Art

Dog Shit Park

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Hey friends, sorry this post is so late.  As I mentioned, my dad’s in the hospital, so I’ve been running between SF and Sacramento, juggling work and family and friends and politics — so what else is new? — but right now with more emphasis on the family.

Unsurprisingly, as tough as it’s been to see my dad sick, it’s also offered many opportunities for grounding, reflection, and appreciation.  That’s how this clear-sightedness stuff works, sometimes, in the midst of difficulty.

And it’s reminding me of a less-serious incident, a couple weeks back, when Ryan and I arrived, stomachs bellowing with hunger, at a highly recommended Thai restaurant tucked away in a corner of Oakland, only to discover that it didn’t open for another half hour. (I say this event was less serious, and it was, but I think we can all agree that when crap like this happens to us it can feel pretty damn grave.)

So there we were, ravenous and cranky. But as luck would have it, the same alley that housed the restaurant also contained a tiny, art-filled park.  “Dog Shit Park,” as a wooden sign proclaimed.  (Or warned.)

Busted pianos, colorful sculpture, plants and trees and chairs for sitting. And so, as we’ve seen before here on Kloncke, an inconvenience turned into a lovely opportunity.

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Disarm BART Flyer #2

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Last night on my way home from Oakland to SF, I boarded the bart train with no intention of handing out any flyers.  It was late; I was tired; also feeling a little shy.

I’d been burned the day before while trying to hand out a different flyer on a similar theme.  This one announced an October 23 rally sponsored by the Oakland/SF local (Local 10) of the ILWU longshoremen’s union, in solidarity with the Oscar Grant movement.  The ILWU has a history of militant, class- and race-conscious organizing: to challenge apartheid South Africa, they shut down the shipping yards along the whole US West Coast.  It’s a pretty inspiring labor-community connection (more explanation over at Advance the Struggle blog), and I was jazzed to be talking to folks about it at the Ashby BART seller’s market on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

But you know, rather than talking politics, most of the men I approached were more interested in hitting on me.

Now.  As I’ve discussed here before, hollering doesn’t alarm me too much and I generally respond with friendliness or neutrality rather than coldness or anger.  But this day, man, I was not in the mood.  The previous night I’d been up at a radical politics discussion in Oakland from 9pm til 3 in the morning.  Exhaustion left me exposed and tender, with little energy to break through the banter and engage the humans behind the Gaze.

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Dear Author Of fuckyeahdukkha:

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This is just a note to say that I have a big ol’ internet crush on you and your incredibly awesome treasure trove of a tumblr. And I hope to be able to organize with you someday.

I wanted to write and tell you that directly but I can’t find any contact info. So if you are reading this, please know that I am sending you all kinds of mental hugs and mental bows and mental incense and mental plantains (yum!), and thanking you so very deeply for your work and inspiration.

love,

katie

Disarm BART Flyer #1

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Simple, clean, sincere. Inspired by Burmese monastics who, when demonstrating in the streets against the military, chant: “May all beings be free from killing one another. May all beings be free from torturing one another…”

[Update: I forgot to mention, but if you’re in the bay area and are interested in passing out some flyers on your BART travels, hit me up at katie (dot) loncke (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll get you a batch! Or, even better — take some inspiration and make your own, and let the rest of us know about it.]

Concert Colors

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Didn’t get too much use out of my camera at the Erykah Badu / Janelle Monáe show last Friday, and I don’t do too well with low light, neither.  But with a little color editing, it works out — now we all match Erykah’s bright, bright stage.

concert crew
francis and eric
Francis and Eric
janelle monáe signing cd's
At the end of Janelle Monáe's set, she jumped off the stage and climbed over the rows of seating straight toward the back of the theater. I literally thought she was going to scale the balcony somehow. That woman has some energy.
francis with a flower in her hair
erykah on stage
Ms. Badu on stage

To be perfectly, perfectly honest, I felt a little disappointed by the show.  Something about the ricocheting between extremes of inscrutable coolness and raw vulnerability that didn’t do it for me.  But!  The audience was simply beautiful — all kind of folks, all ages, everyone warm and friendly and smiling.  I hadn’t been to a concert in a long time, and this one was a great opportunity to just walk around and take in the splendor of regular people.

In other news, my first post is up at Feministe!  I’m pretty excited.  Come check it out!

Badu In T Minus Seven Hours; Feministe In T Minus A Few More

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Guess what?  This lucky bug is heading to an Erykah Badu show tonight in Oakland!  With Ryan, Cat, and a friend of Cat’s (and I’m guessing we’ll run into a whole bunch of folks at the Paramount).  And Janelle Monáe is opening.  Looking forward to some amazing artistry and musicianship, and also to some marvelous audience engagement skills. (Video description and lyrics below the fold.)

janelle monae poster
erykah tour poster

(Random Sidenote: In order to stay up past my bedtime, I may need to treat myself to a rare favorite beverage: fresh-brewed soy chai with a shot of espresso. When I was in high school, my crew’s nighttime haunt, True Love Coffeehouse, used to call this concoction a “Jostled Gandhi.”)

And guess what else?  Starting Monday, I’ll be guest-blogging for two whole weeks over at Feministe, a feminist news-media-and pop-culture group blog that I’ve been following for years now.  Even wrote part of my college thesis about them.  Exciting stuff!

feministe screen grab

Since I’ll be devoting a lot of time to composing posts for Feministe, there probably won’t be too much regular Kloncking happening here.  But I’ll cross-post everything I write, so please feel welcome — and warmly invited — to comment either here or there.

Have a wonderful weekend!  Take care, everyone.

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“We Are Real”: Violence, Colonialism, Human Suffering, and Reflections of Palestine and Israel in The Last King Of Scotland

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amin-mightyAs you may have noticed if you’ve been hanging around here for any amount of time, I don’t talk much about current events.

Partly because this blog is mainly autobiographical — about my own lived experience — and I haven’t been involved in many “current events” lately. Also, news consumption has been extremely low for me in the past year — on purpose.

Despite my personal media fast, some major happenings (mostly US-centric) inevitably come to my attention. Oscar Grant’s murder. The bp oil spill. Arizona’s racist immigration law. The Gaza aid flotilla killings.

Still, when I am trying to talk about these issues, I don’t try to thoroughly research and analyze them the way I might have two or three years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with research and analysis: both good and important. But here, for now, I’m focusing on deepening my understanding not of politics, per se, but of suffering. In order to understand suffering, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening around us — including politics and all the harm that’s constantly happening. But there’s more to it than that, I think.

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Friday Words From The Wise

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Stuck right with me this week, these four:

Compassion is not about kindness.  Compassion is about awareness.

~Khandro Rinpoche

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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

~ Karl Marx

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“But say a man does know.  He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about.  He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today.  He sees America as a crazy house.  He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live.  He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat.  He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted.  He sees war coming.  He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them.  But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie.  And although it’s as plain as the shining sun — the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.”

~ Jake Blount, local madman, in Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

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When you plant seeds in the garden, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted yet.

~Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron.

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That’s all for now, friends. Take care; see you next week!