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so bereft on the blogging…but we’ll be getting back on it as of right now…been wanting to post this for weeks…i love how artists build on top of each other in remix culture…here’s to progressions – peace! kells

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(Written en route from NYC to Shanghai 10/26/11 – continued from Can You Tell Me How To Get To Occupy Wall Street? (Part 2/3) )

Most notably a man who was not a native English speaker who was questioning the structure and some of the intentions of the meeting – was told he was speaking out of turn because comments were supposed to be for a later portion of the meeting (I think they were following some form of Robert’s Rules of Order, which I only know about b/c I was a student council nerd in high school). Strangely enough, whenever he spoke only a few people would repeat what he would say and at a certain point when he was being told he was out of order, not at all.
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(Written en route from NYC to Shanghai 10/26/11 – continued from Can You Tell Me How To Get To Occupy Wall Street? (Part 1/3) )

When I went down to Zucotti Park a few weeks ago late on a Friday night, it felt like an anarchist music festival, a Burning Man gone urban, tarps thrown over all the equipment, a long line at the food table where people came with fully stacked paper plates, convo’s all around about re-visioning the power structure within this country in little clusters.
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(Written en route from NYC to Shanghai 10/26/11)

What’s up world? So daaaaaamn, split this blog up into three (four if you count the SYHME blog) scheduled to post every four days while I’m in China & Taiwan, since I’m on a transnational flight to SHANGHAI right now…Heck, I got 8 hours left on this flight, but I’m assuming you’ve got other things to do than to read my blogs all day, all at once, lol….
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(Written en route from NYC to Shanghai 10/26/11)

What’s up world? Been a little remiss on my blogs as things began to heat up with the first public presentation of my spoken word poetry theater play “Say You Heard My Echo” back in early October.

The play explores the fictional stories of three APIA women (a Twin Towers survivor turned activist, a veteran returning home, and a young librarian who’s affected by detention and interrogation) in convo with female religious icons of their different faiths (Mary Magdalene, Guan Yin, Aisha) ten years after 9/11.
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I can’t say how I’ll feel on September 11th, 2011. I cringe anticipating the apoplectic patriotism: red, white, and blue flags, “My country ’tis of thee…,” “God Bless America.” The president on the TV, not a Connecticut cokehead with a Texas oil twang, but rather the man I saw at the Chicago Historical Society in 2004 who sat through a late-azz hip hop event, humbly stood and offered, “My name is Barack Obama. I’m running for U.S. Senate. I need your vote.”
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Damn, trying to get caught up on hella life here in Brooklyn. The summer is winding down. The stores are stocked with back-to-school ish and fall boots. I’m trying to just process and produce (working hard on “Say You Heard My Echo” which will premiere on Oct. 9 in New York). It’s been a lot of life-changing stuff in this last month or so and as life would have it…It’s changing so damn much that I don’t have time to figure out what’s changed…
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Continued from last week’s “Trinidad, eh? Part 1/2.”

Okay, so much to say, but here are some random thoughts upon my first week in Trinidad. Being here made me realize how much my life is *already* infused with Caribbean culture, lol. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is packed with Trini, Jamaican, and Senegalese culture: food, music, clothing, speech. So when I first got here, I was like, “Damn, this is a lot like Brooklyn,” but then what I realized that’s not b/c Port of Spain is like Brooklyn. It’s because Brooklyn is like Port of Spain.
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What’s up world? Just finished up week 1 here in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and I’ve got one more week to go, so it’s been about three lifetimes in the last 7-8 days. Packed up in Brooklyn last week and headed out to DC to do a spoken word poetry arts and activism workshop with the good folks over at Bloombars (an AWESOME collective-run political performance and gallery space in Columbia Heights, check ‘em out here) which was co-sponsored by Organization for Chinese Americans – One of my favorite kind of spaces: intimate, cozy, and full of energy. (THANK YOU DIANA & GOWRI!)
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Continued from last week’s blog “And she’s back…(Part 1/2)”

In June, I judged the DreamYard Youth Poetry Slam up in the Bronx – and let me be real with the fact that those fourth graders were ready to tackle all the heavy issues, for real. But yup, shorties from 4th to 12th grade all slamming it out with their poems, so it was interesting to check out the evolution of voice, performance, body, what they choose to write about and how, rhyme schemes, drama, monologue, song -
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