30 Day Art Challenge

Friend and tribe kin Ms. Tanya B has initiated a 30 day “art challenge.” The idea is to create, experience or participate in some sort of artistic/creative endeavor everyday for 30 days, with a celebration showcase of our experiments in January. To kick it off, I’m reviving this old dusty blog!

I also sought inspiration from Audrey Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury.” In fact, I’ve often felt that it is. Even after surviving teenagehood through reading and writing poems, I’ve often struggled with feeling like my own poetry was a self-indulgence. Lorde breaks it down real quick in the first lines of her essay when she identifies poetry as illumination: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives…. For it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are- until the poem- nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”

I’m inspired to expand and color that light through which I give birth to my own growth through poetry, dance, collage, and other expressions.

Healing History Through Community Food

Brilliant! The Korean American Coalition invites the community to reflect on what has been healed (or not?) since the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings while sharing food, gardening tips and discussion of food security in LA.What a lovely model for how food can be a tool for healing and unity.

The uprisings may have been sparked by the controversial Rodney King decision in 1992, but chronic disinvestment and police abuses had a long, unpleasant history in South LA – giving residents plenty of reason to feel angry. After the riots, city officials met with representatives from the supermarket industry in particular to address a lack of service offerings in South LA, despite the huge population and need for grocery stores (obviously!) The supermarket heads say “Okay, we pledge to make a better effort to site stores in SLA.” Ten years later, researchers at the Center for Food and Justice found that there had been NO net gain of new supermarkets in the area!

This event promises to be an experience in creating new cultures. Cultures centered around sustainable practices, healthy eating, and reclamation of traditional knowledge of food production and earth-based well-being. Cultures rooted in community consciousness, creative expression, music, and skill-sharing. Community Services Unlimited Inc. has been doing this sort of grassroots food justice organizing for more than 20 years. In fact, CSU Inc was initially a project of the Black Panther Party, but has since evolved into an independent non-profit.

Now, more than ever, the crisis of the food system is garnering national and local attention from policy makers and community residents alike. While “food justice” has been an important part of environmental justice struggles, community-based initiatives and academic papers for several decades, it feels like a movement is starting to coalesce nationally. Props belong to organizations like CSU Inc who have been in the trenches dreaming and fighting for a fair and sustainable food system since before Michael Pollan and Alice Waters drew national attention to where our food comes from.

i heart these fellows

Angel Hernandez and Marvin Alvarado from Youth Radio DC send this video commentary about gay marriage. In Los Angeles, Youth Radio reporter Anne Santos discovers the Democratic candidates aren’t the awesome allies we we want them to be.

i myself have different feelings about gay marriage. color me queer, but i’m not so much for the state-sanctioned institution of marriage, fortified with a plethora of financial and psychological privileges. i wish folks who choose whatever kind of relationship – whether queer collective mixed-family living, leave it to beaver nuclear fam style, perma-single, BFF households with no kids, whatever– should be validated by society.

i feel like institutional homophobia has forced queers to the negotiating table over an issue that invokes all kind of patriarchal, middle class, citizen-oriented values: marriage as a “higher form” of relationship, “freedom to marry,” with flags waving, etc.

NO offense to my LBGTQ community organizing around this issue! i know its a strategic entry point… and i am all about strategic entry points as a place to start shifting paradigms. it’s the place where we start to push, so that more doors open- so that the conversation about concepts like family and marriage widen and break apart where they no longer serve us. the gay marriage issue is the place where we identify and combat homophobia and transphobia.

p.s. i am all for self-designed rituals (public or private) to celebrate love and connection, formerly know as “the wedding.”

the story of (some of my) stuff

when i got to my grrlfriend’s house tonight, there was a medium size box overflowing with hair products. her roommate, who is a hair stylist, left the bounty of products in the hopes that i might scour the box for something i like. i myself moved recently, and in the process i demanded my roommate at the time and my partner to force me to dispose of an absurd amount of crusty, ancient cosmetics that up until then i could not bear to part with for no other reason that i was ashamed of producing… waste. 

i’m still struggling to separate my desire to decrease the ole ecological footprint… from my knack for hoarding nasty eyeshadow. there must be a better way?

it was painful to watch the sour, second hand lip glosses from high school (no joke) make their way to the trash bin… but i knew i was kidding myself that it was some how helping the environment to store them.

tonight, my horror at the box of potential throw-aways before me wore off as soon as i realized… it was indeed a bounty of hair product delight. i don’t even use a lot of product in my hair, but my socialization around “quality,” creamy, yummy-smelling stuff is pretty deep. bath and body works’ cherry blossom shimmer body lotion?? score! achem– i mean…

plus, who among us can resist… free shit.

of course i’ll take the hair crap! i can’t imagine all these 20-something, fabulous and more than half filled bottles going to trash.

the whole affair got me thinking about the massive amounts of crap united-statians produce on a daily basis. it’s no news to any one that we are notorious wasters. but my mind has been grappling with the vast systemic nature of the whole affair.

it got me thinking about what it would take to regulate our own damn selves.