Writing In Ernest

Tell us about Blood Beats: Vol. 1 Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions.
Blood Beats is a collection of selected writings from the past ten years of my career as a film and music critic. I hate the term cultural critic but I’ve been called that, and I guess it applies. Vol. 1 covers the years 1996-2000 and Vol. 2, which will drop this fall, covers 2001-the present.

I’ve worked as a critic since I was in college, in the late ‘80s. By the time of the first piece in Vol. 1 – a Meshell NdegeOcello interview from 1996 – I think I’d finally found my voice. I wasn’t consciously trying to develop a style or identity at the start of my career, in part because I didn’t know it would be my career. I just fell into it. But the accumulation of personal and professional experiences, the fine-tuning of my own political views and aesthetics, and the synthesis of my various identity markers – black, gay, a precariously lower middle-class background that has given way to boho poverty, strong Southern roots, childhood vacations and an adolescence spent in Detroit – all fused into a perspective that is very black, very feminist, very leftist and unwaveringly pro gay/lesbian/bi, etc. And I work from the position that blackness is the most expansive, dynamic and universal filter through which to gauge and interpret the world. It just is. It’s certainly been the most vital and important cultural well in this country, the source of its heart and soul. You toss faggotry in the mix and fuck it: You have gods.

But the book contains film reviews, music reviews, interviews and assorted think-pieces. The interviews include Les Nubians, Warren Beatty, Bjork, Queen Latifah, Ambersunshower, a round-table Q&A with four black women film directors – including Kasi Lemmons, who wrote and directed Eve’s Bayou, and Gina Prince-Bythewood, who wrote and directed Love & Basketball – and two interviews with Meshell NdegeOcello. Film reviews span queer cinema (Edge of Seventeen, Velvet Goldmine), French (Human Resources) and Russian (Mother & Son), as well as assorted documentaries and American indie fare. The essays range from musings on Tupac and House music, to a sprawling article on gay rappers, gay rap fans and modern black gay and lesbian identities as they intersect with, shape and are shaped by hip-hop – but with a historical and cultural backdrop that I think has been largely absent from other articles on the subject.

Take us to your scribbling beginnings. Young Ernest, on a front porch somewhere, reading/thinking/being/writing.
I’ve written ever since I first learned to write – poems, short stories, everything. As I said earlier, I actually started working as a journalist/critic while I was an undergrad at UCLA, where I was an English Lit major. So, I’ve been at this for over twenty years. It took me a long time to call myself a writer, which would infuriate my friends. If people asked what I did for a living, I’d say that I reviewed film and music. I wouldn’t say I was a writer. My friends thought I was insecure or not “claiming my shit.” But I’ve always made a distinction between being a critic and being a writer. I think people like [New York Times film critic] Manohla Dargis and [legendary Negro cultural critic] Greg Tate are both, but it’s a rare fusion. Criticism as you see it in most newspapers and magazines is definitely a lesser form of writing, as far as I’m concerned. And that’s cool. People need something to read while they’re eating their lunch in the middle of the day but don’t want to commit to anything too deep, or something to peruse while they’re taking a shit. And I don’t trip if other people put what I do in that category. But still, writing – to me – is a sacred calling. Er’body ain’t able.

And you are?
Yes.

Expound, please.
I hate to sound precious or snotty but just filling up a page with words, and even being published, doesn’t make you a writer. I’ve always felt that way, even as a kid. Always was a snob. I mean, there are prodigies who fall to earth seemingly fully formed but they’re rare. Most of us have to work at the title. It has to be earned. I hate the nonsensical, idiotic philosophy of “Proclaim or name youself a [writer/singer/actor] and then you are a [writer/singer/actor, etc.].” That’s such bullshit. It’s how we end up with tone deaf divas and hack writers. It doevtails into this weird sense of entitlement that I think pervades American culture, but it’s entitlement unattached to work or struggle. It’s not earned. I think it’s fitting that my book kicks off with a piece from 1996 because that’s around the time that I felt I’d finally earned the right to call myself a writer. Of course, not everybody is as slow getting their shit together as I was.

What was your childhood "in the word" like?
I was a solitary, loner type kid. I still really like being by myself more than in a group. I’m just not a very social being. Octavia Butler and J.D. Salinger are my heroes for the way they lived as writers. I’d give anything if I could just write the books and move on, the way some mothers in the animal kingdom will deliver their offspring and then give a quick look back like, “Laterz, yo…” before they bounce. Anyway, I read voraciously from the time I was in kindergarten. By the time I was in junior high school, I was reading my mother’s old Jacqueline Susann novels and my uncle’s Donald Goines novels, which I pilfered from my grandmother’s attic. I guess that combo makes me a tragic mulatto of some sort. The Mariah Carey of criticism. And I’m just trying to be Sade.

The first piece of literature that just stunned me, burned itself into my consciousness, was James Baldwin’s 1951 short story “The Outing,” which – as you know – is about the family of a Black minister as they prepare for and then get through a Sunday outing with the church. But at its heart is this very lovely, delicately rendered story of sexual awakening between two teen-age Black boys. I just remember almost going into shock, reading it. Just the recognition of these boys and their inner lives and struggles. To have this story deliver me out of invisibility. I’d stumbled over it as I was reading this tattered anthology of Negro American short stories that was lying around the house. Huge impact on me. I can’t even describe it.

Where did you grow up? Did people like you? I hear (well, read) that you are not an overachiever.

Did people like me? I am LOLing very hard at that. Let’s just say that the first time I saw Carrie, I was cheering her on at the end – Fuck ‘em up! Fuck em’ up! Fuck ‘em up! I’ll leave it at that.

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. First child and only son of Ernest Sr. and Dianna Hardy, both now deceased. You know, what’s interesting – at least according to family lore – is that I was the first black baby born in the hospital where I was born and I was the only boy in the entire nursery that particular day. I was so incredibly fair-skinned (and that ain’t a boast) that when my mother’s family first came to see me in the hospital, they went to the nursery and didn’t see a “black” baby. To top it off, I had fiery red hair. Of course, my mother became hysterical that they’d lost her baby. Once everything had been cleared up and I was brought to her room, my aunt Harriet quipped, “Mary had a little lamb, his ass was white as snow.” So, right from the start, issues of race and gender and identity were at play for me.

Was school a pleasant experience?
Although I had some good friends in high school, I really hated it. It was brutal. With college, I think if I hadn’t been working five jobs, seven days a week, as well as going to class and studying, I would have loathed UCLA too. As it was, I just didn’t have the energy.

Talk about how your background prepared you for a life in the word.
I’ve always been drawn to the underdog, even as a kid, even before I could fully articulate or conceptualize my own otherness – although I think I was always, always cognizant of being different. I learned early on that difference costs. Or is that fame? Anyway, I think my writing is definitely rooted in an outsider/underdog sensibility but one where I’m critiquing the status quo, not jonesing to be part of it.

What draws you to write criticism?
A friend of mine sent me this statement in an email after he read my book, and I think he gets it pretty right:

One of the things I like is how forward the description of your “critical center” is [on the book cover]: Melanin-based, feminist, etc.... As if to pre-emptively nullify any assumption of the author’s objectivity. This is fortified by an actual picture of you on the cover of the book. Adding to this enjoyable dichotomy: your speech is wrought with the influence of academia and yet discards the scholar's conventional airs of detachment. The people you choose to write about are public figures that privately, prismatically reflect your own interiority, and personal exploration becomes cultural exploration becomes personal exploration...

I actually do know people who talk like that.

Talk a little about your writing process.
Well, to give some context: At this point, and one of the reasons I think my career has sort of stalled in conventional terms or according to the trajectory that would be deemed “successful,” I really only write about stuff that hits me heart, mind and soul. I mean, I still cover a fair amount of straight-up bullshit because I have to eat and that’s the bulk of what’s out there. But the big pieces I do, the stuff where you have to do lots of research and leg work, tend to be centered on music or film that hits me viscerally. And that tends to be work that, in either text or subtext, grapples with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality – how two or more of those items intersect or come into conflict on the popular culture terrain. I’m interested in how people shape themselves either in harmony with the larger culture – meaning they just sort of absorb what they’re told about themselves and the world, what it means to be a man, a woman, black, gay, whatever, lies and all, and then act that part – or the ways in which they resist and maybe create an oppositional self or reality. And I’m interested in radicals and revolutions that don’t come lined in neon, that don’t necessarily announce themselves as such.

Not to sound all airy-fairy, but I do the research that is needed and then just sort of let the factual data and the visceral response fuse within me, drawing on whatever other knowledge I might possess on a host of issues… because I like connecting dots that might not otherwise get connected. I think that’s the beauty and strength of being black and gay and working-class rooted, and whatever else I am – and not ashamed of any of it, actually embracing it and seeing the gift in it: You see shit in ways that white gays and lesbians, or straight folk of color (especially hetero men) or financially privileged folk of whatever identity configuration might not.

What do you hope to accomplish by being a visible black gay man?
I never even thought of it that way, to be honest. And that’s not really how I’m selling myself. I’m just being. Part of me doesn’t really have any goal except to be the best writer I can be. Period. But, yeah, another part of me definitely has a pointed agenda.

The title Blood Beats is from a James Baldwin quote that is given in full at the start of the book itself, and that quote is really the foundation for my approach to writing – bringing the whole of self to the table, and going the way my blood beats. But hopefully avoiding the cloying narcissism of so much first-person criticism. Using the Baldwin quote was also my way of situating this book in a very rich and specific literary and cultural lineage – that of Baldwin, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen and so on. That amazing black gay/lesbian/queer/same-gender-loving tradition that is a major but under-recognized or acknowledged pillar of black culture, and therefore American culture. The book opens with a Meshell interview and closes with Punks Jump Up to Get Theirs: A Homo-hop Odyssey, which is the aforementioned piece on gay rappers, gay rap fans, modern black gay and lesbian identities, etc. etc. That chosen set of book-ends – black queerness as the cultural bracket – is not an accident. (Apologies to Meshell. She hates the word queer.) I also dedicate the book, at the end, to the late Sakia Gunn and Rashawn Brazell because the lives of black gays and lesbians – as we’ve seen in countless other recent examples – are still frighteningly cheap. It really breaks my heart not only that these two incredibly young people were slaughtered before their lives even began, but also that outside black gay and lesbian activist circles their names really aren’t known. Although my book is wholly accesible to everyone, I would really love it if some young black dyke or faggot picked it up and had that same jolt I did when I read Baldwin’s short story and saw something of myself in it.

I do all of that to say that we are universal. Our voices, experiences and perspectives are more than valid as the cultural barometer by which to judge – which only makes sense when you realize just how much of black and mainstream American cultures are drawn from us, from our imaginations and dreams. And by us, I mean those of us who are forged in the intersection of blackness and gay/lesbian/queer identities. Why should I feign heterosexuality or affect the demonstrably false objectivity of whiteness to offer my critique? That’s moving ass backwards, as far as I’m concerned.
Lastly, the book is also very, very much a West Coast thing – from the settings of many of the stories to my own “written” accent, if you will. I think my voice is very, very West.

I love your blog (http://ernesthardy.com/) profile preface: Negro. Male. Writer. Broke. It doesn't get any more real than that. Well, maybe. The blog entry, "An Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey," was funtastic, but what the hell is she doing in that pic? And I take offense: mixing up Rolanda Watts with Rwanda, a war torn country...well, now that I think of it, Rolanda Watts is a worn torn country. Her show was wicky wicky wack. Remember how she'd kick up her leg (kinda like Mother Love?) and gfaw at her guests all fakity like? Is there a question in here? There was, once upon a sentence. Oh yeah, what type of ice cream do you like?
I’m a Negro. Is there any flavor other than Butter Pecan?

On your day off (that is, if you have days off) how do you typically relax?
Relax? Is that even an English word? I have no idea what that means.

What kinds of books and films do you enjoy?
The good kind.

Now that your first book is out, what’s changed on the landscape of your career?
It’s too soon to tell. We’re a very small, indie, black-owned press at RedBone so the selling of this book is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of build. I don’t anticipate seeing any substantial shift in my career for a while – if ever, to be honest. I mean, it’d be nice. But I am incredibly proud and honored to be a part of the RedBone family. It reminds me of the ‘60s and ‘70s when all these vibrant, thriving black presses were putting out what is now acknowledged as seminal cultural work. I think we have the same thing going on at RedBone. Career aside, it’d be really good to get some ass as a result of the book. I like mine with melanin, please.

Riff for a minute on what folks can expect when the see you read.
You know, believe it or not, I’m actually very shy, very quiet. Low-key. All my “performance” goes into the writing. In the words of Erykah Badu, “that’s all I have / ain’t got no mo’…” There definitely won’t be a Cornel West kind of preaching going on, though I love him, and there certainly won’t be a fiery, Def Horrible Jam style delivery from me. I’m very laid-back. The Sade of criticism. Finger on the trigger for years to come...

Okay, so what makes Ernest’s blood beat?
Can’t tell you that. Gotta have some secrets.

To Order Blood Beats: Vol. 1 Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions, go to Ernest Hardy's website (to get an autographed copy), RedBone Press or order it directly from Small Press Distribution, 1-800-896-7553 and order@spdbooks.org.

Monday, July 03, 2006 @ 01:43 PM