PALM SUNDAY
Palms: Brittle, green-yellow vegetation waving dry and tall in the thick air of the sanctuary. Some braided into crosses of all sizes and proportions. Intermittent Hosanna shouts and wails cried out. Blessed! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!
Deacon George Mighty sits in his every Sunday seat, in the midst of it all, eyes gray and gummy with blindness. He’s Easter-sharp: suit and shirt a sightless white; tie and shoes ocean blue. The shoes are cracked into irregular shapes, suggesting crocodile skin. The tie is sheer, its surface frictionless and slick. Beside him sits a fedora with a wide sash, both the same unnatural white as the suit (double-breasted; wide lapels) and shirt.
Deacon Mighty always tells the story of how he was saved some sixty years ago on Palm Sunday at a storefront in Harlem. He staggered in drunk, a cool metal flask cutting divots into the skin on his hip — walked out free indeed, born again. Now, this Sunday is his own High Holy Day, his birthday in the Spirit, more significant to his personal theology than the Resurrection itself. Every year he wears the purifying white, with shoes and tie to trim.
Rolling down his clay-red cheeks, clinging to the cleft of his chin, are cloudy, viscous tears.
Hosanna, we cry. Blessed, oh blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!
The palms shiver in our hands, rustling praise.
The organ swells again. A minor key that struggles toward major, like a swimmer half-dead catching glimpses of the light.
This game is a poem. It’s a novel. It’s a play. It’s cinematic, it’s a platformer, it’s a first person shooter, and it’s a role playing game with no leveling up or stats, just one special item: the portal gun. It’s basically frothing at the mouth with ideas, but on the inside. On the outside, it’s an elegant beast.Playing with Myself (via solcpark)
THE SHADES.
(Fair Warning: this essay presupposes a considerable amount of interest in, and knowledge about, A Different World, a late-80’s/early-90’s spin-off of The Cosby Show set at Hillman College, a fictional HBCU.)
The best characters in sitcom history are, at root, co-dependent beings, tied in an inextricable, parasitical knot to the actors who played them. This is why you can’t look at Ted Dansen, snowy hair and all, without thinking of Sam Malone, why you’ll never convince me that Queen Latifah didn’t have a brief side career as a magazine editor, didn’t share a spacious apartment with her shallow friend Régine, didn’t have an on-and-off boyfriend named Scooter who went on to father the best quarterback prospect in Dillon, Texas since Jason Street himself.
The more iconic the character, and — importantly — the longer the show was on TV, the vaguer the lines become. There’s a thing, for example, that used to happen in Rachel Green’s face when she smiled on Friends (a folding and a flattening around the eyes; the mouth pulled from both corners into a soft, pink sine wave) that’s identical to a thing that continues to happen in Jennifer Aniston’s face when she smiles — and because I watched that thing happen on TV for about a decade, I feel qualified to watch the real Aniston’s talk-show appearances and tell you when she’s experiencing true joy.
The character becomes the actor, and the actor becomes the character. That’s the rule, the one that keeps great TV actors from ever truly shedding the characters that make them famous, the one that knits viewers closer to the people on the small screen than to their counterparts in the movies or anywhere else.
It’s a rule that’s helpful to keep in mind as we consider the only on-screen persona to ever break it successfully: A Different World’s Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison).
Now, I don’t want to diminish Kadeem Hardison’s role in building Wayne: he was funny, awkward, overconfident, fundamentally good — everything you wanted from Dwayne. His effortless chemistry with Lisa Bonet, Jasmine Guy, and Darryl Bell (who played Denise Huxtable, Whitley Gilbert, and Ron Johnson, respectively) were a big reason for ADW’s greatness. But the truth is that Hardison isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Dwayne Wayne.
That distinction belongs, unshared, to an immortal pair of flip-up shades.
————Waves for days. 1980.
Man oh man. When I was a kid, between 9 and 14 or so, I was maniacal and singleminded in my pursuit of the perfect headful of waves. I’d learned the routine from my father: long, hot shower; too much pomade (my favorite was a waxy, inflexible monstrosity called Nu Nile); about 100 strokes of the hairbrush — 25 on each quadrant of the head; du-rag tied medium-tight, inside-out, line perfectly centered, cape tucked into a neat bun above the nape of my neck.
I’d wake up with the greasiest pillow — despite the du-rag — and the stiffest neck from trying not to move my head too much, trying not to thwart potential undulations of the near-scalp. I’d brush teeth, eat breakfast, get dressed — everything possible before the inevitable shedding of the rag. I always saved that for the very last moment before I left the house; my mom wouldn’t ever let me leave the house with it on.
Reflected in the square mirror in the small, orange-lit bathroom (third-floor apartment, the most Orthodox corner of Inwood) I’d see waves in horizontal stripes across the top of my head. My natural tight curls tamed, gummed up, laid flat. Same across the back, seen with the assistance of a compact my mom used for makeup.
I never could solve the problem of the sides.
Those waves were my pride and joy. Pretty much my reason, along with the Fugees, for living and breathing in the mid-90’s. Nobody rocks waves anymore, though. Looking back, it feels like the last vestige of black male shame of natural hair, a specter of the jheri curl.
I’d walk around school, brushing delicately between classes, cherishing the faint line running down my forehead that ensured my place in the world, such as it was. I’d think about my dad and me in the mirror (a bigger one) in Chicago, practicing and perfecting the wrist-curves that led to follicular success. About how it was a thing, one thing, that he’d left me to do.
-VC
Game Boy Pocket, released in 1996. This was the first handheld system I ever had and I remember playing Pokémon Blue on it.
