The event, to be held at the Film Forum on Saturday, March 20, will include a program of short films, a panel discussion and reception with special guests.

Seattle, WA—Northwest Film Forum and the Bird Cage Collective are pleased to present LET’S DO IT! – A Night of Sex Worker Made Media on Saturday, March 20 at 8pm. LET’S DO IT! will include a program of experimental and documentary short films dedicated to human rights and advocacy for sex workers across the globe. The evening will examine the unique challenges and joys of being a sex worker. Following the screening will be a panel discussion and reception at Northwest Film Forum.

From the Sangli district in the rural south of India to the life of a New York City callboy, sex workers have reached out through the medium of film to share their myriad of experiences. To combat the misrepresentations in the mainstream media of those who trade erotic labor, sex workers and sex worker activists aim to reduce stigmatization by becoming their own authors, reporters and organizers. LET’S DO IT! includes films from Seattle filmmakers Kinsey Bell (Manicured) and Basil Shadid and billie rain (Humor Me), as well the performance film I Want You, with multimedia artist Sadie Lune, experimental work by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Gina Carducci (All That Sheltering Emptiness) and the documentary shorts In Our Own Image and Taking the Pledge, among others. The evening’s program will highlight some of the artistic and political achievements of sex workers, and explore the complicated challenges unique to those in the sex industry.

Following the screening will be a panel discussion with local starlight Miss Indigo Blue (Academy of Burlesque), local writer and sex worker Sophia J. Russel and billie rain (dual power infamy), out of town guest Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Author of So Many Ways To Sleep Badly) and other special guests. The public is encouraged to join this discussion that will examine individual experiences with advocacy, work and empowerment

The evening’s event is a benefit to raise funds for a local resource guide by and for sex workers. The night’s frivolities will include food, beverages, music and a raffle.

LET’S DO IT! is sponsored by the Central Coop.

LET’S DO IT! – a night of sex worker made media at Northwest Film Forum

Saturday, March 20th

8:00 pm

Northwest Film Forum

1515 12th Ave. E. Seattle

Tickets cost $6 for Film Forum members, $6.50 for seniors and $9 for general admission. Tickets are available at www.nwfilmforum.org or by calling 1 800 838 3006.

Interview and image requests should be directed individually to panelist or to the bird cage collective at (birdcagecollective@gmail.com)

Self-help author Barbara De Angelis wrote a book that offers to help us learn “how to make love all the time.” Maybe I’ll read it someday, but right now I’m more interested in your take on the subject. How would you make love — not have sex, but make love — with your sandwich, with the music you listen to, with a vase of flowers, with the familiar strangers sitting in the cafe, with everything? Your expertise in this art is now at a peak.

This has been on my mind a lot lately. I feel invested in my project: Teaching Myself to Love, but also like I’m at a roadblock. My mission for the projected 5-year project is to learn to be a good lover, as an active practice, in life as well as romance. I envisioned multiple, parallel running soft threads of projects that involved daily practice and then period knots of larger public performances, events, and installations. But now I keep rolling over the idea of how to incorporate this urge into my daily life, and then how to make that art. I think of trying to establish daily practices related to loving and then document them, but that is ringing hollow to me right now. Or maybe I’m just at the still hibernatory lull of the year where small but consistent change and activity feels beyond reach. Its much clearer and feels more accessible for me to organize a larger event or public piece than to create small, persistent, ubiquitous love-art. I recognize that my habits around creativity have been problematic lately, more conducive to shame and sleep-deprivation than to loving. So how to bring the love in every day, and how to feel or express the art in the reach to act, to open, to relax, to love? How to make it for real and make it feel real to me without making it such a big deal?
I don’t know. I’m working on it.

We dropped our Jetblue-allowed 6 bags (5 for me, one for Phil) in the room
we would share for the next three months like drunken summer camp-mates,
each of us bedding down on a donated air mattress, a dresser between our
heads for a sense of privacy. We went out for a drink, knowing almost
nothing, this was before we would even think to google map or yelp our new
hood! I recognized the Goodwill where years before, while traveling with my
family, I had bought a long skirt, some leggings and a sweater out of East
Coast tourist misconception fueled desperation about the weather of
California in July. We found Aub Zam Zam, for my first of probably two
visits there in the last seven years, and after our “taking it all in”,
self-congratulatory beer, we ran into a girl rolling on wheelie shoes, being
pulled down the street by her dog. She led us to Cala Foods (RIP) we bought
a wedge of Gouda, some chocolate and a jug of Carlo Rossi, and sat on a
bench in the astringent moistly breathing Panhandle, wondering at the magic
of this strip of cool, green night. She gave us some organic drugs, we
stayed up til dawn, and then walked her to the Richmond; meeting her
protests about how far it was with the adamant assertion that we didn’t know
where we were and we had nothing better to do. The next night I don’t
recall. The following I called a stranger who would become my first
anthropomorphic love in the city “You big dork” at a bar where I mistook him
for the 1 of the 1.5 people I knew and was there to meet. The rest is
history.

And so now I have San Francisco deep in my bones, in the ink on my skull,
pressed into the spots on my arms. Here I started growing hairs on my chin
(I remember an early experience on Market St. where a girl stopped me to ask
the time and I was awed by her distinct softly curled beard…”Wow, this
place is sooo cool.” I thought), and I learned the deeper meaning of the
word femme, and I have knocked down the lion’s share of my dreams; like a
long desert road stacked with infinitely regenerating rows of slow-motion
tumbling rhinestone bowling pins. The thought that the city lives inside me
now, the certainty that the great wide ocean is crashing just out of sight
and the sweet cool fog will spill down off the slopes and melt and then
spill down again; this is very comforting to me. I feel like I can go
anywhere now, set up camp and still hold the colorful condensed peaks of
architecture under my skin, the swarming schools of people in my cells.

Today I took a walk around the neighborhood, had Bi Rite ice cream for
breakfast, the sexy bee lady at the local fancy honey store surprise bought
me coffee, I got jasmine and wonderfully exploding camillia flowers in my
hair, and a Papalote burrito for dinner. In other words, I had a gorgeous
adulthood-San Francisco-style day. I now my house is full of Swedes and and
a Ukranian and a Gina, all happily typing in a chorus of Mac song.

A plethora of videos from artists across California, FREE after the LA Art Walk. Curated by Marci Pinna.
Party with VJs and DJs, live musical scoring, Breakcore, IDM, Ambient/Noise until 2 am.
Featuring my short film, Yum.
I’d love to see you there!

Musicians-bands
Movie/TV actors
Pop Dancers
Fiction Writers
Graphic/Comic Artists
Non-fiction writers
Painters/sculptors
Stage actors
Traditional/modern dancers
Performance artists
Poets

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

One of my favorite things about falling in love- romantically or through friendship, is learning to like things you hate, or appreciate the world from your beloveds perspective- learning how to see or find love in places that wouldn’t normally come easily or quickly for you. I often don’t love many the things my beloveds do (the color orange, action movies, Mariah Carey), but I love better understanding them, or making room for them in my life because of proximal insight. I like that internal breaking feeling when aversion or indifference shifts to curiosity.

So to help myself see better, to remember, to teach myself where love lies, this is
You Know What I Love.
Mostly the subject of You Know What I Love will be from my neighborhood, with extended scope for travel or special occasions. What Hannibal Lecter says, he claims he got it from the bible, “we learn to covet first that which we see every day” has stuck with me since I heard it first as a middle-schooler. I want to learn to love (I’m already super-skilled at coveting) that which I see every day, and realize my love for my immediate surroundings. To experiment with focus and attention. To practice love I can reach out and touch. And to share it with you.

You Know What I Love, #1

Pastries, particularly chocolate, from Tartine bakery.

When it rained for two months straight the winter that was the beginning of ‘06 and I was walking around dazed and changed- newly sober, in what I call my “Invisible Toddler” persona, giant baggy hoody, similar pants, baseball cap and hiding, trying to figure out what to do with myself I started a trick to get myself to get up in the morning and go out in the rain to yoga class. The trick was Tartine on the way back.
Triple birthday breakfasts for all the wonderful women I love born on June 16th, chocolate pudding licked off bare breasts, first wooings of the best Craigs List score ever with frequent text invitations to sugar, and the ultimate period craving satisfaction. It makes me high, even just the refined smell of the sugar inside the shop, the unfailing line to build anticipation, the saliva seeping while I crane my neck, and oh the variegated beauties behind the counter, a romance in every transaction, a blissful future unfolding with each spoonful.

tres leches cake, coconut cream tarts, banana cream tarts, lemon tarts, dark chocolate cake, chocolate mousse cake, opera cake, eclairs and the famous chocolate pudding

Oh how the millenials rub off on me. (mmm…) Well there’s my daily cherry-pop for you, I just broke my youtube upload seal. So now the lovely audio slideshow from Mabel Jimenez of 31 actions can live right here! On the video page with it’s nakedy friends.

Dandy In Charge!

And thanks to Gloria for the lovely high-camp in the pink pink kitchen!

One of my favorite things about the site (besides the venue for models to solicit for their favorite charities) is the stories of strap-on triumph and failure in the model’s bios….
This is mine.

* A tale of strapon win:
Once I had a threeway date with my lover and a semi-famous person who was performing at a cabaret. I ran into a friend at the show and when she found out about my date she said,
“Oh my god! I love ______! I will totally suck your cock if you introduce me!”

…my phone rang. I was waiting to hear from my lover, who was meeting me and our date later, and I didn’t want to miss the call since she would be hopping on her bike and we needed to arrange the logistics. So I picked the phone out of my bag and began talking to my lover while my friend was still doing her slippery work on my cock. My friend’s gloriously sexy green cat eyes filled with malice as I talked rendezvous points and timeframes to my date, but she continued to suck, clearly shouting: “the gall! the impudence! to answer the phone in the middle of a blow job!” with her gaze.
I finished making the plans, hung up the phone, and then started giggling at my friend, who was fiercely and angrily sucking and stroking away.
“What!? You hate me know? You’re pissed? It was my date!”
“Nobody takes a call while I’m….”
- the bathroom door opened, I hopped off the counter and slipped the cock in my bag. My friend and I giggled and smiled guiltily at the woman heading for a stall, while I smoothed my skirt. She wiped the lipstick from the corner of her mouth. The lady raised an eyebrow and then locked one of the swinging doors.
“I give excellent blowjobs!” my friend whispered in a pissy sotto voce with a slight princessy stamp of her heel.
” Yes, you do! That was great, thank you. Come on, princess, let’s go meet _________” I took her arm and she smiled sideways as I wiped some spit from her chin and escorted her out of the toilette.