A Quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Many people in Harlem never go out of Harlem. I mean they'd never even been downtown. And you can see how this bitterness can accumulate. Here you see people crowded and hovered up in ghettos and slums with no hope.They see no way out.
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People are too afraid of uptown. A lot of people will tell you, like, "Don't go to Harlem. You can never go there. 'Cause as soon as you get there, they kill you." That's what people think. As soon as you arrive in Harlem, someone just stabs you in the face right away. That's people's image of Harlem: just everyone standing around waiting for lost white people to kill all day. "Did you see any? I didn't either."
Harlem is really a melting pot for a lot of different people. When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place.
Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.
There have been times in my adolescence where I gave up. I was like, 'I'm just never going to be pretty. I'm never going to be like one of those people on the front of magazines.' It always seemed really strange to me that the projection of how people are in advertisements looked nothing like the people who were actually buying them. You know what I mean? I never understood that mismatch, and now I really start to see that the people you see in the media are a lot more like people actually are.
I think when I start out writing, I always try to write the version of the movie that I want to go see. I don't mean it in a way that ignores the audience, but I really set out to make a movie that I want to see and that, hopefully, other people will want to go see it. So whatever's amusing to me, I guess, I throw it all in there.
When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place. A lot of them are from the south, so they bring those southern influences with them.
Television is just amazing - how many people see it and how many people recognize you, and I think once you've had the opportunity and have been in front of the public, it's very flattering to have people come up and say hello to you. It's a tremendous industry. I've been in places where people come out of the woodwork. And you would never think - small towns in France or traveling through Europe - and there are so many of those people there that recognize you, and you've been in their homes. I find it to be a very flattering thing.
When we're out there, you'll never know a lot of people are gonna look up to you. You don't realize it, but soon you go on social media and see all the messages and people try to reach out to you and you start to realize how huge and how people look up to you.
If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I'm not dressed up or I'm not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I'm talking down to them. People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don't intend to disappoint.
To see classic rock, you had to go to an arena. But punk was happening everywhere, even in little towns in the middle of nowhere in Maryland. I'd drive out to places I'd never been, just to go and see it.
To work for months and months and months, you kind of spill blood and give your heart and soul to something, and then you just sort of let it out into the universe and hope that people like it. How you see it in your head is never how you see it on the screen, so it's almost like an out of body experience.
When American liberals go to the UK they see the Tories as the Washington Generals, and they see the Labor Party as the Harlem Globetrotters, and they love that. Total power. Whether anything works or not is irrelevant. We work.
I see people crossing the road without looking, because the lights say that you can. They're acting as if there's never been a police chase, never been someone looking at their phone, or a drunk driver. When I see people like that I can see that they've not got survival skills. That's where me and a few other people differ.
People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.
For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin' down there and making that my stomping ground... That was a big thing, because I'm from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds.
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