This Is The Girl / Funsch Dance Experience, Sep 2014

Choreographer Christy Funsch enters to give the (now) compulsory pre-show announcement that unnecessarily frames dance performances in SF... but with a twist... when we realize that the announcement is (integrated into) the performance. Information about exits and cell phones erodes into awkward silences and unfinished statements, until finally Funsch states, “I am nothing” and exits as if lost... This opening action reveal's Christy's dry (or is it wry?) sense of humor that threads through and sometimes even structures her work...

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Cop killings in the SF Bay Area, a small list

I have just returned from a march in solidarity with the Committee for Justice & Love for Alex Nieto, who was killed by SF police earlier this year. Alex was unarmed, eating a burrito in a local park before going to work as a security guard. Inspired by the national uprising in response to the unjust and racist killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, I decided to take a moment to familiarize myself with a few of the many non-threatening people shot and killed by local police. Street protests and riots, in addition to legal and bureaucratic activism, are shifting the public discourse, building communities of resistance, and will hopefully result in more indictments and imprisonment of police. We have to increase the costs and consequences - lawsuits, civil unrest, imprisonment, public relations - for police brutality, racial profiling, and murder. And we have to increase support and respect for the families of the victims, those who have to deal with the ongoing insult of being denied justice and honesty from local police, judges, media, and government...

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Notes on the T-word Debates of 2014

Heklina was a tranny.
Justin V Bond and Auntie (Kate Bornstein), too.
Ru Paul was a tranny.
Tranny, tranny, tranny, tranny,
tranny, tranny, tranny.

That said, and following this post, I intend to never use the word publicly again. The battle - and why it had to be a battle I don't know - is over...

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Watch your mouth!

White and straight teeth are over-valued. We accept a level of unnecessary, violent, medical intervention in our mouths that most of us would not tolerate anywhere else in or on our bodies. In fact we voluntarily pay for it. And we subject our children to it, with whiter ideals and more intervention and expense normalized for each new generation. In other areas of health care and healing there are more options, rooted in traditional and/or holistic paradigms that tend towards less intervention, less hierarchical relationships between doctor/healer and patient, and less involvement in big pharma or the medical-industrial-complex. In medical dentistry we have once again nurtured the worst of our religio-racist ideologies by fusing 'cleanliness' and 'purity' with 'healthy' and 'privileged.' And like most body-fascist ideals, we have obediently pursued (and demanded of our Hollywood and pop stars) straight white teeth beyond our limits, both pain and financial. Too many dentists (and too many car mechanics) try to sell more services than are necessary just to make more money...

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