5cense We are not wearing Percival Everett's shoes, nor are we walkng in Minnesota

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761

22 June 2020> Next for our Microcosm DC project we did Minnesota Ave SE, again, by bike cuz our bruised heal is taking forever to heel + also cuz Minnesota Ave is a perty long haul from where we sleep, way on the other side of the river, running all the way thru Anacostia, so relevant for Black Lives Matter (Anacostia is the blackest hood in D.C.) + also cuz Minnesota is where the whole George Floyd incident went down that sparked the recent surge in BLM activity. Otherwise we don't know nothing about Minnesota (the state), not even sure we've been, not even passing thru. All we know is that it's where Prince is from + where our books get printed.

route du jour (19 miles)

We didn't take many photos cuz Minnesota is a pertty busy road + we had to pay attention on our bikes.

 

Not sure if Marvin Gaye is from Anacostia, but think Bad Brains are (+ we just happend to be sporting our B.B. shirt). Passing back home thru Capitol Hill we exchanged a bunch of books to cross-pollinate w/ our liebury boox.

The only 1 relevant to Black Books Matter is the Harriet Beecher Stowe book. Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison also passed thru our box, but since it was June 19th when we noticed we din't want to be greedy + left it out there + the next day it was gone. We also read I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett + are putting that out in our little liebury. Like other works of his we've read (Glyph, Erasure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell), Everett further explores concepts in metafiction, identity, self-reference, absurdism, parody + parenthood (or lack thereof) in a philosophical sense, pushing the boundaries in these areas probly more than any other contemporary Amerikin writer. I Am Not Sidney Poitier may not be our favorites of his (maybe cuz we're just growing used to his over-the-top silly hi-jinx) but it's certainly his funniest. Everett also has a penchant for young wunderkind charactors that act way beyond their age, naturally precocious + whip-smart straight out of the womb, perhaps too smart for their own good... makes u wonder what Everett himself was like as a little 1. More than just black identity, the namesake Sidney Poitier alludes to what acting + fame does to 1's identity + also how labels + role-playing pigeon-hole people, setting preconceived expectations, the basis of "prejudism". We've wondered whether sum 1 like Kevin Spacey is the way he is cuz of the roles he's assumed + the positive reinforcement society has given him, awarding him for acting so creepy, to the point that it becomes engrained behavior. Everett has Not Sidney Poitier go thru imagined scenarios straight from the real Poitier's movies (shackled to a white prisoner (The Defiant Ones), goes to dinner at a white girl's house (Guess Who...), etc... tho we din't get the Ted Turner (his de facto guardian) + Jane Fonda connection. And not just actors, but writers (in this book Everett himself appears as a professor, what he does IRL (tho at USC, not Morehouse)), something we obviously grapple w/ ourself, the role-playing + diffrent identities we assume when writing certain books or this blog + how that fx who we really are. As we said in our I am Not Jackson Pollock post (around when we stopped using our given name), we are not John Haskell, nor are we PJ Harvey (who made an album about Anacostia after getting stuck in D.C. on 9/11), nor Percival Everett. But reading books is the next best thing, the closest we can know what it's like to walk in others shoes.


760 <(current)> 762> Taking a walk on the wild side w/ malice in wonderland (Hueco Tanks + Joshua Tree, 1993)
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