what I missed at the Open Embodiment conference--well, I missed a million things, but sleep remains my biggest arts practice

Heather Barrett's experiment at FLUXX on being a slime mould. Here is her TEDTalk.

"When it meets itself, it knows it is already there and turns back, to grow in other directions."

I always wanted a pet slime mold in a dish, when I was a kid. How could I not? I grew up with GhostBusters. and in proximity to so many hot retention ponds. Heather passed me the lime green flyer and asked if I planned to stay, but alas, it was late at night, I was jetlagged and my colleagues who shared my hotel were nuclei, pushing our cell membrane back across the desert, toward the Marriott. I did not want to travel alone. Who stayed to become slime at FLUXX? Did someone "make photos", as Petra would say? A mass cell selfie?  Join the international slime mould collective!


Anthony Wagner--the gorgeous Austrian who came to sit with me on my double bed/the body poetik's random intimacies installation at the Solar Culture gallery. I heard Austria and wanted to exclaim, My middle name is Vienna! But my brain gave a blip for all the energetic charge and  I could not really recall if Austria was the home of that city. Anthony said he followed me back to my bed to inquire about sexological bodywork, what it was, did he need it. But really, later, when he and I got to the public spooning portion of the installation, he told me he followed me because I was a non-normative girl wearing a quite attractive neon coral negligee.  So, I felt in that moment, that my experiment in obviousness made the right point (I had worried the wearing of lingerie did not suit performance art...gesturing too heavily, and thus falsely, toward intimacy). Anthony was wearing a mermaid tank top and he studies monsters in trans culture. Of course, we talked about the monstrous in disability culture and my one blind pearlescent eye, which stands out to people, these days, far more than any of my other "aberrant' physical traits". I love Anthony.


The other trans person who is a scholar of clowning and sat with me on my bed...why do we fear clowns, why do we fear sex? They are both so absurd and over the top, but really, the art is in the subtle. And that is where we get back to the deep play and the gift. But yes, I missed out on getting his name...It was an excellent conversation.


Oh also, Natalie Brewster Nguyen doing her acro-performance art in the gallery next to mine. I mean, for the record I was not asleep when I missed this, but otherwise entranced, as was the case above. Here is one of the pictures I borrowed from her Facebook.

I missed about a million things, including a visit to Casa Libre, but I presented 3 times and had to store up energy to see a bodpoe client on the last evening...it is important for me to see clients in other states so I can better know body/landscape relationship. He drank iced tea and told me about his work with propane tanks, until kidney and lung issues put him in an early art retirement. Soon, he will be making farm animal murals out of multi-colored corn kernel. We listened to Neil Young for an extended period of time. We attended to the very act of comfort and my Fox and his ferrets.

loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work.

Our panel in Tuscon, April 17--so excited!

Opening Trauma into Transformation: The Politics and Poetics of Embodied Knowledge in Physical Difference and Disability

This panel explores loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work. As intertwined artists, the bright light we stand in is that of transformation through embodied inquiry. Elements of the panel invite audience participation/sensory immersion. 

Amber DiPietra:


“The Disabled Sex(ological Body) Worker: a Poetics of invisible, Intimate Performance”


Amber Dipietra, as a body and personality, has moved on an arc from socially-isolated child with a disability, to poet, to disability advocate, to escort, to intimacy coach. She recently moved from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, FL where she has started a a local chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, swoptampabay,org.. Find her at adipietra.blogspot.com and thebodypeotik.com. 



Violet Juno:


"Portals to Transformation: Body, Art, Architecture and Sound"


Violet Juno is a transdisciplinary performance artist who has performed and exhibited at 70 venues in 36 cities since 1990. She combines text, sound, visual tableaus, kinetic sculpture, movement and a unique form of three-dimensional mapping to create multisensory experiences for her audience. Her work addresses issues involving disability/embodiment, trauma/transformation, and the poetic tension between language and languagelessness. More info at www.violet.juno.com



Margit Galanter:


"Vivid Spaces: Movement as a Re-source"


Margit Galanter is a movement educator, arts investigator, and dance poet living in Oakland, CA. Her fascination with the potency of movement -- the multiplicity of tones, its cultural efficacy, the composing -- has drawn her to embodied inquiry for decades. She has presented, performed, and taught her work throughout the US, and has a thriving practice in the Bay Area called Physical Intelligence Life Arts, where she finds the greatest understanding through the mysteries that emerge from the speculative nature of conversation, creative collaboration, and shared practice. PI Practice: www.physicalintellgence.org * Arts: www.margitg.wordpress.com


Denise Leto:


“Postcard Divinations, Embodied Loss, and the Poetics of Origin: A Grief Geography”

Denise Leto is a poet, editor, and explorer of multigenre and collaborative forms of media and performance. She wrote the libretto for the performance piece, Your Body is Not a Shark, which examined the poetics of embodied difference and disability through music, text, and dance. Recently, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Sicily and was the recipient of the Orlando Poetry Prize. onecontinuousword@wordpress.com

in Flordacana land, manatee record is broken

as 300 hundred sea cows take shelter in three sisters, a 1 acre warm spring.

In far off news, in Taiwan, my mind keeps arching backward, to a balcony. To understand just how my friend fell. He died a few days ago. My co-worker and fellow disability advocate, who lived with multiple disabilities and had just saved up to move across the world to live with his girlfriend and study computer science. My mind keeps arcing back to the moment of the mis-step or the giving-way, or even, the thoughts in his head as he fell. As if, in knowing, I might be able to erase or ease or hold on. To catch him in soft, still water.

Thank you for that day sliding sideways in Golden Gate Park, Derek.

sexological bodywork, finally, the paths converge

A fellow student from my CSB program wrote this up and let us all steal it, so here's what I am doing these days, if you are interested.

Need volunteers for sexological bodywork certification

I’m writing to see if you might be interested in receiving a sexological coaching/bodywork session with me. I am in training at the Institute of Advanced Human Sexuality Studies which will result in a certification (in the state of CA) in sexological bodywork.

Sexological Bodyworkers are educators and guides who tend to the whole human’s experience of their generative, creative energy, which most of us call our ‘sexuality’. Sexological bodyworkers believe sexuality is at the foundation of our authentic empowered human experience; the most radical foundational tool required to build cultures of soulfully reverent and spiritually responsible individuals. The sexological bodywork modality involves, among many other things, bodywork that does not exclude the genitals, sexuality education and self-pleasure coaching and witnessing. (borrowed fromhttp://www.therewilding.com/2013/03/sexological-bodywork-101/)

As part of my training, I need to practice coaching and bodywork with a variety of individuals. Sessions can be over email, phone, or internet (not in-person) or in-person. And the in-person sessions can vary a lot also from no touch and all clothes on to me witnessing you in your self-pleasure (no touch) to bodywork sessions with touch (including touching genitalia). Here are some of the types of practices I am working with:

—coaching (can be over the phone, email, or in person.) in orgasmic yoga practice, sex-related topics, shame, etc.

—coaching and witnessing mindful masturbation; being witnessed in your self- pleasure can be a powerful practice for getting in touch with more of you and having a “communal” sexually embodied experience

—coaching and witnessing you with your lover - also as a powerful practice of being witnessed and seen in your sexuality

—sexological bodywork (one-way touch from me to you in a safe environment with open communication): including genital massage and anal massage

Sessions could range in time from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Sessions can be over the phone, email or Skype or in person in my home in St. Petersburg FL  or in your home.

If you are interested in exploring this with me, both to support my training and learning process and to explore your own sexual interests, please let me know. I would love to work with you.

I teach embodied writing classes and soon, will be featuring an erotic poetry and bodywork class. Go to writetoconnect.com to learn more about me. In the future, I am especially interested in focusing on people with disabilities in terms of sexological bodyworker. I have worked as a disability advocate and social worker in San francisco.

Warmly,

Amber

Seminole heights, if it has sidewalks, is where I would like to live

Seminole heights sans the heights, with a lot of Spanish moss and low-lying sponginess, as if the limestone was just inches below the dirt. here we are at a park in Seminole Heights. Dad saying where are the drum? No drums at the Friday night concert, but an unplugged version of Indigo Girls Galileo and then, Walking in Memphis. A moment of feeling very at home. These songs never sounded so the same, so good.

(Dad's shoes. At some point, in the 90's, his band had a Converse endorsement or sponsorship or some such thing  and he had the high tops that were pre- Target knock offs. But his drum kit, i think, had to have the Converse logo spray painted on it.)

The park concert is actually, at the Lowry Park Zoo. Where there was once a semi-circular concrete stairway painted to look like a rainbow. Not a 1980's rainbow, but a 1970's rainbow. 

Dad or Mom, or some other strong relative would carry me up the rainbow and into the park where hippos lived behind chain link fences. My UV blindness caused me to trip over a chunk of tar dried on the sidewalk near the ferris Wheel and had a hematoma, but I think I still saw the dusty, poop smeared elephant.

Now, my little brother walks up in a tight grey wifebeater and skinny jeans. He gives me his coveted smart phone with the flashlight feature turned on so that I can be safe in the ptich black, mosquito infested port-a-potty. Night blindness and public toilets. Implores me not to drop it in, but sounds otherwise brave and chivalrous. It is likley he has gotten the part in the high school kids' adapation of Little Shop of Horrors. He says his friend's mom asked him why I would move back here from San Francisco. There is no way I can create a good enough arc in as few sentences  as would be appropriate, to be shouted through a port-a-potty door to a 14-year-old I adore.

sapos flattened

Causeway, algae.

My first day of college, by the briny Sarasota bay, I met a girl named Martha who spent most of her time in an old oak, during the ice cream social. When she came down, she looked at me and said, I do see a toad in you--the freckles on your face. She disappeared a few weeks later and I always think of her.

Red Solo cup, Rick's on the River, the ubiquitous Born to Be Wild Cover, the old toothless guy at the bar who asked me and Reese which college football team we were for.

Giant pond snail, now hollowed out by ants.

Jovan does not believe the retention pond in Mom's back yard contains gators. But they do migrate. Come and go. Like the way otters appeared, in the deep middle, crossing, and then gone in the brush, gone.  And sometimes you see the flat, prehistoric-looking soft-shelled turtle and sometimes you only hear the snake bird, whose caw is even more like a crank than the yard geese. Maybe the sound radiates down, and scares the fish up into his avian-serpent's beak.

Is it shameful that I do not know the names for common things, in the landscape that is so climatized (though not necessarily traversable) to my body? Or does that make sense? Inger Christensen tells me, in Grass, that words insist on "procession", whereas Florida, and the arthritic body, insists on fluid stillness.  I google "palm tree pollen frond" and find an article that tells me, due to climate change, Antarctica was once covered in palm trees. It is still cold here for May. Disturbingly so. It gets down to 60 at night.

Sapos ahumados, is what goes through my mind when we see the little American toad in the cul de sac gutter beside Mom's driveway, last week. I poke him with my toe. He feels dry, rigid. It's playing dead, the way my pet toad, also an American (because having a bufo in the house was dangerous), played dead on my bedroom carpet, at 4am, when I was in high school. This was pre- rat and yellow-bellied-slider. He got loose because I had to take my hand off of him to spoon out the mealworm pupae we stored in the refrigerator. If not kept cold, these pupae would turn into big-ass buzzing beetles, in minutes, I believed. So, I always hastened to get them back in the fridge. In my hurry, the Wet Sprocket got away and started doing a wild hop toward my erotic Celtic novels. I trapped him between my calloused crooked feet. Pre hip replacement, there was absolutely no bending over. (Once, there was that other time, at the Days Inn that my college had converted to dorms, behind the overgrown RV lot. The buzzing sulfur light. Puerto Rican night at the adjoining Ramada pulsing over the crumbled concrete wall. Crouching, my stripper friend and fellow postmodern lit student, helping me to catch and hold toads.) Toad in the gutter from last week got truly desiccated just a day or two later, lost some dimensions to a tire.

I am wanting this blog to be something else. To return to writing about somatic poetry, disability culture, something. But there is mostly jus tthis porch, for now.  

The porch I wanted, to begin again to figure anything out, or just to feel.   Jason [Phydras] writes, on http://tract-trace.blogspot.com that prose allows for time, for the sentence to become poetic as it "wanders far afield" and also, takes on a quality of "suddenness".  I have descended to a part of the country where I most come from, that is nearly below sea level, that defines disability as only developmental. (Ok, maybe that is wrong--but there is a lack of specificity in "professional" or service provider speak, a way in which other types of disability don't get seen...or it has to do with naming only what can be funded...I don't understand it yet and I am not sure I want to.)

Swimming, horizontally, is difficult with a rigid neck. I lack the presence of mind to practice with a snorkel. Feel conspicuous among the children at their YMCA swim lessons *the pool on this shaded porch is not swimmable, due to the strangely cold May. Luckily there is the hated one at the Y.). It occurs to me that when/if--with a baby in there, I will be a tiny, walking swimming hole. How I want gills, and to sit quietly, inside myself, on this porch. But to become non-verbal and push off too, into my own air, beyond the screen.

Sunny Taylor on the disabled body, the occupied bed, capitalist value, erotic work thoughts

Crunched down in the big, sunny, soft, tropical, albeit medical model landscape of Florida, trying to find the right niche (to carve is labor so tedious and complex it almost defeats the purpose of trying to dig into a mellow, allowing small pocket/niche for a simple life), I can only revel in Sunny Taylor's article that Michelle Puckett sent to me. Go here and read it: 

http://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/the-right-not-to-work-power-and-disability

But here are some big chunks I adore:

"Disability, in contrast, is the political and social repression of impaired people. This is accomplished by making them economically and socially isolated. Disabled people have limited housing options, are socially and culturally ostracized, and have very few career opportunities. The disabled community argues that these disadvantages are thus not due to impairment by its nature, but due to a cultural aversion to impairment, a lack of productive opportunity in the current economy for disabled people, and the multi-billion dollar industry that houses and “cares” for the disabled population that has developed as a consequence of this economic disenfranchisement. This argument is known as the social model of disability.5Disablement is a political state and not a personal one and thus needs to be addressed as a civil rights issue."

"Marx and later theorists have shown how capitalist development has privileged certain biological forms of embodiment (for example white able-bodied males). Because of this, it is important when trying to understand the impact of space on bodies (for instance inaccessible buildings and transportation), to consider who is forming (and has formed) spaces and who inhabits them. The extreme inaccessibility and alienation felt by impaired people may not be a natural consequence of their own personal embodiments in the twenty-first century, but instead a complex system of historical, cultural, and geographical discrimination that has evolved inside and alongside capitalism and that we now simply regard (and too frequently dismiss) as disability. Crippled and elderly people have an especially precarious relationship to the machine that is production and consumption. People work hard, they age, their efficiency inevitably lessens and, unless they are fortunate enough to have some savings stashed away, they are too often put in nursing homes where their new value will be as “beds.” As Marta Russell has astutely pointed out, the institutionalization of disabled people “evolved from the cold realization that people with disabilities could be commodified…People with disabilities are ‘worth’ more to the Gross Domestic Product when occupying a bed in an institution than when they’re living in their own homes."

"What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?"

And the image that goes with the article, a self-portrait of Sunny (who is a painter):

Just what does she think she is doing, affixing her naked self to a scholarly, political article on the body, disability and capitalist worth? Being a fucking genius, I say.

In a sort of related vein, am artistic statement by me about some of the erotic performance work I did in CA, work that used my body just as it it was/is  (in a slightly different person of my own disabled self) may be on it's way to appearing in the Oxford Journal of Dance and Well Being. I made a lot of money doing the performance work (though the risks outweighed the gain). However, the value of the essay in which I may appear, with other disabled performance artists on the fringe--that is priceless.  Now to remember that and re-channel that energy into my current job search.

flordacana notes: being fed honey-spread by an old Cuban woman in the health food store

In one of the strip malls--actually no--there are still strip malls in West Tampa, in the old Latino part of town where my family used to live. But in my mother's Lake Ellen neighborhood, the strip malls are puffed up, rounded, they are shopping centres. With the t-r-e just like that. Facades for jovial chain  marketplaces and rows of SUVs outside of them.

In one such centre, at the health food store today, I met this older Cuban woman who looked like Sean Penn in this movie about the aging, somewhat hermaphroditic seeming, rockstar:

Maybe  she still lives in West Tampa, behind Macarena Plaza or Fiesta Plaza--the strip malls--or maybe she is not really Cubna but El Salvadorian or from Venezuela. I've been gone long enough that I am having a hard time with distinguishing the accents.

She was  a sample-giver. The person in the food shop who prepares little tasties for you to consider. She was selling a salty, cinnamony crushed almond, honey spread. She artfully used a tiny spoon to  spread it on a thin chip, on an apple, she spread it on a piece of red cabbage sprinkled with coconut and onions. And she leaned over and popped all these things directly into my mouth. It was because she noticed my hands shake, as they do when I have to try to turn my wrist to take small items from someone one else. She said, here let me and then, the bites were going into my mouth.

There you go, baby! Delicious!


Here you go, mama! Isn't that good!


From any other type of person, I might not have been able to open to this. From my own grandmother, no. But a strange, theatrical, aging Cuban woman in a black lace dress (though it is 90 out already), yes. You can be baby and mama with women like her and there is a charge and  a care that has nothing to do with being patronized and everything to do with the crushed, sweet, thick substance of that culture. Of meeting each other with gusto in that moment.  Somehow, when she fed me these treats, and everyone in the grocery store saw her put them in my mouth like it was the most common thing, to hand feed strangers, she made me feel nurtured and powerful at the same time. Some magic she has. I wanted to follow her home, to know everything about her. I felt that if I went with her, I would immediately start to have a Pedro Almodovar life.

ambient notes # 12.2.12

it rained all week. smell of wet metal and gutter sparrows. Bacons' grandfather's old bomber jacket molded in his closet and i felt sad for him. clients at Laguna Honda started speaking more clearly, though I still did not know what to say in many cases. floating above the fountain with dear Val, holding a cup of chai, i recall what she said a while back--"Anxiety can be mistaken for devotion." Anxiety cannot be measured as a unit of work, it is somewhere between static and energy. then, it stopped raining, or--it sluiced lightly and J. and i sat in the dark, with the bedroom window open, looking out into the street. until we decided to take the bus to his work van in Daly City for donuts.  then, the day and the sun. to greet the sea with some coyote dogs. we kept going, where i resisted frosted glass tables at ikea. the cheer of swedish meatballs and Mariah Carey Christmas squeals made me eager, wistful, full of sunday night dread. until J. started pulling me around on the hand truck--and i let it go. decisions were made. a small, low table so now i can see to type this.

Denise Leto, Amber DiPietra: Beauty Is a Verb, Litquake and the Library for the Blind and Print Disabled, Oct 10.

The Library for the Blind & Print Disabled and Deaf Services Center  of the San Francisco Public Library in association with Litquake present


Beauty Is a Verb
The New Poetry of Disability

In the new book, Beauty is a Verb, the New Poetry of Disability, the editors included a range of writings by people society considers to be disabled, but who do not necessarily identify themselves as having
a disability. Guest speakers include Bay Area writers, artists and activists Amber diPietra and Denise Leto whose work appears in the anthology.

Open mic/stage for those wishing to express themselves. ASL interpreters will be provided. Audience members who need other accommodations should request them by October 3, 2012: 415-557-4557
or mgoddard@sfpl.org

All programs at the Library are free.

Wednesday,
October 10, 2012
1:30 – 4 p.m.
Koret Auditorium,
Main Library, Lower Level

100 Larkin St. (at Grove)   (415) 557-4277   sfpl.org

Litquake bios: http://litquake.org/authors/dipietra-amber, http://litquake.org/authors/leto-denise

my client today, age 86, multiple ortho surgeries and vision loss due to macular degeneration

How are you Hildi?

“I guess  I am OK, I am still on the right side of the grass.”

“and now my arm just hangs there like a salami in the delicatessen”

“they’re trying to keep me alive like Bernie till they get that settlement”

“Alaskan cruise—but I would have had to share his room. He has too many hands for me, invited me to watch football and the only balls I saw weren't on the screen. 80 years old, what does he think? He's so short, when we dance, my tits are in his face. I mean, I am no Angelina Jolie, but I am not blind yet.”

 “So much has changed in the City. You can’t be standing still and smoking, Now if you want to smoke, but not go anywhere, you have to walk in a circle on the sidewalk”

Denise Leto and Amber DiPietra at SFSU Poetry center, 9/27/12oetry center

Thanks to the Poetry Center, Neesie and I will be speaking/reading/doing some somatic writhey stuff with the students at SFSU soon!

http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/eventCalendar.html#SEPT27

Olimpias @ People's, Endless Summer, Beast

Photo with the Olimpias Collective, doing a social practice piece at People's Park that included ways to enable dancing for different bodies, conglomerate holding that became dances, energy work and more. Mara (who i had just met) is acting as a body pillow for me, so i am tucked away from the camera. the whole thing was like being an anemone in a sea of dancers and artists playing with touch and improv and other collaged elements. Neil said, "This is the future of medicine." Join us sometime.

Looking forward to reading at Small Press Traffic’s Endless Summer event on June 16^th with a slew of others and bbq. Here it is http://www.facebook.com/events/171963356264964/

&

also at Beast Crawl, with Kelsey Street, at the East Bay’s answer to Litquake, which is cool, because I need new answers to the “geographics I’ve pulled” in the last year.

It is July 7. http://beastcrawl.tumblr.com/

Neil Marcus and Stephen Lichty at ODC

Zooming past the flower beds at the hospital the other day, I reminded myself that the colors in flowers can keep rushing at me if I let them. 

I am ashamed when I just take photos and do not write. Because I chose an identity and think I need to stick with it. Because I did not study photography, but paid money to call myself a writer.  These are weird reasons about how I think I have to commit to time spent, as if it were currency. And also, false notions about what earns us what.

(I imagine people who read this blog and do not know me think that i have very poor writing skills, that I do not know how to use grammar. I think about whether this is a way of performing idiosyncrasy and disability. This is probably a problem as future emploers for places where I might be just a regular receptionist may find this blog to be a dela breaker. Perhaps I should delete the link from my signature line.)

Photos are so close to moving and singing, it’s the sensate trace, a confluence of felt/heard. To be on the ground like Neil and Stephen in these pictures. And lifting. And holding.  Language is my second language, get out of syntax and into the body. Julio, the midwife, told me his mother lost the vision in her left eye when she was a girl in Chile, but did not realize it until she was an adult. Carrying absence on the left side of my head is a good reminder, but I want no further, I want every reminder of how to be in contact with others. I take photos because I might not always be able to see things, words can come later.