Out of Nowhere

21/07/2020

John Murillo III writes a prose poem about Kanye West, catalyzed by West's recent "Birthday Party" rally but a long time coming. Part of a larger, in-process collection entitled /Lost and Found/, a collection of prose poetry about the countless Black folk, living and dead, lost and discovered in the afterlife of slavery.

"You are left weak shambles because you give everything in asking. No answers but the flashing lights because there are none. You only cut as you cry louder; sharp shambles shards are what you speak. Pain twinkles from shattered stained-glass window panes, shambles flaying Black hands outstretched across years and cities and digital spacetimes, reaching to shake you shambles, to wake you and say, “Goodmorning” ooowee eeoo ooo oo ooo-oo-oooooh, to tell you shambles, “You’ve done good mourning, now come back to us, prodigal mourning son, come back shambles and let us hold and behold you the way you don’t know or cannot say you need.”"

You cry out inside can’t you see shambles Mama, what I’ve become? Ndodna Nda don da can’t they see the blood on my leaves, Mama? Mama, why can’t they ndon da da don d’n da see shambles the light of…

21/06/2020

Tonight, John Murillo III offers a two-track story about the pleasure the police take in antiblack terror, and about the tenderness Black folk show one another as we fight, wherever and whenever we are, for something more than liberation.

The piece channels and mimics the writing, singing, and rhyming of Run the Jewels in track 1, "Jeweled Jouissance," and Stevie Wonder and Noname in track 2, "Stevie and the Woman With No Name."

Read and bop your head and feel this as much as you can. Fall into the rhythm.

"Amaurotic nightingales
Look around, and you’ll see
Their ruinous human history
We hope the darkness keeps us well
We vital strangers
Please, keep our heads up,
And when we get knocked down, don’t forget to stand up.

Look around, and you’ll see
Look around, and you’ll find
Darkness keeps us well
Only we keep us well."

Jeweled Jouissance He smiled. They laughed. He smiled with no teeth and they laughed, loud and long. He smiled with no teeth and I could spy the excitement glinting from his irises even as his eyes…

20/06/2020

While we celebrate today, Nicholas Brady meditates on the complexities of Black freedom against those who think the Federal Government should recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday.

"For these reasons, the celebration of Juneteenth is complicated to me. I imagine without knowing that when our ancestors celebrated they asked or felt many questions about the change in their status. Juneteenth celebrations are not the grotesque propaganda of July 4th. They are not the lies a nation tells itself to enjoy its ill-gotten spoils of conquest, r**e, and genocide. What Black people found in jubilation was much more complicated and much more radical. Black people ate, drank, danced, loved, meditated, and prayed together the questions and the joy, the struggle and the longing. In the place of answers, we celebrated the marvels of a life made anew."

By Nicholas Brady On June 19 many Black people celebrate an interesting holiday named Juneteenth. While we classically think of Juneteenth as a celebration of the emancipation of Black people, ther…

05/06/2020

With the lives of those murdered on our minds, in particular Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Nicholas Brady wrote a piece on the power of Black rage to move worlds.

"In the undeclared war on blackness, birthdays become days of mourning and rage. Blackness connects us all together where life and death share no boundary, they exist together at degree zero.

In this way, rage is not an affliction — rage is an inheritance."

By Nicholas Brady Today Breonna Taylor would have been 27. If she were not murdered, perhaps today would have been a happy day, filled with love and celebration. Instead her killers still receive a…

05/10/2019

Keeping up with the namesake of this space, a new piece from Nicholas Brady on the aftermath of Botham Jean's murder and the power of our memory in the face of state-sanctioned violence

"While I agree with the many articles that have spoken in criticism of Black forgiveness as an acceptable response to racism, I will contend something a little different. I do not think they desire our forgiveness — they desire us to forget."

By Nicholas Brady We may forgive, but we must never forget. In the trial of the ex-cop murderer of Botham Jean (a name I refuse to write), we saw many gestures that seem to be anomalies from a Blac…

03/07/2017

Before Westbrook was declared MVP, John Murillo III wrote the myth into existence.

"I am split/spilt between the daily victories and losses, and “the FEEL.” is the precariousness between the extremes. Some days, I lace them up because I am trying to win to keep from losing. Some days, I put pen to paper, fingers to keys, because I am trying to FEEL. what it FEEL. like to win to keep from losing.

And still other days, on the days the work of wearing Black armor or wielding Black ink are too much or not enuf, I put on that oversized either vermilion or pantone orange official alternate Westbrook jersey because I want, or really need to FEEL. like, win or lose, my value as abundant as 0 persists."

0 Intransitive Verb 1 : to crash, thunderously; “0,” they proclaimed, “0 like the coming of a decades-long storm, like the cataclysm that will unwrite this story and usher in the next.” 2 : to deto…

25/02/2017

John Murillo III returns (finally--it's been like 5000 years) for with a talk he delivered at San Jose State University on Wednesday entitled, "A Mote and A Minute: Deranged Facets of We and the Making." The piece draws from several pieces he's written, and adds some new work as well, and considers the relationship between Black folk, time, space, "we," and creation. Peep the flow of the last section, too. It might be pretty cool.

A quote:

"So “together,” then, wholly devoted and broken, down the Black rabbit (w)hole we go. To do the wake work, to work in the wake, to make space, to boldly go, then, speak with, think through, imagine in the presence of, and be with death. Nothing less, nowhere else, with no time to spare."

Facet 1 Untimeliness “The problem to be considered here is one of time” —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask Another one left smoldering and empty, and only time will tell. Michael’s body la…

16/01/2017

Nicholas Brady returns for with an essay thinking through a small moment in Lauryn Hill's Unplugged performance of "I Get Out"

"This moment in the song reveals Unplugged as an album of fragments — of precious, intense moments in between expanses of lectures, poems, and songs. The gems are woven throughout. Moments of improvised creativity and lucid analysis that elide simple bifurcations between the fragment and the w/hole. Nourbese asks us to consider “when does the fragment cease being a part of the w/hole? To become its own w/hole?”

What would it mean for us to take Ms. Hill’s fragmentary hook seriously? Just get out. Towards a politics of blackness that refuses the social bonds of capitalism, nationalism, internationalism. Get out."

By Nicholas Brady Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged album is criminally slept on, an example of how far a first impression can carry on. The album cannot escape how badly it was received when it was released…

09/01/2017

Out of Nowhere with the one-two punch.

First Nicholas Brady with the stunning, "The Death Within," and now, John Murillo III with, "Nixtamalli," both for their first of 52 essays this year (shoutout to Vanessa Mártir, 100%).

From the piece: "At the crossing of veins: ocean and earth, black water and red land, raised and lightly pulsing tidal tectonic rhythms on the backs of two too-big hands with fingers that can bend backward to wrists, right curled into half a fist to grip the pen touched to and tap-tap-rapping against the parted slit between lips whispering bloodied and salty cross-thoughts incanted below eyes closed, burgundy ink and inky sight in search of they and them and those and me I never knew, those I knew I loved, and those we lost; the narrow split of parted lips conjures the vexed hieroglyphic spellings about to spill onto dirty, splattered pages, while my consciousness teeters on the precipice between ages and spaces, between here and the dream where and when the dead, dying, and doomed might have moments and room to be, speak, and breathe—somewhere, somewhen, in the binding of the notebook, the uneven bluffs of unfinished maps, the margin’s sewn seams."

Also, peep the bio:
Dr. John Murillo III is a conjurer. Often, that he practices Black magic with words, rife with nerdy references and citations—to/of Mass Effect, Doctor Who, Yasiin Bey, Umbrella Academy, Pokémon, Hortense Spillers, Steven Universe, Theoretical Physics and Afropessimism—infuriates misguided, uninformed, and petty nonbelievers of all kinds. He channels their dismissive and baseless hateration into inky spells, deathly cast into wordy, cinematic, weird, loving, enraged, and sorrowful sentences on comic book, essay, poetry, and novel pages. Unlike them, he believes in the “promise” and the practice “of the infinite,” tries his best like “Umi Says,” and imagines the unimaginable through, for, and with Black life and death everywhere. His curls have been described as “a portal into the boundless absurdity and wonder of the cosmos.”[1] His favorite dish is mole negro.

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[1] By himself and literally no one else.

https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/nixtamalli/

08/01/2017

Nicholas Brady wrote a little piece on the sociality of death for

"Antiblackness is the organized theft of the death within black flesh. What the master was buying at the coffle was not simply or necessarily our life, but a deed giving him right over the death within us. The ledgers and accounting books calculated the amount of lifeforce that could be squeezed from the slave up to its demise, speculating on the value produced from the breathing dead. The documentation is paper thin, but the relation to death is concrete and felt. Mastery is a parasitic relation to the death within our flesh. The blossoming of death within us is the slave relation coming to fruition, the harvest of his position in the world. The capacity to kill black flesh is the bedrock of mastery. The liberal individual endowed with rights and recognition is nothing more than a fantasy made from the blossoms of the death within us."

https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/the-death-within/

By Nicholas Brady The death is always in me. Within me is the fact of death that cannot be transcended. The death within is not the property of the flesh, but the knowledge of the flesh’s necessary…

21/09/2016

Nicholas Brady reflects on the impossibility of living black in a world structured on our slaughter and consumption

"Impossible is the only
Black way to be"

By Nicholas Brady Impossible is The distance between I have not done that before And everything beyond the horizon of I cannot do that yet Ali told us Impossibility is a dare Creativity is for thos…

18/08/2016

Kala Anthony-Lacy brought us back with this powerful piece on the spiritual necessity to remember our kindred

"To start this piece I tried to make a list of the names that we are mourning, but I didn’t know when to stop. What is considered “recent” and what hurt are we supposed to have healed from by now? How does time function within death? I’ve decided that it doesn’t. So, in throwing away time, I refuse to make a list if I don’t have the capacity to name us all; we all deserve our name. There is not one who I will not recognize for the sake of easy consumption. For all of my family that no longer inhabits their bodies, regardless of bloodline, era, and circumstance, I write this for you."

“Death is seen as a stage of life. The living dead are still members of the tribe, and personal immortality is assured as long as one’s memory is continuously passed down to each generation by the …