Welcome back to my series about art and activism that is worth your time! I’m the algorithm now, sharing a human being’s thoughts about what will inspire you and not a robot’s guess as to what will distract you. All of these art pieces touch on mental health and withstanding being misunderstood.
❤️ Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur on Hulu. This documentary series is five episodes that originally aired on FX but I found on Hulu (might be on Disney+ and Prime) beautifully weaves the story of Tupac Shakur and his mother Afeni Shakur. Afeni was a powerful revolutionary who successfully defended herself in court when she was on trial for her work with the Black Panthers while pregnant with Tupac. The fabricated charges were a result of a series of illegal covert disruption of so-called subversive movements by the FBI.
This documentary taught me so much more about the Black Panthers than I understood. In these times I think it is essential for us to understand what the Black Panthers stood for and how they were utilizing mutual aid and community organizing to help where the government had abandoned people. Here’s a link to the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program that outlines what they were organizing to create.
Tupac’s body of work is massive and I had no idea how hard he was working in his short early adulthood. I was an unsupervised 12 year old in the suburbs of Oakland listening to Digital Underground and definitely didn’t understand what he was going through. As an adult artist and activist, I’m so impressed at his body of work and aspire to his work ethic and drive.
I admire Afeni’s recovery from crack and her trauma with that trial and dealing with the early death of her son so much. I’ve watched this docuseries twice and get more out of it every time.
🎭 Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words documentary on Prime. I watched this the day it came out. The director, Nneka Onuorah, is the Emmy award winning director of Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls. This documentary covers Megan’s grief over losing her mom/manager early in her rise to fame, dealing with unfair treatment in the press after SHE was shot by a “friend.”
A quote from her father that keeps ringing through my ears is “Everything that grin ain’t your friend.”
Megan was vulnerable, transparent and I cried within ten minutes of it starting and many times through it. Fantastic storytelling and worth your time.
🍀 Return to Oz on Disney+. Everyone is talking about Wicked right now, which brings up more of the lore of the Wizard of Oz world. The 1985 Return to Oz movie has little nuggets in Wicked and I was glad I had recently watched it when I saw Wicked to pick those up.
It stars a young Fairuza Balk (The Craft!) and she’s six months from her first trip to Oz and Aunty Em checks her in to a turn of the 19th century mental health hospital for electric shock treatment. She escapes the hospital and returns to Oz not with Toto but with a wise cracking chicken. It’s truly nuts, but the whole movie is seared in my memory from my young childhood. And worth a watch especially if you love the Labrynth, this movie is in the same vein. Jim Henson is not involved in this production but his son Brian Henson plays Jack Pumpkinhead.
(Maybe don’t get a subscription to Disney+ if you don’t have one, use someone else’s or skip it entirely if you’re participating in the BDS boycott to support a ceasefire in Palestine. And we are still skipping McDonalds and Burger King in solidarity!)
This quote has really helped me this week, while 2025 has begun with more climate disasters and chaos: “Do for one person what you wish you could do for everyone.”
A lot of a little is what changes the world. It’s not people moving boulders it’s people throwing sand into the machinery of the systems that keep us down.
Don’t let them make you lose your mind!
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