Honorary film for this blog!! American Violet. Just came to my mind since I am in Texas and I worked with the producer, Tim Disney, also one of my mentors! It is amazing, one of a kind, and based on a true story!
Another film that didn't get the credit it deserved!! Films with a purpose rarely do...
Enjoy,
The Artist
Tru meaning of family!
So, for those of you who don't know, Im in Texas for the week. I came down here for my friends baby shower and to just have a lil fun in the the D with the homies. Also, my aunt, my mother baby sister, lives out here with her husband and 3 kids, so I came to spend a couple nights with them as well. I was really excited because I haven't seen them in a while and because me and my family is sooo distant, I wasn't sure what to expect. however, I was welcomed with open arms and a few home cook meals (can't beat that). My little cousins, ages 10, 8, and 6, followed me every where I went and watched me with amazement in their eyes as I moved around the house. The oldest one said she wanted to grow up and be just like me, I held back the tears of joy and told her I wanted her to be better than me.
I talked to my aunt for hours about a little bit of everything and just really enjoyed being around my family. I'm dissapointed I can't experience this more! I also see the lack of culture in families nowadays because back in the days aunts and cousins and family in general played a serious role in raising other family members kids, but now, we have embraced the me, me, me culture!
Goal to fix this problem: family reunion and committees to keep everyone updated!!
Will let you know how it works out,
The Artist
I talked to my aunt for hours about a little bit of everything and just really enjoyed being around my family. I'm dissapointed I can't experience this more! I also see the lack of culture in families nowadays because back in the days aunts and cousins and family in general played a serious role in raising other family members kids, but now, we have embraced the me, me, me culture!
Goal to fix this problem: family reunion and committees to keep everyone updated!!
Will let you know how it works out,
The Artist
Precious...A must see!
As a filmmaker, I love to see films that engage with
topics that aren't "popular" or might be controversial.
This is a must see film!
Some might find this story hard to believe but this is life for alot of people.
Unfortunately...
Talk about nothing being impossible!
She finally has a home: Harvard
Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row.
By Esmeralda Bermudez
11:03 PM PDT, June 19, 2009
Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.
She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another’s hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.
Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.
“No wonder you’re going to Harvard,” a girl teased her.
Around here, Khadijah is known as “Harvard girl,” the “smart girl” and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don’t know is that she is also a homeless girl.
As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn’t smell or look disheveled.
On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep — survival skills she applied with passion to her education.
Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret — not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.
“I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, ‘You got the easy way out because you’re homeless,’ ” she said. “I never saw it as an excuse.”
A drive to succeed
“I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much,” she wrote in her college essays. “I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people.”
Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.
“I still remember that exact number,” Khadijah said. “It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did.”
In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn’t feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.
She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.
At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school’s gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.
At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. “You ain’t college-bound,” the pimps barked. “You live in skid row!”
In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn’t do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.
When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.
This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school’s track and field team.
“That’s when I was really stressed,” she says, at once sighing and laughing.
Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.
Early adversity
She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.
There are questions about her mother Khadijah is not ready to ask, answers she is not ready to hear. How did her mother end up on the streets? How come she never found a stable home for her daughters? Why wasn’t there family to turn to, no father, no grandparents? And what will become of her little sister?
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” is often her response. Ask personal questions about her mother and the fire in Khadijah’s eyes turns dim. She knows when she arrives in Cambridge, Mass., she will need to seek counseling. So much of her life is a blur.
She knows she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California. A few years later, Jeanine was born.
She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. “She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah.”
When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.
When they went to return her to skid row, her mother and sister were gone.
Khadijah accepted the Londons’ invitation to spend the rest of her school year with them.
In their comfortable hilltop home, Khadijah learned a new set of lessons. The orthopedic doctor and nurse taught her table manners, money management and grooming.
She won’t be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.
Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.
They plan to connect her with faculty mentors and potentially, a host family to check in with every so often. She will also attend a Harvard summer program at Cornell to take college-prep courses.
“I strongly recommended her,” Hilden said. “I told them, ‘If you don’t take her, you might be missing out on the next Michelle Obama. Don’t make this mistake.’ ”
Seeking connections
“I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . . . My work is far reaching and never finished.”
Khadijah expected to feel more connected after nearly two years at Jefferson, to make at least one good friend.
Students flock to the smart girl for help with homework and tests and class questions. She walks through campus tenderly waving and smiling and complimenting everyone she knows.
But when prom pictures arrive, they show her posing alone in a silky black and white dress. In her yearbook, hundreds of familiar faces look back, but the memories are missing.
“It’s a nice, glossy, shiny, colorful yearbook,” she said. “But it feels like they’re all strangers. I’m nowhere in these pages.”
In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.
She found Chantwuan sitting on a garbage bag full of clothes.
“Khadijah’s here!” her sister Jeanine yells. Chantwuan’s face lit up.
She explained the details of her graduation, the bus route to get there and gave her mother a prom picture. She said she would leave for summer school Friday.
There is no talk of coming home of for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.
“Look at you,” her mother says. “You’re really going to Harvard, huh?”
“Yeah,” she says, pausing. “I’m going to Harvard.”
Yea, she bad...
Amber Rose is definitely getting a lot of spotlight nowadays! She just got signed to Ford Modeling Agency, representing for the "thick" girls for sure. Now Ms. Rose has been around for a while but every since her and Kanye has became exclusive, she has became an overnight celebrity. But what I find rather unique about Ms. Rose is that she has no problem with letting you know who she is and what she is about, which is one of the lessons I have learned in life. If no one in the room agrees with you, keep your head high and you could gurantee by the end of the day, people would admire you.
In many interviews Ms. Rose admits to being bi-sexual, a freak in the sheets, and clearly she has a unique style. While other celebrities try to put on this "goodie to shoe" act for their audience (Lindsey Lohan, Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton), Amber tells it like it is and you either choose to accept it or not.
I think this is important for many reasons but let me give you the example I always give to my little brother; you walk into a room with a neon yellow shirt, tie dye pants, silver shoes, and purple shades, of course everyone in the room is staring at you like your crazy. However, you have confidence in yourself and is comfortable with your selection of clothing, everyone will notice your unique style and appreciate you for it. Now, if you would have walked in the room with your head hanging, making very little eye contact and revealing your insecurities, then you can almost guarantee that people will make fun of you!
Ms. Rose walks into the room and demands attention without saying a word...Yea, now thats a bad bad chick!
"No Homo"
Does This Purple Mink Make Me Look Gay?The rise of no homo and the changing face of hip-hop homophobia.
In August, 2005, three weeks before his nationally televised declaration that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," Kanye West made a statement he'd later describe as braver and more difficult than his attack on the White House. Hip-hop, he told MTV, was supposed to be about "speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers, but everyone in hip-hop discriminates against gay people … I wanna just come on TV and just tell my rappers, tell my friends, 'Yo, stop it.' " Taking on Bush was a perfectly hip-hop move, but taking on homophobia, West feared, could be career suicide. Undeterred, he revisited the subject in a November 2005 interview, discussing his love for his openly gay cousin, not to mention his conflicted but evolving attitude toward his interior decorator. West's call for tolerance remains the highest-profile rebuke of gay-bashing that hip-hop has seen.No homo tweaks this dynamic because it allows, implicitly, that rap is a place where gayness can in fact be expressed by the guy on the mic, not just scorned in others. In the very act of trying to "purify" an utterance of any gayness, after all, the no homo tag must contaminate it first—it's both a denial and a flashing neon arrow. This isn't to suggest that saying no homo is a radical act, but there's an appealing sense in which the phrase refuses to function as tidily as some of its boosters might like. This is especially striking in those cases when rappers add no homo to statements of sexual pleasure we'd otherwise have no reason to think of as gay. "No homo, I go hard," Chamillionaire rapped on a recent mix tape, implying that an erection is inherently homosexual. Even more absurdly, when Cam'ron named a song "Silky (No Homo)," it was hard to decide what he was disavowing. The emotions of sadness and longing expressed in the lyrics? Or the tactile sensation of silkiness itself?
But old habits die hard, and last week, West amended his position somewhat on "Run This Town," a new Jay-Z single on which the Chicago rapper is a featured guest. "It's crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow," West begins his rap, "to everybody on your dick—no homo." No homo, to those unfamiliar with the term, is a phrase added to statements in order to rid them of possible homosexual double-entendre. ("You've got beautiful balls," you tell your friend at the bocce game—"no homo.") No homo began life as East Harlem slang in the early '90s, and in the early aughts it entered the hip-hop lexicon via the Harlem rapper Cam'ron and his Diplomats crew. Lil Wayne brought the term into the mainstream, sprinkling "no homo" caveats across cameos, mix tapes, and his Tha Carter IIILP, which was 2008's best-selling album. (Jay-Z has used the word pause in a similar way.)
The term's appearance in hip-hop coincided with the rise of the so-called "down-low brother," a closeted black figure often demonized as a disease-spreading boogeyman, invisible by definition and thus potentially, frightfully, everywhere. Saying "no homo" might have started as a way for rappers to acknowledge and distance themselves from the down-low phenomenon. As the phrase has spread, many have decried no homo as depressingly retrograde, a pigheaded "That's what she said" for homophobes. But the term functions in a more complicated way than a simple slur. As society becomes increasingly gay-tolerant, hip-hop is reassessing its relationship to homosexuality and, albeit in a hedged and roundabout way, it's possible that no homo is helping to make hip-hop a gayer place.
Often, no homo appears not just as a disclaimer but as a punch line, a See what I did there?that flaunts one's cleverness. "Just shot a video with R. Kelly, but no homo though," Lil Wayne rapped in 2007. In this line—a sly nod to both a music video co-starring Wayne and Kelly and to the R&B singer's alleged sex tape—no homo isn't an afterthought; it's the keystone that holds the whole joke together. A funny side effect here is that the no homo vogue doubtless encourages rappers not only to scrutinize everything they say for trace gayness, but to actively think up gay double-entendres just so that they can cap them off with no homo kickers.
Beyond this, there's a sense in which no homo, rather than limiting self-expression in hip-hop, actually helps to expand it. We see this play out in the rhymes and personas of the term's most famous practitioners. Cam'ron and the Diplomats are, ironically, among the most homoerotic MCs in rap. They wear pink and purple furs and brag regularly about how good they look. In the video for "Pop Champagne," Jim Jones and Juelz Santana giddily douse each other with frothy white geysers of bubbly. On Cam'ron's "Hey Ma," he describes having sex with a female paramour with seven vague words—"She was up in the Range, man"—but when the girl leaves, he immediately calls Santana to narrate the act in detail and, in a sense, to enjoy and consummate it fully. Similarly, Lil Wayne has been photographed kissing his mentor, the rapper Baby, on the lips and cultivates a shirtless, slithering, rock-star-worthy air of libertine sexuality. Kanye West attends runway shows, keeps an entourage of designer-clad dandies, and blogs regularly about design. When these rappers say "no homo," it can seem a bit like a gentleman's agreement, nodding to the status quo while smuggling in a fuller, less hamstrung notion of masculinity. This is still a concession to homophobia, but one that enables a less rigid definition of the hip-hop self than we've seen before. It's far from a coup, but, in a way, it's progress.
Man Up!
This site is for and about being an "artist" for social change, and it is only right that I introduce myself to my audience and express why I believe this is such an important subject. I am a filmmaker from the South-Side of Chicago. Those streets raised me and showed me things that I never want my kids or kids kids to experience. Now don't get me wrong, I love my community but the chances of making it out is slim to none and only the strongest survive. I watched a lot of my friends come and go, live and die, lose themselves to the very streets that were once upon a time all I knew.
So then I was left with the question, the question that changed my life forever: What can I do to make it better?
After graduating from Young Womens Leadership Charter School of Chicago, I moved to California to attend California Institute of the Arts majoring in Film/Video with a minor in Cultural Studies and a emphasis on African American Studies. I was determined to change the cycle and educate people through entertainment.
I have posted my film for your viewing and please feel free to comment and engage with the subject matter. The name of the piece is called Man Up! and it is a documentary about African American male sexuality and gender representation. While a lot of people shy away from this topic, I think it is something that has been swept under the rug for way too long and needs to be discussed.
Enjoy,
The Artist
This is only part 1 of this project!
To Be Continued!