The Greatest

Read Me In the Latest Issue of Bitch Magazine

Pick up the latest issue of Bitch Magazine at your local Barnes and Noble or feminist friendly infoshop. In it, I am featured on the contributor's page and have a full page article profiling bisexual activist Sheela Lambert. Good reads all around!

It Was Meant To Be

This CD is absolutely amazing. I've always meant to listen to it but haven't until today because I couldn't find it in stores, when I did it was too expensive, naturally forgot to buy it, etc. But, finally me and this music have crossed paths and it means everything. Now I'm on a mission to stock up on all Pulp and Jarvis Cocker related music. Recommendations?

Brillance:

Beatles Album Review: Please Please Me

Please Please Me is the first Beatles release and naturally the first one I've listened to for this experiment.

This release was very meh. I thought it sounded like a shorter Nuggets compilation--white guys playing R&B and girl group covers or writing original lyrics to music that sounds as such. I love blue eyed soul music but it has to sound sexier, rawer than this. They make covers of "Boys" and "Twist and Shout" sound like church hymns.

I did like two songs. "Misery" is my favorite song on the CD because of the opening vocals. I have a thing for sad lyrics coupled with dancable pop so it was an easy choice. "Love Me Do" was okay too because I love harp playing. I like the look of the band. Nice suits, skinny ties, and the famous Beatles boots. Much sharpness.

Side Note- A found a video of Jeremy Ratter aka Penny Rimbaud, the drummer and lyricist from my favorite English anarcho-punk band, Crass, meeting The Beatles after winning a fan art competition. It's very funny in how awkward it is.


Next up is Hard Day's Night.

Bea Arthur Left $300,000 to LGBT Youth Homeless Shelter

This woman was amazing. Not only was she talented and daring but also immensely generous. As reported by The Advocate, Bea Arthur left $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center in NYC, a space that "offers food, emergency housing, medical treatment, HIV testing, and educational training for as many as 1,000 young people annually." The money will be used to create a house that will hold 12 young people. The building will be named in her honor.

Where are you, Gardenburger Riblets?

I go to grocery stores frequently. Sometimes just to walk around in them. I like the sea of colors the packages make in the aisles, reading the labels of hazardous materials that the rest of the world thinks is food, and talking to elderly peeps, which make up like 90% of the people who shop in the early morning like I do. And who doesn't love snooping into other people's carts, all the while thinking,They want to buy that?

For the past couple of months, I've been disappointed by the frozen faux meat section of nearly every grocery store I've set foot in. Where are the Gardenburger Riblets?! They offered a delicious alternative to the trite veggie burger and would kick any chickun patty's ass in savory points. The yummy, sweet, molassesy sauce of the riblet reminded me of past bbq's when a host would never dream of making an uninspiring, jumbo sized salad in my honor.

Morningstar has now made a riblet of their own, but who cares? The sauce kinda sucks compared to Gardenburger. Is there a rule that only one company can make a mock rib at a time? I need answers...in the form of ribs.

An Episode in Racialized Sexism

I have been pretty jokey so far in the blog but after reading a bit from Gloria Steinem's Revolution From Within I feel that it would be good for me to express something from my life that is hardly given space for discussion.

Two days ago, after hanging out with my friend, we both went to the subway station to get on our respective trains to go home. He went through the turnstile fine but my card was messed up. The kiosk wasn't accepting bills so I thought a bit about what I was going to do. Then I heard a man mention the situation to me, I thought, in the collective "let's complain about incompetency/inconvenience" way that many people like to do but I find irritating. When I looked up, I saw that it was a homeless man and that he related the situation to me so that I would buy a Metrocard from him and not the kiosk that uses credit cards instead of bills. I politely declined but he kept trying to persuade me. He got angry and said that it wasn't a scam and that this is how he can support himself and his family on the street.

I began to feel harassed and targeted as he continued to pursue the issue with me and not one of the several other young people who needed to use the kiosk. I thought about what made me so special to single out. I came to the conclusion that it was because I am a young African American woman and he an older African American man. Though I am more financially privileged, he used his dominance of gender placed within the construct of race to try to make me feel small and like a traitor for not buying a Metrocard from him. He made this quite clear when I finally bought my Metrocard from the kiosk and he shouted "That's cold. We black." Additionally, when he brought up the fact that he supports his children and wife this way, I felt that he tried to appeal to whatever empathy he may have thought I naturally had for children or domesticity because I am a woman.

After the predicament, I felt demeaned and upset. It was another episode in my life where the value of my words didn't matter, only the preconceived notions about my appearance.

I've shared this story because I feel like the situation is very race and gender specific and those type of stories aren't normalized within our culture. Many people who don't identify as being a person of color and a woman may think this incident is insignificant and that I shouldn't take what a homeless person says seriously because they are somehow immune to being prejudice. Yet, if you put this situation in the boardroom, church, anywhere, it's the same story of racialized sexism. The best thing that we can all do is think critically about how we respond to people's identities, before he or she says anything, and what that says about how we think about ourselves.