I Seriously Thought About Killing You

“Today, I seriously thought about killing you” are the opening lines of Kanye West’s latest album, Ye. But should we care about the rest of it? Should we listen to a man who says slavery was a choice?

The short answer is yes. He is an idiot for saying that, I’m in no way trying to defend that or agree with it. The album is good give it a listen.

My take away from the album is that Kanye is reflecting on himself, he has had a rough couple of years with his mental health and is learning how to live with it, and he is requesting, sometimes forcefully – “That’s my bipolar shit, nigga, what? That’s my superpower, nigga, ain’t no disability. I’m a superhero! I’m a superhero!” – that we learn to live with him too.

His last album , The Life Of Pablo, was about him beginning to adjust to family life, being a dad a few times over and deciding which Pablo he was going to be. This new album in no way feels like Kanye settling but it feels like Kanye is comfortable being Kanye. He addresses some of his mistakes, most obviously on Wouldn’t Leave, where he is essentially thanking Kim Kardashian West for not leaving him when he messes up: “For any guy that ever fucked up, Ever embarrassed they girl, Ever embarrassed they wife, She told you not to do that shit” (where “that shit” is spouting racist rhetoric on TV).

As a boy and a young man I learnt very quickly how to apologise in a convincing enough way so that no one was allowed to be angry at me anymore and I could carry on doing what I wanted to do. All of the events in my life I consider to be the cause of genuinely life changing personal growth have been when I have apologised and truly meant it. If I hadn’t learnt how to properly apologise and know when to, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, if I had had more male role models apologising in and around my life I may have learnt how to quicker and therefor needed to apologise less. I think an unfortunate number of problems in the world are because men fuck up and refuse to admit (to themselves as much as to anyone else) that they have indeed fucked up. We do not need people like Kanye fucking up, but they will because they are people and we need them to apologise publicly for it when they do. When the TMZ interview happened the general consensus was that Kanye was cancelled, I even shared a meme that suggested I was in mourning and he may as well have passed away that evening. Redemption is a big word and I’m not sure if Kanye is redeemed yet for all the shit he’s been doing recently but without the prospect of redemption we would have no need for apologies and solutions. In Kanye’s own words from possibly the most beautiful song of all time, Only One: “you’re not perfect but you’re not your mistakes”.

Kanye’s change of attitude towards love and forgiveness has coincided with his family life and that is by no means a coincidence, even his erratic tweets have had a common theme of love and forgiveness. He recently tweeted a video of his daughter singing along to the lyrics “Make no mistake, girl, I still love you, Take the top off, let the sun come in (Believe it or not, the Lord still shines on you)” from his No Mistakes. This theme of unconditional love in spite of mistakes (which I would equate with familial love) has come to the forefront of his philosophy recently and has been as contentious as anything else he has done in his career. He has been ridiculed for colluding with the white-supremacist president when everyone else is concerned with simultaneously ignoring him and trying to defeat him politically. The way Kanye talks about it reminds me of this video about Reverend Wade Watts treating the KKK with love in the face of genuine threats. I know the world does not always work out with a happy ending, it takes incredible amounts of bravery to act like that and we cannot expect everyone to do so for some people have more to lose than others. The story in the video is as inspiring as it is scary and if you watch enough Kanye West interviews you might interpret his recent behaviour as similar to that of Reverend Wade Watts.

I think our best insight into who Kanye is and how he is going to act from here on in is his intro to the whole album:

“The most beautiful thoughts are always besides the darkest
Today, I seriously thought about killing you
I contemplated, premeditated murder
And I think about killing myself
And I love myself way more than I love you, so…
Today, I thought about killing you, premeditated murder
You’d only care enough to kill somebody you love”

I see it as his confession that he loves himself (more but) the same way he loves anyone else, he will sometimes irrationally do bad things for other people just as he might do for himself, but at the end of the day love is the motivating factor. It’s a reflection of something I have believed for a while, that we should treat ourselves with the same kindness we would treat our loved ones with and then eventually we can extend that out to people we do not love yet.

“I love myself way more than I love you
And I think about killing myself
So, best believe, I thought about killing you today”

How Spider-Man: Homecoming Uses Our Own Racism Against Us

Last night I watched Spider-Man: Homecoming for perhaps the third or fourth time and I managed to answer a question I’d been thinking about since the first time I saw the film: How do they manage to pull off that twist that they pull off so well?

SPOILERS INBOUND

The shocking scene where Michael Keaton’s Vulture opens the door to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man’s date’s house is the twist I’m talking about. The moment we realise that the villain is the hero’s crush’s dad and his whole world is about to implode in on itself.

Keaton’s Adrian Toomes begins the film by showing a drawing his child drew and repeatedly justifies his criminal activities with the need to provide for his wife and kid: his child is important to him and important to the film. If you are not familiar with Spider-Man mythology; it is common that Peter’s greatest foes are connected closely to someone he cares about – in Sam Rami’s Spider-Man, the Green Goblin is Peter’s best friend’s dad, in The Amazing Spider-Man the cop doing everything he can to catch the vigilante is Peter’s own girlfriend’s dad, and pretty much every major villain Spider-Man faces in the comics, Peter Parker encounters in his street clothes. So why didn’t we see this coming? And why does it still catch me out on my fourth watch?

Granted; the film is exciting and jam packed and distracts us, stops us from having time to ask “who is the Vulture?” but there’s something else, some deep rooted belief that, even when it is laid out in front of us, forces us to shake our head in disbelief.

It’s that he’s white, she’s black and white people don’t have black children.

A couple of months ago I was with my (white) dad when we bumped into a guy from his badminton club. “This is my son, Elliot” my dad said. I don’t remember the guy looking me in the eye, I don’t remember getting a hand shake or a “nice to meet you”, I do, however, remember the look the man gave my dad as he said “This is your son?”. And I mean I’ve heard the “this is your son?” said to my (black) mum which means “my gosh he’s so much taller than you” and the “this is your grandson?” said to my (black) Grandma that means “I didn’t know you had a grandson so handsome” but at that point I was hearing a “this is your son?” which meant “you have a black son?”. He seemed genuinely surprised. My mum has yet to surprise anyone quite the way that man was surprised by merely introducing me. It makes sense that a black woman could have a black child, that adds up, but a white man having a black child????????

I think it’s one of the many symptoms of a One-drop rule society. Somehow Liz, who is roughly half way the skin tone between her black mother and white father, is just as black as her black mother who’s about twice as dark, and therefore totally removed from her white father. How can this white man produce a black child that is as black as any other black person? It doesn’t add up so we don’t see it coming. This prejudice, intentional or not, is what director Jon Watts used to convince us that the most obvious plot device of a Spider-Man story was actually one of the best plot-twists of any modern superhero movie. I, for one, was fooled.

Grenada South Police Station

After following direction from a kind barman, who had obviously seen examples of tourists losing valuables before, I took a surprisingly short walk from the beach bar where my parents were to the police station just down the road. As I walked into the station, the man sitting behind the desk looked up at me already disappointed and I’m pretty sure if it were possible his eyes would have sighed. I explained my predicament and took a seat outside. With a quick survey of the area around me completed – wooden tables painted police blue, a police trike clearly underused and rusting and an officer pacing the garden and car park – a man called me in to give my statement. Unfortunately I’ve given statements about stolen property before in England and it’s pretty similar here, the only difference I can remember being is that as well as my full name, on the bright pink official document there was also space for my nickname/alias.

The filling in of the statement was pretty straight forward, details I don’t usually think about and times I wasn’t really sure of, the silent gaps between dictating my statement and the officer scribbling it down were occupied with me absorbing the room around me. Opposite, pinned to the wall was a map of Grenada with a cartoon nutmeg with a face in the corner, above my head on the wall behind me was a clock and two officers hats hung from a white rail. The remaining wall, looking back at the door I entered from, featured a hand crafted book shelf with tattered files and tired books. The thickest of the books were the third and sixth volumes of Grenadian law, the covers a similar but deeper blue than the wooden seats outside. There was another thick book without a spine that I just assumed was the Grenadian law volume somewhere between I and V.

All of the paperwork finally complete, my signature messily placed once, twice and three times in the spaces left for me. Now its time for the small talk. Am I enjoying the island? Why didn’t I wait for carnival? Who do I think is going to win the match tonight? I try to answer those questions with more fun than the ones about my missing phone but my efforts are not returned. He’s tired and just doing his job, so that is where the interview ends.

My holiday continues without my phone but with a slightly more enhanced view into the Grenadian policing system. 

The Spirit of a Non Believer

For ages now I’ve wanted to become more spiritual. I think I had a conversation that involved spirituality a couple of weeks ago, I’d been thinking about it before hand a lot and practically exploded when the topic came up, but I don’t think I exploded enough and I still have some thoughts on the matter.

Talking about spirituality from an Athiest/Agnostic point of view is quite difficult to fully get your head round. The easiest way for me to explain what I think spirituality means is sort of like being aware. Being aware of yourself, your body, your mind, your actions, being aware of others, their bodies, minds, actions and being aware of the world around you and the parts of the world that aren’t so around you. That’s sort of how I view spirituality because all of those things can be obtained individually and they’re all on a never ending learning curve that betters your understanding of all existence (as well as your place in it). I actually looked it up and one of the definitions google provided me with was something along the lines of it used to be closely associated with religion but not so much anymore, now it kinda just means gaining experience from (blissful) experiences. And who doesn’t want to gain experience from experiences? It’s a bit like learning but learning to grow as a person rather than learning to complete a thing.

One of the things which I find so intriguing and appealing about being more spiritual is that once you start thinking about it more, you can start learning from anywhere. You can learn something about yourself that can change your life from a television programme about fungi, talking to a friend about their dreams, a youtube video about penguins fighting or just watching an old man walk down the street.

Transport

You know sometimes when you get on public transport in your local area, you look around and you can definitely identify the tourist? Maybe it’s a guy in a brightly coloured skiing jacket interested by what he sees out the window while everybody else stares blankly ahead, or maybe it’s a young woman who gets on the bus and tries to buy a ticket from the driver when “the bus stop clearly states you have to have your ticket before boarding the bus” and she gets off all confused because she didn’t really understand what the driver was telling her. Well now I’m that tourist.

Getting on a transport system that you’re not all too well acquainted with, while everybody else – even the 4 year old schoolgirls – is so comfortable riding is just a tad unnerving. The locals are all so used to getting the buses that not a word is spoken, even during the exchange of the bus fair. People slide on and off the bus where they like and everybody seems to have a mutual knowledge of where everyone else is going. But me and my family sit spread to different parts of the bus as they try to squish us in, my dad sits, smiles and laughs at all of the things he finds funny, my mum sits mostly still and quiet, trying to blend in as the girl from Gouyave she thinks she is and my sister squashed up against some window clutching on to her bag for dear life, thinking about Big Brother. The four of us sticking out like the whitest, most tourist-y sore thumb to ever ride the number 5 bus.

So I haven’t Posted in a while and to anybody who actually sits around waiting my posts I am sorry for you in many ways.

Let’s start with the 14th of February. This year the most significant thing to happen to me on Valentines day was finding out if I got into the college I wanted to go to. Long story short I did get into the college, it’s a really nerdy college that will be filled with maths nerds and yay I got in. 

I am very pleased to get in, honest. It’s just that part of me sort of wanted to get declined.

I can’t remember a point in my life where I honestly failed something or didn’t get something I seriously wanted. I didn’t revise for any exams I took last year, I didn’t practice for the entrance exam of the college and I don’t plan on revising for many exams this time round. Part of me wanted to fail the entrance exam or mess up my personal interview or just not get accepted to give the rest of me a kick up the arse. I wanted not getting in to be the push I needed to be even better than I thought I was, I wanted it to be the part in the film where the boxer gets knocked down, has a tiny epiphany on the ground and gets up bigger and badder than he’s ever been before, but instead the boxer glides through all of the rounds throwing minimal punches at his opponents. What a boring film. I mean it’s great that the boxer gets into the league he wants to be in, but who would want to watch that film?

This is NOT me complaining about life being too easy or everything going the way it was supposed to because that would be silly, it’s me saying nobody would want to watch my life as a film.

 

Half Bad

Because I’m such a cool dude; I was listening to book club or what ever it is on radio 2 yesterday and I heard this woman Sally Green talking about her new book which is coming out. It’s called ‘Half Bad’ for anybody who’s half interested. It’s about this guy, Nathan I think his name is, who is half black witch and half white witch and his struggle in his life being mistreated because he’s both or neither. When I heard the basic synopsis I thought “oh good, another Percy Jackson or Harry Potter” and then the radio presenter said exactly the same thing, that they had the same worries before reading the book. According to which ever Presenter was speaking, it turns out this woman has managed to find a tinsy tiny gap in the ‘hidden mystical beings’ genre and the book is actually really good. According to the urban myth that circulates the radio, the lady’s editor signed her book after just reading 12 pages of it because he predicted it would be such a hit.

A section of the book is available to read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b7431/profiles/half-bad , I’m not sure if those are the first 12 pages because apparently the book is really ambiguous and switches a lot but I read them and it does seem quite good. It doesn’t really say much because I very rarely read but I have never encountered something written in this way before. Just seems like a good book to me and 12 pages doesn’t seem like much time to waste if you don’t like it.

 

Charlieissocoollike

If you haven’t already, you should definitely watch some of his videos – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfBT0EiTXgY

Charlieissocoollike, or Charlie Mcdonnel, is probably my favourite vlogger on the whole internet. One Sunday a few years ago I accidentally stumbled across one of his videos, He’d already been vlogging for a while and I ended up watch two years worth of videos in half an afternoon. 

Charlie Mcdonnel doesn’t lead the most interesting life, he’s not ultra-talented but his videos are simply watchable. I can’t really tell what it is but he has the ability to babble in front of a camera and it interests me. The video that I’ve linked to is a video where he talks about criticism and I think it was at this point I realised I think similarly to him and I started to like him even more. Before I started this blog I did consider starting a vlog but I think it takes a lot more to do a vlog because it’s so much more of you in a sense and – this may come as a shock – I hate the sound of my voice.

I don’t know if any of this will mean anything to you but at one point he was the most subscribed to channel on YouTube and all he did was talk.

 

F***ING flappy bird

Recently, there has been a surge in the number of people playing flappy bird. I predict that it will be a fad that will pass in a few weeks but currently it is the game I hear the most about. One day everybody was happy with their lives and then suddenly boom, flappy bird is all over the Internet and everybody is getting annoyed at their phones. I saw one person’s tweet about flappy birds on a tuesday, got the game myself on Wednesday, and by Wednesday afternoon ever body had it. The thing which is so compelling about the game is it’s simplicity. The game looks so easy when somebody else plays it and you think you can beat the game, you end up getting 3 and addicted. The worst thing about it is I keep on playing. My high score is 71 at the moment – I know, get me – and I’m determined to get 100

An Odd Occurrence

I was in class today minding my own business, talking to the people around me while doing some work when I saw fit. I put my head down to do a few minutes of work and I could hear people from the other table telling each other to shut up. I looked up and everyone was doing the same as me, they were all looking around trying to find what we were being quite for. Eventually I saw my teacher with their head in their hands. The room fell silent. My teacher sat on a table, in the middle of helping someone out but had stopped and was now wiping tears from their face. My teacher got up off the table and went to sit at their desk. For minutes our class sat silently. It’s not like we’ve never seen someone cry before or be upset in front of us but a teacher near enough breaking down in front of the class is a very odd occurrence. When somebody with as much authority as a teacher breaks down what are the rest of us supposed to do?