Free radical, philosophical dilletante, music completist.
By Tav Nyong’o for Bunker Bloggers I don’t think much about the heady days of Web 1.0 anymore. Remember those? The breathless techno-utopianism of the 1990s seems a little ludicrous in retrospect. That bubble was punctured several times over by the rough reality of the intervening decades. But the first week of social distancing-turned-“stay at […]
By Tav Nyong’o (originally posted at Earthling.) Halfway through the first act of Moonlight, the second feature film from director Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), a hounded-looking boy turns to a man he thinks might be a father figure and asks him, “what’s a faggot?” Sitting around the table, the man who has plucked […]
Mykki Blanco – High School Never Ends (ft. Woodkid) (Official Music Video) from The FADER on Vimeo. By Tav Nyong’o My constant teaching has been this: live for the drama, but don’t let the drama live you. You are not your gadget, you are not the face at the end of your selfie stick, or […]
By Tav Nyong’o Once upon a time, I began to write a blog post about the satirical “Twinks4Trump” troll that had started appearing in my Twitter feed. Finding much-needed gallows humor in the idea of a twink for Trump, I began to follow the account. Eventually, I drafted an explanation for the appearance of this […]
By Tav Nyong’o A question has been ringing through my ears this past week, growing louder with my every attempt to brush it away. “Who the fuck made you master?”* It was a question asked, no shouted, in a moment of despair and righteous discontent. An angry, no, an uncivil question, and to that extent, […]
By Tav Nyong’o One of my favorite albums growing up was the soundtrack to the reggae classic The Harder They Come, and I loved in particular the song “By The Rivers of Babylon” by the Melodians. It’s lyrics adapt Psalms 19 and 137, which lament the bondage of the Israelites, and issue an ethical challenge […]
By Tav Nyong’o 7. It’s S/K, not K/S (yes, it matters) As any slash fiction writer, or semiologist, will tell you, order matters. And so the fantasy of a love relation between Spock and Kirk is no more reversible than any other romantic entanglement. Identification always runs to one side or the other of the […]
By Tav Nyong’o In Adorno’s notorious critique of jazz, he consigned the efforts of black musicians to a quixotic struggle against racial capitalism. “With jazz,” he wrote in 1936, “a disenfranchised subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not allow for a way out.” This double-bind of the commercial black artist […]
By Tav Nyong’o Has incivility become the new obscenity? Everywhere one turns these days, it seems, ‘civility’ is being held up as a norm to which we all agreed to be held accountable. When was this consensus to be civil arrived at? Nobody can quite say. It must have been when we weren’t looking. But […]
by Tavia Nyong’o José, I’m calling up thunder. Through so many tears Today, I’m knocking on your door. Can you hear? I’m listening for your laughter through the wall That separates and connects your office and mine. I’m eavesdropping for the murmur of your quiet counsel. Give me that counsel today. Gimme, gimme […]
Bully Bloggers 