Blog Entries tagged 'rebecca walker'
My First Girl, in Marie Claire
By Rebecca Walker
GROWING UP, my sexuality, like for many, was shaped by the culture I lived and breathed, and heterosexuality was pretty much the only meal served at the Table of Sexual Orientation. Ken and Barbie did not have lovers of the same sex. Denise did not fret to Daddy Huxtable about her girl crush. From the moment I grew breasts, people asked whether I wanted to be a lawyer or an astronaut when I grew up, and if I had a boyfriend. No one, not ever, not once, asked if I had a girlfriend. If they had, I might have considered the possibility. But they didn't, so I didn't, either. The thought never crossed my mind. Which might explain why, the first time I fell in love with a woman, I was completely thrown.
I was 21 years old, four months out of college, three months out of a relationship with a boy I thought I was going to marry, and employed at a nonprofit. One evening, I was working a fundraiser at an awards ceremony for women in the film industry. A possible suitor, male or female, was as far from my mind as the salt lakes in the Himalayas. And yet, as I strode across the exquisitely appointed room toward yet another philanthropist, I bumped into a very beautiful woman.
She was a celebrity who shall go forever unnamed, but I will say that she was statuesque and confident, and her skin glowed with health, wealth, and carefully applied bronzer. I sputtered and apologized for almost knocking her down. She smiled and touched my arm, but I was mortified and dashed into the women's room. I had never felt attracted to a woman before. It was as if my whole view of what was sexy, sensual, and possible had just turned on its axis.
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The Walkers in Torino, from the Root
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By Rebecca Walker
Kara Walker is tall, fashionable and reserved when I meet her in the lobby of the chic Residence Du Parc, a brutalist landmark of poured concrete adorned with iconic examples of modernist and postmodern art. Outside huge windows, Turin is celebrating itself: Italian flags drip from every window, flutter along every boulevard.
Kara wears flat leather oxfords, tights and a paper-thin leather jacket. She eyes me somewhat warily as I extend my arms for an embrace and launch into small talk, which I normally detest. Luckily, my bags have been lost and I indulged in a truly remarkable spa treatment the night before, so I have plenty to talk about.
She's been working on the installation of her show we're both here in Italy to support. The necessary projectors have not arrived. The show is to open in five days, and today we have to teach a class to art students. I sense she'd like to get back to the gallery, and the class is a distraction. She twirls her hair as we wait for the taxi.
At the class, the students are on fire. They've studied our work and want to know about memory and myth, the creative process and its demands. Kara and I sit behind a paint-splattered table and do our best. I'm jet-lagged but exuberant, thanks to a piping-hot cappuccino; Kara is laconic and soft-spoken. But then I see it -- a gentle smile, then a big laugh followed by a series of confident assessments of student work.
As the day wears on, we find a groove. We tag-team it, develop a rapport, give everything we can in the time allotted. Driving back to the Du Parc to recover and prepare for dinner, we talk about our kids. Hers is starting high school, into fashion, gorgeous. Mine is 6, getting ready for soccer camp, and I miss him with an ache I can't begin to put into words.
The next five days are a whirlwind of activity. We teach the students, I present my memoir Baby Love at Il Circolo dei Lettori on the same night that Jonathan Franzen reads from Freedom. I introduce Kara's show, A Negress of Noteworthy Talent, to a full gallery, and Melissa Harris-Perry and Jennifer Richeson follow up with talks about the black body and the neurological workings of prejudice. The press descends and recommends.
Falling Out of Love with Steve Jobs
Rebecca Walker for The Root.
I'm all i-Ed out. At the moment I'm packing an iMac, iPad, iPod and iPhone, and David Pogue's review convinced me that I must have the new MacAir because, well, my iPad plus external keyboard just isn't cutting it for real work and real deadlines, no matter how many cool apps I've dutifully downloaded. I woke up this morning thinking that either I need each and every one of these devices to survive life on earth, or Steve Jobs is one of the biggest, baddest drug dealers of all time, and I'm addicted to hisproduct.
I've been using Macs since high school, when my father bought me a512K Enhanced Macintosh to bang out my college applications and I fell in love with the plug-and-play functionality designed for technologically challenged and manual-reading averse humans like myself. I use Macs today for those reasons and more. They're capable of amazing feats of digital wonder, and they drip with heart-stopping beauty.
But Apple really got me at "Think Different."The legendary campaign associated Apple users with Gandhi, John Lennon, Picasso, Einstein and Dr. King; who wouldn't want to be in that company? The bold, minimalist campaign suggested a seamless practice of company wide integrity that trumped all comers.
But things appear to be changing at Apple. At times, profit seems to be steering the ship. Some also say that Jobs has a scary God complex. And as a producer friend texted me the other day while we were waxing rhapsodic about the new MacAir, the company has consumers strung out, drinking Kool-Aid that may have been delish, organic and bursting with integrity 20 years ago, but today may be anything but.
Third Wave: An accurate and succinct rendering.
This is an excellent description of Third Wave; one of the most accurate and succinct I've seen. From the online version of the Encylcopedia Brittanica:
The third wave of feminism emerged in the mid-1990s. It was led by so-called Generation Xers who, born in the 1960s and ’70s in the developed world, came of age in a media-saturated, culturally and economically diverse milieu. Although they benefitted significantly from the legal rights and protections that had been obtained by first- and second-wave feminists, they also critiqued the positions and what they felt was unfinished work of second-wave feminism.
The third wave was made possible by the greater economic and professional power and status achieved by women of the second wave, the massive expansion in opportunities for the dissemination of ideas created by the information revolution of the late 20th century, and the coming of age of Generation X scholars and activists.
Some early adherents of the new approach were literally daughters of the second wave. Third Wave Direct Action Corporation (organized in 1992) became in 1997 the Third Wave Foundation, dedicated to supporting “groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice”; both were founded by (among others) Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the novelist and second waver Alice Walker. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), were both born in 1970 and raised by second wavers who had belonged to organized feminist groups, questioned the sexual division of labour in their households, and raised their daughters to be self-aware, empowered, articulate, high-achieving women.
MoreThe Art of Memoir on Maui
Happy Sunday!
Just a few spots left for the writing retreat.
Come write your heart out...and then go wade in the ocean blue.
One Big Happy Family, Starred Kirkus Review!
So happy to share this starred review of the new book in today's KIRKUS:
A moving, wildly diverse collection showing how radically different familial configurations can work.
Prompted
by her experiences growing up in a family "fragmented and haunted by
unfulfilled longings," Walker (Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a
Lifetime of Ambivalence, 2007, etc.) looks beyond her well-publicized
estrangement from her mother, novelist Alice Walker, to the lives of
other writers "searching for authenticity through experimentation" in
their domestic situations. The essays she assembles smash class, race
and gender stereotypes to collectively demonstrate the fluidity of the
contemporary family unit. Resisting the traditional boundaries of
coupledom, Jenny Block, on the one hand, celebrates the openness of
what she calls a "polyamorous marriage" with her husband and her
girlfriend. On the other hand, Judith Levine and her boyfriend,
together for 17 years, never married for a number of practical and
philosophic reasons. Writes Levine: "A marriage may or may not be a
union of love. It is always a union of property...I'd like the state to
get out of the sexual-licensing business altogether, actually, for
couples gay, straight, bi, or none of the above." Essays by Dan Savage
and Dawn Friedman lay bare the highs and lows of open adoption. Savage
details the difficulty he and his partner have in deciding what to say
to their adoptive son when his homeless, substance-abusing biological
mother drops out of touch for more than a year: "Which two-by-four to
hit him with? That his mother was in all likelihood dead? Or that she
was out there somewhere but didn't care enough to come by or call?"
Friedman, while admitting to occasional twinges of jealousy and guilt
evoked by having her daughter's birth mother integrated into their
lives, trumpets openness for her daughter's sake: "She will never have
to wonder why her first mother chose adoption; she can ask her."
Rebecca Barry closes the anthology with a frank, humorous exploration
of how she and her sister ended up in couples therapy.
Eye-opening and sometimes shocking, as it brilliantly explodes traditional notions about the nuclear family.
(A star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.)
Pre-order and help put our book on the list its first week out!
Newseek: What Michelle Obama Can Teach Us
Interesting Newsweek piece today, with nice reference to yours truly, referring to my post on theroot.com about the CNN black in America series.
