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Reading this afternoon at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center at 4:00.

Leaving for Montreal on Thursday for the poetry festival. Reading on Friday night at Concordia, teaching a renga workshop on Saturday and giving a slide show and reading on Sunday.

I don't read or speak a whole lot French and I am wondering if this is going to be a challenge, as in looking at museum and culture websites for things to do in Quebec, I am encountering lots of French. Mais oui.

I'm going to the Association of Americans Museum Conference in Philly at the end of April and may be looking for a couch to sleep on.

Not moving back to Texas anytime soon as there haven't been any bites on jobs. That's okay, because we love Seattle. And New Mexico. And Colorado. And are holding out for one of those.

A museology grad is working with the chop suey project team to develop an exhibition/installation using the oral histories and video footage we are gathering. We've got two potential venues in mind - the 4Culture gallery in Pioneer Square and some other independent gallery that has expressed their interest.

Craig Perez is in town. And I'm looking forward to hearing him read this afternoon from his Tinfish collection. Tomorrow we may try to go to the 1412 reading to hear Brandon Shimoda and Leonard Schwartz.

I don't think I'll be purchasing a digital video camera before heading to Montreal on Thursday, but may look into borrowing one from UW to document the trip.

Sound recordings of Zora Neale Hurston singing.

More chop suey interviews today in Renton, with Tek and Rick Wong. I checked out a Panasonic digital video camera from school to record the interviews and also have my Sony audio recorder which I haven't actually used, though I've had it for nearly a year. The Panasonic will download the footage in some weird format which I will then have to convert to MPG, perhaps the one major drawback of the technology.

I want to get a digital video camera before leaving for Montreal on March 2, but that's so close a date that it might not happen. I have difficulty making and justifying big purchases. And I don't really love digital. Especially having learned about conservation issues related to migrating data. Give me film and tape stock any day. Though seeing nitrate decay and vinegar syndrome is making me fret about my negatives in their possibly non-archival storage. The word "archival" unless from a professional supplier is fairly meaningless and entirely misleading.

Perhaps not such a bad day if a poem arises out of it....

Light Reign

inside the sky-
viewing chamber

galaxy black
granite flecked

flooring reverses
a cutout of azure

light in late winter

the ground I stand on
echoing nightfall

stone mirror-map of
infinite constellation

   2/20/09, 11:23 a.m.

Newly arrived in my mailbox yesterday was a delivery from the "World of Beauty" postmarked New Mexico - a play on the "Land of Enchantment" - a gift from Jaybird da Vinci at the Placitas headquarters of the Voices from the American Land project. Their inaugural release: "Lo and Behold" a gorgeous chapbook of poems by Joanne Kyger with hand-drawn illustrations by her partner Don Guravich. Introduction by Andrew Schelling. This is a very special press with a beautiful vision - Support 'em by subscribing ASAP.

We are overdue for some lengthy and justified venting.

woman on the bus
no front teeth
flip flops & bare feet
stinking up the place
w/ the kim chee
she gobbles down
stares at me a second
too long as if she
knows me

She Said/She Said: Valentine's Day

Valentines Day

Single Awareness Day. A mandatory day of romance and sweet nothings. Evidence of the direct correlation between love and creativity.

Or so I thought when I was single.

Back then I gave googley eyes to the boy who crafted parmesan chicken and candled ambience in my dining room. Swore I'd never find anyone sweeter than the one who gave me a leather pouch packed with symbolic stamps, quarters, and a 3-page letter filled with sentiments that still shake my core. Found my place on the continuum of love and loss with the one who palmed a red velvety bear as he picked me up from the airport. Thought I'd found my soul mate in the one who booked a fancy pants 7-course meal.

Over the years, my girlfriends regaled tales of arriving home to pre-packed suitcases as a prelude to a weekend whisk to San Francisco. Rose petaled beds. Little blue boxes. Packages that elicit genuine surprise. And I waited patiently for my turn. For my guy who would acknowledge that his action could predicate my mood on February 15th. Only, I didn't marry that guy. I married the guy who was surprised he wasn't able to secure a same-day Valentine's Day dinner reservation. The guy who prefers to pay $80 overnight shipping fees rather than brave a Christmas Eve trip to the mall. The guy who thinks gifts are less important than needs.

After 8 years of trial and error, he's aware that what we do is more significant than what he gives me. I'll take a hot air balloon ride over silk pajamas any day. And I've learned when he says "I have a surprise for you" that I married the guy whose gift philosophy hinges on the notion that others would be happy to receive the gifts you dream on possessing yourself. While my idea of a surprise is sparkly, adventurous, and innovative; his is likely to be practical, useful, and a token of his hope that I live forever.

This year I decided to give him a break. I let him off the event planning hook by deciding I'd rather we went to game night with My Singles. Only, I got a text 4 days in advance informing me that we had reservations for dinner in addition to game night. He also embraced my house hunting obsession and agreed to look at houses before dinner. And it turned out to be the best Valentine's Day ever.

Watching him get excited about our house, our future, is better than a dozen of anything. As we walked through model homes he made comments like "Well, this room won't be big enough for our kids when they get older" or "This is a perfect room for your dad to stay when he visits" or "I think we'll need a bigger back yard for the dog I want to get you." And, more than anything, he told he me is finally comfortable with the idea of adoption. That if he could save a Caylee Anthony from losing their lives to a parent who doesn't want them, that he's ready to make that commitment. The child doesn't even need to be white.

I felt like an asshole. For making him change his shirt that morning. For being a little bummed that he hadn't bought flowers. For thinking bad things when he asked me to drive that morning. For letting outside forces tell me I should have this day. For forgetting why I love him so much. Why he is the person, above all people, whom I chose to, share my life with. That, even though it's not draped in baby wings and arrows, my valentine is with me always.



Modern life doesn’t always allow for the celebrating of holidays and anniversaries on the days that they actually occur. Kort’s been booked on the 2 – 11 p.m. shift for the last few Saturdays, and so this past Valentine’s Day was no exception. Over the year the hubster’s gotten good at planning for big dates. Last Monday, he walked into my office while I was working on a grant application for my thesis project and interrupted so that he could ask if he could make a dinner reservation on Friday night at Nell’s on Greenlake, a very tony Pacific NW/American-cuisine type eatery. We dined there on Kort’s last birthday and I liked the vibe of the place – the view of the lake, the Kir Royale cocktails, etc.

I get home first on Friday and stop on the way home at the record store to pick up some new tunes for K, which he’d put on his Amazon list. Some Fruit Bats and Jeff Hanson. K texts to let me know that he’ll be home early. I get dressed and wait and wait, and about half an hour before our reservation, Kort finally gets home. He’d driven all the way to Ballard to get me a salty caramel frosting chocolate cupcake from Cupcake Royale and gotten caught in traffic. I skipped the cupcakes for gelato at the Greenlake Bottage that night and ate the cupcake for Valentine's day.

I got to experience the best of both worlds this year – some friends here in Seattle decided to do a low-key dinner at their apartment downtown on Saturday. When they found out that I’d be spending it alone, they quickly said, “Come for dinner” and to bring my friend from UW. My UW friend is male, attractive, intelligent, good in a kitchen, and single. Certain neurotic scenarios flashed through my head. On Thursday night’s “30 Rock” – Liz Lemon asks out her neighbor. He suggests Friday, but she can’t do it then, so she insists on Saturday. He agrees but notes that it’s Valentine’s Day which makes for some awkwardness. I thought back to my SAIC days in Chicago too, when GB asked me over to dinner on V-Day. As far as I was concerned, I was in love with and mourning Kort who was in Japan that year. It ended up being a one-on-one dinner and while eating was part of G’s plan, there were other latent intentions that I missed completely. He cooked eggplant parmesan – even called his mother to have her consult on the recipe.

So when UW friend and I are at the Whole Foods picking out a bottle of wine and dessert, he asks, “So is it just you and me and this other couple? Is Kort coming later?” I get squirrelly and adamantly emphasize the “anti-Valentine’s day” non-Romantic element of the gathering. It actually turns out to be one other couple besides the hosts. But everything works out well – UW friend is a master at steaming seafood and cracking open crab legs and gentlemanly in serving others, winning many points with the hosts for his skills which are not in fact cultural, he jokes, but genetic. But I being Asian too, definitely didn’t inherit the cracking shellfish gene.

Jenn writes about home, as in a house and who you come home to. I think of the notion of coming home to as closely related to my sense of community and those with whom I find affinity and familiarity – the friends that won’t let you sit at home on a silly holiday alone, even one that you may not recognize or celebrate yourself culturally or get sad about, but which becomes another opportunity to create new memories and bonds together.

Seeing the opening sequence of Coraline reminded me of the Quay Brother's film about the Henry Wellcome Collection. The nature of the stop-motion animation and something about the disembodied deconstruction of objects in both.

Midterms on Tuesday.

I am reading on Feb. 28 for the Rainbow Bookfest Literary Festival at the Langston Hughes Art Center at 4 p.m.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about issues related to social justice. It is a buzz word in academia and educational institutions - promotion and commitment to "equity" and such. But the practice of social justice on the ground looks very little in my mind like the theory of it. Could I, at this point, work for an organization that didn't prioritize or have in their mission or programming some aspect of social justice? This is a question I have to ask myself. The reason it would be an easy choice to help K build an acupuncture business is because his work resonates with me in terms of helping others on the path realize the right to pursue the health and happiness which every one of us deserves. We may always be poor, but there is dedication to something greater.

K's on a restricted diet that prohibits consumption of nightshade vegetables - onions, tomatoes, eggplant - these are my favorite things and a diet of mostly bland, sweet foods for a prolonged period of time led me last week to binging on the flavors of Indian food, Korean food, and spicy kim chi (not all in the same day). These foods tasted divine, but they didn't feel so great in the body. K explained to me today how tomatoes operate on the body in the ayurvedic system, creating excess in all the doshas. But living like monks isn't particulary appealing either. We have a Taoist friend that eats no meat, garlic, or onion and eating out was always an ordeal. This past month, I've been feeling some of that frustration.

The SF Bay area has poetry neobenshi, Seattle has cineoke.

I am totally unimpressed with the Slog Blog's Seattle Poetry Chain.

Oh, Michael Rothenberg, come and play with Seattle on your Rockpile Tour!

Mammology

We had guest speakers last Tuesday; the head of the mammology department came and talked about the accessioning of mammals and birds - we learned about how new specimens are acquired: Road kill, collecting trips (which utilize traps and euthanasia), people bringing in dead animals, and window strikes - I love the language of that last one - basically bird strike. We also learned about whale fall - before the museum can acquire a new whale specimen, it has to undergo a decomposition process. Whale fall doesn't always happen in shallow waters, so the museum contracted with a mink farm that has a giant metal pot where the skull of the whale could be boiled down. It wasn't totally clear, but it sounded like the flesh boiled off of the skeleton could be used to produce mink food. Someone raised an interesting question around ethics - i.e. what are the ethical implications of contracting with a fur farm to prep a specimen for accession?

Euthanasia was defined as meaning "good death" - we learned about how small animals are captured in traps and then placed inside a jar with a cotton ball soaked in halothane - within 10 seconds the animal is asleep, another 10 seconds and the animal's heart stops beating and it dies. Animals are euthanized while in the field - because to bring them back to the museum for euthanasia would create prolonged distress and suffering. Someone asked about secondary measures to insure death. Neckbreaking is a common measure. A lot of information. A lot.

Objects catalogued recently at the Wing Luke:

- Fu Manchu DVD
- Mr. Wong cartoon DVD
- pornographic Oriental Sliding Puzzle
- Bomb the Jap game (x2)
- Chinagirl flower holder
- Fu Manchu ceramic drinking vase
- Chinaman head ceramic pin
- "Splendorient" pin with Chinaman caricature
- maroon tie handpainted with a toilet and the image of Toyo
- Ronald Reagan propaganda film on VHS
- noir/crime books with Oriental themes
- Chinaman head buttons (x 100)

These are all from Roger Shimomura's private collection. We're also accessioning items from Jimmy Mar's mercantile:

- various Chinese teas
- incense
- box of red envelopes for wedding gifts
- Buddhist ritual paper
- bottle of ink
- restaurant ledger books
- mock money
- joss paper

She Said/She Said: Super Bowl Redux

I am no longer a Super Bowl virgin, though I can’t necessarily picture myself tuning in to watch the big game again next year. Kort and I turned on the tube at home, no beer, no chicken wings, and minimal fanfare. I think part of the whole experience must be the whole group bonding, tribal violence sort of mentality that carries the energy. My experience was fairly painless but somewhat lackluster.

Here’s what I noticed: the Pittsburgh team had a whole lot more ethnic diversity vs. Arizona. Part of playing football seems like learning to fall in a precise way – feet touching the ground, rolled over the ball. This sort of fall when complicated by someone knocking you over with weight and momentum behind them also looks like it has major impact and repercussion for spinal cord and neck injuries that makes me wince. Recently, the New York Times reported on football players documenting major brain injuries.

Most exciting moments were Harrison’s sprint and Holmes’ touchdowns for the Steelers. Bruce Springsteen’s half-time performance and a daring stage slide that resulted in his crotch in the camera lens! He looked a bit sheepish after that one. Springsteen is looking very “man in black”/Johnny Cash these days.

Favorite commercials: the Mr. Potato Head Bridgestone Tire commercial. Jason Statham’s Audi ad which could have been a movie preview. The monkeys and motoroil – though the kissing between monkey and actor was creepy. The Pedigree dog food commercial with wildlife standing in for domesticated pets. The Pepsi remix of Bob Dylan. I also liked the Cheetos “Gossip Girl” commercial because part of me has always wanted to act out quietly when confronted with women like the cell phone chick in the ad. I also found the Alec Baldwin Hulu ad resonant, as I looked over at Kort who was surfing on the internet and reading on his computer during the game.

My last acupuncturist who has since left Seattle once asked me how I thought acupuncture could be marketed during the Super Bowl to spread the word about its healing powers and make an impression on the unwashed masses to mainstream or Starbuck it. It was an interesting question to pose to someone who had never seen a Super Bowl. My response was “celebrity endorsement.” It goes a long way – but I think it would have to be something like a star player having experienced pain relief/management through acupuncture to treat football-incurred injuries (sports acupuncture is a subdiscipline acupuncture). Trade an athlete acupuncture for a celebrity endorsement that is worth millions. Partner with a medical or research center to conduct studies on athletes and treatment of their injuries.

I have a love affairs with sports. Make that most sports. Anything you can do while fat and smoking, however, is not something I consider a sport. This means you, John Daly. (Really, Augusta National? Blacks and women, bad. THIS guy, good?)

Sports are doses of triumph. David and Goliath. Leonidas and Xerxes. Us and The Economy. The underdog plucked from obscurity and afforded his 15 minutes of fame. A ticket to the good life, even if only for a short time. And I always root for the underdog. Or the black person. Whichever comes first.

My love of the midget that is Bob Costas is based on stories of hope he brings to my couch. The autistic boy who goes from team manager to meeting the President of the United States all because of a new successful 3-point shots. The ragamuffin team of college students defeating the iconic Russian hockey players. Lopez Lomong kidnapped by militia at 6 years old in Sudan now a member of the Olympic Track team. USC trampling all over the all-white Alabama football team in 1970, ending segregation in college football. The Williams sisters successfully lobbying for equal pay at Wimbledon after 123 years.

There something about shared a vision, chants, agonies, uniforms and happy dancies that bonds people in a way that's astonishing to me. There's something about a ballpark that makes kissing, hugging, cursing, and patting butts of complete strangers socially acceptable. Sure, I'd get some looks if I did it on a subway or in an airport, but I'd quickly be pardoned if I point to a team's logo anywhere on my person. Be it a bag, a hat, a pin; my sports paraphernalia is a "get out of jail free card" for doing crazy shit in public. The Superbowl is the mecca of get out of jail free cards.

I was astonished to hear that The ABFF had never, in her life, bared witness to a Superbowl. Surely, my father wasn't the only guy who carted his daughter to professional sports games with the "If you want to keep your husband at home, you'd better learn to love sports" mantra. Really? Just mine, then? No there girl-child got quizzed on the first black baseball player or was told black people don't play hockey? Hmmm, my dad's got some 'splainin' to do.

Although I boycotted Arizona through the Jake Plummer years, I became an instant fan for this Superbowl. The recipe for instant fan? Just add a team that's never won a championship with a hobbling underdog of a quarterback and pit him against the youngest black coach in history. I know, I was torn. But Kurt Warner stole my heart with his abusive Midwest upbringing, having to work in a grocery store in the midst of his career, adopting his wife's children, and stealing Matt Leinart's job without NOT telling Matt he can suck it.

For my deep, deep, open-mouth kissed love of football, I was kind of bored with this one. Other than Jennifer Hudson, the koala-punching commercials, and Kurt's near-win in the before the last 30 seconds were the highlights for me; I could have gone all day without Danica Patrick's stupid commercials (you're hot, we GOT it!), some of those lame calls, and the half-time show. What? So ONE little nipple slip umpteen years ago stucks us with singing extras from The Sopranos and old dudes sliding across stages in too-tight pants?

Of course this post would be VERY different if The Cardinals had won, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Research commences tomorrow for my 1st oral history project interview for Chinese Americana. I'm interviewing Ron Chew, former Wing Luke E.D., on his childhood growing up in the I-District, bussing tables for the Hong Kong Restaurant. Ron's had an amazing career as a journalist and community organizer who's risen to fame as a non-traditional museum professional. Ron was on the forefront of the multicultural movement in Seattle. The more that I learn about him, the deeper my respect for Ron and his work grows. That he dropped out of UW on principle due to institutional racism, reaffirms my decision to drop out the PhD program when I did.