Meatspace Announcement

Placeness Practices

full moon rising over rattlesnake canyon, joshua tree at the end of march with EL / although, it is illegal to photograph the moon, per SC

I’d like to talk to you today about a thing called meatspace / Meatspace is a thing that you feel with your teeth and your bones / I don’t want to see you through this little screen / I wanna interact with your little meatbody / Meatspace is the gold standard

These are lyrics from “Teeth and Bones,” a track from our new project The Velvet Ants—we’re named for our hyperparasitic hearts. Catch us this saturday at Bike Oven on Figueroa St, we’re on at 9pm! Never thought I’d be in a band, but AD, HN, MA, and KI really got me!

In other meatspace (physical place, as opposed to virtual space) news, I’ve got a solo art show at Human Resources in Chinatown coming up in about a month, curated by Chris Vargas! Please take this virtual space dispatch as an invitation to the physical place meetup—there will be dance lessons, participatory drawing exercises, film screenings, and more dancing!

I’m writing to you, per usual, while biking, but more literally than is typically the case. I’ve got one leg propped up on the metal rail along the channelized concrete banks of the LA river, notebook braced against my bullhorn handlebars, thinking about the cartographies I trace biking across the city. I’ve just come back from patrols with the El Sereno Community Care Collective: https://venmo.com/u/elserenoccc to support local vendors, neighbors, and the efforts of the collective! Today, we were talking about land tax, the Shuumi Land Tax calculator through the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in the Bay Area and the Kuuy Nahwa’á Guest Exchange through the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy in Los Angeles.

There’s always good conversation at the El Sereno Green Grocer x AIDS Health Foundation weekly food distro, providing primarily for elders in the neighborhood at the community garden. There’s always a familiar face or an unexpected connection, from years organizing and collaborating in resistance to police violence and brutality, in protest of the genocide in Palestine, toward relief efforts in the wake of the LA fires, in response to the ICE raids, from the cross-pollination of tenant organizing spaces, since Mike Davis bookclub meetings in the park and at the local bar in summer ’22, and the group night bike rides that fall and winter.

Lately, I’ve been drawing a lot of maps. Some of them are relational, tracing intimacy and trust, a constellation of people in each other’s orbits. Others are physical geographies, locations and places. We identify new trees and plantings in the community garden so that I can redraw the aerial map with updated plant locations for use by various organizing groups. I go out to the high desert and draw a tiny zine on scrap paper, locating performance sites for a DIY festival with art built almost entirely from trash; creative reuse and the pleasures of misuse are celebrated practices here. I draw a huge map on butcher paper laid out on the floor depicting the tangle of freeways between Lincoln Heights and El Sereno. In our organizing meetings, the designation of neighborhoods through place names matters less than who is showing up; I draw the map to connect our neighborhoods and bridge these arbitrary demarcations, stitching together places that are united in the fight for tenant power.

Drawing maps is a documentarian compulsion to trace paths and mark histories. It’s an effort to situate myself in my local context and within a broader framework, to get grounded in the place where I find myself. Since I haven’t been writing you these past four months, I’ve accumulated film photographs of these placeness practices—psychogeographic, psychogeologic, psychocartographic, and otherwise. I’ll situate the photos with these lyrical fragments from two of our other Velvet Ants tracks, “The Mountain” and “Donna Fury Road,” which embody these tracings, meanderings, complex terrains, and cartographies. Come through saturday night to see us “Play Dirty” and cover ESG’s 1983 “You Make No Sense”!

Frog Soul Palace / Skip stones, sit still

X-ray vision sideways, count the tree rings / Time is a made up thing, don’t quantify / ’Til you die

No borders / No walls / FromEveryRiverToEverySea

Give me place names / Semantic storage for all of this / Sheer volumetric intensity, incidental cruising at the pools, sign me up / For a diamond-coated surprise

Possibilities only realized through physical proximity

Get on your neighborly behaviors

Scaled to just the right size / Situate spirituality / And story

making questionable bouldering choices in indian cove, january joshua tree with J

sespe wilderness with BN and EL, end of january—full sicko mode—4 am, 16 mi hike in, tens of river crossings, several waist-deep and through rapids, moving at a quick clip every time we go uphill, along a ridgeline, mountain vantages down to the meadows and river rocks—solidifying psychogeologic memories, trusting the precipice, debating generative friction in fragmented art practice, speculating on effective organizing tactics—and arriving at the hot springs—regarding calamity as creative invitation, becoming geothermal engineers, soaking in the hot tub, plunging in the cold spring, star-studded skies and scalding heat in the rocky pools, sprawling cactus and the enormous herd of bighorn sheep our only neighbors

the sound of gravel and rocks sifting and shifting through my fingers, head entirely submerged in the hot pool, sulfuric geothermal springs rushing around me and the cold spring tracing a fast, winding path down the eroded floor of the valley and along the edges of the rock and soil and land carved away under the grasses and white rocks—the strongest and surest spiritual tether I can feel at the small scale of my own body—in the rose-tinted dawn, under no moon, in bright white iridescent moonlight casting shadows across the land, or at high noon facing the day moon

first encounter with minerva, heiress of the mayor of wonder valley, late september

public domesticities of the high desert, wonder valley late september

back to dawn mine for the first time since the fires, ET’s birthday with BX, LR, NK

el sereno community care collective, at the garden with VZ, SB, JG, S

mapping, debating, collaborating, drawing, and making plans with neighbors and comrades of the LA tenant union lincoln heights local (mid-morning meeting immediately following the 1am marathon crash ride—EL, BN, and I biked 45 mi to and from the end of the santa monica pier with other sickos of east LA)

bentonite clay mudding, ED and JO in wonder valley, late january

communal breakfasting, LD, EL, JO in wonder valley, late january

at home on the LA river

queer creative coworking + artist accountability group, first meetup at the park

drafting curbside with LE

desert skies in late march, wonder valley

festival merch! screen printing, drawing, making trash art with LD and ED

at home on the LA river

el sereno community care solidarity market at the garden, late march

SM vending egyptian and palestinian dishes at the garden, late march

sewing and embroidery workshop at the garden, late march

at home on the LA river

the useless bridge / le pont inutile with EL

on the walk with BX

BX and I chaotically scheming our next hijinx

S and I cooking congee sopa de arroz for folks at the community garden food distro

songwriting with AD at home for The Velvet Ants (we play dirty)

skinny dip and sunbathing on the forest floor, dawn mine with KY and J

bumblebees asleep in the desert gold blossoms, wonder valley in late february with QN, LD, EL, ED, JO

cap rock with MT, joshua tree, mid october

whitewater preserve, noah purifoy outdoor museum of assemblage art, wonder valley with EL in september

john birtle’s more is more at los angeles municipal art gallery with CV

JI watering new seeds planted at test plot, barnsdall /hollyhock house

BX making aluminum foil tape mobiles for the nye rager we throw in the backhouse

RY’s birthday hike led by local naturalists on the indigenous histories, geology, plants, animals, and built environment of debs park, and collective art practice painting a picnic table together while dancing, singing, and eating tamales

with J, T, and RI at the made in LA exhibit at the hammer

game of scrabble that was over before it began with the killer 7-letter-play “merfolk”

SI in town from montreal in december, cooking us dinner

brown mountain dam, out from the arroyo near jpl

SI and LC at the san pedro tidepools with SC, CC a few days after new years

the last open night at saugus cafe with MT, watery diner coffee and breakfast for dinner on a rainy night, the oldest restau in LA county open since 1886

S and PR at the community garden

neighborly behaviors, waving from the porch

at home on the LA river

lunar new year dim sum with MQ, KY, J

skinny dips in the glittering frigid pools along the trail to sturtevant falls, out with J in the san gabriels late october

weekend roadtripping to ojai with J, matilija creek the first weekend in september

perfect bodysurfing waves the first weekend in september, point dume beach day with BX, KB, KW, PL, DM, JA, GR, KG, DX

a karaoke party at frogtown house with SF, JA

lake merritt, sausal creek, redwood regional park, and joaquin miller treetop sundown over the bay area with JB, VC, and MT in september

strawberry peak and lawler, hiking the san gabriels mid-february with CN

dusk at flat top park in lincoln heights

meatspace channel 19 lower kern and dry meadow in late august with EL

wonder valley and joshua tree, rattlesnake canyon in late february with EL