i just wanted to say that NGUZUNGUZU (sorry for those of you who are dyslexic like me and have to finger spell that everytime) are OFFICIALLY blowing up. they are now internationally world wide on tour forever so get ready to see them in every port and like opening for MIA etc. it's actually impossible to tell you all the amazing stuff they are working on right now so i suggest following their twitter. shout out to mah girl ASMA MAROOF - who is one half da DJ/producer team w daniel pindeda - extremely killing it in an extremely all-mens dudeland...
last night was our THIRD LGL LEGAL CLINIC - AHMAZING! our first real time that community members were coming in seeking services. thrill!!!! i wish i could do that like every single day all the time but actually right now i'm up at 5am to edit damelo todo (BIG NEWS TO ANNOUNCE DER TOO SOON)... kissy
on saturday between 10-15 thousand people took to the streets in LA to call on the obama administration and congress to fix broken immigration laws. no more raids, no more family separations, no more massive firings, no more unjust and unfair treatment of immigrants...
hey new york! here is an artist talk by Andrea Geyer about her eichmann trials project. i play all 6 characters, including eichmann and hannah arendt (yes??!) (above).
another report on CA prison overcrowding was just released - this one by the nytimes. most studies have focused on how prison overcrowding is suddenly an important issue because of the state's epic budget crisis. some more interesting facts: CA spends 11% of the state budget ($8 billion) on prison industrial complex. there are currently 167,000 prisoners in CA. to me, the most interesting part of this study revolves around CA's insanely high recidivism rate (that means being returned to prison after first time offense): 70 PERCENT. the highest in the nation. uh yea.
GET THIS
"California is the only state that places all prisoners on parole at release, no matter the offense ... usually for one to three years. If a parolee is arrested or fails a drug test or misses an appointment with a parole officer, the offender lands back in prison."
AND SO ON...
this debate is particularly relevant for the trans movement because a large portion of our community struggle daily with the interconnected forces of poverty, transphobia, criminalization of sex work, and so on. particularly so for undocumented folks. it's an endless chain or downward spiral however you wanna call it - and all the more within the context of CA recidivism rates...
as a side note - in Los Angeles, if you get picked up for solicitation and you have more than 4 condoms on you, it can be used against you as evidence that you are prostituting.
Alexis Giraldo's life story is a case and point. the first time Alexis went to jail was for stealing beer from a convenience store when she was a teenager. repeated brushes with the law over the years combined with the fact that she was constantly having to break the law because she is poor and trans, snowballed until one day she got arrested for a misdemeanor & parole violation. the judge sentenced her to federal prison and she ended up in Folsom State mens prison, where her cellmate repeatedly raped and abused her for 6 months. Alexis has been trying to sue the CDCR for several years, and currently her case is waiting to be heard in the 9th circuit of appeals. the state keeps postponing. in december she was arrested again for parole violation - so she's currently waiting out her time in jail. i'm having to gloss over a lot of detailz here, but in a nutshell the system is fucked. and i believe the trans movement shares a lot of demands with the prison abolition mvment. just sayin'
MEET ALEXIS
(ps google her she's like totally brilliant and famous hero etc!)
i think i posted this video on class b4 but without PIC critique so here it is again... keeps comin around
OH! and i guess they're trying to change the laws so that they don't send EVERYONE back on parole violations. that's the conclusion of the article. read it
i had a small but super meaningful breakthrough while editing damelo todo today. back in feb when i was working with matt wolf (who is now co-writer on the doc), we figured out that the moment when gonzalo ramirez died is a very significant turning point in the story. that might seem obvious to some people but i mean you have no idea how it's crazy hard it is to see the forest through the trees when yr dealing with all this material. i've been shooting and living inside this world for over two years straight.
when gonzalo actually DID die last februrary, i was so beside myself with grief it never once occurred to me to pick up a camera. i was waiting sleeplessly in the hospital waiting room with koky and javier and nicol. i remember sitting with gonzalo hours before he was taken off the breathing machine, holding his hand and watching his frail body move up and down. it was so alien and upsetting to see my friend like that. it was such a painful confusing time. there was already drama with the ramirez family. we were worried that koky wasn't going to be able to straighten out the will and inherit his half of the bar. i guess that would've be CLASSIC foreshadowing if i had even known i was making a movie at the time. so anywayz nothing is on tape.
flash forward to nowish- matt and i were trying to figure out how to represent this moment, and we were brainstorming a few creative solutions... when TODAY, i was logging old wildness performance footage- keep in mind in a totally braindead state, as i've been wading through hours and hours and HOURS of this stuff (most of it extremely crappily shot as i was trying operate a still camera, video camera, spotlight, and bartend all the same time) when suddenly i tuned into ashlands voice on the loud speaker and realized that HERE was the moment of gonzalo's death, and ashland is asking the crowd for a moment of silence. it's a PACKED house and then there is an EPIC moment of silence. and i think it actually communicates. i kind of lost my mind crying today, traumatized by having to relive that moment. but also felt awefully inspired by this whole process of documentation. i mean i had NO IDEA anyone was even filming- but i guess whoever i handed the camera to had the sense to turn it on... so now it lives forever. it's just real strange, because all these little moments when you're living them have no meaning, no accumulation. the process of making meaning through making art or film or whatever is a real trip. it's so OBJECTIFYING. but cool. anyways, who knows if that scene will even make it into the movie but it's definitely been a transformative experience to be able to go back in time so thoroughly and so deeply.
(me, NGUZUNGUZU, TOTAL FREEDOM, and Silver Platter's Koky, Javier & Nicol)
PRESENT A NEW WEEKLY THING
"OTHER PARTY"
THURSDAYS
@ JALISCO
STARTING APRIL 8TH
it's kind of a special story in case yr interested... basically Javier is organizing the whole thing. he worked out a sitch with his friends at Jalisco so that we can all work there: Koky & Javier bartending, and wildness doing the music performances etc. basically it's a dream come true for da collaboration... or at least the best we can do given the circumstances. (for the record Silver Platter did invite us to continue doing Wildness but we declined in solidarity with our friends who lost their jobs)
unfortunately because the public at large will not know the detailz, i anticipate some characterization of our event as gentrifying another Mexican gay bar. so we'll have to figure out a way to communicate explicitly our relationship to Jalisco when we start promoting. for those of you who are reading it here first hopefully you've been following enough to know the difference. i wouldn't consider doing a party at Jalisco especially except now we are being invited- not that that eliminates all the complications, but basically we plan to work through these challenges the same way we did with wildness. i'm also hoping our event will generate some income for Koky & Javier, who have both been unemployed since February... (oh yea there will be a small cover and that's why...)
the above photo was taken of Gonzalo (left) and Koky (right) when they were boyfriends in the mid-90s. when Gonzalo Ramirez died last year he willed his half of the Silver Platter to Koky. unfortunately because of an ownership dispute with the Ramirez family - Koky is being denied his gay inheritence. he is hoping to settle with family at some point so that he can start a new gay bar somewhere else. no doubt we're in it for the long haul...
at the premier of Damelo Todo 13-min extended teaser in FUSION lgbt people of color film festival...
i hate to say it but CLASSY huh? flacid trumpets sounding
funny i didn't notice until i posted how much we wildness can't (or CAN???) handle our shit in professional press situations - see post before (image taken for AnP Quarterly mag ahem i wonder why the editors decided not to include)
weird little cloud called wildness may be drifting towards a new home!!!
JAVIER (center left) has been in talks his friends at Mexican gay bar Jalisco downtown. apparently they worked out a deal where we could throw a party and he and Koky could work on that night bartending! right now they are totally unemployed so this is fucking righteous. i think i will DIE of sweetness if the whole crew can migrate over and start something new together... i mean really when i think about it it's the way it should BE. dream come true if it happens, but we're still working out the detailz... stay tuned very likely for thursdays.
TOMORROW NIGHT MAJORZ - WE'RE ALMOST TOO UNDERGROUND FOR OUR OWN GOOD - ALL NITE WEIRDO PARTY - FREE B4 2AM - PO PO (MAD DECENT) ME (TOTAL WEIRDO) NGUZUNGUZU (TOTAL COOLIOS) KUTMAH (SOME DUDE) DVA DAMAS (RESEARCHABLE) MORE AND MORE AND MORE MADNESS - RSVP TO GET PASSWORD AND ADDRESS
today in a long sesh of sound-mixing damelo todo teaser with suzanne mejean and logan kibens then i'm picking up dean spade (!!!) from the airport and headed straight to LGL core collective meeting. we'll b processing the outcome of our second monthly legal clinic. dying to get back into it after 2 months of being spread all over the east coast... N THEN GROAAAAAN TONIGHT!
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ IS READING AN EXCERPT FROM HER SHORT STORY "DAMELO TODO" UPON WHICH MAH NARRATIVE FILM IS BASED...
Brochas y voces de la mujer centroamericana en Los Angeles THURSDAY 7PM AT 257 SPRING ST. LOS ANGELES
“Brushes and Voices: Celebrating Central American Women in Los Angeles” will be the first of its kind to celebrate Central American women and their achievements in Los Angeles. Open and free to the public, the night will be filled with an art exhibit by Cecilia Mármol and Alicia Siu, a documentary clip of panamanian film-maker Anayanci Itzel Prado’s most recent work, a theatre piece by Raquel Gutiérrez, poetry and short story readings by author Rosanna Pérez, professor Alicia Estrada, professor Leisy Abrego and PhD student Oriel María Siu, music, words by Garifuna activist and cultural promoter Cheryl Noralez, and by Rosamaría Segura, author of the recently published book, “Central Americans in Los Angeles”. The purpose of the event is to honor these community voices and “brushes” as we also commemorate all Central American women’s daily struggles and lives in the city of Los Angeles. The MC of the night will be poet and novelist Oscar René Benitez. A night of community and sharing, the event will be hosted by Lot 44 Coffee Bar and the Lola Mora Gallery.
of all the endless webwide world of information sailing through my peripheral vision (email inbox)
things like this catch my attention.
'Martha Rosler reads Vogue' looks at the luxury magazine and the veils through which the amorous glances of commodities charm and fascinate with their illusions: Identification, aspiration, wealth, social superiority, class appreciation of the finer things in life, all these are imbricated in an orgy of bourgeois values; the enduring symptom of women's asymmetric relation to power insistently realized through the private world as to-be-looked-at-ness and being-for-others; the elliptic worlds of fashion, art, media, entertainment and the nexus of money; the co-dependency of the artist producing recondite commodities, possession of which bestows distinction within this realm. The works in the show by Alison Jones (ink drawings), Martha Rosler (video) and Milly Thompson (prints) span 3 decades. The show reflects on post-feminism as anti-feminism where invidious forms of oppression are obsequiously returned through the discourse of the free market and consumer culture. New forms of individuality and self-objectification concur with the old forms of the to-be-looked-at-ness of femininity.
the nerdy historian in me cannot resist but ask - could this be signs of another friedian moment?
