I decided to start the Creative Everyday Challenge by Leah Piken Kolidas. I was yearning to explore other forms of creativity beyond wearing my writers hat. Perhaps that is why I also love being a film director as it allows me to use my visual sensibilities. Given that I'm not a painter, I can't really share those on my blog. But, I decided to just write about whatever is providing me with inspiration. Or share an image in which I may find inspiration. All of my musings on this blog are really about finding or continuing to explore my own creative inspirations.
So my first entry will be about the artist date I shared with my partner Alex. It's one of the things I love best about the book, THE ARTIST WAY by Julia Cameron that assisted me over a decade ago in making my own way towards becoming a working artist. I recommend this to anyone that is entering a creative recovery and needs inspiration coupled with a little structure.
Last night I went to see MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY that was written and directed by Barry Jenkins. My homegirl Aurora suggested I check it out a few weeks ago. The film is a love story of bikes and one-night stands told through two African-American twenty-somethings dealing with issues of class, identity, and the evolving conundrum of being a minority in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. An issue dear to my heart, as I grew up in the Mission District of San Francisco and many of my own family members were pushed out of this neighborhood due to high rates and limited jobs. After all, who you going to rent to an artist couple with good jobs or a single mother and her three kids?
Gentrification is an issue effecting low-income, mostly of color communities throughout the country in urban areas. The characters confronted issues of racism, assimilation and gentrification head on without hitting you over the head. But the director still confronted that San Francisco has an African-American population of less than 7%, that is proportionally less than half of what it was in 1970 (the most visible emblem of the black exodus being the razing and redevelopment of the Fillmore district). Very different from my childhood in the 70's and 80's. Now this same thing is happening to immigrant Latinos. Even the Bayview/Hunters Point Area which used to be mostly African American has become less so.
On purely directorial level, the film was shot in black and white with smidgens of color that made each image feel as if it were a painting. I appreciated Barry Jenkin's vision of the limitations that Black and White pushes upon even African Americans. He spoke to the audience while busting out of binaries and creating a more complex menagerie. The feature film was shot for under $100,000 and it was beuatiful in it's simplicity. Showing us that a good story and vision can be shot for less. I guess there's hope for independent media yet.
I loved how he used the photogenic city of San Francisco as a character in the mating ritual between couple in the film. The digital-video images, so desaturated they bordered on monochromatic, and gave a romantic softness, and San Francisco looked even more lovelier than it has in more expensive movies. Jenkin's did all of this by taking the color out of the city. And by doing so her visually forced the viewer to confront their own black and white visions of race.
Mira Nair she speaks about creating 'visual soul.' Jenkins in his directorial debut proved that a film can have visual soul with a message about confronting race and class. This film proved that much can be done with little. And when I went home It inspired me to write the first fifteen pages of my next film. Yeah, for artist dates!
WIRED STILNESS, by Karly Beaumont (check out her blog for more images) of San Francisco when she and some of the Chica Luna mujeres visited with me during my writing residency in 2007. Karly states on her blog that the photo made her sad for some reason. This picture spoke to me and how I feel everytime I return home to see all the change-- Melancholy of Sadness. My neighborhood, THE MISSION is so different from when I was a child. Gentrification feels more like reckless abandonment than change.
Below are a few links about gentrification in San Francisco and other places:
A Cultural History of Gentrification in the Mission
Stop the Gentrification in East Harlem
Below is a picture of a theater where I used to watch movies in Spanish with my grandmother as a kid. Now it's for sale. There were two other theaters like this in the neighborhood. Look at the architecture. This is where I learned to love movies and began dreaming about making films. It was around the corner from where we lived. Where do kids from the Mission go today to dream?
Thanks for the great insight into the gentrification of SF. I left the Mission District in 1992 - pushed out by rising rents and drive-by shootings. I could see then that the Mission was going to lose its Latino flavor. I haven't been back for a long time but it was informative to read your thoughts. I live in Albuquerque, NM now and we are currently undergoing what we like to call the Californification of Albuquerque. Of course the current economy has lots of development projects on hold. Hopefully this ecomomic crisis will help us as a people to re-evaluate our values and begin to create a different kind of world.
Posted by: Judith Shaw | March 05, 2009 at 09:55 PM
Thanks for your post Judith! It's sad, but this kind of gentrification is occuring everywhere as space becomes less abundant.
Posted by: Elisha Miranda | March 09, 2009 at 03:06 PM