This year’s Sins Invalid show is going to be amazing. Friends of mine are coming in from Canada, the American Southwest, everywhere to see it… You should join me there if you want to see queer disabled people of color centerstage. :-)

-cripchick

JOIN US IN CELEBRATING THE 5TH ANNUAL
SINS INVALID PERFORMANCE!

Sins Invalid celebrates the power of embodiment & sexuality, stripping taboos off

sexuality and disability to offer a vision of beauty that includes all bodies and
communities.

Z Space (formerly Theater Artaud)
450 Florida Street at 17th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

8pm Friday April 8th 2011
8pm Saturday April 9th 2011
and

7pm Sunday April 10th 2011

This venue is wheelchair accessible.
Please do not wear scented products, although we cannot guarantee a scent-
free space.

Ticket $16 – $25

2011 artists include: Aurora Levins Morales, Antoine Hunter, Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ellery Russian, Nomy Lamm, Alex Cafarelli, Juba
Kalamka, Leroy F. Moore, Patty Berne, Todd Herman, seeley quest, Maria
Palacios, Ralph Dickinson and Ryon Gesink.

This performance is Audio Described

ASL interpreted by Stage Hands

To purchase tickets in advance, visit http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/

[pictured above is a postcard announcing the show. In the background are white ropes, knots, clocks and DNA strands on black. In the foreground is Leroy Moore, shirtless, with his hands clenched together in front of him. Next to him is a clock. Above his head are the words: 5th Anniversary Performance Sins Invalid April 8 - 10, 2011. Z Space (formerly Theater Artaud)]

Looking for Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn? Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw? This is your chance to get all the books you’ve been dreaming of reading!!

Continuing in Thaura Distro’s footsteps, friends and I are hosting an online book sale to support Mia’s and my move to the SF Bay. There are over a hundred books to choose from and you can pick up as many titles as you’d like. To purchase a book, leave a comment with the name of titles and use the chip-in widget at the bottom of the list. It will take you directly to paypal.

Shipping costs are on us, but we ask that you donate between $5-10 for each title. If a title really speaks to you — like it’s the book explaining the hidden history of your people (been there!) — and you can’t afford $5 right now, no worries, just email me your address at consciouslycrip@gmail.com and it won’t even be a thing to send it to you for free. Each purchase comes with a small gift from either Thaura Zine Distro or artist Nadia Abou-Karr (check out the link to see art she has for sale).

A HUGE thank you to Aaminah, Mai’a, China, Bianca, and Mandy for coming up with this idea and donating TONS of books (and for many of them, shipping it out from their houses on their own dime!) Love you all so much.

Books for Sale

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

The Bad Detective by H.R.F. Keating

Bad Penny (A Cat Dupree novel) by Sharon Sala

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

B as in Beauty by Alberto Ferreras

Bliss by Fiona Zedde

The Book Shop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Born in the Big Rains: A memoir of Somalia and Survival by Fadumo Korn

The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile by Arundhati Roy

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

The Coffee Trader by David Liss

Compact Spanish and English Dictionary by Vox

Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada (en espanol) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Every Step A Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet by Dorothy Ko

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser

Feeding Baby: Simple Healthy Recipes for Babies and Their Families by Joachim Splichal

Femicide in Global Perspective by Diana EH Russell

Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law by Catharine A. MacKinnon

A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tizian Terzani

Growing Up Fast by Joanna Lipper

Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural edited by Henry Mazzeo

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A History of Women in America – Carol Hymowitz & Michaele Weissman

How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto

In America by Susan Sontag

Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues by Paul Farmer

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

The Kingdom Of This World by Alejo Carpentier

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Maid in the USA by Mary Romero

Major Problems in African-American History Volume 1: From Slavery to Freedom 1619-1877 by Thomas C. Holt

Moving Beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking Boundaries of Gender by Gloria Steinem

The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss Our Global Future by Helena Cobban

Organizing Idea Book by John Loecke

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Picture the Girl: Young Women Speak Their Minds by Audrey Shehyn

The Pigman by Paul Zindel

Playing With Boys by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Pleasures: Women Write Erotica by Lonnie Garfield Barbac

Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands: Wildlife Viewing Guide by David W Nellis

Raising the Bar: New Horizons in Disability Sport by Larry Rothstein

Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies behind War and Propaganda by Mickey Zezima

The Sober Kitchen: Recipes and Advice for a Lifetime of Sobriety by Liz Scott

Social Text: Transnational Adoption by Toby Alice Volkman

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Sula by Toni Morrison

Telling: Confessions, Concessions, and other Flashes of Light by Marion Winik

The War on Choice: the Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights And How to Fight Back by Gloria Feld

Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West by Imran Ahmad

The Unsavvy Traveler: Women’s Comic Tales of Catastrophe – RosemaryCaperton, Anne Mathews, Lucie Ocenas

What I Know for Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America by Tavis Smiley

A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe by Christina Henry De Tessan

Work, Family and Health: Latina Women In Transition by Ruth Zambrana

Virtual Equality – The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation by Urvashi Vaid

A Year In the Life of Shakespeare- 1599 by James Shapiro

You Never Know: Stories by Isabel Huggan

To pay, click the orange chip-in button below. If this flash widget is not accessible to you, please email consciouslycrip@gmail.com

okay yall, wherever mia and i end up in the bay will be a third of the size of where i live now. this means i need to purge a lot of things i own. city livin’ at its best. :-)

i’ve learned so much from the blogosphere that i want to share what i have. below are list of books i can mail you for free (i have a free postage stamp thingy). to make sure things get distributed fairly, let’s start with each person getting two items. if two people ask for the same thing at the same time, preference will go to women of color, those working outside of the academy, and poor folks.

please pass the word!

books

• law school confidential
• dreamweaver 8 textbook (i can send you copy of program too)
• what i know for sure by tavis smiley
• an american life: benjamin franklin -taken
• the alchemy of race and rights -taken
• dreams from my father by obama -taken
• cockeyed -taken
• how to teach filthy rich girls -taken
• jesus land
• the pigman -taken
• revenge of the paste eaters
• ovid’s metamorphoses in latin and english -taken
• the culture of fear -taken
• stumbling on happiness -taken
• colonial pathologies -taken
• extraordinary bodies -taken
• globalization reader textbook -taken
• book of poems from def jam poetry tv show -taken
• letters to a young feminist -taken
• to be real by rebecca walker -taken
• the time of our singing -taken
• my face is black is true -taken
• nothing about us without us -taken
• how did you get to be mexican? -taken
• sex drugs and cocoa puffs -taken
• the bible tells me so: uses and abuses of holy scripture -taken
• the communist manifesto -taken
• the essential gandhi -taken
• a cab called reliable -taken
• charlie chan is dead volume one and two -taken
• dragon ladies -taken
• the god of small things -taken
• kitchen confidential -taken
• the truth that never hurts by barbara smith -taken
• the disabled god -taken
• to kill a mockingbird -taken
• letter to my daughters by maya angelou -taken
• the new intifada -taken

for queer disabled people of color craving community with each other:

the azolla is a southeast asian plant used in growing rice. azolla plants carry the ability to grow quickly, suppress weeds, and give nutrients to other plants in a symbiotic fashion. the azolla has millions of small, overlapping leaves and lives on the surface of water with its roots hanging under the surface.

we, as disabled queer people of color, are the azolla. we are everywhere. we have the power to grow and build community (the azolla can double its biomass in 2 days!) we are beautiful. we give nutrient to those around us but either are invisible or called weeds. although we sustain community, the focus is never on us. we are working on creating a space, the Azolla Story, that changes this.

we want this online home to be a space where we can connect with each other; build knowledge and community; share stories and histories; reflect, support and transform our love for and with each other. we are a part of many communities and seek to build a community where we can claim our whole selves. we recognize that queerness, gender expression and identity, trans politics and sexuality are an important part of our lives because of the many ways that queer disabled people of color’s gender, sexuality and relationships are policed, deamonized, ignored, exterminated and exploited.

we hope you will grow with us and join us in the telling of our transformation(s). this is the azolla story.

if you are interested in joining the azolla story online community, pls leave a comment and i will send you a link.

hi all!

putting my need out into the internet since it has been working lately! (love to you all)

do any of yall have information on liberation schools organized by the black panthers, community-led classes, popular education programs, organizing schools, or anything of that nature?

i am in the process of organizing a “campus” locally for the school of our lorde. where i live, this will mean people of color coming together every saturday to study the poetry, pedagogy [study of teaching], and politics of audre lorde

and the youth crew i am is also sketching out the framework we want to use for the event we are holding this summer for disabled youth to come together for a week and return home as revolutionaries

if you have access to online libraries, books you can rec, stories you know, stuff you’ve seen in your communities, models you’ve used, please let me know. told a friend today i was excited to learn that things in my head and in the collective are not new— being accessible is called “popular education”, events where youth come together to learn power analysis, activism, poetry is called “liberation schools”… just have to do the homework!

excited for 2010!!!

cripchick

in 2009 i got to be involved in some really awesome skill shares organized by the cyberquilting crew, a group of genderqueer and women of color who are using technology to thread movements together. i fell in love with both cyberquilters and skills shares.

["skill shares" or "skill sharing" is when people teach other people things that they know. they do it for free or in a trade for being taught a skill. to me this is more than just telling someone how to do something because it is like a transfer of power or knowledge. think superheroes joining forces.]

photo taken at the cyberquilting skills share in detroit at the allied media conference. credit to quirky black girls photography.

every day we are told that a.) we do not have skills and b.) that the things we know are not valuable. this lie exists so that we will try to hoard our skills from others and so that the the system can dangle our need for skill development over our head and sell it back to us.

there are a lot of things i am interested in learning in 2010. i have skills that i can exchange, too, mostly in the area of organizing and media making. i can teach these via webcam, email, or conference call. if you are interested in skill sharing w/ me and others, leave a comment with what you’d like to learn and what you could teach.

things i can teach:

how activists and organizations can use google wave to make the work they have to do together much easier. (some examples: how to use google wave to work with others to host an event, throw a party, write a document, create a plan, etc.)

how to make your event, blog, organization, or space more accessible in terms of disability.

basic html skills or how to create and maintain a website.

basic video editing

how to do mass mailings, webinars, web meetings or conference calls on the cheap/free

how to make your writing 8th grade level

graphic design (photoshop)

how to make your workshop interactive

tshirt reconstruction (cutting up a tee and making a new outfit out of it)

(will add to this list as i think of more)

things i would like to learn:

a vegan dish or two that is easy to cook, cheap, and can be done without special food stores. okay… better eating in general. not only for myself but in hosting events on the cheap. (e.g. there has to be healthier (again, cheap!) food option than beanies and weanies at our youth events)

mediation/energy work techniques that are accessible to me as someone with a physical disability and chronic lung issues. (most ones i see people doing don’t do anything for me).

zine layouts. i’ve worked on 3 zines now but have a hard time wrapping my head around the layout part.

general facilitation skill development

more popular education techniques

how to mix music with opensource technology

budget stuff. i do okay with organizational budgets (aka money that ain’t mine) but don’t have personal budgeting down. see myself drowning in debt if things don’t change soon.

let’s see if we can do some skill sharing with each other.

xo,
cripchick