Community Services Unlimited in LA

Community Services Unlimited Inc.
Serving the People Body and Soul



Announcements
:: Fruit Tree Give Away & Volunteer Day – Sat. Feb. 2nd 10 am – 2 pm @ EXPO
:: February Food Party Fundraiser – Fri. Feb 1st @ 6 - 10 pm (RSVP for location)
:: Get Your Veggies on the Run! Sign up for CSU’s Produce Bag Program
:: Reminders: Thursday Farm Stand & GoodSearch.com


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Fruit Tree Give Away & Volunteer Day

When: Saturday February 2, 2008 10 am – 2 pm
Where: CSU Urban Mini Farm at EXPO
The farm is located on the corner of MLK & Menlo next to the Senior Center. The gate to enter the farm is about 100 feet from the corner.

In partnership with Tree People CSU is helping to distribute more than 100 fruit trees to community residents to plant in their yards and neighborhoods. Along with the tree give away we’ll also be having a volunteer day. Come spend some time w/ CSU and dig into the garden while you learn to plant and care for your own tree.

More info at: http://www.csuinc.org or call 323 296-2038


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February Food Party Fundraiser – THEME: The Punjabi Dhaba

When: Friday February 1, 2008 6 – 10 pm
Where: Near Slauson and Normandie, Address & Directions will be sent to those who RSVP
How Much: $20.00 (home cooked, beyond organic & served with love!)
RSVP: Neelam@csuinc.org or call 323 296-2038. Space is limited!

IN 2008 CSU will be hosting a (mostly) monthly food party as a means of bringing together cool people and great food and also raising some needed resources for our work. Each food party will have a different theme that will be reflected in the food and music (and clothes for the willing). You don’t have to stay the whole evening, in fact the evening is planned so folks on their way elsewhere can stop, eat, chat and move on. The number of attendees will be limited for each event and it will be strictly pay in advance. So come and help get it kick started with, what else? The PUNJABI DHABA.
Featuring the finest food from my home home state in India, cooked to mouth watering perfection just for you! A detailed menu will be sent to those that RSVP, but you can be sure to get home cooked gourmet food, featuring locally grown and beyond organic produce, at an incredible price of $20.00 Spaces are limited, so RSVP soon to neelam@csuinc.org or call 323 296-2038. Send your donation ($20 minimum) payable to CSU to 1467 W. 49th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90062.


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Get Your Veggies on the Run! Sign up for CSU’s Produce Bag Program

Subscribe for CSU’s Farm Fresh Produce Bag program and each week receive a bag filled with seasonal fruits and vegetables from CSU’s urban mini-farms and local farmers. We shop - You Stop - & Pick up your pre-paid bag at the EXPO farm stand on Thursday evenings! Subscribers get first pick of seasonal and limited items before they hit the farm stand and help CSU by paying in advance. Fresh, Local, Beyond Organic – good for you, the earth and the community – Learn more and sign up @ http://www.csuinc.org/programs/villagemarketplace.htm


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Reminders.........

Farm Stand @ EXPO Every Thursday 3 – 5 pm (cancelled if heavy rain)
On Menlo in front of the pool Stadium 1 block north of King. Check out: http://www.csuinc.org/ for more details


Support CSU Everytime You Search or Shop Online.
GoodSearch.com is a new Yahoo-powered search engine that donates half its advertising revenue to charities users designate. Use it just as you would any search engine, get quality search results from Yahoo, and watch the donations add up! GoodShop.com is a new online shopping mall which donates up to 37% of each purchase to your favorite cause! Hundreds of great stores including Target, Gap, Best Buy, ebay, Macy's and Barnes & Noble have teamed up with GoodShop and every time you place an order, you’ll be supporting your favorite cause!

How It Works: Just go to http://www.goodsearch.com or http://www.goodshop.com and enter and select “community services unlimited” as your charity of choice! Tip: Most folks will only have to enter CSU the first time they visit. After that your charity preference gets put in your “cookies” and CSU will automatically be selected every time you go to either site! So make GoodSearch your home page and easily support CSU every time you go online.

Berlant & Warner readings for Feeling Theory

Intimacy is a more troubling idea than Sex in Public. Within an intersectional analysis, it seems that sex and public seem to get some folks in trouble more than others. In referring to the Time Magazine piece on the future of the race/races, the writers offer this point: "But more than exploitation and racism are forgotten in this whirl of projection and suppression. Central to the transfiguration of the immigrant into a nostalgic image to shore up core national culture and allay white fears of minoritization is something that cannot speak its name, though its signature is everywhere: national heterosexuality" (549)

"...intimacy is publicly mediated..." (553)

Berlant and Warner provocatively theorize against the notion that there is private sexuality/identities. Their ideas were lucid, but, somehow, I felt astonished and unsettled by what their argument implied. I do not position myself differently, really, because what they say about heteronormativity and entitlement to space, ideas, identity, and privilege are absolutely the truth. Heteronormativity cannot be linked to whiteness in some oversimplified way but it functions the way whiteness does in mainstream. It is invisible, private, individual, untainted by generalizations. It goes unracialized and unproblematicized. Critical studies in whiteness might be useful to our conversation because at the same time that Roediger and Lipsitz and others ask us to challenge whiteness and a privilege and a possession, the power of whiteness only seems to get more consolidated. Heteronormativity needs to be interrogated by those who benefit from it as well as those who seek to challenge it. Normal is not desired or sought after by the writers in so far as norms /normative connote conforming to dominate ideologies which regulate bodies, ideas and police our desires, our behaviors, our "moralities". Biddy Martin is very nice and cool, but she is also very LIBERAL. That is to say, all gays and lesbians do not want to challenge all social structures within a capitalist framework--some queer folks want to stop those structures that seem to just infringe on their rights (a false notion). It's the NIMBY attitude toward many issues. As long as I can prevent my house from burning down and my neighbors (since they jeopardize my house/safety/property), then I have done my civic duty. Heterosexuality as policy, praxis, assumption is equally insidious as assumptions about white privilege and might be more difficult to 'root out' since it is the scaffolding and the building (interior and exterior, private and public): how do we burn it down without all bodies flying out the windows?

source: Special issue of Critical Inquiry (winter 1998) on Intimacy volume 24: 2

Margaret Cho

Cho gets it 85% right. as soon as i think she's funny, she pisses me off in a non-fun way. Her race politics are off, way off. Mostly white women here and the diss against others is based on class or racial slurs or just bad grammar (not an equal offense to the others).

friends are sending it around. wondering: Funny or Fucked up? or somewhere in-between? What are you FEELING when you watch this?

Perhaps we could relate this utube video to the Berlant articles on intimacy and public/private and spatial-aesthetic

[or am i just irritated w/ her b/c she lost lots of weight & is w/ a guy but is stutting all these women in front(ing) of us? ]

Whose Towel is it?

This is very predictable. lurid, demeaning, evil Arabs -- all the makings for a great AMERICAN NOVEL AND FILM//need to capture it visually. Kite Runner anyone?

Towelhead Screens at Sundance

In other movie news, a controversial Arab American film is being screened at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which begins today. Towelhead, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Alicia Erian, marks the directorial debut of Alan Ball (screenwriter, American Beauty). The provocative, unflinching story focuses on a 13-year-old Arab American girl dealing with sex, racism, abuse and other tough issues while being shuttled between her divorced parents.

American Studies Association: ELECTIONS

VOTE BEFORE MARCH 2008

President (Choose 1)

• Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California

Council (Choose 4)

• Maria Cotera, University of Michigan
• Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz
• David Eng, University of Pennsylvania
• Gayatari Gopinath, New York University
• E. Patrick Johnson, Northwestern University
• Stephen J. Pitti, Yale University
• Susan Stryker, Simon Fraser University
• Rafia Zafar, Washington University, Saint Louis

Council International Member (Choose 1)

• Isabel Durán, Universidad Complutense, Madrid
• Yujin Yaguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan

Council K-12 Member (Choose 1)

• Brian Garman, Wilmington Friends School, Delaware
• Barbara Tischler, Horace Mann School, New York

Council Student Member (Choose 1)

• Rodolfo Aguilar, University of Minnesota
• Matthew Wittmann, University of Michigan

Nominating Committee (Choose 2)

• Ian Baucom, Duke University
• Kara Keeling, University of Southern California
• Micki McElya, University of Alabama
• Marcia Ochoa, University of California, Santa Cruz

Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess

Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium, March 28 and 29, 2008
Sponsored by USC's Assocation of English Graduate Students and the USC Center for Feminist Research

Keynote Speakers: Tavia Nyong'o, NYU Performance Studies and Stephan Elliott (Sex For America, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, Happy Baby, Looking Forward To It, A Life Without Consequences)

Everyone's a little bit obsessive; academics are usually more than a little. But what consitutes our obsessions and what work do they do? What is the relation between obsession and knowledge production; and what about less legitimate obsessions, the things, places, people and cultural forms about which we feel excessive love or hate?

Thinking about the subjects and objects of obsession raises crucial questions about knowledge and culture. How do literary and cultural texts provoke and represent obsession? Whose investments get defined as excessive and obsessive and whose are seen as justifiable (in) moderation? What politics underlie obsession? Who gets to say when enough is too much?

We invite 20-minute papers, panels or performances, from all disciplines and interdisciplinary locations, on any aspect of obsession and excess. These might include:

• ideologies of excess
• excess and obsession in literature
• affect in theory and theories of affect
• fandom and antifandom
• sexual obsession and excessive sexualities
• how race and gender contour understandings of excess
• work/overwork and academic labor
• class, excess and restraint/moderation
• excessive femininities and masculinities
• dressing to excess; fashion and drag
• paranoia
• 'cult' objects and the canon
• obsession, time and memory

300-word abstracts are due January 14, 2008. Please email .doc or .rtf files to uscaegs@gmail.com.

We invite all participants to share their obsessions and find new ones at a music and poetry event in the evening of March 29, organized in association with USC's Pop Music Project.

Tags: academia, public