So I’ve gotten lazy with my bloggy lately cos I’ve been clicking, cropping, and Indesign-ing my evenings and weekends away.
This is my baby of 3 weeks… it’s a booklet I designed for a film and webisode series called Open Minds Open Mouths. The project documents the impact of Berkeley Unified School District’s Food Policy, which ensures that all BUSD students have daily access to organic, locally grown breakfasts and lunches.
In typical Berkeley fashion, the policy’s got its share of fans and haters. Which mostly makes me wonder what the people being most affected by the policy– kids of color and their families– have to say about all of this. Anyway… as someone who doesn’t know much about food policy, I ought to get schooled a bit, check out the doc when it becomes available, before adding yet another 2 cents to the chorus…
If there’s one movie worth seeing while you’re holed up indoors for the holidays, this one’s it.
Medicine for Melancholy is directed by Barry Jenkins, who also brought us this lovely short. It’s the story of Micah and ‘Jo: 2 twenty-something black folks in SF. And I specify “black” cos in my humble opinion, this film offers complex, subtle, and truthful expressions of what it means to be a person of color in the Bay Area nowadays. Intonations of race and class, indie and gentrification, nostalgia and attraction– unfold along the steep chilly beauty of San Francisco.
I first heard about the film after stumbling upon Chinaka Hodge’s review (which is worth reading in it’s entirety, btw). Since I’m not a poet by any means, I’ll let her do some convincing:
Medicine for Melancholy is worth owning because you’re in it. I swear. Me too. This is the first time that I’ve seen an image of someone like me on film, and not in the simple representational TV One sort of way. Not like how my chest swells a bit when Jada takes a good role. And that feeling is nice, don’t get me wrong, satisfying. But what’s at work here is a different kind of sorcery. Micah and Jo are two of the most complex black characters I’ve seen on screen. I’m intentional about qualifying them as black characters because I think the genius of the film is the pronunciation of how spectacular and mundane it is to be a twenty something person of color, in our age and geographic area. Micah and Jo are the people I chills with: reserved and brooding, hilarious under our breath, telling jokes about Carter G. Woodson on the way to indy shows.
I mean, if you know me, you know that I’m all about my Saturday afternoon Blackbusters, but what a special, charmed thing to see a film bereft of absentee fathers, great debates, spelling bees, basketball teams and princely robes. Micah and Jo don’t do that much on screen — in a way that makes me feel vindicated, because if the routines of Jerry and Elaine and Vince and Turtle and Rachel and Ross are entertaining and important, why not the kinds of isht we go through? Aren’t our subtle tensions and conversations at the toll booth and clumsy mornings-after the types of human interactions that change audiences, even in the slightest?
Oh yea, and the cinematography is effin’ beautiful. Check it out.
