still shaking it

These are sad times for photographers and I know I'm not alone in this. It looks like Polaroid as we know it is over for the second time. Sources say that Polaroid instant film will be available through next year, but being the skeptic I am I ordered $300 worth online in a panic as soon as I noticed both B and H and Adorama were either sold out of my preferred kinds or back ordered.

Although production has ceased for my beloved instant film, there is still a possibility that it could rise again, but I'm not counting on it. I'm thinking its time to go shopping for a fridge so I can start really storing up.

Tears actually came to my eyes when I first heard about all this. I never really thought about how attached I am to instant Polaroid film until now. I just took it for granted that it would always be around. The first camera I had that was all mine was a Polaroid. It was a present from my father for my seventh birthday. I still have many of those images and I still shoot with that camera (see above evidence). As my nostalgia progresses and I return to CT to shoot and go through boxes of old photos, you can all look forward to seeing scans of these in the near future.

When critiques are good

Simone Douglas guest taught my Senior Seminar class last week and had a lot of insightful things to say about the work I've been doing on my family. I was afraid that I would have to spend too much time explaining my work to someone who had never seen it before, but to the contrary she picked up on deeper themes in a way I don't think anyone else looking at them has. She understood the reasons behind my compositional choices and saw poetry in them. Moreover, she saw the subtleties in what I've been trying to say about the subject and the environment, the way I've made rooms into landscapes. Refreshing for once not to merely hear, so why are you photographing your family? Yawn. But she didn't just saturate me with praise - she gave me things to look for and strengths to emphasize in terms of making the compositional choices more apparent and developing them as a theme throughout. I will definitely be contacting her again as the work progresses.

Let everything we say be real. Let everything we do be funky. - S. Sundiata

This past week has been insanely busy. I was preparing for three performances whilst playing catch up with classes after having spent the better part of the previous ten days incapacitated with the flu. Yet I accomplished everything that I set out to do culminating with Friday's performances at La Mama which couldn't have gone better.

Thursday myself and a group of students from Eugene Lang College accompanied by Kym Ragusa went to Bucknell University to pay tribute to the work of Sekou Sundiata, specifically the 51st (dream) state. Originally, Sekou was scheduled to appear but even in light of his untimely passing the events went as scheduled. I can only credit this to the incredible impact Sekou, his work and his teaching had on everyone who has been exposed to it. We performed the documentary theater piece that was based upon our experiences being in the year long class with Sekou and I performed the piece I wrote in his honor. The response was incredible and the discussion afterwards went on for almost two hours before we had to leave the space.

Every time we get together to honor Sekou and continue his work I feel a little bit better, which is not to say that his absence feels normal now because it certainly does not. I haven't even picked up my final paper because I'm not quite ready to face the fact that I would have to pick it up from someone who is not him. It feels so weird now but comforting in a way - I meet to discuss my senior work in his office like I'd always imagined I would do but instead I meet with Margo Jefferson, who is an amazing writer and instructor but still - it saddens me that it was Sekou's death that cause us to be working together. I cheer myself with thoughts that it was his suggestion that I meet Margo and take one of her classes. He thought we'd work well together and he was very correct.


I never took a portrait of Sekou Sundiata because
I thought you had to belong to something
Thought I didn’t have what it took
To capture
To expose
Thought my lens could never hold
This man who held so much
I mean how could I capture
That range-
The slight knowing smile
To the wide grin
The contemplative
The body that never acknowledged weakness
The eyes always busy
Always whirring even when the mouth was still
Sekou said that Baldwin never blinked
But neither did you Sekou
I’m convinced
You saw things
No one else could see
You certainly saw them in me
(That semester I was down and no one noticed but you
stopping me in the hall – Amanda, I haven’t heard
your voice all day… I wanted to cry. I was choking, but
when you said that I felt a little more alive.)

and your voice
like molasses pouring over velvet
deep and sweet
but before you even opened your mouth
Abiodoun called you the smoothest brother out there

The last time I saw you
After 4 years of wanting
to take your picture
I finally asked
And we laughed as you said
Many folks don’t realize
I need a little extra light
for this skin
and you said
But I trust you

Yes its true
Dark skin
Absorbs more light
But Sekou reflected more
Than I’ve ever seen
And with him gone
The whole world seems a bit dimmer
Yet he left little lights behind
In all of us
So many
Snapshots in my mind
And I’m trying so hard
To let this little light shine
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine
let it shine
let it shine
let it shine
Everywhere I go
I’m gonna let it shine
Everywhere I go
I’m gonna let it shine
let it shine
let it shine
let it shine

Even when he said
I get tired of educating whiteness
It seemed he had more patience
Than god from where I stood
Answering question
After question
After question
After question
After question
After question
After question
After question
After question
And more answers for questions unasked
And unseen

I sit in his office now
Like I always have
But its empty
I look over my shoulder
Where his favorite picture once hung
The Audubon Ballroom
Right after Malcolm was shot
He’d always point to that picture
Its quiet power
Here it is
He’d say
This seemingly ordinary picture
Of an empty room
A few chairs overturned
But when you know what happened here
It takes on this whole other significance

It feels like that now
Quiet and sudden
The very last thing he said to me
If you don’t publish I’m gonna haunt you
And I hugged him and said please do
I’m tempted to stop this poem right now
Just so I can see him again
I hope he comes by
But you know Sekou
He never was one to live by appointment

All of a sudden…
Like death came and jacked him
In the middle of the dance
The curtain was still up
When somebody cut the house lights
And I never got to give him
The standing ovation I meant to
Just some poems and stories
And a picture of someone who is not him

You’d think I would have learned the first time –
I never got to make a portrait of my father either
Before I was ready
He was gone quicker than the 911 call
He dialed with his last gasp
On the living room floor
I never told Sekou this –
But I used to imagine he was my grandfather
Not old enough but still
a storyteller like all the men
On my father’s side
He could command a room with a whisper
Spin stories around you
Till you forget where you stand
I like to think they’re there now
Sitting around some ancient fire
Dad and his brothers
Grandpa
And Sekou
Their faces warmed by the
Flickering light that licks
Their eyes and cheekbones
Sekou chuckles
And Uncle Donald laughs his wheezy laugh
From around his pipe
Because there’s no cancer
At this spot
And Coltrane is there too
Blowing in the background
While they spit
Endlessly into the night
Which feels brighter than the brightest day
As the words keep coming
Keep coming
Keep coming
Keep coming
Keep coming
Keep coming…

Probably the best part of Thursday besides the opportunity to get together again with some of the folks who were in the 51st (dream) state class, was talking to Kym. We emailed a bit right after Sekou died but this was the first time I have seen her since she was sitting beside Sekou teaching the class. We are both experiencing some delayed grieving - since she was sick and I was out of town for a lot of the summer- his passing still has this surreal quality. We promised to get together and she said she would read my memoir and be sure to send me Sekou's wife's address so I can send her something. As much as it hurts to lose such a friend and mentor - I can only imagine how it must feel to lose this man if he was your life partner.

I felt like I was channeling more of Sekou - I like to think of him as my guardian angel of writing and performing - on Friday night. My friend Trae put on a show called Women of Color Self-Portraits: a Black HERstory event and she invited me to contribute. I read a portion of my memoir in progress and people really dug it. I had to pause many times to wait for the laughter to die down and I got so many compliments after I got off stage. It was such an incredible and much needed feeling. Doing work about yourself is a delicate thing. If it doesn't resonate its just mental masturbation. Seeing so many folks connect with my work gives me the motivation to continue. That combined with Sekou's emphasis on making work that is grounded in the personal narrative gets me so excited to work on autobiographical writing. We spent the first semester of his class working on these personal essays that forced us to consider our American citizenship and our relationship to history. It was making the personal historical, if you will, and it definitely felt like important work.

I read somewhere recently that I poem isn't done until you've shared it. I have to agree. Something happens to words when you say them out loud and even more so in front of an audience. After the Women of Color Self-Portraits, I performed two poems as a part of Bryonn Bain's Spoken Word Poetry Class. One was brand spankin' new and the other is a monologue I have been refining for a few months now that I did at our show at the Nuyorican in December. After several months, I finally feel like I have my performance of that piece exactly where I want it to be and I can't wait for more opportunities to work on the rest.

In other news, I designed an independent study in autobiographical dramatic monologue with Bryonn through which I am constructing my one-woman-show. We begin workshopping this week.

What can I say but YAY!

In progress...

Please pardon appearances as major changes are underway.

Also - especially for those of you who either missed or showed up late (ahem) for my last performance, you have a chance to make it up to yourself as I will be at La Mama Fri Feb 8th at 10 pm. It will be a mix of old and new so do yourself a favor and come on through!

I really want to put this image on my business card

but G. says it's "too depressing" and "not commercially viable enough"

Any thoughts?

COME SEE ME SPIT!!!!!!

the ejaculate fairy

The other day I did a presentation for my History of Sexuality class on the female prostate. I began by quoting 17th century Dutch physician Regnier de Graaf. In 1672, he was the first to recognize the prostate as the ejaculatory source in women. He observed: The urethra is lined internally by a thin membrane. In the lower part, near the outlet of the urinary passage, this membrane is pierced by large ducts, or lacunae, through which pituito-serous matter occasionally discharges in considerable quantities. Between this very thin membrane and the fleshy fibres we have just described there is, along the whole duct of the urethra, a whitish, membranous substance about one finger breadth thick which completely surrounds the urethral canal…The substance could be called quite aptly the female prostatae or corpus glandulosum. Here too it should be noted that the discharge from the female prostatae causes just as much pleasure as does that from male prostatae.
I also provided the class with visuals taken from Female Ejaculation and the G-spot by Deborah Sundahl, which was referencing Dr. Milan Zaviacic's The Human Female Prostate: from Vestigial Skene’s Paraurethral Glands and Ducts to a Woman’s Functional Prostate. Dr. Zaviacic studied the female prostate extensively from 1982 - 1999.

These illustrations are courtesy of Dr. J.W. Huffman who created molds of prostates removed during autopsies.

I meditated on why this information has been suppressed/ignored. Sexologists Sevely and Bennet believe the debate began as a semantic confusion. They outline the debate as follows in their 1978 essay "Concerning Female Ejaculation and the Female Prostate" Initially, the generic term semen was used to describe sexual fluids both male and female. "Galen and Hippocrates argued that a fetus is as much like its mother as its father; mothers therefore, as well as father have child producing semen."

Aristotelians differed. They claimed “If ejaculation of semen for generation never takes place unaccompanied by pleasure, it must be true that women do not contribute semen, since they sometimes conceive without experiencing pleasure.” Furthermore: “a female sometimes becomes pregnant without having excreted any of her own fluid, but never without having gone through the monthly cycle; menstrual blood is therefore essential for generation, but not female semen.”

Once the Aristotelians won the argument, the language used describe both sexes was left to the male alone.
With no words left to describe female ejaculate, it disappeared right along with female semen.

I segued into Dr. Zaviacic's research. Zaviacic confirms that the female prostate is a functional genitourinary organ with a specific structure and function.Compared to the male counterpart, the female prostate has a similar structure, expression of prostate markers and enzyme equipment.He identified two functions: exocrine (production of prostatic fluid, ie female ejaculate) and neuroendocrine (production of hormones)As of right now - only the production of serotonin has been established.

Then to illustrate the way science is often used to prove what one already knows seen through the lens of particular ideologies I listed these conflicting quotes concerning female ejaculation:

“…sometimes described as being emitted in a jet which is thrown to a distance.” -Havelock Ellis (1937)
“If there is an opportunity to observe the orgasm of such women, one can see that large quantities of a clear transparent fluid are expelled not from the vulva but out of the urethra in gushes.” -Grafenberg (1950)
“Since the prostate gland and seminal vesicles are only vestigial structures in the female, she does not actually ejaculate.”- Kinsey (1953)
Man does this at the moment of pleasure, so presumably that little passive counterpart of himself which is the woman does the same. We wonder now how this can ever have been believed…”- Wayland Young (1964)

The last one got some rather amused chuckles from other women in my class.
Then I sited tests done by Dr. Zaviacic and one done by Shannon Bell that prove ejaculate is not urine. It has a higher pH, more gravity, less urea, less creatine and a much higher concentration of glucose.
(And on a personal note - which I most certainly did NOT include in my presentation, I can personally attest to the distinct difference between ejaculate and urine.)

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I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised that my presentation raised some ire but the whys still upset me. My prof really took issue with the fact that female bodied folks could have a prostate. He could concede that we ejaculate, but only men have a prostate. Since ejaculate has to come from somewhere and using the term prostate has come up against so much resistance - I propose we start telling people that in female-bodied people ejaculate is delivered by a fairy. That's right the ejaculate fairy. And since several parts of the female genitals already have already been named by the men who "discovered" them (Thanks Grafenberg! Thanks Skene! -even though you came up short) we can dedicate the ejaculate fairy not to me but to the lovely sexologist whose name I erased from my memory, who when comparing the vigor of the male orgasm to that of the female said: the woman's orgasm is a flimsy thing, a gossamer nothing. C'mon -everybody knows fairies love gossamer. See it all makes sense.