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.

Gulfport notes have to start somewhere

This gyosy poet left LA and came to Gulfport. The Fox dog and I are in love.

All Soul's Day: Searching for bean clams with 2 poets and some dogs

P.O.D. Exit Stencil. His visit ended with him sending me this pod from the Tampa airport.

New collaborative poem with Val Witte on Dusie

Thanks so much to Dusie and guest editor Carrie Hunter for publishing the collaborative poem I wrote with Val. Because I like poem-archeology, I will say that this poem was braided together by Val and I during a year in which shared some wretched travails with intern dating, etc. There are some lowly outcomes, not leas tot which is the pome itself,a kind of prayer and a process of bodywork (at least for me).


It is called "Instructions for Folds: Why Iris?"

3. From the bottom is wine, as buried, fruit festive arm warmers for Christmas choir

4. By turning the most unusual orientation what is peculiar typified or defied, repeat || step 7 and pressed || flat the way we see is sharp, shaped like a diamond or a heart with multiple points || beating

5. A finger inserted is opening what hides beneath color, a skin || to crave texture disfigured, what we want a persona projected, pulled to the middle and sewn
like a pocket despite a tendency to partner we operate

in threes 

Read the rest ot this poem and other great pieces at Dusie!

take the Amtrak

on a tropical day's pitch down into the polar vortex. Nearly avoid getting on the Jersey-bound or NYC-bound car by accident.

On the train, there is a long, lean young black man with a saxophone sticking out of his tote bag. He talks on his cell phone about credits and semesters. There is this beatnik kind of Asian chick, the likes of which i have not seen since San francisco. I want to snuggle her because her legs look cold. I want the man to hug me. Still, i am thrilled to be on a train alone, going somewhere.

The leaving-Ybor-City, downtown-Tampa industrial outskirts bayou. Is this the town called Palmetto where my new friend might live?

And then I've arrived with Mistress A. and things unfold as the kind of nee gift-economy of my life/

She drives me to meet the sacred sexologist in the swamp outside of Disney World. We talk, as low other coastals, about surviving California.

And at my spiritual/sexual fairy godmother's house, there is chai and there are poodles and this beautiful luminous feather blossom. She tells me what to expect upon returning to San Francisco to go to the sex Institute.

After, Mistress A and I contemplate the gift-economy of the intentional accident our lives might be becoming.

 It is all very Tom Robbins. Hilarious and sane. I don't really like the term "inner child", but if only I could have been Robbin's child bride.

Things have ceased to take a shape veer, but are swelling into beginning, rough edges and all. Doing the worm on Merle Haggard's face.

Florida swamp night is very black, but the scariest things aren't so scary anymore.

accessing the sparkly dark interior fold

 of winter

as i wait for the year to turn over, bleed out, grow a new circulatory system, pulse joyfully.

Thank you Gabey, for my beautiful gifts! I'll let you say more about the stopwatches you made when you start your new blog! (Upper photo).

Thank you to everyone who came to IDEVAS yesterday. (Lower photo. My nascent, pagan Christmas/International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers collage) Valerie Witte, there is your sacred heart and your button.

the arrival of gifts

Jovan becomes enamored of the Douglas Fir of his youth.

I try not be a total eco-downer and point out my disdain for getting a tree, a dead tree. He appreciates this.

But he walks away from the Douglas.

And then he falls in love with idea of a real, potted, tabletop fir!

 He settles on a Norfolk Deco, which actually grows year-round in FL.

Our first Christmas in Florida! The tree gets a ride on the lobby cart.

He bought ornaments weeks ago and squirreled them away in the closet. Which means I cannot make a steampunk courtesan themed tree, but I am still charmed by this hidden stash of decorations.

He confesses he has never actually seen a Charlie Brown Christmas, so is just pretending to get my references.

He lets me glitter most of the ornaments.

He puts a tiny one in our bedroom.

Jan Van Swearingen--artist, collector-extraordinaiire, vendor of fine smelling things, sends me the most amazing package with stuff I did  not know I absolutely needed. Letter tattoos for my alt. burlesque photo project, inter-species love, owl soap, and an edible Advent calendar are just of few of the times. How is it that I, Joseph-Cornell-freak, have never had an Advent shadowbox before. When all the chocolate days have been eaten, I am going to re-tool it with paint and glitter and other little things for next year.

Our roommate from San Francisco, Aaron Araki, sent us the most gorgeous cursive letter. Aaron, Jovan read the otter to me while I cooked dinner. I miss coming into our little kitchen in the morning and seeing you at your skillet. Or hearing you rehearse songs in your room. "Oh, Bacon, why did we leave Bacon?" I wailed, as Jovan read.

Mo Pertik, a new friend I randomly met at my nearby cafe during a Jungian art show, brought me a necklace from the Amazon, told me all about Gulfport activism, and her work in dementia awareness.

Oh, and thanks to The Conversant and Declan Gould for publishing an interview with me and Denise Leto about Waveform.

And there have been winding, unfolding gifts in the form of suggestion and introductions. Another new friend i met through interesting channels connected me to sexological bodyworkers in the area, which then connected me back to people in this realm (mutual friends, they all turned out to be, on Facebook...)--people who I had wanted to talk to before I left CA. Now that part of my art and practice is growing in the light in a way I did not think was possible in Florida. Oh yeah, and there is this somatic psychotherapist I met who sees into my love for the color coral.