from Art Threat: Performing Oloha in Queer Times.

In 2001, filmmakers Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe broke new ground with their documentary Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place. The film, which documents the lives, struggles, and aspirations of several queer and trans Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians), also made an important and, at the time, novel effort to explore how the ongoing exercise of settler-colonial rule in Hawai’i shapes gender and sexual identities. An evocative and important project, Kulana He Mahu was released to much critical acclaim, and has since screened at festivals and community events throughout Hawai’i and around the globe.

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how to grieve–an unguide

playing with water color

After Depression

Depression never feels to me like sadness. More like a gag in my mouth, a choking inhibition, like trying to run in a dream when you can’t get your legs to move. But as it melts away, it leaves a quite particular sort of sadness in its place. Everything seems sad. Not terribly unpleasant. Like walking through the ruins after a great storm–not quite awake. How sad, you think… everything so still… and broken. Then you begin to see people hurrying here and there… all so busy. At what? it all seems so strange. Why, one asks. What is it that makes them go? The connecting cords, like a knitting unraveled… pick them up, one a time, until you’re part of it all again. More alive… but less intensely conscious.

What does it matter?

My journal pages have come to be filled with sketches. Not art–by any means, but visual explorations and translations. Nudging words to the margins. I was thinking today… how I’ve come back to what I was doing in 1969. I took sketch books everywhere. Still have some of the pages. I don’t understand how I lost confidence… or came to think this was not something to continue. I draw everywhere now–whether I have paper and instruments or not. I look… and draw what I see in my mind. I care less about representing what I see, and more about the marks on the page. But the relationship is indispensable to the process.
The galleries were closed by the time I got to Old City. I spent some time browsing through a book, art and artifact shop on 2nd. Reproductions, throw-away art, some not so bad. So much of it. Yesterday I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There it is. The stuff that’s rescued from oblivion… and the vastly greater volume of stuff that ends up in shops like this. The question that poisons everything: where in this do I belong? The nitrous fertilizer of false aspirations. Explosive.
Almost everything we are conditioned to think about art, about the creative process, is rank with this poison… the dramatic narrative we’ve been given by the psychotic capitalist nightmare–the misappropriation of aesthetic value as commodity.
I do what I must. My work may never see more than dust in basement where it accumulates… some of it, in those bins in that junk shop, if they survive that long. But that’s not the point. Not what matters.
The question remains… what does matter?

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