CLASS: February 2011

Feb 23, 2011

getting ready

i just found these cuuute gianmarco lorenzi ripoffs at chinese laundry - needed new dancing shoes for our

NEW PARTY THIS TUESDAY.

i just made soup for my new collaborator crew kim anh (booby trap) aaron castle (rhonda) and total freedom (mustache/grown) to discuss how it's all going to go down... the bar is giving us a cut of their sales, which means our event can be FREE yay! we also bargained down their drink prices - $5 well $3 shots all night bottle service etc etc... it's that subtle balance between needing to keep the thing sustainable, but also making it as welcoming and inclusive as possible for our friends. bottom line: we CAN party and dance, which means a lot! you'd think there wouldn't be much to it, but it's actually pretty hard to achieve, getting all the elements right... it feels really good to be hashing details - like finally ready to think about crafting new space. i've been (we've been) NEEEEDING. TO. DANCE. CHAMBERS is at this funny "developed" downtown joint called the CROCKER CLUB- inside of an old fully restored bank vault. the regular crowd is like, bankers i think. but we have a vision for transforming it, we're bringing our own laser beams. it's gonna be classy. and messy ;)

ALSO GETTING READY FOR

LGL is about to have it's first MOBILE LEGAL CLINIC!!!! we are piloting the first one at Friends Community Center. i have NOT been updating enough about LGL ;) there has been waaay to much going on with us over the past couple months! for one thing, we lost our space next door to silver platter.

saaaaad!

but everything comes to an end.

i think it's actually been a really good thing for our organization because now we will be roaming to different spaces where the trans community is already gathering - like tagteaming onto support group meetings and stuff - and probably be able to reach a lot more people that way. we are also again reconfiguring our mission and body. one of the scary cool things also about deciding not to incorporate as a non-profit is that we can continually reassess and redefine. i must say over the past couple months a lot of things have not been working. but that's also the pain and gain of doing this work. people gotta believe. so we're going to pilot the new clinic and see what grows.

Feb 21, 2011

the story behind the WILDNESS movie title

for those of you who are interested, here is a little more information about the evolution of the WILDNESS MOVIE title...

in a nutshell: the original title (from 2008) was LA BIENVENIDA. this past year, the working title has been DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything), with WILDNESS as a potential alternate. Somewhere along the way during the process of editing, we discovered that the more appropriate title would be WILDNESS- but we are only finally announcing it now, because we just spent the past 6 months getting feedback from different community members, specifically about the title and the roughcut. when we felt like we had enough information to stand behind this decision, we announced it. i believe it's potentially a controversial title, because it raises important issues about representation that are at the heart of the film. so in other words, WILDNESS is: the same film, same issues, same story, new title.

a little more backstory about where DAMELO TODO (the title) comes from: in august '09 i approached writer/performer raquel guiterrez about writing a script for a narrative sequence of the movie. i gave her a description of a character, which was based on a recording of FLAWLESS SABRINA doing an "energy read" (channeling/remembering the past) at the Silver Platter.

Sabrina is one of our spiritual leaders ;) she has been performing and organizing shows and fighting in the streets since the late 1950s. she's a living work of art. you can read about her everywhere ;)

when Sabrina walked into the Silver Platter, she remembered meeting a regular there in 1965:

SABRINA: I think that she had the power to be understood, and I think that she was grounded, and I think that she not only had the integrity of knowing that things should be made better, as opposed to just being angry about it, like most of us were, and I think that she just you know took it on, and chewed her way through the problems. That's what I think... that's what it think. I think you know, somebody has to raise the fist first, and it seems to me like she was the gang leader. Yeah.
WU: And she was here?
SABRINA: She was a regular here. Yeah, she was a regular here.
WU: Do you remember her name?
SABRINA: That's what I'm trying to think of... “Blondie” comes to mind, but that's not right... She was blonde. Yeah, she was blonde, she was good lookin, she was tough as nails, steel trap mind. Very nice, wonderful person, I mean really nice person. But when she got her dander up, there was no stoppin' that chick. And she was very very good at making the other people understand... And there was a gal out of this bar that should be researched, should be documented. Yeah, one of the people who changed the world. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s where you get the power. You can feel the power in this space [gestures]. All those ghosts are still here.

so i gave raquel that transcript... and raquel wrote a GORGEOUS story that we eventually turned into a narrative film!

so here is our "blondie" character!

raquel named her RUBIA and she is played by yasenia geitan, who is one of the geishas from the weekend show.

as time went on and the editing process really took over, i had to let go of all my preconceived notions of what i wanted the movie to be in order to find the story... and eventually the DAMELO TODO material kind of seceded, and is now its own short narrative film! we will hopefully be sharing it with the world very soon... ;)

i would also like to say more about the potential "controversy" of the wildness title - and how i've been thinking through that one - but i will save it for another day xx

Feb 20, 2011

DAMELO TODO TITLE CHANGE

so after a long long time of sweating this out - i am here to say that the new official title of DAMELO TODO is

WILDNESS

we arrived at this decision after many months of editing, and struggling to discover the real story of the film. for those of you who don't know (and for those who can appreciate!) editing a documentary is like finding a needle in a haystack - the majority of time is spent in the cutting room trying things out- and FAILING ;) BUT! it makes the eventual success of storytelling all the more rewarding...

when i started making this movie 3 years ago, i thought it was going to be "about" the Silver Platter. I saw myself (and my Wildness friends) as being outside of that community - but as time went on, and our communities grew together, i realized that the most important challenge for the film was to find a way to talk about the connection that we all shared with each other. so calling the film WILDNESS feels like a way to be most honest about my relationship to making this thing. i realize it potentially raises questions about representation, and i want to have that dialog with all of yall, because i believe it's the harder one to have - AND ULTIMATELY hopefully the film will allow you to come to your own conclusions.

i also just did an interview for ORIGINAL PLUMBING that talks more about this stuff if you're interested check it out...

so thanks! LOTS more news on the way on that front ;)

(silver platter photo by paul monroe)

Feb 15, 2011

3-yr anniversary of wildness

today wildness would have been 3 years old...! it's amazing to reflect back on how much has changed in a year - and at such an incredible moment in time.

update about the movie: we are so close to done we can TASTE it.

in the process i have humbly learned that voiceover does not necessarily = authority. sometimes it's necessary to OWN UP to, and be able to SPEAK TO the images you are showing. it gets real REAL.

RESPONSIBILITY REPRESENTATION.