Since I can’t live with a man I don’t love, and since I travel all over the world and still don’t see a man I want, then I just don’t do anything. When I have boyfriends, it’s always just one at a time. I loved Ike almost like I loved Harry, but it wasn’t beautiful and clean, because Ike was so mean. I’m careful with my love. I can wait; I think it’s coming. I can wait.
written by http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tina-turner-queen-of-rock-roll-19861023

My journey to black literary insobriety isn’t so different from how I came to appreciate free jazz after growing up in a house that contained two records, the soundtrack to “Enter the Dragon” and “Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan.” It turns out that I enjoy never fully understanding what’s in front of me, and I masochistically relish being offended while thinking about why I feel offended and if I should feel offended. I also live in Manhattan’s East Village.
written by http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/black-humor.html

Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life — love it more than I loved my fears — and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: to go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.
written by https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of-daydreaming.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000

Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me. Now here in this country we’ve got something called a nigger. It doesn’t, in such terms, I beg you to remark, exist in any other country in the world. We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him. I’ve always known—I had to know by the time I was seventeen years old—that what you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of, and you invested me with it. Now, if that’s so, no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it, I know you can’t do any more and I’ve got nothing to lose. And I know and have always known—and really always, that is part of the agony—I’ve always known that I’m not a nigger. But if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. I know I was born, I’m going to suffer, and I’m going to die. The only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else, anything else. I learned this because I’ve had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well, he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I’m going to give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.
written by James. Bald. WIN.

And so sometimes, on a Friday night, after the singing is over and the clapping dies down, there’s simply no one and nothing to be done. You fall back on yourself. Backstage empties out, but they’re still serving. You’re not in the mood for conversation.
written by http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/crazy-they-call-me

I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies and marveled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and coldheartedness in the world
written by https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/magazine/making-house-notes-on-domesticity.html?_r=1&mtrref=nymag.com&mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=C0BFEE021BCD5189DE8AACFDAEFBD5D4&gwt=pay

While attempting to sort through Cusk’s various literary and public-­intellectual personae, and wondering how close, if at all, I’d come to witnessing the unconstructed human, I never got as near as this story, told to me by Heti: A few years ago, Heti and Cusk were doing an event together in London. They were smoking outside beforehand, and a young man in an “Oscar Wilde–ish” fur-lined coat walked past. Heti complimented the man on his coat, and because she was cold, he loaned it to her. She wore the coat inside. Standing backstage, Heti started to feel insecure about her outfit. Cusk, Heti said, looked so sleek and stylish, all in black, maybe even leather. Heti decided she did not like her outfit, in comparison. She decided to wear the man’s coat onstage. “That man’s huge, strange, beautiful coat was much better than what I was dressed in,” Heti said. She did not say a word about her decision, but Cusk, it seems, was listening to her; Cusk understood that Heti felt safer in the coat, and she did not want her to feel out of place in front of the audience. So Cusk performed an act of female solidarity. Before walking onto the stage, she put her coat on, too.
written by http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/03/rachel-cusk-novelist-transit.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Cut%20-%20March%2014%2C%202017&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20The%20Cut%20%281%20Year%29

Other black musicians Matsoukas has collaborated with—most notably, Rihanna—espouse the same message of economic self-determination. We have money now, their lyrics suggest, so we’re going to build a kind of power that has been denied us. “Malcolm X, during the Nation of Islam years, was absolutely a capitalist,” Hampton said. “Elijah Muhammad’s idea of self-determination and independence was very much linked to black capitalism.” With Matsoukas’s help, Beyoncé has made the idea of capitalist liberation an essential part of her presentation. The last lines of “Formation” encourage listeners to put business before feelings: “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.”
written by http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/the-provocateur-behind-beyonce-rihanna-and-issa-rae