I ran into a good friend and overall great guy D Miller this morning at Urth Caffe. We see each other there pretty often and it’s always nice chatting with him.

“I feel like I’m trying to come out of a long slumber,” I told him.

And I am. We are. Second month of the new year already and we have to ramp up. But the thing about restarting after a time off is that all that energy has to be generated internally.

We are trying.

This month is a short one and it’s coming to a fast close. And it will end with a very full and exciting final week.

One of the first artists I wanted to connect with when we were opening DT•LAB was Kristina Wong. I met her at Tuesday Night Cafe. She was the guest host the same night that Traci Akemi Kato-Kiriyama asked me to come and read and talk about the pop-up bookstore project.

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Well, Kristina sort of blew me away that night with her Tila Tequila bits. You had to be there.

With a little prodding on Facebook by the always present and generous Shana Nys Dambrot, Kristina and I were engaged in a conversation about presenting her new solo show, a work in progress called The Wong Street Journal. It took me about –2 seconds to agree.

Obviously, we don’t have that space anymore.

But that isn’t going to stop us from giving Mrs. Jeremy Lin a proper production to do her thing.

On Wednesday, February 26th, we are proud to bring Kristina to Chinatown for a performance/presentation at Grand Star Jazz Club called Notes-in-Process: The Wong Street Journal. She will be performing and sharing parts of her new show that she is currently developing. She will also be sharing her experience in Uganda late last year. It’s a trip she took to work with and learn about a micro-loan system there. It’s also a trip during which she recorded a rap album.

It’s been interesting watching her, through Facebook, as she struggles through the process of presenting her experience in Uganda in a respectful and honest way, a process that has actually caused some of her friends (or at least former fans) turn their backs on Kristina. It’s a challenge that she is trying to confront with various levels of success. And it’s exciting as hell for me to watch an artist working through different problems that present themselves during the act of creating.

So join us and see what is new from Kristina Wong. Here is the Facebook event page. All money at the door will go towards the creation of Nerio Badman’s music studio in Gulu, Uganda.

Oh. This is just the beginning of that crazy stretch I was talking about. The very next morning Judeth and I fly out to Seattle for our first AWP experience. We will be doing some underground publishing.

I’ll tell you more about that next week.