sadness fort/sad space/chapel
4th annual very queer variety show, gainesville fl, march 30, 2013
we had initially planned to make a 3-chamber structure with a tunnel connecting 2 small (camping) tents but there were major space limitations. also we were concerned about access for bigger and/or disabled bodies so the entrance could be wide and not require stooping or crawling so instead we used this awning and the tent poles, which created a nice curved shape. five sheets connected with safety pins.
kyla cut the words out of butcher paper and fixed them to a bookshelf-structure. we filled the back of the bookshelf with purple and white christmas lights. the phrase is from my printmaking series of melancholy motivational phrases. prints with phrases on them, photos of bodies, lace, pinecones, and shells are hanging from the walls and ceiling.
we had begun working on audio and video elements, like recordings of ourselves crying, but didn’t get everything together in time to include them— also it would have been too loud to hear, i think, because the show and afterparty were loud, and then tent was right by the dominatrix game. i made a video of some of my OCD rituals that would have been included, too. maybe in the second iteration of the fort.
there were a lot of different conceptual axes (w/e— i literally don’t know how to write about Art) like creating the sadness of a temporary space you want to stay, or a place to exchange some of your sadness for someone else’s. as an introvert/highly anxious person parties are kind of difficult for me, and i know i’m not the only person who either drinks too much quickly or who leaves soon after arriving because of social feelings. in some ways the fort functioned as a quiet place people could go sit with their friends during the party. in college i used to get drunk and fall asleep under tables, and the fort was in some ways an outgrowth of that tendency.
i think/hope it functioned as a visual reminder that not everyone is a scantily clad pro-sex performance artist, and that being uncomfortable or feeling ambivalent or alienated in queer space doesn’t make someone oppressive or conservative.
j and kyla and i ate pizza in the fort, then i fell asleep there. i woke up to the sound of two people kissing and rode my bike home.
<3 I love this so much.
Could you please make me a tumblr that’s just pictures of your hair looking great over & over again? BECAUSE I LOVE YOUR HAIR A LOT.
<3 thanks! I actually do have a tumblr for my hair? I started it to try and document what different (mostly homemade) treatments do to my hair. I don’t update it that much though:
http://curlandnail.tumblr.com
Proof that I am not always a grump/my hair is cute.
Apparently, I’ve garnered a reputation at the bar I work at for being the bartender you shouldn’t cross. Which pleases me because typically I am so saccharine sweet in a work environment that I completely efface myself. Last week, this butch touched my chest totally casually, expecting it to be no big deal, and I snapped “Ce n’est pas parce que t’es butch que tu peux te permettre de me toucher comme ça.” The room went quiet and I didn’t see her for the rest of the night. She sent me a facebook apology which I have decided not to respond to, because I finally value myself enough to know that what she probably wants is for me to assuage her guilt so she won’t feel so awkward the next time we share space. Sometimes I think about the number of times I have been touched, grabbed or groped without my consent in queer spaces and the only way I can cope with the depressing figure is to make my discomfort palpable, visible.
The first Day's Night had come — And grateful that a thing So terrible — had been endured — I told my Soul to sing — She said her Strings were snapt — Her Bow — to Atoms blown — And so to mend her — gave me work Until another Morn — And then — a Day as huge As Yesterdays in pairs, Unrolled its horror in my face — Until it blocked my eyes — My Brain — begun to laugh — I mumbled — like a fool — And tho' 'tis Years ago — that Day — My Brain keeps giggling — still. And Something's odd — within — That person that I was — And this One — do not feel the same — Could it be Madness — this?
-Emily Dickinson, from fascicle 15, the Curious Wine fascicle. Johnson transliteration: 410.
http://inamidst.com/dickinson/f15/
———-
I am going to be that girl and post this poem and read it aloud to myself over and over again cuz actually I do think my life depends on it today. Eerie resonances: the way Emily Dickinson writes to her Soul as if it is a person a separate person, the way some traumatized part of myself addresses the rest of me as a “you.”
dystopic on 616
i need to take a shower. i’m troubled by
increasingly distorted fanfictions, psychotic or melancholy,
with the loss of canon. i keep thinking there is a cure
for being awake that doesn’t involve fairies, pot or poutine.
i need to go to school. i am involved in
a memory relapse; i am particular about insults
i am aware of the i and troubled by it, possible worlds’
inflection, inflecting an i that leans towards
smothering, then purges. to generalize then, gross
conformity haunts narrower days in an inconveniently belated
montreal.
—Trish Salah (found here: http://www.blissfultimes.ca/salah.htm)
She was “beautiful as the flame of her thought,” to her daughter Ina. Her husband the poet, intellectual, and mayor of Fort-de-France Aimé Césaire wrote of her: “Ingenuous flames you who lick a rare heart”. André Breton, interned in Martinique on the way to New York, described her femine beauty “which has never appeared to me more dazzling than in a face of white ash and ambers.” Suzanne Césaire burned. And she could write: “Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.”
"I am not writing just to give a message, even though in my writings and my films I am always concerned with something that is very specific. For example, the subject that you have deliberately decided to focus on would be the site around which your energy would deploy. But, on the other hand, the subject is not all that there is in writing, and in filmmaking. One should always offer the reader and the viewer something else than just the subject. And that something else has to do with writing itself and with the tools that define your activities as a writer or a filmmaker. By focusing on these, you also offer the reader or the viewer your social positioning-how you position yourself as a writer and a filmmaker in society. So these are the issues that I immediately face in writing and in filmmaking."
— -Trinh T. Minh-ha in response to the interview question “How do you feel that writing and film differently serve the needs of your message?”
Full text of interview here:
http://pages.emerson.edu/organizations/fas/latent_image/issues/1993-12/print_version/trinh.htm
"For that reason, Detroit carries enormous symbolism. The way we treat this chronically impoverished, mostly-black city is a reflection of the way we treat America’s most underprivileged. Governor Snyder has decided to effectively depose Detroit’s elected leaders and has dismissed the suggestion that anyone should open their pocketbook to help the city recover. Not only that, he has done it with widespread public acquiescence. What does that say about us?"
— The Arithmetic of Desperation in Detroit » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names (via iinventedeverything)
(via doskapozora)
ed: apparently my source fucking edited the letter for “untimely statements” or some shit— which makes no fucking since given the emphasis on how cool this lady was given her position in history. i can’t find the original! whatever. still interesting i guess.while researching shit for my essay i found this letter, written in 1972, by Anne Braden. I dunno, I guess I just think it’s interesting— I dunno if I’ve ever encountered anyone mentioning her, but she writes in this letter is so important as a history document and still relevant today. When people give me shit about being black and identifying as a feminist by totalizing all feminist organizing by projecting these weird grand narratives that appeal to my identity onto *ALL FEMINISM* I wanna whip this shit out on them. Yeah, a lot of feminists sucked, a lot of the analysis sucked, but there’s some amazing gems hidden in history, too, and I mostly encounter these arguments re: feminism specifically— people hardly ever use this line of argumentation as aggressively with other shit i rep. Anyway— here’s the letter:
I believe that no White woman reared in the South – or perhaps anywhere in this racist country – can find freedom as a woman until she deals in her own consciousness with the question of race. We grow up little girls – absorbing a hundred stereotypes about ourselves and our role in life, our secondary position, our destiny to be a helpmate to a man or men. But we also grow up White – absorbing the stereotypes of race, the picture of ourselves as somehow privileged because of the color of our skin. The two mythologies become intertwined, and there is no way to free ourselves from one without dealing with the other.
The awareness never comes easily – and perhaps it comes to each of us in a different way. Perhaps for my generation it was a bit easier – when the mythologies were acted out more obviously and more crudely than today.For me, the awareness began 26 years ago in a courtroom in Birmingham, Alabama. I was 22, a young newspaper reporter, covering the courthouse. That day, a young Black man was being tried – not for rape, but something called “assault with intent to ravish.” A young White woman testified that he passed her on the opposite side of a country road and looked at her in an “insulting” way. He was sentenced to 20 years.I was appalled by the case. Torn by what was happening to the Black man. But torn, too, as I watched the White woman. She appeared to be very poor, but she had obviously dressed in her best – and for that day she was queen in the courtroom. The judge, the prosecutor, her father who told of her fright when she came in from that walk – all rallied round to defend her honor.Later that day, I told the prosecutor I thought the conviction and sentence had been terribly unfair. “Now don’t you worry your little head about things like that,” he said. “As long as I’m prosecutor in this county, we’re going to protect our women.”
