see you saturday?

come be liberated with me. the liberator live, featuring, among many others, sarah white, who i met last weekend along with her daughter isa. good shit.

i'll be there

ART IN HARLEM: black president

art & performances hosted by bre and damond haynes

Sunday May 18, 2008
12-6pm

12 W 130th Street, #3

bring food and drink!

rvsp, please contact: artinharlem@gmail.com

formally instituted in november 2002, art in harlem is a collaborative effort to showcase the works of upcoming and established fine, graphic, decorative and performing artists. artists and their admirers gather at the space in harlem for
art, performance, music, food and spirits.

the idea behind art in harlem was to offer a comfortable, laid back open space in order to provide a clearinghouse for new artists, as well as established ones.




this event happens in my hood! i went to the last one and really enjoyed it...and my friend jackie lives there!

put it on the calendar...

ailey barbie. i'm feeling a little uncomfortable.

in honor of the 50th anniversary of the alvin ailey american dance theater (one of my favorite cultural offerings in this city), mattel will be producing an ailey barbie?

Ailey Barbie doll on sale

In the fall of 2008, Mattel will release an Ailey Barbie® doll that was designed by Judith Jamison. The doll represents a dancer from Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece, Revelations.


BARBIE and associated trademarks and trade dress are owned by Mattel, Inc. © 2008 Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

umm, okay. i'm more excited by the free performances and classes that will be happening in august:

Free Dance Classes and Performances Throughout NYC (8.5-8.12)

In August, 2008, Ailey will conduct a series of free performances and dance classes in all five boroughs of NYC, sponsored by Bloomberg. Venues include Celebrate Brooklyn, Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture, New York City Center, Queens Theatre in the Park, and The St. George Theatre.

and the spring season at BAM (anyone want to get tix with me?):

Spring Season at BAM

The Joyce Theater will present Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for a week-long engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) from June 3-8, 2008. This will be the first time in 38 years that the Company has performed at BAM.

liberty city= a havestrength homecoming

i saw april yvette thompson's play on sunday night, the night before my aunt deedee's wake, and it fed my soul.

my great-grandmother largely raised my grandmother and her brother, my uncle george, in liberty city. uncle george and his wife, dee dee, made her house their second home throughout my childhood. it was in my great-grandmother's bathtub, while drying off from a bath, that i asked aunt dee dee to be my second grandmother (because my father's mother passed away soon after i was born). liberty city holds a special place in my heart.

i love seeing/reading/hearing/experiencing expressions of other people's loves for the places i love. i love having that venn diagram moment when you realize that there are things about yourself that you share with others. i took a friend to the play, someone that doesn't know me or my rituals very well yet. afterwards he commented on the way i reacted, audibly, to the references to homemade corned beef hash and hamburger patties with green peppers and onions and cornflakes, wrapped in foil. the way my eyes lit up with recognition when she spoke about a woman's husband taking the boat back and forth to nassau every weekend. the tears in my eyes as she recounted the mcduffie riots, and i imagined my parents, my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and where they must have been during that crazy time.

i called my mother on monday morning to tell her about the play. as i explained what thompson addressed, my mother began asking questions about her name and where she went to school- "did she tell you her mother's name? i bet momma knows her family!" it was a homecoming for her through my telling as much as it was a nostalgic journey for me. my mommy wants to take her mommy to see the play. we're just waiting for it to make the journey to liberty city.

you should see the show if you can. it's playing at the new york theatre workshop. 20 buck tickets for all seats on sundays at 7, cash only.

for more information, check www.libertycityplay.com.

i'm sad i missed this

on tuesday. did anyone catch it? if so, please tell me how it was...

Harlem Renaissance Revisited
With John Keene, Mendi + Keith Obadake, and Evie Shockley

Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
New York, New York

Four poetic innovators explore representations of race, sexual identity and class in the revolutionary literature of the Harlem Renaissance poets — including Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer and Richard Bruce Nugent — and later generations of writers inspired by their work.

asian american/african american poetry reading on thurs

co-spo'd by cave canem and the asian american writer's workshop. details after the jump. are you as excited as i am?

Thursday, March 6, 7:30 pm
Third Annual Asian American/African American Poetry Reading
Curated by Tracy K. Smith and Tina Chang
Cosponsored by Cave Canem

The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry. Readings by Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, R. Erica Doyle and Bakar Wilson.

Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/ Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/ 2003) She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and a novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. Born in Chicago, he holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York and teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School. He is the Founding Director of the Pan African Literary Forum. Allen's book of short stories, Bread and the Land, will be published in 2008. He is presently at work on Talking Talk, a book of interviews and conversations with fiction writers of African descent from around the world, and the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam & has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, The Barnes & Nobles Writers for Writers Award, A Larry Neal Prize for Poetry and a 2008 DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization & co-sponsor of Split This Rock's Poetry Festival: a celebration of Poetry of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC March 20-23 2008.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her debut collection of poetry, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Prees 2007), is the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, among others and have been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003) and Language For A New Century (W. W. Norton 2008). She is a fellow at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC SummerTIME Writing Program. Currently, she lives in New York City.

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn, NY to Trinidadian parents. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Utne Reader, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and Sinister Wisdom and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2001, Voices Rising, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gumbo: Short Fiction by Black Writers, Gathering Ground, Best Black Women's Erotica 2, and Role Call is forthcoming in Bloom, Our Antilles: Queer Writing from the Caribbean and Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets. She is the recipient of various grants and awards, including a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and a Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School and works as a teacher and literacy coach at Vanguard High. Her manuscript, proxy, was selected by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Bakar Wilson's work has appeared in the Vanderbilt Review, the Lumberyard, and three Cave Canem anthologies. He is a native of Tennessee and currently teaches at Medgar Evers College.

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)

$5 suggested donation

friday night=

...a long walk along 14th street
...an hour at the strand, and buying 4 books for less than 25 bucks (including a yummy soup cookbook! comfort food, anyone?)
...a manicure
...potato skins and drinks with two smart people in a diner
...more drinks at perks
...getting glared at for over-exuberance in the magic johnson theater
...good time spent with a friend.


not a bad night. not a bad night at all.

tonight

things that rock about today

1. today is the day after the second meeting of my ItAG (and the first that everyone attended). we played games from "games for actors and non-actors," introduced ourselves, and started to get a taste of what we all bring to the super-positive, awesomely radical educators' table. i left at 9:15 feeling radiant and expansive, and exhausted. good talk about good books is like crack to me, without the horrible post-hit crash :).
2. my promotion (as lukewarm as i felt/feel about it) was announced at work today. it's good to have it finally out in the open. it's also good to have a great officemate to make sense of it all with.
3. restaurant week dinner at amalia with heather and nicole. FAB! from caldo verde to balsamic-glazed short ribs to warm chocolate cake with vanilla foam and caramel ice cream, fancy dinner was worth every single penny. add the pinot/cabernet/syrah blend to that, and you've got near-perfection. good eats and good conversation-- a great way to end a wonderful 48 hours.

what's up next in this oh-so-blissful week?

• a pan-african literary forum reading at the new school tomorrow featuring our friend c. n. adichie
• maybe first fridays at the bronx museum?
• maybe first saturdays at the brooklyn museum?
• maybe a kinda silly obama-love event at piano's on thursday?

i dunno. but having to decide between this many awesome choices is priceless.

5 reasons to ride the city bus

1. spotting cool graf/murals around the city that you miss when you're underground:

i was on the bus yesterday down lex. ave. (a route that i've ridden many, many times before), and noticed a mural on 111th that i've never noticed before. it's a de la vega homage to picasso, and it's beautiful. one of the many, many pieces of art that make east harlem a more beautiful place to live that i miss when i ride the train.

2. checking out hot dudes' booties:

there was a dude on the sidewalk yesterday whose booty made me smile. :D and i didn't have to worry about him turning around and seeing me stare, nor did i have to worry about his ass being pressed up against my face during a sharp, unexpected turn. sweet and simple admiration, another bus plus.

3. spotting and coveting other people's clothing:

a woman had the CUTEST BOOTS ON. they were hot. i broke that 10th commandment and coveted the hell out of her footwear. all without her giving me that weird "what the fuck you lookin' at?! fuck outta here!" look that i get so often on the train! (yes, i get the look often. no, i won't tell you why.)

4. hmm maybe i only have three reasons:
   

oh well. fresh out of shit to say. that's what i get for getting up at 8:30 to "work" when i didn't get home 'til 3:15. stay up, my friends.

oh, and happy mlk day tomorrow! i will be at BAM's annual event, maybe you should be too!