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J. Hoberman points out, in a classical piece on Micheaux and Ed Woods, that if Micheaux was, as some have claimed, the baddest filmmaker of all time, then what’s remarkable is that over a thirty-year career he got badder and badder. (14)

When they asked Armstrong what he thought of bebop, which was really just an extension of what he had started to

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Jafa reasons that “when we were brought to the Americas as slaves we were generally seen as material ourselves. You don’t really have the leeway to go out and select your own materials. So a lot of our creativity coalesced around the notion of treatment, that is, transforming in some meaningful fashion given materials.” (

Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of black music?

For me, the question is: What is one to make of that which one cannot not know and that which one must, ultimately, unknow?