Almost a year ago, I went up to order a drink at the only gay bar in Olympia, Washington. To my right I saw a bare upper arm tattooed with the state of Texas. Being a Texas native, I inquired about its significance. The owner was one K8 Hardy, performance artist now living in Brooklyn, replied with something like "You can take the girl out of Texas… " As we made introductions, we found out that we'd grown up about an hour and a half away from each other and that she'd often visited my hometown to attend rock shows (frightening, considering that she was from Forth Worth and I was from a horrible little town of only 100,000). Once she rattled off the name of an old thoroughfare in my town, we grabbed a couple beers and toasted to "escapism" or something.

"In Beautiful Radiating Energy, artist K8 Hardy militantly confronts the audience to possess and critique sexist stereotypes. The performance draws upon the personal politics from the Women's Liberation and Riot Grrrl movements, which are rendered both in Hardy's physical and cinematic language. Conversing with the video images and screen with dubious gestures and disarming cheers, Hardy explores an imaginary, and perhaps impossible landscape filled with other like-minded militants."

This track, from 2004, accompanies the attitudes and issues raised in the larger performance piece. Full of hip-hop hollers to cities, art galleries, festivals, and organizations with which K8 and friends are involved, it is a call-to-arms for lesbian, queer, and transgender artists to become active in painting their future by drawing from politics and art, and to point fingers at themselves as much as mainstream culture. Some nameless voice gives us steady juggling of a simple tune with charmingly affected enunciation and cacaphonic cascades of siren shouts (from K8 herself), over a gently acidic bassline and limping beat. All of this is presumably produced by Maison du Chic's Nick Hallet and titled under the group name "Joint Collaboration Productions, LLP."


MP3 Joint Collaboration Productions, LLP. - Beautiful Radiating Energy

READY! Participant!
READY! Reena Spaulings!
READY! Art In General!
ARE YOU READY?

READY? Minneapolis!
READY? Toronto!
READY? New York City!
ARE YOU READY?

We be vaginal gangstas.
Join us in our mission.
Bring the apathetic masses
To a state of recognition.
We be Joint Collaboration.
Our beats is laconic.
We take yer revolution
And spin it reggaetronic!

Mary Cheney!
Chelsea Clinton!
Jenna Bush!

LTTR!
Homo-a-gogo!
Republican National Convention!

Political homos
Keep the balance unstable.
Take back the White House,
And dance on the tables.

We be concept artists…
First-wave mimeses.
The city is our gallery,
And love be our thesis!

[vocoded]
Wanna break forth, get yer freedom from the jailer? READY!
Burn and loot with Bob Marley and the Wailers? READY!
Advertise for yourself just like Norman Mailer? READY
You've got to practice more failure!

(Just tell me where to start)
LTTR, you know who you are…
Joint Collaboration, throw down yer nation.
Back up.
Get up.
Stand up.
Bless up.
(So serious)
READY!

"For years and years I've been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?"