pure performance.
what’s up world? a gorgeous day in bk today — 3 cutie pies on my block were backsliding into the cars parked on the street in their baby plastic escalade which made me wanna yell out “xiao xin” — which made me think how funny it is that in mandarin to say “watch out” or “be careful” translates literally into “little heart” like you’ve got to shrink your passion some to keep yourself in check — have i written about that in this blog before? i forget.
performed at abc no rio last night which was lots of fun (thanks christine!), and just got back from the bay on saturday after performing at the cal state east bay ethnic studies graduation celebration (thanks eiko!), which was good stuff too…caught up with lots and lots of spoken word/apia and taiwanese activist community fam in the bay, which was very necessary — booty-shaking with dj phatrick on the 1’s and 2’s at devil’s pie and poleng, carolyn, mitch, sahra, debbie, vu bang, r.j., steve, chin, weyland, jeff, kiwi, adriel, nico, chinaka, watsky, rafael, reynelle — got to see the intergenerational writers event over at kearny street workshop and also lalah hathaway (donny hathaway’s daughter) at yoshi’s oakland, which was amazing.
i have a lot of convo’s with folks about how the little shuffle-ly self-effacing (or self-promoting) intros before poems are just as much a part of the performance as the poem itself, but seeing lalah hathaway perform, made me wonder what poetry would be like if we harnessed the raw power of poetry, pure performance. no hyping, no congeniality, just the song, just the poem, and the rawness of the god in that. her work needed no introduction. it was a revelation, and her scatting made me realize that i’d never REALLY heard scatting before. (thanks weyland!) also, it’s nice to hear an artist whose work and reach will only deepen with time 
lot of shenanigans with chicago and l.a. friends in nyc and convo’s with my friend mitch in the bay about culture as commodity, and how some accumulate “culture” like other people accumulate shoes or cars — it’s the same consumerism and elitism, just different stuff — also, this whole complex for marginalized artists re: whether our identities create niches or pigeonholes — can we embrace the niche and pimp external expectations in order to flip them? do we end up playing the system, ourselves, or both?
been reading gao xingjian’s “the case for literature” (chinese nobel laureate exile in paris who wrote “soul mountain”) — to think of the enormous lengths that people have gone to around the world to have the freedom to write. we downright squander our goddamn freedoms in the u.s. on so much dumb shit in the pursuit of profit (can’t tell you how many times i’ve been told in my career to dumb down my work) or in the pursuit of maintaining a neatly defined image of an individual or community (is it leftist enough? radical enough? hip hop enough? asian enough? whatever.)
gao xingjian sez’ “The so-called writer is nothing more than an individual speaking or writing, and whether he is listened to or read is for others to choose. The writer is not a hero acting on the orders of the people, nor is he worthy of worship as an idol, but he is certainly not a criminal or an enemy of the people. At times, he and his writings will encounter problems simply because of the needs of others. When the authorities need to manufacture a few enemies to divert people’s attention, writers will become sacrifices. Worse still, writers who have been duped actually think it is a great honour to be sacrificed.”
–> reckoning lately that what one believes about oneself is approx. 19,756,982,365 times more important than what others believe about that person, positively or negatively. it’s scientific fact. i checked it out.
until next smell,
kells the big-hearted