Intimacy & Generosity
I’ve got a number of posts hidden away in an older online wiki project (The Househedz project).  Since that project is about to take new shape and form in a revised online structure come 2010, I will be moving some of those posts here in the hope they become less hidden and open to feedback and discussion.  This one is originally from Nov. 2008: Many of the projects I’m currently working on from writing to performance are concerned with fostering conditions for closeness, vulnerability, a way toward becoming deeply familiar. I have been

Romancing Blackness
Originally posted at Consuming Blackness Diasporically alpha site on July 23 2008 As an African American woman (who is also bi-racial) with an estranged family network, house has provided me with a sense of belonging, rootedness in place, a spot to grow away from but from which I always come back to. Chicago’s spots – Warehouse, Music Box, Bismarck and so on (I haven’t even mentioned the S.Side’s contribution…Still learning enuf to be able to tell it with clarity) provide mapping points in a genealogy of regional culture specific to ChicagoR

Fierceness in the public eye
I’ve been obsessed with the figure of “the diva” and her position within black popular music for awhile now.  Been really preoccupied with her role in the house performance complex as the often unremarked explosive ingredient in much of dance/club music.  But this moment is issuing a new era for the diva — in drag — and most often of color as African American or Latino.  What is the power of today’s “camp of color”? What are our current iterations of “fierceness”?  Beyonce’s I Am…Sasha Fierce, Leyomi and Vogue Evolution’s recent turn (and at least for the moment, adulation) on ABDC, the underground viral following of underground ballroom battles v