Welcome to the beginning of Paradise Is Not For Sale, my long overdue return to blogging after nearly 20 years of absence. I quit blogging and I started bands and social media accounts. I developed other priorities and outlets and I let this method lapse, which, in retrospect, may have been a mistake. I liked blogging. I made some good friends with my blog.
WHAT IS PARADISE IS NOT FOR SALE?
Paradise Is Not For Sale is the art and writing blog/newsletter of intermedia artist Rahne Alexander.
The launch of this blog and newsletter marks a shift in my artistic processes with an unknown endpoint. Your support of this endeavor at any level will help support me in my mission of telling untold tales in the time we have left together.
I am a mid-career white trans dyke artist and writer based in Baltimore and in spite of how I feel about the world at large, I’m excited to see where this will go. Cliche as it may be to say, I didn't expect to live this long, and while I still can I'm going to tell as much as I can remember. This is an intermedia memoir project, a continuation of my exemplativist femmage life/art project.
When my chapbook Heretic to Housewife was in prepublication, my friend and colleague Jordan Stein offered up the most flattering blurb for the cover, calling me the "trans Marcel Proust" and while that had not been a conscious organizing principle in my work, it has certainly influenced my consciousness. It gives me something to live up to.
This blog is a part of that process. I am at the start of a new phase of my art career, the parameters of which are very much in process of definition. Over time, I intend to build this blog out both into the future and into the past, drawing on archived materials. A virtual commonplace book: past blogs, social media entries, show flyers, video, music, recipes; a hybrid of memoir and monologue, collage and community, domesticity and witchcraft, image and music, queerness and transness, life and art. Your subscription is a vote of confidence that I should keep going.
NOTES & BLOTS
The design of this blog and newsletter is going to evolve in the coming weeks; it feels urgent that I get this up and running, and as a one-woman show it takes a lot longer than I'd like to get my personal projects off the ground. I'm aiming for stable branding within the first three months. For now, this template will do. My amazing colleague Molly Steadman (hire her!) created the logo.
In addition to the sections where I talk about culture and queerness, I also plan to use this space to work through a larger project that has bothered be for a long while — investigating the economic conditions of having grown up as a trans woman in a society that has treated me as disposable, and having internalized those dismissals, and where that has left me economically. These elements will all of course be rooted in memoir, in my specific experience of this weird and wonderful world that is also ugly and unsalvageable.
It's a weird time to launch a blog. There's such vitriol in the air, too many mortal threats to keep track of. I won't be sassed on my own blog; this is not an opportunity for dialogue. If and when I am wrong about something I'll deal with it accordingly, but I will not argue with or refund anyone who wants to fight in bad faith.
What do I mean by bad faith? Well, one morning this woman came into the video store I managed and she wanted to yell at someone because the copy of La Dolce Vita she rented was in black and white. She insisted it was supposed to be in color. She claimed that she taught film and that we had somehow slipped her a substandard black and white version of the film she remembered being in color, and that I was somehow part of a vast conspiracy refusing to give her the color version. She came in heated and ready to fight, so heated that I suspected she also somehow entirely missed the point of La Dolce Vita.
Of course, it was plausible to me that somewhere out there a colorized version of the Fellini film was available, but we didn't have it our library and I told her as much. She wanted to fight rather than negotiate, even though she was completely wrong and I refused to let her set the terms. Unplacated, she escalated her hostility until I wound up telling her that she wasn't getting a refund and that she could get out of my store and never come back.
