The Deep Lex Potluck

June 18, 2008

THE DEEP LEZ POTLUCK AND PERFORMANCE NIGHT
Curators – joey stevenson and Caitlin Sweet
El Rio – NOTE: No-one under 21 years old will be admitted
7:00pm films; 8:30 performance

divine monster: light 2  photo Caitlin Sweet	Nomy Lamm  photo Cadwell Linker

The Deep Lez Potluck and Performance Night is a formal hand fasting of radical lesbian feminism and urban queer and gender queer politics. It’s a celebration with bands, films, spoken word, fashion show, body painting, macramé and tea leaf readings. Films at 7 pm sharp, get your vegan potluck on, make some crafts, consciousness raise, let go and let goddess. Performance at 8:30 with Gretchen Phillips, Lesbians, Nomy Lamm, Jenna Riot, Pickup Pattern, Julia Serano, Ophelia Stringer, Meliza Banales, Celeste Chan, Rhiannon Argo, Elan Gerie, Machine, Trinity of Poon Joey Cupcake, Saturn Ray Turn and many more! DJ’s kicking some sisterhood is powerful ass! Come widen the circle for ALL deeply lez identified lezzies of the past, present, and future and friends.

Artists Biographies

Lisa Souza…..born 97% water, 1% celestial moth, 1% rays of saturns rings, 1% liquid silver. she lives in a castle made of mudd. she walks with webbed feet and is dealthly afraid of heights. with her, her mother had a secerene birth so now she hasnt any sense of direction, and instead of going to getting what she wants she waits for it to fall from the sky. she had her appendix removed when she was a lad, she keeps it in a jar under her bed. where you can also find, gummy worms, tennis balls, a strap on, last nights panties, and a cat named arpeggio. Lisa is intrigued by the sexuality of the seahorse and you can find her every sunday breeding catterpillars by the shore. she says its her metaphor for hope. If she could not write, there would be no use in her breath, so she writes when she wakes, she writes when she sleeps, she writes of her death, she writes her story…..

Alana Flores….born 97% water, 1% flowers essence, 1% warm amber light and 1% liquid gold. Upon galactivation to this planet brushed her fingers on the stars, sparks flew to her face and so now she has scares that some folks call freckles. She weeps to the sea for the world and replenishes its water with her laughter. She is daughter of Deborah, the woman who road an earthworm deep down into the center to make prayers for this daughter and so now she calls it father. Words are worlds to this creature, if she goes missing some places you may find her are off the banks of melancoly dancing, in the high mountains of remembrance meditating on forgetting, or in the crystal caves of whowhatwhenwherewhy and how humming for the echo sounds. She has frequent flyer miles to the lands of verbs, adjectives and nouns and so is often out of town. Feel free to leave a message at the tone, she will call you back eventually to let you know you are not alone… in the summer circa 96 they met over binder paper and idealistic notions in some classroom, in some town…..it was love, it was living, it was coming out. it was words in letters sent in bottles left adrift at sea. it was long nights full of smoke and laughter. it was sharpy pens and 40 bottles of beer. it was walking tight ropes and dancing till dawn. it was spilling heart and truth. it was women made of WOMAN, who met again in the silence of affinity. it was that, IT WAS POETRY.. that has brought us here…

Machine is a self taught fashion designer who has been making clothesfor over 15 years. Her creations range from textiles to jewelry andinstallation art. Machine was born in San Diego, made the queermigration to Portland for several years, and then trekked it down toSan Francisco to attend the pattern-making program at Apparel Arts.Her work is known for its complex patterns with great attention todetail and original style. Her inspiration for design is drawn fromcombined time periods and the cultural climate that defines them. Shealso extracts technical details from the shapes and patterns thatsurround her in daily life. She is currently working on collectionthat uses on intricate quilting patterns that are incorporated intoher garments with a focus on texture and color.

Machine aspires make fashion accessible to the queer community bybridging the gap between queer women and the fashion world. Herclothes are sold locally at The Painted Bird and to private clients.

First there was a drum machine, then an acoustic guitar accompanied by a voice full of hallowed out electricity and haloed wonderment. Soon the guitar turned electric and the voice exploded as it went into orbit. Before you knew it there were Black Sabbath bass lines and a full drum kit occupied by jazz hands that hailed in origin from the marching band and the hardcore scene. The evolution of the Pickup Pattern arrives at a time and place difficult to pinpoint, with lyrics and mysticism that leave you wondering if you dreamt that conversation or not, you may never know where you are but you can hang out with us in this limbo of sound, watching as we play Double Dutch with beats, banshee- rifts, and our own queer ass identities.

LESBIANS is a band of former lovers summoning the goddess through folk and punk rock. Guitarist Jenny Hoyston has illuminated the stage in bands such as erase errata, Paradise Island, and Sound Painters, among other projects. She curates and edits the zine Don’t Worry. Drummer Michelle Lawler is a filmmaker who was in bands Neighbors and Gangway. She recently received the Frameline Completion Fund for her documentary about San Francisco performance legend Vicki Marlane. Singer Tara Jepsen is a writer and performer, host of K’vetsh queer open mic, lover of butch-femme history. Her two-woman show with Beth Lisick, Getting in on the Ground Floor and Staying There, will open July 24th at the Center for Sex and Culture.

Lady Fantastique is also known as Celeste Chan. She believes in big girl glamour, writing the revolution,queer of color solidarity, video art, and the sexinessof feminism.

Jenna Riot’s favorite things are: tough queer femmes, big hair, fishnets, stilettos, gaudy jewelry, and Crunks Not Dead Records. She is a busy bombshell! Take a vacation to the lipstick lakes and sip on a lip-gloss cocktail in your best bikini to “Girl You Look Expensive” (out on Crunks Not Dead). Her lyrics indulge in views of modern feminism, best friends forever, traditional vs. modern, femme paradises, butch/femme dynamics, raunchy & glam.

“The glamorous Ms. Riot’s sound is a sexy, smartly tuned hybrid of everything fabulous: the same vibe that’s been carefully flirted with by bands like the Fitness and Mon Frere.” –The Stranger
www.jennariot.com
http://www.myspace.com/jennariotmusic

Elan Gerie is Vicky Divine Revenge is a performing andvideo artist is “A catastrophe in lucite heels” sprunglike rotten yeast from the post-industrial swamps ofSouth Jersey. Recent works include The VaGiant andMuseum of an Extinct Race PRESENTS Peri Pascha on thePassover OR On the Jews and their Lies. Elan Gerie iscurrently preparing to shoot a pornographic remake ofthe Wizard of Oz.

Gretchen Phillips was born in Galveston, Texas to a musical family. As soon as she was on her own she started singing about the joys and challenges of being queer. Her early bands, Two Nice Girls and Girls in the Nose, made quite a splash in her local Austin scene as well as nationally. Upon their demise she devoted herself to her solo career, which has consisted of forays into disco, country, spoken word, rock and whatever else she can think of.

Rhiannon Argo’s stories have been published in, Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing, It’s So You: 35 Women on Fashion, Beauty andPersonal Style, The Lowdown Highway Anthology, Transfer Magazine, andin her own hand-made chapbooks. She is on the manuscript reviewcommittee for Project Queer Lit and in 2007 she took her tales on theroad for an entire month with the new wave of Sister Spit. Sherecently finished her first novel entitled Switch, a tale of grit andglam about feminist sex workers and gender queer skateboarders.

Meliza Bañales is the author of Say It With Your Whole Mouth and the forthcoming 51 Poems About Nothing At All. She recently was published in Alex Olsen’s Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of Spoken-Word , wrapped up the fall ’07 tour with legendary spoken-word outfit Sister Spit, and was the first Latina Slam Champ on the west coast (2002). She also designs clothes as Missy Fuego. She lives in San Francisco.

Caitlin Sweet aka Saturn Ray Turn is a visual artist who works with fabric to create soft sculpture and installations. Her work focuses on the failure of the body and how that creates a space of invention for new ways of beings and most importantly monsters. She is currently excited about making work and talking about Lesbianism and how it is a location for transgression, resistance, and hot radical sex.

Nomy Lamm is a writer and musician who recently moved to SF from Olympia-via-Chicago. Fifteen years ago, she wrote “i’m so fucking beautiful,” a fat-liberation manifesto inspired by her involvement in the riot grrrl movement. She’s released two solo albums (“anthem” and “effigy”) and co-wrote “The Transfused” rock opera with the Need, Emily Stern and Freddie Fagula. She’s been published in anthologies including “Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation,” (edited by Barb Findlen) and most recently “Word Warriors: 35 leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Revolution” (edited by Alix Olson). She has done activism around body image, disability, anti-racist movement building, radical Jewish organizing, and was one of the authors of a widely distributed petition in support of trans-incluson at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Nomy believes in striving for wholeness, and is honored to pay homage to women whose lives helped create space for her own.

Ophelia Stringer. I am a Bay Area native and I’ve been writing and performing my own pieces for 14 years now. All of my pieces are centered around issues in queer communities and communities of color throughout the world. I have performed throughout the Bay Area at several venues: Mills College, Malonga Casquelord, Black Reparatory Group etc. My most recent performance piece is called “The Seven Sides of Sadie”. “The Seven Sides of Sadie” is a one-woman show that addresses race, gender, religion, sexuality, identity, body image and politics. C.E.O’s will debut the show again this fall. My focus as an artist is healing through understanding. Being a black lesbian woman from Richmond, Ca, one of the toughest cities in the Bay Area, I am a survivor. My main area of interest is sparking consciousness in my community and building a new bridge from the broken planks that float in our troubled waters.

C.E.O’s is a community collaborative based family. We are currently traveling the Bay Area performing spoken word and comedy events geared toward our queer communities.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word artist, trans activist, and biologist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007), a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement), in feminist, pop culture and literary magazines (such as Bitch, Clamor, Kitchen Sink, make/shift, other, LiP and Transgender Tapestry), and have been used as teaching materials in college-level gender studies courses across the United States. For more information about all of her creative endeavors, check out www.juliaserano.com.