Well, my dear readers, I have been slacking on blogging because I have been stalking a social life. I think I have it effectively cornered and I am figuring out how to feed it. Here are some morsels I have thrown at it that were tasty:
The Monterey Bay Aquarium - I went with friends to grovel before the Cthulic cuttlefish, but they did not demand a sacrifice... this time.
The Ruby Room - I've been trying to log hours under the red lights to get my hipster quotient up out of the negative numbers. Some mighty dykey bartenders, who (bonus!) are also usually my neighbors in East Oakland.
Exodus - I was honored to organize a reading/ performance thingy with this incredibly talented, young and powerful lady hiphopster, the author of these words (the poem "My dinner plate/ grandma's back yard"):
Simple greens
Verses frozen beans
Corn meal
Knee- d- ed into corn bread
Light Mango spread
On Banana bread
Eat your spinach like your mother said
And charge your chard
Paint the rainbow with your squash
And cry like the Nile with
Saboas
Lentil jump around in my
Arroz con pollo
Tauro, Tauro, Tauro
Ahora usteds....
Con Orchata
Simple greens
Verses frozen beans
The last of the mo-ji-cama'
Dance the rain dance in my tang
Pina y pina
The ripe co-co-nut on the floor of the cut little hut
Simple greens
Verses frozen beans
Don’t taste like the skillet of my grandma hands
In her southern ways
Too much pork fat in those days
Caused her to sing simple
Songs
'Bout simple green verses
Frozen beans
In California....
Rock on, Exodus!
Another tasty tidbit: the PornOrchestra -- a recent development in the East Bay, they improvise music to bad mainstream porno flicks. I'm afraid I have to say it is an idea that is better on paper: in practice I found the music and the porn both a little tedious. The highlight was a 70's porno with the female figures blotted out, and some particularly thoughtful jazzy instrumental accompaniment. If you want a taste of this sort of thing, improving/ innovating soundtracks to original film is much better done by the Sprocket Ensemble. But hey! I got out of the house, down to that amazing Oakland cultural institution the Parkway Speakeasy Theater with all my fingernails and toenails painted (all the same color purple- I'm such a vamp!) and a nice slutty outfit to go with. I even had a date.
The SF Lesbian & Gay Film Festival -- which I stupidly eschewed for years because they don't have "bi" and "trans" in the title of the festival -- and the National Queer Arts Festival -- hopefully these two festivals will keep my social life fat and happy for the rest of the month. The only drawback is the initial immobilizing shock of sudden immersion in seas of queer people (including exes who I enjoy not seeing) that exhaust one with their combination of unfathomable optimism with unfathomable cattiness. You know, there you are, crying at a touching low-budget movie short about coming out to your family and someone behind you says "that is so GAY." I mean, I'm glad we're reclaiming "gay" as an invective for our own saccharine white-washing tendencies, but really. A little after-school-specialness isn't going to make queers irrelevant to the counterculture.
Or maybe it will. At an event Saturday Kate Bornstein gave a heady lecture about the poisonous nature of assimilation that seemed very old (can I say retro-90's yet?) which was followed, as if to illustrate the point, by a slide show by some ladies who have bought a farm in the country and got married there (and wanted to flaunt a little apolitical propertarian privilege). Going from Kate Bornstein to the married farmers gave me some serious vertigo: one, throwing her speech's pages angrily on the floor, shaking a fist at the violating nature of marriage constructs, and the other waving her spotless (still price-tagged) chrome hay hooks at the audience, boasting about how she had actually figured out how to use them to move hay. *I* never had hay hooks. I got hay burn all over my arms and legs every spring, loading hay with just gloves. God how we hated the dilettante cityfolk who fled NYC to the far reaches of the north to recover their sense of humanity by buying shiny toys and white-washed fences that would be auctioned and abandoned after five years. They never rode their horses enough to warrant owning the purebreds they invariably bought. But yet, at the end of the night, I still had more to talk about with the farmer wives than the communist demagogue. These awkward social mixes are just a necessary hazard of social life husbandry, I guess.
