Posts from — September 2009

This Sunday, September 27, join us for Marga Gomez’s show “Comedy for the People”!  She is a hilarious comedian…highly recommended!

Marga Gomez and her gay boyfriend Marty Grimes will tackle politics, race, sex, pop culture and Prop 8 in one high voltage, politically incorrect afternoon and evening. Recommended for audiences 18 and over.

Sunday, September 27, 2009
at 3:00pm & 7:00pm at
MACLA’s Castellano Playhouse
510 S. 1st Street, San Jose, CA 95113.
$15.00 advance tickets or $20.00 at the door.
“Meet Marga” ticket for $25.00
Includes a special meet & greet reception at 6:00pm along with delicious munchies, drinks to whet your whistle and admission to the 7:00pm show.

Advance tickets are available online at advance tickets or by calling 408.938.3594.  MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana is an inclusive contemporary arts space grounded in the Chicano/Latino experience that incubates new visual, literary and performance art in order to engage people in civic dialogue and community transformation.

Other MACLA shows below: [Read more →]

A group of privileged women who did not have to work for pay,  are forced by recession,  to come back to labor market. This NYT article calls these women the ” collateral damage of the recession.”

She pointed to investment losses “in the healthy six figures,” along with “some very high medical expenses for a family member and having two daughters in college. And then the value of our home and pension plan has taken a tumble.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/business/19women.html?emc=eta1

Are you a Latina between 18 and 35 years of age?
Do you like reading popular fiction novels?
If you answered YES to these questions,
you may be eligible to participate in this book club research study.

The purpose of this research is to gain an understanding of how Latina women connect with “chica lit,” a genre of women’s popular fiction aimed at Latina readers.  Participants will read 6 books from September 2009 to May 2010 and will meet 7 times to discuss each novel as a group.  All books will be read in English.  Book club meetings will last approximately 1 hour and will be held in the 5th floor conference room at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose.  Participants may not directly benefit from this research study, but it is hoped that they will enjoy the process of reading and discussing books as a group.  Participants will receive all of the books to keep and will receive a $25 book store gift card at the completion of this study.

More details below…. [Read more →]

Dramatic Reading of a New Play by Chicana scholar-playwright Cherrie Moraga—

MATHEMATICS OF LOVE
by Cherríe L. Moraga
with Ricardo A. Bracho

Monday, September 21 @ 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Evergreen Valley College Arts Theater
3095 Yerba Buena Rd, San Jose
Tickets $7 students; $15 general — At the Door.

Featuring…
VIVIS*
George Killingsworth*
Sarita Ocón
Catherine Castellaños*
Rosamaría Escalante
Ricky Saenz*

In the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, through the ‘demented’ illuminations of the aging “Peaches” (VIVIS), we are taken on a journey through pre-Conquest Mexico City, Mission-era California, and contemporary Los Angeles toward a Xicana reckoning with the mythic “Malinxe” (Catherine Castellaños). In the process, the play tells us a bit of how we might calculate the gains and losses of love, not just in our individual lives, but the life of a pueblo.

https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/74289
See attached for details.

From “No, Not You”

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are committing a crime- no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

Here’s another version

For those of you who make scheduled fee payments:

You MUST PAY by the deadline on your account. The Bursar’s Office will be dropping students for non-payment of the September 17th deadline.  If you don’t make your payment, you will be dropped from all of your classes for the rest of the year.

I’ve seen too much in sports to be outraged by Serena Williams‘ outburst at the U.S. Open last weekend. I’ve seen world class athletes head-butt opponents, spit in the face of umpires, fire lethal serves at linespeople, tackle aging bench coaches.

I’ve seen it all. But rarely from a woman.

Which is why I can’t help but think that the outrage unleashed toward Williams in the past two days has something to do with her gender. She’s playing the sport of frilly underpants and dangly earrings, yet she came off last weekend as unhinged as Mike Tyson.

And Michael Kimmel wrote in Huffington Post

Ask yourself this: would the line judge have felt so threatened had she been yelled at by perky, pretty little Melanie Oudin, all 5 foot 6 of her bouncy teenage self?

How about a white man? White men can express anger and outrage — indeed, they’re supposed to. It’s one of the few emotional men are allowed to express — and we express it often, and often without penalty. And sometimes we go even further. Don’t get mad, the saying goes, get even.

Read more

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kimmel/double-fault-serenass-los_b_285039.html

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

By MAUREEN DOWD

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?em

Semenya’s saga was made for the news media. A girl who may not be a girl! That chest! Those arms! That face! She was the perfect vehicle for nearly any agenda: was this another incidence of people calling into question black female athletes’ femininity (the Williams sisters, the basketball legend Sheryl Swoopes)? Was it sexist to assume women were incapable of huge leaps in athletic performance? Should all female athletes be gender-verified, as they were in Olympic competition until 1999? (The practice was dropped because no competitive edge was proved for the few women with rare disorders of sex development — it served only to humiliate them.) Should the entire practice of sex-segregating sports be abandoned?

Was that a girl, was that a girl. That’s what people kept asking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-WWLN-t.html?emc=eta1

OMG! Check out this article by George Lakoff from UC Berkeley. http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=77 .   This is exactly what I was trying to say in my last blog post. I guess great minds do think alike. Ha ha ha.

…The university is lot more than an economic engine: it is a quality of life engine. And when it is truly public, it is a moral engine.

And it is especially a moral engine because it educates millions of Californians. Education is about more than making money. It is about coming to know the world, about learning to think critically, and about developing the capacity to create new knowledge, new social institutions, and new kinds of businesses. It is about each of millions of people becoming more of what they can be. That is the real promise of California. It is our system of higher education that delivers on that promise.

The reason that the Master Plan designates “state-supported higher education” is that higher education contributes a disproportionate amount to the protection and empowerment both of individuals and of corporations, and to the creation of a California civilization.

All discussion of moral issues must start there, with the systemic and moral effects of higher education.

From this perspective, the university-as-factory metaphor is not only inaccurate, but is immoral. It is both because it hides all that — all of what public universities are about.

The university-as-factory metaphor sees the university as a factory producing educations in the abstract and selling them to students and/or their parents. All discussion of raising tuition or taking more out-of-state students who pay more tuition is based on that metaphor. The central argument is that students (or their parents) should be paying what the product is worth, economically, over a lifetime, and that they shouldn’t be complaining about fee raises because they’re getting a relatively good deal.

The factory metaphor misses almost everything. It obviously misses the enormous contribution to the economy of the state as a whole. But it also misses all the other forms of protection and empowerment, as well as shaping California civilization…..

Read full article here