burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

• with Abby: Ahsoka 1.08 (season finale)

• Abby read me the picturebook I got her (various places bill it as having a queer woman protagonist, but nothing in the text makes that explicit -- or even, imo, particularly suggests it)
• ~read Abby 3 picturebooks with they/them protagonists & 1 other picturebook
• Dear Mothman by Robin Gow -- middle-grade trans

• We went to my best friend's wedding, and our last night in KC, Abby and I stayed at the 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City -- which has art on premises.  The lobby (and up to a second floor) has a big themed exhibit, and then there's also art by local artists on the guest floors.  (The local artist part is "Elevate" -- the website says, "Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding Kansas City. Elevate provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.")  One room of the lobby also has a local artist exhibition.

  There were also penguins -- which we were not entirely expecting.  “Any visitor to 21c Kansas City will encounter a member of the flock of Sky Blue Penguins, created exclusively for 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City by Cracking Art.”  (From the digital guide -- which says lots more words about the fact that they're sky blue, etc.  Apparently other 21c hotels have penguins in other colors -- Chicago and Bentonville [Arkansas] are green, Louisville and St. Louis are red, etc.)

  Huh:

  21c founders Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson purchased the sculptures after seeing them perched around the city at the 2005 Venice Biennale as part of a public art project.
  
  “The public really chose the penguins,” says Wilson. “They were part of our opening exhibition in Louisville and people couldn’t help but interact with them. They would move them around, take photos with them, take them to dinner and to their rooms. They have really become an icon, and emblematic of our mission to make thought-provoking contemporary art more accessible to the public.”
  
  -"The History of Our Penguins: How the Red Penguins started it all" (2019 article -- which lists the 8 hotels at the time and their penguin colors; but Oklahoma City and Nashville both stopped being 21cs this year [2023], and 21c opened hotels in Chicago [Feb 2020] and St. Louis [Aug 2023] since that 2019 article.)

  Oh, and that digital guide reminds me that Site-Specific Art at 21c Kansas City includes Ken + Julia Yonetani (Japanese, Australian), U.S.A.: Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, 2013-15 which I thought I maybe saw at a nuclear exhibit when I was in Toronto in (checks notes) 2015 (for my second ASA conference).
  
  The blurb says, in part: "This is the largest work in the artists’ series of chandelier sculptures, introduced at the 2013 Singapore Biennial. Entitled Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, the installation was comprised of 31 uranium glass chandeliers. Utilizing the rarely employed material of uranium glass, the size of the chandelier corresponds to the scale of each country’s nuclear power capacity."
  
  Which definitely sounded familiar.
  
  I Googled and yes, the Camera Atomica exhibit at AGO [Art Gallery of Ontario] -- where I saw the Canada chandelier (see, e.g., the last paragraph of this review).
  
  We also saw Brad Kahlhamer, Super Catcher, Vast Array, 2017 when we went to the bar for our complimentary Angel's Envy bourbon samples, and Luftwerk (German, American), Linear Sky, 2018 in the entryway.  I was a little side-eye that the Kahlhamer text says vague things about his complex identity or something (I apparently didn't photograph the sign, so I can't quote it exactly found it -- "His work often features motifs of Native American visual culture such as totem poles, teepees, and hawks, while weaving in elements of popular culture that interrogate his own, complex, multilayered identity.") but doesn't list any tribal affiliation for him (which I would expect for an actually Native person) -- especially since it explicitly says that dreamcatchers are "Associated with both Ojibwe and Lakota traditions" -- but then I Googled and apparently Kahlhamer was born to native parents but adopted by German American parents in a closed adoption, so he doesn't know specifics of his ancestry and isn't eligible to tribally enroll anywhere (see this Artsy article, cited on his Wikipedia).
  

  Anyway, over the course of 3 stages (there was so much art! I was not prepared!) we saw all the exhibits:

  • Elevate – Guest Floors: Lauren Phillips & Katrina Revenaugh (On display from July 2023 - December 2023)
    
    "Lauren Phillips is a queer, neurodivergent visual artist based in Kansas City." Her one piece (an LED "Touch Me / Don't Touch Me") was on our floor, near our room. Though I think she also had some pieces on the public part of the second floor (our floor). It was a little confusing because at first we thought the public part of the second floor was more of the local artists, but in retrospect some of it was definitely part of the themed exhibit (currently "Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art"). Though the hotel was also playing music in that second floor hallway (unrelated to the exhibits! even though at least one of them was a video you put on headphones to listen to and the outside noise bled in), which I found really annoying. (It did not help that I am not a background music person to begin with.)
    
    We walked upstairs to the remaining accessible guest floors (3-6) and each of them, near the elevator bank, had 3 pieces by Katrina Revenaugh ("Extracting color and imagery from her photographs she combines them with botanicals and insects she’s photographed into an alternative printmaking process where nature is imbued with the color from graffiti walls.").
    
    
  • Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art (On display from March 2023 - March 2024)
    
    There were lots of cool things here -- and a wide range of interpretations of the theme. I am not gonna attempt to write up any of it rn (though you can read about some of it at the exhibit link).
    
    
  • Elevate – The Savoy Lounge: Brittany Noriega (On display from July 2023 - December 2023)
    
    I had not realized initially that there was a room in the lobby of a local artist, and I think this was the last room we saw -- after finally getting through all the other art. I was expecting more art in the guest floors than there turned out to be, but also less art in the lobby than there turned out to be. At one point Abby said something about "2 more rooms," and I was like, "What?!"
    
    Anyway, I think this one was the last room we saw. The artist does graphite pencil on canvas, and the images look simple and low-key and then upon closer inspection are kind of unnerving -- like you'll realize a figure has vines growing into/out of it, body parts are severed, etc.

• SWANA Creative Non-fiction Panel at RAWIFest 2023

  A friend of mine had posted:

  Super excited about RAWIFest 2023! On Friday, October 27 at 3pm EDT, I’ll be part of a virtual panel about writing non-fiction, alongside Maha Ahmed, Barrak Alzaid, Sarah Aziza, and Abdelrahman ElGendy! If you want to hear me read a short essay about Halloween, SWANA monsters, and gender queerness, register now—the virtual conference is free! Link is in the comments. Hope to see you there!
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/miznarawifest-2023-tickets-671668016117

  So I registered to Zoom in for that panel. My friend was great, predictably. I also cried during the last two readings. The last of which was Sarah Aziza, reading excerpts from her recent Baffler piece, "Doomsday Diaries" (about being Palestinian in the USA, Oct 7-17, 2023).

• [Front Porch Arts Collective/Huntington] Fat Ham w/ Abby

  A (brief! 90min) modern variation on Hamlet, with a queer Black man in the U.S. South as Hamlet.
  
  I was largely sold on this from Stevie Walker-Webb, director of this show, during a "Reimagining Shakespeare through the Black Lens" panel.
  He said it has a lot of joy.
  He praised how the women in the play get to write their own narratives. (Which I took to mean they get to be fully actualized characters with their own stories -- as opposed to just being undeveloped side characters.  Which is true, but watching the show, the actual thing he said is more true than I had expected.)
  Quote from him: "It's a coming out story for everyone except the gayest character. Everyone has to come out of something."
  
  There were definitely some lines I missed during the performance, but they were selling limited edition scripts for $20/each, so Abby and I each got one :)

Currently reading: The Witch King by H. E. Edgmon -- YA fantasy with a trans masc protagonist
Abby started reading it, so I started reading it. She finished yesterday and I'm almost done. We both enjoyed/are enjoying it.

Reading next: The Fae Keeper by H. E. Edgmon -- second in the duology

Next feminist sff bookclub is Nov 19, so I also need to read the book for that -- The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei (Translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich), originally published in 1995. Speculative sci-fi written by a queer Taiwanese author.