Mallorcing about
In praise of escape
In this issue:
Headliner A wedding, a birthday and a new flex in the Balearic Islands
Revival Mississippi Masala (black + brown love = complicated)
Aftershow Lonnie Holley’s All Rendered Truth, good advice for young journalists, American Fiction from another angle and do people actually want to read men’s personal essays?
45, more life 💪🏾
A little dispatch after returning from Mallorca, baggy-eyed but still basking in the glow of a magical wedding up in the hills of Deià. Congratulations to the chicest, Vic and Pete. It’s too soon to go through all the images. Running on random access memories for now but here’s a taste of the trip.
For all the struggles of this year, especially the dread of being in work wilderness and longing to feel closer to the centre of something, I must give thanks for privileges like this. Grab them while I can, if even you feel undeserving.
Being able to see two people I admire celebrate their union among a warm-hearted and fun-loving bunch from several corners of the world – in such an exquisite and generous manner, and despite a few stern challenges – brings the potential joy in life into sharper focus.
But it takes teamwork and hard work to get to this point. A little bit of luck too, of course, if you’re going to make something extraordinary in a remote place. Random encounters, the odd twist of fate … that type of thing. Meanwhile, guests had to bounce from train to plane, to car, to coach and minibus before they could touch the heights. Isn’t that how it should be?
The plates of grilled fish and veg, succulent aged cuts of meat and zesty salads were as life-giving as any I have had in recent years.
The refreshing natty wine was flowing (throughout the weekend), as were the mescal mules that powered me on the dance floor … where I often feel most liberated. At my best, perhaps, buoyed by some of the crew I have had many eventful adventures with, both abroad and back home. Best men Si and Greg performing essential duties long after the formalities🕺🏻
House music in the hills will always bang when Matt Murphy is at the controls. While my man Kev just knows how to ignite any disco. That face-off and back-and-forth between the boys and girls during JT’s ‘Senorita’ will live long in the memory. Out to Nat, the instigator. That’s what weddings come down to – moments.
The speeches were as moving, insightful and humorous a set as I have heard. Big up the bridesmaids and Team Norway. I love how girlfriends rarely shirk a conversation. They get into it and turn up in numbers through good and bad over time. You could feel that history in some of their words. Imagine hearing more angles to a groom from different friends. I’m into it. Si’s comedy timing was spot on though. “Deeply pretentious wedding” 😂
We gazed at the stars, traced the ancient wrinkles of olive trees (each their own unique character telling a different tale across the land), shared observations and frustrations and then laughed them all away. Lounged at numerous spots to get myriad perspectives on the island and marvelled at the mighty sun as it faded to crimson and then … vanished.
And what luck to be staying in a divine home with strangers who quickly became (house)mates. Cornwall lads 8mm Matt and photographer Nick, plus Matt M and Charlotte. Thank you for the new slant on surfing, coffee, the West Country and so much more.
Our hideaway was Balearic, bohemian, whitewashed and tastefully adorned with anything from rock photography to crystals, comfy cushions, old postcards and candles. The wind would blow through now and again, scattering flower petals across the floor to the constant sound of birds rustling and zzzzing from afar.
In no rush to go anywhere, and accompanied by the meows of an unexpected lodger, I kept discovering places to linger through the day as the heat circulated. Terraces, balconies, alcoves, hideouts, hammocks. Hammocks!
I was still coming back down to earth when I toasted another rotation with my diamond cousin Jess, the newlyweds and some new friends at Bar La Sang as we enjoyed more vino and delectable plates.
Earlier that day I had looked after two very different dogs (hello Roo and Bailey), as if the universe was bootcamping me for what should come next. It was five full days of experiences.
I return home tired (again) but with my spirit revived. The trip has reminded me about the importance of getting out of your everyday. The thrill of travel, even when things aren’t going your way. The beauty of uncertainty. How having conversations with strangers – opening up to them – ignites my mind, draws out my playfulness and unlocks new possibilities.
London stress and being in a hurry could do one for another day. Mañana, baby. Let’s see if I can carry some of this rediscovered vim into ‘real’ life.
Ps I think it’s good etiquette to learn a few phrases in the language you are visiting. When it’s the Spain region in the current climate, even more so. Although I can’t say my three years of intermittent Duolingo have made me a smooth operator who blends in, I think the effort/comedy is appreciated. I’ll leave you with this straightforward idiom: “En mal tiempo, buena cara!” ✊🏾
Black and brown love – it’s complicated
How did I miss Mississippi Masala in my youth? Thanks to inclusion champions The Other Box for dropping this into my world via their thriving Facebook group a few years back. And to London Indian Film Festival for screening what became the Audience Favourite in 2020. I watched it again the other night and it still holds up.
Starring Denzel Washington (fresh off winning a Best Supporting Actor in Glory) and first-time actor Sarita Choudhury, this curio of a film from 1991 portrays a romance we rarely get to see on screen. It also exposes the uncomfortable truth about prejudice between people of colour.
As they spend more time together, Mina gains a clearer perspective on how her identity as an East African Indian living in America relates to her heritage. It’s a true cultural exchange. Demetrius, “Mississippi born and raised”, has a more strident sense of self and helps her along with nuggets like this. “Well, Miss Masala, racism – or as they now say tradition – is passed down like recipes. The trick is that you got to know what to eat and what to leave on the plate. Otherwise, you’ll be mad forever and you’ll never eat."
Lonnie Holley – All Rendered Truth
It all started with ‘Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants’. A celestial, palpitating transmission from another universe, included on Lonnie Holley’s 2013 album Keeping A Record Of It. Through his music, I felt an instant connection to an ancient civilisation. All blood, bone, earth and stardust. I felt wonder. Who is this guy?
I soon learned that he is a self-taught artist born in Birmingham, Alabama. One of 27 children, whose early life was characterised by unconscionable trauma. His mother gave him up to an alcoholic who took him on the road at one and a half. “I was too little to understand what was being engraved on my brain but I always sang and moaned about what I saw,” he remembers.
That carnival lady sold him to an abusive whisky house owner, with whom he lived from the age of four till twelve. At seven, he was hit by a car and dragged along for two-and-a-half blocks, which rendered him unconscious for more than three months.
He was then sent to Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, supposedly a reform school but more akin to a penal colony where the kids were put to work and treated horribly. Webby Award-winning podcast Unreformed delves deeper and is one my list.
I tell you this so you understand that Lonnie is born a survivor. Someone who has managed to channel all his pain and suffering, as well as his love and devotion for Mother Earth, into his creations. “Before I got an understanding of what this art meant to the whole of humanity, I used to cry about it, he says.” Music, and the healing force he spreads through it, is just one expression.
Lonnie is like a cross between a shamen, a preacher and an inventor. He has been making visual art from flotsam and jetsam since 1979, when he carved sandstone tombstones for two nieces who perished in a house fire. It’s instinctive, compulsive, a practice he has felt his way into like you or I might find our feet or voice in an elemental sense. His work is commemorative, redemptive, hopeful.
All Rendered Truth at Camden Art Centre shows us what he can do with branches and stones, wires and scrap metal, feathers, jars and a whole lot more. Giving a new life to objects that have been discarded or abandoned. Where others see rubbish or mess, Lonnie senses the potential to make anew.
He calls these assemblages in the central space “placements”, inspired by his grandmother, who would get up early and go to the city dump to collect copper, aluminium, brass, motors… Fifty-five gallon drums of each, he says. The same grandmother who helped dig three of the graves for victims of the 16th St Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham back in 1963. That’s where the idea for Three Shovels To Bury You (1998) came from.
I lingered by one plinth after another, imagining him playfully twisting and arranging each piece into being. The kind of craft that’s endearing in its lo-finess, yet these sculptures have presence.
In the second room, the artist scales up and expands his repertoire to include ladders, a firehose and a doorframe. His choice of artefacts are emblematic of major events in his life and for those in black communites across America. Working in the House (2020) shows respect for the strong ladies working in domestic labour and evokes fondness for their elegance.
Elsewhere, No Milk and Bad Water in the Hood (2018) is a direct critique of the disgraceful contaminated water contraversy in Flint, Michigan. An emergency to everyone but those had the most power and responsibility to act.
Without Skin (2024) is an arresting double-whammy in how it nods to both the use of attack hoses for (black) crowd control and how lives have perished in burning churches. Pious souls taken in their hour of worship as they sat on chairs like this.
Paintings are also part of the exhibition. Iridescent echoes of the coiled silhouette in the central space. The Nine Notes features an enamel and spray paint portrait of overlapping, intertwined faces on an antique church organ. Lonnie made this to commemorate the victims of a church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, at the hands of a white supremacist. That was in 2015. Not so long ago, eh. I closed my eyes and imagined a defiant chorus rising up in a moment of reincarnation.
The 2019 film I Snuck Off The Slave Ship occupies the last space and is the perfect reverie to drift away to in deep contemplation and gratitude. It combines archive footage of Lonnie exploring and scavenging in 1998 with trips to significant locations like Birmingham Airport, whose expansion laid waste to so much of the art environment he created.
There’s more recent footage of him in South Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp wearing one of his wire sculptures, tinkering wide-eyed in this workshop and also performing part of the title track in church at the piano. A resounding 18-minute new spiritual that was originally included on 2018 LP MITH.
Lonnie Holley has willed much of his life into being when the odds were stacked against him, following the philosophy “you use what you have until you get what you need”. He has managed to forge his own path, in his own time, through an urge to express his lived experience as an African American, but with arms outstretched to all humanity.
This gives his songs, placements, sculptures and paintings real meaning, even though much of it is “drawn out of the muck of America” as we’re told at the end of the film. His artworks are like beacons. So much heart and sincerity is bound up each one I can’t help but move towards them.
All Rendered Truth is on at Camden Art Centre until 15 September.
About a boyhood essay
A while ago I wrote an appeal for more personal essays by men, because I am interested in the form and sense that their/our absence is because of fear.
has dissected, with great care, the dilemma that many male writers feel. His article is an invaluable extension to the discourse featuring recollections of his early attempts at a more confessional style on the internet. I had to read this two or three times to begin to find my place in it all as a 45-year-old who occasionally gets personal.I am connecting the lack of these personal essays with the topic of masculinity because the more men who feel uncomfortable or unable to share their honest feelings on who they are and where they perceive their place to be in society, the smaller the potential pool of writers who might help others to feel seen, heard and understood.
Clearly, there are certain forces at play in culture and in 'the industry' that are deterring guys from sharing their thoughts and experiences on topics such as dating, relationships and masculinity. That is a loss, either resulting in a skewed impression of an issue or for those who speak loudest and most often to shape the narrative. Let's hope this platform offers community and encouragement to these “cultural exiles” as Chris calls them.
Yes, some men might choose to vent anonymously on Reddit, make a podcast or start a video channel. But I always find the words that endure most are those that are written/authored and attributed. For me, there is a vacuum in that regard that I would like more writers to fill, particularly those of a younger generation across a wider range of backgrounds.
I have just been watching a video of Ursula K Le Guin's 2014 National Book Foundation Medal speech and this is the part that resonated deepest.
We will need writers who can remember freedom. The realists of a larger reality. I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art."
How we do that has yet to be written. I think about words that are used to criticise this style of writing: wallowing, whiny, insular, cloying, self-indulgent. They could be pitfalls to writers of any gender but, yes, men are under greater scrutiny in this field.
I have little interest in a style of writing that's described as "sad boy literature" – a hatchet job of a sell – or reading anodyne prose, clipped and compliant. Vulnerability shouldn't be palatable or acceptable as Andrew Boryga has pondered. It should be honest.
I implore writers to express themselves with less fear. That does not mean being reckless or insensitive in our choice of words and at whom they are aimed. Alex Perez hit the nail on the head, as Chris says. Instead, let's use them to try and figure things out and convey a “larger reality”.
Happy to be part of the conversation.
Thread for young journalism pros
NPR reporter Brian Mann wrote this life preserver of a thread a few months ago. One for the journalists of ages and persuasions. This industry is an unforgiving grind. The rates, the rejection, the threat of technology. They sap motivation and corrode the soul. You have to be agile and adaptable, yes, but also not too hard on yourself, as Brian explains.
Capitalism and the freemium model have made it tougher than ever for people in creative industries to earn a living. The answer is not to peddle faster or churn out more. It’s to leave a little room for joy. Give yourself permission to ditch your desk and really be in the world so you can stumble upon the seeds of new stories.
American Fiction could have been great
On the surface, I really enjoyed the film for the humorous satire in its provocation. What if a ‘black writer’, so desperate to be acknowledged as just a ‘great writer’, channelled his frustration with a ghettoising, cliche-peddling publishing industry into a spoof hood novella written by fictitious felon Stagg R Leigh?
And what if it becomes the bestseller he’s been craving, not only as a mark of acclaim but also as a way to pay for his mother’s medical bills? What would that say about his attitude to race and his willingness to exploit the stereotypes he finds so abhorrent?
It’s how Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is drawn deeper into the pretense and how the absurdity plays out in the literary world that kept me entertained for the duration of the film. The cast is brilliant. The scene where Wright slips into Stagg mode in his agent’s office and drops his first “motherfxcka” had me howling.
But even on first watch, I longed for a more rounded impression of his black identity in the context of his relationships with mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Clifford (a brilliant Sterling K Brown).
The elephant in the room is class. Monk has a chip on his shoulder – watch the scene with successful nemesis Sintara (Issa Rae) – but it’s dipped and coated in exasperation at how his talent has gone unappreciated. Tembe homes in one his using Monk’s relationship with Agnes’ live-in housekeeper (Myra Lucretia Taylor) as a key example.
Where the movie flattens their relationship into one where Monk is somewhat uncomfortable with thinking of her as their family’s employee (she’s family, he insists) the book clearly outlines the tension of an employer trying to lay off his longtime employee. The one time we see a hint of this tension in the film is when Monk attempts to give Lorraine the apron she’s worn for years, assuming she had some kind of choice in her uniform. But then the moment is gone. Fleeting. The refusal to complicate this relationship in the film reinforces a fiction that racial solidarity transcends class, that the Black community is one big, monolithic cookout, where socio-economic status doesn’t affect treatment or attitudes.
I sympathise with anyone who wants to be more than their skin colour but when someone is straining so much to be an individual to the point where they reject different aspects of their heritage, you have to wonder what’s driving that? What makes Monk so different to Black working-class people besides his love of Mahler and Greek poets? Money? Hard work? Intelligence?
Why is he now willing to adopt Black trauma porn instead of passing for white by using an everyday name to prove his point?
Tembe unpacks his prejudice:
He’s never quite comfortable around dropped consonants and hand slaps. His solace is in his work: obscure, complex, intentionally opaque, a world where he’s confident that he is better than everyone else and he isn’t measuring his Blackness against anyone else’s. He is mostly frustrated that the world identifies him as Black because when he sees other Black people, he doesn’t see himself.
If, like me, you haven’t read the source material – Percival Everett’s Erasure – I would bookmark this, get into that and then watch the film again.
If you’re ready, I’d love to hear what you thought of American Fiction.