Field Notes from the Open Embodiments Conference at UofA, Tucson on Tract. Trace.

Perfomring and/or speaking/being with Sex Worker Outreach Project artists,  advocates, and acrobats. On a bed,a stage, at a conference table. How Doing Nothing helped. And, of course, my disability/trauma/erotics/bodylogic peeps let me move it through.  Thanks to Tract.Trace for putting this on their website!

Natalie Brewster Nguyen and my Foxy Brown

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.

outtakes from vaquera because the book about vaquera won't matter, as matter-in-action, unless the process lives in the "open* somewhere else. like here.

Progressively, I move off the page as I admit that reading--with one, low vision eye, is not an effective use of psychic, creative and processing energy. It certainly is not the kind of dance of phenomena the eye, the brain, the literary image in cadence can make, if less constrained, across a page.

Sometimes, I fear I am a lazy/nervous thought-circler. My partner sometimes claims I am a naysayer. Poet friend Sabrina claims the physical needs of a more limited body have taught me economy. Her answer is a balm, and a way forward. Though it is clear that through too much economy, I fail to make choices--intuitive, embodied moves, through the chaos that could be nothing or everything. A mass of content and energy.

I mean, in terms of editing--shaving away from a mass of collected earth and flesh--that could be a manuscript. A poem-book, or kind of story. Editing, choosing what to keep and not to keep, and how to cut the contour, so it can appear, as a durational form, here in the world, as book.

It is starting to matter so much less to me--writing, I mean--if it ever did. I just wanted to approach a subliminal singing and traveling.  Except writing is still a medium through which to enhance a witnessing/noticing practice around moving and connecting, physically. The editing feels pointless, a thing not mean to be contained as text. But then subsequently, I begin to disappear as a writer, as nothing gets edited, done, sent away, published. And that could be Ok, because my real work is that of a sex(ological body) worker/poet/performance artist. That is an imperfect sequence of descriptors to describe one situational body artist arcing through time, a word for which, I do not have a thing. Just me, is the thing.

Documentary poetics, then, and more direct memoir are a way to point at the body (sex (art (work. but it becomes a mass of sorting and sequencing, and trying to channel different tones and degree of fact into form so that something can be told if it cannot be witnessed or experienced somatically.  And again, I can't make it into some thing, not at least until more cultural shifts occur. Much of what i am making/documenting/discovering goes on over here, quietly and consistently as the body poetik--and outside the sessions with the clients, appears only occasionally at performance of those sessions to audiences. (Yay for last October in Boulder/Naropa and yay, trepidatiously, to the Soamtechnics conference in Tucson this spring!)

But I can make them apparent here too, it occurs to me, as a number of discrete outtakes from many undercover works and their corollary writings. Bhanu has taught me that the blog is almost better than the book. No, it is is. it is document, in the more alive, unfixed sense.

I used to be afraid that if I blogged, there would be nothing left to really write, since all the wiring is about an art of lived experience, a looking through a lens of sex and disability, of chronic pain and sex, of curvature and light and supple flow, of intimacy and it's bridge with poetry and the body in motion. And the very practical economy of who can come together, with who, in the most intimate way, and for what most personal efficacy and why. Sex and power and the juice that flows the world.

I think the only way to cut away now, to make any choice, to feel that I am making the motions of making the sex body art work that I do visible, is to actually blog. To blog as editing process. Because it is all process work. The writing is only an arm of the overall arc, the conversation my palm has with the spine.

So, right, yeah. I am trying to write a series of long poetic sections into a manuscript about sex work, deformity, bones, cowgirls, fear and safety in the sacrum. To help me edit it, to leverage choices around what to cut and how to sort and sequence, I'll alleviate some of the pressure from the body of notes, by a kind of restorative yoga. A lifting and pulling away in which the cut parts are put in traction, here, on the blog, as outtakes from the thing that will be  isolate in it's own, discrete body (as we all are and have to unlearn and learn in degrees), a finished manuscript, the vaquera manuscript.

And, I'll begin...now. Or tomorrow.

As for Open"

"Bodies are enfleshed, but not enclosed: they are open, radically so—biologically, environmentally, socially, politically, and affectively. To be open means having the capacity for connection and curiosity, and willing to be receptive to otherness and difference. Openness is an engagement with processes of becoming, to be in anticipation of future states without predetermined ends. To be in the open is to be exposed and vulnerable under conditions of necessity and possibility, of risk and danger. Open is ontological, an ethical stance, an imperative: it demands of us to open borders, detention centers, and prisons, to open our eyes and our hearts, our senses and our awareness. Invitations are openings, as this one is: Let us come together and open ourselves to the embodied experience of our messy entanglements, fraught alliances and fuzzy boundaries with each other and with the Earth. And let us do it in Tucson. Open Embodiments is an international conference marking the relocation of the Somatechnics Research Network to the University of Arizona’s new Center for Critical Studies of the Body. Founded in 2005 by Nikki Sullivan and colleagues in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, the Somatechnics Research Network is an international, transdisciplinary group of more than 500 researchers interested in the “always already” technologized nature of embodiment—that is, in the sense in which embodiments cannot be distinguished from the means and methods of their making, that they are contingent, emergent, actualized, and materialized relations between some parts of a milieu and others. Somatechnics conjoins an open-ended curiosity about embodiment in our contemporary techno-nature-culture contexts with an ethics of embodied difference derived from feminist, queer, transgender, disability, and critical race methodologies, and with a political commitment to dismantling and refiguring those social technologies that maldistribute the means of life and survival according to modes of embodiment, including anthropocentric hierarchies of value. Over four days, conference participants will have the opportunity to connect their scholarly, artistic, creative, and activist engagement with embodiment’s openness to the geophysical/geospatial location of Tucson, Arizona, in the U.S./Mexico borderlands: to the surreal beauty and hazards of the Sonoran Desert, to the many vital local cultures of resistance to the militarized violence of the border and to the state’s ugly and damaging race/gender/sexuality politics, as well as to the University of Arizona’s historic commitment to interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the physical and life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. The conference will take place in numerous venues in Tucson’s revitalized historic downtown as well as the nearby University of Arizona campus. In addition to breakout sessions for delivering academic papers and keynote presentations from internationally renowned thinkers and culture-makers, Open Embodiments will include film screenings, performances, workshops, and other public events."

--from the Somatechnics conference site.


What opens us and spurs us on.

P.O.D. The Beautiful Pigeon Fancier, a film written by Gabo

I just found out that Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on April 17, 2014. In recent years, from time to time, I would do an anxious Google search, to see if he had passed, because I knew he was in ill health.
But I was not searching for that today. I was looking for an image of the cover of Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Remembering a connection between that book and the many ecstatic mornings in sex school when i spent meditating and sobbing about the viscera that binds sex and death. This would've been right around April 17, 2014. It was his last book, and it gave me a kind of wild and grounding permission.

 Cien Anos de Soledad game me permission also--when I read it my last year in high school. When I was ugly and alone and hid in the bleachers to read during lunch. When my 12th English teacher (who was into Joseph Campbell and archetypes) was so enamored of me reading that book that he allowed me to write poetry about it in lieu of taking all major exams. One Hundred Years of Solitude solidified everything I knew about intimacy, both familial and sexual, about time and its shape, and the fundamental basis of reality as the marvelous, often horrific, sensual.

And here is this woman, he met in in an airport once, who I only hope is telling a true story--though that never really matters. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/01/gabriel-garcia-marquezs-secret-muse-finally-reveals-herself-261175.html

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

Suncoast Burlesque Festival at St. Petersburg Nights.

Burlesque as the sexy-funny of the pain-int the-assery of taking the stockings on and off--starts to mean a lot more when you do it with an orthopedic disability. or just say, Fuck it and don't do it, but want to lick the legs of the girls and boys with the best fishnets.

The glorious Blazing Saddles MC.

 
Mr. Rendez Vous, Ron Day Vu (sp?)

LOVE tattooed down his spine.

The ladies form the Hip Expressions burlesque class try out their number.

Oh, the much coveted pirate swing.

Franki Markstone, to Falco's "Rock Me Amodeus" remix!

Many other wonderfuls.

 Rubber Ducky, you're the one!

Not all hedonism, folks--a fashion auction to benefit a burlesque dancer who was recently hit by a car while riding her bicycle.

I must get this fire eater's name.

 Classic.

Everyone out on the stage and audience dance time.