Okay, eight days in for my New Year's post. It's taken me a week to fully feel in step with 2008. I'm the same way on a dancefloor--I don't jump into the mix until I've counted four bars of each quarter note of a song. So it wasn't until it was January 1st that I had some time to really pause in between Dickwhipped rehearsals on what the hell about 2007 that nearly broke my ass? And what's it's gonna be (like En Vogue sang in the Queen Latifah gem, Set it Off) in the 2008? We just performed a great weekend under L.A.'s heaviest rainfall and it was interesting: I have been making work in my ensemble for over five years and friends, colleagues and comrades are still down to engage in these conversations. Now, more openly than ever before. I feel like I'm not the same angry young turk unwilling to abandon dogma. I finally feel entitled to state my needs.
I mean, I wrote this post on Oh! Industy about the song and video that I am taking with me into 2008. Those pop cultural choices I made were not in vain. What was it that happened in 2007 where I would need the use of an angel-winged life preserver in the forms of Alicia Keys and Mo'Nique (heyyyy!). Now this is the fan not the critic talking here so the fan doesn't want anything to do with criticism. I want to embrace my fandom and its pop psychology as if it were a bowl of ice cream and cocoa pebbles after a break-up.
It was that break-up that really got under my skin. If only I could have given myself the indulgence seen in High Fidelity, of getting to look your ex up in the phone book to have the end-of-the-relationship post-script of not just what went wrong but WHEN did it go wrong. Was it when the rad high priestess of Caribbean queer studies yelled at me on my cell phone about there being no organic meal waiting for her at the Standard as I was on my way to HERE? The paternal scapegoating over a bar tab, a few books and a free lunch? The blatant disregard for community based intellectual labor? Star fucking.
All the makings of a 90120 of my dreams. Except it's been feminist Office Space for way too long now. I'm talking about the promise of grad school--and the exposure of the hypocrisies, the fetishism and that everything is an Ann Taylor-wearing mafia. The caste system that drives the machine-no matter how radical the game your spittin' happens to be. This is the whole thing I've been griping on and on about since the inception of this here blog. It's sadly like Perez Hilton just more poetic and critical.
Bringing me to the onset of 2008--what will I do to exorcise heartbreak's groove that tries to repeat itself like a scratched record. I guess for starters it would be good to name it to let it go. I can understand that. It's just that years after the fact of our outing that right now as I leave the blinding glow of our entanglement that I realize that I don't want to be remembered this way. I don't want to go out like Wanda Sykes in Monster-in-Law, a neutered butch available in the service of Jane Fonda's second wave flag bearers. That's worse than a break-up--give me lesbian bed death over this any day.
This is the opposite of King Kong. I didn't sign up for in this POC-exceptionalism auction block. Dude, give me state university any day. Can't have my power denied like I was Tituba. No more drama like Mary Jesus Blige told me in my hopeful activist heyday. I'm just going to say no to this theatre of absurdity and abuse.
2008 feels way more liberating just eight days into it. Hot damn I hope I stay on this wagon for its remainder.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
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