Category: Me Myself&I

This was such a great read. The oral story of Office Space.

I watched this movie the first time on a lazy Sunday in my first year living in the US sometime in 2010. I thought it was brilliant and funny as hell.

It’s interesting to see how 1999-2000 were a mess to promote anything: so much was happening and the Millennium veneer was all over our eyes. We couldn’t see shit and certainly not a comedy about offices.

In the end it still found its audience. The point is: make something you believe in. Always.

Speaking of lefties, let’s look at how the NBA is being taken over by us.

First you obviously have James Harden. Regardless of his ways, the man averaged 43 pts a game in January. That is completely absurd. He can score at will outside and can pass extremely well. True, his step back is sometimes a full-on travel but when he’s on, there’s not much you can do to stop him.

Isaiah Thomas is back! IT will always be special and my dude. He’s playing real basketball –no size cheat- and what a more than excellent shooter. His season at the Celtics is one of the highest %FG ever recorded.

The D’, D’angelo Russell and De’Aaron Fox. I love those two so much. Kings and Nets are the funniest teams to watch right now, and those two lead their respective squad with what I call the Left Hand of Death: when they’re about to shoot, it’s going in. D’angelo has one of the most beautiful arc I’ve ever seen and De’Aaron also has an effortless-looking jumpshot that is money. I love them. Shoutout to Marvin Bagley III who’s been torching teams recently.

Mike Conley is a super dope lefty too and he’s hard to spot because he plays so much with his right hand. He works that aspect so hard, it takes a few games to realize he’s left-handed. Julius Randle is a fantastic power forward that the Lakers shipped to New Orleans because well let’s not talk about the Lakers front office. When he drives to the basket on the left, that’s going to be 2 points my man.

Luke Kennard is really good. Domantas Sabonis is a beast for the Pacers, a Swiss army knife who has a huge impact when on the floor.

Left-handed brothers, I root for you.

You right-handed people have no clue what that name really means.

After my adoption and probably one year of school or more, I needed left-handed scissors badly. I didn’t even know they existed. I thought I would get a black, squeaky, maybe rusty old lefty scissors. But instead mom came back with the Rolls Royce of scissors: Fiskars.

It had the orange handle. Stainless steel blades. Orange sheath with built-in sharpener. The tool looked like a Transformer. All of sudden it’s a PLEASURE to cut through sheets of paper. It’s fluid. It’s gliding. I’m full of joy.

At school no one could steal my left-handed scissor, there was no point to it besides hurting your hand. My parents were always telling me to be very careful with them because yeah, those were, are, sharper than Trunk’s sword.

Then the brand disappeared from my life and reappeared a few months ago. Someone gave me a Fiskars cutter. Still that beautiful design and orange color. It is so satisfying to create shapes with it. So I thought, hey what up Fiskars? Turns out, Fiskars is one of the oldest business in the world! It started in 1649. They have celebrated a 365th anniversary in 2014. 365 years old business.

Design, check. Technology, check. Inclusivity, check. Sustainable business, check.

I was meant to use that brand. Now onward to find a left-handed orange pair of scissors because those are red now. And I want the Fiskars Orange.

I have little interest for drama.

Orphan/transracial adopted/immigrant/black man trying to sustain his present and future. It’s a lot of drama in a million ways. A massive pile of knots to deal with. I’ve been busy.

Drama drives everything though: media, politics, constantly. Gossip, thus social interactions. Twitter. Traffic jam. People, I noticed, hate drama and really look for it as well. I don’t, really. I have enough. Shit bores me real quick.

I can sit there, chilling and it’s still super dramatic in my head. I seek for solace quite often. A sunny spot on a curb. A calm afternoon on my couch, reading. Playing music, bass or keys, is so soothing. The beauty of stillness never stops to make me smile. I can’t wait to go back to the desert to do nothing.

So when there’s drama in front of me, I don’t really believe in it. I acknowledge it and try to move on, immediately. If said drama can be dissected to look like a decent situation that can be solved, fine. Otherwise, I have other places to be. Drama for drama feels like a turnstile. I go through it.

Time is the only real currency. I try not to waste it too much.

How being isolated like I am manifests itself? I have a good example. The “she/he looks like [her/him]” that we perpetually go for because the brain is a pattern-recognizing machine.

You probably have no idea how often that situation unfolds because it happens all the time and it’s such a given. Everyone looks like someone they know or knew.

Well this pattern doesn’t exist in my case. I’ve never looked like anyone around me and no one around has ever looked like me. Or moved like me or ate like me etc. You get the point.

It’s not a problem per se. But physical connection ties one to something bigger. A family. It’s everywhere in real life, stories, books, movies. It’s core to human societies. It creates a “Us”. You just need one other person to create a “Us”. I don’t have one.

Y’all mofos are going to act like “it doesn’t matter, you can always recreate” but I know it does matter. Especially in tough times, which are here. I wish it didn’t matter. Trust me.

Looking alike is almost social currency.

I have a family. But I’m broke as hell.

I picked up Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir on Friday. Finished it over the weekend. It’s good.

But also I share many things with Marcus, it’s uncanny. And I also have a distinct difference that is now sinking more and more in my soul:

I do not have siblings nor relatives, nor memories of them. I do not have pictures. And never did.

I’ve never had anyone blood-related to me and it looks like it’s going to be forever.

But back to Marcus, the 70s-born, European white family-raised, US-living black man that reminds me of me. He’s a star in New York and I’m grinding in LA. Still, I understand his every moves, the relentlessness that a transracial adoption I think enables: we grow up knowing damn well that we’ve got dealt a good hand. Time to not waste it. Shit is serious. It’s not about cockiness or arrogance. It’s about respect and fixing what doesn’t work. That’s the line we follow.

I see myself in him being serious about cooking while his friends were not at an early age. Paying attention to sound and deciphering how every one of them is created, has been a game of mine. When my friend told me “I’m going on vacation for the next three weeks” instead of producing music with me in early 2000s, I took that hard. The parallel between my domain and his is lovely because food and sound share vocabulary. Texture. Color. Flavor. Layers. Symphony. They share tedious preparation, obsessive dedication and limitless future. Samuel notes that he’s in the “memory business” which I love because sound and music are this too. I remember watching a Minecraft video of someone who had spent thousands of hours in the game and for whom the best memory of that game was the pretty piano playing hide and seek while he was building blocks. Memory business.

The biggest difference in careers, and this is where it super fucking hurts, is that the food business has been around for centuries and there’s an apprenticeship thing going on. There’s a system. I had none. Listen, I started making sound for games before game development schools and diplomas existed. So like Marcus, I focused like a demon and worked very hard to produce, learning a myriad of techniques. Instead of going slowly through the ladder of an international brotherhood like the culinary world is (or seemed through his book), I did not. There is no brotherhood in game development, just a gigantic web of pretty small tribes who don’t like each other much and don’t let outsiders like me in. You can’t see it unless you’re looking for work. I don’t talk too much about it in my memoir but I probably should give a few examples of searing pain when a job interview that goes more than well only leads to being ghosted. I have award-winning designers recommending me for positions and I don’t even get an email back.

It’s fucking me up and has been for years. Still at it. Determination is immense. I’ve left everything to do this.

When a 40-year-old business built from hippie/progressive white folks has less diversity than a centuries-old business built around regional taste and dare I say, patriarchy, you know there’s a problem. You know it means that my business is doing a very bad job at adding flavors. There’s no other way around it.

Marcus’ book highlights another thing: the exponential curve and the start of craziness. He was born at the start of the 70s, he got opportunities. I was born at the end of the 70s, opportunities from then and on are so much more fragile and rare. It’s one of the biggest constant in my life. A mere decade completely changed the job market. Thus people’s lives and expectations. Thus moods and feels.

Anyway. Great book. Inspiring. Tough for me, understanding that I won’t get the kind of closure Marcus experienced. Or will I?

Hello Mr. Baldwin,

I just finished your book, The Fire Next Time. It’s also Black History Month. A wonderful adaptation of your book If Beal Street Could Talk is in theaters. Also, it’s 2019.

Nothing has changed, basically. The struggle continues. Only we have an ungodly amount of entertainment to go through while waiting for death. It used to be church, booze or needles on the stoop. That was your world. It is now “memes”, “likes” and a “feed” on the way to a mind-numbing job.

You asked the question: do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? Well, the burning house is now our whole planet, which is suffering from our stupid tenacity to stay ignorant and greedy. You know the deal. So integrated or not, the house, the property, our only property is in flames. It’s not a good look.

Love, as you mention it in the terms of tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth, is even less alive these days. We’re in the realms of ironoia, a term coined by Ian Bogost, which in essence is a failure to be earnest or true to oneself. You can understand that this is not helping with love. At all.

You would not believe the lengths to which people go to so that they can hide their hearts. It’s disheartening and a really tough problem to solve.

So we lose a fair amount of time, on everything. We dance for moons and nothing happens, really. We did get a black couple to rule the White House for eight years and you can accurately imagine how magnificent that was. But the fire is here now. It was there then too. We were just too busy smiling to acknowledge it.

Compounding effects led most people to do nothing between when you were writing and the world I’m living in. Black culture has exploded in popularity though, which is good? Consolation prize, I guess.

So, we continue. We stay focused. We work, relentlessly. We avoid, organically. We chill, seriously.

I am realizing how equally twisted our lives are: you moved to France, I moved to the US. You needed a break from racism, I needed space, which is kind of the same.

I write what I want to write, so you did. They say you wrote about bitter truths and I kind of do it as well, except that it doesn’t pay in my case.

You died of stomach cancer. I’m very active and in great shape but I feel like this world is burning my heart at great speed. Faster than it should, you know? The situation I am in is so intense I feel like apnea is occurring every five minutes.

Nonetheless I feel having a limitless amount of energy, hope and dedication to what I believe. Even though like 120% of black folks I am sick and tired, like we say these days: “but I’m here, bitch”

Godspeed James.

Your long distance nephew,

Anthony Davis at the Lakers? I don’t know.

First, I didn’t know that AD grew up looking up to LBJ. He’s such a different player and he looks 35 already. He’s only 25. So I get how playing with your idol must be very exciting.

The problem is that basketball is a team sport more than ever. Yes, we see James Harden or Giannis take over and secure wins for their teams but make no mistake: it’s all about depth and having a squad. Big 2 or Big 3 ain’t it anymore. The Clippers or Kings show that very well right now: no big name, no problem. AD who gave everything for 7 years at the Pelicans knows that very, very well too.

Every position needs to be staked with talent that can switch and do everything from defending a 7 footer to shooting 3s. If the Lakers give everything for ONE player, they’ll just end up with injured stars. Sure, stars sell jerseys and that’s the juicy business here: merchandising is the cash cow, right?

But if the team doesn’t perform well, there’s no game. If there’s no game, what’s the point of buying stuff?

Back to you, ESPN.

My man Red passed away recently. I wrote about him last year, when he “retired”.

Things go too fast. He sold his business across the street. It’s a new gentrified shop now, as if the 25 years of him working that corner never existed.

He died six months after finally getting the bag. I still go through that street 4 times a day.

Down the boulevard another mom and pop shop, JnJ BBQ, is now gone.

The Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, predominantly African-American neighborhood on the banks of the Mississippi River, was completely submerged by the hurricane. When actor Brad Pitt visited the area two years after the storm, he was alarmed by how little had been done to rebuild. Putting to use his considerable power and wealth, he pulled together 21 of the world’s most famous architects, as well as homeowners and community organizers in the Ward, and launched a project to build houses that were affordable, environmentally friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.

Ten years later, only 109 of the 150 have been completed, and of those 109, many appear to be falling apart.

It is now quite a disaster. People are suing. Some thoughts:

– On the neighborhood not wanting to change

There’s nothing wrong with that. There can’t be many stores and services? Have the minimum like everywhere else on earth then. Have a small shop that doesn’t make mad profit but serves a community with basics. Have bigger shops come in the neighborhood with trucks, once a week. There are many solutions to having single family homes serviced. You don’t need skyscrapers and a massive Walmart or Ralphs to accommodate people’s needs.

– On designs

And it quickly became clear to residents that a few of the all-star designs — sent from architects as far away as Ghana, Chile and Japan — weren’t going to work in Louisiana. The roofs on more than a dozen houses were flat — a red flag for locals.

smh. How on earth is that possible to fuck it up like that? Flat roofs in Louisiana is not a brilliant idea but even if you go for this, just tilt the damn roof by 5° and water will evacuate… It’s not rocket science.

– On costs

There are ways to build sustainable houses for quite cheap. The fact that they had inexperienced –and underpaid, probably- staffers working for the organization to help people go through one of the worst disaster ever in the USA, is maddening. You needed the best of the best here, no exception. The organization should have paid upfront to get a solid team so that they don’t have to rebuild and maintain houses for the next 20 years would have been smart. But no. Cut corners, get wrecked.

They also used OSB SIP for walls, a terrible choice because OSB rots easily. You wanted to experiment? Use hemp insulation and a bit more wood because hemp can’t be used for load-bearing. But it doesn’t rot and is natural.

That’s where having star architects was supposed to change the deal: they put some money in to make sure good material is used, for instance. Those residents are paying a mortgage on a new house that shouldn’t be decaying that badly within a decade.

What a shame. Imagine losing everything because the government failed you with levees that don’t work. Then you have a Hollywood star coming in with big bucks, building a green house that you pay for and it’s rotting right away. How can you trust anyone, anything after that?