Joshau Tree, January 2024
October 2024
I saw this little hand on on Dads back on the tram. It was so little. And then I looked down at my own hands, and remembered they also used to be that small, cute and tiny and chubby, and my parents also used to marvel at those small hands, how small they could be. And now they’re here, riding on this tram with the rest of my body, holding each other for comfort. I noticed how I painted my fingernails myself, and how that made me happy. And I noticed how I’m still that little girl with the little hands. I’m still her, just grown up a little.
It’s August again, the month where humidity rests in the air. For the first half of the summer we did everything we could to keep the bugs out of the apartment; installing nets, keeping windows closed, discarding every scrap of food. Now, we live among them like one would do after surrendering to something so uncontrollable as nature. Violent July rain storms in Berlin leave August grey and cleansed. A squirrel keeps digging up the balcony flowers that my mom planted when she came to visit in May. I religiously spread ground coffee over the soil every few weeks to deter him away, and it worked until it didn’t. I watched him quietly creep back, burying his nuts beneath the flower roots to retrieve at a later time.
I gave up being mad and allowed myself to crack a smile at his boldness when he looked me straight in the face while stuffing his cheeks with chestnuts, standing in the strong and resilient flower beds. I know we both will enjoy them for a limited time, until the first frost comes. August brings gifts, always. Changes in perspective. Changes in seasons. Changes inside and outside. I love this month.
A River, a Nina
Out of nowhere today something interesting happened. The fear just went away. I had been feeling heavy in my bones the past few days, bleeding, retreating, over thinking, underperforming. And holding on to way too much. I sat on my pink couch that I cleaned up earlier to list on EBay. And like a breath that I didn’t take, the fear vanished. Took off from me like a flight of invisible birds. And it’s raining, now. And suddenly I’m filled with compassion and I can breathe again and the people who I resented I love. And the people who I loved I love even more. And I idolize nothing. I am just filled with life. A longing just to be, here.
Reflections on green
I like to think that I fall somewhere in the middle of my parents two extreme spectrums in regards to money. My Dad texted me, early my time in Germany, reminding me of the urgency to open up another retirement account, stressing its importance to secure my future. My mom on the other hand, on the phone an hour ago, reassured me that she will in fact splurge on the nice hotel in Ohio, where we will go to visit my brother in college, because what else is money for? Using it! I carry both of their wisdoms, both of their learnings and mistakes, and perhaps even a drop or so of the scarcity mindset that comes from being poor and Black in America in the 1960’s. They want better for me, better for their children. And I want better for mine. Perhaps that’s why I took off to Germany during the tail end of the pandemic, searching for something I couldn’t put my finger on - a life, maybe, free from the shadow that is cast on Americans, Black Americans, people searching for The Dream. Germany has it’s own shadows, but here they aren’t afraid to look at them. And so, consequently, they turn to light.
October musing
The birds are flying south
Global warming hits in the fall, end of October and nearing 70 degrees in Berlin. Leaves sit on the floor, damp, waiting to be washed away by the swing of winter that comes in strong, with a force, unapologetically and without warning. this time though, winter comes late, or doesn’t come at all. Hard to enjoy the warm air when you know the reason: The earth is heating up at its core. People are dying, cities are burning, ice burgs in the south pole are melting, or something like that. Maybe instead of fantasising about the doom of the planet I can breathe - in and out - and enjoy the weather against all odds, and stay in the bath a little longer, till my fingers and toes are wrinkly and soft and the salt has drained any energy that isn’t mine that i don’t need, out of me, out of my skin and pores. And then i am left soft like a newborn baby, covered in mucus and film from my first home, a protection, a shield, a covering straight from God, which is the Uterus, which is the Woman, which is me.
Time
My cousin is having a baby. When we were little, we’d stick pillows in our belly’s and pretend to be sumo wrestlers. We’d talk and laugh all night about things I don’t remember. And now - on partial bed rest due to carrying low - she’s got a real live human growing inside her, laying in the sweet arms of my aunt, her and child both warmed by the Southern California sun. And I am here, halfway around the world in my thrifted turtleneck sweater, the cold winds of January rushing though the windows of my studio apartment in the thick of Berlin winter, thinking about her and her future child, and about me, and mine, and the fact that time moves so effortlessly.
It’s my last night in LA and I feel like maybe I should write something in honorarium. So here goes.
it’s 8:34pm and the sky is still dark blue. I hear cicadas outside my window. Tomorrow I’m starting a new journey, I feel like a surfer about to catch their biggest wave, terrified and exhilarated. I moved here when I was 22 and now I’m 28. I’m probably about 1/2 an inch taller, my hair is longer and my cells have regenerated to become something new. Literally, I am a whole new person, in the same (but different) shell. Snake shedding skin over and over again. You think you’re in your best skin and then you shed again. My cat is sleeping 3 miles alway and I can still hear her snoring. My mom got an air fryer and I named her Alice. Alice the air fryer.
Thats all
12.31.20
It’s been 365 days of this year. I don’t remember all of it, but when i close my eyes i can feel everything that happened, the energy in my body, the swift swirling movements of my soul, being in my brothers arms, falling in love, slowly, surely, so easily. Tasting Kim’s. Flying for the first time this year, wrapping my head in a scarf in the airport. I remember all of those moments, the times when i felt alive and seen and loved and scared. Watching I May Destroy You. Starting therapy and doing trauma work. Getting to know Robert and the Kesslers. Getting to know Midnight. Getting to know myself.
I’ve learned how to do French braids and how to pluck my eyebrows (kind of) I’ve taught myself how to write every day and to make something out of nothing. A beautiful alchemic dance. I’ve cried and laughed harder than any year before. I bathed in salt water and let my ice-burgs, years of shields, melt away.
I discovered dandy blend, had prophetic dreams, felt my child nearer. I painted and spent time in the desert, in the mountains and in the ocean. I surfed for the first time ever, swallowed whole waves that left me seasick for half a day. I ran longer and faster and harder. I wrote. I remembered. I accessed my heart and let her lead the way. This year has been full of ups and downs and twists and turns and sometimes nothing, so much nothing that it felt like the Earth was flat-lining, when in fact everything around me was being reborn, including myself.
I am so grateful for this year. For everything I had before this year, and everything I will hope for after. Something magical is happening now, in this moment in time. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve gotten pretty good at surrendering to the unknown. After the plague comes the renaissance. The renaissance my friend, is here. We are living in it. Like the fish who searches for the ocean all his life. Here we are, in the renaissance. Isn’t it beautiful?
Jordan in Ohio, August 24,20
Talk to Me in the Sky
When I was in college I started doing this thing where whenever I’d get on a plane, I’d ask my friend group, which consisted of my 3 best friends and my boyfriend, to “talk to me in the sky.” It became a thing between us all, right before any of us left for the airport, wherever we were going, we’d say, “talk to me in the sky!” Something about knowing my friends were right below me while I floated in a metal tube in the clouds, sending me good wishes and good vibes softened the edge of leaving my familiar territory, even just temporarily.
I equate that story with what my relationship feels like with my biggest-little brother, Jordan. We grew up like twins, 16 months apart, sharing clothes, food, baths, friends, and life. During our teenage years we drifted apart, I moved to France then New York then LA and he moved to Ohio, but in the past few years we’ve come back together, and I remembered how beautiful it is to have him as a friend.
One of the greatest gifts is knowing he’s doing this whole thing with me, this life. Wherever I am and wherever he is, whether flying through the clouds, in another city or in the next room, I know he’s there, somewhere, with me, talking to me in the sky, and I’m comforted.
August
I was born on a sticky August Monday morning in Brooklyn, New York, 2 months before the doctors prescribed due date. After 36 hours of labor I arrived, bald and beautiful and much too small, here to experience the wonders of this new world. My parents thought the whole time I was a boy, I was going to be named my brothers name, Jordan, who fell into our lives 16 months later. Azure was the only “girl’s” name my mom had thought of, so Azure it was. Born on August 24. I often think of what that day was like. The apartment my parents lived in. The love they had for each other. New York in the early 90’s. It’s all so far away and so close. I have high hopes for this month, but August never lets me down.
Mom
I live in Los Angeles. My mom is a 10 minute drive away. Lately I want nothing more than just to be near her. I go to her house to watch her garden, or to take a bath, or to lay in her bed and smell her smell. Sometimes I just sit in a chair and twiddle my thumbs, or look out the window, or stare in a mirror, or go on a walk. I stay there all day and then I go home. It doesn’t matter what I do as long as I know she’s near.
My landlord is 103 years old. He sits outside in the garden, sleeping in the sun. Sometimes I catch him when he’s awake. One day I caught him, and sat down next to him. He looked at me with bright blue eyes that have seen decades of joy and tragedy and creation and loss, grabbed my hand, and with his wild blue eyes twinkling, said, “you have a mother, dance around!”
I caught myself in the mirror this morning and saw my mom. It caught me by surprise. Is it inevitable we turn into our parents? I look at my brothers and see them morphing into men, parts of my dad, parts of people I never knew.
This photo is from last summer when I took myself to Paris. It was a full moon. I look forward to traveling again.
Distilled for the Eradication of Seemingly Incurable Sadness
I live down the street from a bar that I love with dim lights. It’s hidden between a smoke shop and a comedy club. I love it because I can walk there and they serve a drink made with cucumber foam. I take my friends there. I took a date there. On said date there was a group of very drunk kids, and the guy out of the group said very loudly, “Gin is great! It tastes like flowers and I love it.” 🌸
I’ve watched 4 seasons of Peaky Blinders and I’m starting to think in British slang. Tommy Shelby (main character) creates a Gin that is supposedly distilled for the eradication of seemingly incurable sadness. Its a tiny detail, the label is shown maybe once or twice, but I thought it a beautiful and subtle ploy to invite empathy for a dark and stormy complicated hero. I empathize with his character, played so brilliantly by Cillian Murphy.
From My Life in Art by Stanislavsky, a Russian theater character actor born in 1863: “When you play an old man, look to see where he is young. When you play a young man, look to see where he is old. When you act an evil man, look to see where he is good.”
Patti Smith
By Judy Linn
Le Centre Pompidou, 2012
Invisible Things Draw us Close
When I was 14 I watched a movie called Babel. I was so affected by it, the memory lives in me as a defining moment in my life and career.
We weren’t allowed to watch TV. Weekends were an exception, but only for 2 hours, and only parent approved channels, which as far as I can remember, extended as far as PBS and Charlie Brown. (♥) Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and The Disney Channel, the cool channels, were all off limits.
My parents both received movie screeners from different guilds. They were dusty DVD’s that lived in the top drawer of a TV cabinet that was always closed. Like I said, we weren’t a TV-watching household, and the one we did have was so small you had to sit a few feet away from it to hear it properly.
When my parents had their backs turned, my brother and I took turns sitting 2 feet away from the TV, volume on low, to watch the forbidden channels. My brother turned to Sponge Bob, (he still claims It’s ahead of it’s time!) and I, the untouched screeners. When I stumbled upon Alejandro Gonzales Inurirtu’s Babel, it was my first experience watching something where multiple narratives weaved in and out of each other in the most beautiful, unexpected, human way. I had no idea movies could be made that way. It opened something up in me that still seeks to emulate that feeling oneness in my art - the gentle reminder that we are always 1 degree of separation away from each other, even when it seems that we are the most far apart.
Jessica Andrews says it best, There are invisible things drawing us close. I believe that.
Poppies
Yesterday I drove 88 miles to see the Poppy Reserve in Lancaster, CA. Though the park itself is closed, fields of golden poppies surround the perimeter, inviting visitors to be healed by the friendly flowers who bloom at this time of year. This year is no exception and they were more beautiful than ever. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to live in California.
Some kind of Magic
When I was on set of The Good Lord Bird, the Director Michael Nankin told me that when you wake up before the sun, your days will always be better. To be fair, he was referring to set days, as one of my lessons as a Director’s Shadow was to always get to set before anyone else, which meant dragging myself out of bed at 5am to meet him on the dusty trails of our set in rural Virginia. He explained that doing this will help facilitate some sort of magic to help you know what the scene needs. I met him on set as the extras were floating around, and all of us together marveled at the beauty of the golden orb rising above the mountains. Shivering from the cold and the sleep still in my eyes, holding a warm coffee, I was filled with an inexplicable amount of joy, faith and magic. And my days were always better.
This morning I woke up before the sun. I did so much as look at my script, much less make many edits, but somehow even that small gesture of dragging my body out of bed, putting it in front of me and looking at it, gave me the kind of magic Michael was talking about.
This morning, 6:56am
Sunrise on The Good Lord Bird
April Update
it’s April, and I’ve started a blog.
Studio Apartment with Midnight
Kind of. It’s really more like a creative space where I can share my ideas and projects with someone other than my cat. So, here we go.
I’ve realized that if I look at time in quarantine as more of an artist residency than a mandatory order to stay inside, my world becomes much more colorful. I’m painting, drawing and thanks to a little help from Art of Freelance, finishing the feature film I began writing a little over a year ago.
Today, for the first time, I printed out my screenplay. To my surprise, I found that I have almost 100 pages. Not everything’s in order and things will change and shift, but it’s there. And there’s more to come. Thinking about the fact that this will eventually become a movie gave me so much nervous and excited energy in my body I had to shake, literally, and then hug Midnight to calm down.
Lately I’ve been less active on Instagram, but I’ll be posting more about my process and what’s to come. If it calls to you to follow along, please do.
I’d love to have you on this journey with me.