Off to Montreal for LASA Conference

Wish me luck!

renaissance woman

I've always been a renaissance woman. I have always wanted to be all and do all. Most of my endeavors have been about promoting other people, about telling stories that don't get told, about bringing attention to work, individuals and movements. I have always wanted to be a publisher, a writer, a filmmaker, a poet, a performer, a leader, an academic, a creative being that moves mountains and shakes souls with my creative works. I am all those things and sometimes do them well...but for some reason it is so hard to do those things for myself. All of these projects would seem like they are about myself but for some reason I remain unable to move the spirits in my soul for the projects that are just about me.

I am a natural collaborator a person who naturally gravitates to people with potential and wants to help develop that potential in every way. I naturally want to help and counsel and cheerlead and coach and love...But how can I break out and do for myself, the way I really need to? A very simple example is I set the goal of publishing my first solo chap book this summer. I began dilligently. Sifting through journals and typed up poems. Took an amazing writing workshop that rocked my world and melted my face off.

I had all this energy and what did I do? I directed that towards other folks, towards making an anthology of central american poets. Again its something I've always wanted to do and is about to be completed, but where am I? wheres the energy directed at editing my work and doing what I wanted to do? Well at least its not wasted energy. And please, this is not a complaint. This is just something I need to constantly work on. Of course it would be great if I was recognized for my fabulousness and the work just fell into place but these are the struggles of the fabulously misunderstood. I'll keep working at while you all work on discovering my unrecognized genius and we'll find a happy medium.

Paint your world-THIS FRIDAY!

Radio 2050-Pinta tu Propio Mundo



Pinta tu Propio Mundo SIX

@ Galeria de la Raza


Friday, August 10, 2007 @ 8 p.m.


Featuring:

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Opal Palmer Adisa

Mamacoatl

Maceo Cabrera Estevez

Las Manas: Maya Chinchilla, Milta Ortiz, Cruz Grimaldo, Anayvette Martinez



Hosted by Leticia Hernandez


Featured visual artist: Chamindika
Tshirts designs and Art FOR SALE
www.chamindika.com

Six years in the running, this evening of women's art and expression presents accomplished writers, risk taking performers, and cutting edge visual artists in the heart of La Misión.


2857 24th Street @ Bryant Street
415-826-8009
$8 - $15 sliding scale/Galería members FREE

Sponsored by Poets and Writers Inc., Nicacelly, KPFA, and Global Exchange.

ALARMA!

WHAT: ALARMA!

conceived and performed by
Eric Aviles, Maya Chinchilla, Milta Ortiz, Gerardo Perez, Marc David
Pinate, Yadira de la Riva and Nicolas Valdez.

WHERE: Galería de la Raza, 2857 24th Street @ Bryant, San Francisco

WHEN: Saturday, August 25 & Sunday, August 26 @ 8:00 p.m.

TICKETS: $8 Students & Galeria Members; $10 General Admission

INFO: (415) 826-8009, www.galeriadelaraza.org

Galeria de la Raza proudly presents the world premier of Alarma! A
postmodern myth for the apocalyptic times we find ourselves in, Alarma!

is a multidiscipline, hybrid performance blending elements of movement,

spoken word, sound and video to explore the issue of immigration in the

shadow of Western consumerism. Commissioned by Galeria de la Raza as
part of its Picturing Immigration Project – a year-long exposition of
art exhibitions, film screenings and performances inspired by the 2006
May Day immigrant's rights marches around the country – Alarma! uses
non-linear narrative techniques combined with powerful imagery and text

to go beyond the mainstream media rhetoric and reveal the underlying
relationships between rich and poor, compassion and hate, us and them,
love and fear which lie at the heart of the immigration debate.


The culmination of a 4-month performance workshop under the direction of renowned choreographer Sara Shelton Mann, Alarma! features the talents of seven envelope-pushing, Bay Area performers and videographers whose credits and past achievements are impressive. Actor/writer Eric Aviles worked extensively with well known Chicago playhouses, Steppenwolf and Goodman theaters, before relocating to the Bay Area where he has performed for Teatro Campesino and Teatro Visión. A poet and recent Masters graduate in video production and communication arts, Maya Chinchilla's video documentaries have been shown and won awards at various film festivals around the country. Milta Ortiz is slam poet/performer. In 2006 she received a commission from the Oakland Arts Commission to write and perform her one-woman show, Scatter My Red Underwear, which is set to tour nationally in 2008. Gerardo Perez is a visual artist, puppeteer, actor and videographer who has shown and performed his work extensively throughout the Bay Area. He was a member of the creative team behind the award winning public access show, Viva la Vida. Marc David Pinate is a national slam champion and has performed as an actor, poet and musician throughout the country as a member of Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word and as the front-man for the musical group, Grito Serpentino. Yadira de la Riva was a member of UC Santa Cruz's groundbreaking Rainbow Theatre and currently works for Kaiser Permanente's educational theatre program. A recent arrival from San Antonio, TX, Nicolas Valdez began playing the accordion at the age of nine. Nicolas was a member of the nationally acclaimed Teatro Animo, youth theatre company and performed with Guillermo Gomez-Peña and in a national tour of Zoot Suit with Teatro Campesino.

Sara Shelton Mann has taught, performed and created performance since 1967. A protegee of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, she has studied dance with Erik Hawkins, Cliff Keuter, Merce Cunningham, Brynar Mehl, Andrew Harwood, and balanced her training by studying QiQong with Master Qi Yang Ma and Master Zi Sheng Wang. During the seventies, she was artistic director of the Halifax Dance Co-Op in Nova Scotia. In 1979, she formed CONTRABAND, a group of collaborative artists dedicated to the evolution of an interdisciplinary dance vision. From 1996 to 1999, Mann collaborated with MacArthur "Genius" Guillermo Gomez-Pena in a series of interdisciplinary performance installations based more in theater than in dance and toured them throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. She has taught at such prestigious schools as Stanford University, Jacob's Pillow, san Francisco State University, Mills College, University of Colorado andNew School for Social Research in NY. She was an Artist in Residence in 1995 at the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, CA; Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA; Moving Arts in K-In, Germany; and the Sacred Dance Guild in Hawaii. Sara Shelton Mann was received numerous awards including a Choreographer's Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, Emerging Choreographer award from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Art Commission and four Isadora Duncan Dance Awards to name a few.

La Bomba and Las Manas on the Radio

Talking about LA BOMBA this saturday July 21,2007...Check it.
KPFA RADIO 2050
and a past show
Milta and Cruz on Radio 2050

Whats up

Here are some events that I will be a part of that are coming up:

-Sat,July 21st "Bomba" (fundraiser for Galeria de La Raza) at Cellspace
-Sat, August 10 "Pinta tu Propio Mundo" at Galeria de la Raza : with
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Opal Palmer Adisa
Mamacoatl
Las Manas
Maceo Cabrera
Leticia Hernandez Linares
featured visual artist: Chamindika

-Tuesday, August 28 Lunada at Galeria Featuring Maya Chinchilla (thats me!) and Uchechi Kalu
By then I will have a version of my chap book to sell. I just finished a workshop with Willie Perdomo through an amazing organization called VONA Voices and I'm feelin a need to be a published poet.

And that project I've been talking about called Picturing Immigration will be on Aug 24 or 25th at a location to be determined (we'll be hammering out the details this weekend)

I hope you are all doing well. I'm finishing up some of the final details of graduate school and looking for work, working on some video projects(keep your eyes and ears open for "Mi Vida Yoga" and "Amor Cubano") and have been giving myself some time to focus on working as an artist while I work out the details of what is next.

Gloria Steinem: In Defense of the 'Chick Flick'

By Gloria Steinem, Women's Media Center
Posted on July 7, 2007, Printed on July 13, 2007


Here's a modest proposal to the young man on the plane from Los Angeles to Seattle who said of the movie that most passengers -- male and female -- voted to watch: "I don't watch chick flicks!"

So what exactly is a "chick flick?" I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.

I'm not challenging your choice; I'm just questioning the term that encourages it. After all, if you think back to your school days, much of what you were assigned as great literature could have been dismissed as "chick lit." Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.

Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll's House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde "chick lit," only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars.

Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world -- and women aren't taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs -- the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.

Still, I know this is not your problem. Instead, let me appeal to your self-interest as well as your sense of fairness: If the "chick flick" label helps you to avoid the movies you don't like, why is there no label to guide you to the ones you do like?

Just as there are "novelists" and then "women novelists," there are "movies" and then "chick flicks." Whoever is in power takes over the noun -- and the norm -- while the less powerful get an adjective. Thus, we read about "African American doctors" but not "European American doctors," "Hispanic leaders" but not "Anglo leaders," "gay soldiers" but not "heterosexual soldiers," and so on.

That's also why you're left with only half a guide. As usual, bias punishes everyone. Therefore I propose, as the opposite of "chick flick" and an adjective of your very own, "prick flick." Not only will it serve film critics well, but its variants will add to the literary lexicon. For example, "prick lit" could characterize a lot of fiction, from Philip Roth to Bret Easton Ellis and beyond. "True prick" could guide readers to their preferred non-fiction, from the classics of Freud to the populist works of socio-biologists and even Rush Limbaugh.

Most of all, the simple label "prick flick" could lead you easily and quickly through the thicket of televised, downloaded and theatrical releases to such attractions as:

All the movies that glorify World War II. From classics with John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, those master actors who conveyed heroism without ever leaving the back lot, to Spielberg's "Band of Brothers," in which the hero would rather die than be rescued, Hollywood has probably spent more on making movies about the war than this country spent on fighting it. After all, World War II was the last war in which this country was clearly right. Without frequent exposure to it, how are we to believe we still are?

All the movies that glorify Vietnam, bloody regional wars, and the war on terrorism. These may not be as much fun to watch -- you probably are aware that we aren't the winners here -- but they allow you to enjoy mass mayhem in, say, South Asia or Africa or the Middle East that justifies whatever this country might do.

All the movies that portray violence against women, preferably beautiful, sexy, half-naked women. These feature chainsaws and house parties for teenage guys, serial killers and sadistic rapists for ordinary male adults, plus cleverly plotted humiliations and deaths of powerful women for the well-educated misogynist.

All the movies that insist female human beings are the only animals on earth that seek out and even enjoy their own pain. From glamorized versions of prostitution to such complex plots as "Boxing Helena," a man's dream of amputating all a rebellious woman's limbs -- and then she falls in love with him -- these provide self-justification and how-to manuals for sadists.

As you can see, one simple label could guide you through diversity, and help other viewers to practice avoidance.

But if you really think about it, I'm hope-a-holic enough to think you might like to watch a chick flick after all.

Gloria Steinem travels widely as a feminist activist, organizer, writer and lecturer. She co-founded New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine where continues to serve as a consulting editor. She has been published in many magazines and newspapers here and in other countries, and is also a frequent guest commentator on radio and television.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/56219/