Anatomy of a piece of crush art: paper, envelopes, stickers, pens, stamps, random things.

For who? I especially like to send  crush art to:

1. Crushes. This one is obvious but worth stating. I might actually never do anything but crush on said person, but that alone inspires and is worth making art over.
2. Friends. If people I barely know who impress me get my time and attention, how much more do my beloved and brilliant accomplices and partners in action deserve crush art? Lots, that’s for sure. I accept friend crush art and I send friend crush art, for the record.
3. Dates. People who I’ve already wooed using crush art [and other methods] still get crush art! Water the garden, people. It’s not enough to just plant the flowers and walk away.

Anatomy of a piece of crush art.

1. Gathering materials — what does this person make you think of? What would make them smile to see written down? What can you pad and fit into an envelope? Do you even have an envelope or will you have to make one? I have a gathering place in my room where I place things I know I will mail. It’s like a little altar to the love I have for all the amazing folks I know and it makes me super happy to look at it.

Things to go IN the art!

1. Assembly & Content– don’t forget to write something fun / sexy / smart / funny / whatever your heart tells you to on something. Layering items inside items can be fun, and also a way to keep things from getting smashed in the machine that is the USPS.
2. Sealing– this is a spiritual practice, for me. Am I truly done? Have I said everything I want to? Should I fill this with glitter or more comics with the lines changed first?
   

   Are you ... SURE you're DONE?

3. Delivery– you have three options:
   1. USPS: Tape that shit up, double-check your zip code and postage & just hope for the best!
   2. Punk Mail: give to a hopefully trustworthy friend to deliver in person while on their travels.
   3. Handoff: give it to the person yourself. Positive: seeing the look on their face! Negative: it’s a little less magical than the surprise effects in the other two methods.

Delivery method? The HANDOFF

Special considerations

I like to use one of two psychological tactics:

1.  Surprise: hey! I wrote down your address in the morning/at the meeting/some other sneaky way! While this can cross into sketchy territory, I’m hoping you don’t do that. Surprise mailed crush art might not be technically and formally consentual, but it usually isn’t creepy. Don’t be a dirtbag and ruin something beautiful.
2. Tease with the impendingness of the mailed crush art. Hey, I have something for you. Hey, I saw this thing and thought of you. Hey, I tagged you in my instagram feed. Both are totally savory [but frankly I think I prefer to surprise -- and be surprised].

Return Address: Just, always include it. That’s how you get return mail, people. And how shit you didn’t put enough postage on gets back to you.

Outcomes.

Ahh, the joy of utilizing recycled paper, dollar-store stickers, hoarded treasures and ephemera, markers and post-its expropriated from past employment, and a bit of creativity to put together packages for beloveds and people you frankly don’t know as well as you want to.

Folks: Email, texting, even hanging out does not compare to a package with a letter that’s also full of gathered small bits and pieces, special, all for you. A partner of mine excels at this and its one of the most awesome things she brings to the world of people around her.

And, just this week while writing this, I received an unexpected crushy mail art package that made my day. It had a VAN PIN, glitter and earthy/natural items in the box, and a letter in the shape of a paper airplane. Just…wonderful.

That's a tiny VAN PIN in the mail art I received this week. Do I WIN or what?

But — even if I did’t get magical and random deliveries of crush art in the mail as much as I do — making and sending it Feels So Good. Don’t just rely on email and texting, people. Woo better – do it in paper.

*No really, wasn’t this winter extra-brutal? I GAY SHAME this past winter for it’s extreme austerity measures on the spirits of me and so many of us. Luckily the last month and especially today’s new moon are healing. But, really, I’d take unexpected crush art over most things any day. 

Saturday 5/4, 7pm @ Bluestockings: JACKS McNAMARA’s INBETWEENLAND book launch

Join us at Bluestockings for a night of queer reading & resilience to celebrate the launch of Icarus Project co-founder Jacks McNamara’s first book, Inbetweenland. Featuring readings by Jacks, Victor Tobar, and myself.

Preview some of Jacks’ gorgeous writing: http://ashley-mcnamara.net/category/text/writing/poetry
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/157687084399863

Sunday May 5, 8pm @ Branded Saloon: Opentoe Peepshow queer salon #7

Sunday May 5 at 8pm, come to Branded Saloon [in Brooklyn at 603 Vanderbilt Ave, 11238] to see new art work by: Tennessee Jones, Amber Dawn, Nicole Myles, Katia Perea & Zavé Martohardjono
Bios on all the artists are here: http://www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com/?p=500
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/110293645840847/

TEN REASONS TO SEE ALL THE QUEER PERFORMANCE SHOWS IN NYC THIS WEEKEND

10. Because it’s not every weekend that you can be part of recurrent smart queer audiences in a not-loud / intoxicated situation. Wanting to cruise? Wanna talk to someone you’re crushing on? A show like this is the place.

9. Touring is hard as shit and if you go in person and listen and applaud, it makes it a little less hard — and all these are touring shows.

8. There are so many creative and non-didactic gender expressions happening this weekend it might actually negate all the badly-done poetry and drag you’ve ever had to witness in your life.

7. Annie Danger has lavaliers for Fully Functional!! Those beasts are expensive so going helps make it worth her time in getting it.

6. Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon came all the way from Canada and crossing borders sucks.

5. When you have gay descendants, you can tell them about the time you saw 17 brilliant queer performance artists LIVE in one weekend.

4. You could decide that seeing every show is your own form of endurance art, and have a *meta* performance art experience.

3. Sister Spit via Michelle Tea has been doing this show over 16 years. Ivan and Rae have been collaborating for 7 years. Heels on Wheels has been touring for 4 years. Fully Functional is on year 2. That’s 29 years of touring NOT EVEN INCLUDING all the other work all these artists have done. What have you done for 29 years? Aren’t you really pretty good at it?

2. Stories told by queer folks are fucking important because they push back on hegemony and make visible the breadth of our magical lives. And these four shows present stories told sooooo well.

1. There is nothing that compares to the emotional experience of live performance. Not a video. Not a Facebook event comment. Not a tweet. NOTHING. Live performance is what it is because it happens only once that exact way.  The spirit of the audience is part of the magic, so go, go, go!

So, here are your options:

HEELS ON WHEELS GLITTER ROADSHOW [site]
Thursday 4/11 @ Stonewall Inn, 9pm, 21+, $5-15 sliding scale
Friday 4/12 @ The Spectrum, 10pm, all-ages, $5-15 sliding scale

FULLY FUNCTIONAL CABARET [site]
Friday 4/12 @ Barnard College, 8pm, all-ages, free [do-it-all tip: head to Heels on Wheels at The Spectrum after--you can totally make both shows!]

GENDER FAILURE (Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon)
Friday 4/12 & Saturday 4/13 @ Dixon Place, 10pm, all ages, $12-18 [get tix]

SISTER SPIT: NEXT GENERATION [site]
Sunday 4/14 @ New Museum, 3pm, all ages, $12 [get tix]

is a queer performance art cabaret of radical extravagance and thought-provoking glamour. Our fearless performers rampage across the femme-inine spectrum serving up poetic theatre, hilarious performance art, and rocknroll you can sink your heels into! The four touring artists are: Shomi Noise [NYC], The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins [SF], Heather Acs [NYC], and Damien Luxe [NYC] + special local guests at every show!

DONATE!

We’re fundraising for sustainability and to keep our glitter sparkling — if you donate by March 20, you have the option of getting VIP presage tix to our shows! Or a carabeener cup, or a bondage lesson from me… please $upport! http://igg.me/p/356603/x/61736

Connect with the Heels! Tour Calendar, Artist Bios, Glamour shots: http://www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com // facebook.com/heelsonwheelsroadshow // @HOWroadshow // tumble: http://mfaindiy.tumblr.com/post/44205743719/heels-on-wheels-glitter-roadshow-is-a-queer

ABOUT THE GLITTER ROADSHOW PERFORMANCES

Shomi Noise plays guitar and reads from her zine series “Building Up Emotional Muscle,” the story of her journey as a Bolivian immigrant navigating U.S. culture and finding herself through alternative music scenes. Damien Luxe invites the audience to participate in a satirical and sincere aerobics session for all bodies about dissociation and survival (complete with spandex and sparkle!). Heather Acs uses theatrical storytelling and scientific theory to explore the formation of stars and her working-class, Appalachian roots. Adelaide Windsome [video] is a fabulist storyteller and puppeteer who queer-ifies fairy-tale structures into trans-narratives. The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins uses dance, movement, and performance drawing from traditional burlesque techniques to explore herstories of her working class, femme, sexworker ancestors, while interrogating the exotification of feminine bodies, race, and of exotic dance itself.

DATES FOR TOUR

March 22: LA @ Pieter — Doors 8p / Show 9p / all-ages
March 24: San Francisco @ El Rio — Doors 9p / Show 9:30p / 21+
March 27: Olympia WA, Stonewall Youth / 3:30-5:00pm / all-ages
March 28: Olympia, WA @ The Northern — Doors 8p / Show 9p / 11p dancing! / all-ages
March 29: Seattle, WA @ The Cockpit w/ Butch Queen — Doors 8p / Show 9p / 11p dancing! / all-ages
March 30: Portland, OR @ The Local Lounge — Doors 8p / Show 9p / 11p dancing! / 21+
March 31: Portland, OR @ RECESS / Workshop 4p / Show 7p / all-ages
April 1: Vancouver, BC @ ArtBank — Doors 8 / Show 9 / all ages
April 3:  TBA
April 4: Eugene @ TBA
April 6: Oakland, CA @ SoleSpace — Doors 8p / Show 9p / 11p dancing! / all-ages
April 7:  TBA

April 11: New York, NY @ Stonewall Inn — Doors 8p / Show 9p / 11p dancing! / 21+
April 12: Brooklyn, NY @ The Spectrum — Doors 9p / Show 10p / Midnite dancing! / all-ages

ABOUT HEELS ON WHEELS ORGANIZATION

Heels on Wheels has been presenting cultural events for four years, and is a NYC-based group of queer, interdisciplinary performing artists who create performance-based art and community events that have a feminist and radical agenda, are produced from sites of femme/inine-positive queer embodiment, and reveal the power in under-represented communities.

Heels on Wheels is an all-femme-powered working-class led, multiracial, and anti-oppressive-focused arts and cultural organization who showcases live performance and offers artistic and social justice workshops by diverse, queer feminine-spectrum artists who work in theatre, music, multimedia, performance and literature.

Damien at 24: Once a pirate queen, always a pirate queen...

Folks it’s February and I, like surely some of you, failed to get a vacation. FMML.* So, I made a music mix for the season, and planned some cool art to share: at least there is some hope in the future…

Sunday 3/3 7pm — Opentoe Peepshow #6 @ The Village at Guerje
Featuring Silas Howard, Cristy Road, Lotus Eater Machine and Merrie Cherry. 7:30 showtime $3-$10. Details: www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com/2013/02/opentoe-peepshow-6/

Thursday 3/7 7pm — Raised Fist Slideshow @ The Forest of the Future
Remember how I used to hang out? That was before graduate school. FMML. But, I’m sharing a slideshow about my rad research on the history of the raised fist image, before Kate Huh shares photos from her g-d incredible archive. This is at the Forest of the Future, which you might want to be checking out anyway due to all the amazing programming: http://forestofthefuture.org/.
Also, I made a special raised fist poster, for fisting You’re welcome.

Saturday 3/9 1am — Hey Queen: PIRATE QUEEN @ Public Assembly
If you ever wondered what a combination music industry liberation/parkslopedyke-

My Cunt Is A Muscle The Size of Your Fist, Damien Luxe 2013

[print pdf] My Cunt Is A Muscle… is based on the wonderful Your Heart Is a Muscle 1999 woodcut by Dalia Sapon-Shevin, then a member of the Syracuse Cultural Workers, it was made as an inspiration to activists and a response to the state repression experienced during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. Dalia’s image has been reproduced and re-versioned widely across multiple activist communities in prints, patches, and more. I find it simple and therefore powerful, and wanted to pay homage while also adding a queer, and for me, a dyke element.

Your fist may be the size of your heart, and it’s also the same size as your uterus [for those of us who have 'em]. Fists can fit in any of the holes–cunts and otherwise–that we fuck with. In the words of artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz:  Every Time We Fuck, We Win.

I feel that in all the ways I fight and work and celebrate being able to fuck any and all the fists I’d like, and I feel it in the queer history of all our bodies getting the pleasure and love we deserve and want — and so I believe that statement intensely, and I adore fisting. I feel that I’ve survived in my body when I’m fisted/fisting, and this act of choosing and intensity has healed and shaped [ha!] me. It’s been with me as long as I’ve been practicing BDSM [12 years] and for all the bodies and cunts and holes and asses and fists I’ve thrown and caught, this is a love letter.

My Cunt Is A Muscle is set in Blue Highway Linocut, produced in InDesign. The cunt is from Wikipedia Commons, and the fist is from an image taken by Shaun Slifer from the Interference Archive’s collection of raised fists. To encourage sharing, My Cunt Is A Muscle is copyleft with a Creative Commons NC-BY-SA [attribute, share under the same copyleft license, for noncommercial purposes].

Enjoy. Fist. Win.

Musical Power Notes, Feb 2013

In preparation for the “Queer Power, Queer Vulnerability” talk I gave at the IVYQ conference last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about power…

I think about it in many forms and am actually kind of obsessed.

I think about resistance, social change, revolution and “people power.” The ways and means from which individuals and groups step into, leverage, develop, and demonstrate power.

I think about the raised fist image, the power which is a threat or a show of solidarity. Power as a way of saying something else: I am here. I am surviving. I am unmovable.

I think about power as freedom; an access route on the road of choice. About how the ability to choose is a kind of power, and so therefore how consent is powerful. Choosing based on our desire; the ability to desire in the first place.

Power-as-choice is also complicated. Many of our choices are situational, that is to say they are from a set of limited options. Not all choosing is power, though sellers and marketing would like us to think otherwise. Picking a white or a black piece of technology is not exerting power. It’s just exerting choice.

I think about how it’s complicated; how unacknowledged power can manifest as obliviousness, harmful uses of privilege, oppression, and interpersonal violence.

I am working on making the speech I gave into a piece of writing; hold tight. Until then: power is complicated, and that’s a really good thing.

Photo by Najva Sol

On Friday Feb 8, I’ll be speaking at Yale at the IVYQ conference, on “Queer power, Queer vulnerability: BDSM, femme, and generating resistance in identity,” talking about personal instances where queers created joyous lives, structures for accountability, and modes of resilience that pushed that back on dualism, domination culture, and histories of shame. I’ll post a link to the text & slides soon!

The Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow is performing at the Five-College Queer Gender and Sexuality Conference at Hampshire on March 1.

Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow is performing at SUNY New Paltz on March 10.

Last, Heels on Wheels is officially going on our first West Coast Tour March 22–April 7! We’re booking it now, so our dates will be announced in a few weeks!

BitCurator [http://mith.umd.edu/research/project/bitcurator/] is a project that I’m rather excited about, although not wholly for the developers’ original reasons. It’s a set of Linux-based OSS’s which “incorporate the functionality of many digital forensics tools” for the purposes of humanities research and archiving. The site says, “the BitCurator project is an effort to build, test, and analyze systems and software for incorporating digital forensics methods into the workflows of a variety of collecting institutions.”

Translate your CDs, disks & hard drives into hexidecimal with BitCurator. Use it to play Archivist or Forensic Scientist...

The forensic and “bit” part of the project involves reading and recording the hexadecimal static data that exists on readable drives, to incorporate extra information into a data pull, keeping both original file order and original disk order. This results in files which contain sections and clips of extra information; much of it hexadecimal gobbledygook [<-- see left side], and some of it useful notes on the hex data [<-- see right side].

For example, many cultural creators’ have been making digital copies of their work for decades now, whether on floppy disks, CDs, or on a stack of hard drives, and retirement is a-coming for many. This package would allow archivists and collecting institutions to rip the bits off any version of an old digital media and then process the file using forensic software that search out meaningful data, like phone numbers, emails, names, et al., along with the file histories and notes on the hex data.

This is where the poesis begins: the archivist and the criminal investigator share a common interest in scraping the data out of its digital bit corners. One to condemn and the other to accolade, but both to pursue the deepest level of trackable data available. this crossover is, to me, indicative of the ways in which power, proof, accreditation, and institutionalization function and perpetuate taxonomies of power/knowledge and intellectual ownership.

It’s interesting that there is such a deep crossover with law enforcement and archival selection/appraisal, but it makes sense considering that the practice of archiving comes from a legal/judicial tradition, to create evidentiary value that was originally intended to support the legitimacy of the State [person or department].

The ways in which digital forensics is needed — or considered needed — to pursue the depth of information that this ability allows for is disturbing; and powerful. For if all I need is the old floppy disk of someone to obtain all the phone numbers they ever placed in a file on the disk –ever– then not only did the thrift store just get more interesting, but the volume of information available on any given individual just increased exponentially.

As for me, I’m excited about the possibility of taking a set of digital data [say, oh, Dorothy Allison's disks of Bastard out of Carolina from the Lesbian Herstory Archives] and extracting the bit code to get hexadecimal information on the digitalia. Then applying a text visualizer to the hexidemical information to see what other patterns appear across the typologies of produced bits of data. I think I would need a structured taxonomy of input ahead of time, but perhaps I would also be surprised to see what digital patterns equivocate to a text.

I’ve been writing about the Digital Humanities Winter Institute, reporting on the Data Curation track here, and weird data archiving here.  The DHWI was a faucet of information which I spongily absorbed, learning that I am especially apt and interested in: large-scale data/text analysis, working with open data sets, and image algorithm analysis; and that I will continue to apply my radical and working-class understanding of the world to something as ostensibly “neutral” as data and technology.

After being in the Data Curation track for a few days, I comprehended that I am a huger nerd than I had realized, and what I actually care about is sitting with a powerful computer and crunching data because I think that ideas outside of institutions are important — surprise! And there are, in fact, really cool and not-that-hard ways to do this. And, I learned about APIs and gathered a bunch of rad resources.

Data Sets

Did you know that you can look up other people’s research RIGHT NOW?… and then make cool graphs with it, perhaps thinking about it in a way which someone locked into an institutional mindset hasn’t considered? YOU CAN!! That’s fucking cool.

“The DBpedia [http://dbpedia.org/About] data set uses a large multi-domain ontology which has been derived from Wikipedia. The English version of the DBpedia data set currently describes 3.77 million “things” with 400 million “facts”.”

Google Refine [http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/ ] “Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.”

Freebase [http://www.freebase.com/]  is an “An entity graph of people, places and things, built by a community that loves open data.”

APIs

Application Program Interfaces [APIs] have felt like a unicorn to me for quite some time, a special black box in which one can place one’s Special Programming Skills and retrieve streams of pertinent data at lightening speeds. If only I were Special! If only the Black Box liked me, too! I sighed to myself looking forlornly at the links to code and instructions.

An API is an information interface intended for machines, specifically software that holds data. The API talks to the software to interact with machine data structures and retrieve the kinds of data you tell it to. It’s kind of a data bottom that you negotiate with very carefully.

After this week, I’m still not a whiz at APIs but I’m no longer intimidated. And that’s why I’m excited that CollectiveAccess offers an API because the data that we’re placing in this radical archive needs a way to get *out*.

Intersectionality: Race, Class & Gender

I got to DC from an overnight bus and arrived in College Park, MD via train, so thoroughly out of it that I didn’t notice the shuttle bus to campus and just walked, weaving my way onto campus through the facilities and maintenance department; a working-class metaphor that did not escape me. After finding deliverance in the form of coffee and getting to the opening plenary, there was one awkward moment that stood out: the organizers asked everyone who’d gotten a scholarship to raise our hands [there were a few dozen of us, mostly graduate students] and then named that every teacher had taken an honorarium cut in order to be able to let us come.  I’m trying to narrativize why that felt bad — perhaps because it didn’t feel like a scholarship anymore, but like taking something from someone; or because my internalized shame around being the scholarship kid didn’t like being pointed out as needy; or because it’s a practice of naming I’d never seen done before; or just because the math didn’t make sense to me. It made me think a lot about the culture of money and access to money that I might encounter at the Institute.

I picked the Data Curation track specifically because it seemed to apply to my work with the Interference Archive on their CollectiveAccess build; because as a cultural producer I create quite a lot of data which I wanted to understand how to wrangle most efficiently; and because I want to learn from folks who are not white men whenever I can [which is not totally often and which is no discredit to amazing male teachers I've had who also happen to be white]. Either way, I walked from a conference plenary that was more white and male, into a room populated by women and wondered what about gender was going on in this particular production of knowledge.

That I picked a track based on the race and gender of my teachers is a commentary on the state of formal and institutional education* but I am also kicking myself a little because making that kind of decision meant that I did not take the hardcore data crunching track because I thought it would be either spurious to my work or a man[splaining] party. As a result of taking the Data Curation track and being at the conference and exposed to the edges of all those other ideas, I am now more interested than ever in: large-scale data/text analysis, working with open data sets, and image algorithm analysis. Lord goddess get me a grant so I can play with the badass macbook pro I got and some of these programs.

Random Links:

From Berkeley’s Knight School of Journalism comes FreeDive, an OSS which purports to make an embeddable search bar for your website/blog which can draw off data in any published Google Spreadsheet: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tools/freedive/

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ – set up your gmail to send emails later, and to re-send them automatically if you don’t hear back. TOTAL LIFE WIN.

•    http://geekfeminism.org/
•    DataBit — repository of where people are putting and getting data
•    DHWI wiki -- http://mith.umd.edu/dhwiwiki/index.php/Main_Page
•    Alan Renear
•    4 Short Links Blog on O’Reilly
•    TEI encoding
•    Topic Modeling
•    VIAF.org — authority control on [meta]data
•    authority control
•    Artists Books Online — Joanna Drucker’s work [collaborative feminist artist books]
•    http://www.sublimetext.com/
•    Trifles — a game of social justice
•    DCC — curation life cycle model [creators, curators, users]
•    Edward Curtis — book of text and plates [photos] of 19th C. Native American peoples
•    Image analysis algorithms – http://mith.umd.edu/dhwiwiki/index.php/DHWI_Wiki:Exploring_Image_Analyses
•    Web crawl — do a web analysis
•    Personal Expressive Bibliography in the Public Space of Cultural Heritage Institutions, M. Feinberg — a way for users to recombine their experiences to create metadata via contacts.
•    Anvil Press “Built-upon” project, clearly show connection btw projects
•    N Katherine Hayles, web additions to As We Think book
•    See GitHub datadump
•    virtualbox.org — to run other OS’s on your machine
•    Archive Team, Jason Scott [rescued geocities, see it on bittorrent]
•    Bethany Naviski
•    Chronicaling America — LOC 19th C newspapers collection
*though that will change, since the last several years of enrolling classes in colleges and universities across the board are more women and ethnically diverse than ever.