[-empyre-] last "week" of December greetings and intros

[Irina Contreras]

Hello and happy Thursday!

Thanks so much again for reading and participating December guests.

Thanks too to all you looky-loo's of the voyeur variety. ;)

Last guests of this week will be as follows below.

We might have some people updating their bios as they see fit and I will
wait a bit to see if anyone jumps in with questions etc.

It would be great if any of the guests can pipe in on what they have
observed from other guests etc.

Just a note too that guests were paired a bit haphazardly because of
holiday traveling schedules. I had initially planned for example to have
Josh T Franco speak to Sarah Jones work etc. It's just so happens that this
week somehow became the "music" week thought it was intended to be a bit
more dispersed. That said, in retrospect....it does seem interesting to me
that it has become the "sound" week.

Looking forward!

Irina

Essex Lordes is a San Francisco based DJ, writer, amateur photographer,
activist for social justice, and full-time student. Hailing from Detroit,
he has been chilling around the bay area for 3 years. His alias, DJ Booty
Klap, has spun jamz at homolicious & poc-centric nights such as Ships in
The Night, Fruitcake, BLACKOUT, and is one of three driving forces behind
the new Party Hole. His blog, Pieces of the Kaleidoscope, seeks to examine
life in the queer/black/radical intersection within the city of San
Francisco, where the black population dwindles as the cost of living
rising, and in the greater context of the U.S. empire and the world.
Full-time student at SF CIty College, Essex studies sociology while working
towards a certificate in HIV prevention. He is a supporting member of SF
Pride @ Work, aka HAVOQ. With some of his free time he works to create
community by gathering black queer people in SF for monthly meetings for
discussion and socialization in a safe space.

Josh T Franco was born in West Texas in 1985. He attended Southwestern
University near Austin, Texas where he graduated as a Paideia Scholar in
Art History (2006). Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Art History at SUNY
Binghamton in Binghamton, New York. His dissertation focuses on the
multiple aesthetics present in the town of Marfa, Texas. This year he holds
two fellowships, one residential, one nominal: Predoctoral Diversity
Fellowship at Ithaca College and Imagining America PAGE (Publicly Active
Graduate Education) Fellowship. At Ithaca College he is teaching Chicano/a
Art this fall and will lead a seminar on Minimalism in the spring. Franco
is an Artist-Guide at Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, the home and
studio of artist Donald Judd in New York City. He is also the Texas
correspondent for New York City-based zingmagazine. Since 2008, Franco has
been an active member in the Modernity / Coloniality / Decoloniality
Collective, working primarily with philosopher Maria Lugones, with
occasional study with Walter D. Mignolo, Laura E. Perez, and other advanced
scholars in the field. His most recent publication, "Rebozo [Man] in
Nepantla: Gender and Arts Revolutions in San Anto, Tejas", appears in the
trilingual anthology *México en sus revoluciones, *from University of
Toronto Press. In 2013, he also presented the public talks "Minimalism y
rasquachismo: Questioning 'Decolonial Aesthetics' in Far West Texas" and
"EXPOSED: Process, Couture, and Photography in Marfa, Texas" at Marfa Book
Company and the Frick Collection respectively. Franco also maintains a
slow, but steady studio practice. Since 2009, his work has been exhibited
at the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center and as part of the Gloria E.
Anzaldúa Conference both in San Antonio, Texas and at CoLab in Austin,
Texas. Currently, he is working on piece commissioned by Spare P*art*s and
Lady Base Gallery in San Antonio.


Among other things, Los Angeles native Nanny Cantaloupe (aka Mitchell
Brown) is a DJ on KXLU and Dublab, a music label owner (Melon Expander) and
an assistant to mentally and physically alternatively-abled children. As a
sound artist/musician he improvises and composes using analog electronics,
magnetic tape manipulation, electro-acoustics and percussion, among other
things. Cantaloupe’s artistic sensibilities can sometimes be related to the
various natural psychological and physiological states one can channel when
casting aside social judgments in favor of a more solipsistic approach to
the human senses. Seemingly foreign inner landscapes can become a familiar
canvas upon which feelings, perceptions and sounds without common
descriptions by established verbal languages, can flourish
transcendentally. And sometimes he just makes people boogie and/or scratch
their heads to his esoteric record collection. Current musical projects
include Golden Hits (with fellow labrats Frosty, Jimmy Tamborello, Katie
Byron & Ben Knight), Fancy Space People, Brain Sucking Peanunanners
(founded with children), Points of Friction and collaborations with Joseph
Hammer, Matthewdavid and Hymnal, among many others.


Juba Kalamka is most recognized as cofounder of "homohop" group Deep
Dickollective (D/DC), development of the micro-label/distributor Sugartruck
Recordings, and direction of PeaceOUT World Homohop Festival (2002 -
2007). He received a 2005 Creating Change Award from the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force for his activist work in queer music community. He
recently appeared at Life Is LIVE 3 (Berlin, Germany) and is included in
the lyric compendium The Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010).
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