Pragmatic Use of a Blog? What!?

Strategizing means of self-promotion is real new to me in terms of my writing and art, but here goes. If nothing else, this blog can and will serve as a temporary space for updating my public performing, speaking, and publications.

So here are the most recent happenings:

I co-edited and have a piece I'm really excited about in the first of a series of beautiful zines from Femme Family NYC. This first one is on Coming Out as Femme and has work from Damien Luxe, Alysia Angel, Sophie Rogers-Gessert of Shameless Photography, Princess Tiny and the Meats, Taueret Manu, and Bevin Branlandingham among others.
You missed the slammin reading and release at Bluestockings Bookstore, but you can still purchase the zine online! Zines are available via paypal, $8 for hardcopy and $6 for download- visit http://www.femmefamily.com/home.html for instructions.

Next, this Sunday, December 6, I will be a panelist at Gather, "a community builder/social platform for lesbian women in their 20s and beyond to come together and discuss their issues." at The GLBTQ Center in Manhattan. This "Gathering" will focus on the coming out experiences of queer women from a variety of backgrounds and stories. Gather is open to folks of all genders and sexual orientations so be there!
The Center
208 W. 13 St.
New York, NY 10011
5:15-7 Room 312 (not elevator accessibly)

Lastly, I am very very excited to post that I was asked to fill a performance spot at Cupcake Cabaret hosted by Bevin Branlandingham this Sunday, December 6, (yes, I'm like a double-feature, follow me from one event to the next).
The very talented Alysia Angel was scheuled to perform her poetry, but due to illness couldn't make her flight from Olympia, WA. I give you this background info because I feel reaaly honored that I came to mind to fill the spot of someone so badass.
I will be reading some new and some old work and will maybe wear gold lame?
More importantly I am thrilled and a little terrified to be sharing the stage with four AMAZING performers- Spoken word by Femmecee Bevin Branlandingham, World Famous *BOB*- extraordinary burlesque performance artist and storyteller, Dave End- Meandering genderfabulous queer musician, and Miasia, BREATHTAKING Queer Fat Femme belly dance! (I hear you haven't really seen belly dance until you've seen Miasia).
So come on down and eat it up!
CUPCAKE CABARET
doors at 8p, show at 8:30p, $10-$15 sliding scale (proceeds go to performers)

45 Berry St @ N. 11th, Brooklyn L to Bedford or G to Nassau

Don't be surprised to find another post before Sunday evening about how I'm surviving my nerves at this suddenly stunning jam-packed weekend...

Excerpt from Hope Springs

I have yet to write about the Hope Springs Women's Performance and Poetry Retreat that I attended this July, but it seems that an excerpt of the writing I did there is a fitting prologue to whatever I write about the retreat in the future...

The assignment, (as facilitated by Rosemary Daniell), was to "write your story," but using the second person instead of the first. "Your story," was a concept up for your own interpretation... I have always written in the second person when I was most struggling so this exercise satisfied:

You are a little drag queen dressed in giant yellow and fucia prints at a dirty street fair on Delancey street, and once the ferris wheel stops and all the goldfish in plastic bags have cursed another day without being won, you go home and climb under the sheets between your godfather and his new boyfriend Angelo. You are taken with the lightbulb plugged into a cheap Flamnco dancer doll in a red dress and the clock in the kitchen with a hologram of the last supper on its face.
You make little worlds in empty liquor boxes in the basement of the restaurent where your dad cooks. You sleep in lots of beds between lots of men and you don't ever really consider the concept of a straight man until older boys start directing your hands. You dance with trannys ans queens at AIDS walk, refusing to take advantage of the stroller- four year old feet walking eight miles unphased. People die fast and all at once and the only men left want things from you and throw furniture at your mother.
You buy Bette Midler albums and dress as Marilyn Monroe and Lypsinka for the PS3 halloween parades. You get kicked out of your cousins suburban slumber party after a Michael Jackson fan tape featuring that little blonde boy prompts you to tell the other six year olds the four ways to contract HIV.
You kiss girls. Often. You were Doc Martens on the first day of middle school and assume that some day you'll really understand why both Bessie Smith and Abba can keep you from burning deep holes in your wrists. Your dad comes around sometimes and tells you, you only think you're a dyke because you're too fat and ugly for men to want. You empty the liquor boxes into your own mouth before making worlds inside them.
Mostly now you make bedrooms with sand on the floor and santos on the walls.

Experiment?

I hadn't planned on/never have posted this or any other video of me singing, but this is me playing at "Fire Sign" by The Gossip in bed at the end of a long day- enjoying the partial loss of my voice- makes me less self-conscious about the strength of my breath, etc.
All week I've been teaching vocals, body-image/love workshops, and helping along with general mayhem and glory at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. A lot of the volunteers at Rock Camp are involved in the DIY women's punk music scene, (i.e. For the Birds Collective). They do great stuff, but I spent a lot of the week figuring out how I could translate their feminist DIY approach to, "just start a band," into the context of my own desired aesthetics and abilities...

Femme Bitch Top

If you don't know about Tribe 8, allow yourself the masturbation-quality experience of doing a little research. I'm angry tonight- brimming, hot. Wanting bad, just for the sake of satisfaction. I feel like my sexuality has been neglected and tempered lately.

Sometimes music is the closest we can get to where we really need to be...

Home

This video feels like home. New York senator Tom Duane wrote me my college application letters. Seeing him now, years later, it is the closest I have come to the in-the-name-of-love rage that filled so much of my childhood during the throws of our family and community living their last months with AIDS. I could have waited a bit to regain composure and better articulate this swell of feelings, but there's nothing I can say beyond what he said in this session. My most core love and gratitude to Tom...!

Arbus

Recently someone told me that my work is like written Diane Arbus... Word?! I can't turn that one down... (And ever since I've been craving some time behind my camera). Often enough I feel like I come to writing when and where I can't afford the art supplies an image in my head requires. And of course, writing is what I go to for the pictures I imagine in motion.
So if you've never seen any of Arbus' work, here's your start- keep on it!

Prompt: Masturbation (In Progress)

Getting Over

To when the finger loses understanding of the switch and can’t
manage to off
To my chest and shoulders cramped from the
conflict— forcing the hand always down
and the chest concave against breath
Body parts not believing one another
To picking up the phone, check email, write poems
and love letters against the buzzing
To my vision gone white and hazy and

To excess of sustaining
muscle ache of holding
bitter taste like full from more
than I knew I could eat or
Excessive draining of the sex and sensation
from my body—

Which is to say, I can’t tell the difference between hunger and bloat.

My skin reckons itself
Only two choices—
Set the hands that dare reach out
with a hungry palm aflame, or
burn myself from the inside in

If I keep on like this
I’m likely to be ash on gold sheets by morning