bliss

Lavender - vanilla body souffle. And Parijat's hot chocolate, made with soy milk, cocoa, honey, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, ground cloves and ginger.

new york brings out

two sides of me.

The wide-eyed Kenyan tourist, who bumps into people on the streets because her eyes are gobbling up skyscrapers, market stalls, crowd life. Dissolves into fits of unsophisticated giggles over things New Yorkers don't find funny.

And the fiercely driven, ambitious, competitive go-getter. Who actually enjoys the adrenalin rush of the sleek suit / high heels / think on your feet / move faster than anyone else / get in with the edge / clinch the deal / places to go / people to meet / calls to make frenzy. For a few days, at any rate. As long as I know it's just a game, not my real life, or my real work.

markets

The Arts Presenters Conference is a gigantic marketplace. The largest commodity exchange floor in the world for the trade in live performing arts. The buyers are the arts presenters - theaters, arts councils, universities, festivals, any organization that books and presents artists. The sellers are the artists - there are showcases from 8am to 11pm of artists touting their wares. The brokers are the agents - 3 floors of booths in the exhibition halls of the New York Hilton.

The buyers have purchasing power. The sellers have the creative power of their product. And ultimately, it's their message that gets put out on the stage. But it's dependent on the buyers giving them a stage. The brokers' power lies in the relationships they have with the buyers and and the hotness of the product they represent.

Several times a day I remind myself that I can do markets. Almost every Sunday of my childhood, I accompanied my father to Nagara market - Nairobi's huge open-air fruit and vegetable market, to buy the week's food. Hundreds of tiny stalls crammed into narrow dirt alleyways, with little mounds of chillies and beans, pyramids of fruit, onions, tomatoes, bunches of spinach, kale, greens, laid out on sacks. Buyers assessing, fingering, sniffing, squeezing, bargaining. Sellers calling, cajoling, promoting, hustling, bargaining.

I walk through the concourses of the Hilton; fix my mind on my own roadmap of what I'm here to do; tell myself: "It's just Nagara market, to the power of 100."

funniest chat-up line I've encountered this year

Last night, at San Francisco Airport.

"I know I've seen you before. Wait - were you the one in the fish costume on the unicycle at Burning Man?"

sunlight in brooklyn

pours through Parijat's bedroom windows. I'm in that state of friable body / twanging mind, that comes from too little sleep, red-eye flight, and 2 pints of green tea.

Just about to head out to Arts Presenters. Nervous, excited, trying not to expect too much. But also not to let myself off the hook about seizing every opportunity.

75 and counting......

hours spent this week on festival submissions, photocopying, mailing, marketing, contacting presenters, agents, inviting them to come to my reading in NY, trying to set up meetings at the Arts Presenters Conference.......

20 or less - hours this week spent sleeping.

3.1275 - hours spent this week actually thinking about and rehearsing for the shows.

If an artist rocks the world on a stage, but no one saw or heard it who could book her, pay her, keep her in oatmeal and dentures when she's 80, did it really happen?

Wanted: Teleporter

Getting ready to hit the road - or the BART and United Airlines, to be more accurate. This is the stage of the business where I always want to just close my eyes and be there.

There are people who can pack to go round the world in a couple of hours. With me, packing expands to fill time available. If I allocate a day to pack, it takes me a day and an extra frantic hour of tossing out excess stuff. Regardless of whether it's weekend trip or 3-week tour.

I will blog much less frequently while I'm on the move. But I'll be back on Feb 10th, just in time for the Mistress of Spices Reception at the Oakland Museum. Meanwhile, if you read this blog from NY or Nairobi, come out to my shows there in the next couple of weeks, and please come up and say hello afterwards.

Photo: D. Ross Cameron

love poems: part 6

In my poem, For The Women of Project Pride, I write:

If I trust one thing on this scarred and merciful earth, it is this. All love begins with seeing. How I learn to write is how I learn to love. Because to write anything, first / I have to see it. In its wholeness, without resistance. In its detail, without judgment.

love poems: part 5

I read an interview with architect Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, in the Smithsonian Magazine. She said:

I see with my hands.

I thought:

I love with my words.

love poems: part 4

The only way to write a good love poem – hold nothing back.

Love poems demand greater rigor, honesty, self-revelation stripped of exhibitionism or self-pity, than any other form of writing. You have to bring everything to a love poem. All the largeness, grieving, beauty, rage, cynicism, anguish, fear, you hold in your body.

I think you can only write a true love poem when you embrace fully the irony of love poems, in the face of all that militates against life on this planet.

More, at Love Poems: Part 3

blogging in bed

I have a more-than-faint suspicion that this Will Lead To Bad Things. I'll start to stay up until 3am: Just one more entry, then I'll sleep....

Or doze off and fall forwards or sideways, breaking or damaging my laptop.

Or, worst of all, come to prefer my ibook in bed with me, over the warmth and complexity of another human being.

From Walt Whitman

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms
to everyone that asks, stand up
for the stupid and crazy, devote your income
and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning God, have patience
and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men - go freely
with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young,
and with the mothers or families - re-examine
all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss
whatever insults your own soul;

and your very flesh shall be a great poem,
and have the richest fluency,
not only in its words, but in the silent
lines of its lips and face,
and between the lashes
of your eyes,
and in every motion and joint
of your body.

From the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

The line breaks are mine :-)

bill mandel

I learned this evening that my friend Bill Mandel was hit by a car last night. He's in hospital, in fairly serious condition.

I opened his autobiography, Saying No To Power, a little while ago, after I heard the news. It's a book that's taught me more about the real history of America in the 20th century, than almost any other. It strengthens my will to act in moments of apathy.

Here's Bill:

The most important human right is the right to live. It is also the most important civil liberty.

So glaringly obvious. So easily forgotten in the rhetoric that justifies war in the name of "human rights" and "democracy."

Fascism is not openly terrorist to the mass of the people, but makes unprecedented use of social demagogy. [It] requires that a politically decisive mass of citizens is willing to use force to deny democratic expression to fellow-citizens...

Don't oversimplify. Life and politics and human beings are extremely complicated and internally contradictory.

And one of my favorite definitions of courage:

...the sense of moral indignation that overwhelms my fears.

I'm going home! I'm going home!!

It suddenly hit me, amid the welter of bills to pay, emails to get out, grants to submit, shows to prepare, calls to make, packing, shopping, planning.....

In less than 17 days, I'll walk out of the cavernous baggage hall at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. My parents will be there. Waiting for me.

I sat still for a moment to breathe in that thought. Then I began to cry. And laugh at the same time. I'm still giddy, tremulous, sniffly, as I write this.

countdown

I'm in that 3-days-before-I-leave-town-and-6-days-worth-of-stuff-to-get-done frenzy. And trying to get enough sleep before I leave, because I certainly won't in New York, at the Arts Presenters Conference.

I have to keep letting go of the alarm bells in my head:
I'm not ready!

Replace them with:
When it's time to get on the plane, you'll be ready.
When it's time to do the SALAAM show, the Nairobi shows, you'll be ready.
If you're there, you're ready.

my hero

From the Deccan Herald:
Celebrated writer Arundhati Roy on Saturday refused to accept the
prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in protest against the Indian
Government toeing the US line by "violently and ruthlessly pursuing
policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing
militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation".

Writers With Drinks

Soundtrack for a sunny working Sunday:
Self-Portrait by Jon Jang.

We did a set together at the Asian Jazz Series in 2004; I did what I think is my best performance ever of Dreaming In Gujurati to his piano accompaniment. I wish I had it on tape.

Still a little high from Writers With Drinks at The Make-Out Room last night. So much more fun than I'd expected it to be. I rarely do bar readings that aren't slams, because my experience of them has been that people are there to hang out and drink, not necessarily listen. But Charlie Anders' persistence finally wore me down, and I'm glad. It was an amazing crowd; in number, size, depth of attention, and appreciation for good writing. It was also that almost-unheard-of-in-the-Bay-Area phenomenon: a show that started on time and finished 4 minutes early!

And Charlie gave me the best, most astute, most hilarious, most-tapped-into-my-work intro I have ever received. I want to hand it to everyone who ever introduces me at future shows and say: Just read this. Don't change a word.