Heather Gold

Recent interviews: Internet Collaboration and why SXSW fun is good for art and business

I recently guested on Feast of Fun, a delish gay podcast hosted by the adorable Fausto and Marc. That’s Fausto’s sister above who came to their queer meet up at this years SXSW. We talked about canv.as, Color, and what makes web apps, sites , parties and the Internet great : collaboration.  Of course we meandered into Ani DiFranco, Kirstie Alley, Rosie O’Donnell and how to pick up a nerd.

I was also part of a Business Insider piece about SXSW, written to justify partying as work. SXSW has had a huge impact of my life  and my work. It has certainly got some new issues but I still found it really worthwhile and energizing to be there.  The place now does have massive attendance and it’s crawling with marketing and old school media companies trying to be all Internet cool now. But I actually found that I learned something from this. More on what that is soon.

The End of Shame, or Getting Over Oversharing

I hosted this conversation at SXSW 2011 with Melissa Gira Grant, Cindy Gallop Jeff Jarvis and many other participants formerly known as the audience.

There has been a real backlash against openness as the word “oversharing” implies. As CNN noted, I think an “oversharing” accusation is often another persons way of saying “what you are saying is making me uncomfortable.”

Handling out feelings and learning how to be in public space together is what much of my work is about. I believe it’s a lot of what the shifting economy is about too. As I told Umair Haque in our TummelVision conversation: “We’re not going to think our way out of this economic/cultural place. We’ve got to feel our way out.”

The End of Shame conversation happened because it was the one Melissa most wanted to have and it was one of the bright moments of SXSW for me this year. It was a room of incredibly smart and interesting people who taught us more than we shared. And we know how to share.

Collaboration: My Rocking 2011 #SXSW Panel

Girl Walk // All Day

A recent delightful collaboration between remixing dancer Anne Marsen, videographer Jacob Krupnick and of course the music of mash up maestro Girl Talk.

Collaboration has been the key to indie success in the era of the web. It’s the key to how we make now: with each others stuff: music before us, an “audience” of co-creators. What’s the key to great collaboration?

I’ll explore at SXSW 3/15 11:am with amazing panelists, genius Allee Willis (September, Neutron Dance), Mary Jo Pehl (Rifftrax) and Kenyatta Cheese (Know Your Meme, Rocketboom) and you baby, you. I run “panels’ like I run my shows which means they are large, intimate conversations and we get into the nitty gritty. No turning away from what’s unsaid.

Allee alone is working buying a ticket to Austin and a hotel room for 2 days. Seriously. She’s one of my great creative inspirations and I couldn’t be more excited and honoured to have these folks together. Do not miss this conversation we’re craving.

The Heather Gold Show: Receiving Rundown

Saturday November 11, 2006

i first heard about my first guest, love artist Kathe Izzo, during the Intimacy show, when Michelle Tea mentioned experincing intimacy when she was being loved by Kathy at a tremedous distance, across the country. “It just made me feel so good to know that three was someone out there loving me,” she said.

That seemed fascinating to me at the time, in an anthropological way. I didn’t understand that on a visceral level until I was injured just weeks before the Receiving show, and experienced asking for and receiving love at a distance from many people while recovering from my elbow surgery (I broke my funny bone. Comic karma).

Kathe takes love to new depths and certainly breadths. It is literally all she has done for years. She is a performance artist from the visual art tradition of installations. Her interest in the boundary between life and art drew her to the area of love and she had for years loved people, of every stripe in person at museum installations, at their homes for a day, or even at across the country while they are working at a bookstore, (as Michelle Tea was) sending them loving emails that come from a completely present place of loving acceptance.
While Kathe acknowledged that she is comfortable giving, the topic of Receiving was a challenge sh is working on. She has receintly been loaned a sum for career investment by a sweetie who wants to take care of her, a new adjustment she is making with her decision to value herself as she does everyone she will love (which is anyone)

Former San Francisco 49ers Tight End Dr. Jamie Williams gave a profound life and football receiving lesson. He picked a random woman out of the audience to teach who turned out to have quarterbacked her Nebraska high school team’s powder puff team. (I love how the midwest tries to mix a cosmetic term in there to make it seem like the girls aren’t really playing football).

Jamie had great chemistry with Kathe which I really enjoyed. I love it when the show brings together people who might not otherwise meet. Both Kathe and Jamie seemed to be coming at life questions in some similar ways, despite their very different pursuits in film and football (Jamie) and performance art (Kathe).

Shanan Carney, also known as the Voice of Tivo discussed her recuperation from her recent knee surgery. A neighbor kindly agreed to bring her ice every day to fill a special machine which cooled the swelling. This small act of kindness has prompted Shanan to soon launch a vlog called “Random Acts of Kindness” based on the premise that vrey small, meaningful acts can make a huge difference. Both of us, based on our injuries, agreed that receiving can make one feel compelled to give. Shanan called her doctor to find out who else had a surgery and needed ice. She later came over to my place, complete with elf costume, cohort and camera crew to loan me the ice machine and ice to cool my elbow, prepping for the vlog.

Audience regular Scott brought a fabulous Linzer tort. I will ask him for the recipe to post here.

Highlights and Links

• Even though Kathe has gone to the home of complete strangers in New York City to love them for the day, she has never felt unsafe. “If I am giving them everything they need,then what more can they want?” She has held her ground by clearly taking care of her own needs and letting those who are emotionally needy that her own aegis matters.
• Jamie Williams – “To catch the ball, you have to want to catch the ball.”
• Kathe Izzo’s True Love Project
• In order to truly receiv one has to not give back to the giver right away. This is something of a refusal of the kindness (and whatever else being given to you). If you feel compelled to give yourself, then as people say, “pay it forward.”

Heather Gold Show: Intimacy rundown

Photo credit: Heather Champ
Left to right: Betsy Salkind, Derek Powazek, me (HG) and Michelle Tea.

We moved the show to a bigger room because some folks got turned away last month and then we sold out Gallanter Hall. It was another great show last Friday. There was a great, diverse crowd (it may have been the first show at the JCCSF to draw both Jewish grandparents and a drag queen) and we ate glazed lemon tea cake and brownies made by my sweetie and Lanya from the audience.

Betsy announced that she was there to represent the “con” position (oh it’s hard to convey the irony in a text blog post). She followed up with dozens of hilarious insights about the difficulty of having intimacy and the genuine possibility of one-way intimacy, especially during a sexy dream about an acquaintance who refused to acknowledge in waking life what her body remembered as true.

Michelle Tea read from her new novel Rose of No Man’s Land and had her own anecdotes about the odd one-way intimacy that comes from performing and writing intimate details about ones life. She distinguished between physical intimacy in sex work which is real enough, but that renting that didn’t mean you the person providing it was actually going to be present. She talked about being loved for a day by love artist Kathy Izzo and what a difference it made to her day, knowing she was loved as she worked in a book shop.

Derek observed that human beings are “intimacy machines,” that we “can’t help it” and will use any tool we create to be intimate or “get laid.” This was true with the telephone which has become invisible to us and it is now true with the Net. He noted that the ideas now of a computer not connected to the network was an odd one. Does this mean that we not only end up using all technologies to connect but are somehow driven to create them in order to have intimacy?

The banter was so quick and clever that I really found myself stretching to keep on top of it which was a delightful feeling. It was conversation as jam session, complete with a timely reflective pauses from audience members. Steve shared how intimate death is, having been in the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the city, and how every “dropped their shit” and “got real” with each other because the loss around them. Another audience member advised that she was able to have more intimacy when she started listening to friends without thinking about her own ideas in her own mind when friends were speaking, but giving her entire attention to regarding the friend. I asked her how she noticed that she wasn’t really doing this before and she said ” I has to ask people to repeat themselves a lot.”

I’m wondering now. Is this kind of mutual attention and intimacy the same thing as prayer?

Insights + Highlights

• The intimacy that comes from being drunk or high together, in your own secret, shared space, is real, but not sustainable.
• Intimacy cannot be bought.
• Safety is necessary for intimacy
  • this is why distance and online connection is easier for some
  • it’s also why for years my family got intimate only on car rides on the way to the airport
• Intimacy can be experienced by practice and consciously wanting it. This can require confronting fear.
• I got intimate with the audience and read a poem I Love You With Technology

Audio podcast of the whole show 80 minute show and video highlights to come shortly. Do you want to see the whole show streamed in video? Let me know if you can help that happen.