(created without intention over 17 hrs by 1,097 ‘friends’)
making persimmon velvet floor length curtains for the front parlor
fantastic padded throne like chairs. It is pretty big. Free WiFi, and iced mocha
all the hula
one of my favorite Modern Loves
All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing
in my pink tutu (hope it holds up till the end!)
hoping to attract an Indian family who owns a restaurant
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing
Nails, Toes and Lunch!
Octubre, mi grupo, los peaceniks, está
Every Kramer entrance in chronological order
horrific and haunting
mention my husband’ name without my permission?
The father is such a bad liar
Angels panic. Angels lose.
10:38 am and miracle of miracles
i get a bit misty eyed
we’ve probably pissed of the Moon People with the random bombing
Testing the extent of their slavish adoration
“no. none of them loved me.”
hi sweetness-
four squash blossoms
carrot cake and it had papaya on top! You should check it out,
and is eating it in bed like what
“What is the worst smell in the world?”
gingery curd rice
I have this urge
while the biryani simmers
Tonight. Again? Always?
who remembers?
Philosopher wallpaper doesn’t scream
here now here now here now here now here now here now here
got to get my ass to the other side of town
in sting to uncover discrimination
see me run
a 5th brief to the court on Title VII successor liability
i am a strong mf!
he says ‘you don’t use the rabbit?’ and I said ‘you mean the mouse?’
Doesn’t it always come down to this…
football heartbreak
salmanila (sp)
narcissism as a defining force
We will not take this lying down.
a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe
This Friday is the National Summit on Arts Journalism, which convenes some key thinkers in the worlds of journalism and the arts, in Southern California. Ten projects that are supposed to represent promising directions for the future of arts journalism and arts criticism are being presented in front of a live audience and online. You can watch them right here. (If the links on this page don’t work, go to http://najp.org/summit/).
The times are approximate, but here’s the rough agenda (Friday, Oct. 2, 2009):
9am Intros
9:15am First five projects, including NPR’s music coverage and the Indianapolis Museum of Art
10:20am Welcome address by the NEA Deputy Chairman for Grants & Awards
10:25am Roundtable moderated by NPR’s Laura Sydell, with journalists Jeff Chang (a well-known hiphop writer) and Seth Schiesel of the NY Times
11:00am Welcome address by Geneva Overholser, Director of the USC J-School
11:05am Next five projects, including Flavorpill
12:20pm Roundtable on the business of arts journalism, with the director of the NEA Institute in Classical Music, the CEO of Salon.com, and the director of the Getty Foundation
I always find it fascinating to see how other artists create their work. Here are three things that have inspired me recently.
(If you’re reading this on Facebook or elsewhere and can’t see the videos, please go to my blog and it’ll all be clear.)
• A short video of cartoonist Alison Bechdel talking about how she created each scene in her beautiful graphic novel Fun Home (which you should read immediately, if you haven’t already done so). Her process is simply amazing:
• A thoughtful blog post by author Farai Chideya (you may have heard her on NPR) on how she wrote her rock musician novel Kiss the Sky:
• My friend Canyon Sam describing the many years of exploration, travel, rejection letters, and rewrites that it took for her to complete her upcoming nonfiction book, Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History, a book you’re going to be hearing a lot more about:
So to anyone dreaming of or working on a big project… these women did it, and you can do it too!
Sometimes I feel them now, the millions, licking at my heart. I am the god-king of their pagan sacristy, the one they worship to soothe their own pain, boredom, loneliness. Their prayers are vague and ill-defined, and if you asked them, they might deny wanting anything at all; yet they come, wanting to taste me. Singing my own songs to me, dancing my dance, they come; gazing into my mirrored lenses, they come. With flashbulbs and tears, with professions of love, with ancient gestures of praise and great wails, they come. I shelter myself with acres and magical beasts, with the innocence of children and of mothers; yet they come.
And how can I resist them? Every god needs devotees, craves their touch as a boy his father’s love. I never learned how to be just a man. I am the sacrifice they bite at with their small, human teeth. With their love, they are eating me alive, hollowing me out, and I say yes. Come; oh dance, oh come, yes.
Devoured, I will live forever on their lips.
2. Limbo
How pale the moon looked, from below. But here, up close, it is dark and pocked, shadowed, purplish brown like a bruised cheekbone. I am walking all its surfaces while I wait. Down there they are teasing my body and stories apart, dissecting me under glass, under scalpel, under spotlights. It is all familiar; nothing’s changed except that now, I am the space between the out-breath and the in-breath. I have chosen not to inhale again.
I am waiting to be buried, so that I can fly.
3. Death
God is opening the gate with one pearl-gloved hand, and angels sing like happy rainbow children, I’ll Be There. I see Mahalia and Eartha and my grandfathers, two old men leaning into each other like melody and harmony. If I had known death was only music, I would not have dreaded it so much. Do we each create the heaven we need? Still, despite the sequins and sweetmeats, the cloud-dolphins, the wings, I know already I will be restless here. I want to sink to my knees and beg, I want to say I didn’t mean it, that last great mistake. I don’t want to live forever as this porcelain boy. Let me go back, o god, let me touch the brown soil, let me try one more time to be a man.
Following up on my first post on tiara activists, I am so proud of my friend Nancy Murrell, who just gave a kidney to a stranger! She said it was no big deal and wants to encourage everyone to do it.
It’s pretty simple, really: I never loved him, never hated him. How could I? I didn’t know him.
And neither did you.
So what’s up?
I always feel confused during these big cultural moments, out of sync, cuz there’s something I’m just not getting. It might sound really cold-hearted, but honestly, I’m not trying to be a jerk. I really would like to understand how people — people I know and respect— can care so much about an event that, to me, feels so distant. (To me it even feels rather tawdry to be involved, to have this level of public engagement, in another family’s private grieving process. Particularly disgusting are his so-called friends who, in the guise of writing tributes, are revealing intimate details he swore them to secrecy about during his life… but that’s another topic.)
Maybe I don’t really know what it means to be a fan, in some profound sense. It’s almost un-American to say, but I seriously can’t think of a single celebrity whose death would make me, on a non-PMS day, weep. At most I think a public event has made me mourn a facet of myself or reflect with sadness on a time in my life passing; but in these cases I’ve been aware my emotion is all about me, not really that man in the mirror .
Love, grief: to me these are intimate emotions, waves of feeling that come to me in relation to people I know — and I don’t mean people I “feel like” I know. I mean people who know my name, too. Y’know, real people.
And mega-celebrities are not real people in our lives, however much we want to imagine they are. The great illusion of celebrity is that we’re supposed to feel intimate with these people who are actually as remote to us as the moon.
What any of us thought we knew of Michael Jackson was a public surface, a skin. Even the self that an artist expresses is just a version, not the real person. It’s hard enough to truly know the people in our lives, let alone those we encounter only through the filters of media, marketing, and stage-lights. Heck, any of us who put ourselves out in public — whether it’s a Facebook update or a book or a film — know how easily we are misunderstood, mis-read. I suspect that fame only amplifies that tendency.
So we experienced Michael Jackson’s art, yes; so we honor and remember it as a part of an important time in our lives, as culturally significant, etc. Like everyone else, I’ve been tuning back into his music, and I’m filled with admiration for his particular genius. His art is still with us, as the massive numbers of video and audio downloads over the last two days makes clear.
Still, it seems like something more than a deep appreciation for the music is creating this moment of communal grief; the last time I remember seeing something like this was with Princess Diana. (Wasn’t feelin it then, either.)
So I’m curious: Do you feel sad about his passing in the same way you would about someone you actually knew, or is ‘fan grief’ a different order of feeling altogether? Are you maybe mourning a time in your life, a part of yourself that was reflected by him or his work, a generational change? Are you swept up in the drama as if you were watching a movie and someone died?
Or something else?
What I’m not really asking is how or why Michael Jackson touched you; there’s been plenty of that. I’m more curious as to how, if you’ve been sad about his death, you make sense of having strong feelings about the death of someone you don’t know.
And of course, no one has to justify how they feel.
Tiaras are not just for birthdays and weddings and silly princess games anymore. They are for taking over the world!
1. High school elects boy as prom queen
From today’s Los Angeles Times:
Sergio Garcia, 18, spent most of his years at Fairfax High openly gay and wanted to be part of the Los Angeles school’s prom court — but not as prom king. He felt that vying for prom queen would better suit his personality, so he decided to seek that crown, running against a handful of female classmates…. Read full story.
2. (Beauty) Queen calls for gay rights in India
Former Miss Universe Celina Jaitley launched a campaign this month for gay rights in India. I couldn’t find a picture of her wearing a tiara, but this is some amazing headgear: When I openly stood up for the human rights of sexual minorities, I got a whole lot of support from people all over the world; at the same time I have been accused of being a lesbian (which is all right) and, more importantly, scorned and abused for standing up for the sexual minorities’ rights. Before I begin I would like to explain my sexuality: I am a straight woman with a whole lotta balls! Read full blog post and sign Celina’s petition for the repeal of India’s anti-sodomy law.
3. Cop dresses in drag for a cause …
and ’cause he likes it?
From the Orlando Sentinel earlier this week: Former police officer Harry Doremus, 50, walked into his veterans post wearing an evening gown slit up the side, makeup, a red wig, high heels and pantyhose [AND a tiara]. The stunt helped Doremus collect $1,000 for the fight against breast cancer, an amount he donated a week later to the Lake County division of the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure… Read full story.
4. O.T.A.
From the tiara archives (ok, YouTube), this video clip is from “The Last of the Two-Dollar Bills” and shows Wonder Woman, who is the Original Tiara Activist, using her tiara as a boomerang in order to catch Nazi war criminals.
You read it here first: It’s about changing the world, one tiara at a time.
♥ An interview w/hip hop artist Maya Azucena on the LatinoUSA radio show. Her music has its own unique sound and when the interviewer asked her about that, she said, “The thing about imitating is, if you’re an imitator, you can always only be second best… Stick to being yourself. If you’re the greatest you you can be, there’s no competition.”
♥ Re-reading the novel They Who Do Not Grieve by Sia Figiel, the first woman from Samoa to publish novels in English. I’m not yet up to full reading strength yet (I hear this is common for writers who’ve just finished a book), so I am finding it comforting to re-read books I already know. This one surprised me by being even more amazing than I remembered. So powerful and compelling: sexuality, secrets, taboos, silences & how to break them, cycles of oppression & how to break them, colonialism, home, migration… all told by really powerful, heartbreaking narrators.
♥ My dreams—always a rich well of images and life juice.
The other night I dreamed that someone was coming over to clean my house, and I was embarrassed because it was so messy: There were flower petals everywhere. I told the woman that I had intended to vacuum before she got there, and she looked at me and said, “You don’t have to vacuum, honey, that’s why we’re here.”
So I’m trying to remember that (1) help is available, and (2) even when things seem like a mess and I’m not as organized or together as I feel like I should be, it’s because there have been and continue to be an abundance of “flowers” in my life. The fifth person in a week asking me to send my bio URGENTLY, even though it’s right up there on my website? A flower. Being tired cuz I stayed up too late watching tv on hulu.com? A flower. Having a hundred emails in my inbox that I feel overwhelmed about handling and am therefore procrastinating? Flowers, flowers, flowers.
♥ My Facebook friends! OK, weird, but it feels very good to be reminded on a regular basis of the awesome community/communities that I am part of and the emotional, political, and logistical resources available to me through people I know. I’m hooked up with amazing artists and activists and people doing good work in a lot of different ways, struggling, loving their families, creating, sharing what they’re passionate about, organizing, resting, reflecting, celebrating, hurting, making change in the world… and doing it together.
♥ Bay Area poet Kim Addonizio’s book on creativity, Ordinary Genius. I first became a fan of Kim Addonizio’s writing when I reviewed her book of poems Jimmy & Rita for my Bay Area Books column in the San Jose Mercury News, way back in the olden days when newspapers actually had book review sections. Recently I went to her reading for Ordinary Genius at the Booksmith, and thought it would be just the creative spark I need to start getting interested in writing again. I like it because I can open it to a random page and find an exercise and do it quickly in a few minutes … just to feel the juices flowing.
Here’s a video of Kim talking about the book:
And here’s a little “poem” I dashed off this afternoon based on one of her suggestions (I’m calling it a “poem” in quotes because for me it’s not really a poem until I’ve had a chance to sit with it, consider the form & each word carefully, revise, decide whether it’s worthwhile. So right now it’s sort of a pre-poem, to me, like a doodle might be to a visual artist…):
I wanted to touch you, your three-
dimensional world. Against
the sphere of you I am flat,
so flat, like the earth
before Copernicus
in the days when everyone we knew
knew the same truth,
when the books were illumined
in gold. I have thousands of books within me
while you are all air,
that emptiness that spins
at the core of me, too,
& all of us
in between every molecule,
if you want to know.
You don’t. So whole alone
you don’t need me,
no slot for me in your life,
nor for anyone. I want to place my mouth on you
& breathe.
Instead I spin, going nowhere,
absorbing & repeating
the undiminished memory of your
one perfect curve.
The exercise was to look around the room, list several objects, choose two of the objects, then write about one of them being in love with the other. I chose a stack of computer CDs being in love with the yoga ball. Hmm! After I wrote it, I read, “This is an excellent exercise to do if you are in love, or have just lost a love, or are obsessed with someone who does not love you, or are lonely for someone to love.”
I was incredibly moved to watch the live stream of today’s poetry jam/slam at the White House. For 45 minutes solid I was amazed and stunned to see poets, mostly poets of color, telling their truths, naming their ancestors & deities, speaking their languages … IN THE WHITE HOUSE!
President Obama started by introducing his wife as “someone who brings a lot of poetry to my life.” Aww, how sweet is that? Then the First Lady spoke passionately of the importance of poetry and spoken word in helping to “turn the White House into the People’s House.” People telling their own stories is, she said, essential to democracy. She said she had been wanting to do this event “since Day One.” What a difference from our last presidency, when Laura Bush cancelled a poetry symposium at the White House because some of the poets were going to read pacifist poems; she said it would be “inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” Did anyone in the White House five months ago even know what “spoken word” is?
But enough of the bad ol’ days. The poets I admired today were unabashedly political, as was the act of placing these poets—voices of their People—in the seat of power itself.
◆ Mayda del Valle gave us a gorgeous and moving poem about her abuela and about faith:
I need it to reassemble myself whole from these shards of Chicago ice and island breezes so I can rewrite the songs of your silence and pain.
◆ James Earl Jones threw a monologue from Othello into the mix, and wow, what a great use of his talent. As my friend Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (an amazing performer/poet herself) commented, “this is some deep statement shit about Black masculinity in the White House right now, damn.”
◆ Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, who mixes smoothies at a juice chain store while attending my alma mater, came out strong with the opening lines:
what happens to the ones forgotten
the ones who shaped my heart from their rib cages
i want to taste the tears in their names
and built it up from there, crescendoing with phrases in Hawai’ian that made their meaning oh-so-clear. (She came up through Youth Speaks and did them proud today.)
◆ And in between there was gorgeous music by bassist/composer Esperanza Spalding as well as other musicians and spoken word artists.
How beautiful it was to hear the diversity of cadences and languages, to watch the faces and take in the voices that—finally—made sense. When June Jordan created Poetry for the People, this is what she meant; today was evidence of her legacy as much as anyone else’s. And to watch it all streaming out of www.whitehouse.gov … well, that was just magic.
Here’s hoping this is a sign of things to come from the new presidency when it comes to funding for the arts, diversity/equal opportunity policy, economic justice, and other topics of importance to the People.
Day 57 after the release of Leaving India … Time to reflect on what’s happened and what’s yet to come! I’ve toured in DC, NY, LA, and the SF Bay Area, as well as a few other spots. I’ve been thrilled with the media coverage and great reviews, learned all about Facebook and Twitter, and reached the San Francisco Chronicle review‘s Top 10 weekly bestseller list twice. More exciting events are coming up this weekend and beyond in San Francisco, as well as broadcasts in Portland and New York. Hope to see some of you!
May/June events
5/1/09 Radio: KBOO Portland, “Angry APA Minute”
APA Compass is the Pacific Northwest’s only Asian Pacific American public affairs program. They kindly invited me to do their “Angry APA Minute” segment! It’s a brief radio essay/rant reflecting, with some humor I hope, on the recent Amazon.com debacle. When: Friday, May 1, 9:00-10:00am PST (my piece will air in the last 10 minutes, approx. 9:50am). Where: Portland radio, or online Contact: Listen in the Portland area at 90.7 FM, live stream at www.kboo.fm or on Facebook, or listen later at www.kboo.fm/apacompass.
5/2/09 Berkeley: Queer & Asian conference
I’ll be the featured reader at the closing event of UC-Berkeley’s Queer & Asian storytelling conference, “Articulation: Animating Our Collective Autobiography.” Check out the website for an exciting day of workshops and stories. When: Saturday, May 2, 2009, 4:45pm-5:30pm Where: MLK Student Union, UC Berkeley Campus, 2100 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA Contact: qacon09.wordpress.com Free and open to all.
5/3/09 San Francisco: K’Vetsh reading
I’ll be a featured reader, along with Courtney Trouble, at the K’Vetsh Queer Open Mic, one of the longest running queer open mics in SF, located at the fabulous, scandalous, and intimate EROS Lounge. When: Sunday, May 3, 2009, 7:30pm – 10:30pm Where: K’Vetsh at EROS Lounge, 2051 Market at Church, San Francisco, CA Contact: 415-255-4921 Free. All genders ages 18+ welcome.
5/3/09 New York: “Shabd Star” tv show
If you’re in NY check out my interview with Ashok Vyas of ITV in “Shabd Star,” a literary program (20 minutes). When: Sunday, May 3, 2009, 3:30pm, AND rebroadcast Friday, May 8, 2009, 2:00pm Where: In Manhattan/Queens, Time Warner cable channels 77 and 501. In the Bronx, Cablevision.
5/28/09 San Francisco: Modern Times Bookstore
I’m very excited to be invited to San Francisco’s independent collective-owned bookstore. Reading, q&a, and book signing. Please come by! When: Thursday, May 28, 2009, 7:00pm – 8:30pm Where: Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 Contact: 415-282-9246, events@moderntimesbookstore.com
6/10-6/14/09 Chicago: Kriti Festival
When: June 10-14, 2009 Register now and save: Only $40 if you sign up before May 1 for an entire weekend of readings, workshops, and panels with Amitava Kumar, Bapsi Sidhwa, Romesh Gunesekera, and many other amazing writers of South Asian origin.
