Posts with subject matter about or referring to China. Separate categories exist for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and separate tags for Tibet and Xinjiang.
Fave sci-fi / fantasy / demonic space opera book of the year? Very yes.
I don’t have the energy to write all about it (cheers chronic ijdgaf fatigue), but if I did I’d go on about how much I loved the main characters, all the food, the meticulous discipline of being a professional musician, love, kindness, moral ambiguity, queerness, transness, west coast migrant Asian-American culture. Pretty much everything I want to read.
Twit wants me to know that 13 years ago, on September 12th, I signed up. Happy 13 dumpster fire years.
Well hazy on the details now, but I think I signed up because China banned Blogger / Blogspot / Google, all the China bloggers mass-migrated to Twitter and it was the only way to stay up with them. A couple of years later China banned Twit too.
I logged-on last night for the first time in a couple of years for actual timeline scrolling (OKCupid had shown me enough white cishet couples and TERFs for one night). I love the people who I actively follow, as in go to their profile, read and scroll, and love the communities around them.
But but but. The place fucks majorly with my mental and emotional stability — as do all social networks. It reminds me of addiction and compulsive habits and wakes those again in me. And it’s full, full of nazis and TERFs and fascists and racists and white supremacists and swarming bot networks run by the same. And the people who own and run it are functionally indistinguishable from that, their actions leading from hate crimes to genocide.
I wish there was something else. And more than that I wish all the people I love who use social networks would understand their culpability and find ways of creating and participating in online communities not bound to necrocapitalist corporations. I can’t see that happening though.
Michael! What am I looking at!?!?! ??
very love!Thank you, dear.
Wait for the final edits. So many other photos we are going through.
Expressing the shit of this time.reminds me a bit of this photographer from the 80s / 90s who did black and white stagings
trying to remember his nameYes!
My friend in the photos took his inspiration from him but I cannot recall his name.
Such powerful works he did.
Crazy dark stuff with people with disabilities, corpses, etc.
Decapitated corpse heads kissing. This guy.Joel-Peter Witkin
i wish you could see how stunned with the beauty of these i am.
I met Michael Garza in Guangzhou eighteen years ago. He’s still there, still principal bassoon with the orchestra, also with a woodwind quintet, Pan Pacific Ensemble, we see each other every couple of years when he blows (ha ha) through Europe, and he’s my strongest connection to a city I have a deep love for, as well as being one of my dearest friends.
He sent me these photos a few days ago and like I said, I was stunned. Chinese puppet theatre, butoh, Día de Muertos, deep queerness, heavy memories of AIDS in the ’80s, SARS (which we were both in Guangzhou for, the smell of burning vinegar in the damp winter air, and that train ride with Yunna back from Wuhan in the night, getting messages telling us to stay away from the city because there was a plague). Photos by Gustavo Thomas so ya know.
Michael’s orchestra closed a couple of months ago, long before the rest of the world got over their racist fuckery and thought about taking this shit seriously. (Very aside here, I think the disaster underway in Europe and America is substantially because of the nationalist and white supremacist ideology stretching back to the Renaissance – or late-19th century imperialism and colonialism if that’s too long a time for you to grasp.) Every single artist I know or know of woke up some time in the last weeks and found themselves unemployed, all their upcoming work cancelled, and no idea when they might return. The better-off ones have – for the moment – family and friends to rely on, but there’s a lot, a very large lot who were already doing it hard. Not all of them artists either. I already see this for myself, trans, immigrant, neurodiverse (fuck I hate that word), multiethnic, queer, not in a relationship, there’s a marked difference already. I fully expect, like every other time in European history when shit got bad, people like us are going to be the first to get fucked. Art like this, then, arriving across continents and hemispheres in a messaging app convo, feels good, feels necessary, feels like we’re forcing our way into being remembered, holding on to beauty and love when we’re being told, again, to give it up.
“But habibti, there is only enough here for one month. And why you buy rice in one kilo bag? Wallah! Such disappointment.”
For real, tho, this is what I’m always like. Definitely inherited the ‘casually well-stocked cupboards’ habit. A bit light on the beans though, ’cos people who never normally cook beans fucking panic-skived off with them all. Except chickpeas. Jokes on them, I’m making hummus.
And every other province and land that had self-determination stolen.
I wrote that this morning after I got up, haven woken twice in the night with that pit in the stomach inescapable dread I’ve had too often in the last ten years. Nothing on that list was a surprise. That doesn’t mean each of them aren’t individually and collectively an avoidable tragedy. It’s far from an exhaustive list as well. Indigenous deaths in custody, trans women being murdered and ‘bathroom bills’, ICE and detention camps everywhere, Muslims being targeted globally, who remembers Christchurch was only last March, on and on and on, all the things that gave me sleepless nights and left me grieving.
And waking up through this night, more of the same is coming: straight white people taking and taking, not giving a shit, destroying the world, and destroying anyone not like them. All that suffering we could have avoided. That’s our past and that’s our future.
There’s so much I have on my list of “Shit to Steal from Museums.” So much. And while I applaud the thieves who broke into Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden’s Historisches Grünes Gewölbe for their commitment to stacking mad cash, their commitment to aesthetics is lacking, and I do not approve. Unless it’s for reparations.
If I was to hit Residenzschloss, I’d go straight to Neues Grünes Gewölbe, having cased out all the museums in mid-2017, and lift the alien madness of Daphne as a Drinking Vessel. And smash Tequila from it (’sup Vass?). And the Basilisk Drinking Vessel. Which would be my German Whip.
Seriously, though? The video of the thieves hacking at the display case with an axe is deeply upsetting both for its relentless violence, and for how fucking incompetent they were.
It’s been twenty years.
I usually let this day pass, and have done consistently since 2008. I don’t go to any vigils, mourning happens every time I read of another death. Another murder. Over the years, the reasons have changed, but primarily TDOR is a day for my aunties, sisters, siblings and cousins and I don’t want to be around cis people or masc people performing mourning for what is overwhelmingly a list of people murdered for being feminine. Feminine and Black and brown and Indigenous and sex worker.
22 in the States. That we know of. 331 worldwide. Again, that we know of.
We know those numbers do not reflect reality, just like official numbers of how many of us there are. I was reading the report Being Transgender in Belgium yesterday, published in 2009 (and its followup published in 2018), which came up with figures of such rarity, the entire trans population in Belgium would almost be wiped out by those 331 murders. Which proposes two questions: If the incidence of trans people is so staggeringly low, 1 in 10 or 20 or 30,000, why is there so much attention on us from medical reports and legislation and experts having opinions over decades, and the vast corpus of published research, for a few hundred people out of eleven million? And why are cis people — mostly male, but let’s not forget feminist cis women and their history in this — so determined to not just murder us, but erase us from existence and memory?
I say, ‘us’, knowing there is legitimate disapproval and frustration especially from Black and Latina trans feminine people (21 of the 22 murdered in the US were Black) with white-presenting trans people claiming ‘us’, and I know how pale I am. I’ve been writing back into my history recently, spending a lot of time with those aunties and sisters in Aotearoa, back when we were called transsexuals, trannies, shemales, and the only job open to us was sex work. I remember them on K’ Road and Vivian Street, Māori, Pasifika, and a couple of Pakeha women. Women, not trans women or trans feminine or anything else, ’cos that’s what we were and that’s what we aspired to be, no matter how hard the path. I remember fists and guns and knives and iron bars, and the constant fear, or just being hit by the disgust or hate or ridicule. I was lucky. I got out. I have dance to thank for that. But there were a few occasions if things had gone slightly different, a cop car hadn’t cruised past at that moment (on more than one occasion, also ironic, no?), or friends in a car hadn’t, or something to interrupt what was about to happen, I wouldn’t have made it. So, ‘us’.
A difference in recent years is we’re no longer just being remembered and talked about on one day of the year for having gotten ourselves murdered. Every day I see my beautiful sisters and feminine siblings utterly shredding it, and truly, that it’s possible at this moment for them to live their lives so fully and openly and to be loved for all of their selves brings me much joy. And I want to remember my aunties and sisters from whom I learned to live my truth (as we say today), and who burn brighter for me the older I get. Some of them probably made it out, quite a few wouldn’t. The other violences were AIDS and drug addiction, and these ravaged us. Doing the remembering, then. Each one of these deaths hurt. All the deaths that shouldn’t have happened and lives unable to be lived hurt.