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.

Laura Ann Samuelson helps me understand the Norah jones of my past

Kitsch


the real woman's body (yes yes yes,essentialzingnuse of the real, but isn;t just a spectrum metaphor to to indicate an attempt to measure and also, just be, standing outside measurement). Kitsch is real, I've aways thought. When it listens to Norah Jones circa just post 9/11, lonely old bus depot city stricken by AIDS and then forget,  stricken later by 140 characters (which I now can;t speak without) to crowd out real renters. And 50,000 later for art school Norah Jones who lives n Starbucks incidentally. But this is Laura Ann Samuelson and she gets married to her partner who is paper, the sound of festive lively paper stuffed into a car and disappearing in the night. I don't know her, but through Bhanu's blog, but I wish I did!

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

Naropa outtakes, 3rd spiritual home next to my bed, the Gulf waters (love to you, Beth Murray) & San Francisco sex school

I met an ex-bio-engineer who knows how the bones build out to the cosmos. He eats spaghetti off the floor with his 11-year--old son, who writes his school essay on developments in prosthetic arms. My friend, the lady in the life of these boy-mens, is a sexologist I met in SF last sprieng. She came to scoop me up the night I arrived in Boulder.

Boulder back-lot altar, in honor of student and faculty transitions. Accomplishment or major life development is pure movement, which only exists in relation to little moments of breathing stillness. A tiny plastic dalmation, a teddy bear with pennies in his crotch, Denise's purple-scarlet boots on the flagstones. her "Sacrarium"and the pleasure of being a "voicer". Left some hot plum light in the vestibule for Bhanu. Met a woman my age, Danielle Parfunda, who has kids that have made up a thunder cat mythology. It comes from her mother bones. that is where the cats live, and in the cosmos too. Everything is her fault. She is the funky originator, the rot in the fruit. LOVE HATE on her knuckles,  tattoos. The brutalizing and brutalized force of being mother, of "foisting life". Talks with Sheila Blakc about letting her son decide whether he wanted three inches of orthopedic brutality for 3 inches of height, waiting, and the relief when he said, No.

Violtet Juno draws me being a comma and laying down over a student/former sex worker's spine to read a quote from an essay by Julie Carr on the body and the avant-garde.

These living things, these dead things. I am more alive and feeling around for others, so far outside my reach and inside of me, than I have ever been.

Mirasoles/girasoles, the nodding sleepy head of autumn death turning towards...

This pink rock just before the Naropa campus. To be that hard and open. Go to the body poetik site if you wish to hear more about this time from the perspective of a "professional" bodyworker seeking clients and co-researchers.

Not pictured here; the ESA's I met at Naropa. Leeny Sack who does performance art and her emotional support animal. The somatic psychotherapy student from Miami (my home state, what what!) and her ESA dog--a real squirreler. They made it so legitimate for me, as an artist and a person. Never travel without your dog again, they said. Especially, bring her to Naropa.

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

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.

SWOP Tampa Bay hosts Dec. 17 event

SWOP Tampa Bay is hosting a vigil, a gathering, a chance to tell your story or hear other stories.

@ Genaro Coffee, 1074 Central Ave St. Petersburg

We will be offering free coffee, tea, and snacks.

If you are a sex worker, adult entertainer, stripper, escort, porn star, cam actor, or anything else, please come help us celebrate this day in healing and remembrance. We extend this invite to sex worker allies!

Our work is risky in a society that doesn't observe our basic human rights. Find out how you can join us on the 4th Monday of every month to build community, be empowered in your chosen profession. and create social change for sex workers. This group is facilitated by current or former sex workers.

Please RSVP so we can have enough free snacks!
727 280 6778
swoptampastpete@gmail.com

If you can't make it, but want to be a part of this local group, please contact us about joining the private Facebook group. We need you and can't wait to meet you!

color book

in which I am excited about writing a book I think I can finish, at the same time that we alight in a little apartment between the bay and Gulf, a peninsula off of a peninsula, an old building that keeps the air moist and salty as a sea. and, new ways to let go of certain traumas or meet physical pain where it is really at. 

to be excited is an act of particles moving, neither comfortable or predictable (learning things about FL mental health system) but connected to flow, and this writing might be the kind of bodywork i can really practice, for myself and others. outside of originality, of completing a new manuscript and being it's author, but through Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses, 

If matter is trapped light, by seeing yellow flowers you restructure molecules and you're not a solid.

and it is all pulled in through color as a structure for a book of poems/experimental prose and a way to make sense of being in Flordacana, arising thanks to Bhanu and Kapil Muni, but also so many others. 

the colors are not so much colors, as currents, where i am as coordinate making arcs wiht other coordinates.

grouped as they might be known,  according to the standard spectrum (Arco Iris is not just a Cuban-Chinese restaurant in West Tampa, but a profusion), ROYGBIV, a kind of rough Dewey decimal system for pointing to presence. as in, for instance, the first two--it is not that red isn't vital or in there, but is not the way it is usually most available to me.

the colors are: bonecream limestone, pink, anaranjado, citrine, tannic, verde que te, in pools, storm/bldg., noche, estrella. the book, or the process as documented, is hopefully, coming all the way through soon.

("Shrimp must look very sexy to other shrimp...because they are just giant muscles, flexing around the sea.", in which Artie Glove contracts his bare and noodly torso once, minutely, for emphasis, before resuming the task of delicately peeling the tail.)

without me needing to explain the urgency for a collaging space, Welo set about wrestling this corkbaord into the concrete walls with great vigor, wearing a fab ultra coral shirt at that.

because of contrails, I could pull it in as neon sherbet or hot peach, as in mess, but that was not quite accurate.

and some are mixed and total, as this photo Gabriel sent me from Coachella, to reveal the mystery of the palm and the spectrum. Also, a photo (and a man) loved for doubleness and the gulf between...a very Cali-Florda-cana.