thank you, jesus!

...a la saved!

i arrive at the raleigh-durham american airline luggage terminal, to retrieve my red rolling suitcase. or, so i think. if you keep updated with this blog, you will know that my laptop was stolen at laguardia. i am happy with my powerbook, my 60 gigs of music, and my important papers and photos from my external hard drive.

i watch the suitcases slowly fade from the turn style. my mother had picked up her luggage. finally, nothing is left save a small red rolling suitcase and a large black mass. the tears start to fall because i simply cannot believe my bad luck. then, a light hits me. i bet you that someone picked up my suitcase by mistake. i call the number on the ticket, google the address, and discover they live in chapel hill.

my aunt is able to contact them and inform them they have taken the wrong suitcase. i am starring at their suitcase thinking, "honest mistakes happen, but shit, this suitcase looks nothing like mine."

a man comes back to the airport about an hour later very apologetic. he was double parked and quickly grabbed the wrong suitcase by mistake.

i'm thankful, because my one of a kind vintage soft leather scrunch boots were in the suitcase. all is right in the world, the belongings were safely returned to me.

now, i must write an angry email to american airlines in the hope of getting some free shit.

this christmas by donnie hathaway.

i dunno, merry christmas or something.

flavor in your ear.

my current album purchases:

black cherry//goldfrapp
turn on the bright lights//interpol
greatest hits//isley brothers
the hip hop violinist//miri ben-ari

i want to give a special plug for miri ben-ari. her sound excites the ear, it is unless anything i've ever heard save select kanye tracks. i've played it around the cafe (cafe gato rojo) and about the room to warm reception. my favorite track is "chillin' in E," or so i think that's the title.

hair activism is sexy.

there's a war going on & only dark people know about it. this war is over hair; not just hair color but hair length, hair texture, hair history and what inevitably becomes hair politics. is it chemically straight? european silky? happily nappy? or yakky? do you press it? wrap it? flip it? stitch it? or relax it?

now, you see, my mother has always been partial to the bourgie, must-have-been-born-in-DC bob. you know the look--strands that fall carefully around the face, no highlights, no life, just bourgie. my mother is "blessed" with what they call "good hair." let it be known that i abhor the phrases blessed and good hair. they're rooted in two things--the europeanization of black americans both aesthetically and religiously--but that's another manifesto. my mother got more daring each passing year---she has gotten a shag, layers, and many shades of color at the thought of going gray.

i, too, have what they call good hair. i got my first relaxer at 4. they say that memory begins at 4. put plainly, i do not remember the texture of my natural hair. i've seen one eighties style snapshot with the edges rounded off & the color distorted. the photographer could not capture all of my hair in the photo. for the last 16 years, my hair has swung in the wind like white girls.

each time i went to your local black hair care salon, i came out looking the same. last summer, i asked for a sidesweeping bang & i came out looking like sheila e. at 14, i asked my stylist to cut it all off & he refused. i got my first substantial hair change this fall when a stylist gave me highlights and a razored bob. i had braids for a minute one summer & cornrows with beads every summer during camp.

being the only black girl in a sea of white classmates meant that i endured a lot of stupid questions. i allowed people to touch, offered explanations, and provided justifications. as children, that's fine. in adulthood, we should all know better. so to the white boy with 3 inches of silky strands i offer this, "no, i don't know how to cornrow. try another negra." further, do not ask me if my hair will form into an afro. no reason necessary, just don't.

i'm a bit tired of my hair's lack of creativity. it's time for change. too often, young black girls get to college, get political, and get rid of their "oppressive hairstyles." this might not be the revelation revolutionaries are looking for, but i just want a head of wild hair. please believe that my "natural" style will be as costly & time consuming as any chemical relaxer.

this is an experiment in aesthetics.

out of chaos, comes beauty.

i am back at home, being a sloth, sleeping all day, and watching netflix. shifting through my old bedroom i came across 2 amazing fashion finds.

one, my mother found this frida kahlo broach given to me out of good faith and kindness by my friend kyle, from tufts. i was so happy to find it after it went missing almost 2 years ago.

two, i found a pair of vintage soft brown leather flat scrunch boots in my mother's closet. she purchased them back in the early 80s in richmond, virginia. they are exactly what i have been envisioning. i'm excited, that's all i have to say.

i SO don't read blogs.

did you know blog is short for web log?

the vagina workshop.

i was cast in the vagina monologues 2006 as "the vagina workshop." last year, i was "the anry vagina," a role that is near and dear to my heart. in hearing that i was cast as the workshop, i was taken aback and maybe even a bit disappointed. my thoughts were that i was strongly miscast for this role. for those unfamiliar with the monologues, the vagina workshop is a monologue about a woman who goes to a seminar to find her clitoris and eventually orgasm. this monologue in year's past has had the aire of an uppercrust british women and frankly, little about my character screams "british elite." so goes my troubles.

after meeting with the executive director, i have decided to do the show. she made a convincing case--1) this year's production will have only 3 solo pieces (my piece being on of them) 2) my strength as an actress will carry a piece with many archs 3) the angry vagina is not much of a theatrical challenge and this year's monologue will pose more of a challenge.

i will experiment with a hackneyed, working class british accent. i will be downtown julie brown.

stiletto pumps in da club.

for my feminist theory course, i wrote a 17 page final paper about the stiletto heel and the way it informs conceptions of womanhood. i used theories of embodiment & gender performance to reason that a woman can wear stilettos and be a feminist. here is a excerpt:

The bodily manipulations made by the stiletto constitute a sexual science, a complex system of physical maneuvers around which we define what is feminine or sexy. This complex system of definition develops along two fronts--that is, the physical contortion of the body and a social understanding of femininity. The two concepts work in service to make the stiletto symbolic of womanhood. The feminist critique examines further how the stiletto as a symbol of womanhood alters the body and informs movement and gender construction. Cox describes the social outcome of this complex system by saying, "[w]ith a hardened, phallic body that inspired both terror and sexual longing....a woman could prove to be an untouchable object" (Cox, 103). Her comments speak to the imagined notions of womanhood constructed about the physical changes. The physical body and the cultural constructions are at play here in informing our thoughts on gender performance.

bitch: for gay men & dope women.

let me say that i secretly long to be joan morgan, to wear sexy shades of "black girl" orange, write for the voice, and author when chickenheads come home to roost: my life as a hip hop feminist. her work was instrumental in my girlhood. i closed the book & had become woman--grown an inch, bumped up a cup, & developed a switch that was 2/3 confidence to 1/3 self-consciousness.

morgan recently penned a review of madonna's new disc. morgan says that "madge is taking y'all to church." for those not adept at southern slang, i offer a translation: madonna has schooled us in the art of dance music. i wish i could ride morgan's wave of enthusiasm, but alas, i can't. the tide is low and so are my feelings toward her album. the tightest track is hung up, the lead single. the pulsing beat is infectious and madonna's thin, wiry voice skids along the surface of melody.

i ain't mad at you, madonna.

blackc.a.s.t #2.

blackc.a.s.t's fall production of the colored museum was named the #2 dramatic production of 2005. i'm proud to lead a troupe of such amazing people.

utterly bizarre.

last night, after the culmination of an otherwise lackluster semester, i went out to dinner with stephen and my favorite professor at grafton. dinner began at 6:00 & ended at 11:30. the liquor and food tab was nearly $200 dollars across 3 people. i was stumbling over words, smiling, laughing, and being my typical boisterous self. conversation topics covered:

blowjobs
anal sex
the first time
philadelphia
new york city
the epistemology of the closet
rules of conduct

but, he is no longer my professor--that is, until i turn in my final paper. i'm not one for adhering to boundaries, just ask my friends. my professor, then, he comes back to my dorm room to "get over" his drunkeness with the help of a bit water, the side of a toilet bowl, and my maternal backrubs. my roommates didn't know what to think. i didn't know what i think.

hey professor, what are you doing for new year's?

sound advice.

[anonymous] don't ever lose your virginity when you're mad drunk on the basement floor of your friends house to a kid who is the town fuck up, on a first name basis with the police, and then proceed to allow him to put it in your ass, and maybe it hurts a little but don't let him say "shh...just bite my lip and kiss me."

ass & acid jeans.

angry white men.

hate crimes rock columbia's campus

the opening line reads, "two columbia university students were arrested december 2 in the school’s ruggles hall for allegedly committing a hate crime in which they drew graffiti of swastikas, racial epithets, and homophobic symbols on the walls of a suite." it continues, "sophomore stephen searles told police that he and junior matthew brown used red and purple markers to deface the walls of a ruggles suite, according to reports in the columbia spectator and in the bozeman daily chronicle. searles attended high school in bozeman, montana. the alleged perpetrators said, "we were drunk and we wrote anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls in our friend’s dorm suite.”

this event strikes close to home because one of the victims, daphne, is my allison's best friend from high school. in particular, upside down triangles--the mark used to brand homosexual men during the holocaust--were scrawled across daphne's dorm room door. i'm saddened by the irresponsible & ignorant acts of a few. and quite frankly, what is funny about "jesus isn't king, the white men is?" scribbled across a wall in purple marker. take away the academic incubator & these boys are little more than hate-mongers.

that said, i am infuriated by the crimson column today written by john hastrup entitled lovin' hate crimes. to put it kindly, hastrup is a self-righteous conservative who finds a way to muddle the facts in the most insidious of ways. self-righteous in the sense that we do not live in a tit for tat world: a black student student association is not equal to a white student association, a civil union is not the same as marriage, and race fuckin' matters. yes, damn right, it matters all the time, wherever you go--that is, if you're non-white. to understand our world in any other way is short-sided and naive.

first, the graffiting of walls no matter how drunk is deliberate & calculated, not simply a "tasteless" mistake as hastrup considers it. hastrup argues that the admitted perpetrators should be given a slap on the wrist because they attempted to cover up their actions. if anything, a near cover-up is a tacit admission of wrongdoing. the boys knew their actions were out of step with the sentiments at columbia.

i was particularly offended that hastrup called daphne's comments incoherent musings. he writes:

daphne, offered incoherent musings about broad-based intolerance. “i also don’t want people to think that [the vandalism] is what racism is,” she said. “racism is much more subtle.”

clearly, daphne's remarks were not in response to the event themselves but an answer a question about the future of racism both inside and outside of columbia's gates. read carefully, that's the only way this could even begin to make sense. it appears that hastrup has tacked together an argument that hinges upon the non-sensical attributing of words. flaky journalism, at best.

hastrup ends with the following:

hate crimes are terrible acts of ignorance that hurt the entire communities of the victims involved. but if this label is too quickly attached or used toward other ends, it is stripped of all meaning and all moral authority on the subject is lost.

wise words or just another insidious way of to trivialize the experiences of "the other?" let's be frank, the power structures that be make it such that i, as a black woman, cannot be speak out without SCREAMING.

i'm done for the moment but would like to end on this note. hastrup calls the event in which gallo garcia '05 was punched and sent to UHS after leaving a bgltsa party a "minor altercation." as i recall, garcia received stitches and spent part of the night in the hospital. at the very least, what happened to garcia was battery. you can't punch a man in the street for being gay much like you can't slap a ho in the club for stealing your man.

i'm infuriated, though not surprised.

at the pulse.

download it:
a change gon' come by sam cooke
ai du by ali farke toure
love of my life by erykah badu

watch it:
do the right thing directed by spike lee
kids directed by larry clark
the l word brought to you by showtime

read it:
in defense of anarchism by robert wolff
lolita by nabokov
are you there god, it's me margaret? by judy blume

breed love world tour.

precious & i saw mos def and talib kweli (blackstar) perform live at the roxy. thanks to a charitable friend, we were able to be nearly 10 feet away from the front row, dead center. i love the energy of hip-hop shows, the smell of weed, the way people undulate in waves.

kweli came out with much more energy than i would have ever expected. his performance is gritty filled with arm waves & beads of sweat. his stage adornment was simple--a long white T, a black hoodie, a backwards yankees fitted, and a mic. before long, the black hoodie gave way to a sweat-stained t-shirt with a wife-beater underneath. he performed crowd favorites including "get by" and "black girl pain."

mos def, on the other hand, has a much lower key performance. at time, it borders on lethargic. mos def is a self-indulgent perfomer. he takes it time, does it right but the reality is, the audience would be happiest with a simple, high energy performance. rather than rhyming he prefers to sing--with a reverb mic--much in the way that he does on the new danger. i love the singing, but it works better in the four walls of my dorm room, not a live stage.

if you ask me, the new danger is lyrically sound and artistically beyond much of what mos def has done before. for that reason, it does not resonate well with an audience that prefers the beat to the lyrics.

the audience was expectedly about 60% white. problem is, both mos and kweli speak exclusively to a black audience--that is, not in their lyrics but in the comments directed to the audience. they ask people to raise fists in the air, spread love to our people, etc. so, my question: are white audiences alienated by live performances in particular? if so, how does that change the dynamic between audience and artist?

mango tea & a woman from DC.

coming back from a nanotechnology exam unshowered, unkempt, and generally dissheleved, i made a quasi-impromptu stop at cafe gato rojo. i ran across a semi-regular customer who i knew well enough to comment on the weather & provide espresso suggestions. i learned her name was caroline, she's from DC, and she took time off from harvard to pursue other things. we spoke generally about wgs and her intentions to joint concentrate. then, she asked me to sit down and join her.

we shared a great deal--sexual appetites, religious upbringing, worldly pursuits, academic breaks before i even knew her name. i sat with her for roughly an hour feeling free to cross into any talking point.

we exchanged numbers & agreed to hang out again.

untitled (i know this much is true).

elegant autumnal.

click here to see a few shots i added early this morning at around 4 am. i named my make-up design for the night "elegant autumnal" because it combined shades of gold and green. i look surprisingly pulled together considering this was taken after a night of self-indulgent, heavy drinking. considering my roommate once commented that i always come home looking partially undressed, i'm impressed by the photos.

...the city of angels debate continues.

so, i'm up on a saturday writing a paper about female homoeroticism in the bible. i made a case to change the topic, appealed to my TF, and hopefully he will verify. you know, i'm sure he will. he's a tight-bodied mormon with a cute smile & a caring spirit. either way, a friend and california resident emailed to explain to me why LA is, in fact, the best city. to read my earlier thoughts on LA, click here. he writes:

It's precisely the disconnect present in LA that makes it so great. There is so much SPRAWL and beautifully artificial ORIGINALITY that you have to appreciate the sheer grandeur and scope of it all. The energy of the city is a million times greater than any other city. And it's sunny. East Coast creativity, on the other hand, is too measured, I think, and tries to hard for some sort of European sensibility. And, most importantly, you absolutely need a car in LA to find anything of value in the city. In short, the West Side is the best side.

good point, maybe LA does embody some american, sprawling spirit? maybe cities along the eastern seaboard are european knock-offs?

i'm focused man.

haddock-riley win in a landslide!

annie for UC!

annie, my illustrious roommate, is running for undergraduate council vp on a ticket with john, a former harvard yard entryway mate. this election has been lowdown, dirty, and a joy to watch unfold. the other ticket--the "other john" and tara--have engaged in questionable politics. aight, let me be honest--they have been engaged in dirty politics. accusations of bribery and general tomfoolery are abound--buying the domain name of the other ticket, lying to student groups, offering upscale lunches, offering to buy out a third-party ticket, etc. i mean, really.

things look good for john & annie. quite frankly, the other ticket had things pretty wrapped up leading into the first day of voting. once these allegations began to circulate, the harvard crimson decided to rescind their endorsement of the other ticket. this is HUGE. question: why did the crimson endorse the other ticket in the first place? answer: politicking & a sudden loss of consciousness. the withdrawl of the endorsement is scathing, appropriately so. the withdrawl says:

"This trend of dubious and deceptive behavior calls into question Voith and Gadgil’s ability to lead. If Voith and Gadgil cannot control the actions of their campaign staff, made up of friends and trusted deputies, we question whether they could successfully lead the UC. Their alienation of the BGLTSA and HRC also introduces doubt as to their ability to work with student groups, which is a central part of their platform. "

the real shame is that the allegations hurled at the other ticket will follow them. i know i'm not the only one has googled a prospective employer, roommate, etc. in speaking with consulting recruiters, i learned that googling is a common if not necessary part of the employment process (i-banking & consulting, at least.) it's a damn shame, really.

one things is for sure. i still do love politics. i found myself generally disillusioned with politics in college. oh no, not any more. in my career, i need to be a publicist, write press releases, do damage control, gossip, mobilize, and keep an ear to the ground. it's what i'm good at but at the same time, it keeps my pressure up.

early monday morning, i sent emails explaining the allegations to the email lists i subscribe to--straightforward bullet points. a friend replied to my email:

so gangsta.

--signed

damn straight. i'd cut a bitch for annie. well, theoretically. as i explained to her, i'm the diddy to her biggie, the dam dash to her jay-z (that is, back before they severed ways.) i'm on the streets hustling mixed tapes out of the truck of my car. actually, i'm hustling for votes in a harvard election. the prinicple remains the same.

haddock-riley for uc!

untitled.

when in doubt, apply lip gloss.