Items

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  2021-03-14

  Alex Smith Oral History, 2021/03/14

  Self-description: “I’m an artist, writer, musician, and an off-and-on again activist, lecturer, worshopshop leader. I’m coming out of Philadelphia. My work revolves around concepts relating to Afrofuturism; for lack of a better term: superheroes and the conceptual nature of superheroes and the idea of the vigilante and the people’s champions and heroes can walk among us. I use [aesthetics and the immersive ideas of] from science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, biopunk, and Afrofurturism to empower people of color, queer people and to project us into the future and our ideas and culture into the future as well. I use different mediums to do that, my bands Solarized (a sort of noisy punk rock band) and Rainbow Crimes (indie rock, but a little crazier and noisier than many excursions into that). I have written a short story collection called ARKDUST. And I do collage work and soundscapes and curate events like Laser Life, which was a queer sci-fi reading that me and my friends in a collective that I’m in called Metropolarity put together. That’s my praxis right now: a little bit of everything. I view my work as if I’m creating for 18 or 19 or 20 year old Alex, who probably needed some queer Black sci-fi in his life. So, I’m projecting these aspects of myself back to the past to not just nourish my community, but to nourish myself.” Personal website: alexoteric.com Other biographical details: Vegetarian, experiences depression, Pew Center for the Arts Fellow, during COVID is the first time in his life he’s had Health Insurance. Some of our discussion touched on: Using art to project hope and remaining hopeful during the pandemic. Afrofuturism as a part of the fabric of activism, how it is imbedded in culture and impacts queer and POC culture. How Afrofuturism exceeds an “aesthetic revival” of representation of Black people in the future and the kind of work that needs to be done to ensure those futures. Deciding to cancel a show he was organizing in the early days of the pandemic to protect the presenters and audience members. The everydayness of people dying because they don’t have healthcare access or can’t afford medicine* outside of the times of COVID-19; racism, sexism, and transphobia in the healthcare system.Corporate interests and their influence on policy. The unreasonable imperative that artists take the pandemic as an opportunity for productivity when many are out of work. It is hard to make art without fuel and without food. Witnesses barriers in the healthcare while caring for his partner after a stroke 5 years ago, the importance of medical bureaucratic literacy in a “Kafka-esque system”. Excitement about getting the vaccine. The pandemic in geopolitical context. Isolation in practice: Safety precautions and research prior to traveling for a funeral. Hope for “science married with activism”. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences need to be more visible, speak in lay person’s terms, do advocacy, and get in the streets. “Nothing is safe unless it empowers.” Other cultural references: Netflix, Zombie Movies, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, Black Panther, Teenage Bounty Hunter, Elon Musk, GoFundMe. A specific reference is made to the need for his sister’s sickle cell anemia medicine in this interview. She dies a few months later. The GoFundMe to cover funeral expenses can be found here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/memorial-fund-for-elizabeth-graham?utm_campaign=p_cp_url&utm_medium=os&utm_source=customer
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  2020-03-01

  Escaping From Our Daily Despair

  Like most people living through these difficult times, I've found it exhausting to endure months without being able to see close friends and not being able to enjoy activities that I once took for granted. A lot of people have coped with these new, debilitating circumstances by adopting new hobbies such as baking breading and making pottery, but I've chosen to dig deeper into my favorite pre-pandemic hobby: reading. Before the pandemic hit my radar back in March (Like it did with most people), I had already amassed a collection of books that I had gathered from thrift shops or borrowed from the Phoenix Public Library. These books, whose topics ranged from Chinese science fiction (The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin) to 20th century European history (Reappraisals by Tony Judt), have helped me partially escape from the daily despair that came from watching the national death count tick up toward 200,000 people and the anxiety that comes with having friends and family who work in the vulnerable service industry. I feel guilty about escaping from our deadly reality into the pages of fiction, but it's necessary to prevent oneself from giving in to darkness and corroding your mental health. Besides, it's not like I have anything better to do with all of this time. Sometimes, I'd rather think about how it would be like to live in Ceres Station (The Expanse series) or to be constantly reincarnated (The Years of Rice and Salt) than to see the cold, hard reality around me (We're on the road to 300,000 dead by winter's end). Sometimes, you just have to drink the soma to get through this brave new world of ours. I just wish it didn't have to be this way. I just wish we had done better as a society.
• 
  2020-08-23

  Having No Mouth

  My story of the Quarantine is that initially I was kind of excited about the prospect of having an excuse to stay indoors. This is due to the fact that I am a homebody and would rather chill with my friends rather than go to parties. However, one thing that I did not think of was that not only would I be staying home most of the time, but a majority of the rest of my family would as well. When I was younger, having everyone home was not a problem, but now we are all grown up, and we all need our space. Due to Quarantine, getting that space that I wanted was rather hard. It felt like I was having a hard time being able to be alone without someone hearing what I was saying. Not only that, but it was also hard because the conflicts in my family came to become more and more prevalent/ This is due to the fact that things like the college process and transitioning from high school to college seemed to have been made a lot harder. Instead of this Summer being relaxing and giving me room to breathe, it was made into one of the hardest times of my life. The short story titled "I Have Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison captures how I felt during the pandemic. In the story, the characters are trapped underground and are totally helpless to the situation that they find themselves in. In many ways, I felt almost the same way to these characters. I felt like I was trapped in a place that I felt as though I had no control over anything because it was not my domain. Like the narrator of the story, I too felt as though I had no mouth by the end of it all. This is due to the fact that I am not the best at standing up for myself or handling conflicts. Not only that, but I feel like whenever I would try to argue my point, I always felt like nothing would happen. Even if anything did happen that went my way, it always felt like it was not enough to feel like a victory. By the end, it would just reinforce my unwillingness to speak up for myself or to just let things go and allow them to continue. I hope that I will be able to improve things once my time at Suffolk starts and when this Quarantine ends.
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  2020-06-17

  California Gym Builds Workout Pods

  This gym built see through pods to enable clients to workout in safety. They are showing social distancing, but what grabbed my attention was how similar these pods are to the glass prisons you see in science fiction movies. Check out Avengers, Skyfall, X-Men, or Star Trek. This is what a virus-infected world is coming to!
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  2020-05-20

  2020 Movie Poster

  A lot of people are joking that 2020 was written by Stephen King. This meme includes Tarantino as the director.
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  2020-05-26

  Writing to fight fear

  I am a writer of fan fiction (informal stories about published works). While I was in quarantine, like much of the world, I was very nervous about the future. It was then that I saw a post that was similar to the one that directed me to this site. EarlyBloomingParenthesis knew that some people were driven to write during this pandemic to relieve stress. She suggested that we make a collection for works that we write during this time, and that we explain WHY we wrote them. As I began to worry more and more about the virus being persistent and immunity not being permanent, I wrote a story about how I imagined such a world might be from the point of view of a child. I published it on Archive of Our own (archiveofourown.org), the Hugo award winning fan fiction website. I have resubmitted it here because I think it fits what you were requesting. I also suggest you check the other works in the collection. Although most of them are unrelated to the pandemic directly, they reflect on how people deal with these challenging times. Some people use fantasy to get away, some use it to face their fears. The introduction to the collection says: "Hello! We live in strange times! A lot of folks have been talking about the importance of fic and fandom communities in this moment. This collection wants to know: how is the global crisis of the coronavirus impacting the fic we write? How are we using fic to cope? This is an attempt to document the relationship between fic written during the crisis and the experience of the crisis itself. Each fic includes an end note about the impact of the coronavirus situation on the fic/writing process. Hopefully we'll all get a chance to process our feelings together and feel a little less alone!" It helped me feel less alone to know that others like me were going through the same thing, and I was pleased that my worried thoughts and plans could help others to make sense of our times, and the times to come.