Common Good Collective

Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Nona Hendryx and Women Who Fly

“There’s no such thing as the future,” Nona Hendryx, member of the groundbreaking group Labelle said to writer Emily Lordi during their interview. It was just hours before the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in New York City as the two women discussed Afrofuturism and the new story Hendryx is revealing about Black women, speculative art and technology. Imagination is what empowers the collective to shape the present, can stir up hope for an alternative, brighter future.

Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories
by Emily Lordi

On the last night of Black History Month, February 29, 2020, I attended a concert held in the Temple of Dendur, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—the last such event that I would attend, it turned out, for a very long time. Those who have visited the room will know that it resembles a massive display case: a pavilion-like wall of glass exposes the temple to the sky, and a reflecting pool frames it below. On this night, the temple glowed lavender in the dark behind 600 folding chairs that had been set up to face a makeshift stage. A DJ played songs like Parliament’s “Mothership Connection (Star Child)” while four dancers roamed the aisles, voguing and tilting into deep penchés. One dancer, a very tall person with a beard, wore a visored helmet, silver wings, and a skirt made out of a tarp. Before long, a line of people wearing similar costumes and carrying instruments processed up to the stage and started to play—saxophone, synthesizers, arca, drums, bass. A poet, Carl Hancock Rux, recited lyrics about the future. A singer, Keyontia Hawkins, performed incantatory chants.

Afrofuturism, despite its status as a perennial cutting-edge pop culture trend, has a history and a trajectory. It has a gender. And it has ancestors who are still with us.

Nathaniel Mackey’s Long Song

Nataniel Mackey, a Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, understands the intricate weaving of poetry and jazz. His work reflects both loves, and how they come together to create a new story.

Nathaniel Mackey’s Long Song
by Allison Jones

Not many poets can claim a three-decade stint as a DJ. For prize-winning writer Nathaniel Mackey, however, music and writing have always been deeply intertwined. In fact for Mackey, writing often starts with listening.

“Sometimes I will feel a line or phrase as a pulse before I have the words for it, and later I find the words,” Mackey said. Read more

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Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Cierra Hinton: Journalism, Community, and Power

Common Good Collective had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Cierra Hinton, Executive Director of Scalawag Magazine. We spoke with Cierra about the critical role journalism plays in building community and people power. We have included the inspiration for our conversation below — a speech Cierra gave at a local news conference that challenges the industry to de-center structural power and speak to the power of community.

It’s time we abolish the Fourth Estate
A letter from Scalawag’s Executive Director-Publisher
by Cierra Hinton January 15, 2021

Last week, as we watched white supremacists storm the Capitol, journalists across the country stated their disbelief in what they were seeing—as if journalism did not play a role in growing that chaos.
I’ve been watching The Crown lately. For those unfamiliar, it’s a TV drama that follows the political rivalries and romance of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and the events that shaped the second half of the Twentieth Century. For a history-loving millennial like myself, it’s solid entertainment.
Support anti-racist, people-driven Southern media.

“Art for life’s sake”

“Art for life’s sake,” is how percussionist John Santos describes the jazz tradition and the many African and Indigenous musical traditions that inform it. The work of improvisation is no exercise. It runs much deeper than that. You can hear it in the shouts of a brass section, of the wails of a blues guitar, or the pulsing syncopations of an Afro-Cuban drummer. It is the longing for freedom, and at the same time a process for achieving that freedom, through reliance on a community, through the expression of gifts, through the refusal to be silent.

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Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

“Peace”

When Ornette Coleman and his “free jazz” ethos arrived in New York’s jazz scene in the late 1950’s, he shook up one of the world’s great cultural hubs. He was attempting to throw off the constraints of Western harmonic and rhythmic systems. The results could be dizzying, or cacophonous, or plaintive, or just gorgeous. This track, from the album The Shape of Jazz to Come, captures that still captures that ethic more than 60 years later.

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