(written in a moment of ungrateful cynicism)

We eat ourselves alive
in Brooklyn, there was a house of joy
and the joy the joy the joy became
    a terror to our sanities.

Everyone so happy, (pretending
    freedom so well) that sometimes
forgetfulness would cover over our garbage – how we  ate each other up,
    enduring decay, communally. Covered our inadequate patterns
in the foul breath, the death gasps, of each other’s sweat glands,

ever dripping with big ideas.

novela sample

It begins with performance.

The hijacked subjectivity. The spectacle. Awareness and manipulation of gaze. Enjoying gaze. Employing gaze. Shape-shifting and addiction.

Some people, like me, are born to perform. We can’t help it. It’s all that we do: day in and day out, even when we are by ourselves. It’s like we’ve surrendered our souls to some all-encompassing reality show, except we’re not sure if anybody else is watching. Every frame of our lives: acting, acting, acting. For what? The contract was signed in blood. We were made to be looked at.

And there are more and more of us every day who are being fixed this way. Something about the internet and celebrity culture, and advertising, and MTV bloodsucking the American dream: we can talk sociology all day. There should be a law against looking, or something, because really, it’s such a trap.

I star in my own little personal drama, an epic poem in which every moment is connected to every other in a tapestry of personal symbols, an anti-heroic romance that flirts dangerously with metaphor and circumstance, each a jealous lover, but I want them both. I love it all. And I’m not afraid to fool one or play the other, bend the rules and cheat tricks, then pretend I didn’t do it, play nurse or play dead. God, it’s narcissistic, and so many other disgusting, clinical words.

The problem is: I leave a mess all around me. Destruction, chaos, everywhere. I’m clumsy. I wish I trampled more lightly, carefully, patiently. But gravity is beyond me, and I was born with it pulling at my bones; awkwardly I have been trudging on, in spite of warnings. Omens. I am too thick for this delicate life with its delicate people. I am like poison.

How to ease the toxins of entropy? The patterns that have made themselves so obvious, artless, the repeated lessons I repeatedly fail to learn? I hold my breath and try to squeeze myself thin. I hold in my garbage until it makes me sick. I live in my garbage, in refuse. I never meant to harm anyone.

But I exist. Thus harm.

The human virus, scourging the Earth. Let’s go back to primitivism. (Oh, I prefer words. I strongly prefer ideas to material things.)

We must transcend the problematic, suffering ego and give to others freely. We must live in community. We must destroy private property and Capitalism.

There, we said it. Done. Now that this hippie theory has been paid proper homage, I wanna take a deep dive into our mental dumpsters, find the memories and relationships that we can’t live with, and savor the rancid corruption of our egotistical logic. The nasty fucked up whispers we get scared of when we look into the mirror on a bad mushroom trip. We have to salvage it. It’s our duty as scavengers and decomposers. All those expired little secrets must be freed with honesty.

But that’s the spectacle in me speaking again, setting up the scene for a dramatic confession: Father, I have sinned. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it, and died a million times. Are you ready, Father, to be manipulated?

————–

The Fox Demon terrorizes Chinese history. Each dynasty falls to scandal, and empires crumble in arterial blockage. Kings get caught up in their concubines, and war logistics are thrown to the wayside. Seductive women are terrorists; they trigger the Kingdom’s undoing. Eve took one bite of some sacred fruit, and because of her dumb, disobedient hunger, we are all shot clean out of Eden, burning forever.

My grandma and I used to watch imperial soap operas every night on Shanghai’s CTV. I was four years old. One evening of my childhood, Da Ji, the Fox Demon, tried to hang herself to rid the Zhou Empire of her own evil and to save the King, with whom she has supposedly fallen in love. It was an act. He rescued her, lifted her slender and helpless body up from her silk suspension, and basking in his own heroism, the King felt more love for Da Ji at that moment than he’s ever felt for anyone. And so the fox charms her prey, holds him captive and strangles him by the rope of his own eyes, stronger than any silk. I learned second-hand from the CTV Fox Demon that death is beautiful on a woman, and sacrifice is stunningly feminine. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, unless you fake it.

Shakespearian heroines. Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona: the more beautiful you are, the less you deserve to exist, and your lessened existence only heightens your beauty. Even a shrew must play along.

I gaze down on men from a well-lit stage. Five feet one, with eight inch platforms to become five feet nine. You can’t have my number – baby, they don’t allow me to do that here – but I will take your business card with your generous tip.

———-

Chris was a fucked up manga artist. I met him online when I was fourteen: OKCupid, some profile compatibility bullshit, modern day oracle boners and e-masturbation express. He messaged me first. He had a naked picture of his ripped torso on his bio, and a really long ponytail that hung down to his ass. I had a photoshopped pic of me with makeup and my hair blowing in the wind, with the Shanghai port and skyline behind me. I wrote up a sassy profile too, completely false. (I was really just in it for the personality tests, I swear, but once I got onto the site, well, what the fuck, I might as well see what happens.) We had Thai food for lunch.

I took the subway to Brooklyn from my uptown apartment, wearing a nice button-down blouse my mom made me, a gray sweater-skirt, and black boots. On the F-train, I felt like Columbus; I felt like Cortez, ready to conquer every living testicle. I wore a push-up bra because I barely had any tits, I was so green and so curious. I told Chris I was seventeen because that sounded old to me; he told me he was thirty-five, and I couldn’t even fathom a number that groggy, but I didn’t care. He showed me his apartment and his manga collection. I wasn’t really into cartoons anymore, but I liked the careful little drawings with the whispery sight lines that he carefully erased and delicately inked over. I liked the thirty-second animation commercial that he drew for Burger King, with the wide-eyed manga protagonist in a sexy sailor/Catholic schoolgirl outfit kicking ass for burgers. Chris told me about his freelancing, and it seemed like kind of a lousy living to me: trucking your portfolio to all sorts of interviews for a lucky gig, but whatever. He was a real artist, and he lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone. And that, he told me, was how he knew he was successful.

Chris showed me tons of photos and stories of ex-girlfriends who looked like supermodels. He was pretty modelesque himself; thin and well-defined, he was into raw foods and the caveman diet.

He was into BDSM. He had strange action figures by his bed with their skins ripped off and clipped to wooden stakes, with eyeballs peeled from their sockets, and red veins on their ghostly faces like taxonomy diagrams. I freaked out when I saw those toys, and I hid in the bathroom for a few minutes, contemplating escape routes. I thought he might have been a serial killer. It excited me to no end. And then during dinner and all the following weeks, I secretively thought up scenarios in which I would out-kill him.

(Part of my ongoing fiction novela, see Sister Stripster)

Luce Irigaray and Georges Bataille: how their ideas inform my approach to music & eroticism

      Two contemporary intellectuals, Luce Irigaray (b. 1932) and Georges Batailles (1897-1962), are influential in my approach to music and sexuality. Luce Irigaray, a second-wave feminist, linguist, and philosopher, challenges the symbolic order of language, which is fundamentally male in structure and symbolism (Lacan, Freud), and she urges a creation of l’écriture féminine, a truly female linguistic, free from the male appropriation of verbal expression. Through music with my band Twilight Language, with Joshua Slusher, I intend on exploring the essence of feminine expression through the musical delirium of vocal sound, devoid of linguistic logic, for a more primal communication that supercedes the Babylon of words, in hopes of touching on what is essentially female in me and unrestricted by masculine linguistic form. Irigaray’s ideas on female goddess-worship and witchcraft, as the female expression of divinity, separate from and repressed by male-dominated Christianity, also informs my interest in “mysticism,” as the female language of the Universal unknown. Finally, in this blog entry, I intend on touching upon Georges Bataille’s theories on the nature of eroticism, as a transgression of interdiction that reaches its zenith in the (regulated) shattering of taboos. My understanding of and approach to BDSM sex work has its foundation in the desire to grasp human sexual identity and psychology through erotic transgression, the act of which defines through opposition the formal structure of patriarchal civilization that gets broken in the process. I will explain how I intend on applying this understanding to my newest project with Todd Pendu, an avant garde/Surrealist pornographic film.

      Luce Irigaray is a linguist and psychoanalyst whose work centers upon the study of schizophrenic “ideolect,” verbal expression that does not follow the rules of formal language. By studying the linguistic structures of the words of schizophrenics, words which seem devoid of logic, Irigaray seeks to find essential human patterns in language. She honors delirium, as Surrealists honor madness, as the key to understanding atavistic human psychology predating the structures of civilization. Irigaray builds upon the theories of Lacan, who wrote that the symbolic order of language is fundamentally masculine and patriarchal, particularly in our languages of law, economics, mythology, and history. She also builds upon the ideas of Freud, who wrote that the phallus/penis is the “signifier of signification” and the keystone to all linguistic structures. Like the film critic Laura Mulvey, who wrote that the film medium is appropriated by a visual and symbolic language that is essentially defined by a “male gaze,” objectifying female characters to serve a male heroic narrative, Irigaray also challenges women to create a new language, a new gaze, that is essentially independent from male verbal and visual expression. She believes that this l’écriture féminine, would find its truest expression in modes of delirium, which she writes has the potential for providing the basis of a woman’s language.

      However, by defining her ideas in opposition to the works of male intellectuals, using their defined terms and their symbolic language, Irigaray falls into the same trap of masculine linguistics. Her dilemma is the fundamental dilemma of Second Wave feminism, which seeks to transcend more than the social inequalities that women experience, but also transcend the deep-seated Patriarchal ideological structures that govern women’s understandings of themselves and society: Second Wave feminists desire more than equality for women through being socially or politically equal to men; they want an equally valued female way of being, essentially different from men, but they can only articulate this separateness through opposition to an existing male language and framework, thus complicating their dependency. The trouble with Irigaray’s argument is that if our language is fundamentally Patriarchal in structure, there is no way to transcend its limitations through philosophy, which requires language to communicate logic; by using Lacanian and Freudian arguments, Irigaray is allowing herself to be governed by the same logic she seeks to subvert. 

         I believe that the construction of an essentially female language, l’écriture féminine, lies not in philosophy but in music. I believe that noise vocalism, devoid of lyrics, transcending words, inspired and informed by musical delirium, communicating only with the texture, tonality, and rhythm of pure vocal sound, is the key to touching an atavistic tongue before Babylon. This is what I aim to do with many of my vocals with Twilight Language. I sing in six languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Kakchiquel, and Tzutuhil (the latter two of which are Mayan indigenous languages); but I also want to make motions in sign language and sing pure noise, like a human beatbox/synthesizer, but without any intention of imitating a drum kit. I want to sing pure emotion and create my écriture féminine.

      Furthermore, I strongly believe that by singing/writing/painting about the experience of the whore, I am freeing a repressed female voice that needs to emerge and be honored in order for Third Wave feminism to progress. Both the Madonna and the Whore are male understandings of female as object, servicing men’s domestic and sexual needs. Women’s social status as objects of dependent sex (monogamously married) or independent sex (promiscuous, economically self-sustaining), is one defined by a Patriarchal order of female valuation. (Please read my zine, The AnnaKissed ManiFiesta, for elaboration of this argument.) Sex workers are keenly aware of the dilemma of being trapped by the “male gaze,” the male language of social understanding and desirability. In order to survive, sex workers cater to male notions of what is or isn’t attractive, and play to their fantasies to seduce and gain income; they consciously and subjectively objectify themselves by appropriating a male language and gaze, a language and gaze that, paradoxically, already appropriates their sexuality and objectifies them. This double reversal of perception and power dynamics, which confuses subject-object relations, is the complex reality of self-understanding and conscious agency in sex work. I believe it is of utmost importance to the feminist movement that a sex worker expresses her or his experiences in authentic terms, devoid of Patriarchal social assumptions, and I believe that such expression is a crucial part of creating l’écriture féminine.

        I am also fascinated by Irigaray’s take on mysticism, divine goddess worship, and witchcraft. These female-centric belief systems have always existed outside of Christianity and legitimized male-dominated religions. They have always suffered repression and persecution as “evil” and “strange” belief systems, though they are no more or less rational or superstitious as Bible stories. In fact, witchcraft and “pagan” Earth goddess creeds have offered a wealth of knowledge on nature and natural medicines that has always been marginalized and persecuted to destruction by those of the male-dominated theological, legal, and medical professions throughout history, which are threatened by female bodily self-understanding and understanding of the Earth. The Earth, like women, must be tamed and used for mankind’s purposes, not appreciated for its own worth. The female body is appropriated by male science and the female mind is drugged by male pharmaceuticals, just as the female sexuality is appropriated by Patriarchal marriage and whorehouses, and the Earth is “civilized,” exploited to the brink of destruction, or “sustainably developed” to serve mankind’s needs and whims. The realm of the unknown is called “religion” by male prophets and Kings, but the language of Universal spirituality as experienced by many women prophets, is called “witchcraft” and “mysticism,” and deemed strange and inherently evil. I see mysticism, witchcraft, ecospirituality, and goddess-worship as the l’écriture féminine of what men call religion, and I experience and analyze them for the purpose of discovering a twilight language of the female tongue.

        George Bataille also writes about religion and its relationship to eroticism. I became interested in Bataille only recently, when Todd Pendu, the filmmaker who is creating the avant garde/Surrealist porno I will be acting in, “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” recommended that I read Bataille’s The Eye to prepare myself for the aesthetic of our film project. I am fascinated by Bataille’s obsession with horror and obscenity in eroticism. Bataille wrote that horror is fundamental to art, as it creates “disequilibrium” to our “general economy of utilitarian materialism,” and it allows us to commune with something sacred. He defines sacredness as “a privileged moment of communal unity, a convulsive form of what is ordinarily stifled,” (Visions of Excess) and links it to eroticism, which is a “fundamental violation of the pure (sacred) self” and a “transgression of interdiction.” Through eroticism, human sexuality obtains its climax through the shattering of taboos, and this transgression in turn creates the foundational constructs of religion. The erotic impulse is the first thing to be appropriated and bound by religion, as can be seen in the story of Eve’s Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, thus eroticism is actually the foundation of sacredness rather than its antithesis. Anguish and horror are the contestations of the disruption of social structure and sacredness, yet these very transgressions define the boundaries of that which is shattered through the act of eroticism. In our post-Sexual-Revolution society, where people are increasingly desensitized by sex and eroticism, which have been casually co-opted by advertising and a consumerism of excess (“homogeneous expenditure without return”), the realm of transgression is pushed further and further into BDSM. I enjoy playing with these erotic taboos as an exploration of sacredness as delineated by anguish and horror, and as a means to commune with a transcendental psychology, a fundamental humanness, that has yet to be completely defined, dissected, medicalized, and advertised to the point of non-eroticism or bland sanctity. Paradoxically, the experience of sacredness is only reached by breaking sanctity, and I experiment with eroticism and BDSM to touch new levels of sacredness/communion.

         In “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” the protagonist Laylah recites a mantra or spell that unleashes a fantastical beast. This beast, or demon (evil by religious linguistics), is the embodiment of the transgression of interdiction, whose manifestation and penetration unleashes Laylah into the realm of the sacred. Its very existence is a struggle for the psyche of Laylah, the mind that is slowly and torturously unbound from formal erotic signifiers into a language all its own, an authentic linguistic of eroticism that I hope to make l’écriture féminine of sex.

May First Oh-Nine

4AM

breathe slowly and enjoy the creeping night /
boy huff puff the shadows with bushy eyes \ sweep out the ashes
till the sickness of venetian blades rising /
burns through delusions \ like a good blunt
smiles and twitches and refuses to grow old //

this industry of immortals, this city of vampires \
deep in our stiletto shoes, we are all a million years old /
lifetimes ago, we must have signed something without reading it  –
pitchforks tuned to disaster
and all tails pointed to a sleepless bliss //

—

10AM

morning class:

every negative thought is an intrusion!
he keeps himself gated up,

mind-twisted, like a peacock

yoga mind
(he progresses)
straining for half the world
like coffee, except coffee is unhealthy
he eats ezekiel and wakes up at 4:09
stretches harder and harder to reassure himself, leg             up so high

so pure
chops critics with his mind

him maverick

——-

5PM

i am nervous, skidding across the surface, aware of my short skirt
i caught an old woman / subway laser tag

wish, wash / gazes across
like being filtered through a synth phaser:
moods changing / attack and frequency rising

tremolo!
everyone so variably perceptive

——

8PM

and then somebody got caught under the L-train
clogged up all the hip arteries to the underworld
blood spills onto buses
unhappy transfers: people i’d never talk to /
asking me where is the J? M? Z?
Metropolitan? Avenue?

on cell phones: “did you hear about the person who died?”
shocked girl. so shocked.

too many people at a bus stop
eyes peer out from tinted windows, dreadfully
stomachs prepare for the crowded air

bag lady hands folded on bus
never asked for this
why people fussing on my route
whi’ people always fussin’

J? M? Z?

artsy artist says i’\m gonna be independent
finds an artsy bicycle

punk with no ears no more
i don’/t know anything about a fucking train delay

home voice:
Crushed Neighbors Make Friendship from Subway Accident

——

11PM

notebook smelling of cigarettes
charred flesh inside me where
pages turn fluff
gray hairs on a strangers’ head
music, never mine

tired cafes
where English sprays out
amid mouthfuls of beer
and chewed up diagnostics
lays afoot all dreams

hi-hats roll over
cracked voices

—–

12AM

runaway children
where are all the families you deny?
pierce your face with me
so we can retrace our roots
with better fantasies

deny our food
prefer to dive into ghettos
treasures from fetishized things tossed aside
but this Spanish ain’t ours: why hide?
walls hugging our romantic corruption
are so fragile

I dare not ask
where you come from, really
we all have our fronts
and our backs
who am I to deny you
your victimhood?
I’m content
we have our smokin’ mirrors to blur out the obvious lack of art here

Chinatown

I.

I, Mott Street Amazon:
fishnets and steel toed boots crossing streets lined with
kitchen equipment
porcelain sets / I trample on
all shy girls with plastic slippers
that smell like 99 cent shower curtains
sour Chanel baked with Canal exhaust
skinny legs and hoop earrings that dangle over fish
I beat down on all cute cartoon animals!
will have no bubble tea or slightly sweet pastries,
refuse pale skin and round surgical eyes
watch me squint
and enjoy my disgust for you
like a fortune cookie you cracked excitedly but stare at confusedly

Take tips from men who
beg to lick my unbound feet: call it Chinese nipple torture
call it whatever
I’ll be the bitter part of Made In China
still falling into the same exotic trap
but armed at least
with spike chains and surgical implements:

my dreadlocks past Grand street create
battlegrounds with each step
Cantonese wisecracks
break mothers’ backs

those men with boxes, in and out of vans
for restaurants that open and close
- and that’s a day:
home to where wives wok and children do homework

make sense of everything
old woman counting her lucky stars

—-

II.

I, Revolution retired
sleeves still rolled up to my elbow
ready to throw stones
at bourgeoisie in hats
not I -

I sent my children to the farmlands
sacrificed my jewelry for Mao
waited over bedsides
where soldiers died in quilts of flowers and tear-soaked letters
my husband in a casket of calligraphy

That was respect.
Now these sour streets I can’t believe
dust over bad language
and bad rice cooked in too much oil.
Raised sons but left with daughters
to a Fujianese dirt camp
not I -

I saw right through the Japanese
and the English
I watched my husband collapse
in a bed of whispers,
I watched my children enter buses
packed senseless,
and slowly, I too fell out of place.

counting the sidewalk cracks
arrogant child with too much makeup

—–

III.

Black stilettos meet Revolutionary sleeves
Neither in their proper landscapes
And so failed to touch

Lucky to be here, says
Mother rolling her sewing machine
fingertips humming of rice fields and industrial kitchens, warrior second
stitching together this town.