist moment is happening in film and television. What are your thoughts on that?


I just feel like people forget. People forgot what Martin was actually like. I was watching a rerun of Martin where he was being gaslit by his mother — who was played by Martin (Lawrence) too — into thinking that Gina is trying to poison him for insurance money. In the episode, the mom makes some biscuits and acts like Gina made them and they’re poison.

And as Martin is trying to eat the biscuits he starts to hear his mother talking and then she comes up in a thought bubble above his head, and his mother is him. So he’s having a conversation with his mother as him but then it becomes physical. Like, they can actually touch each other, and it’s totally surreal.
But nobody walked away calling Martin the Afro-surrealist revolution. Or even Chappelle’s Show or In Living Color. I think we have new cameras and technology has evolved but I think the concepts and ways of envisioning those concepts that blackness generates, are not out of the fucking blue.

I think they all have a really deep history that has always been growing. I don’t think it’s a moment. I think we’re the now but there’s an assumption about our own ability to self-determine creatively, and I think saying surrealism means that. When people say “surrealism” it just means that they see, it seems like, “I get to do what I want to do.” Even with Atlanta or Insecure, it’s like: “Oh, it feels like there’s no white person telling them what should or shouldn’t happen.” Or not even a white person but more like a corporate, other creative force is doing that. I think that nobody’s saying that Lena Waithe‘s The Chi is Afro-surrealist. But I think it also has that — “Oh, that person is doing what they wanna do. It has that ‘freedom’ to it.” To talk about it as a moment is maybe disrespectful to what gestated it.


OKP: That’s a very interesting way of putting it because sometimes I feel like when people say “surreal,” it’s coded for something. Like, “Oh, wow, black creators are capable of doing this.”


It is but I don’t think it’s intended in that way. Also, we’re not sitting there, thinking “Let’s just make this surreal moment.” To call “Everybody Dies” (a segment written by Frances Bodomo) surreal, in some way sort of divorces it from the fact that it is documenting — in a very direct way — Frances and our communities’ emotional state. To see it as surreal, it’s like, no, that’s just me explaining to you what it is, using a sort of metaphor. Or a sort of allegory. I think that actual surrealism is way more divorced from reality.


OKP:I want to talk about “Everybody Dies.” You said that Frances wrote it but what was your impression of it?


It reminds me very much of Sethe in (Toni Morrison‘s) Beloved. Because you’re watching this person care for her daughter and then it’s revealed the care meant killing one of her children. And that she’s the protagonist and we’re watching her — depending on where you sit and how you hear the story — either devolve into insanity or reckon with what is ultimately a loving act.

I think that there’s a lot of echoes of that that are connected to Ripa the Reaper. Ripa’s immortal. Ripa doesn’t even have to live or die. But it still distresses her. You see how distressed she is with the process. Like, the life that gets lived in between. And I think that’s what reminds me of Sethe’s thought process: because it’s like “Well, everybody dies. This baby’s going to die at some point anyway, let’s make it now.”


OKP: You’re originally from Dallas. How did living there affect your approach to the show?


This reminds me of Wyatt Cenac, who’s been a supporter of my work since the beginning and I’m hugely indebted to him as just a person and a friend. He saw an early cut of the first three episodes and his first reaction was, “This is the most Dallas shit of all time.”

Which is funny for him to say since he’s from Dallas. I can’t remember exactly what else he said. He articulated it in this weird way of just like the backwoods-ness of it. There’s this sort of sprawl, this urbanity that’s just for show. It’s almost like you could push it down. And especially in Dallas there’s always been this pretense of an entertainment industry. I remember they used to film Walker, Texas Ranger there.

But the kind of kitschiness of something like Walker, Texas Ranger being filmed on a back lot in Los Colinas, which is the suburb of Dallas where they make corporate videos and public access-y looking things. That when we’re growing up in the late ’80s and ’90s a lot of what you’re seeing on TV is locally produced.

The fact that I could roam also plays a part. There was no supervision, in the same way, there might be in other cities or now. It was just sort of learn about life, wandering in that way. I grew up in this place called the State Thomas Community which was — to my knowledge — the oldest black community in Dallas. My parents grew up there during segregation. Like, State Thomas is right next to downtown Dallas.

Also, I think any place that’s got a lot of black people and isn’t super expensive to live is gonna start to develop some freaky art shit. There’s a music culture in Dallas that’s really specific and has a direct jazz lineage from Ornette Coleman all the way to Roy Hargrove. This is connected to Houston, too. Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, and all those people.

Look at someone like Erykah Badu and her career. Nobody’s been able to copy that. Being a mother, being prolific, living in the city that you kind of made, making what is arguably “alternative music” that still finds a way to be top 40 consistently. Even now with what my brother’s doing and Dolfin Records and Liv.e, Jon Bap, Ben Hixon, and all those people. You could never be whack. You can’t.

I’m able to do what I’m doing because of that, because of that lineage. It didn’t happen yesterday. It’s not some new shit. It’s been happening.


OKP: Jon Bap, who we’ve covered, has his music featured throughout the series. How did you meet him?


Nelson introduced me to Jon a few years ago when he showed me his music. We hadn’t met in person yet — we would just email and text each other. I think the first thing we worked on together was a short film on Jimi Hendrix called Jimi Could Have Fallen from the Sky. I sent it to him and was like “Put something here and something here,” and he had it back to me in a day. He also contributed to another film I produced that’s not out yet called Piu Piu. His versatility is just crazy. Just watching him work is such a joy.


OKP: Another aspect of the show I enjoy is the multi-media aspect such as the White People Won’t Save You website and the Kekubian Assassin game. How would you say these supplementary mediums contribute to the show?


We wanna extend the world wherever we can so people can catch it. Even if they never see the show I think the game has value and hopefully we’ll be able to do more of that live experience stuff. There are a few little things that are extensions of the show but they receive just as much attention creatively as the show did. So I think in subsequent seasons we’d be able to explore that and do more.


OKP: The show has been getting compared to Atlanta a lot. What’re your thoughts on that?


It’s a privilege to be compared to the hottest show on TV, that became that way by existing in a creative space that was unfiltered and uncompromising in its representation of a certain group of people. Again, I think what people are recognizing when they compare the shows isn’t as much an alignment of aesthetic as opposed to an alignment of “Oh it looks like those people are doing what they wanna be doing.” I think that’s refreshing whether you’re black or not. There’s no attempt to obey any sort of precedent.

The experience of watching Atlanta is watching the stakes constantly being raised in a group of artists’ ability to double down on being themselves, and just that alone is so instructive for all artists doing anything. Hopefully, we’re in that spirit too.


OKP: The show just got renewed. Are there already discussions happening in regards to what you want to explore in the second season that you didn’t get to do in the first? And who is your dream guest appearance?


I have no idea. Since we just wrapped up the first season it’s very difficult for me to think about what even is gonna happen in the second season. I feel like my dream guest is somebody whose name I don’t know. I’m much more interested in just working with people and building a community.

One of the big things I’ve taken away from Spike Lee’s career is just how many performers he helped to create space for to do things they don’t get to do. Like, Giancarlo Esposito. You look at his first few movies with Spike and it’s like, “What is going on?” He’s doing all kind of shit. He gets to do Buggin’ Out (in Do the Right Thing) and the dean of the fraternity (in School Daze). That’s what I’m interested in. I’m much more interested in meeting a Kevin Rivera, who played Pan in one of our segments called “Nuncaland.” Or a Le’Asha Julius, who played Wendy in “Nuncaland” and was also part of the pilot.

Those experiences give me that feeling that I’m chasing.

Just wasn’t for us.

It actually made me want to vomit.

I guess that was the point?

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TBH the fact that you're even a mod here fits squarely within Jag's narrative of OK-sanctioned aggression, bullying, and toxicity. *shrug*

Not every moment works for me, but enough of it works for me to recommend that people watch.

Peace,

Spirit (Alan)
http://wutangbook.com

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