Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Olivia Robinson Jul 2015
I don't apologize for my blackness and your fear seems like this beautiful melanin enriched skin is a blessing and a curse. police offers using our young men's as target practice ripping our rich black roots from the ground and scathing them  them all over the cold blood stained concrete streets that my people paved.they just want us to dance sing and play ball to entertain them. they don't want us to succeed and move on to bigger and better things so sinister grins creep upon their faces as they watch us slaughter eachother in the streets. they watch us struggle to get out of poverty they say we're all on welfare and ain't **** but how can we move up in the world and get out of poverty when this system wasn't built to benefit us? we are more than the stereotypes. we are doctors lawyers entrepreneurs nurses designers filmmakers activist.we are intelligent intellectual beings with knowledge that surpasses all understanding. they don't want us to open our mouths and speak our truth...they want us to shut up and chuck and jive and kiss their pasty white ***** to the bone they want us to ignore the blatant racism and discrimination we face everyday and be content that we aren't enduring as much pain as the ones before us have. but we will not shut up. we do experience racism. we do experience discrimination. and our people are dying everyday from it.how dare you utter the words respect yourself and well respect your from the same mouth that slandered my ppl and taught us to hate ourselves with? we were taught to love everything that was white and hate everything that was black and love blonde long straight hair and blue eyes and hate our chocolate skin and ***** hair but these ***** roots are deep...no matter how much you try and destroy them they are deep and run through us all. so my brothers and sisters... be proud of your roots take care of your roots embrace your roots love everything about yourself from that ***** *** hair that breaks all the teeth of your comb to your chocolate skin that glows in the sunlight and those strong minds and powerful voices because black is beautiful, black is powerful black is brilliant, black matters.
poem I wrote a while ago around the time of the Mike Brown case. it's not finished.
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer
Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly
The pollen-filled air flies past like the
Pelicans at the edge of the harbor
Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride
Down the corridors of plastic colors
Through the one word answers that bubble forth from
10,000 years away in hyperspace
Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted
That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point
Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure
You remember hating and pinching your nose from
And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it
Just like your addiction to ego games and
Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say
But I'm an intellectual
Too impatient for meditation
And lost along the way to enlightenment
That I truly want,
But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool
Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies
The shapes of skydives,
He comes in and out of our dull lives
And there's an electric current that solidifies between
Him, Us, and his music
Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth
A broken paradise
Crumbling in a whisky tumbler
Blackened by fiber filters, creations
Unlocked by flowing ontological
Caricatures, open wounds gnashing
At attention-seeking osteopaths
Fortune seekers clamber down
Soccer field bleachers,
Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods
Once there was a set of barbells along the trail
We fell in line and started
Counting each other
One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall
It was up to us to wait for the shower
It would feed our kin
We'd begin to rise up together
But it could never keep up with our pen
We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes
But we couldn't command the armies of the dead
We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories
We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us
We take a passive role in finding love
And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark
The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old
An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind
Of a hogtied adolescent
Guessing that the course of existence
Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations
Testing the warm water on a naked toe
We could dive in and forget to breathe
And the water could carry us forever
Alleviating gravity
All the obstacles we perceived in past lives
Remain with us like
Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a
Klu Klux **** telephone operator
Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost
And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night
Drinking nail polish and
Obscure references to the films of the
Ancient Greek philosophers, who
Saw the medium as a means to a message
And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes
And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public
That would not outright reject it
But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole
Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures
And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter
And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair
Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches
Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of
New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we
Had no choice when the government bond expired
And we had only technological solutions left to hope for
And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies
With giant weapons and uncreative slogans
Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime
Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of
Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson
Who gave one final performance
To save himself from what must not be
judy smith Feb 2017
In 1983, the Fashion Design Council burst on to the Melbourne scene like a Liverpool kiss to the mainstream fashion industry. Inspired by punk's DIY aesthetic and armed with an audaciously grandiose title, an earnest manifesto and a grant from the Victorian government, FDC founders Robert Buckingham, Kate Durham and Robert Pearce were determined to showcase the burgeoning Melbourne design scene in all its outrageous glory.

"People resented hearing about Karl Lagerfeld," says Durham. "Our movement was against the mainstream and the way Australians and magazines like Vogue treated Australian designers."

Over its 10-year lifespan, the FDC launched such emerging designers as Jenny Bannister, Christopher Graf and Martin Grant. But what was perhaps most exciting was the FDC's ecumenical approach. Architects, filmmakers, artists and musicians all partied together at runway shows held in nightclubs.

"It was an inventive time when people came together and made people notice fashion," says Durham.

Among the creative congregation, Durham remembers artist Rosslynd Piggott, who constructed dresses of strange boats with children in them and filmmaker Philip Brophy, who used "naff" Butterick dress patterns. Elsewhere, an engineer made a pop-riveted ball dress out of sheet metal. The crossover between music, art, graphic design and film extended to architects such as Biltmoderne (an early incarnation of celebrated architects Wood Marsh) who designed the FDC's favourite runway and watering hole, Inflation nightclub.

"Clothing was confronting," says Durham. "It was brash and tribe-oriented. It was quite good if you weren't good-looking. People liked the idea that this or that clothing style was going to win you friends."

Today, however, even Karl Lagerfeld has a punk collection. To complicate matters, "fast fashion" appropriates the avant-garde at impossibly low prices. The digital era too has caused the fashion world to splinter and bifurcate. What's a young contemporary designer to do?

"The physical collective is no longer that important," says Robyn Healy, co-curator of the exhibition High Risk Dressing/Critical Fashion, which uses the FDC as a lens to view the current fashion landscape. "These are designers who are highly networked through social media who put their work up on websites."

Fashion designers still use music, film and architecture, but in different ways. Where FDC members might document its runway shows with video, studios such as Pageant use video as the runway show and post them online. Social media is perhaps the big disrupter. Where FDC designers might collaborate with architects, today it's webdesigners.

"Space has changed," says Healy. "Web designers might be the equivalent of the architect today. It's a different use of space."

As grandiose as the FDC, yet perhaps even more ambitious in scope, is contemporary designer Matthew Linde's online store *** gallery, Centre for Style. Like the FDC, it offers space for "artists who aren't at all designers per-se, but they're dealing with a borrowed language from fashion", Linde told i-D magazine.

"It's an extraordinary juggernaut across the world with a huge amount of Instagram followers," says co-curator Fleur Watson. "[Linde] has created a brand that uses social media in an interesting avant-garde way."

Yet unlike their often untrained FDC counterparts, these designers are perhaps the first generation of PhD designers, notes Watson. "Robert Pearce had a belief in culture changing the world. That's what these new designers are reflecting on in their research, their position in the fashion world and how do they change the way fashion works?"

While it's also true that new technologies offer exciting possibilities in embedded fabrics and experimentation with 3D printing, fast fashion has created certain expectations.

As Cassandra Wheat of the Chorus fashion label laments: "It's just hard for people to understand the complexity and the value that goes into production without being really exposed to it. They think they should have a T-shirt for cheaper than their sandwich."

During the course of the exhibition Chorus will produce its monthly collection from one of the newly designed spaces within the gallery. The exhibition's curators have commissioned three contemporary architects who, like its '80s counterparts, work across the arts, to interpret FDC-inspired spaces. Matthew Bird's Inflation-influenced bar acts as a meeting place for the exhibition's forums and discussions on the contemporary state of fashion. Sibling architects abstracts the retail space, while Wowowa's office design resembles a fishbowl. For Watson, the exposed shopfront/office has as much front as Myer's. Its architecture suggests the type of brazen confidence every generation of fashion design needs. Says Watson: "Fake it till you make it."Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/cocktail-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-2017
Josh Bass Oct 2014
Imagine a castle in the middle of a city
It sticks out to say the least
A sentinel of the city
The Kingdom of Fairmount
Steve Buscemi says it is
a prison of:
Silence
Cats
Ghosts
Tourists
Filmmakers
Gangsters
I crane my neck and take one last look
before heading to the Trestle Inn
for a drink and dancers.
William Daniel Sep 2016
as an audience anxiously awaits
an adequate answer
an admittedly artificial
academic administration addresses action
and announces afternoon activities available
at an auditorium all asleep,
absently applauding away.

barry's basketball bounces back behind
by blueberry bush
bound by belief baseball's better,
barry barters, begs basically,
blindly balancing between *****:
baseball or basket
but barry boasts both.

city civilians cross carefully,
crowded, cold christmas crosswalk
counting countless cars
casually, cabs crammed close in clusters
constantly coughing chemicals
citizens carelessly creating catastrophe.

dusty dreary downtown dallas diner delight
dreamy desert delicacies delicious, delightful
dan danced decisions deciding, daring
diner downpayment deplete dollars.
don't ding **** ditch dan's diner door
drop by, drool on dan's delicious delicacies.

even enormous endangered elephants
eat everything entry-level edible.
entire eons erasing, each era escaping
eventually enough endangered
easily enters enxtinction, ending everywhere
entirely empty encounters.
even empires entertain enemy error.

friends, families, fixate in front
for films favor favorable focus.
fancy film fastival, foreigners fill first
filmmakers flock, finding familiar faces
facing forward, feeling fairly fortunate.
"five, four" finally flash
fear fades fast.
will periodically continue to update poem with more stanzas
And leave it to Turturro
To steal the movie again,
A tour-de-force in a single character,
Repeatedly, consistently . . .
Except maybe one time.
"Raging Bull" 1980:
Turturro was "Man at Table,"
Uncredited, of course,
A man of no words,
A role difficult, constraining for any
Would-be Richard Burton,
Some shrew-taming Petruchio,
Over the top & out of a job,
Again.
Ask any director who
Directed in the 1950s and 60s?
"Difficult to handle," says Unanimous,
Auteurs & Schlock Filmmakers,
Alike.
Turturro too, needs special handling,
Or Jesus Quintana will chew up the scenery,
Emilio Lopez will be sneaky-sneaky-sneaky,
Materializing without warning over & over
Again.
Turturro: veteran of 60+ films,
Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing,
Fading ******, The Color of Money,
Do the Right Thing,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Turturro TV: Frazier, Monk & Miami Vice.
And others.

Turturro: a Brooklyn boy, Italian,
Roman-Catholic, the son of Katherine,
An amateur jazz singer who worked in a
Navy yard during World War II, &
Nicholas Turturro, a carpenter &
Construction worker who fought as a
Navy sailor on D-Day.
Turturro: attended the State University of
New York at New Paltz, completed his
MFA at the Yale School of Drama.
A life most worthy, capped off with
Amedeo & Diego, his two sons.

So, I'd like to thank The Academy,
In advance yet decades overdue:
A Lifetime Achievement Award, Johnny.
Recognition over the long haul.
Zulu Samperfas Nov 2012
And I really do mean men.  And mostly white men.
I learned that at Columbia film school
In LA, at USC, all those male filmmakers were somewhat suspect
What they made, could not often be called "art" but even worse
they tended to extreme geekines
They wore ***** athletic shoes everywhere and spent long hours on sets
in t-shirts, wearing caps with the name of their film on them and not smelling particularly fresh
They were not particularly athletic in a city that sport "muscle beach."
But here, they were MEN.  They could hold their own in any test of masculinity
as art is a serious undertaking, and requires great powers of the intellect
And here, where most life is spent indoors, the men dressed well,
in proper leather shoes that had names, and followed the fashion of the bohemian moment
which was not considered bad, maybe because you need clothes so much there
You are always freezing or sweltering and sweating.  You freeze outside in winter
and you sweat when you come indoors.  In the summer you boil outside in hot
and air conditioned New York, like you are in purgatory, and then freeze again in the air conditioning
To have that artistic authority, no woman can come close
It isn't a woman's world, at least in the early nineties in New York, it wasn't
Such a dissapointment for me since I thought I could somehow slip through by sheer cleverness
It's like a black person hoping to be identified as white.  It can't be done.
There was a place for me, like no matter where I hid in a cinematography class
in the front, middle or back I always became the woman who is photographed
to demonstrate lighting
"You learn the most up here" said Beta Badka, in a thick Ukrainian accent as he set me on a stool
But that's not where I wanted to be
I longed to be taken seriously, telling stories about women, about girls
and having them be respected with that same cache
that came with stories of men
paige  Jul 2013
Closure
paige Jul 2013
At  a music festival
Among sixty thousand others
I managed to spot you

We both knew the other
Would be here,
But figured there'd be
Too many people,
Too large of a crowd
And not enough cell phone
Service to go around,
To bother trying to find the other
Especially since we haven't spoken
Since, well,
                                           you know

      But here you are.

Eight rows of people ahead
Through the most perfectly spaced gap
I spot your face
Turned slightly to the right
Of where I am standing

I watch you laugh at what
A friend behind you said
You cut your hair
just the way I like it
And your smile still
Makes me go weak at the knees

It's this moment that people write books about, paint pictures of, this moment filmmakers write whole screenplays revolving around

Where two people make eye contact from across a crowd, and instantly the spark is ignited, or reignited, and their fate is written, the opening to their love story that, without their control, is set in stone, perfectly planned out stepping stones that lead to happily ever after

But you never turned my way
And we never made eye contact
And my text that said
I see you! :)
Didn't go through until
Hours later

I guess this wasn't our moment.  
                                 our relapse
                                 our love story.

                                                         I guess this means
                                                         we really are not
                                                  m  e  a  n  t   t  o   b  e
Irate Watcher Sep 2018
I want you to be different.
Different from the same,
but still the same
uncouth
and
artistic
person.

But with your **** together.

Is that too much to ask?

Where are the sandy blonde
documentary filmmakers in my life?
Hunky, rugged, and on the road.
A hustler on the African savannah.
Paper driven type
of my soul.
Everyone says to marry for love. Money is not important. And mostly, I agree. But if you're broke, I can't help but find you unattractive. Makes me feel like a horrible person sometimes.
Andrew Rueter Apr 2021
Some people still don't understand the power of the internet
nor the consequences of social media
they're incredulous when society reacts negatively to someone
if it's someone they like, that is
then that incredulity fuels their perpetual outrage
little things like buzzwords change over time
political correctness becomes cancel culture
and those people say Tropic Thunder couldn't be made anymore
but those people were saying Tropic Thunder couldn't be made
when Tropic Thunder was made.

Those people have truncated perspectives
and provide truncated answers
to non-existent questions
then wonder why filmmakers don't respond to the criticism
of someone who watches ten movies per year
and their half-baked commentary on the film industry
that has more to do with their political agenda
rather than any real concern for creative liberty.
Brent Kincaid  Dec 2016
ON-SCREEN
Brent Kincaid Dec 2016
The on-screen horror
Was as vivid as the real thing.
We watched as people died
Fighting against an evil king.
While in our own lives
We just smiled and went along.
Maybe we might have stood up
If accompanied by a clever song.

It won for best picture
The saddest we had seen
It shocked and appalled us
In nearly every scene.
The Director thanked Jesus
The author and his wife.
Yet the king is still alive,
But this time in real life.

Screen heroes heroes as shallow
As comic-book supermen;
They are full of flash and dash
Then they run back home again.
We honor them much more
Than the people who save us
And fail to see the blessings
Their dedication gave us.

Day to day our teachers
And our medical personnel,
Our police and our firefighters
Confront a real-life hell.
Those people and the military
Are paid the lower wages
While people who show profit
Get rich while the holocaust rages.

So, filmmakers are delighted
With each new massacre.
After all, making ****** fortunes
Is what entertainment is for.
The media allows much more time
To the ogres in our society.
Villainy is more photogenic
Than any kind of propriety.

As long as the public can’t resist
Buying those pathetic rags,
The tabloid press will still reward
Snoops, gossips and nags.
Those are the same fools
Who then go on to elect
Crooks and thieves and liars
With disastrous global effect.

— The End —