tierney finster

Welcome back Katrina Kemp! Katrina is an actor, producer, activist, DJ, and intuitive from LA. 

Katrina not only shares her own coming-of-age story as a person with pseudoachondroplasia but also speaks to the relatively new project of people with Dwarfism collecting their own history, free from the gaze of average-height people. 

She explains how people with dwarfism were enslaved for centuries and how being forced to labor as circus performers still inform how they’re treated in the modern movie industry (and the world at large) today. Katrina traces the relationship between erasure and exploitation in media and reflects on how vital it was for her to find representation and community online growing up. 

“We find each other deep, deep in the internet. But other people are finding us too,” Katrina says. 

This sets the stage for our discussion of “Dear Average Height People,” a film Katrina is producing by director Aubrey Smalls. As far as Aubrey and Katrina know, this is the very first documentary comedy special to be directed and produced by people with Dwarfism. In fact, they haven’t been able to find ANY films, shows, or specials created by people with Dwarfism and urgently want that to change. 

The film is about dwarfism, disability hate groups, agency, and freedom. It portrays a global network of people with dwarfism who may live far away from each other, but who live in deep solidarity. It illustrates the way obsessive hate groups target and harass people with Dwarfism online, as well as how platforms like Youtube encourage violence and monetize torment.  It also depicts how talented, beautiful, funny, and diverse the Dwarfism community is around the world. 

Listen to hear Katrina’s many insights about beauty, bodies, surveillance, her bone to pick with Stephen Spielberg, Britney Spears, L’Express, Diane Arbus, inhalants, and more… 

“People experience epiphanies with me every day… every hour if I allowed it,” Katrina says. 

Follow Katrina on IG, Twitter, Twitch, and Youtube. Please consider contributing what you can to “Dear Average Height People.” Pledge your support on Indiegogo here.  Production crew volunteers, exhibition and performance spaces, and community partners are also welcome to donate resources. 

+ For more Katrina on the pod, listen to our Britney Spears episode from 2021. 

Thanks to Margot Padilla for engineering and editing this episode. Our show music is “Let Me Love You” by Dis Fantasy. Follow me on IG: @TSTAR7. 

Recorded 10/3 at Pirate Studios Silverlake. Pirate is open 24/7 in Silverlake and West Adams, as well as all over the US, UK, Germany, and Ireland. They have DJ, rehearsal, and podcast studios for everyone to use. Book online and let yourself inside. Click here and use the code TIERNEY for $10 off your first booking. Write me: tierneytierneytierneytalks@gmail.com

Rachael Finley is the author of the new book “Nobody Ever Told Me Anything,” a memoir and survival guide detailing her highly isolated childhood in South Florida and unique coming-of-age experience online. 

She tells me about exploring the duality of women through writing about her mother, surviving her 11-year-old year squatting alone in a vacation rental while her mom sought out mental health treatment, and broadening her horizons by hanging out at the mall. 

At the mall, she met strangers for the first time and began experimenting with the parts of herself she thought the world should know and the parts they shouldn’t… tailor-fitting parts of herself for an audience… a lifelong experiment that led her to write this unfiltered book.

Follow Rachael on IG @instasteak and buy her book on Shop Hot Lava here. 

Thanks to Margot Padilla for engineering and editing this episode.  

Recorded 10/3 at Pirate Studios Silverlake. Pirate is open 24/7 in Silverlake and West Adams, as well as all over the US, UK, Germany and Ireland. They have DJ, rehearsal and podcast studios for everyone to use. Book online and let yourself inside. Click here and use the code TIERNEY for $10 off your first booking. 

Our show music is “Let Me Love You” by Dis Fantasy. Follow me on IG: @TSTAR7. 

Write me: tierneytierneytierneytalks@gmail.com. 

I'm back from a prolonged hiatus with my very first solo ep! What a risk! Tell me how it goes! I talk about losing a friend, traveling for the first time since the pandemic began, turning 30, getting engaged, and more. I also discuss my love of Lindsay Lohan and Anthony Kiedis, the shameless way I engage with Bravolebrities, and my year of only reading memoirs. 

Please subscribe to the show wherever you're listening. New interviews coming soon! Follow me on IG @TSTAR7 and write me with questions and comments at tierneytierneytierneytalks@gmail.com. 

Thanks to Margot Padilla for engineering and editing. 

Our show music is "Let Me Love You" by Dis Fantasy. 

Erin Taj joins us to share astrological knowledge juicy enough for beginners and devotees alike. Taj breaks down fixed, mutable and cardinal signals, explains astrology as geometry and defines what houses mean in the context of your natal chart. She teaches what having planets “conjunct” and “square” one another means, expands on popular misconceptions of rising signs and discusses favorite parts of her own astrological makeup. Saturn Return, synastry and generational forecasting based on Pluto are also hot topics. “No one owns astrology,” Taj says, “It’s embedded in us to be curious.” 

Write to Tierney -- tierneytierneytierneytalks@gmail.com 

Our show music is "Let Me Love You" by Dis Fantasy. Recorded and edited by Margot Padilla. Hosted, written and produced by Tierney Finster. 

Tierney Talks celebrated one year of podcasting with a live show at Murmurs, a favorite art gallery, cafe, shop and community space in LA. The variety-show-esque program consists of readings, musical performances, conversations and a DJ set. 

Here’s the timing of everything, just in case you want to listen out of order: 

2:15 - A karaoke-centric reading & performance by writer, sartorialist and Sisters With Invoices founder Amelian Kashiro Hamilton. 

18:04 - PLUR poetry and pop music by artist, organizer and co-founder of Cosmo Visiones Ancestrales La Pachamami. 

33:09 - A one-on-one conversation with State Assembly Candidate Fatima Iqbal-Zubair about how representatives outside of your own district can transform state-wide legislation, repelling corporate funding, running an independent campaign and housing and education inequality in LA. 

57:06 - A one-on-one conversation with artist, activist, model and writer Emily Barker about the history of standardized and invisible norms in architecture, ableist design as structural violence and what inspired their most recent exhibition “Built To Scale.” 

1:31:00 - Amelian's DJ set begins! Featuring incredible adlibs by NikoTheIkon. 

Recorded live and sound mixed by audio engineer extraordinaire Margot Padilla.
Follow me on IG @TSTAR7 and tell me who to talk to next.

Thank you Morgan Elder and Allison Littrell for welcoming us at Murmurs.
Thank you Camila Creates for your wonderful catering and Andrea Ámez for your Ámezing facials. 

Jiz Lee is an award winning porn performer, queer porn superstar and author of the anthology “Coming Out Like A Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy.” This episode begins with two readings from the book, followed by a conversation with Jiz about the origins of their porn career, the importance of teaching porn literacy rather than arguing about “good porn” versus “bad porn,” not shaming someone’s sexual fantasies and dispelling myths about porn production.  

Then, we move into a panel discussion with Lotus Lain and Miss Mimosa. Lotus Lain is an independent porn performer, writer and activist who works with the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry's trade association. Mimosa is an artist and sex worker with experience as a professional dominatrix, BBW porn performer and fetish content creator who spends most of her time in San Francisco in LA. She also works behind the camera in both adult and mainstream film, doing both casting and performer advocacy. 

The group discusses diversifying who gets to feel sexy, their experiences disclosing their work to both friends and family and new acquaintances and the hypocrisy of the way Hollywood treats sex workers. Lotus speaks about being outed as a porn performer without her consent, the stigma of having sex for fun and how porn can be one of the safest settings to explore kink. 

Mimosa remembers asking her mother about how she would react if she became a porn star at the age of ten and reflects on body positivity within porn. 

“Having a body that’s different, for me, was always a source of power,” Mimosa says. “When you’re your own home, other people will want to be there.”

This episode was recorded live during Pillow Talk in the penthouse at the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles. Follow @jizlee and buy their book here: bigcartel.com/product/coming-out-like-a-porn-star

Credit and thanks to Margot Padilla, the best sound engineer.