thuggery & skullduggery

a poem for you, from me.

2011-05-19T09:33:00.001-07:00

BUTCH CLEAVAGE
By Raquel Gutierrez

There is a young man I miss.
He lived behind my eyes.
Inside my fists.
His name was mine.
My name was his.

He, a hunk of dust ready to explode
over cunnilingus
a prized pelt.
One dead doe and some rabbit meat
Together we could skin anything.

Brutos.
Hooligans.
Thugs.
Hermanitos de leche.

He had a temper and it was my beacon.
And the only way to temper such a storm
was to consume briny flesh,
a raw meat anti-thesis of sugar and spice
‘Twas the adrenaline we hunted and collected together
though sometimes he’d go in on the kill
alone

When I’m sleeping, I feel his boots
he leaves footprints on my back
I use words sparingly
for his name is a prayer written in gunpowder.

You were my protector.
I will love you more than I do.
I will honor you beyond a masculine incantation.

I cannot talk about my body and not bring him up in the conversation.

When we were Together
shoulder to shoulder
in line at the 99cent store
Atlantic and Randolph,
lesser gods bisecting suburban sprawl
my gaze upon the railroad tracks
while He ponders your naked body underneath his.
He provides me comfort in the sex without love imaginary.
He champions me.
I look away.

In this plastic oasis
I’m unsuccessful in my bid for quality candy
hellbent for the hot tamales that will temporarily
scorch the invisibility off my tongue
until it’s time to return for Saint Valentine.

I make the excessive point to make
my talk as small and loud
when it’s my turn to bat eyelashes
with the cash register ringer,
tight eyeliner on her deepset obsidian eyes
looking everywhere else except into my own eyes.
While his eyes
rage and invoke
the most violent of jokes, quotidian juju
to ward off another mundane episode.

He and I are
not forlorn over testicles
On the contrary, that we are borne from brown men that lack
mostly effectiveness
We rise from the ashes of eunuchs and
Fly with phallus wings pieced together with the wax that mourns us as it melts.

He and I are a nucleic acidic force
Split us wide open in this uninterrupted plateau of concrete,
a parking lot composes a version of the world where I’m not dead
and he is yet to be alive.
We meet in the middle, in the sharpest part of the chasm.
This gap exists in my chest, between my breasts
under wifebeating tendencies
and still there is another hollow visible between where it’s rarely seen,
the split
that never ceases to exist
not unlike the slit between my legs.
Is the sideways smirk really there?

The slit and the spit it emits creeps me the fuck out
Only during those instances when I ruefully forget
that this body we share hovers in
perpetual paradigmatic purgatory
of the in-between terrain of living today
and circumnavigating death
all the days after,
the oblique desire
suicide in teeny tiny increments
like vitamin death twenty-four times a day.

Even when my ass clenches, even when his eyes close,
even when all I have is my sense of smell leading me into temptation,
there’s still this cleavage between my eyes, between his legs,
a hollow made visible by your eyes and not your eyes.

If you could learn to see the split in my lip,
the tear my hands do unto his hair,
the gash where my stash ought to be,
the cracking up,
Mad magazine
an aperture between my teeth,
from here is where
I spit out the bad water,
only to have him lap it back up

I’m only giving back what I get and getting what I give.
And he repeats the same pattern in a mirror that neither of us see

When you see me,
You see him
When you see us
what do you see?

Butch hair.
Butch face.
Butch neck.
Butch shoulders.
Butch arms.
Butch hands.
Butch torso.
Butch stomach.
Butch hips.
Butch cunt.
Butch cock.
Butch ass.
Butch thighs.
Butch tongue.
Butch ankles.
Butch feet.

Dickholes in my underwear becomes another sucker’s punchline.

I am honored to carry this burden.

Butch cleavage.
He sprang from the split, not unlike Athena.
He sprang to life with no father,
with a prosthetic dick,
a lightening bolt.
We became each other
Two baby daddies, sucking each other’s thumbs.
Butch cleavage
It is here from where we conspire

You gave me life, papi.

Ready, on the eve of one whole year with you | For Marla Renee Fisher

2011-03-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

absence leaves fleeting marks
of
lipstick on my collarbone
eyeliner tears on my chest
bruises on my face
the freeing sense of impermanence steamrolled against skin

absence leaves indelible marks
of
matching red plaid
consensual makeout on your bed
your face the first time I took off my shirt
and my heart leaping at the sight of you getting
small then smaller in the rearview mirror
upon our first good-bye

Dear Lover,
all I wanna do
is snakecharm
them love things
into you
your body
with
me
my body
slow and bold
the moment is a present
we both deserve

my clothes come off for you
they do, ya know…
butch is in the details, ‘tis true
red kerchiefs from back pocket
white v-necks
briefs, colored in eager hues
and other intimacies apparent
to yr femme’s eye
so fluent that even when I don’t have accoutrement
charged with butch lightening
on my person
as it is sometimes is a trite semiotic
and I don’t always want to hit you over your head
yet, nevertheless you still see them because
people died, after all, not so we can take that shit for granted

so as cocky and as capable of sucking my own dick as I appear
the swagger
the invisible nautical star branded on my body
well that’s one word for the cliché, how you say
a sigh of relief
as it took awhile to shed baby butch fat
put on weight and wait for muscle’s memory to kick into high gear
for I am lean
now
and finally
ready for you

ready for public makeout
ready for femme stomp boot camp
ready for six-inch platforms
ready for period sex
ready for your blood on my cock, your cunt embracing me into safety
ready for servitude with a smile

ready to be a complex napoleon, rub my chin and temper the small man big mouth intemperance that has 86-ed me out of the beds of other femmes

ready for your attitude problem
ready for your too loud laughter
ready for tales of strange men and your pointy shoes
ready for your attention deficit
ready for your indomitable wanderlust
ready for wanting one thing and doing another and telling you that contradiction is the true site of liberation because I get it when you do it because I do it, too.

I am ready for femme supremacy

a new short story, 'cuz it's not too late to say it's 2010.

2010-09-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

EXPERIMENTAL FILMS

We ride our bikes east on Temple in hopes of catching Ernesto before the first film starts. We are late. I could not find the other pair of sneakers that fit through my pedal stirrups since the ones I usually wear were already on her feet. She and I share stuff, like sneakers and hoodies, but doing so often compromised our punctuality. I was an atheist to POCT-- people of color time and don’t believe in alternative temporalities. Movie time is the last bastion of what a colorblind society should be like. Arriving on time is my contribution.

She and I have been going to Crescendo, the experimental films program for a few years now. This year we would arrive sweaty from our bike ride through a revitalized downtown. The films in their limited avant-garde charm would most likely subject us to hairy zombie muff from outer space or some twink getting his ass pounded by a stuffed animal to a generic electro beat. This was film for the icy hearted who did not want catharsis. But free tickets are still free tickets. I was broke and Ernesto, the event’s programmer, had free passes for us. We had to rush to meet him before he gave them away to some other boho-on-a-budget.

It did not matter what pretentious art school debris we were seeing—we were supporting queer art. We are choosing to not see the Hollywood blockbuster we knew we would get at the video store three months from now. It might help if a person of color made whatever unbearable film we were seeing so we could then like it more than we actually did. That made more sense to me than people of color time. Still, this was the edgy stuff—what everyone around us was made of. This was living in the margin; engaging in experiment, true innovation—like drugs no one had died from yet, in a way, but with artschooltistic merit and thousands of dollars in grad school debt.

In the early days of our courtship we would have paid for our tickets. The experimental film series was a treat that often ended with fucking and a mindless lot of it, back when we were new to each other. The mundane had not yet crossed our minds and enough was never enough.

New Pussy—I do love the goddamn everything about it I would probably sell a kidney
for it.

“No one has ever taken me to the theater,” she would tell me in my father’s vintage Mercedes Benz. I opened the door for her wearing second hand suit blazers, nothing less than brown polyester. I bought the tickets after hocking my electric guitar.
She was almost a foot taller than me that night. A date, a real live date with high heels and everything—one that did not consist of tallboys in paper bags drunk in the makeshift soccer field in MacArthur Park. I was determined she would love me.

Our end of the date goodbyes always started when she straddled me. We kissed for an eternity before the first piece of clothing came off.

She could spread her tongue like frosting on cake. I pulled her hips in deeper to feel her thickset, velvet, ivory thighs. Down there, she is patchily sprinkled with blond wisps I feel on my cheeks facing her Gordon Gekko-greedy pussy.

There is theater and there is film. The experimental films in the last couple of years there began to feature works made by every one of her ex-partners. We witnessed the black activist, the newly transitioned FTM, and the fat genderqueer dyke. Their visual narratives were told in maddening second person: a self-loathing hip hop fugue exploring broken inter-racial dating promises; the self-obsessed gender transition story that now underscores each Trans 101 cliché; and thirdly, eating oneself to new sexual plateaus. This one I kind of enjoyed.

All of them—the films and the partners—had her in common. She loved these inward-looking strangers being made that much stranger in her. Their romantic past plastered on the wall, images moving, exposing skin and glances. Seeing these younger versions of her as contextualized by lovers, dance moves, and combat boots.

These films, all of them are mild renditions of her past -- a photo album full of Polaroid intimacy. There are traces of her former life in our current one. Of course, she would never admit that she was the center to their narratives. But, I knew. And she knew. And nary a conversation came up between us.

These films though became unwelcome images that held up an intrusive mirror to our
relationship. Even when I said that seeing them did not bother me, or at least that is what I intended to say rather than simply omit the sentiment. This was not experimental—this was pure horror and all of it against my will, staying with me even after the last film screened.

It was the exact same intrigued feelings I got after seeing those extra scenes they put back into the Exorcist—like the backwards staircase spiderwalk that terrified the hell out of me but I still wanted to see through the braid of fingers over my face. I could control seeing it in my waking life but my subconscious would release these images at the worst times—like when I closed my eyes in the shower.

Someone that is not you is making love to your girlfriend onscreen. I started to drink more of the bad free vodka cocktails between each film, suppressing fears that I was developing cuckold fantasies. The more bleary-eyed I became, the more I felt her love slipping away in a dust storm of my making.

Yet we persisted, insisted on supporting the community, our community. Now we ride our bikes to see these films. The money we save on gas now goes to these endeavors. There is no logic behind it other than blind devotion to community building and sad masochism. It hurts less when there is a collective good at stake.

I was huffing and puffing up the grade with everything my calves could muster. My hamstrings burned. I am out of shape. For every piece of red meat and pint of Russian stout I put into my body, I double its caloric burn equivalent with exercise. I can walk forwards and backwards through the taxing demands of Runyon Canyon, run three miles and do boy push-ups on any given day. I am self-loathing enough to know the importance of daily exercise. But, I am out of shape.

I should be wearing a helmet. I started out the ride looking typically butch in a black muscle t-shirt that showed off thick arms, copper and solid. Ten minutes later, I am a narcissistic failure, spitting out bus exhaust bile before I reach the hill’s apex.

On my bike, I feel the fat chap rubbed raw between my thighs, stuffed into expensive cut-off jeans— the in-between space that has not had visitors. Well these monogamous days it is only she that is my sanctioned action. I wasn’t classic enough to go stone butch—I enjoyed the occasional fingerbang like any good switch. You just had to read my mind to know it.

She made the transition to two wheels three months before I did. I was covetous of her bike—an Italian number that emanates stone-cold metal inner peace on the streets. I blew my tax return on my bike, feeling guilty at first but now I feel guiltier paying four bucks a gallon at the pump. I am an asshole either way—waffling between self-righteousness and consumptive piggishness.

With every pedal push I generate mean thoughts about her. I don’t know if it’s the steepness of the hill turning me into a creep or if I am doomed to regurgitate the same resentment from years past. I am in hell watching her ass do nothing but sit on the bicycle seat. That ass is still my reason for being here.

She moves uphill with grace. It makes my ride that much harder to bear.

Last year she cheated on me. In retaliation, I hooked up with an old dildo-teaser whom never quite made it into the flame department. It sucked but we got over it. Even though sometimes I am smarting over the occasions where I have to make a concentrated physical effort on her behalf like smile like a sore winner at her past—a past she can’t change. When this dormant animosity stirs, a baby rage creeps up my neck through my shoulders until I am muttering trash talk at her like nobody’s Tourette’s syndrome.

It does not mean I am going to make a stop-motion animation film about it though.

I walk my bike at the next upgrade. I am a pit bull on the prowl as I see her figure get smaller in the distance. We have probably missed the first film. I want her to wait for me. I want her to be the reason for things that have nothing to do with her.

The beads of sweat on my forehead permeate with thoughts about the peculiar way she laughed during the sex last night. Refusing to use my mouth or fingers I started to pound her harder with the measly 6-inch member she insisted we buy last month at the sex positive fuck shop. At least it has fake looking veins. God knows I have a big dick in my brain. We switch positions and she senses my annoyance.

“Show me what you got,” I taunt.

She stops. Fuck. We stop. I turn over. She wants to talk.

“I want to fuck. Can we not be lesbians this one time,” I ask before turning my face into the pillow to sleep.

This used to turn her on in the beginning, the baiting. I did not know that at the time though. Just because I know it now does not mean it is right. The question is always shape shifting, the answer—good luck. After a year of couples counseling and purging myself of actual resentment, there hasn’t been an indignant bone in my body, which is difficult since no more angry sex means there is no one to drive our orgasmic fury-mobile.

I tell her, “That was the three pints of Belgian wanna-be talking, not me,” when we’re able to process. I apologize in the morning before she goes off to an Al-Anon meeting. I refuse to be that prick today, agreeing through gritted teeth that we go see this year’s selection of experimental films, many from her exes.

I love her too much to give her up and hate myself for being unable to flush the painful “family of origin” scuzz trapped in my system. I probably should not bike ride with her anymore. I only get competitive. I need to be on top, I need to be in front—I can never be one to follow a good lead.

She is in better shape, has longer legs, and when she falls off her bike she definitely bleeds more kindness than I do.

I do not want to make a short film about our relationship to realize all that. Seeing every ex’s celluloid confession about how they fucked up should straighten me out.

She stops at the top of the hill, squinting back at my sluggish form and yells,

“You okay, baby?” She is concerned. She is genuine. I rocket from asshole to wounded child every time she calls me baby.

We were not riding our bikes to save the planet. We just wanted to spend some time on each other and the few saved dollars on microbrews and gourmet fries. I wanted to use this time to tell her that I appreciate her taking the trash out and killing the spiders and making the coffee and moving the cars during street sweeper days and buying me dinner when I do not deserve it. I wanted to let her know that our domesticity was more radical and so much more satisfying than any of the drivel we were going to see this afternoon under the rubric of experimental blasting of homo-normativity.

“I am okay, sweetie, but I did not pace myself very well.” I muster enough hangdog resolve to hook her. She turns around to bike on the sidewalk and meets me.

“It’s not a race, silly,” she tells me, her head cocked looking at me as if I were a benign rabbit.

HELL IS A PLACE FOR ME AND MY FRIENDS...

2009-12-30T00:07:00.000-08:00

(***DISCLAIMER***I have retired "it's been a minute," when it comes to the frequent dispatches from this humble web log. Stating the obvious is a pet peeve of mine. But it's been a hairy year and the time to trim is now. So, let me wipe the cobwebs from my respective critical orifices and get down to the business of observation. If you are a new reader: WELCOME...and just give me a chance.)

So 2009 is here for another what? 36 hours? The year leaves me raw and cracked open with growth and insights that will carry me into a brighter, better year. The first fun event of 2010 is to of course check out Shizu Saldamando's new THERE IS A PLACE exhibit opening this Saturday at Steve Turner Contemporary (6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA). But before I look to 2010, I have to pause on some recent visual stimulation of the latter part of 2009. And since I'm already on the topic...

November came and went and the thing that left me seething with jealousy was the big welcome Los Angeles received at the Guadalajara Book Fair. I am okay to admit it, jealousy, envy, schadenfreude--all those emotions that fire those funny little synapses of dopamine into our brains--we all got it and the fact that all my LA friends and other national makers and breakers got to go and I DID NOT tightened those needles into my frontal lobes big time. Oh well, how can anyone have foreseen that gay marriage is okay in I <3 DF anyway? The time for returning to Mexico was not yet mine, but I was happy for friends Sandra De La Loza and Shizu Saldamando doing the 18 With A Bullet exhibition at the Cam Contemporáneo Arte space in the GDL (along with LA artist Juan Capistran). There's nothing like photo albums to make you feel like you were there.

Shizu and I are friends. She is the most well adjusted Morrissey and Smiths fan I have ever known. I grew up listening to Morrissey and The Smiths like every other brown kid in Southern California and I am sadly still interpellated by all the arrested development the Moz wails on and on about through barbed satirical lyrics. I was greatly influenced by the man and the band. I picked up The Portrait of Dorian Gray in high school because of Morrissey. Every brown kid now in the current state of Californian education that is born with a chance will be saved by the literary influence this sullen Manchurian has. Excuse the hyperbole, I’m a Pisces Rising.

So it has often been fun geeking out to Morrissey trivia with Shizu over the course of our friendship. All this gives me an entry point to the creative process behind this collection of queer intimate moments set to bed sheets.

The bulk of Shizu’s work has focused on making Latino youth cultures visible in such a way that utters a basic quotidian ontology; a visual murmur that reveals a lot without revealing the secrets of our complicated public identities and the scary abyss within our very private selves. It is through what I see that I can’t help but assert narratives onto these images—perhaps the first couple met at the Blur concert in 1996, except they were there with different partners. What if they are a few degrees removed from the same ex? To quote Blur’s popular genderqueer club anthem “Girls and Boys”: love in the nineties is paranoid.

However, what’s so magical about Shizu’s images is that they capture a kind of serenity that is often too elusive to experience as queer lovers in the material world. What is so covetous for me (as a peace-seeking queer) is the lack of paranoia here, even as the couple is presented as pieces of an otherwise unseen public. One in which Shizu tells me is a “space that is often antagonistic.” These moments on the bed sheet softly intimate that we adjust our way of seeing so that we can locate hope that the public space be merciful towards the lovers we observe, who not so incidentally happen to be gender minorities, women and queer people of color.

But I’d like to go beyond the banality of intimacy here and offer another reading that brings intimacy in a different way that adds to queer romantic rapture. I have to bring it back to the state of fandom, of being fanatical, of being the #1 fan. That set of feelings that come with gushing, twitching and stalking the object of our admiration and affections. Have you ever seen early Morrissey live performance videos and the bum-rushing of his err-bum onstage? That's because I like to think that queers make good, rabid fans, especially since as adolescents we tend to offset our outsider feelings of robust alienation with quiet, desperate longing. We make good fans because we act out emotional misfires and general fuckery on those that we love and that do not love us back. Most of our unwilling receptacles of our adoration nary have good reason for such worship—I mean, these crushes don’t sing, dance, act or write but we deem them crushworthy nonetheless. Then there are the capital-A Artists like Morrissey that literally offer in the form of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out…” a vehicle needed to indulge in the melancholic search for sweet oblivion.

A first foray into fandom takes place in private—by pushing play on the CD deck, the iPod, and dare I say, the turntable. For me, this experience began in my bedroom with my Kenwood system and headphones handed down to me by my older brother, Jaime. The bedroom has a bed and that bed has sheets that witness, enshroud, embody the most intimate of acts. I appreciate Shizu’s use of the bed sheet as they operate as the placeholder of a secret affection transpiring between the gay and lesbian couples in her work. The private sphere of the bedroom is a place where many an awkward queer youth have reigned supreme be that with hairbrush in the mirror singing along to some stubborn torch song (like the young lad in Morrissey’s Last of The Famous International Playboys video) or making love to the mirror Superstar-style with the hopes of attracting a same-sex mate (just like the howling desire felt in “How Soon Is Now?”). Who of us that haven’t spent hours of practicing our Blue Steel gazes can cast the first stone?

I would like to cast the bedroom as the site of transgression, the private domain for queer youth; the last bastion before stepping into hostile domestic and public spaces shared by family members and ordinary citizens. It is the last over the shoulder peek at the mirror. The private and the public meet in Shizu’s work—the imaginary longing finding its tangible parallel in public and challenging invisibility with a stolen kiss, a tender moment, an embrace kept intact, never broken by what public spatial implications tend to do to its queer denizens.

Happy New Year. Be nicer to yourself.

Spitting Blood Like Truth: Support Generation BOCA.

2009-04-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm pushing about ten years here in Los Angeles doing the community based queer Latina/o arts organizing thing that continues to move, baffle, inspire, and exhaust me. Me da vida. I love it. I hate it. But I'm never indifferent to it.

I believe in making space for queer Latino/as living in Los Angeles to share creative work at an emerging level that often goes unseen and unheard. Oftentimes that's the least of our troubles in the cacophony of violence that surrounds our realities as either gender-non-conforming outlaws trying to make a home in the communities we are from. We remember Gwen Araujo. Lawrence King, presente. Sakina Gunn, RIP. These youth did not have the chance to spit their truth and so we, as poets and artists, render their struggles poetically to remember.

As a poet, writer and performer coming into my 30s, I look back at the amazing artists and activists that stepped aside and helped me up onto their shoulders so that I too could have the space to spit my truth. It only makes sense that I do the same for an exciting group of folks that have survived the post-adolescent/current queer adolescence where we make stunning discoveries about ourselves and the worlds of our making.

I hope my straight-leaning, straight-acting, hetero to the last drop readers can pause and think about the LGBT gente in their lives--have you ever thought about the struggles that they face as they remain true to themselves while occupying spaces with family, friends, and institutions like church and school. Have you ever stopped some bullshit language flying around the schoolyards or did you let the slap in the face go unpunished? Did you ever not talk to somebody because the gender line was crossed in such a way that...ni porque decirlo?

If you're new to this struggle, then welcome. I hope we can become the best of allies. If you're at all interested in learning more about young brothers and sisters currently trying to fight it out in the name of self-determination and puro empowerment whilst having a good time then check it: BOCA ESCUPIENDO SANGRE // MOUTH SPITTING BLOOD: Queer Latina/o Writers Under 30 is going to break it down and break it hard like many of our queer corazones when too little is never enough. This is the generation that spits blood like truth. Boca Escupiendo Sangre comes from Matriz Sin Tumba O: "el baño o de la basura ajena," a poem by the ferocity that is Gloria Anzaldua from her ever important text, Borderlands. This poem tells us that even as we die we crave and dream ourselves into a world worth our beauty, that sees us as we should see each other.

This weekend I'm happy to announce that San Jose-based slam poet, Yosimar Reyes, will be sharing work from his totally DIY-style chapbook, For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly. Yosi holds the title for the 2005 as well as the 2006 South Bay teen Grand SLAM Champion, has been featured in the Documentary 2nd Verse: the Rebirth of Poetry. (2ndversefilm.com) and is published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press). His words have open up concerts for Carlos Santana in his latest endeavor Architects of a New Dawn, a multimedia project launched earlier this year. (Aoand.com).

I have organized two chapbook parties in two counties where Yosi will share the platform and microphone with a stellar line-up of young queer latina/o writers in the Los Angeles area:

Rubin Rodriguez
Lils Pancha Gonzalez
Emmanuelle Neza Leal-Santillan
Junue Millan
Genevieve Flores
+MAS MAS MAS

BOCA ESCUPIENDO SANGRE / MOUTH SPITTING BLOOD --> OC Edition
April 3, 2009, FRIDAY | 8pm
@ BREATH OF FIRE LATINA THEATER
310 W. 5th Street (2nd Floor)
Santa Ana, CA 92701
http://www.breathoffire.org/

BOCA ESCUPIENDO SANGRE / MOUTH SPITTING BLOOD --> DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES
April 4, 2009 SATURDAY | 8pm
@ COMPACTSPACE
105 E. 6th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014
http://www.compactspace.com/

These events are free but please make it a point to support the young artististic endeavors by purchasing a chapbook and donating to both these amazing art spaces in both counties. Nos vemos here and forever.

C/S

Raquefella

Boca Escupiendo Sangre // Mouth Spitting Blood : Queer Latina/o Writers Under 30 Share WORK!

2009-03-25T08:31:00.001-07:00

DEAR FRIENDS & COMMUNITY:
I'm really excited to announce these two upcoming events in both Santa Ana and Downtown Los Angeles. They will feature the 20yr old genius slam poet YOSIMAR REYES from San Jose, California, whom just self-published his chapbook FOR COLORED BOYS WHO SPEAK SOFTLY. I have organized two chapbook parties April 3+4, 2009 in two counties where YOSIMAR will share the platform and microphone with a stellar line-up of young queer latina/o writers in the Los Angeles area:

Rubin Rodriguez
Lils Pancha Gonzalez
Emmanuelle Neza Leal-Santillan
Junue Millan
Genevieve Flores
Xuan Carlos Espinoza Cuellar
+MAS MAS MAS

BOCA ESCUPIENDO SANGRE / MOUTH SPITTING BLOOD --> OC Edition
April 3, 2009, FRIDAY
@ BREATH OF FIRE LATINA THEATER
310 W. 5th Street (2nd Floor)
Santa Ana, CA 92701
http://www.breathoffire.org/

BOCA ESCUPIENDO SANGRE / MOUTH SPITTING BLOOD --> DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES
April 4, 2009 Saturday
@ COMPACTSPACE
105 E. 6th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014
http://www.compactspace.com/

These events are free but please make it a point to support the young artististic endeavors by purchasing a chapbook and donating to both these amazing art spaces in both counties.

Tell your people about it!

YOSIMAR REYES BIOGRAPHY

From the Mountains of Guerrero, Mexico comes Yosimar Reyes, a Two-Spirit Poet/Activist Based out of San Jose, CA. His style has been described as "a brave and vulnerable voice that shines light on the issues affecting Queer Immigrant Youth and the many disenfranchised communities in the U.S and throughout the world."

Yosimar’s distinct style has managed to get him to perform from the Bay Area to New York City (always Representing East Side San Jose and his beautiful Mexico).

He holds the title for the 2005 as well as the 2006 South Bay teen Grand SLAM Champion, has been featured in the Documentary 2nd Verse: the Rebirth of Poetry. (2ndversefilm.com) And published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press) His words have open up concerts for Carlos Santana in his latest endeavor Architects of a New Dawn, a multimedia project launched earlier this year. (Aoand.com)

He is currently touring his self-published chapbook For Colored Boys Who speaks softly…

When he is not rocking the stage with his Diva attitude you catch Yosimar waiting for the bus and sharing PALABRA with his Abuelita always breaking it down hood and speaking from a community spirit.

He currently lives in East Side San Jose.

Hipster Anxieties Abound: I finally saw MfM

2009-02-24T15:04:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Ernest Hardy, for taking me to school and tipping me off to Medicine for Melancholy.

(*Sigh*)

Yesterday I booked it hard through the Redline to the 2 bus down Sunset in West Hollywood trying desperately to get to the 3:10pm showing of Barry Jenkins' emotional stinger of a flick at the Sunset 5. I got there on-time and waited for my friend, Shizu, to hurry up the steps. No color people time for us. We roll into Theater 3 only to be subjected to 15 more minutes of previews. So far so good.

Medicine for Melancholy is a really good film with a lot of good things going for it. I highly recommend it to anyone that went and saw and thought they loved Danny Hoch's gentrification show. MfM brings the tensions around authenticity, blackness, gentrification and class to a boil in a quiet storm of unsaturated colors. There's no white guy shouting people of color characters into your already burdened consciousness with skull snaps and the utmost of hip-hop ironies in the background.

Basically, we meet Micah and Jo in the first 45 seconds coming out of their hook-up hipster hangover. How funny that it transpires between the seemingly only two black people at the white hipsters loft party--complete with a white guy wearing tight cut-off corduroy pants offering the sheepish walkers of shame some cereal before heading out. Is it the site where the category of black truly empties?

Then we see the courting session begin because boy unicorn can't let go of girl unicorn just yet. When can you be assured that you will meet another unicorn in the sad worlds of your making?

I couldn't help but wonder about their choices in clothing and gearless bicycles, thinking to myself that I, too, would like to have a track jacket with fighting roosters on it to match my tattoos. Or that I would totally date a woman that screened female directors' names on t-shirts. Am I revealing too much here?

It sort of has a "each one, teach one" vibe about it with boy identity-checking girl and girl resisting labels in such a way that will appeal to all my essentialist revolutionary peoples yet is anchored by a certain cynicism making the rounds with the more angst-riddled existentialists de colour. But it's really about two people trying to connect but end up unloading their racialized anxieties in a city where black people make up only 7% of its population.

I really enjoyed the moments where it's just the ambivalence wrapped in giggling, glances and goosebumps taking hold (on a carousel, at the organic food co-op) while society is drowned out by the music and the identity politics are temporarily shelved. The kind of moment propelled by curiosity and chemistry--those little luxuries rarely afforded to complicated people of color on film. These transcendent moments are ever ephemeral but when they occur I appreciate it because pretty soon the anger will take back the reins and I remember exactly where my place is in the already overwhelming schema.

Anyway, here's a quick excerpt taken from an interview with Barry Jenkins on blackvoices.com:

Why shoot the film in black and white?

BJ: That was one of the original discussions I had with the cinematographer, my buddy James Laxton. We wanted the visuals to portray San Francisco,and the first thing we decided to do was to capture the image that would best display the emotional mood of the characters in relation to the city of San Francisco. It's not completely black and white. It's about 93 percent saturated. In a way, it reflects the small population of African Americans in the city. There is some color in the film, when the characters are being more intimate and are talking about politics and race.

I often forget that Shizu is from San Francisco/Mission District and post-film and over garden burgers she shared her own frustrations with a city that has no place for kids of color trying to listen to Bloodcat Love and Oh No! Oh My! amongst their own. It is hard not to feel blessed (for lack of a better affective state) to live in Los Angeles, where you could find and make a ghetto in your own image, readjusting the center to reflect the true majority. Shizu and I both agreed that the music was pretty phenomenal and that it would suck to only get to enjoy it in white-dominated spaces.

Lightbulbs - The Answering Machine

New Years Kiss - Casiotone For The Painfully Alone

No One Needs To Know - The Changes

I Have No Sister - Oh No! Oh My!

I'm jamming to the soundtrack right now. Are you mad? Do you hate me? Do you feel overshadowed by my tragic hipness?

Heh heh, I thought so...

The Hipster | My Melancholy

2009-02-19T10:41:00.000-08:00

I am really excited to see Medicine for Melancholy. It is known as the black hipster flick by Barry Jenkins, set in San Francisco between two unicorns and it opens in Los Angeles tomorrow. I saw Ernest Hardy’s review of it and put that ish on my calendar.

In the meantime I’ve been thinking about hipsters. I have been this way for about a month now way after the backlash. I feel like Mexico still wearing acid wash jeans and fauxhawks. I’ve been thinking about hipsters of color. And when I put those two together—hipster and of color—the divergence between those terms appears far, wide and laden in clarity. Oxymoronic? I don’t want to have to go into making keywords for theory here but put simply I believe that what bugs most people about hipsters is the hipster’s blatant disavowal of economic justice. Whereas a self-determined modifier such as of color announces itself to be fully aware of the historical implications of the societal context it finds itself existing and enduring. You know, consciousness. Not just a Black Star album, but having the lights on in every part of the house so you can see exactly who and what is coming in and going out, socially speaking of course.

Of course I have also been thinking about white hipsters. I feel so passé admitting this but you can’t have a concept like hipster of color and not go to the source of contention. So different yet on some levels it ends up being the same—is a hipster always a hipster? Or is the grating of our political nerves struck differently at different political timbres? Do white hipsters bug you the way black and brown ones do? Is it all class-based?

There is so much hipster hatred going on right now in the many worlds I inhabit—both blogosphere and the physical, critical and creative communities made up of the artist-activist-academic peoples—the humble, broke-ass kind. Many hate the hipster’s entitlement over our gardens and taquerias. Immigrants and their kinship networks have suddenly fanned their own isolationist impulses against spoon-fed outsiders. A bad scene, everyone's fault.

(And when I say hatred I mean it in the hateration sense, not any hate crime sense—but you knew that, right?)

Anyway…

It began to crystallize here—a few weeks ago I caught the Danny Hoch Taking Over show here in Los Angeles in one of the city’s western pockets called Culver City. The show was basically hip-hop theater’s most prominent hustler, Danny Hoch, telling the audience that the changes in the last twelve years in all of New York and its (un)real estate development is ruining an otherwise economically depressed yet thoroughly authentic Williamsburg (a neighborhood where Hoch owns property). A solo performance about gentrification—get it? Hipsters are ruining everything. They’re cannibals. They attract families with children and the authenticity of poor and working class folks of color gets siphoned into the outer suburban areas.

Now I know—a big theater touring production that breaks down the ills and powerlessness against gentrification is a positive contribution to educating theater patrons, the kind that can afford to drop a wad of cash to nod off in the middle of the show. But what I can’t get with is Hoch’s equal assailing of white and black hipsters. Somehow he thinks they belong to the same branch of evil. But white hipster is not a black hipster is not a brown hipster.

What bugs me about that is that I get the feeling that hipsterism is somehow an indicator of whitewashing—that somehow the person of color engaging in hipster-like activities is somehow less authentic than someone participating in hip-hop culture. And that a neighborhood’s coolness depends on the authenticity of its inhabitants of color. It feels like you’re less a person and more cool-kid accoutrement for those trying to pass as urban and down.

I have my own gentrification narrative and feel somewhat self-conscious by all things hipster, simply by the way I have been consuming music, politics and culture for the last fifteen years. They have always been around me in different degrees—some have politics, others want to know what’s up in music, cheap eats, new designers, etc. They linger like carrion birds, waiting for bits of flesh. For the most part a lot of them I’ve known through art and music, but back then I used to identify these people as scenesters. But because we have inhabited similar spaces for so long I sometimes feel compelled to be a cultural broker between scenesters and those whose spaces they encroach upon. What a burden, especially because most of the time they don’t want to be bothered. That’s when I realize that I’m progressive and they’re liberal. They only like Animal Collective and Glenn Branca. I like Animal Collective, Glenn Branca and Chavela Vargas and Betty Davis. They’re never going to go the extra mile.

My self-consciousness also comes because I know I operate under a mix of hipster trappings, such as the actual aesthetic I impose upon my own brown queer female with alternative gender presentation to the world. I, of course, could never be a hipster—I’m too stocky, too butch, too brown. I get mistaken for the nanny. I translate for janitors. I’m too goddamn earnest. I wear Dickies and thrift-store clothes but have been doing that since I was a kid, going shopping with my mother. How stoked was she that she didn’t have to spend money on me when I wasn’t wearing a catholic school uniform. I do understand from experience and from reading practices that there are lots of people of color that choose to overlook identity particularities or not engage them actively.

Like M. Ward for instance. Homeboy's from Ventura, Califas and born of a Mexican mother but does he engage child of immigrant angst in any of his intelligent folk music? No, he doesn't have to and that's what bugs. Sure his music is cool but when you're a listener bringing in your own context politicized as a person of consciousness. It's hard to not feel some level of alienation considering that the artist in question doesn't have to--I guess that's what makes the hipster litmus test.

So a film like Medicine for Melancholy seems like a nice and complicated counterpoint to the reductive reads of black and brown kids listening to rock as being byproducts of self-loathing. Here are characters self-conscious about those trappings. I feel of course very strange and conflicted about growing up liking punk and indie rock and most rock, a lot of it by white artists. I ride a bike and eat organic, watch indie films and all that other cliché stuff that for the last fifteen years hasn’t felt like a cliché but just choices in consumption. I feel somewhat entitled to it all since I’ve worked hard to access independent circuits of cultural production but I’m also down to watch an hour’s worth of Nancy Grace and the latest Will Smith flick with my parents and extended family.

(the author as a young queer, circa 1994)

But, what about me? I already know about the ills of gentrification. I have been concerned with it for a long time. I moved out of my parents’ Bell Gardens home in 1998 when I was 22 to move to a neighborhood that was not West Hollywood, where I could be Latina and into queercore and riot grrl and dykes and music and musicians, pay cheap rent to boot. I lived and learned and loved on Bellevue and Benton for five years, in an apartment being vacated by two fifty-something white coupled working class lesbians that were moving near Lake Tahoe to have a little piece of the world with their names on it. The window on the door had a decal with a unicorn encircled by a rainbow back before that shit was ironic.

I patronized all the queer Latino establishments—Dreams on Sunday at Spaceland, Club Nayarit for their Klub Fantasy nights, Escandalo at the Axis in West Hollywood, Le Barcito for a night out with the queens, Silverlake Lounge and the Garage Sunday nights, Tempo on Santa Monica Boulevard, Little Joy’s way back when, Jalisco Inn when The Smell became unbearable and Woody’s before it became MJ’s. I’d go here when the cute mod girls only dated other cute mod girls. It became impossible to be singly and mingly at hetero-dominated clubs like Café Bleu and Velvet.

I worked in a range of surreal music industry jobs and having my consciousness raised thanks to music; made friends with community based artists and organizers, particip ated in youth-centered political projects, and was conflicted about musicians with big label forlorn. I worked and then quit my full-time job as an “e-commerce coordinator” for an online music label right as the Internet bubble was about to burst and returned full-time to college, getting a degree from Cal State Northridge in the lovely San Fernando Valley. And this whole time one of my three roommates that shared the 2-bedroom, paid less than $435 a month from a mostly data entry job.

You could make music, see poets, buy chapbooks, make a nice little DiY-community, and there was one around the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhoods. Café Luna y Sol was possibly at the epicenter for a while there, when I lived just a block north of the 101. I caught Manu Chao’s midnight acoustic performance secret show there with fifty other Xicanos, as well as Jerry Quickley’s open mic night every other Wednesday. It was a time when tofu tacos inspired you to do a double take.

In 2003 I moved from Silverlake to New York for one year to pursue a shot at academia, wondering if all my denouncement of corporate structures could translate into grad school idealism. This is how I would serve the movement—as an intellectual.

A year later, I found myself returning to that very neighborhood only to find unaffordable housing with an entry-level job’s salary. A job I have been at for four years and my salary hasn’t changed much. Did I mention I work at a private university? It’s funny in that embittered kind of way but my working in the penumbra of the intellectual industrial complex mirrors my music industry working period—I pursued these jobs to be close to entities I love: music and theory.

Hey, I have an idea to counter my growing feelings of powerlessness against gentrification! Let’s do queer performance! I saw Vaginal Crème Davis open for the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at 18 at Jabberjaw, I know what I’m doing! And that doesn’t make me a hipster—that makes me a tragically jerky fanatic, Jack Black’s Barry from High Fidelity, if you will.

And I like and will take my theater uncritically in most instances consuming the catharsis the way I would a Tommy’s chiliburger—I know it’s bad for me but it feels pretty damn good because it is so easy. So I wish I could be totally hipster about it and embrace Hoch’s inhabitation of character of color, but I can’t. And when I am not reducing my critical metaphors to Barry’s self-righteous outburst about Mitch Ryder vs. the Righteous Brothers in the clip above, I am actually engaging in an act of resistance against a white person professionally performing people of color on stage.

I can’t get with that—call it a difference of political opinion if you can. I cringe because there are so many black and brown educated young theater and spoken word cats that I see at his show nodding their heads in approval.

Oh man. But that’s not even my beef!

Public Service Announcement: Schofield and Devil Bunny Make the Rounds.

2009-02-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

From time to time I get contacted by the great programmers of queer performance here and around Los Angeles asking if I could get the word out about upcoming projects and events. So this week, in addition to my upcoming blogging about live shows I've caught in the last six days, you will be seeing posts related to events happening that maybe you should go check out. I'm checking them out, maybe I'll see you there.

Highways is doing a big FROM THE MARGINS event/artist exchange with folks from Los Angeles and San Francisco. The weekend features a milieu of identities from the queer spectrum in what I imagine is an earnest attempt at cross-pollinating audiences and minds. If you're still bleeding for queer theory and/or want to break out and experience some actual praxis then head over to FROM THE MARGINS and enjoy your outsider street cred or for those who used to be soccer moms you can get some here.

I'm really excited to see Scott Turner Schofield, newly moved to the great metropolis. I know homeboy is probably still adjusting to the big city lights and taco trucks and probably missing sugar in his tea and hoping Nickelodeon will call his ass back one of these days. But in the meantime he's going to represent Los Angeles in this Highways/Queer Cultural Center artist exchange. I'm not sure what he'll be presenting, but Turner's milkshake always brings out the cutest questioning corn-fed college-bound bois and femmes to his yard. If you haven't seen this charmer in action then save your pennies and get to Highways and check his shit out.

Same with Gigi Otalvaro Hormillosa. She is so way overdue for a performance in Los Angeles it's not even funny. Gigi was one of the first artists Tongues promoted back in that identity-driven moment. She's the devil bunny and has been nesting in her hellhole for far too long methinks but I'm happy she's making the trek down. For all you vagina-come-latelies Gigi's work is a must for critical consumption. Gigi does really heady, complicated post-identitarian projects these days, gay marriage cheer routines that are infused with clever gestures to race and class, and making general creepy performance art that probably triggers many a sensitive over-educated queer woman of color. Personally, I can't wait to get triggered. I've been feeling awfully comfortable these days and I could use a good disturbance to shake me out of my smug zombie state.

Check out the info and rest of the performer bios below:

Highways Presents
8 LGBTQ Performers in From the Margins, a Radical New Works

+++Friday and Saturday, March 6 + 7, 2009 at 8:30 p.m.
+++Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.

Highways Presents the Los Angeles presentation of a four-city tour of Fringes-Margins-Borders featuring L.A.’s Queer Exchange: Deadlee, Ian MacKinnon, Saleem, and guest artist Scott Turner Schofield + San Francisco Artists: Stephanie Cooper, Sean Dorsey Dance, and Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa.

Fringes-Margins-Borders is a multidisciplinary performance project of new works drawn from personal narratives designed to initiate community across artificially and socially constructed identity divides. For the tour, Highways is partnering with San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center and San Diego’s Sushi Performance and Visual Art.

L.A. Artists:
Deadlee is a wordsmith, actor, activist, and entrepreneur. Gay.com's Josh Tager said: "Like many of his rap peers, Deadlee's albums are intense, writhing outbursts of anger. The notable distinction here is that when Deadlee bashes, he's bashing back. He is a vigilante for social justice, committed to confronting homophobia wherever he sees it."

Ian MacKinnon is a gay centered performance artist and curator of queer theater events in Los Angeles. He was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for "Best Off Off Broadway Performance" for his piece, SPANKED! at the New York International Fringe Festival, which he also toured to The New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Locally he has performed all over: Highways Performance Space, The Hammer Museum, The Electric Lodge, The Cavern Club, The Coast Playhouse, Theater Theatre, El Cid, Dragonfly, The Celebration Theatre, The Davidson/Valentini and The Renberg Theatre at the Gay and Lesbian Center.

Saleem is an award wining Middle Eastern performance artist, best known for his GLAAD award wining play Salam Shalom A Tale Of Passion, a love story between an Arab man and a Jewish man based on his own biography, the work is being developed as a film. As a dancer, he has developed his own dancing style, which incorporates Middle Eastern dance, gypsy movements, flamenco, and jazz. This mélange produces what he terms “free style belly dancing.”

Scott Turner Schofield is a man who was a woman, a lesbian turned straight guy who is often called a fag. Since 2001, Schofield's three major works, Underground Transit, Debutante Balls, and Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps - as well as readings from his book, Two Truths and a Lie - have entertained feminists and fratboys, season subscribers and people who “don't like theater” in big cities and small towns across the US.

San Francisco Artists:
Sean Dorsey is an award-winning San Francisco-based choreographer and dancer. Recognized as the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has blazed a new trail for transgender and queer bodies and stories onstage.

The consummate candy-fag, Thisway/Thatway (aka Stephanie Cooper) is an intermedia performance artist who enjoys the messy collision of glitter and theory. They launched into performance with the finest of Washington, DC's drag king and burlesque scene before wandering to the Bay area. The child of Black-Panamanian immigrants, their work explores the perils and possibilities of interstitial spaces through voice, video, and movement.

Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, also known as the Devil Bunny in Bondage, is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary performance artist, video artist, cultural activist, curator and percussionist of Filipino and Colombian descent. She is originally from Miami, Florida and received her B.A. from Brown University where she created an independent concentration entitled "Hybridity and Performance."

Highways Performance Space
at the 18th Street Arts Center
1651 18th Street; Santa Monica, CA 90404

Tickets are $20 general admission and $15 for members/students/seniors.
Buy your tickets online @ www.highwaysperformance.org.
Call 310-315-1459 for show information and to reserve

PS - IF YOU READ THIS AND WANT TO GO THEN MENTION RAQUEFELLA TO GET A PAY WHAT YOU CAN DISCOUNT AT HIGHWAYS. ORALE, AND YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS A STRICTLY NARCISSISTIC PROJECT...

Night of Planes and Stars with a full San Pancho Moon

2009-02-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I am hard on San Francisco. Why? Is it the ubiquity of Giants caps and jackets that is responsible for my discomfort? Nah, orange and black are just as pretty to look at as Dodger blue and white. The thing that makes me like Bay Area folks is that we like our poetry real and raw and that is how we cooked it February 9th at a spot you may or may not be familiar with called Galeria de La Raza.

San Francisco becomes the site to do an event centering on the poetics of Southeast Los Angeles, particularly the Hub Cities known as the stretch between Vernon, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Bell, Maywood and Cudahy, mainly because two of the three from SELA now call the Bay home. Our job was to render these places for the folks that made it out to MPFS. One of the goals I have for this poetry of place series is to give people a chance to voice their critical observations of how space shapes our sense of self as well as how displacement and gentrification continues to produce anxieties about how we inhabit the neighborhoods we might have taken for granted. No judgment there intended when I say take for granted. It's just sometimes we are so accustomed to a way our neighborhood ought to function that we often only notice who and what is coming in versus who and what is leaving. I want to create a space where we can speak openly together in lieu of and addition to tapping into strange impulses like be the sole voice for a community as a way to protect our territories.

Anyway, I wanted to just take a minute to give the Bay Area its due justice for a wonderful night of place-oriented poetry. Does that make sense? It was the Poetry of Place of Southeast Los Angeles with some top to bottom from San Francisco and San Diego to remind us why California can be a maddening, magical and melancholic place for lovelorn Latina/os and messed up mestizo/as. Thanks to my poet friends that came through to read on a bill that complemented such a beautiful moonlit albeit freezing night in the Mission District.

Here we have Marc Pinate quieting and preparing the masses for a night of palabra. Marc performed several songs throughout the night. He used to sing for a San Jose band called Grito Serpentino. The man's voice is really pretty.

Vickie Vertiz is here, reading an excerpt of her novel in progress about two pre-teens living and learning in the big BG, Bell Gardens. Vickie is my co-conspirator for this event and she actually grew up right around the corner from me, near the corner of Loveland and Eastern. She lives in the city now and I didn't meet her until a few months ago at this Latino arts empowerment gathering in downtown Los Angeles. Vickie was the glitter glue that kept us all in touch and hope we can do this again!

We had a lot of great folks roll through to participate in the open mic portion of the Lunada's program. It was so great to finally see Lito Sandoval of Gay Latino performance ensemble of the late 90s and early 2000s, Latin Hustle fame do a piece that night. He is a fabulous writer and an engaging as all hell performer. Read more Lito and often!

Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez were two of the five features. The duo are poetry dreams come true. I have cut my teeth on their work and feel really special to have them in my and be a part of their family. They are responsible for statewide unity by bridging NoCal and SoCal together. Tomas as you and your mother knows used to be the heart of Taco Shop Poets and Leticia has curated the powerful and inspiring Pinta Tu Propio Mundo poetry of mujer feroz project now pushing almost ten years. Umm, anthology anyone?

Yosimar Reyes from San Jose, Califas came up during the open mic and did his piece on what does not make you conscious. I love it, so Bay Area. Young Yosi has a new book of work called For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly. Check out his truth spitting here.

Aida Salazar, homegrown in Maywood, Califas, was the last featured writer. She read the crushing tales of bones and panty thieves, home and obsession. It was a treat to read with her because she is amazing and not many in Los Angeles get to do it. I guess she's like a prose unicorn ya know? Aida was a major contributor to the art scene in Los Angeles, producing large events for the likes of Maldita Vecindad and Quetzal for our serious cultural consumption. She's also a performance artist and writer schooled serio pedo styles at Cal Arts and is currently writing a memoir on some very personal experiences about motherhood.

Trust that you'll see her, Vickie and I in Los Angeles telling a tale about other architectures of the Southeast.

It's so easy to get caught up in the beauty of another city especially when they have superior pupusas. But at the end of it all I was really happy to come home to my town and put my head on a familiar lap and pillow. Here's a pic I snapped on my way home from LAX. The poetry of place...coming to LOS ANGELES.

Lysa Flores in Latina Dance Project

2009-02-05T09:45:00.001-08:00

I always stress the things I will miss when I go out of town. This weekend I will be missing Lysa Flores performing with her trio at the aptly titled Latina Dance Project at the Bootleg Theater in the neighborhood adjacent to where I currently call home, Historic Filipinotown.

This event features an array of locally based dance and movement artists performing choreographed new works to Lysa’s music.

My girlfriend and I went down a few weeks ago to check out Lysa perform live at the organic punk rock girl empowerment camp known otherwise as Ladyfest LA. We were the oldest participants in the audience at the Chuco Justice Center in Inglewood. I really wanted to see Lysa perform in this environment and it was such a treat to see all these young teenage girls vibe off her music. It is so gratifying to see young female-bodied folks discovering new underground feminist aesthetics and practices that don’t conform to messed up societal expectations. The way the light goes on behind their eyes that another world is truly possible. It helps when the shit rocks and Lysa Flores, with backup from Jaguares bassist (and baby daddy) Marcos Renteria and fly LA percussionist, Fredo Ortiz, fucking rocked.

I caught up with Lysa and asked her what she was working on next and she mentioned this dance performance coming up. What an interesting concept—cross-disciplinary collaboration! Stuff like this enables Lysa’s artistic and autonomous sustainability outside an unmerciful commercial market that makes unfair demands on women.

I have to admit that I am a big Lysa Flores fanboi. Her music puts a big shit-eating grin on my face, which is funny to me now because back in my identity politicking daze I could not wrap my head around her music. I guess mostly because I don’t like nor can I appreciate Ani DiFranco and Lysa used to do a lot of fucked up acoustic guitar strumming songs that just struck my lesbian nerves the wrong way. Now I love “Beg, Borrow and Steal” which is a song from the best Latino film ever, Miguel Arteta’s Star Maps. Remember Lysa’s role as the tortured daughter of a creep pimp? Soul-crushing.

(Lysa Flores performs at Pinta tu Propio Mundo, San Francisco, 2007)

Late last year I had the pleasure of being on a poetry bill curated by my friend, Leticia Hernandez Linares, that put me side by side with Lysa in San Francisco. It was the Pinta Tu Propio Mundo event and she blew away the crowd with her cherry red Stratocaster and songs about being a Mexican white girl. I thought to myself: Self, why isn’t Lysa Flores fucking world famous? Oh, the injustice.

Try and catch Lysa and friends at Bootleg this Saturday, February 7 if you can swing it. I will be preparing for the Mistaking Planes for Stars event happening Monday at Galeria de la Raza in the Mission District of San Francisco. Tell a friend if you can.

Elegantly Superb

2009-02-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

CHICOS Y CHICAS!
DANCE!
DANCE!
DANCE!

Today is the day. After seven long years of waiting and suffering in silence, Los Super Elegantes release their second full-length album, Nothing Really Matters. A band that has been thankfully evasive about describing what they do to whomever comes to their oeuvre proving that labels especially have never really mattered.

Check out the first video, filmed and photoshopped on location in Athens, Greece.

I have been pressing my nose against the digital window today since I have to wait until the 12th of this month for my emusic.com downloads to refresh. Hey man, I haven't seen a promo CD since my snot-nosed heyday working for industry tipsheet and pre-bubble bursting dot-com-landia so I have to be a monk sometimes in my musical consumption. But trust me when I say I have been jamming to those 30-second samples like nobody's business.

Anyway, I am really happy. This band, this duo of unequaled madness y sabor, one of my favorite Los Angeles bands ever, have delivered another set of gems for the queer undereducated masses in today’s fiercest threads to bump and grind to. Bump and grind in the drug use context, honey, not the sex acts.

This is what you listen to while you blow-dry your bangs for a night that will leave you wallowing in full-throttle chale! in lieu of regret the morning after. If you don’t drink, goody two-shoes, then turn to the wisdom of Martiniano y Milena for blatant social lubrication.

I first saw LSE at Saint Lucy’s, a girl punk-driven venue adjacent to Fais Do Do, and I think they were on the same bill as The Need. It was like all the cultural confusion of my interiority was catalyzed by these fresas and their punk rock pipiripau. My brown kid anguish of being invisible in a dirty white girl punk scene responded to the Super Elegante dog whistle and I haven’t let go of this bone yet.

Even as I got caught up in identity politics in college and being a better Latina that does everything for free, there was always Los Super Elegantes to turn to when the limitations of labels just became too much psychic burnout. The band tends to get a bad rap from small Chicana/o fundamentalist groups that deem the group apolitical. But the picture of Milena below tells me something different.

("EVERY HUMAN BEING IS SUPER ELEGANTE" - LSE)

LSE have been written about up the wazoo in every single imaginable publication. And they have consistently been described so clumsily, and if I read another gesture towards mariachi-hip-hop-punk I'm putting a fork to my eye. Yes, a band that does performance art—how…radical! But man, wasn’t it a thrill to see these cats at the Whitney Biennial the only year I ever lived in New York. It felt satisfying to no end to see the most provincially-attituded biggest center of the world acknowledge the amazingness of Los Angeles-based duo, M y M.

It was thrilling to see a couple of artists whose work I connected with enough to want to write about them early on in their careers do well and succeed in these fickle times. I wrote the cover story on LSE for the long defunct Frontera magazine back in 2001—my first and only cover story to date. It was in this feature that I called these two militant dilettantes, which I think is the best description ever for them.

Last summer I ran into Martiniano on the dancefloor of a downtown Los Angeles club called Shits N’Giggles where he remembered me and gave me a really sweet hug. I asked him how his abs were doing and he said he had gotten so flabby in typical super elegante fashion. He also mentioned how my article helped LSE reach new levels. Maybe there’s some journalistic ethical concern I’m missing here but hearing that made my night.

Rocky Dennis In Heaven | Stuff About White People

2009-02-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

(*Thanks to Jens Lekman, Swedish singer-songwriter, for penning such a great musical homage to RLD.)

This week I owe journalist Daniel Hernandez my gratitude for bringing Rocky Dennis back in to my emotional motherboard and pop cultural imaginary. Hernandez, of course, being the writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the LA Weekly, is poised to have a successful career in journalism. Rocky and Rusty Dennis are of course the real life folks that inspired the film Mask. Rocky Dennis was a boy with a disfiguring disorder called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia that caused his head to grow to twice its normal size, and his mother, a biker named Rusty, was determined he live a normal life.

Mask, or I should say Rocky’s likeness as rendered wonderfully by Eric Stoltz, became a perplexing footnote in DH’s either ambiguous putdown or passive aggressive come-on to my friend, Dino Dinco, who just opened a solo exhibition of his multimedia work in San Francisco.

The blog post was written under his nom de gay on another person’s art blog and it sounds like it is promoting the exhibit but I am not entirely sure. This blog in particular goes over my head with the psychically violent esoteric references that I gather are supposed to be somehow ironic. It’s like if Patsy from Ab-Fab was Latina, on Adderall and art theory, and emboldened to be racist and messed up so her mean gay rich white friends would like her better. In DH’s post however I cannot help but read his insertion of Rocky Dennis image above Dino’s image as ill-intentioned. Was it supposed to insinuate that he was an ugly freak? Or a lovable, brilliant, funny guy cut from working class cloth and dearly loved within his own biker kinfolk and the people that meet him today.

I am going to go with the latter because if Dino Dinco is Rocky Dennis then hooray for my ability to judge characters.

One of the first memories I have of living in my Bell Gardens barrio was of seeing movie trucks around the corner from where we lived. My mom walked us to the little corner park on Loveland Street and Eastern Avenue to see production assistants milling about the motorcycle garage across the street. Harley Davidsons would roar up and down, too, and these burly hairy guys would be hanging out waiting for their next scene. Later the following year when my parents took my sister and I to see Mask at the Fiesta Drive-In in Pico Rivera we realized it was Mask that had been filmed and Bell Gardens was supposed to be Azusa in the 1970s.

I believe that Rocky Dennis was an affable young kid that took the time to get to know people because he saw the inner good of the world around him and that his mother, Rusty, did the best she could in fighting the institutional indifference rampant in medical and educational spheres. A classic underdog story.

I find the film itself terribly satisfying even if it does fall prey to Hollywood hyperbole. Nevertheless, there is something terribly raw about a mother who turns to Quaaludes and handlebar mustaches when unconditional love becomes unbearable. I also find it brutally sweet when tough biker dudes kick into high paternal mode when the red-haired monster boy is in trouble or ridiculed by the world at large. A kid like Rocky inspires men weathered by life to be something other than what their caste dictates them to be—gentle.

More importantly, however, my friendship with Dinco and Hernandez’ post both prompt me to think through a personal trajectory scattered with different levels of amiability I have had with white people. Just like Rocky D’s own coping strategy of thinking of something good when something bad happens, I too think of my good interactions with white people to counter all the negatives ones that persist at my sanity. I am reminded of the poor and working class white people, particularly, the children and grandchildren of the Gran Torinos of that microcosm we inhabited in the Hub Cities of Southeast Los Angeles.

I remember Tommy Barton and his big ass ID bracelet, freckles and blonde hair in our kindergarten class at Colmar Elementary in Bell Gardens. I was one of the few Latina kids that spoke English pretty well so I got to be in his class and be chaperoned by his super mean mom that looked like Aileen Wuornos. She smoked Doral cigarettes in the playground while us kids ate lunch. Tommy would occasionally get picked up by a long-haired blonde man riding a motorcycle, this before helmet laws. My older brother had a motorcycle too and would let me ride on that back of his Kawasaki when I was 5. Tommy and I would talk shop about it.

Then when I switched schools there was Amanda Novak, one of the few white girls at Saint Rose of Lima in Maywood. She was straight off of a Holly Hobbie lunchbox who kept to herself but the Mexican and Cuban boys would torment her so badly she finally went off and shook one of them by the hair so hard I thought she was going to snap his pencil-thin neck. Gangster. We were both in an honors literature class so I knew she was writing a book in seventh grade and into all of the Little House in the Big Woods books—two things I was also doing, but I had a survivor’s instinct that went deep so I never wholeheartedly befriended her. I was too vulnerable myself as a nerdy honors student to risk social pariah status.

Then there’s Katie O’Donnell, white girl with a thick Huntington Park barrio accent that liked punk rock and kicked it with Mexicans into Brit-pop. I secretly enjoyed her and her punk girl gang taunting my friend, the bourgeois Chicano boy from Downey’s upper echelons, after he had broken her heart with such typical lame boy callousness.

Many come from the kind of life where it is nothing but the taps on a chin, getting looked down on by rich folks with alligators on their shirts, losing their factory jobs, fighting against the yellow man—the burdens described in many a Bruce Springsteen song (whom Rocky Dennis loved by the way) as well as Los Tigres del Norte. Both artists open up different aspects of my child of immigrant sensitivities—I remember blasting the emotional heat of Born in the U.S.A on my Walkman headphones to temper the self-loathing from those untamed Tigre accordions in “La Puerta Negra” spilling out of my parents’ van stereo. A typical soundtrack for many road trips to Baja California just so my mother and father could see dentists and doctors and buy cheap medicine in Tijuana and Rosarito.

Diles por "hay" a tu padre y madre,
que si ellos nunca el amor gozaron,
y si se amaban tambien la puerta,
la puerta negra, se la cerraron.

Others might manage to improve their station in life and go beyond a pre-destination and get to another place, make a different world beyond the values systems of our Reagan Democratic parents. I speculate if people of working class backgrounds feel it easy to reject white privilege since it might feel like none of it exists. I say this only because sometimes I feel strong enough to reject my oppression because it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course these are just my utopic musings of an otherwise complicated mixed consciousness that would incite rage in your run-of-the-mill tenderhearted leftist reactionary. The by-product of that being an inexplicable resentment of all white people without recognizing the large handful doing their best to resist their privilege and make a better world free of racist and economically unequal bullshit by organizing their communities or raising their own mixed-race babies.

Does that mean there are good whites and bad crackers? I don’t know but I would expect and take offense and totally understand if anyone rendered me an apologist. Candy-assed, sure, but I apologize for no one. Maybe I am just hyper aware of all the complicated sites I inhabit. Maybe the 90s made it impossible to avoid these observations. Maybe I’m tired of being burdened by anger. Maybe it will be different for the generations that follow. Maybe I am tired of putting up walls when I really want new thresholds to cross.

All I know is that are white folks in my life for good reasons, many with experiences that parallel my own. They hail from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, North Carolina’s Appalachians, Reseda, California and beyond. I think about the circumstances that have made them accessible to me, which leads me to think more about the kinds of white people available to people of color. Not just funky white people, who seems to be shorthand for lame Djembe-drum playing types, but the barrio and ghetto white folks that contribute to our sense of self and belonging to the worlds of our making, some that even go without usurping them for their own gain. Shit, even Santana had a white homeboy that served as his right-hand man in the making of La Eme in American Me.

White people. You guys get a bad rap. I say that with irony and earnestness. I get it. You get it.

I leave you with this poem written by the real Rocky L. Dennis himself that leaves me somewhat feeling less burdened by the identity game:

These things are good:
Ice cream and cake,
A ride on a Harley,
Seeing monkeys on a tree,
The rain on my tongue,
And the sun shining on my face.

These things are a drag:
Dust on my hair,
Holes in my shoes,
No money in my pocket,
And the sun shining on my face.

Familiar Dystopia, circa 2002.

2009-01-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

I got my grubby hands back on this bit of prose I wrote in 2001-2002 in this women's workshop held at Highways Performance Space led by the matchless Sharon Bridgforth. I feel like sharing. This was one of my first meditations on space when I lived at 2715 Bellevue Avenue and commuted to Northridge for school and Santa Monica for work often taking the bus and probably feeling self-righteous for it. Back then I had a lot of community organizers in my life so the feeling was often co-opted back and forth. That's how we do.

Anyway, space will always be present in any work that I do. Check it.

Familiar Dystopia

Sometimes los angeles is a large belly turning and everyone trapped inside is trying to hop on to sidewalks and duck under trees, avoiding falling gases and acids. Survival is trend, but it hurts to get caught on the verge of digestion. On this bus, in my car, in your car, in this building, at this bar, the days and lives of this city intersect without ever touching, speaking, looking into each other's eyes. And despite the sprawl, there are too many places in this city where my shoulders and knees brush up against someone else's against their will. And my exhale means it's your turn to breathe now. There are too many instances that I feel compelled to honk at the Jaguars ahead of me, but I fear coming face to face with my own powerlessness. And still on buses, I manage to pass judgment to the cars I look down on whose windows are shut as a familiar cloud of pot smoke lingers around passenger face and hands. Other times I measure my level of safety walking down Sunset in Echo Park according to how many brown and black faces outnumber the white ones. L.A. has it all. I would write a poem about it, but the movie trucks across the street from MacArthur Park obscure my view of the evening skyline. Mine are one pair of witness eyes. Immigrant trannies, las mas chuliadas de esta ciudad, claim bar stools and dance floors and accept watered down cocktails from their neighbors’ husbands. And you only have 10 seconds to cross the street because here the SUV is king and pedestrian is just another Armenian last name.

I am bound to this city, but don't call it loyalty. A nation all its own, but I am no nationalist. I don't do Dodger Blue today. Or wave a Laker flag. My flag is the white of surrender to the soul-numbing freeways. But at least on the 101 South coming home from the Valley I can practice my singing to Freddie Mercury or Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. My body never knew such pleasure, my heart never knew such pain and you, you leave me so confused. L.A., are you the bedridden parent I'm forced by tradition to care for? L.A. foremothers and kingpins, kingmakers and drag queens keep their children, like enemies, close by and clip their wings in the name of guidance. Crumbs. I'm just looking for a few crumbs. Still, that's cool, because I'm a socialist revolutionary starfucker and the breadline is just another addition to my commie fetish list.

But I get happy. I still get happy. My days are made when I hear the persistence of Spanish in the formerly Latino quarters of Café Tropical, 7 Mares and the Silver Lake lounge. When young rockeros stop to talk about the dead Salvadoran revolutionary poet on my t-shirt, I say - "Take that, gentrification!" I live to eavesdrop on the dirty jokes and late night workshift horror stories that only the finest Michoacan native son can tell. In my 'hood, bald-headed daddies and tight miniskirted mamis hold their children proudly like schoolbooks against their chest, while I'm left to learn real life in classrooms, and I get labeled the future? And then I am humbled and lower my head. Alvarado and Beverly, 7th and Hoover, Santa Monica and Western. My eyes silently whispering thank you. These are the women who've known me in unconquered languages, transmitting strength, endurance and desire through their breast milk. Damn, you are SO tough. Crossing NAFTA-stamped terrain, stepping through barbed wire and beneath gatekeeper's radar, with baby on your back. Your love must be dark and deep, rich and haunting, pure and bitter-tasting like the scent of dried jamaica flowers. You are so tough. And then there are the ones who are so tough, they call it God's will when they leave their babies behind.

Like my mother, whose journey north was a fortunate trek from San Salvador, on plane she was blessed as she drew the right holy card, the most coveted document she had that visa and doors opened. She was a fortunate one indeed. To leave behind weak economy, battered household, homicidal husband and big-eyed boy, precious firstborn son. Big brother. Long eyelashes and smooth copper skin. Trauma. No child should have firsthand knowledge of such absence. Working and providing from very far away. Landing on Coronado Avenue. 10 people one room. Abuelita y tias seran mis mamas. Six years. A long time to take care of someone else's blond children at $20 a week. Stress. Jaime, mi hijo. What must you think of me now?

Crossing Identity Streams with the Thorns of Life

2009-01-28T21:31:00.000-08:00

The first couple of days of the year of the Ox have produced strange yet pleasant nostalgia about the days before the Internet, the daze before identity markers. It was a time before I knew how to wave any identity-driven flags. If I was any younger then I might freak out at the nerdiness I embodied 16 years ago. Luckily I’m able to just let all that shit go and enjoy the fact that I was a smart angst-ridden teenager that managed to have a good time on my terms while maintaining a chuntara sartorial sensibility that teetered between pleasing my immigrant parents and gliding under the gender appropriate radar.

I am 32 years old and I spent my adolescence avoiding sex and drugs to chase bands around the sprawl of Los Angeles at soon-to-be documented sites like Jabberjaw, the Anti-Club, the Alligator Lounge, Spaceland, Macondo on Melrose which was right around the corner to the Bike Kitchen in the Heliotrope haven for the post-messenger bicyclist, Saint Lucy’s which was adjacent to Fais Do Do, UCLA’s Coop, Claremont Colleges, and Cell 63, which rotated out of several public storage garages in Sun Valley, Pacoima and Northridge. I was too young for Raji’s in Hollywood and Fender’s in Long Beach but I was able to catch a lot of great and epoch-defining shows, at least for myself.

I hate sounding like a some kind of technological Archie Bunker but it was a time in which people actually used to postal system and fanzines to communicate their feelings about bands, shows, tours and the concomitant gossip to one another across zip codes, area codes, counties and states. I swear I am no Luddite but there was something kind of magical about actually using your hands on a typewriter, a steering wheel driving to Kinko’s, ripping off Kinko’s and selling the ‘zine to folks you talked to directly that I kind of miss.

But another thing I miss is the ability to compartmentalize my identity according to the band I listen to which brings me to my current site of torment: The Thorns of Life.

Thorns of Life is the new Blake Schwarzenbach musical project. Blake Schwarzenbach is my fucking Bob Dylan. More than anything I write this blog because I cannot turn the hands of time back to last Thursday. It was the day in which instead of turning in grad school applications I should have opened the goddamn LA Weekly to see that Thorns of Life were playing in some god-forsaken spot in Eagle Rock.

I am an asshole. I missed the show. Can somebody hold me?

Yet, who cares, right? Well, you obviously don’t know that I have been enamored with Schwarzenbach’s first significant band, Jawbreaker, for almost 20 years now. That is fine, I can’t expect you to know such meaningless crap about me. But Jawbreaker’s oeuvre pretty much helped me understand, and dare I say, contextualize gendered dynamics, uncomfortable truths and sexually tense circumstances, too (see the song Chesterfield King off their 24-Hour Revenge Therapy for reference). I was so butt hurt and unable to process grief that when Jawbreaker broke up and Blake moved to New York, I just could not deal let alone enjoy his next project, the magnificent Jets to Brazil.

Blake’s new band features Aaron Cometbus of Crimpshrine and the Cometbus mini-bibles all handwritten in the most perfect penmanship from the empty train cars of the Southern Pacific. The band also features Daniela Sea on bass. Yes, Daniela Sea of the (*shudder*) L Word. I feel weird about that collaboration—he on guitar, he on drums and she on bass. Sure, she played in Bay Area punk rock mainstays The Gr’Ups and Cipher in the Snow but so what? I was all about Blatz, Tribe 8 and The Tourettes and Raooul anyway, you know the stuff that actually made it down to Los Angeles. I was into The Haggard, never Bitch and Animal.

Hey man, Daniela is fine on the L Word and to each their own but I am tired of accepting the mediocrity in the name of visibility, especially considering the perfunctory writing on that show. I will also never forgive those pig-bitches for the “Papi” character perpetuating bullshit Latina stereotypes. So why does Sea have to ruin it and be in a band with my man? Now all these lesbians will be at Thorns of Life show—and all we have in common is that we have sexual relations with other female-bodied females.

Man, and to think that I was so desperately trying to avoid the L Word at all costs this year and like the freakin’ mafia, Schwarzenbach pulls me back into this bottom-feeding scene by joining forces with the likes of them. This is worse than gender policing in public restrooms. What is this discomfort that I feel? Like it’s not bad enough to be rendered invisible by white dudes, I got to go and be terribly transparent to white lesbians that could rob me of my rightful place at Thorns of Life shows, too? My psychic wounds collected through punk rock are survivor scars I show to you now but I am more lenient on punk and indie rock scenes because they are places for misanthropes and fuck-ups. The lesbian scene portends to open its doors to all women-loving-women, which is bullshit. My trauma from those circuits of sociability is still alive and thriving every day.

So don’t get me wrong—I love the mixed gender and orientation bands. I love Hazel and Bloc Party and Husker Du and Unwound because you know with those bands it has always just been about the music not any sort of toxic psychic spillage. But of course, there’s this heinous zeitgeist that the L Word has become these last few years amongst the champions of the Kunte Kinte. I ask you: have you ever been to an L Word viewing party at a lesbian bar? Never had I felt like such a sloppy Mexican until I went to the Falcon in West Hollywood. To be inundated by power suits, crazy geometric hair and butch dykes in skinny jeans and leather jackets was too much for me to ever want to return.

Indie rock and punk shows offer a respite, a place of refuge if you will, from lesbian-specific spatial and social dysfunction. I have gone to rock shows and know that I can be ignored on my own terms. But lesbians! Who really understands them? When we’re not ignoring each other then we’re neglecting the playlist and end up resentfully dancing to vapid Katy Perry-like music. I am compelled to ________ the pain away and right now it looks like an Adam Sandler dramatic vehicle (I’m looking at you, Punch Drunk Love) might do the trick.

All I want is for my lesbian life to separate from my punk life, no matter how far apart they actually are—it somehow convinces me that I am in control of an otherwise powerless existence.

Thorns of Life is a Venn diagram I am unwilling to participate in at the present moment, but know I will have to at some point if I want my special feelings to be acknowledged and taken care of in the form of some cryptic, revenge-laden power pop scorcher. I guess I will be fine as long as there aren’t any Thorns of Life parties being held in West Hollywood or see any snarky posts about stocky lesbians in Dickies attire on Craigslist.

Ugh.

Art Versus Brand | Stealing for Inspiration

2009-01-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, my partner’s sister and brother-in-law drove down from their home in Steinbeck Country, Salinas, for the wild industry freakshow in Orange County that is the yearly global music products convention known as NAMM. Two years ago I got to walk the innards of the Anaheim Convention Center and lasciviously linger over the Rickenbacker and Paul Reed Smith guitars, the same brands used by my personal rock gods, Paul Weller and Carlos Santana. Few things question my atheism and music and the ocean are two things that reinforce any inkling of spirituality that lies dormant inside my shell. So in these rare moments I must seize the emotional connection I have to large bodies of water and to the guitar-bass-drum trifecta. I used to check out Ozomatli, Invisbl Skratch Picklz and Mix Master Mike so I go straight into auto-pilot mode and bob my head in response to the knob-noodling and crab-gripping (you know, like the kind that put DJ Shadow on the map) on the mixer by the toughest selectors sampling all the newest DJ gear. In grad school they tell you to never ever say this in relation to the burden of your identity, but in this situation, it felt natural. This was just a privileged peek inside the musically banal, the pragmatics of music making, the minutiae of roadie logistics, things like guitar pedals (no Big Muff to Tuff), drum equipment, airport suitcases for guitar amps, digital versus analog, Luddites versus mouse-clickers.

If you have never been a part of music making or spending social time with friends in absolute silence except for the sound of Miles Davis’ fusion period cranked to 11 or even playing Dark Side of the Moon to a Wizard of Oz on mute then you might not find the aforementioned understandable but worthy of your derisive attention. There is a lot of crunchy curly hair, bellydancers, groupies-in-training, emulators and fanboys so engrossed in meeting everyone from Sheila E (which Zoe and Efrain did! LUCKY!) to Dave Mustaine that you forget that sometimes passions are messy and hard to look at with a serious face. I had no idea if we would run into any famous folk ourselves but I made to sure to dress the part of musical aficionado. On me though that look translates as Samantha Ronson in a funhouse mirror with my old-school fedora, white-shirt, hoodie vest and leather cuff even though I’m aiming for Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sabrina, my partner, totally agrees to be my Lindsey Lohan. The people of NAMM look the way they do with no hint of irony and have no hopes or desire to ever appear on the webpages of hipster photography or mean-spirited sight-charting blogs. They just look like they work at a music shop in Downey.

The male-female ratio at NAMM is off by 1000% so all this male attention inundates my partner and her sister, as if they’re the Kelly LeBrock character from that movie, Weird Science, going down the escalator in the mall scene. I even see musicians I thought were dead but are actually alive like Bootsy Collins. I thought that dude was totally dead. I was wrong.

This year, I didn’t have a pass to official NAMM but managed to go and check out Armando Peraza and Giovanni Hidalgo to bring gender balance to the sausage party in one of the big Hilton ballrooms. Both men performed with other beloved studio musicians that, like Pereza and Hidalgo, contributed to popular understanding of Latin music classic recordings. But there’s a distinction to the musical appreciation and I just want to make that clear. Peraza and Hidalgo both appeared on recording by guys like Hector Lavoe, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Santana and Charlie Parker. The lazy listener might have different occasions for which to hear recordings by these artists, nary one to actually approach any record to look at and study the credits and possible liner notes. They understood and obtained their appreciation of the musicians onstage through their personal attachments to the records these guys appeared on and there are many. Just call this a clichéd observation of fandom and commitment to craft but I just want to give it up to those that take the time between breakfast, lunch and dinner, punching in and punching out, happy hour and hangover to do their homework.

This episode dares me to think that Peraza and Hidalgo might be the last of the artists in a world where each day it’s not so much the concept, the virtuousity, the spirit anymore but the brand that gains circulation and popularity. I’m not suggesting artistic extinction it’s something else. Every year I’m finding myself admiring the hobby artist—those that do their craft out of love and not careerist necessity—and the multiple ways in which they admire other artists. Peraza and Hidalgo are by no means living in obscurity but maybe it’s because there will always be hobby artists that appreciate and understand the artistic labor of hired hands, musical braceros if you will but with better pay and different relation to posterity. I just think maybe someone like Santana is understood popularly more as a brand, you know like you hear Black Magic Woman at your Chicano nationalist uncle’s wedding party or the aisles of a Pep Boys and it feels like Coca-Cola for your ears, especially more so now when he adds vanilla and lime and diet to his repertoire by adding goofy pop singers crooning mindlessly on his later work. Maybe Santana is an artist in a world where the masses are unaware about how much they lose when they give their souls, credit card numbers and social security codes over to the corporate structure in the name of immediacy and convenience. It is the loss of patience, passion, and attention spans—the holy trinity in critical consumption—but the truth might be that some people would rather just download it and go, not pore over the grooves playing name-that-guitar-pedal.

And then before I fall into this tragic abyss fueled by self-righteous diatribes about the scarcity of artistic integrity and consumer-producer interface I look at this Jim Jarmusch quote that’s been circulating mightily up and down the blogosphere this last week about stealing with gusto in the pursuit of personal authenticity. Fortunately the quote operates like an inhaler calming my most reactionary impulses to rail against the artist becoming commodity. It pacifies my inner Jack Black-in-High Fidelity beast against getting mad for not just selling out but for stealing voraciously to sell out, getting mad because they don’t work the mind and soul-suck of the 9 to 5 while we slave after dinner to get that line break down or that chorus-verse-chorus into shape.

Does that mean that inspiration is always thievery? I guess it’s time to think about critical thievery and if it is going start playing a role in my own art-making practices (and maybe your own) and speculate if these practices coincide more with dominant mainstream artistic industry standards or intervene and disidentify against such standards. I guess because DIY-styles proliferate differently now because of the Internets it’s almost become really easy to become a brand. I mean part of me can’t hate on Shepard Fairey because the fool did follow and wheatpasted the trail blazed by Robbie Conal, even if it was with some stylized rendering of this totally geeky esoteric part of my WWF-watching past. Fairey does what has and will continue to make the masses clamor for more—makes the dorky cool. Transforming geeky knowledge, however trivial it is, into something visually stunning will always put money in your wallet. And for some, possibly the majority considering how hard it is to sway them, politics is really dorky, definitely uninteresting to look at because there’s not enough good art with the resources to be advertised as brands. I don’t want to spend time on qualifying dorky or turning it into some kind of keyword or whatever so let’s just keep going with it for now. Politics is dorky, political graphics is for a politicized niche of people that like to collect that kind of cultural document. I brought back a bunch of gorgeous OSPAAL posters from my first and only trip to Cuba ten years ago because I like to have cool graphics that match the interior of my political leanings. But if you look at those pictures of me from that trip then you will see that I indeed presented visually as a dork.

This is difficult damned-if-you-do terrain to hover over because I know there are two camps of artists out there—those that believe in citationality, that is, getting permission—and those that don’t. There is the “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” bunch that feel emboldened to project those whims and calculations publicly. I guess Mark Vallen’s critique of the Obey man himself has me all in a tizzy, especially as I anticipate Favianna Rodriguez’ continued criticism of artist stealing from political visual archives to push their own careers further (like into the Smithsonian) and being self-aware about it while doing it. But then I think about hip-hop’s origins in the borrowing and stealing arena and its ability to take the old and repackage it into something truly transformative. Yet, I understand the murky ethics of it all because a lot of samples were never originally cleared in the beginning and there are clear legal issues at play. Then I’m feeling cagey about the Danny Hoch Taking Over show happening right now at the Kirk Douglas theater in Culver City. I wonder if he’s become a brand and if his is the brand about being the white guy that lives hip-hop as creed that tells mostly liberal white people that don’t listen to hip-hop that go to his shows why they suck for doing all this bad stuff to the black and brown folks whose teats, incidentally, he is allowed to suckle and who in return nod their heads in approval. Is that what we like because that is what we expect? And is that what we expect because we’re up on some shit about identity, politics and desire but don’t really question the rubric American Theater falls under and the political implications endemic to the industry (i.e.-filling theater seats with white butts).

But that industry is just one of many microcosms of our capitalist society and so we must ask ourselves how can we go beyond critiquing individual artists and address the real/right issue. Can’t we speak candidly about being ethical in our engagements and entanglements with authenticity? Are those unethical artistic practices by-products of fame? I am suggesting this mostly to counter the feelings of powerlessness and asshole-ness that arise when critiquing unethical artistic practices. Stealing still happens and as long as people are hungry it is going to keep happen. You still see the man claim a position that teeters between bashful and boastful about stealing people’s work and getting away with it in a recent Boing Boing video encounter between Fairey and famed street culture photographer, Glen E. Friedman. It’s all good bro’, you stole my shit and I busted you but we both ended up getting paid so it’s all good bro’. If you read the comments you’ll see something I wrote under my nom de guerre, Raquefella, to which someone promptly shoots back the Jean-Luc Godard line that Jarmusch pillows his own quote under which just tickles me.

Capitalism keeps us disconnected from art and the means of production. So instead of getting caught up trying to fight the behemoth of the brand name I have to return to the only form of consumption I know. I’m going to read the liner notes and spend time with a work of art and see if we connect. I’m going to meditate for a moment with the likes of the new Antony & The Johnsons CD or the latest book on street artist from NYC, James De La Vega and get a feeling going on some level. When I don’t have time then it’s off to the Starbucks to see what music they can spoonfeed to me because that brand is trying to corner a market on it. Too easy? Well, isn’t that what brands do?

I DON’T NEED SCHOOL TO CALL IT ART (excerpt)

2009-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

( Seesaw at Jabberjaw, 1993.)
written by raquel gutierrez for the jabberjaw book

The wait was torturous and worthwhile but hearing the first chords of “Dragnalus,” a collapsed and discordant siren, made the hair on my arm stick straight up like little Watts Towers on fire. We rocked out to a Tumwater death march. This was the Fake Train tour and my first time seeing the trio that had the biggest ‘hood fame that night—the redwood, the woman, and the misanthrope. A fine bill it was with one of those line-ups that reflected the founding of a brotherhood of dysfunction, an anxious intimacy that didn’t require boys kissing each other to call it love. It was the end of summer, 1993, and Unwound’s penultimate show on tour before heading back home to Oly. Although, they were already home.

Unwound. Floodgate. Seesaw—Richard and Joey had just graduated high school. I was there with those two Downey boys that so desperately wanted to be from Olympia. Seesaw had just came back from their first West Coast tour, including a show at the Red House on Vern Rumsey’s invitation. Lucky bastards. Oh well, Richard was jealous of me for being granted access to Riot Grrl-L.A. meetings thanks to my Kunta Kinte.

This was the new macho. It was awkward cock rock. It was the invitation to smoke your older brother’s secret stash. The kind of stash that floats boat dreams from a hill. The same guys that ignored me for not catching their Jawbreaker references yet always kindly let me go in front of the stage for the seasonal Schwarzenbach-lash. When it pains it roars. Even though I didn’t like dick I still loved these guys the way a masochist loves a narcissist for letting me into the clubhouse.

I was already inaugurated into the scene with my first cappuccino in a root beer mug served by Wrecks Carrs of KXLU at the Nation of Ulysses show. He was the guy with the mushroom cloud for hair that just kept getting skinnier and snottier until his trust fund ran out. Nevertheless, he was still a kingmaker and we knew it. Maybe you knew him? He was one of many characters that the same dozen people introduced me to in a hundred different ways and he never looked me in the eye or remembered my name. That type of underground snobbery could only transpire in a place like Jabberjaw, yet it never really bothered me. Few were of that ilk. Many were there because they loved being there with the bands, the fans, the experts, the geeks, the next-in-line’s and each other. No one was ever already over it nor had we begun to take it all for granted.

Everyone that had a hand in making Jabberjaw what it was were all very nice to this nerdy stocky girl from Bell Gardens, California. Randy Kaye was a gentleman but definitely and understandably too cool for me. I didn’t know what a pin-up was until I saw Michelle. Gary was cool and inspired me to wear brown pants and black shirts and white socks as my daily uniform, Jessie always had a smile and I remember them all, along with Brian and Maureen, always being in good spirits when Godheadsilo were in town. It was definitely like a really cool family that did drugs together but would never get all Helter Skelter on you.

(Kicking Giant, year? No idea!)

Jabberjaw was still the place you came to be a jerk because you owned Steelpole Bathtub 7-inches, toasted your cinnamon raisin bread at Ships, and Steve from Slug knew your name. All of this credibility often entitled you to stand behind the counter a few feet away from Michelle. You couldn’t just be a dick in your regular everyday life to people who had no sense of the nomenclature of cool you measured your life by. You have to give it up to a place that served no alcohol yet inspired that kind of attention-seeking behavior. Maybe it was my age but all of it was just lost on me, went over my head or maybe I just wasn’t brave enough to ask—but, why pop tarts? At 30 I might have felt the slightest twinge of irony eating a pop tart. At 16, I was just fat and didn’t care because I ate chocolate pop tarts before going to school. It was my cheap ambrosia during those noisy nights. Trenchmouth, Canopy, Beekeeper, Today Is The Day, Unsane and Kicking Giant. God knows we needed the refined sugar to keep us going straight into the morning.

Testing the waters: poetry of place

2009-01-13T16:23:00.001-08:00

It seems like there is a spectrum of feeling around the poetics of place, especially with so many Los Angeles-based blogs becoming these grand sites for radical spatial narratives. Maybe it's because I've been thinking about the different turning tides in southeast LA in the course of my life that I look for that which I want to see. Place is always a big factor in most creative works, at least it's the yin to time's yang. What an awful simile. Place and Time. Perquin, El Salvador, 1981. Mexico City, 1968. Some narratives are larger than others, but every narrative waits to be written. Our blogs serve as every day acts of resistance, a thoughtful intervention into the banality of state logic, vessels we invigorate with meaning.

I'm interested in starting a POETRY OF PLACE collaborative series at any number of spaces that are proliferating in neighborhoods we inhabit and are estranged from.

I'm doing one at galeria de la raza to test out material before doing stuff in LA. I have this crazy idea of doing quarterly events in different parts of our schizophrenic metropolis. Maybe inspiring folks to think more critically about the way they inhabit the world that they do and return the form to some kind of reportage that takes place, critical witnessing if you will. We all do it, so why not do it together?

Anyone interested in some kind of event that focuses on areas such as Boyle Heights, Alhambra, South Bay, Northeast LA, Venice, dollar you call the zip code!?

New series in the works.

2009-01-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

Mistaking Planes For Stars: The Poetry of Place in Southeast LA
February Event for the LUNADA Series

Galeria de la Raza
Monday, February 9, 2009
7:00pm - 10:00pm
2857 24th street
San Francisco, CA
415.826.8009
info@galeriadelaraza.org

featuring Aida Salazar, Raquel Gutierrez, Vickie Vertiz, Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez-Linares

Come to Galeria de La Raza’s popular LUNADA series this February 2009 as three poets with origins in Maywood, Huntington Park and Bell Gardens, Califas poetically render the emotional and political architectures of Southeast Los Angeles. Veteran poets, Tomas Riley and Leticia Hernandez-Linares round out the spatial flow with harmonious and discordant narratives of north and south, San Francisco and San Diego.

The moon shines bright this night over the city and its Bay. See you there!
-------------------------------------
The POETRY OF PLACE is a series idea I got from organizing this event at Galeria de la Raza. Now that I see what potential it has it makes me want to keep doing this series in different sites where poets and writers would focus on a particular set of places. I don't know where the next will occur after this in SF but it's got the wheels turning.

I'm looking forward to seeing Aida read at this event. I first came across her work about ten years ago, I believe at a mujer de maiz event at Self-Help Graphics. It was my first foray into witnessing smart feminist performance art. She called herself a performance artist and I thought that was so cool. Red paint was involved and she dipped her upper body in the liquid. Visually it was really jarring. Reminded me of a more hopeful Nicole Blackman (whom I first saw at the first Ladyfest in Olympia, WA around the same time).

Aida was also an arts professional and I remember her leading workshops for the county and Getty interns on how to produce a large-scale event. Man, that is some serious work but also a really exciting time for LA arts, back before all this economic standstill.

It will be fun to share the stage with her at Galeria.

Game back on...2009 re-launch

2008-12-31T17:18:00.000-08:00

I'm looking out the window and seeing two planets aligning with the moon. They are Jupiter and Mercury and they are quite a sight. That has to be some kind of auspicious sign about what 2009 is bound to bring and what I'm ready to receive. I can't help but think of Death Cab for Cutie's "The New Year" and hope that it's played once the clock strikes twelve.

It's been a very long time since I've taken a stab at my blog but I am re-inspired to keep going, keep writing, keep pushing through. There are projects lined up for 2009, lots of travel with the Butchlalis, and a serious intent to get more serious about writing. It has been the longest love of my life and it is time to pay the respect to it. I resolve to write every day--even if it's just my name on a piece of paper. I resolve to write more of what I know. I will challenge myself to have a stronger insight, more compassion and even more patience. Sustaining momentum and the ambitious drive--that's the ticket now for 2009.

I leave you with a bit of light.

Vexing: And I'm Missing IT!!!

2008-05-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot that I had this blog but since I've stopped drinking and blogging it's almost hard to get me to do anything with it. It's more fun when I'm complaining so let me bring that back into the mix. I'M SO BUMMED THAT I'M NOT GOING TO THE OPENING OF THE VEXING SHOW!! Here: this is what I'm talking about. Of course it's just the goofy Agustin Gurza article on the event. I always imagine Gurza rocking some sort of long mullet of indio hair in that Mexicano bourgeois bohemian kind of way. I have never seen his face but he always misses the target of most of his articles. Anyway, my complaint isn't his ass but the fact that I'm going to miss the AMAZING ALICE BAG, TERESA COVARRUBIAS and their little sister, LYSA FLORES, deliver some damaged girl medicine. Now, those are my gutter goddesses!

So, get your ass to Claremont and get mixxxy in the mosh pit for me. I'm going to be sleeping off some airport bug in a dingy Oregon hotelroom. I can already see it, running through the forest all Harold and Kumar style on our way to the gay music festival in Eugene, Oregon. I'm not looking any gift horse in the mouth--is just that some people organize better than others and the white folks up north got us way back in February and Vexing organizers did not.

Alas, do not worry. Butchlalis de Panochtitlan will be performing on June 21st as a way to get you to foot walk through the show. Yes, we'll be doing snippets and then some of Barber of East L.A. (which everyone is loving by the way) at the Claremont Museum of Art, curated by the likes of Colin Gunckel and Pilar Tompkins. There's already what is either my favorite Prince album or people just tripping about East L.A. semantics. You think it was a comic-con or something, but you should peep Alice Bag's blog for the pedo around pedigree and punk rock locality. I always thought you carried your location like a burden so that somehow informs where you're at--you know, it's not where you're from...oh wait, wrong genre. Wait for next year for the East L.A. hip hop exhibit--but that wouldn't be interesting, now would it? Everyone knows in their heart that Chicanos can't rap. Doesn't mean I don't like it. Even I love being a Hispanic causing panic.

Did I tell you how I spent Cinco de Mayo? On the main Santa Clara drag in San Jose, wachando the lowriders go by as I made my way to the Emergency Room for a throat infection. I spent more time in traffic then I did in the ER--but that's probably because I have insurance. Still, it was like Lowrider magazine vomiting all over the downtown SJ area--girls, lil' shorts, high heels and wrapped in the Mexican flag. It was crazy...it would've been okay but then this is Sharks country. Total mindfuck.

Get Vexed: Stay Vexed!

2008-03-10T14:41:00.000-07:00

Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk at Claremont Museum
By Ryan • Mar 10th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives, Photography

From ArtDaily.org:

“CLAREMONT, CA.-The Claremont Museum of Art is pleased to present Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk from May 18 to August 31, 2008. The Museum will host an opening reception on Saturday, May 17th, with live performances by several artists in the exhibition.

The burgeoning punk rock music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s in East Los Angeles provided an electrically charged, creative climate. This scene created an atmosphere where performance mixed with poetry, and visual culture was defined by an aesthetic and an attitude. Artists and musicians interfaced and blurred the lines of actions, documentation, photography, sound and style. Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, Vexing is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices. This documentary-style exhibition will include photo, video and audio archives of the era as well as studio work encompassing painting, installation, writings and performance.

In an artistic environment fueled by exchange and experimentation, music played a pivotal role in defining new images of self. This exhibition documents a vital moment of artistic and musical interchange in Los Angeles, with women staking out a position between and within punk rock, East LA and the downtown art scene. Vexing not only considers their significant contributions to the cultural landscape of LA, but also examines the multiple scenes and identities they negotiated. These women have also served as a model for subsequent generations interested in alternative social movements as a platform of expression, as well as the post-identity conceptual practices of today.

Participants include musicians Alice Bag, Teresa Covarrubias, Angela Vogel, Monica Flores, musician and artist Exene Cervenka, artists Diane Gamboa and Patssi Valdez, photographers Dawn Wirth, Elsa Flores and Louis Jacinto, recording label-founder of Fatima Records Yolanda Comparan Ferrer, printmakers Richard Duardo, Jessee Vidaurre and John Miner, and filmmaker Jimmy Mendiola. Representing a newer generation of artistic producers influenced by these women are musician/artist Lysa Flores, artists Shizu Saldamando and Sandra de la Loza, photographer Chris TV, performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, and the band The Sirens. Special concert footage and interviews courtesy of Pete Galindo, Willie Herón and Lysa Flores from the forthcoming documentary on The Vex. “

Friday Night Re-Cap

2008-03-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

Did you see this? It's the obituary for Manuel Reyes, 82; Conviction in Sleepy Lagoon murder case later overturned. His children didn't know about this historical episode in their father's life until the invasion of privacy court case was brought up against playwright Luis Valdez by the living members of the Sleepy Lagoon trial. I assume they didn't want Zoot Suit to be made but were able to get 1% of the play and films earnings. It trips me out since I'm in the midst of producing a script for a play that takes place in a historical period...but not based on actual events. Hey, no one said anything about being on the same plane as Zoot Suit, I'm just trying to connect to a world beyond me. Anyway, read on and trip yourself out.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-reyes7mar07,1,7819681.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

Top 5 for Larry

2008-02-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

I fight the tears that come upon laying my eyes on the boy's smiling eyes and sweet nature that emanates from the top of his head to the button of his nose. A princess named Larry, your reign ended much too soon. Today I mourn you little baby stolen from your family and friends--your nascent ferocity that we could see with our eyes and hearts open couldn't protect you from the vile teenage hate that took you from us. Little do they know that there are so many people that love you and us alike--our intentions are never to hold up the mirror to those that kill us. If they see themselves in the innocence of our skin and fight us with fear then how and why does that become your burden? I mourn you from the comforts of an antiseptic office that purports to create knowledge about that kind of thing.

I offer these songs to help us find words to feelings, melodies to our mourning. Que descanzes en paz, Lorenzito King.

and finally
"Ela Sonha" by Giovanni Venostra
http://play.rhapsody.com/giovannivenosta/princesa/elasonha

A Soundtrack All My Own...

2008-02-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the month where my 75 downloads at eMusic get refreshed and I get to select new stuff to pass the days with and lo and behold James Spooner the dude that made the kinda interesting film, AfroPunk, has a top 12. He picks bands with black people in them. There's only room for 12 so he's got to make it really good which explains maybe why there's no Trenchmouth or Nation of Ulysses. Trenchmouth was a great band though and Nation's Steve Kroner was not a singer but a guitar player. Spooner makes some good recommendations--feeling the Spank Rock from way back, been rocking to Sun Ra's Space is the Place since the 90s. The boys I played drums for in our band would play SITP while we watched the heyday of Traci Lords in our rehearsal space. But damn, Spooner hits his mark on Swiz. Damn, he's core. Bad Brains is a no-(bad)brainer but to slip in Swiz shows serious authenticity--not about being black, silly, but about digging in them 90s punk crates. Only heads know them some Swiz.

But I'm rocking out to Kirb & Chris' Niggaz & White Girlz This Oakland duo are seriously using plans for Nigel in this lover of color ode to the irrepressible desire for white girl.

Yeah, finally something for me. To be a lover of color interpollated by hard to place new wave gems underscoring random love-making banter by a couple of Yay Area MCs. These guys are earnestly rapping over lesser Human League. It's kinda tripping me out. There's samples all up and down from my KROQ emotional archive--the Cure, Simple Minds and from B-52's "Legal Tender"!! 10! (Pay me) 20! (Pay me) 30! (Pay me) Million Dollars! Download this shit, they rap over The Smiths. I don't know what more I can say to you.

This is so good. It's totally the part in Afro Punk that I enjoyed the most--being punk, of color and loving on the white people or trying to and failing so miserably. You have to listen to the skit "Murs Lives To Tell" and it just breaks the interracial melancholia DOWN.

Sure it's all bio-dudes talking and there might be a call for me to insert some sort of queer critique in here but I'm still in the midst of identifying and over-identifying to somehow put a masculinist critique in here. I'm making it my own--does that somehow introduce some kind of transgressive possibility in it? For now I'll just ride the fucked up butch tag for a minute because truth be told I don't mind penises or the dudes that swing them. I have love for Sayid Jarrah and the King of Siam so I'll just chock it up to belonging to a special kind of fraternity of misunderstanding.

Hip Thrusting for Obama Victories

2008-02-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

You know that dance, right? Don't forget the elbows at hip level and pumping them in and out while you hip thrust to do the dance of victory with a small 'v.' Obama took the Potomac states and it's like I'm too scared and hesitant to say that he's got it. But, looks like he has it to me. So hurry up and drop out already, Hillary.

More later...especially tales from Berkeley.

How I Know I'm Getting Older...

2008-01-08T17:57:00.001-08:00

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.

Building An Archive With Friends Is Fun...

2007-11-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

Look at us with Teresa Covarrubias from the Brat. This was just earlier this month over at Buster's in South Pasadena and what a great time it was talking to the very fierce Teresa C. We interviewed her for some of the stuff we're working on for the Barber of East L.A. One of the first things we riffed on of course was hair. Teresa shared how when the Brat started to blow up and hooked up with a less than savory management company she was pressured to become the sexy babydoll in order to sell records. Well, as a mode of resistance she showed up to a very important function for the band sporting a buzzed head showing them that no one owns this bad ass. We vibed on the power of hair and the message you send out to the public, especially as an artist and performer. It tripped me out a little bit but yeah hair is still one of those things that gender queers deal with on the daily. Man, talking to her about what it's like having worked with a bunch of dudes that made you feel like they were doing YOU a favor made me all the more thankful for having my crew to work hard and play harder with. It's like wow, again, clueless dudes unable to spot the real star power right in their faces. But I guess that goes beyond gender. Sometimes you just have to be older and set in your ways and insecure about your own relevance before you're willing to admit that there's a pool of talent knocking on your door.

That made me think about what we as a group of butches can bond over with straight women, chicanas, feminists, because sometimes it feels like the lines in the sand are drawn in really deep. It's hard enough being able to really bond with other queer chicanas that don't somehow have a rigorous gender analysis and by that I mean presentation and all of its concomitant implications. It's like can we talk about something else besides how I didn't open the door for you? People already have their agendas in place and it's hard trying to feel somehow allied in a way that really makes way for change. Even if that change is just a simple shift in assumptions and perceptions it still goes longer than it did without it. But sometimes identity and the monolithic practices that keep it in place are all we have.

Whatever it is, it would just be nice to finally have some dialogues upfront and down in center because it just seems like I don't really get to have these conversations with people anymore. Not that I don't get invited to stuff. I do. I need to come up for air and have some good old-fashioned dialogues with folks because ever since I jammed out of Tongues it's like I've been turned off from just getting into it. But really how much change can you be responsible for if you're not up in it and in it up to your knees.

More Soon: JOT@ FOR THE HOLIDAZE

2007-11-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

New Show Coming in 2008

2007-11-15T11:10:00.001-08:00

TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO | PUBLIC TRANSITorio

2007-11-05T13:41:00.001-08:00

TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO | PUBLIC TRANSITorio
This is an amazing 8 day event spanning the extreme locations of Los Angeles. Check out the website at http://www.publicotransitorio.com/ and it is extensive!!

A MIGRATORY INSTALLATION
OF ARTISTS & ACTIVISTS
FROM THROUGHOUT
LATIN AMERICA +
LOS ANGELES

BE sure to check out EVERYTHING on the website because it is a really amazing convening of artists, activists and cultural workers this city has seen in a while. Below is the schedule for just ONE event of the 8-day project. Please see below.

UCLA DOWNTOWN LABOR CENTER
675 S. Park View St., 1st Floor
Los Angeles, California 90057-3306
T: 213.480.4155

9 AM-3 PM

L.A.’S UN/FREEWAYS: COLLECTIVIZED PRACTICES IN THE DISPERSED CITY

Join local and international artists and activists for a day of discussion and intergenerational dialogue about feminist and women-led collective practices.

9-10 AM Participate in one-hour-share by bringing materials from your own or others' activist / art projects to display and share. Bring images, texts, objects… records of you what you've done (or hope to do) or of others' work that inspires you.

10-11 AM ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN EAST L.A.

Mothers of East Los Angeles | MELA is an environmental justice public interest organization whose mission is “to protect the environment and public health, defend the interests of the East Los Angeles community, and achieve justice for communities of color and working-class communities.” With Mothers Mary Lou Trevis, Teri Griffin, and Lucy Delgado.

El Proyecto Jardín is a community garden in Boyle Heights that sponsors the monthly market Mercado Caracol. With Daisy Tonantzin, community activist artist and Program Developer and Organizer for Proyecto Jardín.

11 AM-12:30 PM CREATING AND DOCUMENTING FEMINIST CULTURES

Kirsten Dufour is a feminist artist, activist, and writer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since the 1960s she has created and participated in numerous groups and socio-aesthetic projects that all attempt to unite artistic and political practice. In 2002 she began The Feminist Video Archive: Let Us Speak Now, a growing archive of video interviews with feminist artists and activists from different generations and different countries.

Make/shift + LOUDmouth are Los Angeles-based magazines made by and for feminists of all genders and that are committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives. With Jessica Hoffmann, a member of make/shift' s editorial collective and a contributing editor of LOUDmouth , & Irina Contreras, make/shift staff writer and editor of LOUDmouth .

1:30-3 PM CARVING SUBJECTIVITIES IN / OUT OF LOS ANGELES

Butchlalis de Panochtitlan | BdP is a multimedia performance ensemble of butch dykes / transgender butches / genderqueer speaking subjects that explore and make legible the liminal space of female biology and testosterone-taking transexuality and the identities, communities and neighborhoods these subjects claim and are claimed by. BdP is Mari Garcia, Raquel Gutierrez, and Claudia Rodriguez.

Gloria Alvarez is a Chicana poet, community based artist/activist, literary translator, curator, educator, and mentor to generations of Latina artists. Former member of Chicana art collectives Eastside Artistas (ESA) and L.A. Coyotas.

Yreina Cervantez is an artist, educator, and former member of Eastside Artistas.

Womyn Image Makers | WIM Four Xicana/Indigenous independent filmmakers and artists who base their collaborations on a collective creative process that respects the community element of filmmaking and challenges the hierarchies of conventional filmmaking. WIM is Maritza Alvarez, Aurora Guerrero, Dalila Mendez and Claudia Mercado.

This event will be held in English & Spanish with simultaneous English & Spanish translation provided.

A Day and 3,000 Words Behind!

2007-11-02T11:18:00.001-07:00

It's National Novel Writing Month and I'm already late by like a thousand words I'm sure. I even bought a NaNoMo writing kit in preparation back in March, complete with coupons you give your significant other or kids that will get you out of doing chores so you can focus on writing. Damn, I always miss out on good shit like that. That jamba juice coupon has been sitting on my desk waiting to get used but I just can't get it together. And I do have a novel to write, I do! I do! What if I just banged out 6,000 words today to make up for the lapse caused by a Halloween where we went through 8 bags of candy, 2 homemade Viking costumes, pugs as pumpkins and 2 cats that wouldn't go near their ladybug costumes. Priorities. Maybe I'll do research in the meantime to see what it takes to get published in 2007-2008.

I have decided to read up some of the work of the English faculty next to our offices here. There's a library full of books so I'm going to read and find out what makes them special. You read, and read, and read, and that clarity about the writer's specialness never seems to materialize. Getting published means something different to everyone, I suppose.

I haven't written in a while blogwise because I've been sharing my free time with paying writing gigs. The thing with getting paid to write is that you are often writing some of the most embarrassing drivel that will get read by unimaginative teenyboppers wasting time creating fictional versions of themselves on crazy social networking sites that sell the best new ringtones in the cyberworld. It could definitely be worse. I don't want to have to get a part-time job at Trader Joe's or anything. At least they're bringing canvas bags to the supermarket though so I can't be too ticked off with the banality of blogging that pays.

I'm also in the middle of racking up interviews for the Barber of East LA play I'm doing with the Butchlalis. That takes up a lot of time. If it weren't for all the bad stuff associated with it (bad skin, aggressive premature aging, heart failure) I might consider a foray into crystal meth for the energy boost. I might just up my veggie intake though and drink less beer and more vodka now that winter finally seems to be upon us. I think I'm making excuses a la Jack Torrance from the Shining, the big horrific mirror held up to writer's block...and racism. Lots of racism. You know Jack always blamed Wendy for his inability to put words down on paper. Typical weak ass guy shit that turns to Promise Keepers to sustain masculine privilege. I guess a big ass hatchet is just as good. I've been obsessed with the Shining this week so I've been peeping the available YouTube vids. I think it's just me trying to stay focused on the written word or else really bad things will start to happen if I go into room 237.

so much good shit it makes me wanna die...

2007-10-10T19:10:00.000-07:00

oh snaps, just read in the paper that i never have time to read in the morning that there's a new William Pope L. exhibit over at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Shit, I didn't know Santa Monica was cool like that. Anyway, the show is going on through December 23. But I'm going to catch it sometime this month.

William Pope.L—Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid…

I am trying to imagine a possible world while living in this world, the so-called Western or real world. I am imagining a world in which there is art, and the entity “white people” is in the condition of “after,” that is, obsolete. The time is probably post-empire. Maybe whiteness has gone subterranean à la Ralph Ellison and is pondering its fate…

—William Pope.L

Also go see Ela Troyano's new documentary on La Lupe called La Lupe: Queen of Latin Soul. It's at the Arclight in Hollywood at 3pm. I'm going to try and go though I might be vacuuming in preparation for a little dinner party we're hosting honoring the thug miss turning another year older. Cutie libra that she is...but maybe we can sneak away to see La Lupe slap some voodoo on us. Have you ever seen her perform? She is fire personified. There's a reason she left the island--it just wasn't big enough for her and Fidelismo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRIV23LQyI

Remember at the only Hemispheric Institute I went to in New York when Jose was to give a "paper" but didn't much to the chagrin of conference attendees and white lady cronies (that can be read as senior faculty and cocaine) and ended wowing our young hearts with footage and a high theory homage to La Lupe. It was so beautiful and I thought to my impressionable self "Self, you're in the right place." THis was also my first entry into high tier-1 conference schmoozing where I saw the likes of Susana Baca and Guillermo Gomez Pena like this close. It was also the party of the summer where I totally freaked the hell out of Doris Sommer. I think she must've been a dominatrix in a previous life. But how awesome is that/ But the real star to me was Jose. I am not a critic. I am a fan and I can spot one when I meet one. And I know there's a fanboy deep in the heart of that Stalinist sweetie.

Hot damn, it feels nice to gush every once and a while. I don't let myself do it enough on these pages. It's just nice to have queer academic heroes that don't begrudge you for keeping your self-respect.

I wouldn't have known the work of William Pope L. without Jose either. Some how that just eclipses the hell out of drag kings.

anarchitecture: now that's cool!

2007-10-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

we went to the gordon matta clark exhibit at MOCA. free thursday evenings. you should go because MOCA is great when it's free. the work is pretty breathtaking and reminded me of what if texas chainsaw massacre was about architecture and not killing teenage bums. i read about matta clark in one of my dwell magazines and he in a vulgar nutshell attempt at describing his work uses buildings as his medium in a visually arresting array of spatial and psychological dynamics at play. he and a bunch of other artist folks in 1970s NYC ran a cooperative restaurant called FOOD that was more concerned with invigorating food with performance than just running a vegan joint. anyway, i highly recommend spending the evening there if you can swing it.

i'm just a rhymer and a stealer, what can I say?

Descansa En Paz: Meowmeow Gutierrez 1998-2007

2007-09-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

Meowmeow the puppy.
Meowmeow the dog.
I'm really sad to report that my dog Meowmeow had to be put to sleep today. She was 9 1/2 years old. Meowmeow came down suddenly with these symptoms that might have been cancer. She had a tumor and a sudden hemorrhage that wasn't boding well. She was suffering.

I was living in Silverlake back in 1997. I moved that fall out of my parents house to be on my own. It was lonely even though I had a roommate. I remember it being a Saturday when my roommate looked out the window and yelled "Oh my god," and bolted quickly out the door to the street in front. This sweet little furry puppy almost got hit by a car. My roommate, Eliza, walked back into the living room holding this big puppy who was so adorable how could I say no to her living with us? We didn't know what to name her but for some reason Meowmeow seemed appropriate. She got into everything and chewed up everything she could find, including my De La Soul album (the 1st one, on vinyL!). It was okay because she kept me company. I always got compliments on what a good looking dog she was.

After a while though my landlord found out and said no dogs allowed. I also was finding dog responsibility too hard to handle. It wasn't fair to Meowmeow so I took her home to my parents' house. She wasn't living with me and hadn't been for the past eight years but she was my dog who became my family and my family's dog. I could tell my mom was all choked up, too. And my dad's way of saying he's going to miss Meowmeow is him saying "Don't ever bring another dog home."

All of our hearts are breaking but at least Meowmeow's no longer in pain. Rest in peace my beautiful friend.

Well WTF Book Are YOU?

2007-09-19T12:00:00.001-07:00

You're Inherit the Wind!

by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

To you, the learning process is inherently about controversy. If
people aren't having their minds stretched, how could they possibly be learning? This
makes you a good but unpopular teacher, and the people around you are ready to make it
a federal case. All you're asking them to do is evolve a little. But they would like
you to be more creative. You would make an excellent lawyer, even though people think
you love monkeys.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

To Be or Not To Be...?

2007-09-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you want to entertain your inner dick swinging asshole as if your inner DSA were a tantrum throwing two year-old and you're will to do anything to shut Inner DSA up for good. I really want to send this e-mail but I'm questioning whether it's a good idea or not. All those months of therapy and journaling will have gone out the window and I'll be at square one with my rage and confusion. Still wouldn't you want to send this out to that smug and privileged bio dude who seems to get everything he wants by just simply showing up?

I was feeling really low but then my mother called and told me that our older dog, Meow Meow, was doing a lot better and wouldn't be put to sleep this week like I had previously thought (and began to prepare myself for). So I was in definitely better spirits so sending the ultra macho e-mail now enters my "yellow light for caution" psychic space.

I'm not going to post the whole thing but it basically ends with:

Go back to your fake ass art studio you fucking bourgeois bohemian unimaginative twinkie and learn your Spanish and your fucking Salsa lessons.

If I ever see you in the street I'm going to fucking kick your ass.

Raquel Gutierrez

How awesome that this is my life, huh?

Wikky Wikitty Wiki!

2007-09-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

That the onomatopoetic (here let me help you: on·o·mat·o·po·et·ic ) attempt at describing the sound of scratching a record on a turntable. You likey? I have been looking up the following on Wikipedia:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand because I remember starting it back in high school and never completing it. It popped into my head because I remembered it was all about architects and was more and curious yesterday as to why crazy Ayn Rand would use architecture as a metaphor. I thought about that because I was thinking about Florence Knoll.

She was a prominent architect and designer who was all up in the modernist movement, having studies with the likes Eero Saarinen. Anyway this is my secret lusty hobby of looking at moderne furniture and architecture so I was curious about who Florence was , especially as I am the proud owner of an old red leather armchair that will go in our listening room/office of our apartment. It's masculine (squared clean lines) and feminine (small, perfect for short/petite bodies) and comfortable as all hell. I might post pictures but this might just be something I find to be particularly special.

Wikipedia is such a source of random information. Yet it's not so random in that it's arbitrary enjoyment. No way. So I decided to look up the movie "Death Wish"--that vigilante movie of the 1970s starring my father's favorite actor, Charles Bronson. I had this distinct hankering to find more out about it after reading a review (one of the many reviews I have read for it) of "The Brave One" starring Jodie Foster.

I am so grossly fascinated with the concept of this film for so many borderline pathological reasons:
A. I grew up watching A LOT of vigilante movies--not because I wanted to watch them but that's what my father watched and my parents didn't really do the whole V-chip thing parents do today. I mean they didn't say it was OK for me to watch these movies but no one ever said "hey go to your room." The only time I ever got punished for watching anything was when I was 6 years old and Porky's was on SelecTV.
B. I loved me some Jodie Foster in Candleshoe, Freaky Friday and Foxes when I was a kid. The Taxi Driver came later--much later.

Put those two together and voila! Lots of conflicted, if not special, feelings. I don't know if I'll see the movie this weekend or anything but if I do, mark my words there'll be words exchanged.

This is AWFUL!!! And in NYC of all places!!!

2007-09-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Ex-`Top Chef' contestant is attacked

Wed Sep 12, 8:56 AM ET

SEA CLIFF, N.Y. - A former contestant on Bravo's "Top Chef" was beaten by attackers yelling anti-gay slurs, her lawyer said.

Josie Smith-Malave, who was featured on the second season of the reality show, was among a small group of women who were asked to leave a Sea Cliff bar over Labor Day weekend, lawyer Yetta Kurland said Tuesday.

About 10 young people followed the women and began screaming anti-gay epithets, spitting on them and then beating them, Kurland said.

Smith-Malave, who is in her early 30s, is openly gay, Kurland said.

Nassau County police said they were investigating, but declined to provide details of the incident.

Smith-Malave, a Miami native, is a former sous-chef for Marlow and Sons restaurant in Brooklyn. She has played for the New York Sharks of the Independent Women's Football League.

No Yo! For ME!

2007-09-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

I didn't go check out Yo!Majesty last night so there won't be some review of the show on this blog here. That's okay. I was tired. I don't mean to bitchlali but Butchlalis rehearsals take a lot out of me. And I'm all about all work and no play makes me a dull boy but there's no way I was going to leave the house when there was an LA Ink episode on the imitation TiVo. Oh how I wish for that teleport machine or that DNA splitter that will let me create another me--all the help I can get to enable me to do more things and be in more places. I have to admit though I was curious about the feminist driven event on a very heavy pop culture tip happening at the bar we all love to hate but love that it's there.

Man you ever just realize that maybe just maybe you're not an activist?

I am excited about the Latino New Works festival. It's great being a part of it. I think we're on the mainly queer one with Dorian Wood, Plastilina and Ric Montejano. You know Dorian Wood just got a full write-up in the LA Weekly. Check out the article here: http://www.laweekly.com/music/music/dorian-wood-beautiful-losing/17014/ He sounds like a totally cool cat. The Friday program is going to be pretty musical which is great because I've always thought of BdP as being musically grounded even if none of really play any instruments (except for moi) or sings (except for moi again). Yeah I know--how talented, huh? I'm just like my pugs with this constant need for attention--you can practically hear the whimpering in this post. When will this void be filled?

After we did our film presentation at T2T Laura Aguilar comes up to the Munch and I saying how much she liked our video, Juan Diego. She asked me if I remembered her and I'm like OF COURSE I REMEMBER YOU! How do you forget Laura Aguilar? Seriously though she's such a fucking amazing photographer whose work is just untouchable. I am a little scared of her, too, because she shares knowledge so simple and matter-of-factly and in a very Buddha-like kind of way. She was definitely one of the best reasons to get out of bed that day. That and the coconut shrimp at the Abbey. All very pleasant surprises.

Who The F**k Are These People?

2007-09-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to be so aggressive in my titling but I'm curious who these folks in Object are. It must be the testosterone in the air from the Kanye West/50 Cent record beef. Check it HERE and it's called the Lady Party 911 (talk about being gender insophisticate) but if you're in the know then you might know about the Yo!Majesty show at the Echoplex happening tonight. I want to go real bad so hopefully rehearsal and tech work will flow enabling my going out on a school night. But I know you might be all asco about going to a site of uncritical gentrification but the truth of it is--it's fucking Yo!Majesty so why not go and check out some honest to God black lesbian ironic hip hop. They even take their shirts off. How tough is that?

Damn, it's called Lady Party 911. That sounds weird. Nina Hartley. The Media's obsession with punishing the princesses--so someone's gonna talk about Britney and Lindsey?

That's because tonight's thing is touted as some sort of "dialogue," and conversation that sort of reeks of the argument in Female Chauvinist Pigs which is cool and important. I don't know, those pints of Stella might be a little too distracting for me. I'm so bad. I never want to actually talk about feminism and stuff pertaining to the societal treatment of gendered beings. I so would rather just party with them and call it a day. I gave at the office.

This is the attitude I have. I also had it during this past weekend at what felt like watching my ex-wife remarry. You might know it as something else.

BdP Back To HIGHWAYS This Friday!

2007-09-11T12:08:00.001-07:00

Butchlalis de Panochtitlan's "Waterboy, Round 2," the L.A. favorites return to the ring with a serious suckerpunch of butch affect, daddy issues and an uppercut into the butch subconscious. A performance meditation going to places we're afraid of going to especially in mixed company!

BdP is on a great bill Friday night (9/14) at 8:30pm with the fabulous Dorian Wood (musician with a mission), spoken word magic with Ric Montejano and the genderqueer chanteuse, Plastilina.

Get your reservations at (310) 315-1459. www.highwaysperformance.org

Read on for more information about the Latino New Works Festival--the only one of its kind in greater Los Angeles.

September 14 - 16

HIGHWAYS' 3RD ANNUAL
LATINO NEW WORKS FESTIVAL

CURATED BY LEO GARCIA

The first and only Westside festival dedicated to contemporary performance and visual art created by solo Latino artists and independent performance/dance companies.

Friday, September 14 @ 8:30pm
An alternately jolting, tender, and funny evening of queer performance + music featuring:
Ric Montejano's lyrical short story, "Beauty," which wrestles with the obsession of beauty, the horrors of crystal-meth + remorse, and features live original music by Jack Keller. In Butchlalis de Panochtitlan's "Waterboy, Round 2," the L.A. favorites return to the ring with a serious suckerpunch of butch affect, LAtinidad and bristerhood. Feel the love and get yourself butchslapped! Dorian Wood will perform a heartbreaking lullaby from his debut album, BOLKA, followed by the debut of his latest Spanish "panic" ballad, "El Vals Del Arbolito Cagado (Mierdaligera)." Warm and glittering chanteuse Plastilina creates a garden rich in flowering interpretations of traditional Spanish songs.
$20/$15

Just Take My Lunch Money Instead

2007-09-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

Just read in the L.A. Times a tiny aside about a gang-style shooting that occured right up the street from my apartment. A group of dudes got shot at after these "suspects" that I guess are female asked where they were from. I grew up thinking that if you said "nowhere" or my favorite "mama's pansa" when asked where you were from then you would get left alone or at least just spat at or insulted for wearing something dumb. You're not supposed to get shot at but I guess it depends on the itchy trigger finger of the person asking you where you're from. I mean it's not so much because it just goes against all that is right in the law and logic of the neighborhood--for all we know maybe there's a group of separatist gang girls that really have it in for the men in this part of town. But damn I have to walk by that alley now that I'm taking the bus to work. I guess I gotta suck it up because it's not like gentrification is going to keep me safe or anything.

When I was in 5th grade I would like a dumb cavalier dude ask the cholas in my class if they really liked the Raiders. Such a stupid thing to do but lucky for me these girls were kind of chola posers because if they were really the tough bitches they claimed then I'd be dead meat. Deader than meat already is--or at least punched or shanked really hard. I have had a soft spot for the chola/o poser though because it's like what other rebels do have that inspire such emulation? The homeboy aesthetic is what my friend Ricky Rodriguez (the long lost member of the BdP!) would call it. He writes amazing theory about another artist friend, Hector Silva (www.artbyhector), who takes the homeboy aesthetic to this level that inspires my melancholy, admiration, covetuousness when I look at his work. Everybody loves what Guillermo Gomez Pen~a would call "el look." And if you don't love "el look" then at least you can recognize it when you see it because it's like fucking ubiquitous any time Latino masculinity is called into question. El look that consists of crisply ironed white t-shirts with a modest yet eye-catching gold crucifix on chain, not quite so baggy dickies but at least 1-2 sizes bigger than what you'd normally wear, Pendletons, shiny black shoes, even sweet zoot suit inspired suiting. Ever notice when it's purposeful and when it's the only thing you've ever known yourself and others to wear? Ever notice when someone tries to distance themselves away from it? You got to admit it's such a clean look in terms of an aesthetic and yet so functional. It makes so much sense in so many different ways but I trip out on the meanings we make from it.

Have you noticed how it's become high lifestyle urban fashion with the talents of Mr. Cartoon and Estevan Oriol leading the way to specialty shops in lower Manhattan, Melrose and the pages of Complex? It's a trip, man.

Of course "el look" is a contentious one because it's so shrouded in that violence, right? Not just the random shooting in the alley near my apartment type of violence but violence with a capital V. The tattoos and white wifebeaters (that the plain white tanktop undershirt is called that is a fucking testament) are there for a reason, right? Spiderwebs on elbows still mean something, right? The annihilation of self kind of shit that trickles down to generations, the kind that exists on the backs of children, the post trauma stress we carry but never seem able to unload it for good. I don't want to get carried away with the romance of brown masculinity just because I'm a sucker for aesthetic. Maybe I'm a sucker for false power. I mean, I'm sure if I watched enough Scarface I would develop a passion for tie-less 70s era 3-piece suits. Who knows.

Getting Paid To Bitch / Paying To Watch Me Moan!

2007-09-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

Now that's how I like it. What is my good news you wonder? Well it's for me to know and you to shrug your shoulders in apathy to--I'm going to be a paid blogger. Not only is it great because I can supplement my income but I can get out of my woe is me mentality that often typically plagues my posting of the day at the lovely walls of thuggery & skullduggery. Let's just say the tunnel vision around the feminist Office Space that has been my summer is is growing smaller and smaller. Woe is me? No way and no more, my lovelies and uglies bumpers--I will be swaying opinion with just a stroke of an Enter key. Pretty fucking amazing if you ask me. Can't rely on newspapers and magazines anymore in our instant gratification etch-a-sketch lives--we need it and we need it NOW. I'm going to be one of the many who give it to you.

I'm going to wait a few weeks before I reveal the locations that are powered by my copy and sentiments. I know, I know, I'm interested too in seeing how exactly am I selling out. But it beats making funny comments about people you and I know rather intimately. I keep hearing from folks who say they've heard about my blog and the funny stuff I say about them. I wish they would comment when they come to read the stuff I write. Like Luis Alfaro lovingly taking me to task about clowning how he calls me "Pal" because he doesn't remember my name. It's all good and copacetic though--he knows I adore him. I guess this brings me to some other amazing news about how the threesome that is the Butchlalis will be working with Luis on our full-length play scheduled for April 2008. Can you stand it? He's directing it and we're going to bask in his attention. I am so humbled and blessed to be working with a total personal artistic hero. Love me like I love you, Luis.

Since we're on the topic of name-dropping like love bombs out of the sky I must say that Diane Gamboa is my new best friend so if you didn't know, now you do. She has always been my favorite visual artist even before I was brave enough to engage in actual conversations with her. Like just nodding my head wildly at her because everything she says is just so amazing. Yes even I partake in a little high school fantasy about friends, fiends and the rebels that move us. Even though I know you're not happy unless you're in constant crisis and devestation, you MUST mark your calendars for the Marisela Norte exhibit at Tropico De Nopal curated by my new BFF.

Are you going to Tongue2Tongue? Girls, you better not disappoint your daddy.

In other news, I'm taking the bus now because I just don't believe in paying to park anymore. I can't justify paying to park my car to go to work. That's just dumb.

Okay off to work because a hustler's life is never quiet.

Marisela & Diane

2007-08-28T11:20:00.001-07:00

Sociedad Anonima
by Marisela Norte
concept curator Diane Gamboa

September 15- October 13, 2007
Sat-September 15 7-10pm : Artist Reception:
Thu-September 27 7:30pm : Conversation with
Artist M. Norte and Curator D. Gamboa

Sat-September 29 8pm: Film Screening & Martini
Night
Sat-October 6 8pm : Reading: Marisela Norte by
Ruben Martinez, Michael C. Ford & others

Tropico de Nopal Gallery - Art Space

1665 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles (Echo Park), CA
90026
213.481.8112 http://www.tropicodenopal.com

Gallery Hours: Tu - Fri 12-4 pm and Sat 1-5 pm

Los Angeles, CA
- Tropico de Nopal Gallery-Art Space
is proud to present Sociedad Anonima, an unprecedented
exhibition of Marisela Norte writings and photographs
curated by Diane Gamboa from September 15 through
October 13, 2007.

Using Norte's writings and photographs taken during
her many rides to and from East Los Angeles to
downtown on the no.18 bus, Sociedad Anonima traces
time and a city in change for the last twenty-five
years, a concept of Diane Gamboa, not only a
contemporary of Norte but a Los Angeles connoisseur
and artist herself.

Sociedad Anonima will show a perspective that is
fresh,
poetic and profound of Los Angeles and its
citizens. Putting images into words, Marisela Norte
says she doesn't write fiction, "I just want people to
experience the every day glimpses of life that I see,
that to me are sometimes heartbreaking, but most of
the time incredibly beautiful." Her photographs, on
the other hand, though poignant and timely, have never
been publicly shown, thus, the joining of written word
and photographs of Los Angeles by Norte, a true
Angelina, makes the exhibition groundbreaking as well
as historical.

Considered one of the most important literary voices
to come out of East Los Angeles, she has appeared in
Rolling Stone, Interview, Elle, Option, Venice, Los
Angeles Weekly, Buzz, WEST, the Los Angeles Times
Sunday Magazine, Chicana Art, BOMB, Tu Ciudad and the
upcoming issue of Propagnadist. She has performed her
work throughout California and many cities in the
United States, and most recently at the Tate Modern in
London. Norte has also co-authored the play, Black
Butterfly, Jaquar Girl, Pinanta Woman and Other Super
Hero Girls Like Me, and performed it at 350 Middle and
High Schools in Los Angeles the last few years.

Marisela Norte has been honored at the Kennedy Center
in DC and nominated for an Ovation award. Her work
can also be found in the anthologies Microphone
Fiends, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a
Nation, The Geography of Home: California's Poetry of
Place, Rara Avis, Loca Motion: The Travels of Latina
and Chicana Popular Culture, American Studies in a
Moment of Danger, the American Quarterly, Rolling
Stone's Women of Rock, and just published Chicana
Art-The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities
by Laura Perez.

The packed month starts with an
Artist Reception
scheduled for Sat-Sept 15, 7-10pm, followed by a
Conversation with artist Marisela Norte and curator
Diane Gamboa Thu-Sept 27, 7:30pm; a Film Screening &
Martini Night Sat-Sept 29, 8pm; and a Reading of
Norte's work by Ruben Martinez, Michael C. Ford and
others Sat-Oct 6, 8pm.

Tropico de Nopal Gallery-Art Space is a venue
dedicated to exhibiting and promoting contemporary
emerging and mid-career artists through cross-cultural
and multi-disciplinary art forms.
###

Don't Miss Us 09-14-2007

2007-08-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

See? It Ain't Just ME....

2007-08-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

I woke up late this morning. The pugs and I needed just a bit more shuteye but we walked into the dining room where the thug miss leaves a post-it note over this article on the front page of the paper today. Ah man, it's nice when you are affirmed from outside objective sources. Read on and weep. Savor the divorce from reality that graduate school affords you. And thank your stars you don't work for anyone that is, if you are your own boss.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Is the boss a real piece of work?
Getting even with an ogre, or at least venting, is a cottage industry.
By Molly Selvin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 21, 2007

Bosses are really mean these days, or employees are really thin-skinned.

Lawmakers across the country are considering legislation that would give workers grounds to sue their superiors for being, basically, jerks. Bookstores are stocking bad-boss advice tomes, including "Snakes in Suits" and "Was Your Boss Raised by Wolves?" Today the AFL-CIO will name the worst boss in the country, based on the results of an online contest.

Are relations between workers and management really in such an awful state?

Maybe. The ranks of bullying bosses are growing, some experts contend, as short-staffed companies tap managers with lousy people skills. Others point out that though mean and dimwitted supervisors have been around since work was invented, baby boomers on the cusp of retirement and restless younger employees are more likely to complain or quit than suffer in silence. It's easy to decide against taking the latter tack, thanks to the proliferation of venting websites, among them www.ebosswatch.com.

The AFL-CIO, not surprisingly, puts the blame on management's shoulders. Sure, there have always been bullying bosses, said Karen Nussbaum, executive director of the union's Working America lobbying arm, but today some of them "don't even have good manners anymore."

If that doesn't sound like grounds for a lawsuit, at least four state legislatures are thinking about making it so.

A bill in New Jersey would give an individual the right to seek as much as $25,000 in damages if an employer created "an abusive work environment." Similar measures are pending in New York state, Vermont and Washington state. In California, a Sacramento-based group called California Healthy Workplace Advocates is working to revive a sue-the-boss bill that died in committee in 2003.

The bills are short on specifics, such as what exactly would constitute an abusive work environment, and their prospects are far from certain. The wisdom of giving employees new grounds to sue is debatable, considering the threat of frivolous court-clogging suits and laws at the federal level and in many states that already protect people against, among other things, sexual harassment and discrimination based on gender, race, pregnancy, physical disability and religion.

But New Jersey Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, a Democrat, said she was committed to seeing the Healthy Workplace Act, which she's sponsoring, become law. People need protection, she said, if they can't afford to quit and therefore "have to stay and put up with poor treatment."

Jumping on the bandwagon, the AFL-CIO launched the My Bad Boss contest, now in it second year, to "expose what is a growing problem," Nussbaum said, and to give workers an opportunity to get their bad-boss experiences "off their chests."

Last year's winning entry was "Dr. X," a dentist who took $100 out of each employee's paycheck for every canceled appointment.

This year's contestants -- all anonymous, of course, as they were in 2006 -- tell many horror stories.

One of the hundreds posted is about a lawyer who called the office every morning to give instructions as he brushed his teeth and conducted other business in his bathroom; another is about a manager who refused to let an employee whose husband had a brain tumor take a day off unless she provided a note from a doctor.

"Freezing" in Washington says his office was so cold that the ink in his pen stopped flowing, and his boss told him to use a pencil. A woman in Connecticut says the owner of the store where she worked invited all the employees to a bridal shower for his assistant and the next day presented them with bills for their share of his gift of a $500 china platter. The contestant "Momtimesfour" recounts the day her boss offered to buy everyone in the office lunch and took them to a discount warehouse, where he instructed them to dine on free samples in the grocery section.

"Melanie" from Alabama, a cancer patient who lost her hair as a result of chemotherapy, says she overheard her boss making fun of how she looked with a bald pate. And a pregnant pizzeria worker says her manager ordered her to complete her shift after she had gone into labor. "I stayed and waited on customers," she says, "and made pizzas between contractions."

This afternoon, after the online votes are counted, the winner of the "People's Choice" grand prize will be announced and awarded a weeklong condo vacation at one of 500 locations and $1,000 for airfare. And the "Most Outrageous Story" grand prize winner will enjoy a week at the Royal Hotel Vegas and $500 toward airfare. Runners-up will receive prizes such as earplugs, for use when a bad boss is yelling, and "The Very Best of Aretha Franklin" on CD, featuring her hit song "Respect."

Although a bad-boss contest may be fun for workers, the union, and management and employee specialists around the country, are serious about the boss problem.

This year the Employment Law Alliance, a San Francisco clearinghouse for employment and labor lawyers, conducted a survey of employees across the country, and 44% said they had worked for an abusive supervisor. Another poll this year, conducted by Wayne Hochwarter, a business professor at Florida State University, discovered that workers who thought their bosses were abusive reported higher rates of depression, migraines and sleep disorders than those who judged their supervisors reasonable.

Linda Viloria counts herself among the abused. The San Francisco resident developed high blood pressure after she started working for a boss who yelled at her, she claimed.

"Employees need some sort of protection against this type of issue," she said.

OK, what's reasonable?

Lars Dalgaard has an idea. The chief executive of San Mateo, Calif., software firm SuccessFactors had an awakening a few years ago at another company when he reduced a staffer to tears with his abrasive manner. Thus was born the Rules of Engagement, posted throughout the office. "I will not BCC (blind copy) anyone and never talk negatively and destructively behind someone's back," goes one rule.

The rules are a "terrific recruiting tool," said Stacy Epstein, spokeswoman for SuccessFactors. "It's amazing how in an interview so many people will say, 'Gosh, I really want to work in this environment.' "

In most cases, there are no posted rules, and job seekers are on their own. Asher Adelman, who earned his master's in business administration at UC Irvine, thought he had it made when he went to work for an Israeli software company. As it turned out, his boss was prone to cursing and throwing things. So the annoyed 33-year-old launched www.ebosswatch.com "to level the playing field."

Its motto: "Nobody should have to work with a jerk."

Steppin' Out With My Baby

2007-08-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

This was me and the hot thug miss at the Hammer Museum last week--aren't we fucking precious? We went to see those bands play that were indie and cool or so they tell us but putting my tricky troll bagging baton down for a minute--both bands were actually really cool. See, I like stuff, too, ya know. I'm not just cutting things down simply for the mere thrill of hating something. I like a lot of stuff in fact. Later that night we went to the Tongues fundraiser at La Victoria in downtown L.A., hop skip from the University of Spoiled Children. It was fun and like a total time warp back to the early 2000s--the music was the same, the dance moves were the same, the same women were either thinner or fatter or sexier now than before and the qwoc hospitality was still the same. No, I wasn't butt hurt. I was just saying. There were lots of femme third wheels though. I guess that's the new fashion accessory--your single femme friend tagging along.

Hey there's nothing wrong with that.

Last night the thug miss and I went out to the Elf (or Elph?) Cafe on Sunset across from my ATM machine at Lucy's laundromat for a sexual dinner. It's a mostly vegan organic joint that has some really delicious and satisfying offerings. I usually need some sort of distinct protein if I'm going to be dropping that kind of waddage but this is the 2nd time we've gone there in two weeks. So go and order the special, it's always superior. Anyway, we sat next to the same man we sat next to the last time we were there so we all started talking and he was new to the area--he lives in Echo Park right on the lake and was all "I'm surprised this area isn't a multi-million dollar area-blah-blah" to which I answered calm and coolly "well I'm sure that'll happen sooner rather than later" and quickly changed the subject and asked him what he did. Well the man was an architect and was all surprised that I asked him all the questions about what kind architecture he practiced. Like did he do preservation? landscape? interior? Did he go to Sci-Arc? Oh, Columbia? Cool, yeah them and the Getty, right? Right! Like he was actually so taken aback that I knew some stuff, but you know I'm just an architecture dilletante but whatever I got a subscription to Dwell for my birthday (thanks, Party!!) and I like my SoCal architecture like the next guy--what is the big deal? Anyway, he was all gung ho meeting the L.A. natives and gave us his info for a tour of his architecture firm in a loft which I am so all over. Getting to see how the other side do it with no shame? Where do I sign up?

The funny thing is that I get that a lot. White folks don't think by looking at me that I know what the fuck is up with basic run-of-the-mill shit that most people would be into--like architecture. Or black women in rock. I must look like a square unhip gardener or something? Is this what happens when you step outside of the little world of queer women of color and try to mingle with the masses of Echo Park? One cute thing that happened was running into Judie Bamber who is always so pleasant and fun to talk to. I wonder who else we'll run into at the new organic vegan spot in Echo Park. I know--I feel a little twinge of guilt having written that attestment to the plague of the never ending and it's never gonna end wave of gentrification.

Last night the thug miss dropped me off at the Smog Cutter to hang with the nicest and sweetest batch of USC grads for Charlie's birthday. I forgot my keys though and felt bad I was gonna trouble miss thug to let me in later that night so I kareoked with a guilty heart. But I really went to hear the birthday boy do his heartbreaking version of the Phill Collins' classic "Against All Odds." You know how sometimes you own a scary movie and you watch it from time to time but you already know it's Jigsaw sitting in the pool of blood but you watch it anyway because you love the thrill of terror overcoming your entire being? Well that's how it is watching Charlie do "Against All Odds"--except that I feel all overtaken by sadness in that love is never having to say you're sorry kind of way but I love the thrill of experiencing the surrender to that affective state. And I've heard his sing it before and I get all teary and shit every time--but I fucking love hearing him do this song just so I can cry. But I always cry at music--live music mostly and only when the air is thick with so much emotion I can style my hair with it. Or like I'll cry for like amazing orators like Fidel Castro or something. Anyway, if I ever gay marry then that's the song and the singer to bring the house down!

Also I just noticed that Charlie, who writes a great blog, just went to a friends only/private sphere which I can totally be down with because sometimes you just don't want things on your blog to get out to certain people. Should I do that? Will you be part of my private dancer world? Well, I would do that but maybe it's the training as a journalist that has me feeling somewhat resistant to that strain of thought. I'm here to write my truth. Couple that with my writer's desire to be read by as many people as I can reach. I know sometimes I write things that are acidic and cheeky but you know what? It's fucking interesting and if I can't keep my own interest in writing in this blog then how do I expect to keep you, disloyal reader, from coming to visit every now and again? You wouldn't be here if I didn't have something juicy for your consumption?

That's what I thought...

Shizu's Show

2007-08-02T07:55:00.001-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Shizu Saldamando, one of the artists I curated in the Aqui No Hay Virgenes Show back in March, is a few days away from her own 1-artist show opening this Saturday at Tropico de Nopal. I won't be able to make the opening since I have a family function out of town this weekend but I am surely going to her artist talk. I wholeheartedly encourage you all to go and check out her work. There should be a fun vinyl only DJ at her opening along with some of the cutest Morrissey loving boys and girls. My humble opinion opines that Shizu's work is probably the most exciting visual work coming out of L.A. Here are some of her pieces to give you a sense of what she's doing with portraiture and the practice of everynight life for latino youth cultures. It's so fucking good.

Also, check out this article on Shizu's work in the L.A. Times Calendar section. I don't know how to place this link into my blog but y'all should be reading the newspaper everyday anyway. My foray into being a publicist, if you will.

I'm Already Doing What I Want To Do...

2007-07-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes your job is not really your career but that place you inhabit because you have to pay bills and rent because you don't want to live at home (even though lots of people still live there). You don't want to live at home--you want and need to be free. Free to try on harnesses in different pairs of pants + underwear combinations in the privacy of you and yours. You know--can you pack and be okay in boxers and Dickies versus snug trunks and some 501s. Can't really do that back in Huntington Park. So because I want to be able to that in my home then yes, I'm willing, to a degree, eat shit and suspend disbelief working 9-5. Even if my job doesn't involve a high level of corporate angst...in a way, it does. But that's what happens when you hit the entry level world at 28 right out of a grad program that required an additional PhD-riven servitude to really have the drapes match the curtains. But the drapes and the curtains don't match. (and I'm talking about it in the literal sense because if I had an actual academic career versus only existing in the periphery of it then I would be making enough money to where yes, the drapes really did match the curtains in my apartment.)

So I feel like a late bloomer in every sense of the world. It's like I didn't catch on to certain endeavors that seem to come more naturally to others--you know, like figure out what a career is supposed to look like. I mean--I'm not a fireman. Or a policeman. I'm no doctor or lawyer. I was seduced and signed on to want to be a college professor because the age came of needing to be equipped with a career had arrived. But then I realized this professional path and me weren't having a love connection. I mean we were but it was that kind of love that was the adult compromise-driven/seeing-everyone-as-beautifully-damaged-and-so-worthy-of-your-love-that-goddam-it-i'm-going-to-save-them/crazy-making/passionate-til-muerte/reciprocity??!-you-must-be-joking! kind of adult relationship with someone who's seen stuff and knows stuff. Have you ever had one of those? You fall in love and you just never fucking let go even though you have to in order to save yourself.

But I couldn't do that then so I, very much like Pedro from the movie Like Water For Chocolate, decide in order to be near the one I love I have to marry her less interesting sister. (Aside: Man, it takes some kind of genius to render romantic madness (regardless of its heteronormativity--quit being so utopic) so sublimely and inspiring others to enact such things-you go Alfonso Arau!) So I needed a job and man, in this day and age of inaccessible health care I wasn't going to be emboldened enough to find something I actually loved to do. I can't wait around for that perfect combination because right now I need to survive and perfection doesn't exist. There is so much fear in our culture--and all of it centered around the fear of pain, violence and death. SO yes, I am afraid of not being able to fight cancer and AIDS and shit like that on my own. So I sell my soul for a PPO. I need Kaiser more than I need the wiggle room a freelance job could afford me. This is the shit that I would totally respect someone else for feeling and thinking and making the decisions they do in their life--yeah man, if you're sick then maybe you should see the doctor. But I lack that same generosity for myself. I can generate it for others but rarely ever for myself. Maybe that's just a function that was placed in me over the course of a life heavily doused with psychic wounds. Maybe never dealing with it makes you make mistakes same ones over and over. But then it all crystallizes in grad school when you learn how to really breakdown your points about how you really feel about and understand any world you decide you will embody. So for the crazy beautiful (yes, I'm thinking of that movie with Jay Fernandez and Kirsten Dunst--damn, I love that movie!) damaged ones what graduate school does is strip you of your human dignity and makes you doubt yourself to the point where you become someone you don't recognize in the mirror. It's scary and destabilizing being about to understand those wounds and how they got there. It's hard and leaves you changed and you hope it's for the better but it hurts so much you don't know if it will. And that wasn't you a year ago or two years ago when you felt like you were really happy and strong. AND then the rug gets pulled right from under you and you fall high and you fall hard. That's fucking grad school. That and paying for the most expensive Rolodex already full of contacts.

Man, I sound SO cynical. Trust, I hate this about me. Sometimes I feel like I carry so much pain simply because I hold onto it so deeply. But what if I let go? Holding on to so much pain makes you feel like your giving up. And I've spent a lot of time here at the university. I've been around a place that totally glorifies giving up--glorifies surrender as a place with so many conditions of possibility. I totally stole that from Munoz classes. Those nuggets you relish as an insatiable graduate student and pull out like an ace in moments of one-upmanship. Come on, at least I'm aware of trying to one up you that is the passive aggressive way of the warrior graduate student. Anyway, man, that place of glorification can be so crazy insidious. Like all playground taunting of "Look at all my pain! Look at all my pain!" that people start running on you, creating these new overblown colored glasses to see the what has basically become a banal event in my life--growing up of color. God I hate writing it as much as I do saying it. Person of color. Anything that basically ends in "of color" as a way to describe anything or anyone troubles me. It just taps into my most knee jerk humanistic reactionary impulse of why can't we just be people but realize that's impossible because of all the shit that's gone down. You know, the colonization, the crossing of the Atlantic, anti-miscegenation laws--stuff like that and then some. It's hard to forget and you're told never to forget as though you should be thankful you don't have to experience it like your ancestors did and you have to respect those that endured and survived but then you just feel so fucking guilty. Is that why we become activists? Is becoming an agent of change who works to minimize the damage and violence of racism, classism, corporate greed, sexism and imperialism a mode of operation to subdue our guilty feelings. And why do we throw out shit like white guilt? Like only white people feel guilty about this stuff? I don't know about you but I feel pretty guilty. But I don't know how to trust it. Where do you go with it? I just take these cues that suggest somehow I am just a victim and to hold that hand and play it hard. It's starting to feel like a bad habit, the addiction that kills cells, puts shit between people and you. And I kind of need to quit that shit.

But what if that's the pain I let go of first? Maybe the domino effect (writing "domino" makes me laugh maniacally out loud for some reason) will involve all the pain being let go one piece at a time but sequentially--or whatever I know this shit doesn't run linear.

Anyway don't get too lost. All I'm trying to say is that all the labor around intellectualizing special feelings (Affect, people, call it affect because it sounds like a 30,000 dollar word) and then not being in that place to do it so you gotta find another way to pay bills because you'll never get a fellowship or or whatever and after all I am a hobbit and I already am part of a fellowship. I don't even want it. I just want to write. I don't have a color to my parachute and that's okay. Everything else is loosening its borders might as well imagine new ways of income. For survival. Because we have to. So it also means having to imagine new ways of making your dreams come true and knowing that dreams and jobs don't always have to mean or be the same thing but they can still provide a sense of fulfillment. Just knowing what you're getting yourself into sounds like a realistic goal. It's different for people now. The working world can't keep its word about what it can do for you anymore. We're being outsourced in so many different ways now. No one wants to work for other people anymore. We don't want so much but we keep doing it anyway.

I don't even know if I can call these realizations but somehow it makes sense to me (in that romantic madness kind of way of course).

No More Troll Under This Bridge Called My Back!

2007-07-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how long I have lived without wireless internet on my computer. But I have. Yes, I still own the iBook G3 from that fateful summer of 2003. I bought this old bad boy from the NYUniversity bookstore. And yes it came with my 15GB iPod for FREE.

Damn I thought I was hot shit. But it didn't come with nor did I buy the Airport Wireless card until now. That is, I bought it on eBay 'cuz the Mac store doesn't sell shit they made back in 2002. I hear they already come in the new macbooks and people don't endure what I endured to hook up this bad boy to the wireless. Well isn't that a kick in the pants?

Anyway, this sure is more convenient than holding my computer in my arms while I surf the Internet and check my email standing over the cord that connects to my old ass bad boy. No more holding. I also had to do it in our dark hallway. The longest hallway in the world but still I like sitting at my cozy little mid-century desk in the even cozier corner I call my workspace.

I'll have to post pictures at some point. For now I am just impressed with technology even though I'm so behind all the gizmos out right now. I had to buy a cell phone because my old one broke. I don't have phone insurance and I ended up buying a $99 Sprint "flip phone." I know, I shudder at the mere thought of its royal blue casing. No blackberries for me anytime soon. Except in my oatmeal.

Planting the Seeds of Doubt(Fest)

2007-07-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

This is my recap of the OutFest events I didn't really go to though thought about attending. I will also include some of the screenings and events that I did go to though. The first thing I went to was the Queer Fossilization, Or, A Tour Through the Museum of Gay Unnatural Herstories as programmed by Jose Mun~oz and Nao Bustamante. You notice how these Platinum series just keep getting smaller every year? It's sad but performance has kind of been the stepchild to the festival's more mainstream foci. I mean there's a plethora of topics to choose from to make movies about queer lives but Outfest's focus is on LGBT communities with a rather large emphasis on the L and the G. So we have movies about how there's meth abuse, christianity, muslim queers in love and occupied, it's like you know the real straight world but sprinkled with gays or at least protagonized by queers and wow that's like revolutionary. Yes, yes, I know I'm not saying anything particularly illuminating or anything.

All I wanted to say about Queer Fossilization, Or, A Tour Through the Museum of Gay Unnatural Herstories is that it just felt empty to me. It was okay, not the fullest house but you know it could've been cooler. I mean I appreciate the fecalphilia of geniuses just like the next guy does but after actually experiencing the suspension of self-respect that was graduate school in performance studies while all I have to say that I'm just about over the tiny little cliques that dictate what's fucking hot and amazing and what is not in queer experimental circles. Yes, yes, queer radicality--don't own anything, don't marry anyone, be broke and fuck benefits. Oh wait, whose belly is this? Sure some of it was great like Nelson and Christina this great biographical short centered in the dirt and grime of gay East Village with sweet fey man and his beautiful if not mysterious friend Christina. You know when drag queen before transgender circulated and trafficked into our daily vocabularies and practices. When queen was a pronouncement and not a putdown. Anyway, I'm bad at describing movies--I'm more interested in the politics of curating. As in, who gets to fucking curate this shit anyway? When can we have more than just one or two voices in the mix suggesting to a broader audience what is cool and what needs to be seen right now?

I have to say that I spent the weekend cleaning my house in that sexy hands and knees kind of way (well it was hot when the thug miss was on her hands and knees--but I digress) and it felt more gratifying than the events I actually attended. Except for Team Dresch at the Echo. Now that was a rock show but because it was the Outfest attempt at encroaching upon queer underground musical communities it didn't feel as amazing as it probably should've been. The gay south by southwest? Ugh that shit is riddled with industry hacks. I guess it's okay as long as its gay industry hacks. Team Dresch were great though. You have to appreciate a band that writes songs that actually have like a melody or hook or that shit that grabs you that sticks in your head. Don't think I got that from the opening bands which was frustrating for me as patron and lover of the queer punk. Oh gosh and that burlesque group ruined a sonic youth song for me but not forever. Don't worry. Not forever. But it must be nice to be relevant, huh, girls?

Saw Lezploitation too. You forget that it's not all shit and giggles and sloppy tits all over the place until the Asian and Black naked women come up on screen and then you feel all sad, somber and sickened by the realization that exploitation has a genre. Aww man there I go again not being pro-sex and shit. Why do I have to bust up the party?

Peggy Shaw is Coming To TOWN!

2007-07-18T10:22:00.001-07:00

I know, I know. Los Angeles is no town like the small town you're from but hey it's my kind of town! Anyway, just a bit of news about a great performance artist coming to L.A. soon enough. Peggy Shaw is coming to the Hammer Museum next week and you should all try and go. You know how some purveyors of so-called lesbian sub-culture fancy themselves alpha dog but is really the grandfather of insecurity studies who writes about your grandmother's punk rock while totally turning you off of all things butch and butch-femme? Well, Peggy Shaw inspires to a higher plane taking the pain caused by posers away reminding you why butch-femme has such a beautiful and relentless history--someone who reminds you why enacting this gender presentation is such a gift and not a constant failure. Why we do what we do because bad asses like Peggy Shaw paved the way. She is the one-butch rat pack which I guess that's how it's always been. I don't want stone butch blues to always be the butch blueprint we go to for butch history but did urban butches really roll that deep? I don't know. But she's pre-Drag King; no lip sync substitute for that priceless raspy forever frog in her throat. Grand style. No queer hedonism just a good old fashion one butch telling a really good story kind of show.

I worked at Highways Performance Space when Peggy Shaw did Menopausal Gentleman and I was hooked. I was floored. It was definitely in my top 5 performances I had ever seen at Highways. Yeah, a caged lion and she's got a roar on her, too. She was so fucking smoov. Held the audience not just captive but possibly hostage and inspired one hell of a Stockholm syndrome in all of us where we'd take a bullet for our captor. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? FUCK YEAH.

A tender emotional and tough performance. Like tough as in bad meaning good. Even before showtime she was kicking it in her white boxers, white tank top and dark colored socks with the sock suspenders around her calves and wingtips. I believe they were wingtips. Reading the newspaper like the butch dad we imagine we'll either be or be married to one day but presently resist and resent those marriage delusions and fantasies for keeping us up at night with anxieties about losing queer credibility.

I was just saying though.

No alpha. Just respect.

So F**king Hungry Right Now

2007-07-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Dayum metabolism is making it hard to keep food in my system. Now that I am feeling hunger I realize that I've negatively affected my metabolism and now my body holds onto its fat making weight loss harder now than it was a few hours ago. I just can't stick to that 5 small meals a day plan. I've only had 1 today and I inhaled the hell out of that chicken pesto sandwich from wolfgang puck's. Yes SC has a WPuck's on campus. Is that normal? Does your elite institution have high end food chains? I should pack a lunch, that's what I should do. I should cook more than just a couple times a week. I mean, the thug miss and I do eat breakfast for sure and dinner at home a lot but usually salads with her tasty secret salad dressing passed down from generations and like toast with the salad. Or I'll make soup. I make a mean veggie soup. I'm learning to stay in touch with my spinach and chard but I need to make better sauteeing choices. Ginger and garlic are killing it and not in a good way. Ginger is intense, need to be less of a pig bottom about it. I'm sick of fish, scared of red meat preparation. We do eat out a lot though, I mean who are we kidding? We both work and the household duties aren't always a priority. Which is cool. I'll probably make a run to Pho Cafe for some #3s. Tacos. Maybe I should make some turkey tacos. Mmm Yuca tacos. Fish tacos. I should learn how to make some fish tacos. Damn you Trader Joe's for making me retarded. Pasta. I make a mean pasta with olive oil sauce though gotta lay off the sauce when I can. Oh I made these amazing cauliflower enchiladas with tomatillo sauce that were pretty divine. I wasn't so gluttonous with the queso fresco.

One time I made Claudia and Stacy my chilaquiles at their apartment and they were turning out really amazing. And Stacy got up from the couch (she was wearing pajamas at like 2 in the afternoon) and came into the kitchen and saw me add the amount of queso fresco much to her dismay. She just curled her lip like that sneer that uppity femmes tend to have and said, "that's so GLUTTONOUS." Damn I felt really bad about myself which I guess was the point of that comment--but I was cooking for her? Wait a minute! Whatever. She ate it up and had seconds though. So who's the pig bottom now, Stacy?

That reminds me of the lesson for the day--advocating for self. We are our own advocates, our auto-lawyers. Defenders against those that try and overcharge us. Like today my small victory over the car dealership--get it: I took my car in last Thursday because my driver side window wasn't sliding down and then I said I thought my clutch was kinda wonky. Turns out I need a new transmission! Doh! I am not even at 33K miles! Can you say design defect? So my warranty covers that shit no problem. They put me in a car rental that they pay for. Cool. No problem. Then they said that they'll need to replace my clutch and while it's not at the nubby nub where the manufacturer's gonna cover it under warranty so they try and fork $325 outta me to which I say No nubby nub? You're just nit-picking. The dude "Kelly McGee" (I hope he doesn't have a google alert on his name like Jo$h Kun did) was all "hey i'm not trying to make an enemy" about how he was doing me a favor replacing my clutch at no labor cost to me to which I say "yes, I know. But I'm a customer with the impulse to ask questions." So he was pressing me and I wasn't backing down (which is rare 'cuz I fold like a house of cards) and I said "I don't know, I feel like my clutch can go longer than what you're saying." And then Kelly McGee asks if I have an extended warranty and I say "I need you to check if I do because I don't recall." Well it turns out that I DO! I'm covered for another year or 18,000 more miles so when my clutch dies (and it will) they're going to cover it for free anyway! So there ya go. Tiny victory but a victory nonetheless because lord knows I've been knocked around some these last few years. But I'm not going to get cocky. I just won this battle. For all we know Kelly McGee might victor in this war.

Okay remind me to tell you about the Mr. Cartoon lowrider show I went to over the weekend. Lots of cool pictures and lots of leaning like cholos. And lots of firme folks though there was like no queers that were like out. Maybe a few gays for pays or gay when you're locked up types. Definitely no marimachas. Oh and then i gotta tell you about the Queer fossilizations program during outfest programmed by Jose Munoz and Nao Bustamante. You know those 40+ queers have their shit all google alerts.

Al rato.

Voldemort's Henchman No More!

2007-07-13T17:44:00.000-07:00

I took the afternoon off yesterday to go see the 3:15 of Harry Potter at the Vista. I probably just fucked myself writing that since I'm your paper-pushing 9-5er, but alas...I had to for my own morale. Harry is looking very cute and on the edge of seventeen but like most adolescent males he is angry. Very, very angry. I found myself overidentifying to the point of tears. Angry tears of course. The boy's been done wrong, characterized as untrustworthy and underhanded, chastised by those who he loves most and cast out of proper society. It's all a mindgame. Your enemies want you down and out. Voldemort wants to get into your head and convince you that you're all alone. But guess what Voldemort? YOU'RE the one that is all alone and has no friends and doesn't know real love. And you're not running the Center for Feminist Research anymore so THERE!

How timely. Those Harry Potter movies are so damn good. The only glitch of an otherwise lovely afternoon was walking in front of a woman and her two friends and overhearing her say "Which is the book where Dumbledore dies?" To which her companion says "Dumbledore DIES???" And the thug miss and I stand to the side and let them pass us so we'd get out of their toxic earshot. That was so fucked up it felt like a hate crime.

People never know to quit when they're ahead.

Renewing My Faith in Drag

2007-07-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

Whoa, have you seen this? You have to see this amazing performance of I Need A Hero by Tande Iman Dupree. I believe it's the 2001 Black Miss America Pageant. Wah, I just found out she's deceased but hot damn girl works it!! Mourn you 'til I join you, Sister.

Don't Waste Your Life....

2007-07-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

Okay I'm on a rampage trying to generate some serious freelance work because I didn't get a raise at work but that's another deadly but silent issue that I'll only write in the folds of my skin and you'll have to roll my dead carcass over several times before you find out how it all went down. Let's just say it sounds like a goat trying to escape.

But never you mind that, if you've got some freelance action that pays by the word then by all means send it to moi! moi! the broke ass boi!

At least I'm learning Excel. Damn sometimes you just have to stay silent and believe me when I say I work for the feminist equivalent of Office Space. No, not The Office. I mean OFFICE SPACE--fucking classic dumb dude self-loathing within the small walls of a cubicle. All I lack is a cubicle, though.

Remember when 24,000 right out of college was a lot? Damn you, non-profits. And now 40K is like the new 32K? I know, right? These are bad times. Rent is up as are college loan interest rates. Stay in school, fools, just don't slit your wrists. I almost think that maybe I should just eat the cost and take out another loan to get a PhD in expensive rolodex of contacts in the field of my choice. But then again I'm like--do I really want to exhibit at the Whitney? Am I really going to be interviewed by ArtForum? Small presses work for me just fine.

But I at least still afford those small pleasures for myself. What are they? Ohh, you know, the 2 a month Netflix, the $20 subscription to eMusic, salaciously objectifying the Scandanavian mid-century pieces on Craigslist FOR FREE, the usual.

I have to still figure out how to get myself to New Orleans for the ATHE conference. Yes, that's right. I'm presenting. On Butchlalis. Duh. And space. I know, right? It's going to be this powerpoint I call my back for real so if you're there come up to me and say well how do you do? I won't know anyone in New Orleans. I hope I don't do anything stupid like get a tattoo. I shouldn't do stuff like that by myself. I might not advocate for myself all that great and will do a better job if someone's there expecting me to fight for my subjectivity. You know you always put on a better show of treating yourself with respect with an audience, even if it's an audience of one. Isn't this why we have girlfriends? Not just to have as audiences but to remind you of why you're fucking amazing to begin with? I mean, what does your wonderful girlfriend see in you if not another equally wonderful person. That's how it works, doesn't it?

Anyway, I'm having a neat summer? At least I've gotten on a plane and that's always good. New York was fun. New Orleans will be hot. I hope Katrina doesn't have a hot little sister because that would be tragical and all I'd want to do is save all the dogs. I'm such a dumb lesbian sometimes.

And no I haven't gotten a tattoo because guess what? I'm BROKE! People with nice tattoos I've learned spend quite a bit of money. I didn't factor that well enough into my plans. Ahh well. I guess I'll hit the gym instead and tone up the rest of my body (because my arms are looking pretty sweet--except now they're just smaller than the rest of me) and see where these tattoos will eventually call home.

Okay well I needed that. Sometimes a treadmill just won't do.

Your Mission Today: Cream the ARTS EDITOR at L.A. Weekly!!!!

2007-07-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

You can email DOUG HARVEY at the L.A. Weekly if you're inclined to see some coverage on local artists that seriously resonate with you.

dghrvy@hotmail.com is his email. Read on and check out the email I wrote him. You think it's too much?

Anyway, help a troll out!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Doug Harvey,
Hello! I was told by my friend, XXXX XXXXX, whose
contributed work to the A CONSIDERABLE TOWN section, that I
should get in touch with you regarding writing a piece
for the Weekly. I know XXXX from our days frequenting
rock clubs like Al's Bar and Jabberjaw back in the
early 1990s. I have also written an article under the editorial
guidance of Kateri Butler for the style section.

I am interested in writing a story
about Shizu Saldamando, who will be doing her first solo show (at
age 28!) at Tropico De Nopal gallery, owned by Reyes
Rodriguez. The gallery is located in Historic
Filipinotown and is an amazing space, highlighting
post identity work from L.A. Latino artists.

I'm wondering if you might be interested in an artist
profile and an interview with this up-and-coming
Los Angeles based visual artist. You can find the gallery's
press release here: http://www.tropicodenopal.com/currentshow/Shizu%20S/press%20release.html

Saldamando's work is edgy and fierce (www.myspace.com/saldamando) and the Weekly would be an
ideal space to highlight her talent as a new L.A.-relevant artist.

Saldamando has her solo exhibition coming up at
Tropico De Nopal gallery in Echo Park and has been
part of key exhibit in and around Los Angeles. She
depicts young urban adults from the richly diverse
communities of East, Southeast and Downtown Los
Angeles in these quotidian yet haunting ways.
Straddling portraiture and candid captures, her pieces
consist of detailed renderings and multi-layered
collage that pay homage to her friends (cool
cha-cha
girls, hot rod rockabilly boys) and their eclectic
styles (rockers, mods and lowriders) and musical tastes
(from Thee Midniters to Morrissey). Her use of ballpoint pen similarly
references both Latino Lowrider art as well as Pinta
(Jailhouse Art) but with a distinct feminist
amplification of these forms. The coupling of
traditional artistic mediums together with pop culture
materials, highlights an historically-specific, re-mix
of inherited, but more importantly, selected social,
commercial and artistic movements and done so in a way
that reflects Saldamando's experience as a woman of
color in the art world without the burden of monolithic
representation.

Each subject depicted exudes an emotion present and
prescient with vulnerability mounted on the likes of
canvas, paper, wood, or cotton fabric. The variety of
materials mirrors the complexities of her subjects as
well as Shizu's own interesting origin as a
Japanese
Mexican post-goth who grew up in San Francisco's
Mission District yet found her muses in the backyard
parties of East Los Angeles during her college years
at UCLA. She currently
calls Los Angeles home.

Anyway, I'm a HUGE FAN of her work. And I've also a
decent amount of freelance clips to show you. They can
be found here:

http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=3419&Itemid=122
and
http://home.digitalcity.com/losangeles/bars/mayan-theatre/v-100031311

http://search.cityguide.aol.com/losangeles/entertainment/rockaway-records/v-100076225

http://search.cityguide.aol.com/losangeles/entertainment/middle-earth-discount/v-100134517

Please let me know if you need
additional items from
me such as more writing samples.
Take Care,
Raquel Gutierrez

Don't Call L.A. Los Escandalos for Nothing...

2007-07-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Oh snappers it looks like L.A. just got juicier as this scandal makes it way onto the LA Times today. Check it:
-------------------------------------------
Mayor reveals romantic link with TV newscaster
Both seek privacy but the admission raises questions about ethics.
By Duke Helfand and Steve Hymon, Times Staff Writers
July 4, 2007

At 4 p.m. on June 8, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a terse statement announcing that he and his wife, Corina, were separating after 20 years of marriage.

Two hours later, Telemundo television anchor Mirthala Salinas delivered the story to her Spanish-language viewers on the Friday evening news.

"The rumors were true," she declared of the split after an introduction that described the story as a "political scandal" that had left "many people with their mouth open."

What Salinas, 35, did not say in the newscast was that she was the other woman. She and Villaraigosa, 54, had been in a relationship even though she had previously been the political reporter assigned to cover local politics and the mayor.---------

I only cut and pasted an excerpt into my blog, you really should hit up the LA Times website for the complete story.

But don't it make you wonder: damn my life is not so interesting. But then for the queer in the public eye this shit is just part of the territory you traverse as you go about your business. You work hard whether it's writing the great american novel or the album that casts the shadow of greatness, you get all consumed by your non-sexual passions and things on the homefront begin to wane. It happens. Many a favorite album contain the collaterol (sp?) damage of wrecked relationships and marriages, lovechildren conceived in the penumbra of artistic genius--hey people it happens. And then there's the basic neglect that occurs when you're too busy being all brilliant and that requires a basic boring exercise in daily narcissism. And who do you think suffers? Friends, family, girlfriends, hubby, the pets--you name it.

And it's going to keep happening over and over again until you decide that shit just can't go on like this. Are we gonna be like Tony Villar and screw your friend's ex-girlfriend. Damn remember that STUPID article about MAPs (Mexican American Princes) written by the small-penised Daniel Hernandez for LA Weekly?? These guys roll dirtier than the dirtiest queer--which goes to show that self-esteem and the lack thereof sees no sexual orientation/gender colorline. And by dirty I just mean busted emotionally, someone who's just damaged goods, therapy can't save you now when you refuse to take responsibility.

But Tony has, I mean, he has to. At least you have to give him that--I mean if you're the empathetic type I guess. But taking responsibility for something so salacious and shameless that it makes it hard for me to not laugh in that fucked up patting you on the back for being so undeniably sin verguenza and just plain insane in that normalizing insanity kind of way--you know, like as if I'm watching the Sopranos or some other wild and violent male fantasy shit like Scarface (which I've actually never seen...but I digress). Like damn! If you can weather this storm and still make it to the white house then yes you deserve that great brown hope wreath of laurels or whatever it is they reward your kind with...it just feels like madness but what do I know? And then Mirthala Salinas?? Grrl, what are you on when you're the Telemundo reporter who's covering the break-up of the mayoral marriage? You're the other woman!? Now that's some shamelessness.

I haven't seen that type of shamelessness since my days rolling with Tongues.

Last Minute Business - Up To The Minute News

2007-06-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

It's summertime and the living's been somewhat easier than the spring. The semester is over. No one is here. It is quiet and I'm about to lose control and I think I like it. Work is chill when the bosses are away so here I am archiving a rather difficult year. But alas I made it and I am committed to making this a productive summer. All I really want to do is have fun without having to fall under the spell of identity constraints. I don't want to further navigate any more terrain best summed up in a discipline I wish to give birth to and call Insecurity Studies. I know these events happen because individually we are weak, yet together we are supposed to be strong. I didn't do gay pride or dyke march because I didn't want to have to fake the funk in these exhibitions of community cohesion. I don't know what it is but I'm kind of tired of going to places dictated by identity and practice yet there's no real space for talking about conflict and contradiction. I always find myself in spaces and situations with people who project their bullshit onto me or decide they want to read my performance according to their bibles. It's funny but I was going through some old shit at my parents house. Found the best box of vinyl, books, letters, pictures and other ephemera. There was this picture of me in the Chuparosa club days where I was at my most happiest because I was at my most anti-social--I was the club DJ. I had crazy greasy longer hair and had on this funny chocolate brown ski sweater I must've picked up at goodwill or something, had the headphones around my neck inside the DJ booth and I was flipping off the camera with the meanest look on my face. It pretty much crystalized these feelings and anxieties as to why I always felt like such a crazy outsider troll in these mild-mannered QWOC spaces. I just couldn't fit into that box, man. Not a good dancer and I'm tired of marching behind dykes on motorcycles. But that's just me.

Maybe I do want in on mainstream culture. I mean is that the impulse I need to listen out for just because I'd rather have a drink at these cool old man bars? I don't know, I'm just tired of the limited options of sociability that comes with being a dyke. I know there's an economic element to that, sure. But I'm sure there are some very interesting economically limited people out there, not just me. But more and more I don't really buy the whole we're all broke community crutch we walk on. If you really wanted to see Knocked Up...you'd find a way. If you really wanted to buy that hot new independently produced art zine at Skylight books that costs $10 you would so decide what you were going to do that week: Slurpees? No. Vegan lunches? Maybe. Gas? Maybe not.

Hey I'm just saying.

Tomorrow the thug miss and I fly out to New York for a well deserved and so overdue trip back to where it all began for us. I am so excited. I haven't been to NYC since I finished grad school. I've just been so broke. Ugh. But I'm happy to see friends, eat at favorite spots, see new exhibits at brooklyn and studio museum in harlem, buy sexual sneakers, hit up the strand and WOW theatre space and walk central park with my special ladyfriend.

Okay! Gotta pack now. I'm also trying to sell this desk: Would you buy it for $75? Gotta pimp this mid century motif like a madman!

When I get back I let you know about my birthday plans. Yep the sun is moving into Cancer. Let the countdown to 31 begin!

Five Minute Post

2007-05-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

You know how hard it is out here for a pimp, right? Well you have to imagine that it's that much harder for 'ho. University staff gotta drop it like it's hot when parents come a knocking. Dropping knowledge to you young ones on the day of graduation here at the University of South Central. I just learned this week that one of our students here in Gender Studies is on The Hills. I had to stop and explain to folks what that show is and what it does. Then as I walk out and about the campus I start to notice that there are all these skinny blonde power moms straight from Laguna Beach on the arms of all these men that look like Aristotle Onassis decked out in Tommy Bahama.

Damn Ari Onassis was a classy man. But you don't realize how close to absurdity you really are day-to-day.

So this means summer is here, upon my handsome bald head, and many a ditch day I will take. Yet as I pause on the eve of white shirts and flip flops I have to tell you that I am also at a blogging crossroads. You see...I am getting to a place where hell...I have to start taking some responsibility. Yes, yes, you know it's the therapy talking. I've been reading about my "patterns" and trying to enact something different, trying to cool the flames of anger with a little buddhist-style compassion for self. I'm tired of being Mr. Blamey McBlamey. Debbie Downer. Sally Selfish. Shamey O'Shamey. Unaccountable Ana. All that shit that leads to a life of butch caricature. Oh I know you know it. Someone spare me a life of rocker horns and muscle tees as I work to embrace Vespas and meditation. Maybe not you, maybe someone you've heard about, maybe someone that just never called you back. Someone you never had a chance to say peace to and then some. Butch caricature. Self-medication. Well, sirs and ladies and gentlefolk of all gender/genre distinctions...let me be the first one to tell you that I hear you. It's all about choices. What will you let in and what will you let go?

Oh I know I speak in ridiculous metaphor; I realize I'm almost incoherent. What I'm trying to say is that perhaps this not-so-humble blog is in need of a humility injection. Some introspect that lets you in, lets you see how broken my heart is, how hard it is to conquer unloveability and doing so in a way that doesn't seem so Morrissey-ish, ya know? I hear that bastard is miserable.
Am I going to change the focus? Will I be conscionable? Will I respect those around me as I bridge the gap in the respect I hold for myself? What's going to happen to the mission of this blog? Will I be as fun to read if I stop the righteous hateration for the powers that be ridiculous?

Who knows. Seriously. Am I going to be a guilty pleasure or am I going to pursue a higher destiny?

Do you just want to read about all the cool stuff I do all the time? Yeah, methinks yes. Do you want to know what I'm reading? Hell, why not? Do you want to know what food and drink I am consuming? Possibly, I mean I do like a good pilsner glass of fine lager. Hobbies. I have hobbies though maybe I don't want to be so vulnerable as to share them with you. I can be coy, too, you know.

Who know what directions we will take but just know that they are good ones. I am looking forward to a summer of outdoor activity. I have a feeling we're in store for a New York style summer, muggy and unmerciful, so let's have no shame about cut offs and tank tops okay?

Everyone is loveable.

Chinga Tu! Chinga Tu! Chinga Tu Madre!!!

2007-05-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

That's right, Alice Bag was in town and Alice Bag is God.

It's Ain't Self-Help If It Helps You, Too...

2007-04-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Without good boundaries:	With good boundaries:

Feel afraid - anticipate crisis - always expect the worst to happen	Feel secure - grounded - able to cope
Have difficulty saying "no"	Are able to set limits and say "no"
Change your behavior, plans or opinions to pacify partner - withhold your truth	Remain true to self and attempt mutually satisfying compromise that respects the needs of both
Make exceptions and excuses for partner's behavior - even when appropriate	Is flexible and accountable and expect others to be flexible and accountable also
Are unclear about your choices, preferences and opinions - wonder if you are right often	Feel clear and decisive and act to get what you want and need
Make others responsible for your good and bad feelings about yourself	Take responsibility for your own feelings and responses
Use guilt, fear, shame, intimidation or interrogation in attempting to change partner	Speak with "I" messages and attempt to hear and understand partner
Are more focused on partner's needs, emotions and feelings than you are on your own	Are in touch with your own needs, emotions, feelings and attend to them with self nurturing
Are unable to get angry but often feel victimized	Can express healthy anger and refuse to be victimized
Feel you must physically separate to get space and feel safe	Can stay engaged and yet feel separate
Often discount intuitive hunches	Listen and abide by intuition
Will comply with unwanted sexual advances in order to feel loved	Do not compromise your integrity for sex
Attempt to get your own needs met by constantly doing for others	Are direct about getting needs met and does not attempt to manipulate others
Avoid knowing the truth in attempting to avoid pain	Willing to experience temporary frustration or pain as an accepted part of growth

Total up your score: If you have 7 points or more on the "Without Good Boundaries" side, you will know this is an issue affecting your relationship.

You Know Where I'ma BE!!!

2007-04-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

CINCO DE MAYO SHOWCASE

Saturday, May 5- Jensen Rec Centers
Curated by Ian Brennan
MusicPass accessible; tickets also available at the door.

Cinco de Mayo

On Cinco de Mayo (Saturday, May 5) the Silver Lake Film festival celebrates the rich-history of Chicano rock music in East Los Angeles from Lalo Guerrerro to War to Los Lobos. The evening will feature performances by Dios Malos, Lysa Flores (1997 Independent SPIRIT debut-performance nominee for the film "Star Maps"), Ollin, The Revolts (featuring Jonathan Velasquez, star Larry Clark's "Wassup Rockers"), and culminating with the grand finale of 1970's punk-legend Alice Bag being presented with the MUSIC PIONEER AWARD and her performing a song by The Bags for the first time in decades.

Saturday, May 5: Cinco de Mayo showcase, Jensen Rec Center in Silver Lake, featuring Alice Bag, Dios Malos, Lysa Flores, Ollin, The Revolts. MUSIC PIONEER AWARD: ALICE BAG

PEER MUSIC SHOWCASE

Friday

2007-04-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

Man, imagine if I was the type of thug that lived at home with her mama with no job and a devil on her shoulder in the form of their pot-smoke blowing friend. No, not the life I long for, I'm just thinking of the premise of the Ice Cube film with the same name.

Friday. Need to find a cheap copy of that to keep in the office for rainy afternoons such as today.

Anyway, I can't believe I've been writing this muthaphukker for almost two years! And now i'm getting into trouble with it 'cuz mad people have been peeping toms and that's just amazing.

Look how I've aged!

Just a little eye candy to remind you who you are dealing with now and forever.

Arce & Bustamante

2007-04-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

Performance art can be cringe-worthy. The stereotypes that circulate in mainstream arenas such as the nudity and chocolate sauce, the obsession with orifices, the scary non-sequiters being spat at masochistic audience members can cause a loyal disciple to nod her head in agreement. It’s like enduring a politicized Gallagher event—you know that guy that destroys watermelons with jackhammers. Yeah I know, enduring isn't my favorite audience pasttime either. But a theatricality that comes with unpredictability, site-specificity, politicized and affective ardor doesn't promise a pleasant taste in your mouth let alone passive witnessing.

Writing about performance is tricky though especially when all you want to do is performance 24 hours every day and not pause to intellectualize it. Am I enacting brown sufficiently? Do these tight jeans cause too much gender trouble? Is the child of immigrant guilt overflowing out of its stoic vessel? It’s downright frightening.

Performance is both rife with possibility and failure, and more so when you (or in this case me) write about two artists that set the bar so high you can’t help but feel paralyzed by their greatness. Yet the work by both Nao Bustamante and Elia Arce is still simple and hard, gratifying and elusive, damning and liberating and that’s hard to come by in performance art.

Both of these forceful artists have a body of work suffused with a ritualistic sense of purpose that borders on urgency and stress. So how do I begin to tell the tale of Arce and Bustamante without setting off performance art booby traps? Or how do I adulate in a way that won’t leave me feeling all stretched out and vulnerable, reaching for a bath towel to hide my nakedness? In other words--how to make love like a performance artist?

Well how and why does their work resonate with me and position myself as I struggle like a Jedi knight to be the next generation of fiery (Did I just write "fiery"? What the hell is wrong with me?) Latina performance and talk the talk with some serious feminist flair. No problem, right? Well it shouldn't be. Yet I've only seen a handful of Nao Bustamante's work, most of it in the last four years but I wish I could've been there to see more. I always want more.

Like Las Cucas, the hot post-punk mariachi outfit that she fronted in the Bay Area singing the pomo hell out of Menudo covers. Seeing that up close and personal would’ve been great, but alas the ephemeral nature of performance forbids it! As well as some Indigurrito which was funded in 1992. Nao applied for this grant that supported artists creating work in response to the 500 years of indigenous subjugation that came at the helm of Columbus 1492 arrival to the New World. So what does she do but strap on those infamous Mission District vegetarian burritos the size of a newborn to a harness and dildo typically used during queer/dyke sexplay and summon all the white men in the audience to come and atone for their white guilt. Man, talk about setting the hoops of philanthropy aflame by disidentifying with strict rubrics of identity as though applying for monies wasn't hard enough.

Another performance "Sans Gravity" features Nao submerge herself in water without a life preserver. She weighs her whole body down with small clear plastic bags of water taped to every nook of her voluptuous body. Once every bag is placed then her assistants give audience members who've encircled Nao's monstrous form long, thick needles to prick holes into the bags with where suddenly there's this human fountain emptying herself before us. That isn't complete though until Nao wraps a bag of water around her head, taping the bag to the base of her neck. Always willing to subject her audience to physical tension, an anxiety we collectively engage when we view her about to push herself into corporeal danger. It is a fear factor Bustamante invites, she flirts with our nervousness--a deadly coquettish game perhaps?

Why can't I tear my eyes away from what happens next?

The stuff of Nao's genius is the way she grapples with identity in a way that centers it as an absurd fundamentalism. It is a a streetwise shaman that vindicates white anxieties about indigenous subjugation by biting the burrito of absolution. Rituals, man, it's all ritual. Nao's current work is a sexier rumination on affective states and not so much on the monolithic nature of identity practice. There are the slightest utterances in terms of a successful Latina performative practice that relies more on you and me as audience trusting our instincts to say "oh...she's Latina" even though no accent is present, no allusion to one of two barrios all Latinas are assumed to be from, and no struggle around overt racist oppressions in that one-for-all/all-for-one approach prevalent in performance by political people of color. I know someone's blood is boiling after reading that last sentence but I have to say it.

Oh and then there's Elia. Elia Arce. Okay so what am I going to say about Elia? That the first time I saw her I was blown away because her presence is undeniable and energy volcanic AND!!! Because she's this raging immigrant female ferocity that weaves tragedy into the bloody blanket I want to wrap myself with when I'm about to go into those dispiriting situations...like a faculty meeting as the court reporter?

Anyway this is where I need to pause on an already overdue feminist magazine article.
There's too much hybridity going on and it feels like no one's noticed...so I'm going to read up on Elia's work in IN OTHER LOS ANGELESES (by M.Cheng) and see if it jogs my memory. Writing about performance without the performance archival video is hard. It's like I have to tap into my own corporeal archive to access the feelings I had when I saw Elia's First Woman On the Moon. But those were 24 year-old baby dyke feelings, baby performance artist feelings, baby baby feelings.

I think this post can be best wrapped up in the following haiku:

Feelings that were there
are just not here anymore
performance art heals

Oldie But Goodie...

2007-04-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have been revisiting some of the older posts and my goodness I had some clarity once upon a time now didn't I. I mean, I'm taken aback at how much I tried and fell off that wagon, but indulge me as I try to warm back up to myself in re-posting this post from 22 months ago.

Friday, June 17, 2005
Anger management where ya been all my life?!

It is now making sense, this strange cosmic affinity I feel with Adam Sandler movies and their male-in-training premises. It's like he is my En Lak Ech (Mayan indigenous ontology that translates to "Tu Eres Mi Otro Yo"/"You are my other me"). So yeah he made a movie called "Anger Management" which I'm not going to rehearse the plot for you, but basically bullied talented young man turns his anger inward his whole life and the boiling point is not pretty. It's funny and tragic, and god such a way to see myself.

So my earlier post from this week is just an indicator to my own boiling point and how now I'm starting to realize that I've always been afraid of anger. I've grown up in a household where it's been expressed in hostile, violent ways and yeah, that contributes to these coping strategies that I'm struggling to unlearn. I don't need to be the stoic immigrant who suffers in silence, so why should I be the stoic stone butch who suffers in silence, too? But since I'm really green on anger, I need to understand that there are healthier, coherent ways of dealing with it and expressing it; not automatically go to a site of shame for feeling anger, don't choke it by turning it inward, or take it out on folks you care about. There's all kinds of ways that anger gets channelled and hot damn, I'm figuring out so much more about my hotheaded ass. It's awesome and really tragic, but it's going to be okay. I don't have to be so hard on myself and compassion is on my things to learn list. I don't have the answers and I might not ever have the answers, just live the questions like Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet, the original how to be a pimp guidebook.

This is an excellent resource for understanding anger and coping with it. Check it: http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/anger.html

It's all about breathing deep from the gut and cognitive restructuring party people, because logic defeats anger and that's the mantra I'll employ when I find myself in a difficult and uncomfortable situation. Maybe it can help you?

Those Rascally Hapa Heartbreakers...

2007-04-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

The arcade buzzes
Silence our goodbye glances
Breaking up is hard

Buy Felicia's Book

2007-04-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

Crazy Funky White Boys...

2007-04-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Damn. Don't you just get the feeling you're being hoodwinked by all the good music being performed by racially ambiguous sounding white boys. I take solace in the fact that Elliott Yamin is Iraqi/Jewish but Robin Thicke? I like his CD so much but don't think I'm not showering after trying to wash the scary feelings away.

I did love Elliott Yamin SO MUCH during the 5th season of American Idol. That boy made me cry left and right and then all that shit about his mother having cancer and beating to watch her boy go to the top?? Fuuuuck, forget about it!

Anyway, just more of the same as to why I'm your bad subject.

Thinking Ink

2007-04-10T15:26:00.000-07:00

From the Producers of "Miami Ink"

CONGRATULATIONS! You have made it to the final round of casting for our LA episodes of Miami Ink featuring Kat Von D!

Pretty COOL, huh? Do you know who Kat Von D is? Well peep out this tremenda fiera

I know, right? I'll get to be TOUCHED by this sexy devilgirl and not only that...SHE'S going to stick a NEEDLE on me. So send a shout to whatever being you pray for that I get this opportunity. I know I could hit her up for a tattoo anyway, but having it filmed gives it a certain voyeuristic quality that I'm very cool with...

So now, what tattoo to place on myself, right?

Here are a couple of things I'm seriously considering but which one to pick first?

I want Angel Martin's La Adelita:
She's smoking, right? I've always thought so but because of feminism and not having discovered what it is to be "sex positive" I've struggled to own this desire. But how could you not love this image? I mean especially when I want to infuse it with a distinct politic, desire and admiration for: 1. revolucion 2. history 3. popular folk culture 4. a sexy fierce mujer 5. southeast los angeles carniceria calendars. The only thing though is the flag. I'm not big on flags--neither waving them or claiming them...but alas. CONTRADICTIONS, people. You gotta do your best to live with them and disidentify with them because hell...they can't define you, nor should they. Just have a good time with them because life is short.

Okay, here's another option but perhaps for another time and another paycheck. San Lazaro known also as Babalu Aye. I mean damn, the gods know I've been feeling like a broken old man lately needing something to lick my wounds. I've got two dogs too that also contribute to the resonance of this image. Also I've always been kinda bummed that I haven't found a religious image/motif that I can be super down with until I realized that I'm such a child of San Lazaro/Babalu Aye. I mean yeah I got my head read in Cuba and was bummed for a minute but am trying to tap into that power in knowing. There is power in knowing your pain and power in seeking to have those wounds licked. I'm trying to get off my crutches and it's an every day struggle. Wouldn't a San Lazaro tattoo be an amazing homage to that struggle?

Okay this next one is funny but cool but I don't know I shake my head at it but then shake my fist at my head for not being supportive. But check it out. It's kind of embarrassing on one hand because it's like the label to some coffee can sold at Trader Joe's but it has that old school tattoo flavor. Oh man, it's a VOLCANO! A volcano! Get it?? A volcano 'cuz I'm matrilineally Central American. I'm 1/2 Salvi and we have...VOLCANOES!!! Wow, huh? Fucking Trader Joe's, man! But damn them for appealing to my biculturalism like no one else can...But I would get something else in the banner over the volcano and possible have a vulture juxtapose the prettiness of the butterfly. And no I'm not going to put an Izote (*el salvador's national flower - google that shit if you don't know what it looks like*) So what would the banner say? Maybe "AMOR DE MIS AMORES" or "AMOR ETERNO" or gosh what's another Sonora Dinamita song? Hermanos Flores? Maybe a Roque Dalton poem?

Gotta keep thinking 'cuz it's only something I gotta be happy with forever...

Procrastination Nation

2007-04-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

Damn i'm so behind on producing this article for the Make/Shift clan on performance artists Nao B and Elia Arce and why my performance rookieness looks to them for inspiration. Well they only set the bar so high and forces me to really do what I do right, with focus, with a rich sense of ritual and with a tongue firmly in cheek as to not fall prey to usual performance art traps. It shouldn't be very hard all I gotta do is just talk about their work and why it resonates with me and position myself as the next generation of fiera latina performance and talk the talk with some serious feminist flair. No problem, right? Well it shouldn't be. I've only seen a handful of Nao B's work, most of it in the last four years but I wish i could've been there to see more ya know? Like Las Cucas would've been hot fo'sho! As well as some Indigurrito which I think will be the stuff of her genius that I'll focus on since it plays into my current ruminations of the monolithic nature of identity and the way it plays out in a variety of not just art and culture but organizing and why the left can't get our shit together. Yes, I said it. There's too much hybridity going on and it feels like no one's noticed. How can you organize around a set of identity markers when most folks refuse to come out from behind the hybridity curtain?

Hybridity curtain? What hybridity curtain?

Oh come on now, are you functioning in denial, too? That's why performance is so great. It let's you explore the contradictions that you aren't able to cope with in your material world and quotidian realities. Someone out there is going to get mad at me for using the word "quotidian." I bet they are an organizer or activist of some sort. Maybe someone with an MFA even who feels guilty for having one and not getting scraped up enough in the trenches but deep deep down wants to be all up on the gallery wall. Isn't it funny with us artists of color? How we're all we hate the system but we want in to the system but we swear we're going to hate the system no matter how far deep we want to get fucked by it. Damn that system and our desires. Damn the institutions and our abilities to justify our narcissism as a project in the interest of social responsibility. Damn these contradictions.

But doesn't at least seeing them on your computer screen make you feel just a little more free than you did maybe five minutes ago?

Black Eye

2007-04-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had one? Not the kind on your face but the coffee/espresso amalgamation? If you ever complain about not being able to drink or do drugs at work then you should pick yourself up a Black Eye because it is like being on something during the workday. And god knows I need something to help me push paper better.

writer on the storm:newwork

2007-04-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

The sky is still when Nestor’s eyes flutter open to its gradual burst of yellow and orange. The cackling roosters in the distance stir Nestor out of sleep and into his early morning erection. He dreams of anonymous soft breasts yet has not changed his pants in over a week and the fluid emanating from the head of his penis feels suddenly unfair in the presence of his mother and Panchito. He awakes before reaching climax, gritting his teeth and tugging at his left earlobe to temper the rage of the swell until he can leave the tent.

Nestor is careful not to wake the rest of the encampment though everyone should be awake by now. He does not want anyone to witness his moment, especially in the midst
of constant movement. The group of sixty is traveling through the mountains of Chalatenango, moving towards a more remote location farther away from the river Tamulasco while the Atlacatl Battlion move through the nearby village of Arcatao. His father issued the order two days ago when they discovered pictures pasted all through the main plaza in San Jose De Las Flores of mutilated residents. There were four faces plastered on the dirty paper and Nestor knew one intimately—his cousin Armandito, not yet eight years old and his eyes torn from their sockets and stuffed into his mouth.

Nestor wanted to cry but he could not.
The large group has only slept for three hours and the collective anxiety falls on a suspended hush, a refusal to exhale except for Nestor’s hardened dick that implores his young body to relieve it. He is ashamed despite feeling no shame in flaccidity to strip and bathe in front of compañeros. What a rush of blood could do for young man of eleven and his ability to temper his emerging sense of privacy. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Nestor said. Even his mother, Magdelena, who was waking up, knew when to give her budding manchild a moment of discretion. “Hurry up,” Magdelena said. “We leave in five minutes.”

Nestor steps out of the tent careful to not make any sudden movement. He glides out in a squatting position maintaining his balance on the balls of his feet. He learned from basic training how to move like a jaguar, graceful and calculated so as to never make a sound without meaning to. He cringes at the discomfort his bent torso is causing his brick-hard bulge. A birdcall startles him and he looks up.
“Que te paso?” Rogelio asks, smirking while smoking a cigarette. Rogelio has been on watch this shift while the women and children sleep. His eye fall onto Nestor’s crotch tent and places his hand over his mouth to smother the hearty guffaws erupting from his belly.

Nestor is mortified but his boner still will not yield. “Well don’t just stand there, go take care of it,” his uncle whispers loudly. The young man, shirtless and ashy skinned, sprints into the dark of the forest and begins to rub his penis with his thumb and forefinger desperately trying to ensnare the image of soft breasts that had beguiled him in his sleep. The breasts elude him and all Nestor sees when he closes his eyes is Armandito, small and curious, throwing pebbles at the chickens in Niña Blanca’s courtyard back in Arcatao shrieking with an elfin joy. Nestor wants to extinguish this image from his mind as well as his erection from his body and tries again to imagine an erotic object again. He looks up into the branches, focusing on its drooping blossom and still nothing except for Armandito’s dead corpse to which Nestor finally reaches climax, his face contorting both pleasure and pain and releasing his cloudy fluid on the top of his hand where he wipes it on a swooping leaf. His other hand reaches up to wipe his tears as he silently sighs mouthing his cousin’s name.

“Vergón,” Rogelio says once he sees the lanky shadow surface from the shrubbery that surrounds the small camp. Vergón, a compliment to mean that one is well-endowed and employs an arsenal of the most desirable masculine traits, though Nestor was afraid to be called such. His mother calls Panchito his younger brother “huevón,” which means having big testicles that contribute to his lethargy and uselessness. Big dick is good; big balls are bad.
Nestor pretends not to hear his uncle whom is beginning a second cigarette. “Your hand is your hand, a trusty companion. But, it is better with the real thing,” Rogelio hisses as he exhales smoke from his flared nostrils making him look like a smug dragon.

“Have you had the real thing? That little thing looks like a pink mouse, tastes like a rotten jocote and it feels really good, little man,” he said over puffs of smoke that were beginning to irritate Nestor’s nasal passage.
He is talking about ladies, Nestor thinks to himself registering the metaphors his uncle uses towards sex. A rodent and a piece of fleshy fruit that has surpassed its sweet peak. He remembers his mother recount bits of chat to the lady at the window store counter on the corner of their old neighborhood about his uncle and his womanizing ways.

“Rogelio is a beast,” Magdalena would say to La Niña Haydeé, “that poor girl was only fifteen and he just had to humiliate her and not just once…if I could get my hands on him…” Her voice would trail off and old Señora Haydeé just shook her head in between puffs of her skinny cigarettes.

Magdalena criticized Rogelio prior to her realizing that he and her husband, Nestor’s father, Dagoberto Villatoro, former schoolteacher cum rebel commander, were chest deep in the ERP, the faction of the rebels entrenched in their region of the Chalatenango. Rogelio’s sexual appetite required a cannibalization of the younger girls that lived in the nearby Chalatenango villages. Magdalena believed Rogelio to be a sex fiend. Rogelio just wanted sex and did not know how to finesse his way into it without coercion. He could not afford a whore or the time to travel to the capital or even the maturity for romantic relationships where the promise of sex was always present. Instead, he reduced one or two teenage girls to premature hardened shells that raise babies forcefully deposited in their wombs. Joining the rebels was the most honorable fatherhood avoidance tactic he could muster though in the thick of combat he often invokes those memories. The images of young girls under his command ease the tension brought on by the apprehension of a gruesome death.

“A jocote?” Nestor was uncertain why his uncle had invoked his favorite fruit to describe anything biologically feminine. A jocote was like a sweeter papaya the size of a date and smaller than any girl he had ever known.

“Quiet now, it’s time to go,” Rogelio said looking over his shoulder and motioning in the direction of camp where now the scent of burnt coffee began to tickle his nose. He scanned Nestor’s pants and raised his eyebrows at the holes in his nephew’s knees. As poor as Rogelio and Dagoberto were they never had to wear the same pair of pants days in a row. They took turns wearing the three pairs of pants between them and they were always clean thanks to their sisters’ consistent visits to the river to wash the family clothes. They were the petite kings that ruled supreme within their family.
Rogelio thought about how difficult it was to stay in a village long enough to make contact with a girl. He was starting to get hard. He put his rifle and holster down for what was to be a minute-long jack-off session. He went into the bushes leaving his nephew dumbstruck. Was he going crazy due to the lack of sex or the profusion of shot nerves and frequent visions of the devil? He needed the taste of innocence though Dagoberto would blame his desires on capitalism. He pulled out his hardened, thickset cock and began to stroke himself. Fifteen seconds later he pulled his underpants over his pelvis and buckled his pants.

“What happened to you,” Nestor motioned to his uncle groin. “Does it make you sad, too?” Nestor wondered if Rogelio cried when he reached climax.

“Sad?” Rogelio asked in an amused if not cynical tone. Nestor has no inkling to the cynicism existing in all of his countrymen. Nothing good ever happens to us should be El Salvador’s mantra Nestor would say in his future.

“It doesn’t make me sad, it makes me really happy,” Rogelio said simply. “Ay, little man, when you do it you will know how good it feels to get what you want.”

Nestor and Rogelio walked back to the center of camp where all that remained from the small campfire cooking coffee and heating up beans were nothing but blackened ashes. “I didn’t get any coffee,” Nestor said plainly to no one. Magdalena said he took too long in the bushes. “Who knows what you were doing,” she said. Nestor hated her for chiding him in front of the comrades.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Nestor mumbled. He was visibly sulky now. The whole time they have been traveling through the Chalatenango landscape Nestor never complained or acted the child he was. He was the first boy to enlist himself in the army cohort led by his father and uncle. Magdalena tried to intervene. The compromise was for her to train for the infantry and join the guerrilla.

“Leave him alone,” Rogelio said drinking out of his cup. “You can’t be his mother during a war.” Magdalena was stunned and her face reddened while she pursed her lips tightly.

“Rogelio stay out of this,” she said.

“Enough is enough he can take care of himself,” Rogelio shot back. “You both are equals in this army, don’t forget that.”

“He is my son,” Magdalena fought back tears of anger.

“He is my subordinate. I will command him and you as I see fit,” Rogelio reminded her. “Magdalena, do not disobey orders.”

“Stay away from my son,” Magdalena voice cracked.

Magdalena inched forward towards Rogelio with every breath she took never dropping her gaze from his. She repeated herself until she was arm’s length and, along with the two, startled by a sole gun shot overhead.

“Get down,” Rogelio hissed. He scanned the area to see Dagoberto coming towards the center of camp. Their eyes locked and both nodded their heads at each other. Dagoberto did not look at Magdalena.

“I want everyone’s attention,” Dagoberto said loudly. His eyes were sunk in so deep into his face that he looked unrecognizable to Nestor. “I just received word that Atlacatl has left the perimeter and were actually helicoptered out an hour ago so we are clear to return to Arcatao, rest for a day, and load up on supplies.”

If Rogelio could conquer his lasciviousness, thought Dagoberto, then he could at least be the next Camilo Cienfuegos. As troublesome as it was to endure Magdalena’s complaints about his brother, Dagoberto needed Rogelio by his side. He was an expert marksman and the only member of the troop that could take apart and put together a rifle in less than a minute. Of all the members of their peasant army Dagoberto knew Rogelio would be first man on the frontline. This enabled him to pardon his brother time and time again for his indiscretions, as this was the most critical moment in the war. There was no time for human imperfection.

The New Style.

2007-04-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

This is a new t-shirt. I bought this with another one at my favorite online t-shirt joint. No i'm not going to namedrop that spot because I don't want you posers blowing it up. But FORGIVE FORGET is an admirable space to aspire to, a life's mission, a life's mantra for sure. I wore last night pre/post BdP Panty Splash Hour at the Renberg/Village as part of the Aqui No Hay Virgenes. Thanks for coming if you indeed came.

FORGIVE FORGET. It's hard to do that especially when you're a creature self-aware about the amount of damage and emotional toxicity that permeates your being and in turn you emanate it like it's not taking years off your life.

I keep thinking about the purpose of this blog, the role it plays in my attempting to peel away the wood, metal, trash, blood and shit from the core I'm really trying to get at. I write about a lot of things here that vary from basic announcements for events happening in LA, BdP promotion, self-promotion, things like what clothes and records I currently like, famous people faux pas, workshopping ideas for creative and non creative works, marital bliss and trouble, scandalous gossip, weekend recaps and angry rants. This is one of the few places that act as therapy and really the only place where I have any power. I don't have power at work, I'm part of a caste system that offers great benefits but tears at my sense of agency on the daily. I might be smarter than the average bear but my competence gets questioned a lot and it's kind of humiliating. I hold in a lot of shit and I suck it up like any other office drone but I like being on the periphery of academia and mostly because my gender presentation doesn't put anyone off and to one degree or another I can be myself and not worry about that contributing to people's perception/judgment of me. I get to be at a place where if I'm going to be judged it's going to be on my personality. And that's amazing to me. I'm a dick on the inside not the outside and that shit is just priceless for a raging queer like me.

I'm going through a break-up right now. I love my girlfriend so much and am willing to struggle to save our relationship. We might not get back together but we are working towards trying to forgive and forget our respective transgressions in an attempt at preserving friendship and respect for one another and ourselves. I want to get back together though but not under these current monstrous conditions. I'm a monster because of you and when I say you I really mean work. It is really sad because we are everything we ever wanted in a partner--politics, chemistry, twisted senses of humor and an affinity for the outsider. How did we get here? I know that the stress from work gets brought home and that stress manifests in my chest when I can't breathe right. I feel depressed at the tangibility of powerlessness, I feel less than a person, my personhood is questioned and ultimately denied to me. I can sound dramatic but let's just say it's equivalent to the boss yelling at office drone who then comes home and yells at girlfriend or kids or pets who yell back, take their own desperate measures at regaining composure, etc, etc. Reasons why we divorce or why we spent our childhoods in different homes, blah blah blah I'm finally part of the American tapestry blah blah blah. Passing the buck? Is that como los americanos dicen?

Anyway, I don't know why YOU the reader is here. You want to read about my comings and goings, I guess, but you're not my friend always. Sometimes you are some drifter hitting up thuggery & skullduggery like it's a passing fancy and you get your rocks off, pick your teeth, get inspired by something I wrote, or give proppers when I least expect them. Sometimes you want to engage in something with me but I'm not inspired to do the mutuality thing. Sometimes you tell other people that I write about them in an attempt to what? Demonstrate how well you sniff jock?

I might be the one that lacks a certain kind of imagination but at least I have the courage to let you all watch. Or maybe I'm just a run-of-the-mill exhibitionist who wants to show you my asshole on the daily so I get what I deserve. Or maybe I just don't know how to share in a way that makes you feel comfortable. Want me to be your blog nanny and then I'll call you MEESUS and we can call it even? But at the end of the day, this is still my house and I should be able to do what I want despite living in a world that is terribly hostile and unwelcoming. The Stalinist reality that helps pay the bills is what it is but it's all good because I come from an ilk of bad ass beasts of burden that have taken it up the ass for generations. Bring on the burden, muthaphukka.

I'm going to go start my day now. Do some laundry, walk the pugs, get some paint swatches. I don't have the time today to sit around and let my paranoia be my guide. Maybe tomorrow though...

U Ask, We Tell...

2007-03-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

2007-03-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

If you have never seen Butchlalis perform or would like to become familiar with the older work from the TEENAGE PAPI shows then this would be a great way to acquaint yourself with this performance banda macho madness. Get your tickets and support this endeavor because the RENBERG is a pretty cool place to see a show not to mention a show like this. AND COME EARLY TO CHECK OUT THE AQUI NO HAY VIRGENES: Queer Latina Visibility Exhibit (sponsored by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions - LACE) at the Advocate/Gochis Galleries located right next to the Renberg.

ORALE.

This should be INTERESTING...

2007-03-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

That's What I'm Talking About!

2007-03-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Don't YOU want to hear me talk about it, too?

Aqui No Hay Reason to Hate Myself!

2007-03-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

I know, I know...I suffer from that butch condition known as butch melancholia...BUT right now I have to say job well done, son! I was really happy with the exhibit and was glad for the wonderful turnout. It was so great working with Doyle, Chad, Allison Moon on the curatorial and installation logistics. It was amazing to speak with Diane Gamboa, Shizu Saldamando, Alma Lopez and through a MySpace time/space rupture with Alice Bag, who supplied the exhibit with some of the most exciting ephemera from her personal archive. I was total fan boi as I'm sure you were. What was really amazing about this whole thing was the constant conversations taking place before, during and after. And I'm not talking about homo gossip type of shit but the kinds of dialogues taking place from one wall to another. The work was speaking to each other in a way that maybe I've never been conscious of before with other exhibits. Maybe it's just my proximity to the work and process but these voices just kept getting louder and more excited to be there with one another, like the party you always wanted to have with exactly the right invited guests. You knew the t-party would go off...

Thank you for coming. Thank you for thinking about going. Thank you for making plans to go. Thanks to Carol at LACE, Sabrina Smith, the Butchlalis Homeboy Crew, Karen Tongson, Alison De La Cruz for Superstar DJ-ship, Matt Johnstone, the LAGLC/Ed Gould Plaza staff and OF COURSE THE ARTISTS in the show for a wonderful event.

Serious Salvi Eyes

2007-03-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

I ran into Herbert Siguenza from Culture Clash today at the army surplus store on sunset in silverlake while I waited for my hair appointment. This is the second time in two months that I've run into him but this time I said hello. I'm all, "Hey, are you Herbert?" And he was all, "Yeah, that's me." And then I proceeded to tell him that I LOVE Culture Clash-I-saw-the-last-show-it-was-crazy-when-you-dropped-the-C-Bomb-onstage, which is true. But I didn't tell him that HE was my favorite actor of the three. Herbert's got amazing range, but I mean AMAZING. He really is frighteningly good. Culture Clash is doing 4 nights up at Getty Villa. That's a nice little gig there if you can get it--and we all know that yes, Culture Clash CAN. He was buying costumes and I was trying on SMALL Dickies work shirts which is the first time in my life that I've ever been able to button them over the fellas. Dickies still makes weird shirts though. They look better on Ice Cube, not me.

Anyway, check out the quick point and shoot I did with Herbert. Look at our crazy big ass Muppet-sized eyes. A sign of Salvi-ness if ever there was one. Or maybe we're just good actors/artists and we just have that looook.

You did know that 2/3 members of Culture Clash were of Salvadoran extraction, right??

Flapping My Wings About Feminism...

2007-03-14T13:12:00.001-07:00

No, I said wings not my lips.

This is more an exercise for me to think about the curatorial statement I need to help co-produce for AQUI NO HAY VIRGENES. When J. Doyle approached me about putting together an exhibit on Queer Latina artists I was in the middle of writing and producing the BdP show. I didn't think I'd have enough personal resources to pull something like this off. But more importantly I didn't feel prepared to take on the questions needed in order to produce an exhibit of this caliber. Those questions were basically headaches around identity policing in drag.

Well, you start feeling fearful, right? And I was. But I also take that as a sign that I need to do it if it scares the hell out of me. Otherwise it just doesn't seem worth it to me. No half-steppin' here so what do I do but agree to meet with Doyle and proceed to tell her what I can't do and what this thing can't be. Also, considering that it was an endeavor sponsored/supported by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits (LACE) as a project that attempts to engage the current local climate around feminist art as framed by the behemoth on display currently at MOCA, I knew that this had to be a politically strategic project propelled by openness.

I didn't want to operate under a strict rubric around identity and practice around which artists would get to participate in this project. There are artists who aren't queer in the lgbt community sense of the word but because the space and resources around los angeles feminist art are scarce and far between it made sense to me and Jennifer that this exhibit had to compensate for that. And I struggle to use the word compensate because the exhibit as a whole is mindblowing and visually stunning. And it is unapologetic. The work you will see tomorrow will explain this to you better. But let me just say that I don't need everyone or anyone to be a brown dyke for me to feel represented. Call it the voyeur in me or better put just an active agent taking responsibility to insert myself when no one else will--i see myself in this work. I think you will, too.

I'm not apologizing either nor am I trying to make up excuses. I'm just trying to make up for lost time. It is about time we occupy each other's spaces, que no?

See you tomorrow.

Things That We Missed This Weekend

2007-03-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

Okay, so we shouldn't have stayed out late on Saturday because I missed the MOCA community walk-through as organized by Jennifer Doyle and Catherine Lord. In attendance many a feminist young and older, brown and white, yellow and brown again, queer--you see where I'm going with this? Anyway, I heard it was amazing. The turnout left the MOCA staff scrambling for better audio technologies but that Doyle has a loud voice. She plays soccer, you know?

Also, I missed Sisterhood is Powerful and I mourn that very deeply. I bet it was great. I hope the visual component is up for a while and that I can get there perhaps during my lunchbreak and peep the new up and comers. It's at ArtShare L.A. in the Artist district. Google that shit, friends.

Things coming up and not to miss:

AQUI NO HAY VIRGENES Opening on March 15, 7-10pm. DJ Set by Superstar DJ De La (Alison De La Cruz).

Make/Shift Release Party at LACE (Right in the middle of Shared Women exhibit).

Los Angeles Launch Party

Friday, March 16, 2007, 6:30 to 9 p.m.

LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028

Featuring Erin Aubry Kaplan, Raquel Gutierrez, and others TBA.

Finally, a place to call home.

La Cucaracha

2007-03-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Hey anyone else notice that there's a gaping hole missing from the LA Times comic section? Where's LA CUCARACHA, mang?

WACK! How appropriate...

2007-03-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

I don't think curator Connie Butler took time to consider how the feminist exhibition newly opened at MOCA called "WACK!" would resonate with a distinctly urban POC sensibility. It's almost as though she's giving it up on a silver platter. You know, the potential for critical feedback from a populace so painfully absent from the table. We all know how WACK! that is. And particularly from the opening night reception that transpired this past Saturday evening. I mean the Sisterhood is Powerful event took place the same evening as the Moca party and I felt torn about where to go. Seriously. I knew someone was going to feel butt hurt that night and I should've known it was going to be me. Thanks a lot, second wave feminism, I feel all Benedict Arnold but what else is new?

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of people of color in attendance at MOCA and they, like the white people, were mostly in line--for dranks, the pissroom, the actual exhibit. The kind of people of color that if they're worried about performing their authenticity correctly well you wouldn't know it. I think about how labeling just makes it easier to see ourselves in progressive contexts but there's a bit too much blowback to this elusive desire to create radical possibility. Yes, I know that it is so important to state the queer woman of color position. And I do. And I know all my old school women studies mentors and pals have a hard time with my saying that I'm anti-essentialist about 99% of things. So it should come to no surprise to you that when I'm asked what exactly am I disidentifying with as a writer and performer and cultural activist that my answer is Queer Woman of Color. Identity is my beast of burden. The overbearing parents I can't say no to because then I'll feel like such an ungrateful child. All this because to me possibility is contingent on doing away with catergorization. But the POC somehow gets the monolothic identitarian treatment and it just about drives me crazy. How many white people does it take to really shake up your cultural ethnicity? I'm not being rhetorical. The answer should be none. It never ceases to amaze just how many identity markers there within us all and how we/me/you/one can be insecure about almost everything that makes up personhood/subjectivity.

Not brown enough. Now black enough. Not 'hood enough. Not fresh off the boat enough. Not quite the paper bag test but somehow that aptly describes the feeling. But you want to know what really drives me crazy? And this happens mostly when it's about feminism but I think it's going to be a doozy when I see all the BdP written feedback but isn't it just crazy NOT to engage race and class with gender and sexuality? Why you'd think that would be a given but it hasn't been and I don't understand why? Do you not understand how all that shit shapes context? And while you're at it bring in transnational politics, messy desire and citizenship. Seriously do not call yourself a theoretically rigorous person until you really understand the politics that infuse the context and content of the work that ooh ooh ooh turns you on.

But then there are the people of color that are often approached to come to the table so we could all feel better about inclusivity and diversity because the identity is being performed up to expectation. Sometimes I wonder where I'm falling in on that spectrum because the subtle cues I get from time to time tend to lead me to believe that fundamentalism is no fun. I want to believe that it's merit and not always affirmative action but damn where would we be without it? Affirmative action, that is. But then I'm led to believe that if you're good at what you do then you're an uncle tom identity poser. This comes especially from folks like my racial fetishist boss who institutionally supports this king kong narrative that I'm constantly at war with and enraged by. But sometimes oh man do I ever--sometimes I do feel like an angry ape ready to destroy all that threatens to cage me up and suck me dry.

The Reasons That We Share...

2007-02-28T10:55:00.000-08:00

It's like the morning after kind of feeling that you get when you hook up with the hottest girl you've ever met. You know when you get all shit-eating grin at all the moves you pulled the previous night and how she totally felt you trying to do x-y-and-oh hell yeah-z to her and how she liked it and at the end of the night you knew...she really liked it. Isn't that the greatest feeling for a butch?

Okay so that's how I'm feeling about our weekend at Highways. I feel fucking good 'cause the hot girl's all on my jock. You know I'm just speaking in metaphor, right? Okay then I don't want any rumors to get started and the only hot girl I'm jocking up on is the troll miss. So anyway...

The house was packed, the energy was fierce, my friends and collaborators brought the goods and let y'all have it. And it was FUN. It was so much fun. When it stops being fun then we'll stop doing this performance thing but it just keeps getting more and more insane that it probably won't stop anytime soon. My friends and me--we just know ourselves and each other and it probably shows and we love and respect each other like friends who are family do. And we're funny fuckers that take damage and twist it until it submits itself into something sweet, sublime, sexy, and sinister. No que no? I'm not trying to intellectualize the work that we do, I'm just taking this moment to bask in the fury...the most positive fury I am having the pleasure of being a part of and I'm taking the time to say thank you and that I feel lucky and blessed and excited to keep working as hard as I have as we have.

Some of the funniest shit from backstage/pre-show/post-show

"If you don't have huaraches, I don't have huaraches..."

"Who are the Banda Sexy Monks? WE are the Banda Sexy Monks!"

"You're dancing with too much soul. Try more self-hatred."

"These cheetos are fucking amazing..."

"Hey...(*straight girls coming through the door*) the dancers are here!"

"Is she white? Are you white? You're white!? If you're white where did you get that body?!?"

All in all I'm just glad that I don't feel bad. And that's one of the best feelings I've had all year!

2 VERY IMPORTANT EVENTS/EXHIBITS

2007-02-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
90028
t: 323.957.1777 | f: 323.957.9025
PRESENT
Aqui No Hay Virgenes: Queer Latina Visibility
MARCH 15 7PM
AND RUNNING THROUGH APRIL 30
AND
Butchlalis de Panochtitlan: The BdP Panty Splash Hour
SATURDAY, MARCH 31, 2007
8PM
TICKETS: $15.00

Aqui No Hay Virgenes:
Queer Latina Visibility
curated by Jennifer Doyle & Raquel Gutierrez
The Advocate & Gochis Galleries
at The Village at Ed Gould Plaza
March 15 – April 30

Aqui No Hay Virgenes: Queer Latina Visibility
The artists in this group show present us with atypical images of radical Latina selves. They forego the compulsory iconographies associated with mainstream Latina identity - no corn husk goddesses, no Virgenes de Guadalupe. These are anarchic visions of bruisers, brooders, and romantics that will knock you out with a kiss.
Thus the title: “here lie no virgins”. In their place we have women of subcultural
distinction; women with attitude and a strong sexual presence- divas, punk rockers,
malcriadas (bad girls) and peleoneras (fighters).

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance art pioneer from the San
Joaquin Valley of California. Her work encompasses performance art, installation, video, pop music and experimental rips in time. Bustamante's work has been presented in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, as well as at other venues. She has performed in galleries, museums, universities and underground sites throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico and of course the United States. Her collaborations include working with such luminaries as Coco Fusco and Osseus Labrint. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship. Currently she is living in Troy, New York and an assistant professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For “The Perfect Ones”, included in this show, Bustamante collaborated with the film-maker Matt Johnstone.

Diane Gamboa is a recipient of a California Community Foundation Individual Artist
Grant, and her recent solo exhibitions include "Bruja-Ha" at Tropico de Nopal Gallery and "Chica Chic" at Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica. In the early '80s, she photographically documented the East Los Angeles punk rock scene. Throughout most of the '80s, she was associated with ASCO, a conceptual multi-media performance art group. Gamboa organized numerous site-specific "Hit and Run" paper fashion shows - created as easily disposable streetwear. The shows became quite popular and some outfits ended up in museums. During the '90s, she found herself using the tension and stress involved in the urban environment to create new works, leading her to develop a Pin Up series of 366 ink drawings on vellum as an in-depth study of male-female relationships. These works led to her "Endangered Species" series, which recreates some of the Pin Up drawings in a three-dimensional form. Many of the figures in the Pin Up drawings are covered in tattoos, which is an ongoing fascination for Gamboa. She has also been involved for more than twenty-five years in art education, ranging from afterschool programs to college and university settings.

Alma Lopez is an artist, activist and visual storyteller working in painting, photo based digital prints, and video. She is internationally recognized for her innovative digital images, which recontextualize cultural icons bringing issues of race, gender and sexuality into relationship with transnationalist myths. She holds a BA from the University of California Santa Barbara and an MFA from the University of California Irvine. She exhibits her work extensively and has received awards for her work such as the California Community Foundation Arts Funding Initiative's Individual Artist Grant, and most recently, the Astraea Visual Artist Award. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, Flash Art International, and Ms. Magazine. In 2005, she produced her first digital video documentary titled Boi Hair, and is currently working on a documentary about queer femmes.

Born in Texas and raised in the Midwest, Delilah Montoya now lives in New Mexico, the ancestral home of her mother’s family. Her work is grounded in the experiences of the Southwest brings together a multiplicity of syncretic forms and practices from those of Aztec Mexico and Spain, to cross-bordered vernacular traditions, all of which are shaded by contemporary American customs and values. Her work explores the unusual relationships that result from negotiating different ways of understanding and representing the ways of life found in the Southwest. Montoya’s many projects investigate cultural phenomena, always addressing and often confronting the viewers’ assumptions. This work is part of The Los Angeles County Museum, Smithsonian Institute, and Houston Museum of Fine Art collections. Her gallery affiliations are Andrew Smith Gallery, Photographs Do Not Bend and Redbud Gallery. Montoya is a professor of photography and digital imaging at the University of Houston.

Shizu Saldamando was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission district and received her B.A. from UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture in 2000. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2005. Her work has been exhibited in the Freeways Festival of Experimental Media Arts, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and at The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. She is the recipient of a California Community Foundation fellowship, and has worked for such organizations as Self-Help Graphics & Art, Center for the Study of Political Graphics and Slanguage Studio in Wilmington. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

CURATORS’ BIOGRAPHIES
Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006), and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996). She has written numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and visual art – including essays on artists Tracey Emin, Andy Warhol, and Los Angeles’s own Vaginal Davis. She is Associate Professor of English at U.C. Riverside, and lives in Los Angeles.

Raquel Gutierrez is the Assistant Director of the Center for Feminist Research at USC. Born and bred in the 213, Gutierrez calls herself an “indigenous Angeleno” who has worked for years as a queer arts promoter/producer, director and curator. She is also a performance artist who, on and off the page, explores the policing agents in identity politics, internalized racism, and gender enactments in an attempt to create experimental textual cultures. Gutierrez is a visual and cultural activist who wants to activate a new way of seeing our multi-layered, contradictory and celebratory selves in an often hostile world. In addition to working at USC, Gutierrez has also taught at California State University, Northridge and has regularly conducted writing/performance workshops at local colleges and universities. In 1999 she co-founded a bi-annual queer publication and organizing endeavor by and about queer women of color called Tongues. Currently Gutierrez is an active member of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, an edgy brown butch performance ensemble that has performed throughout the country. She has degrees in performance studies from New York University and journalism and in Central American studies from California State University at Northridge.

Butchlalis de Panochtitlan: The BdP Panty Splash Hour
Saturday, March 31, 2007 @ 8pm
At the Renberg Theater at the Village/Ed Gould Plaza/LAGLC

The Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, L.A.'s beloved performance banda machos, head on down the yellow brick road with The BdP Panty Splash Hour, a multimedia full-length show featuring new sketches and crowd favorites in a 1-nighter at the Renberg Theatre Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, BdP, is a sketch-driven performance/video/installation ensemble, so don’t get it twisted: Butchlalis de Panochtitlan explore identities, communities and neighborhoods these subjects claim and are claimed by. New work by the furious foursome call Chicano history with a capital "H", radical femininity, transnational desire, co-dependent deities, papi perils, butch maternity, pain sluts and bitch-hood into question the way four hot butches know how. Bringing the sexy wit live and direct with troubling and titillating images, skits and skills--ya hearrrd?

WHAT THE CRITICS & FELLOW ARTISTS SAY ABOUT BUTCHLALIS DE PANOCHTITLAN:
"BDP are voices you want in your head. Feel their heat!" - Marga Gomez
"These thug homiesexual muses are the "light that never goes out" in the dark and
resplendent landscapes of lesser Los Angeles. Pick your delicious poison or sample the whole pu-pu platter of sweet and tender machismo--from Raquelito's emo-thug impresario magic, to C-Rod's pin-up ready, pretty-boi cool, to big papi Mari's dashing demeanor (the one you DO take home to moth-er), to Nadine's "boi, interrupted" razor sharp edge... The BdP 's style and substance can't help but leave tsunami-force panty and manty splashes in its wake." - Karen Tongson, Cultural Critic (USC, English Department)

"I really think you will surpass the Beatles. Look out fab four----make way for the cockless cuatro." - Monica Palacios

-------------------------announcing//// SHARED WOMEN

opening reception:::::::: wednesday February 28th, 2007::::7-9 pm
at LACE in Hollywood

opening night performances by
Marriage, Taisha Paggett, Tri-state Area, Edie Fake & Dewayne
Sleightweight
--- interactive opportunities with Tit Pin and A.K. Burns in the
Transaction Station

artists:
A.K. Burns, A.L. Steiner, Amy Adler, Ashley Reid, Carrie Moyer, Celeste
Dupuy-Spencer,
Chicks On Speed, Daphne Fitzpatrick, DeborahSchamoni, Edie Fake & Dewayne Slightweight, Ellie Murphy, Emily Roysdon, Erica Vogt, Eve Fowler, GB Jones, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Goody-B Wiseman, Heather Cassils, James Tsang, JD Samson, Jeanine Oleson, Jennifer Reeves + M.M. Serra, K8 Hardy, Kathe Burkhart, Leidy Churchman, Lindsay Brant, Lisi Raskin & Aaron Brewer, Marriage Math Bass, Nicola Tyson, Nicole Eisenman, Paige Gratland, robbinschilds, Shannon Ebner, Sharon Hayes, Sheila Pepe, Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge, SuzanneWright, Taisha Paggett, Tara Mateik, The Third Leg, Ulrike Mueller

curated by A.L. Steiner, Emily Roysdon, Eve Fowler

Featuring the Kapitalist Kiosk- with a plethora of wowing artists multiples for sale

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
6522 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Phone: (323) 957-1777
Fax: (323) 957-9025
www.welcometolace.org

Shared Women is an exhibition that is dependent on cronyism, feminism and nepotism. We are supposed to be doing it for the love of the craft, for the love of humankind, for the love of the planet but we are not. We sleep with each other, inspire, plot, plan, respond, complain, collaborate, and analyze. We reorganize and reaffirm our histories every few years, culling histories from ‘the women’ and ‘the gays,’ from outsiders now insiders. This is a gay feminist show that picks up the tools of our mothers and refashions them to seduce and influence each other. Maybe some artists in this show have slept their way to the middle. Maybe some are using that bridge called my back, but all are creating conscientious contemporary feminist art that needs to be seen by more than the “communities” that form around alternative venues,
ideologies, and shared women. Welcome to our dirty commerce.

Where we go when Butchlalis has no home...

2007-02-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

Did you know MySpace freaks the fuck out if you do these paypal buttons anywhere on your site?? It's true and I could add this stuff onto our website but dammnit, my ATM/Debit card was lost at the Commerce Casino so the website is inaccessible for the time being. Check out the info below. If you really want to get a T-Shirt, then MySpace message us and we'll get the ball rolling.Drama, huh!?Anyway, Thanks so much for reading.

YOU WANNA BUY A T-SHIRT? WELL, DAMN, EY, NOW YOU CAN! WITH PAYPAL! $17.50 includes SHIPPING & HANDLING. T-SHIRTS COME IN ALL SHAPES & SIZES! Boy Colors are Turquoise(Small Only), Yellow (Small, Medium, Large Only), Storm Gray and White in S, M, L, XL, and 2XL. Girl colors are White and Lemon Yellow and sizes range from Extra SMALL - 2XXL.

I Need To Charge Rent...

2007-02-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

...To all the shit that squats freely in my head. Yeah that means you theme song from Hill Street Blues! Get out of my head. That means you, too, stupid Pazuzu from the Exorcist! I mean business here so if you could just move to the side and let my other thoughts help me get a jump on my day and the rest of the week, I'd absolutely appreciate it.

I wish I could have cool stuff jump into my brain and help me do a more productive dance, but alas!