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To organize it is to kill it.

Grandmother Margaret Behan

Chloe Dzubilo and Pati O’Poser at Squeeze Box circa 1997

#squeezebox #chloedzubilo #punk #transgender

Pass as What?

She was a blonde, leggy WASP from Connecticut who lived in a historic hotel with a grand piano in the lobby. Her skin was flawless and blonde peach fuzz glimmered on her arms in the right light. She showed horses on the A Circuit and was the wife of a famous NYC nightclub promoter. She was an East Village rock star and did cameos as herself in downtown art movies in the 90s. She vacationed in the Hamptons and designers Mark Jacobs and Alex Bittar loved to dress her. She was a member of the most elite club in Manhattan, hobnobbing with rock legends and movie stars. She sat on committees for mayor Bloomberg and launched a charity that gave horseback riding lessons on the Chelsea Piers to young girls living with AIDS. She ate raw or from Whole Foods and spent many hours a day pampering her hair and body.

She was a tranny living with AIDS in a welfare hotel. She worked, legally, for less than minimum wage in social services, subsidized by food stamps and public benefits. She had track marks and a Medicaid funded titanium hip. She wore second hand clothes and plastic bracelets ~ 10 for a dollar ~ that covered her hesitation marks. She spent a portion of her life in the hospital, often the Bellevue psych ward. She only left her 10 x 15 foot room to go to medical appointments, 12-step meetings or an event when someone remembered to put her on a list. She could only eat one or two easily digestible foods at any one time and spent the first half of the day doing what she could to relieve the pain in her body enough to get out the door.

She made beautiful paintings and cartoons, poems and prose that changed the way you mis-understood everything. She made every event and room that she walked into instantly glamorous. All of her widened the path to trans-euphoria and healed so many children.

#chloedzubilo #aids #eastvillage #transgender

Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions have a need of beauty.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

Consistent adequacy is always better than inconsistent excellence.

http://nonprofitwithballs.com/2013/07/community-engagement-101-why-most-summits-suck/

#Vu Le

East 8th St between Aves B & C ~ the view from the door of the Rock Against Racism squat, 1985

Mrs. Claus and her elves in Timor Leste ~ The Grand Palace, Christmas 2014

Beyond Strayed (as in Ask Sugar)

There is a kind of story, God, that glides along under everything else that is happening, and this kind of story only jumps out into the light like a silver fish when it wants to see where it lives in relation to everything else.

~ Fanny Howe, In the White Winter Sun

There will be a way to hold women who do not make and raise babies that makes both the grief and relief of it all of ours.

A way that sees nature while not romanticizing it, that critiques patriarchy without shaming.

Woman who do not birth and raise a child are ancients and futurists. The middle story is about grief and strength as if they cannot be separated.

The way will not be built by celebrating the warrior, the queer, the auntie, the inventor, the accomplished. Our being is not the new story.

It will be more than flipping scripts, more than standing witness to possibility.

Making it will require irreverence and passionately cutting through muscle and scar tissue every step of the way.

The new story will be seen when it can.

(bad poem #1)

Grieving rock ancestors, coast of Timor Leste

Dear Brothers and Sisters

This is how people from Timor Leste refer to people they know. People they don’t know are called Cousin. If you are really special, you might get their term of endearment, Kakah. I would love to go home and call my besties Kakah. The crazy thing is, this would take less explaining than calling people I know Brother and Sister.

Timorese in business and government kiss on the right and left cheeks as a greeting (traceable to Portuguese colonialism). Except when you are American or Australian. They have learned that we don’t do this with Cousins. With Brothers and Sisters, OK, but not with Cousins. A Kakah’s Brother or Sister maybe, if you are like that.

I have a platonic soul mate and we call each other Brother and Sister. Proclaiming this soul mate endearment was a very un-American thing to do in the first place. Calling each other Brother and Sister is practically communist. We learned it in Canada.

We started by saying “I want to have an unprofessional relationship with you” and laughing out loud. We found this joke in one of our first 6-hour conversations during which we deconstructed the many ways that the institutionalization of “appropriate boundaries” can go wrong. Boundaries can be beautiful things that invite life to thrive, like a garden fence that allows the tender baby carrot tops to grow free of four-legged nibblers. They can also suffocate life.

One of my soul mate’s social work students was a young father who worked in the child welfare system during the day and attended graduate school at night until 10 pm. Part of his case management job was to counsel young boys as he walked them to afterschool programs. This program design was intended to feel less institutional to traumatized kids. One day, he took a boy to a barbershop because the child was humiliated by his own hair.

The young social work student told his story defiantly because this act would result in a supervisory warning. Not so much for being late to the developmental activity scheduled in the case plan, but for spending his own money on the boy like a brother might do.

Holiday in Cambodia

Actually, I’m in Timor Leste. I did the Holiday in Cambodia in 2009, also with my bestie Catalina who I co-founded an anarchist collective with in the mid-80s. At the time, she was organizing worker-owned collectives in rural New York State. After various US projects and business school, she began traveling the globe offering her many skills to rural economic development supported by US foreign aid. Occasionally, she lures me out of the Lower East side because without experiencing her life abroad we would become obsolete to each other.

Wisdom grows out of experience and environment, so living uninterrupted in the world’s superpower means that one’s global perspective becomes both stunted and arrogant (see US Foreign Policy). Before passports became necessary to cross the Mexican and Canadian boarders, only 3% of Americans and about 10% of our Congress held passports. This explains a few things.

It feels very different in Timor Leste than in Cambodia even though both countries are in their own story of colonization, civil unrest/war, torture, collaboration, rape, killing of more than 10% of the population, resistance, liberation and lots and lots of foreign aid. Today, the people of both countries are mostly illiterate and living on what adds up to around US$100 per year.

The getting-off-the-airplane on-the-surface difference between the two countries has something to do with the absence of foreigner-can’t-miss-it Timorese culture and the dominance of the foreign aid and NGO infrastructure. Walking up to what looks like an animist alter and finding a plastic fir tree draped in Christmas lights and a nativity scene comprised of white faces also makes you feel like something deep rooted has happened here. In Cambodia, these same structures would house ancient Hindu or Buddhist sculptures draped in flowers with oranges with freshly let incense at their feet.

While foreign aid is ubiquitous in Cambodia (it became the country’s first billion dollar industry within a year after the end of Pol Pot), it’s in your face in Dili, Timor Leste’s capitol and only city. The embassies and foreign aid buildings are the largest and most sit on what is prime ocean front real estate in Imperialist countries. The US ambassador’s mansion is next to and four times the size and grandeur of the embassy’s own office building, ostensibly where the work gets done.

In Cambodia, the structures of ancient cultural prominence like Angkor Wat and natural resources like the forests and the huge prolific lake Tonle Sap that still feeds most of the country as well as a portion of China are prominent. It feels as if the country is organized around them. During his extended dictatorship Pol Pot closed the boarders, which slowed foresting so that some of the last standing old growth jungles in Asia are still intact there (precarious as they are due to the rush of logging that followed the end of the civil war) where as above Dili, the mountains are naked with a bit of green stubble that shows during the rainy season.

For 400+ years Portugal colonized Timor, Catholicized everyone and exported all of the Sandalwood trees. The ecosystem is fucked. This display of mountain flesh makes me want to look away.

People and their earth are solid and present, but the adornment is demure compared to Cambodia where foliage, plumage, textiles, food, dance, even small souvenir replicas of ancient temple fragments tell an ancient story that is continuing. Here, the sculptures of seals (none live anywhere nearby), mermaids (not from this sea) and the same abstract forms that show up in front lawn fountains in Queens that mark the gate posts along the renovated ocean walkway tell a story too.

What I haven’t seen in the two days that I have been in Dili is an Uma Lulik, the ancestor house that was the center of every village. I will get to see one in the mountains when we visit one of the farmer collectives that Catalina has been working with.

Her ‘unusually successful’ and widely recognized (by farmers, buyers, local government, US AID, China) project is wrapping up its third year. The first year was spent getting started according to industry best practices. What is not in the reports that get read nor in the US AID annual calendar of Timor Leste projects-to-brag-about-photos is the product of the first US AID money that entered each farming community ~ the Uma Lulik.

Local tradition states that the ancestors must be honored before anyone in the community can move on. These honorings require wealth. The ancestors are not satisfied by the same scrappiness that produced shelter and sustenance following the Indonesian army’s complete destruction of the Timorese infrastructure. They require hard cash and everyone’s attention.

Most important to the widely recognized ‘unusual success’ of this US AID project, is Catalina’s practice of working with (which requires listening too), rather than for or in spite of the AID recipients.

The four months of project staff time and the US AID development money that went into building the Uma Lulik had to happen and be done well in order for any other form of local development to be routed in on the ground realities. Even so, it will never show up clearly in the reports, photos or best practices. The Western foreign aid worldview has no way of hearing or seeing it properly.

The ancestors here are remaining under the radar of the foreign gaze. Perhaps this is their source of strength and resilience in Timor Leste.

peoplesclimatearts

Indigenous

stealcollective-blog

pati-o-poser

Women of the IRA, Alex Bowle, Northern Ireland, 1977.

whoever says don't count on your children in old age hasn't chosen the right children

Pati O'Poser

SCANDAL

This past summer, I spent most nights alone. Almost every evening, I lounged in a hot bath with an entire episode of Girls, House of Cards, Top of the Lake, Orange is the New Black and, yes I admit it, Scandal and Olivia Pope. At a certain point, the stories of the characters in these series began to show up in my dream state more vibrant than the world. Eventually, I would jolt awake, a bit disturbed that my subconscious was working with content from a made for cable drama: an awkward message that that the illuminated screen was more compelling than the world and people around me.

Each time that this awareness struck, I thought of my Irish grandmother Clara during the last few years of her life that she spent in her bedroom with a colposcopy bag – state-of-the-art treatment for colon cancer in the 70’s. For a period of time, my mother would pick me up from grade school and drive us to Clara’s house where I would change out of my school clothes and into a party dress. I would then take a tea tray to my grandmother and we would watch an afternoon soap opera.

My mother stopped my tea-time contribution to her care visits when Clara began to talk about the people in the soaps as though they were part of our family. I remember her voice, the old lady smell of tea rose scented powder, our mutual delight about me being in charge of the tea ritual and the contents of the top of every surface in her room. I cannot remember anything about the stories or characters on the black and white TV.

Thankfully, my partial exile this summer was self-imposed, unlike Clara’s. I chose to step out of the constant flow of human interaction for the solitude of a house in the woods. During the day, as I interacted with human beings in realtime or virtual ways and just enough to sustain a room of my own, I began to look forward to the evening ritual of long bath with the next installation of a well calculated human drama.

The high-jacking of my dream state by these dramas was an unexpected and disturbing outcome. I did not foresee that checking out for 42-minutes in the tub would work more powerfully on my subconscious than reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, studying a garden, waking to the sun and morning bird songs, sitting meditations and walks in the woods.

As the summer exile comes to an end, it is apparent that the characters from the illuminated screen will fade. At the same time, Clara is more vivid, her story revealed. As we left her most of the day in her bedroom in a quiet house, with occasional well-staged visits from grandchildren, the characters on the black and white TV were in fact more vibrant, their stories more complete. Her six children and twenty grandchildren withheld our 70’s drama of divorces, DWI incarcerations, mid-life crisis and acid trips gone wrong; her only access to us, an occasional visit from a grandchild in a party dress.

It appears that her replacement of soap opera characters for family members was as much a product of exile as the natural process of an aging mind. We could not see that our replacement by scandalous TV characters was a very clear message that she had the capacity to be a player in our own series, Catholics Gone Astray. Instead, we enacted what is considered a death sentence in many cultures and exiled her from her own human drama.

#grandmothers #dementia #exile #Women Who Run With the Wolves

Dyke March NYC 2013

Weird n beautiful Siouxsie...

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