A Note to My Readers: Catch My Disease
Join me on this journey.
You just read where I came from in my last post, “Avoiding the Cymbal.” This is where I’m going — and I’d like you to come with me.
A Different Lens started as preparation for an autobiography and became something larger: political essays, film criticism, cultural history, Chicago, the diaspora, what survives the making. I didn’t plan that expansion. The world kept doing too much, and I kept paying attention.
About 1,200 of you are reading now. Twenty-one of you are paid subscribers. I want to be straight with you about what that means: the writing costs time, and time costs money. I’m also in the middle of making films that need hard drives. Paid subscriptions are how this continues.
Here’s what I’m offering:
Monthly subscribers ($7/month) receive a six-month free pass to Blacknuss.tv, my curated streaming channel of Black independent cinema — the films that found their audiences in Paris and London before Chicago knew their names.
Annual subscribers ($70/year) receive an eight-month pass. Two extra months for the readers committing to the long relationship.
The next 50 annual subscribers also receive the Drapetomaniac shirt. Shirts for my present annual subscribers will be shipped out in 30 days.
A doctor diagnosed enslaved people’s escape attempts as a disease in 1851. We’re reclaiming the term. Ornate script meets the diagnosis itself: delirious from a disease called freedom. Clarity, not illness.
Your Blacknuss.tv code arrives within 48 hours, personally, from me. The shirt ships within about two weeks via a code I’ll email along with it.
If the writing has been worth your time, I’d ask you to consider making it worth mine. The cymbal is real. I intend to keep showing up prepared.
Be sure to check out out free online magazine bfmmag.com
— Floyd
So glad to have found your writing, Floyd.
It ranks with the best writing I'm finding anywhere else these days, so it totally makes sense to remunerate you for it.
Thank you.
🙏🏿🙏🏻🙏🏽
Floyd, for those of us who subscribed and paid early, can you send us a link to blacknuss.tv please? I think this is a service to the world and I'm getting the word out in my set.