Author Archives: Je Writer

The Veldt Drift Back Into View with “Black Girl” and a Return to the Road

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Some returns arrive quietly, less like a reappearance and more like a shift in atmosphere you gradually realize has been there all along. The Veldt have always operated in that space: elusive, textural, emotionally exacting. Their new single, “Black Girl,” arrives not as a reintroduction, but as a deepening.

For a band whose legacy has often been framed through the language of firsts—first-wave shoegaze, early architects of a sound too fluid to be pinned down—the more interesting story has always been about their resistance to stasis. Even now, decades removed from their North Carolina origins, The Veldt remain committed to a kind of sonic permeability. “Black Girl” drifts in on that ethos, pulling from dream pop’s haze while grounding itself in something more corporeal: movement, determination, a body in motion against constraint.

There’s a quiet defiance in the track’s construction. It doesn’t explode so much as it expands, echoing the narrative it draws from—a young dancer reaching toward something beyond her circumstances. The band doesn’t romanticize that struggle; instead, they score it with patience. Layers accumulate. Vocals hover just above the instrumentation, never overpowering it, as if insisting that presence itself is enough. This sense of accumulation carries into the broader Spanakopita EP, a project that feels deliberately porous. Part new material, part excavation, it resists the tidy cohesion expected of a traditional release. Instead, it behaves more like an archive in motion—fragments, experiments, and fully realized pieces coexisting without hierarchy. The decision to make it available primarily as a tour-only CD underscores this intimacy. You have to be there. You have to step into their world, however briefly, to access it.

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Holding the Line: Stanley Nelson & Marcia Smith on Documentary, Discipline, and the Art of Pushback

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Interview by Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

There is a particular gravity to filmmakers who have not only shaped a field, but insisted on its integrity—across decades, political cycles, and aesthetic shifts that threaten to flatten form into trend. 

Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith have never chased trends.

In 2026, the co-founders of Firelight Media were named Black Public Media’s Trailblazers—an honor recognizing not only their films, but the infrastructure they’ve built to sustain others. The award, BPM’s most prestigious, will be presented at the PitchBLACK Awards on April 30th as part of a broader convening that continues to fund and platform Black filmmakers at a moment when such support is increasingly precarious.

For over two decades, Firelight has functioned as both incubator and intervention: a space where underrepresented filmmakers are resourced, mentored, and, crucially, taken seriously. Through its Documentary Lab alone, the organization has helped launch the careers of more than 100 filmmakers of color.

Nelson, a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, remains one of the most rigorous visual historians of Black life in America—his films resisting spectacle in favor of depth, refusing compression in an era defined by speed. Smith, a producer and strategist, has helped build the scaffolding that allows those stories—and others—to exist. Their recognition arrives in a moment of contraction. Public funding has thinned, with recent federal rescissions stripping critical resources from organizations like Black Public Media. Streamers have narrowed their appetites. The language of “content” continues to erode distinctions between rigor and volume, truth and approximation.

What remains, as Nelson and Smith articulate with precision, is not optimism—but clarity.

And, perhaps more importantly, resistance.

Documentary Filmmaking in a Time of Contraction

Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer: Thank you both for being here—and congratulations on being named Black Public Media’s 2026 Trailblazers. I want to begin broadly: how would you describe the current climate of documentary filmmaking, particularly for African American filmmakers seeking funding?

Stanley Nelson: The landscape has shifted. Streamers have narrowed their focus—primarily to true crime and celebrity-driven stories—and they’re open about that. At the same time, public funding has been reduced. We’ve seen institutions like Black Public Media lose critical support. That combination makes it much harder to finance substantive documentary work.

Marcia Smith: There’s still money, but it depends on what you want to do. If you’re trying to tell stories about history, culture, or contemporary issues, those projects are harder to fund. And even when opportunities exist, structural barriers remain.

On Market Demands and Creative Integrity

Graham-Mayer: If you were offered funding for a true crime project, would you take it? And could you make it your own?

Nelson: It depends on the story. Some projects in that space can still explore meaningful ideas—race, justice, power. But filmmakers are rarely given both funding and full creative control.

Smith: More often, you’re deciding whether to spend years developing something that doesn’t fully align with your interests.

Graham-Mayer: There seemed to be a surge of opportunity around 2020. Did that moment lead to lasting change?

Smith: It created a brief opening. There was recognition, and there were more resources—but it didn’t last.

Nelson: We saw it. The calls came in—and then they stopped.

Advice for Emerging Filmmakers

Graham-Mayer: What guidance would you offer younger filmmakers navigating this moment?

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Marie Krüttli writes toward vulnerability—and lets it take shape with No Fear No Gear

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The album opens not with a statement, but with a drift—into texture, into space, into something quietly unfolding. Instead, Marie Krüttli builds a world that reveals itself gradually—through texture, through atmosphere, through the slow unfolding of feeling into sound. On No Fear No Gear, written, composed, and produced by Krüttli herself, the album carries the intimacy of authorship at every level. It feels held, considered, and yet unguarded. If anything, this is a record about removing the guard entirely.

Krüttli’s relationship to the song is fluid here. Melody is present—often strikingly so—but it is never fixed in place. Each track behaves like an environment rather than a structure, something you move through rather than arrive at. Sound stretches outward: lush, then sparse; aqueous, then brittle; intimate, then suddenly expansive. The arrangements breathe with a kind of tidal logic, receding just as they threaten to overwhelm.

What she is shaping is not just music, but space. And within that space, emotion is allowed to exist without hierarchy. Sung primarily in French, her mother tongue, the album feels close to the body—close to breath, to sensation, to the small, internal shifts that often resist translation. There is a clarity to the emotional language here, but it is not didactic. It is felt before it is understood, absorbed rather than decoded.

Love, in No Fear No Gear, is not singular. It fractures, multiplies, contradicts itself. Desire sits beside fear. Devotion beside uncertainty. Motherhood beside the question of whether to mother at all. On “Mother and/or Not,” Krüttli approaches that question without resolution. The song holds tension rather than dissolving it—the pull between care and autonomy, between expectation and self-preservation. There is guilt here, but also defiance: a quiet insistence that identity does not collapse into role. It is one of the album’s most vulnerable gestures precisely because it refuses to conclude.

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What Remains After the Making: On Artist Process and the Survival of the Creative Self

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Guest Author: Audrey Jackson

There is a moment in the making of almost anything when the work stops feeling like yours. It happens differently for everyone. For the painter it might arrive mid-canvas, when the image has moved far enough from the original vision that neither version seems true anymore. For the writer it comes in revision, that strange grief of encountering a sentence you once loved and no longer recognizing the person who wrote it. For the musician it is sometimes the recording itself: the work fixed, final, suddenly separate from the body that produced it.

This estrangement is not failure. It is, in fact, the work telling you it is alive.

The Process Is Not the Product

We live inside a culture that is deeply invested in outcomes. The finished novel. The released album. The gallery opening. The cultural object that can be held, reviewed, purchased, remembered. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to complete things, with wanting your work to exist in the world where other people can encounter it. But the process, the actual daily texture of making, is almost never discussed with the same seriousness as the product. We talk about what artists made. We rarely talk about what it cost them to sit down, again, and begin.

Process is unglamorous. It is Tuesday morning with coffee going cold and a blank page that refuses to cooperate. It is the sketch you made at midnight that seemed, in the low light, like the beginning of something real, and looks, in the morning, like nothing in particular. It is the repetition. The return. The discipline of caring about a thing before anyone else does.

And yet process is where the self actually lives. The finished work belongs to the world. The making belongs to you.

What the Body Knows

There is a reason artists talk about their work in physical terms. The painter who says she feels when a composition is right. The poet who knows a line has landed because something releases in his chest. The choreographer who can only find the movement by moving, who cannot think her way to the answer from a chair. The body holds what the mind cannot organize. This is one of the deep truths of creative practice: that intelligence is not only cognitive, that knowing is distributed through the whole self, and that some of the most important artistic decisions are made below the threshold of conscious reasoning.

This is also why creative work is so hard to explain to people who don’t do it. The process resists the language of strategy. You cannot reverse-engineer presence. You cannot optimize your way to a poem that breaks someone open. The work asks for something more total: a willingness to be uncertain, to not know, to stay in the room with the unresolved thing until it begins to resolve itself.

The artist is not someone who has answers. The artist is someone who has learned to live inside the question.

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October 29: When Scorpio Creates a President

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The Shared Birthdate of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah

History loves a coincidence, but sometimes a coincidence feels more like a pattern hiding in plain sight. Two African presidents—born decades apart, raised in different political realities, shaped by different revolutions—share the exact same birthday: October 29. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf arrived first, in 1938, in Monrovia, Liberia. Years later, in 1952, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was born in northern Namibia, then a territory under South African rule. One would become the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa. The other would become the first woman to lead Namibia.

Same date. Same astrological season. Two political lives defined by endurance.

Astrology is often dismissed as mysticism, but it can also function as narrative language—a symbolic system for understanding temperament, timing, and the strange rhythms that seem to echo through history. October 29 falls deep inside Scorpio territory, a sign traditionally associated with transformation, survival, and psychological acuity. Scorpio is ruled by Pluto, the planet of rebirth, and historically linked with Mars, the force of confrontation and courage.

In less cosmic terms, Scorpio energy is about resilience. It belongs to people who do not panic when systems collapse. It belongs to people who can sit inside chaos long enough to rebuild something from it.

Look closely at the political biographies of Sirleaf and Nandi-Ndaitwah and the symbolism begins to feel less abstract:

Sirleaf’s story is inseparable from Liberia’s own turbulence. Long before she reached the presidency, she had already lived through the pressures that often fracture political careers: clashes with authoritarian rule, imprisonment, years spent in exile. She moved between international financial institutions and the shifting terrain of Liberian politics while her country cycled through instability and civil war. By the time she won the presidency in 2005, Liberia was emerging from years of violence and institutional collapse. The work ahead of her was not glamorous. Rebuilding a nation rarely is. It meant restoring international confidence, repairing public institutions, and slowly guiding a traumatized country back toward political stability. Over time, Liberia reestablished relationships with global partners, restructured portions of its economy, and strengthened democratic processes under her administration.

If Scorpio has a governing myth, it is the phoenix—the creature that passes through fire before it rises again. Sirleaf’s presidency feels almost mythologically aligned with that story: a leader shaped by political hardship who ultimately presided over a period of national renewal.

Nandi-Ndaitwah’s political life carries a different chapter of the same archetype. She grew up in a Namibia that had not yet achieved independence. As a teenager she joined the liberation struggle through the South West Africa People’s Organization, the movement that fought for Namibia’s freedom from South African rule. Political activism brought detention and eventually exile, where she continued organizing internationally while studying abroad.

For many people, exile deeply interrupts life. For women like this,  it defines it.

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P / P Essay: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf & Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah: Presence and Pragmatism

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Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah offer a stark reminder of the vital role women play in shaping the continent’s future. Both of these leaders—one from Liberia, the other from Namibia—have not only defined their nations’ political histories but have also become symbols of strength, resilience, and the importance of female leadership in the broader African context. Their careers, while shaped by different historical and cultural forces, speak to the transformative power of leadership that transcends gender.

Photos available via Creative Commons

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s place in history is firmly anchored in her role as Liberia’s first female president, a position she held from 2006 to 2018. Her rise to power came after years of struggle—political exile, imprisonment, and the devastating aftermath of Liberia’s civil war. Sirleaf’s journey to the presidency was a testament to her unwavering commitment to national recovery, resilience, and reform. Her leadership during Liberia’s post-conflict era was instrumental in stabilizing a nation that had been torn apart by violence and rebuilding its institutions from the ground up.

Sirleaf’s tenure was defined by a pragmatic approach to governance. She focused on restoring international relations, securing debt relief for Liberia, and laying the groundwork for economic recovery. Under her leadership, Liberia’s economy began to stabilize, foreign investments flowed in, and peace began to take hold. Her achievements were not without challenges, but Sirleaf’s diplomacy and economic strategies helped Liberia secure its place on the world stage. Perhaps her most lasting legacy is her advocacy for women’s rights. Sirleaf’s presidency marked a turning point for women’s political participation in Liberia. She implemented policies aimed at addressing gender-based violence, expanded educational opportunities for girls, and created pathways for women to take active roles in the workforce. Her leadership demonstrated the tangible difference a woman in power could make—not just in terms of policy, but in shaping societal attitudes about the capabilities of women to lead.

While Sirleaf’s leadership was focused on rebuilding a post-war Liberia, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s influence has been felt on the diplomatic stage of Southern Africa and beyond. As Namibia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Nandi-Ndaitwah has been a prominent advocate for regional unity and African solidarity. Her career is deeply intertwined with Namibia’s liberation struggle, where she fought against apartheid and colonial oppression. This experience laid the foundation for her role as a political figure who is committed to both domestic growth and regional collaboration.

Nandi-Ndaitwah’s work in diplomacy has placed Namibia at the center of conversations about Africa’s future. She has worked to strengthen Namibia’s relationships with its neighbors, while also representing the nation on the global stage. As a respected voice in the African Union (AU), she has championed the idea of a united Africa, working tirelessly to foster Pan-African cooperation. Nandi-Ndaitwah’s leadership is characterized by her ability to balance national interests with the broader goals of continental unity. At the heart of Nandi-Ndaitwah’s leadership is a commitment to gender equality. Throughout her political career, she has advocated for policies that promote the economic and political empowerment of women, ensuring that women are not only beneficiaries of national development but also active participants in shaping that development. Her contributions to advancing gender parity are a testament to her belief that women must be present at every level of decision-making, both in Namibia and throughout Africa.

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Toward the Sacred Ordinary: Townes at The Old Quarter

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There is a particular kind of silence that only happens in a room where people are truly listening. Not polite silence. Not distracted quiet. The kind that hums — electric, anticipatory — because everyone present understands that something unrepeatable is happening in real time.

That’s what pulses through Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas — the newly reissued archival document from Townes Van Zandt, released again into the world by Fat Possum Records.

Calling it “new” feels almost beside the point. What this record offers isn’t novelty. It offers presence.

Recorded over a series of July nights in 1973 inside a modest Houston listening room, the performances unfold without adornment: one man, one guitar, and an audience willing to lean in close. There are no lush arrangements to shield the songs, no studio gloss to smooth their edges. What we hear instead is the architecture of Townes’ songwriting laid bare — the skeletal beauty of melody carrying emotional weight that feels almost geological in depth.

The mythology of Townes Van Zandt has grown outsized in the decades since his passing. He is often framed as the doomed poet, the tragic romantic, the saint of beautiful sorrow. But this record complicates that caricature. Here, he is funny. He is wry. He lingers between songs, tossing off remarks with an understated dryness that disarms the heaviness of what follows. The darkness in his writing isn’t theatrical; it’s conversational: When he moves through songs like Pancho & Lefty, If I Needed You, or Waiting ’Round to Die, they don’t feel monumental — not yet. They feel intimate. As if they are still becoming. There’s a humility in the delivery that resists canonization. These aren’t museum pieces. They are living, breathing things shared in a room that smells like wood and sweat and Texas summer air.

What strikes me most is the patience of it all. The record does not rush to prove itself. It allows silence to hang. It allows a lyric to land and reverberate before the next chord arrives. In an era that compresses music into snippets and background ambience, this kind of duration feels radical. You are asked to stay. To sit inside the story. There’s also something politically resonant about this simplicity. No spectacle. No mediation. Just an artist trusting that words — honestly delivered — are enough. That faith in language, in narrative, in human attention, feels increasingly rare.

The reissue by Fat Possum doesn’t attempt to modernize or reframe the material. Thankfully. What it does instead is remind us that live performance, at its best, is a form of communal reckoning. You can hear the audience responding — laughter breaking tension, applause surfacing like waves. The room itself becomes an instrument.

And perhaps that is the enduring power of Live at the Old Quarter: it captures not just songs, but relationship. Artist and listener meeting without pretense. Townes does not sound like a legend here. He sounds like a man in a chair with a guitar, telling the truth as he understands it. The legend came later. What remains in these recordings is something far more valuable — the sacred ordinary of a night when the music was enough, and everyone in the room knew it.

‘V’ Series: Loss & Longing

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Loss & Longing is the second installment in the Publik / Private “V’ Series—an intimate gathering of fourteen poets whose work spans centuries, continents, languages, and forms. Edited by Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer, this collection traces the delicate, unbreakable braid between love and absence, devotion and distance, memory and desire.

From the aching tenderness of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the spiritual urgency of Rainer Maria Rilke to the sensual immediacy of Bernadette Mayer and the metaphysical transcendence of John Donne, these poems refuse easy consolation. Here, longing is not something to overcome—it is something to inhabit.

‘V’ Series: Loss & Longing

Read here.

Publik / Private Essay: on Gisèle Pelicot’s call to survivors

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Gisèle Pelicot in 2024 – Publik / Private does not own this photo.

There are moments in public life that do more than interrupt the news cycle; they rupture the very architecture of shame itself. Gisèle Pelicot’s emergence into collective consciousness is one such rupture. What she has invited the world to witness, to feel, and to reconsider is not simply her own story—harrowing as it is—but the deeper social lie that murder, theft, and assault leave stains on the victim’s soul, and that humiliation is a cost to be absorbed quietly, in private.

This lie is ancient, pernicious, and coded deeply into the way society talks about sexual violence. It insists that the violated should cover their wounds, carry their pain behind closed doors, and perform discreet silence as if harm is a private blemish. Gisèle Pelicot refused this inheritance. In the mass rape trial that unfolded in Avignon, she did something extraordinary: she waived her right to anonymity and demanded the trial be public. She said she wanted “all women victims of rape … to say: Madame Pelicot did it, we can do it too.” And she declared with quiet gravity that “when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them.”

To say “never have shame” in a world that reflexively trains victims to internalize blame is to challenge the very grammar of violence. Shame doesn’t spring from the wound itself; it is a social product, a mechanism that protects power by making the vulnerable feel small, isolated, and unworthy of witness. Pelicot stood against that mechanism, insisting that the weight of disgrace belongs not with the one attacked, but with those who inflicted the harm. 

This shift—simple in phrase but seismic in effect—is a reallocation of moral responsibility. Pelicot’s experience was nearly unimaginable in its scope: over many years, while drugged unconscious by her husband, she was raped repeatedly by dozens of men he invited into their home. The revelations emerged only after police investigating unrelated voyeurism found disturbing footage on her husband’s computer, revealing the systematic nature of the abuse. 

The instinct of the criminal justice system in many societies is to protect the privacy of victims, to sequester their experiences in sealed rooms and sealed pages. But Pelicot refused this protection precisely because that privacy historically serves perpetrators far more than survivors. By opening the courtroom to the public gaze, she made the crime visible on her terms. She turned the spotlight from hidden shame to exposed accountability. The shame was no longer something lodged in her voice or bowed shoulders; it was something placed squarely on the acts of her husband and the men who participated with him. 

Her words—it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them—are not a palliative or a slogan. They are a methodological shift in how we think about collective responsibility. When Pelicot articulated this during her testimony, she was not issuing a comforting platitude; she was proposing a restructuring of who bears the emotional and moral cost of violence. Victims are too often taught to apologize for surviving. Her stance interrupts that conditioning. 

And yet, there is humility in her refusal of the language of heroism. When observers called her brave, she deflected—not because she was unheroic, but because courage abstracted from consequence is a story we tell to feel comfortable again. Pelicot described her persistence as “will and determination to change society,” not simply personal endurance. Courage for her was not a static trait but a sustained commitment to truth-telling in the face of denial, minimization, and cultural avoidance.

In insisting that victims should “never have shame,” Pelicot forces us to examine the structures that scaffold shame in the first place. What does it mean that we accept a culture where consent is poorly understood, where “I didn’t think it was rape” is offered as a defense? What does it mean that survivors must navigate not only the trauma of assault but the expectation of self-silencing? These questions are not rhetorical. They point toward the very conditions that allow violence to become normative rather than aberrant. 

There is no quick fix here, no singular legislative moment that will instantly dissolve centuries of conditioning. But there is a shift that begins in language and extends into empathy. When we stop locating shame in the body of the victim and start locating it in the conduct of the perpetrator, we begin the work of dismantling stigmas that function as social glue, holding in place systems that protect the powerful and isolate the vulnerable.

Pelicot’s call is, at once, an invitation and a demand. She invites survivors to reject the internalization of shame. She demands that society change the terms of its moral imagination. To reject shame is to reclaim narrative authority over one’s own life. It is to declare that harm is not a mark of dishonor but a testament to an injustice that must be addressed, not hidden.

In a cultural moment saturated with testimonies—some celebratory, others mournful—Pelicot’s voice resonates because it refuses to locate dignity in silence. Her message matters because it disassembles a foundational assumption: that victims should be quiet. Instead, she insists that silence belongs to the perpetrators who hide their acts behind euphemism and denial.

This is not merely about visibility. It’s about truth. To say “never have shame” is to assert that survivors deserve a world where their stories are not obstacles to justice but bridges to change.

And if we are listening—truly listening—we might begin to understand that the redistribution of shame is not an act of forgiveness, but an act of radical accountability.

The Courage to Love Loudly: Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

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Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. stands in history not simply as a leader, but as a moral mirror—one that forced a nation to look honestly at itself. He spoke during a time when injustice was law, silence was safety, and equality was treated as a threat. Yet he chose to speak anyway. Not with bitterness, but with belief. Not with violence, but with vision.

Photo Credit: National Geographic Kids

What made he extraordinary was not only his intellect or eloquence, but his unwavering commitment to love as a force for change. He believed love was not passive or weak; it was disciplined, intentional, and demanding. To love in the face of hatred required courage. To preach nonviolence while being beaten, jailed, and threatened required faith. Dr. King’s life testified that love, when practiced boldly, can dismantle even the most deeply rooted systems of oppression.

Dr. King understood that injustice was never isolated. Racism, poverty, and war were interconnected, feeding off one another and stripping people of dignity. His dream stretched beyond integration—it reached toward transformation. He envisioned a society where justice was not selective, where freedom was not conditional, and where humanity was not ranked. His words challenged America to become what it claimed to be.

Yet he was not a mythic figure untouched by struggle. He experienced fear, exhaustion, and doubt. He knew the cost of leadership and paid it in full. His assassination did not silence his message; it amplified it. His death revealed the danger of truth spoken too clearly and the power of a dream too strong to be buried.

Today, his legacy asks something of us. It asks whether we will reduce him to quotes and ceremonies, or whether we will live out the values he risked everything to defend. His dream is unfinished, resting in the hands of those willing to act with integrity, empathy, and courage.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught the world that change begins when people decide that injustice is unacceptable—and that love, when chosen daily and deliberately, can reshape history.