Black Life: Newsletter 19
From Sasha Kelley, Black Life’s Summer Resident
I have been thinking about archives a lot lately. To be honest, loosely for the last 10 years. My younger self always yearning for access to learn from what was, what and how other peoples like me created, expressed, explored solutions for what they were experiencing in their lives. Equally within these times, third party owned digital spaces and social media platforms, have been the homes for hosting these processes and this work.
Lately, I have been thinking how we can get back in the flow of moving outside of that, in a way that is both accessible, virtual and tangible. That if you are unavailable IRL you can still experience URL and if one platform falls, the information is still backed up elsewhere. The value of an archive is accessibility. Creating something that can be experienced for the generation to come. And don’t get me wrong I don’t think social is pure evil. I am actually interested in flooding all platforms. Not in a glutenous junk food kind of way but in a way that works created by qtibipoc peoples are available and easy to find. The archive as a way to take up space, to imprint our experiences in the history books and files to come.
CLUB PROXII EP 012 : LET'S CALL IT SEXUAL FT. BLACKMOONCHILD
Join us next week at the theater!
On Thurday July 7th, Black Life is excited to introduce a new 35mm restoration of Charles Burnett’s iconic film Killer of Sheep screening at the museum as a part of Indelible Moments: May I Have This Dance, a series curated by former director of the Pacific Film Archive Edith Kramer. We’ll be glad to see you at the theater on Thursday July 7, at 7pm.
If you’d like to join us for this screening but cannot because of the prohibitive cost of tickets (among other things in the Bay Area), please do write us at blackblacklifelife@gmail.com and we can accommodate you!
“A great—the greatest—cinematic tone poem of American urban life” (David Edelstein, New York Magazine), Burnett’s Killer of Sheep evokes the everyday trials, fragile pleasures, and tenacious humor of blue-collar African Americans in 1970s Watts. Burnett made the film on a minuscule budget, with a mostly nonprofessional cast, combining keen on-the-street observation with a carefully crafted script. The episodic plot centers on the character of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker mired in exhaustion and disconnected from his wife, his children, and himself. Stan and his neighbors struggle just to get by, let alone get ahead; as befits a Los Angeles movie, vehicular metaphors of breakdown abound. Only the kids, leaping from roof to roof, seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders. “More than anything, Burnett grasps the task of the director as one of inventing surprising, eloquent, forceful gestures—which is why the slow-dance scene between the bare-chested but strangely alienated Stan and his wife, trembling with amorous emotion, is the single most-recalled moment from Killer of Sheep, or indeed Burnett’s entire, prodigious, multi-faceted career to date” (Adrian Martin). —Juliet Clark
Take Care,
Sasha + ruth + Ryanaustin