Radial time: Aging, Lonnie Holley, and the jazz of transcending time.
we're all part of the wonder
good evening baddies 💌 x
I am wishing that this letter finds you all indulgent in the decadence of the summer and navigating the waters of cancer season with ease. Welcome back to the newsletter of my digital garden of musings! Cancer season marks a year of having this newsletter running and that feels special (cue the birthday music 🎶), so I’m tapping into that energy of renewal as I write this and beyond.
I’d like to offer this moment together to pause, to stop scrolling/take a few breaths as needed, and get yourself a little treat or drink while you read. If you haven’t gotten the chance to check in with how you feel in your body, I invite you to do so with me at this time. I’m fucking UP a glass of iced pomegranate peach passion white tea as we speak (my fave bottled tea on the market fr)
🎶 Now playing: Crush // Solange 🎶
Lonnie Holley & MOCA Miami 🎨
A couple of months back, during Taurus season, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami for the first time ever without looking much into the exhibitions and I was deeply invigorated by the experience I had. The leading exhibition at MOCA was Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew running from May 10th to October 1st of this year. The exhibition, curated by Adeze Wilford, is Lonnie Holley’s first and most robust major exhibition in the South. The exhibition provides an intimate and deeply evocative look at his prolific career, spanning decades of his work as not only an artist but as a musician. The exhibition showcases 70 works, including foundational “sandstone” sculptures, new works on paper, and quilt paintings that depict faces, a motif seen through a lot of the Alabama-born artist’s work.
I was really moved by the sandstone sculptures that were displayed in the exhibition by Hollie which alluded to Egyptian, West African, and Pre-Columbian art. My mom who was there with me was particularly so fascinated and kept noting how much they remind her of the indigenous Ecuadorian sculptures she’d seen growing up, which made me feel a deep sense of interconnectedness and yearn to know more about his work process. We walked through the entire exhibition and found so many reflective pieces on female bodily autonomy, gentrification, and displacement in which his range of triptychs and sculptures showcases his practice of repurposing discarded objects by transforming them into assemblages with renewed purpose.
But sitting rather secluded behind the front desk of the museum is one of Holley’s most powerful and moving pieces in his multi-disciplinary work: his musical film “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship”, 2019. The film is an afro-futuristic collage of visions featuring glances of his art pieces made of found materials (such as his iconic facial sculptures and glasses all made of braided wire), women holding ritual together, hands playing piano, and portrayals of aging over a 17-minute shamanistic musical meditation with the lyrics serving as the narration of the film’s message of survival, curiosity, and vulnerability with his powerful vocals and performance. To witness the film was to reconnect with the spirit of sustenance, being offered the gift of time travel through swamps and streets as he told his story of survival centered on the southern African-American experience. It was so deeply beautiful and inspiring as a musician to see a deeply personal multi-dimensional music film be featured in an art museum. I’ve dreamed of finishing projects of such scale crossing disciplines in this way that to say I feel invigorated at Holley’s exhibition isn’t a large strong enough word for the encouragement I feel now to know that this work –and being supported in it– no matter what age you’re at IS possible. Having received this affirmation, I wanted to share it with others as well that we are not in a race to achieve the things we desire, artists or not, all delays are divinely timed. I’m sad that the film isn’t available online to share but I’ll embed the trailer here and as well as link the museum 3D walk-through so you can experience it as well! (So much love to MOCA Miami for their commitment to representing rising and marginalized artists, if only I lived close by!!) Please feel free to support him directly on Bandcamp!
so… about aging (and loving it)
The internet is an opportunity to water digital gardens of found imaginations in community just like it is a vapid bottomless mimosa special of bad takes, and while I’m better at navigating the cyber realm to my advantage of collecting inspiration and wonder (in my mercurial nature), I’ve fallen to doom-scrolling a lot and lately landed on that cursed TikTok aging filter. Naturally, a lot of people had very negative reactions to seeing themselves with wrinkles and crow’s feet, which brought up a lot of conversation around preventative botox, face yoga, and a million other methods to reverse the test of time on the face.
I thought it was a 12th house profection year thing at first, my extended cycles of grief and growing pains that I’ve been tending to this year, but I think I’m becoming more and more aware of the collective conversations of loss– not just surrounding the people and time we’ve “lost” during this pandemic but also the youth that early gen-z folks are slowly realizing we’re growing away from. The dread I’ve been feeling on and off about being “late” and falling behind in my artistry due to comparing my journey to other artists, the sudden focal point on aging, and the constant race against the clock isn’t unique to me but a collective issue we have due to social media. It’s something I found important to reflect on because –that aging filter had me fucked up for a second there! But it was the interconnectedness felt with others and reflecting on Lonnie Holley’s exhibition at MOCA Miami that guided me gracefully back to recognizing the privilege of aging which, for many, goes unappreciated.
The truth is many of us don’t have queer elders with us that to have the sole ability to age in our truth alone is a gift that many weren’t granted. While I was in distress momentarily, even though my grandma herself didn’t age the way that filter told me I would (and she lived to 100), I get excited now thinking about myself as an elder, scarred as evidence of impulsive piercings in youth and so much warmer and approachable by the tenderness of my skin, goldened by the years and softer. Femmes ultimately do not get the social ability to age without scrutiny, so choosing to focus on aging as a marker of accumulated joy (such as loving on your smile lines as evidence of your laughter in this lifetime) rather than investing in companies that profit off of the unattainable pursuit of social capital (beauty) against time is an act of resistance.
“Beauty companies will sell you aging is a curse, when in fact it’s a blessing-not given to most” –Jane Birkin
‿︵‿୨ Jazz Time ♡୧‿︵‿
I’m very interested in thinking about aging and time as a jazz recital with its own kinder theory of ideal perceived time. I talk to my mom a lot about her youth and all the memories she can gather of my grandparents to make a map of our shared experiences. The more stories I hear the less timelines matter and the more it feels like all these stories take place at once, all in the same ocean and witnessed by the same clouds that were once lakes that once held us: an eternal cycle. Jazz mirrors this colliding of perceived times to me in the way Jazz is what happens when multiple musicians “rag a tune”, playing their instruments separately but simultaneously, all approaching their shared purpose on different journeys. Almost every European “rule” about music was really a choice that determines what Europeans consider valid and not. This colonial idea of what “real” music is bleeds into the conversation of what “valuable” and “well-spent” time is too. For instance, polyrhythm is the sound of two or more strands of rhythm happening at once, seeming to cross-purpose each other but being part of a whole. But because our musical expectations are governed by where we’re from, pitting twos against threes in this musical manner was foreign to Europeans and ultimately punished. We know of the horrors of colonialism, in which indigenous African, Caribbean, and South American spirituality/religion had to be rebranded in a Eurocentric/catholic veneer, but even musical practices had to be suppressed and disguised into the European framework. Syncopation, being what happens when we don’t hear musical elements in places we expect but rather in places we don’t, is an act of musical rebellion –the ghost of all that survives time and lives beyond those borders. Jazz is just that, a radial story of musical time outside of the Eurocentric lens of value. All to say, I’m choosing (for the sake of my mental health) to take the cues of jazz as storytelling and live by radial time. It’s the twenties baby! and I’m very tired of keeping track of which algorithms best let me thrive, which apps best support me in being listened to, and am no longer worrying about the attention economy that runs my life as an artist and I invite you as well, if it speaks to you, to take everything in jazz tempo (not in quickness but at your own pace.)
Jazz talk aside, I hope you all have a beautiful time sitting with this Virgo moon transit in whatever way makes you feel rested and replenished. With the moon’s nodes shifted into Aries and Libra + the Venus retrograde in Leo approaching this weekend, take it easy on yourself and be extra sweet to your loved ones. We all could use some extra sweetness this season for others and ourselves. Take your sweet time.
Yours in resistance and rapture
Love, Neptunemuse ✨🌺
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