Instructions to self, September flew by, October is almost over... Post ANYTHING. Trying = Starting = Finishing = Relief.

Well, this is strange, it's 4 am, I'm in LA, still pre-divorced but still living with and even still sharing a bed with my parter, it's CoViD times and the election is right around the corner and right now I'm feeling good. 

I'm saying this as this past Tuesday should've been my worst day of the year... I couldn't figure out a why a new used (but expensive) computer wasn't working, and I ended up unintentionally staying up until 5 am then trying to hash it all out. I truly believed that this would fix all of my life's procrastination problems, buuut it turns out you're not supposed to buy electronics during mercury retrograde, so that means it's all my fault.

That all then led me to sleep through a whole morning, missing a therapy appointment and getting a parking ticket because I didn't move my car in time, but I was given the task this week by my therapist to... 'do nothing'... so perhaps ironically, Nailed it.

I have to say, now that 'do nothing' has much more Officially been given to me as homework, (maybe it was only alluded to before?)
there's been more presence in joy, and in being with people, that was all worth the experiment, and I imagine that it's only a hybrid version from here on out... 

I wanted to send out an update... even though it's kind of to no one in particular, and my Time-Blind brain is sayin' let's go with it... so hello.

I think I'm taking advice from my friend Mallory to take motivation when I can, similar to striking when the iron is hot...

 

- I want to write about how I have a new somatic therapist with ADHD!
- I want to talk about how I ended up in another Navel.LA assembly group this time it's all about "Hip Magic"
- and then I've been in a pseudo book club talking about 'The Entreprecariat' (I say pseudo since Solidarity Club isn't always a book club and I've only read like 16 pages before I started getting lost in this authors way of writing...)
- I want to write about what interesting things that seemed to just happen and while attempting to  'do nothing'... that I hadn't really anticipated, one of those things being: a deep level of understanding myself, and the other is my pure spontaneous joy...

I can say that with my new somatic therapist it's serendipitous that they're providing me with a bunch of missing pieces that I had wished I had had for my ADHD guide on:

 - Boundaries (and specifically HOW to set them) it's like the adventure of Consent!
 - What's the medical (or more holistic) take nowadays on Sensitive Rejection Dysphoria?
 - Advocating for oneself in the doctors office
(As I've learned more about ADHD specific gaslighting in the process of getting help for ADHD)

and also strategies for not beating myself up, so instead of things being just general 'self-care' I was given a plethora of information on grounding, but lots of better language all around it, like when I was describing that I have a problem with discipline, they very matter-of-factly said that consistency in ADHD is complicated/contradictory and maybe to:

"try again, when it feels accessible, if you want to."

which was a much more caring kind of balance rather than... a razor's edge.

And also in short order, there was this slow horror reveal that my trauma goes much deeper than I really know, (not get into it too deep before I understand how to talk about it better) but for example, I qualify EVERYTHING that I do as either good or bad quite unconsciously, and quite seriously heavy.

Feel feelings? Doing 'Good' work
Applying for things? Doing 'Good' work
Making 'Bad' art is 'Good'

Post SOMETHING to represent the last two months, something = better than nothing
Doing 'Good' is the bare minimum (as opposed to just being alive which is not Good enough)
etc.

and... I can't really drop the Good / Better / Best or the Bad / Should / Waste without feeling completely disoriented and specifically dissociative.

But I also want to write about a discussion put on by 'The Artists Office' and 'Other Places Art Fair' that ended in talking about strategies to be purposefully, un-Capitalistically, unproductive; and that was sooo nice.

- One artist clears two entire months of their schedule so that there's actually space to just be!
- Tatiana gave her tips on grounding with literal feet on literal dirt, she also inspired me by just describing candidly being talking about deadlines that she totally missed, but then dealing with it all the same, she too ruminates on missed opportunities, AND shit happens.
- The example I wanted to give was going to be about how I've heard of artists sharing the power/opportunities they have by flexing the leverage they have

i. when artists refuse individual awards and share the wealth against scarcity/competition
ii. 'Riders' that performers write into contracts that demand that the rest of the staff be diverse

- and my art piece attempting to visualize anti-FOMO, and asking for help to expand it, but in the end it was better that I just listened, there'll be more discussions on another day, I'm sure.

I'll just give a quick snapshot of where I've told myself it's OK if I can't get around to it (even if I'm not actually trying to say no.)

I've dipped a bit in participating in some other projects where I was previously a bit more active, which I've told myself is okay:
- connecting more with those in the Level Ground Collective,
- Jennifer Moon's Scrooging Missions,
- and I've got a whole 4-hour conversation I'm sitting on with Tatiana Vahan to go over 'Bar-Fund' as a way to lead me into writing an epic piece on Money & Art.

But on top of all of that I have been struggling with finishing the following things in the last 4-8 months:

- Just finish figuring out how to bring Over Over Over Part 3 to a brilliant end...
- Just finish figuring out how to use Unity to complete turning the art into a VR piece...
- Just finish figuring out Medi-Cal and when you can see someone for acupuncture or physical therapy or dental work...
- Just finish up looking at all of your finances since being on unemployment and figure out how long it will be until I've depleted my savings vis-a-vis a complex Excel visual aid
- Just tell people, curators etc. all about my brilliant art practice and post juicy snippets daily and weekly on Instagram
- Just finish figuring out who will write some really good letters of rec for applications deadlines coming up... (I got as far as making a diagram...)

Pandemic aside I just keep expecting to Nike the whole thing (Just do it).

I've also been beating myself up because there's also shame around not being able to be consistent about showing up to a practice whether that's art or yoga... it's the whole 'not waiting for inspiration to strike' deal which I've been seeing versions of this motivational quote seemingly everywhere lately?

 

 

But with Intention-Deficit Disorder and some kind of trauma that throws me into extremes, maybe a nicer, less work-a-holic way of saying that would be phrase it as: 'expect joy to strike at any moment, act on it if that's ideal, or don't act on it if that's actually ideal.' So yeah clunky, but basically reminding myself that things can be quite inexplicably tough for me...

This is me:

And this is me:

 

Then this is me:

Because I really...

And this seems too true...

So uh yeah, this is a real ramble of a post, but basically I just wanted to remind myself that among all of the pretty meh stuff, was a lot of glimpses of a horizon. I don't quite know what's beyond my early coping mechanisms that probably are no longer serving me, but I will say that sometimes I do... get 'round to it.

Is there a phrase for the artistic version of actually starting something that you've been avoiding...

that's akin to "the bark is worse than it's bite?"

all I've come up with is "The Relief of Now AND Later", but surely there's some kind of word play that will just *click* in a much smoother way... I can almost picture this motivation, something that I hang in my bedroom so it's the first thing I see when I wake up.

Right now the message I use is, "just try it for 15 minutes..."
The only problem is well.. right now it's 6 am.

Part 1: Precursor to a Perspicacious Vision Board

I keep thinking about making plans, but some antagonism towards work, as well as participating in some reading groups has also inspired me to find ways that I DO want to work.

“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence…” - Ella Jo Baker

Ella Baker had an audacity to dream big, but she also said the following: 

"This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.”

And there’s many interesting notes about the kinds of plans made by George Schuyler and Ella Baker from Irvin J. Hunt’s essay “May Things Fall Apart” (Looking at their interest in co-operatives in the 1930s)

"Planning for the collapse of the governing body was thus tantamount to remaking the body of the black public sphere, turning a collectivity organized around charismatic male leaders into one defined by gender-critical societies, each governing itself into ungovernability.”

Dr. Irvin Hunt went on to say that Ella Baker never wanted to be held up as an exceptional individual (like Biden did during his recent DNC speech) because the whole idea was to have each generation get to work in their time, not to rely on each older (usually male-centric) generation, and to be radically horizontal.

Then I looked up “Things Fall Apart” and I stumbled on this...
 

I kindof wanted to see it in inclusive language so I re-wrote it thus:

Visual art/ Literary arts/ Performing art/ Culinary art is one's constant effort to create for oneself a different order of reality from that which is given to you or me or any of us.

“Fugitive Planning” in Fred Moten & Stefano Harney’s terms involves “self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism”

(Honestly I have to re-read all that to figure out if I really understand it. I know it’s important somehow...)

So a Vision Board… 

Maybe one can update what it is and how it works? So it can take in consideration:

1. White Supremacy Culture Characteristics
2. Bene Brown & Whole Hearted Living (See workshops based on it)
3. The skepticism from one guy on 'Vision Boards'
   (even though he probably wants to sell you his version of an ‘Action Board’…)
   “Recycle Your ‘Vision Board’ / Positive Thinking is White Junk Pseudoscience
   (the secondary title is mine)

A brief introduction to the Allied Media Conference (Transcript of the opening to 'Queer Astrological Technologies, Live from the 2020 AMC!)

While I was in the labor group with Bene & Emaline [insert website here], I realized that not everyone knows what AMC is (even though I still haven't been?!) but I thought this was a nice intro, I feel like everyone I know would love it, so if you want to hear an intro to it, there's a quick short explanation from Autumn Brown that is accessible either by Podcast OR the clips published on YouTube. I thought it'd be neat if I plugged in links to the references mentioned to see how deep and wide it goes!

Autumn Brown, (Sagittarius Sun, Gemini Rising and Libra Moon) Queer science fiction writer based in Minneapolis, (the epicenter of the uprising) and also a mother of dragons:

"Hello beloved survivors, what you are about to hear is a plenary conversation that Adrienne and I  hosted at the 2020 Allied Media Conference, which is a career highlight for me, but might not make sense for you if you’ve never heard of the Allied Media Conference.

So a bit of background,

 

The Allied Media Conference or "AMC" emerges out of 20 years of relationship building across issues, identities, organizing practices and creative mediums. It started in 1990 as the Midwest Zine Conference in Bowling Green and was really compelled by the concept of Do-It-Yourself or DIY media. Eventually it became the ‘Allied Media Conference' in 2002, that’s when it was re-branded as the AMC, and then in 2007 it moved its home base to Detroit. 

That move has enabled the conference to draw on the lineage of visionary Black organizing models, and the legacy of Detroit as a Black Power and Labor Movement city. The core of the AMC is the theory and practice of media based organizing, or ANY collaborative process that uses art, media, and technology to address the roots of systemic problems, and advance holistic solutions toward a more JUST and CREATIVE world. 

The 2018 AMC was a pivotal moment for the conference itself and after that year, after that year the conference went into chrysalis, took a year off, so there was no AMC in 2019. We were all SO looking forward to coming together again in Detroit for AMC 2020 and then… the pandemic happened... and the AMC had to transform again with a move to virtual conference for the first time. 

Adrienne and I were so honored to be asked to help open the virtual 2020 Allied Media Conference, because the AMC is a space where both of us have built and iterated on key pieces of our work. Adrienne experimented with her first workshops on Octavia Butler, 'Emergent Strategy', and 'Pleasure Activism' at the AMC, I helped to co-host the first ever healing justice practice space at the Allied Media Conference, and it’s also the space where I led some of my first earliest science fiction and social justice workshops, some of my earliest anti-oppression facilitation workshops...

AMC for both of us and for many other people who have gone over the course of the last decade or so, we’ve experienced it as one of the few national conferences where new work is actually developed and iterated, not just a place where people are dropping in to present on the work they’re doing somewhere else. It’s also a space that over the last decade has shifted to center Black, and Indigenous and POC and queer folx, so sometimes when we’re there it feels like we’re walking into the world that we want to live in?

It’s a really magical place. 

So the conversation you're about to hear is the opening plenary of the Allied Media Conference 2020, where 'How to Survive the End of the World' brought back one of our earliest guests, the queer astrologer, Chani Nicholas. Chani as you probably remember is the author of the NYT bestseller, 'You Were Born for This' (get it here?), and she’s a hardworking astrologer whose work has offered a new kind of consciousness for our social movements in terms of our broader purpose and our practice. 

So we talk about this in the plenary, we talk about the role of the Allied Media Conference inside our movements, and we talk about how to work with 'Hard Astrology' of which there is quite a lot coming our way over the course of the rest of this first year. This 90-minute conversation that we had really helped set the tone of the rest of the virtual conference, we hope that you enjoy our giddy, love filled talk with Chani as much as we enjoyed having it…

Welcome to the AMC 2020..."

+AMC Video Here

+FULL Transcript Here

Simone DeSousa Gallery to close its exhibition space, another small business closes during COVID

Images above include a shot of me n Simone in 2014 at my second solo show in the space that’s closing

I know it’s just high ceiling white walls, and @SimoneDeSousaGallery can be proud of being at this spot for a decade, but in the context of ppl talking about trying to support Black owned businesses I can’t not think about Simone DeSousa Gallery as being run by an immigrant, a woman of color (Do we have another word for POC that’s not white-centric yet?) and the difference/disparity of connections and wealth that other galleries enjoy that will weather this COVID storm.

I vividly think about #SimoneDeSousa working so hard to get publications made, international connections, things that those with deeper pockets, bigger names, wouldn’t bat an eye at being able to produce on a whim.

Anyone else hear about the gallery that refused approved PPE loans because their rich family refused such handouts, so... instead the director fired all of the staff who made the gallery run? What if that gallery could’ve taken the loan and their privilege to pay the staff that would be hit the hardest and have THAT go forward as the gallery’s image...

Getting help from artists Karianne Spens-Hanna and Alissa R Lamarre, but also a shout out to the help me and my art has gotten from artist Virginia Torrence too!

Anyways,

it reminds me that #SpiralCollective also used to be on this block with #Goodwells (RIP vegan pocket sandwich) and even longer ago there was Willis Gallery, and of course before that, a place of trade for Indian/Indigenous people, the ‘Three Fires People’ (Ojibwe, Odawa and Botawatami.) There’s a quote I came across that was chilling, look up its context some time: “I had an elder tell me one time that we were conquered by our own love. And I believe that.” - Sue Franklin

I feel lucky to have been represented by Simone who is more concerned about trying to figure out how to support more artists of color than how the gallery might look after posting Black Lives Matter to all of the gallery’s followers…

So I do think that this is kindof a big deal that Simone DeSousa's exhibition space is coming to a close because without loans/support/a flush backer, it simply can't survive the pandemic, when other newer galleries will have benefited from galleries run by POC making something ‘a cool place to be’… 

What if these galleries were to take this time and reflect on the loss of Simone DeSousa’s space and with intention function less competitively, y'know kindof like the artists we know in Detroit? (To show support for how prior to her success maybe ya’ll didn’t think it was safe to open a contemporary gallery in the city...)

Thank Simone for her vision by giving the kind of support that you get automatically. Offer the grant writer or banker you pay that may know of an opportunity for small businesses that she wasn’t able to land, help to partially fund upcoming projects so she doesn’t shoulder that burden on her own funds, have information about ‘Editions’ at your own counter and tell people that Simone DeSousa Gallery had to close down the main gallery space and that is that spaces/projects run by people of color of too few and far between in this city with these demographics.

Kindof my 4th show that I put on with the gallery, was curating 'Over Over Over', this is an image of one of many banners by Ross Sinclair

wonky mini concrete pillars I imagined for future fundraisers for Simone, still available at Editions!

Book Review of "How to Know What's Really Happening" - Francis McKee (2016)

Living in Los Angeles with having two therapists and thankfully COVID ended my dead-end job for 5.5 years, all me and friends wanted to know was... how do we become our best selves, set ourselves up to not hate ourselves and our lives if somehow it turns out that's what we're used to? (Thanks Capitalism)

Anxiety/depression pushes those thoughts away and says, look at this excel spreadsheet, when including a car and your lifestyle and your rent, it costs you $125 a day to be alive, get back on that horse!

So that's the context in which I may have gotten a few art-focused self-help books on getting back into art, but I could never stop having one foot out of the door. I mean, it's great advice and all, but aren't I trying to one day get a cushy job of being an art consultant too? I'm supposed to be making my brand of kool-aid too!

Then I think about my friend Francis and his book "How to Know What's Really Happening" which has come back to me after being on loan for a few years and I wonder...

How does he deal with both sincerity of strategies, his own joy in research, and his own and others' mental health within an art world that perhaps is looking to be only decreasing in funding, increasing in MFA graduates as consumers, artists attempting to be global and relevant enough to translate it into further opportunities for themselves? The last thing I think he was actually trying to make was just another self-help book.

If you think that this is all just interesting tidbits stitched together, then I think it's similar to Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" or Harry Dodge's "The River of the Mother of God: Notes on Indeterminancy, v.2" which all make fascinating references so quick and accessible it hand it makes you wonder why you never get answers this quick when you actually try to Google something.

But there's also skeptical reviews of his book and so I also think that his cover should have warned the reader enough that you were not going to be able to get access to the information you may have been looking for in the first place. If anything, the amount of references and what you can glean from them is more like a time capsule than a little red book that you can wave in the air and memorize to join a movement.

I'll spoil the 'ending' for you just so that you maybe can enjoy the book on another level other than seeking answers because Francis McKee is a trickster of a very high level (and last I heard it's out of print so I don't feel so bad posting pages from the book up on Instagram...):

How to know what's really happening:
Question 1: Describe one of your most viewed YouTube clips and talk about what in it appeals to you.
Question 2: Who is your favorite historical figure and why?
Question 3: Who is your favorite fictional character and what draws you to this character?
Question 4: What would you do if you were a magpie? (Of the Corvidae family, one of the only animals that's not a mammal that can recognize itself in the mirror)
Question 5: Outline a scenario for your ideal trip.



And then he proves his metrics Must be worth something because it's the same questions used by Fortune 500 companies, NASA, Oxbridge entrance interviews... So if that irony is lost on you, do know that it's not a joke at your expense, it's more of a self-deprecating joke where perhaps we all lose, so it's not just you... solidarity!

In many ways this is a book about dispelling the myths of greatness into bite size chunks.

Don't think you'd understand artsy books like Finnegans Wake? Francis glibly has it down to a few sentences. Want to hear a bunch of strange but true stories about Science (with a capital "S")? Then this is the next best read after the 'Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'.
I think this book sits next to Paul Preciado's article "Learning from the Virus" because when it says to leave your phone and its tracking behind, McKee ends his by saying "I have decided to leave my baggage unattended" (both the sign of the privilege to travel where the curse is that Capitalism is making Everything look the same and GPS/wifi means you can never be lost again, but also that when we follow the official rules and regulations we are casually supporting that system by being a rule-follower of sorts)

I also think that he's contemplating books like adrienne maree brown's "Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds" as well as Ross Birrell's "Justified Sinners" as the kind of books small enough to pass around friends who may be familiar with all of the references but it's nice to have it all in one concise package.
But unlike those two I think he deliberately side-steps the elephant in the room of "but what activist actions produce lasting change?" in order to have exactly those kinds of thoughts;
because he knows that if you, the reader, does not actively update any kind of information into the lens of one's actual, current context, it is just some kind of virtue signaling or only taking in stories for their seductive aesthetic. The book itself is like a Socratic method littered with false entry points to prove a point.

I feel like this book would look at Adam Curtis' HyperNormalization' and say, how exactly do we know that we're better than or not in the disinformation times of the Soviet Union? And then perhaps it would also slyly point out that the film doesn't quite have a favorable view of women...

There's this idea from Jonathan Crary's "24/7" that kindof says "Garbage in, Garbage out" and it tries to get at the low quality of the stream of information we think we need, but where that book says to SLEEP, this book says to have patience, to step further back. Maybe you'll never be able to stop the onslaught of information, maybe because you're not supposed to... maybe you can render it powerless in another way that starts with how you alienate corporations instead of people...  (words taken from Emaline from 'Workshopping Work Beyond Capitalism' assembly)

Maybe we just don't actually know how to respond to the actual abundance that is online as if you're part of one gigantic single mind!

(Francis McKee is pulling from people commenting on other people's Facebook pages, unpublished films where you can see snippets of it on You Tube, and probably a snapshot of 3 months worth of articles from places like Science Alert, Wired, and the occasional tabloid newspaper/magazine. There is sheer abundance if your essays don't stick to whatever you can access via JStor)

You might wonder, who reads the drivvel that comes out of 'The Sun', 'Mirror', or 'Express', but then shouldn't we be asking ourselves how do we really differentiate the stuff we don't take seriously, and the stuff that we take so so seriously. And what if there is something bigger at play here, could pulled quotes from publications called 'The Sun', 'Mirror', or 'Express' actually be meant as a tarot reading? (The book he wrote after this featured tarot)

This little yellow pamphlet might be like an inside joke as a whole, but in the space between the bibliographical references it's got real things that the author themselves lives by, runs organizations by, and that the book has been written by.

Want specifics of what I mean (in terms of how the book is written in the spirit that it is inspired by?)
- He gives a neat history of Mass-Observation (the archive) while the book itself is a quirky archive of whatever was in the news in 2016.
- He talks about a guide-book to know "what's going on" can't really be 'out there' (and therefore not even in his book) "We have reached a point here where the search for what is happening no longer concerns the outer world. It's now the inner realm, the weather in our head, that we must learn to
navigate."





In between the lines this book assumes that protest is necessary, and that maybe the best "skill set" may be to know how to come back to yourself when all of the information threatens to make you feel inadequate. I think it's a 'meta' reading/action, like the moment you grab this self-described self-help book, you realize that to take it in on your terms you're sharpening your skills in spotting Neoliberal rhetoric, questioning the source that assumes self-aggrandizing individualism (like being 'Woke'), and noting that the lip-service-strategies proposed to eventually deal with climate change aren't going to help us nearly enough when it comes to climate change right now (Lookin' at you Biden). It assumes that we are living our greatest challenges to our lives and need to know that there isn't a message we can buy into, nor can we get away with publishing self-help books (or COVID resource packets or Instagram life hacks) ad nauseum. It's a darkly funny proposition of 'What do we doooo?' and one of his responses is to look at those who thought the world was going to end, and well... I guess since the government murdered them, the world kindof did. But hey you're reading this and you're alive, and you thought a book titled "How to Know What's Really Happening" would be somewhat enlightening, so why don't You figure out how has one person's activity of 'Listening' turned into a book that seems like it's about nothing?

This book is perfect reading for a laugh when trapped in purgatory for eternity, nothing is funnier than reading "the year 2016" when time no longer exists.