In Service, and to Success

This month has been an incredible one. I’ve made a lot of art, I’ve vacationed with important chosen family with whom I share cross-sections of identity with (that I don’t share with many others in my life). I’ve networked, showcased, performed, premiered, attended trainings, and kept up with the day job gigs, I’ve made time to visit friends, and was accepted into an herbal training internship starting in a couple weeks! It’s also been a brutal month emotionally—a long time since I’ve felt as depressed as I consistently struggled feeling over the past 4 weeks. I don’t know that there’s a way to reach peak highs without also accepting and struggling through peak lows. Would I trade this emotional reality for another? I don’t know…

I’m in an interesting place right now. My roommate is leaving very soon to tour the country and find eventual housing in warmer climate (jealous!). I’m overjoyed for them. Also change is hard. It’s difficult to envision keeping my place and paying twice the rent and utilities, considering I struggle to make ends meet already. My home is a smaller one, perfect for a couple, or people who are already close and communicate well. It’s a much harder space to negotiate between strangers. My values are also communal, and I want my home to be a safe and welcoming place for people who need to be with me for a time, for those who seek training in safety and BDSM skills, and for those who want to collaborate and make art together. I don’t know what equation will work in the end, but something will have to pick up for me to continue on as I have been.

I’m considering offering a skill share meet-up regularly at my place. I’m musing on the possibility to rent out one of the bedrooms in my place as a space for subs-in-training to use intermittently. I’d like to build some bookshelves in the living room, and set that area up for consulting.

This morning I had a session with a client I wrestle and role play with. Every time I meet with this person I’m reminded why I love the Dom work I do. Playtime is important—and that doesn’t lessen in adulthood. If anything, the moments we have to play games that we love, to feel the things we desire to feel, to have playmates who will listen to us and give of themselves for our benefit and needs, become even more important with age. I am passionate about this. My client remarked that one of the things he loves about seeing me is that, while I completely get what he’s looking for and bullseye the character and scenario, I’m also just a good person and that makes him feel good about our time together as well. Not everyone will be a perfect fit for my style as a Dominant, teacher, or service provider but I can say that the one thing I look for in my clients is this same thing too. I want to work with people who are sincere about their needs, and who value our transaction and my abilities.

To a steady and resounding YES to growth and opportunity within my own self and my industries. To an ever expanding understanding within the public about the differences between getting one’s needs met respectfully and getting them met opportunistically. We’re at an interesting moment in time where public discourse about who we are as individuals, what we need, and who has control over our bodies and the labor we pursue or deny with our bodies, is shifting and becoming less repressive and more autonomous. Women, people of color, queer and trans people, immigrants, and other marginalized people are beginning to be heard over an elite who have been in control of policy for a long time. As the middle class effectively realizes it has disappeared into the ranks of the working poor, we are reexamining the system itself which has always held some people up demographically over others, and has generationally kept itself in business. I’m excited to see how we’ll shift, and how we’ll band together for effective change.

I’m an artist. It’s my job to hold a mirror to society. I am a queer person, working poor, visibly trans, a sex educator, consultant, and professional. It is my job and desire to help free those who are oppressed (in the ways I am able to aid) whether because of personal repression, family, or society. We have one body in this lifetime and through better and worse it is the one thing we have at our command, and the one thing we have in service to others. I want to succeed for myself (of course), but even moreso I want to succeed in order to create opportunity for freedom around me.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
Please visit my Patreon, offer one time Support or email me for other options. Thank you.

Tonight: My Art in Boston

I’m spending this week with The Scarlet Tongue Project collective (TSTP)! We’re in the middle of our Boston residency, culminating with a show at the Dorchester Arts Project on Wednesday (tonight!), and collectively teaching a workshop on “Multilingual Anger” this Saturday at The Arts Equity Summit, where we’ll be in attendance Friday through Sunday.

I was recently saying to Samantha Bryan, the visionary who created this project, that I feel grateful to be a part of TSTP. At this moment in my career I’m shifting and changing a lot. I’ve been cocooning and largely standing out of the stage light I usually command, which though intentional is a difficult shift for me within my activity focus. How and where I perform my art is being redefined right now, as are the mediums I employ, and the style of interactions I have with my audience—when my art these days even requires me to be present in the first place. I’m finding footing in a new creative space after many years of being comfortable on stage. I’m redefining who I am, at the very least to myself.

My body is on a journey with testosterone, and my emergent sense of identity plays less and less on stage, showing up more in my personal experiences and finding voice in static art and installation. I feel estranged from the “character” persona I’ve professionally and publicly been linked to for the past 30 years. It’s a strange, depressing, interesting, vulnerable place to be.

I don’t know the world of museums, galleries, and other non-theater spaces I need to be finding. Amidst my upheavals and searching, The Scarlet Tongue Project has given me a way to keep pushing and utilizing the voice I have at this moment. Within our collective I’m challenged by, collaborated with, and cheered on by fellow artists. I’m able to create what I want and there’s a home, a show, and a deadline for me here to keep accountable to. There’s no expectation that I will turn out a piece I’ve done before, only interest in my artistic voice as it explores, and encouragement to question and to develop. Anything. Everything. What I want and need.

The artists performing tonight are spectacular and I’m a fan of each of them as creators, thinkers, activists, and as people. Come see us fill a space with manifestations of our experiences and drive. We are womyn+ who create, connected to and informed by our experiences of anger. Sometimes the root of anger is obvious and tempest in form, other times it’s the compost which grows a thing of peace and beauty. Anger is a meditation, a question, and always a conversation…

Please join us at 7pm. As our event lets out at 9:30, the moon will be reaching perfect fullness, and we’re ready for the next cycle. Understanding where we’ve been allows us to step into the new. Welcome Spring too, may the coming year be fertile after a season of breaking down what’s no longer needed.

Time & Location

March 20, 2019
7:00 PM doors – 9:30 PM
Dorchester Art Project: 1486 Dorchester Ave, Boston, MA 02122, USA

About the Event:

An evening of sneak peek film footage, interactive installation, gallery art, mixed-media performance art, and a project Q&A. We’re preparing something special for you and can’t wait to create an evening together utilizing your ideas, experiences of resistance, and presence too…

Be a part of the project: Tonight we’re joined by Mitzie Gibson, a photographer, who will be gathering portraits of womxn’s anger for a larger installation to be showcased for Scarlet Tongue later this year.

The Scarlet Tongue Project Artists Presenting:
Katia Tirado ~ (all the way from Mexico City) Performance Art
Cassandre Charles ~ Performance, Film, and Visual Art
Makiko Suda ~ (from Portland, Oregon) Live Drawing
Creature Karin Webb ~ Interactive Performance Installation, Film, Visual Art
Samantha Bryan ~ Film (and being the most badass producer alive)
with Local Guest Artists:
Pampi ~ Performance Art
Mitzie Gibson Photographer ~ Interactive Photography Installation

This event is BYOB, and entry is by donation: so come as you are, bring what you can, and settle in with us for a night of transformative art and idea sharing with some brilliant artistic minds.

Parking/Transportation: parking is on the street, and the entrance is a little tucked in, so keep your eyes open! If you don’t want to fuss with parking, the Fields Corner T stop on the redline is a one minute walk from the venue. We’ll have you out by 9:30, so no stress about missing the last train or getting to work in the morning.

Suggested donation for entry: $10 – $20
No one will be turned away for lack of funds

Play On My Friends, and I hope to see you tonight!
~ Creature

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
Please visit my Patreon, offer one time Support or email me for other options. Thank you.

Honoring the Scales

“What do you want to see in the world? …Be it.”

From “NO SHAME”. Photo by Jennifer Bennett

These words are easy. The struggle to their reality is complicated and difficult. The road forward is often infused with self-delusion, and checkpoints can be missed. Repairs must be made at regular intervals or because of accidents. Parts and service can be expensive. What tools do you have to stay securely on the road to your end destination? What have you been born with? What’s been given you by friends and family, or offered because you seem amiable to those who have the resources to share? Which tools can you afford to buy or how have you built up enough credit to purchase in advance?

We are not equal. That’s simply the truth of the structure we’re tangled within.

We aren’t born with and we’re not taught the same emotional skills or lessons in our lifetimes. Similar coping strategies are not available to each of us—nor even desired to be learned by some. We do not have the same information in our minds, capacity for struggle in our hearts, or strength of muscle and bone. We do not fight the same fights, nor choose the fray equally.

It’s paramount that we work with one another. That we share our resources—be they monetary, emotional, intelligence, perspective, charisma, spiritual, physical, shelter, mechanical, words, healing, teaching, space holding:

Access to food.

We live on a planet with abundance, enough for each of us to thrive. Working within the structures of human divisiveness, we learn to take from one mouth to feed another with lesser need. Gold is positioned on high, exalted, danced around in mass-observed ceremony. We dress our poor in rags and stench to serve as warning to us all: you’ll be this thing too, should you refuse to participate. We build walls. Hide the backstage messiness that reveals the antics of banking and loans when observed more closely—serving to pretty-up the faces of our charismatic caste until they’re able to cash in on their connections. Upward mobility is a fairy tale read each night to the masses, though it’s meant to come true for a very select few. Our dreams push millstones miles along… energy stolen.

When I tell you to pay me for my time and attention it is not a request. It is a fairness. That you appreciate my words, my world, my intelligence, and that I capacity to listen intently, offer advice, perspective, and care is the result of investments I’ve made over my entire lifetime.

He feels his sexuality should be served without giving back.

He’s not looking for love. He’s looking to get off. To use my mind, my skills, my body for endorphins and dopamine. This is not a problem for me (within the boundaries of my offerings) for a professional fee.

He feels his emotional and sensual needs should be listened to and resolved without giving back.

This is not food filling my stomach. Food offering me power to instruct, to carry out the desired sound beating, to give of my time and heart, to afford particular dress, to organize our fantasy negotiated, to gather toys with which to invade and sensitize the flesh, to learn proper technique and to carry forth safely. This is my overhead. The theatrics, showtime, and marketing efforts too, are my work.

I understand the need to save. Each dollar is a percentage of one’s lifetime, a moment struggled more than one wants. It’s part of our constructed fallacy, the divisive divide which keeps us apart. In a perfect universe we’re each serviced as we wish, everyone given opportunity to measured time with loved ones and the Deities, every delight we desire.

Negotiations are not [same = same] though, they do not wish to be. Feeding one’s any-gendered-erection is not what I was born to do, though I may have grown to excel at offering such things. My life, my skills, are my investment, and without food I expire too.

Listen to your neighbors. We aren’t meant for battle, though I know fear lies chokingly nearby. I may never firsthand understand your fantasies or your needs, but I will travel as far as I am able to, to embrace our differences, to let you know I wish you peace. Compatible and not compatible, we share molecules and breath. We effect each other. We orbit one another. In meaningful ways we owe each living thing our livelihood and our lives.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
Please visit my Patreon, offer one time Support or email me for other options. Thank you.

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