Essays · film, television, music
Sortie d'Usine
Eight cultural industries at the exact moment they tip over.
The calendar
Forthcoming
Coming in 2027
Forthcoming
A random excerpt
The Abstract
“I never wrote ‘produced by Q-Tip.’ That wasn’t the point. It was Tribe.” — Q-Tip, Red Bull Music Academy, 2013 It is winter 1993. The Élysée Montmartre is packed to bursting, the room already sweating, and I am there, somewhere in the crowd, waiting for the group I have been playing on a loop for months. Midnight Marauders has just come out. That is why we came. The lights go down. A man steps forward on the stage in a purple hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up over his forehead, and he throws out a name the way you throw down a watchword. Steve Biko. It is the track that opens the record, and tonight it opens the night. The…
A random excerpt
King Mapother IV
The Croisette has been closed since noon. Navy barricades hold the crowd behind the grates. Palm trees clipped square, the marble of the Palais des Festivals baking in the sun, red carpet washed one last time. It is eighty-two degrees. The wind is dying. The sea barely moves. You watch the black cars ride up the boulevard, the journalists penned in their pits, the flashing lights that glide by without sound. On the screens set up above the terraces, the Top Gun Maverick poster has been looping since morning. The festival's official portrait: helmet, flight suit, gaze cast off-frame. At six forty-five, Tom Cruise steps out of a car. Black suit, thin black tie, white shirt. Fifty-nine years old. He…
A random excerpt
Amblin
A Tuesday in 1982. School outing. A dark theater somewhere in France. I’m seven years old. My sister Tabara is six. We don’t know yet what we’re about to see. There are two letters on the poster. E.T. Two hours later, we walk out. Tabara is crying. She is crying like an adult in front of something she has just understood for the first time. A child has just said goodbye to his extraterrestrial friend. The bicycle passes in front of the moon. The finger glows one last time. And Tabara is crying. I don’t cry. I look at my sister. I look at the sky. I understand that something has just been done to my sister, to me, to…
Why Samba
Five letters
It was all my father knew how to write. His first name. Samba.
Five letters traced on deeds, school reports, contracts, residence permits. Five letters that held good when the pages themselves stayed silent to him.
Today those five letters sign my books.
Allaj Sidibe, for my father