Lots of people I know fell in love with artist Miranda July last year when her first feature film, Me And You And Everyone We Know, was released. What fewer people know about, but everyone should, is her website Learning To Love You More, an interactive extravaganza where visitors (that’s us) can pick “assignments” and post the results on the site. The assignments range from artistic (“draw a scene from a movie that made you cry”) to autobiographical (“give advice to yourself in the past”) to community-oriented (“make a neighborhood field recording”) to just plain funny (“lipsynch to shy neighbor’s Garth Brooks cover”) but all of them encourage visitors to cultivate curiousity in ordinary things, to take what we think of as mundane and turn it into art. Even if you’re not up for making something for the site, you can spend hours browsing other people’s contributions (and for Sleater-Kinney fans, look for Carrie Brownstein’s video of herself dancing around a kitchen).

What I really love is that, while some people who have posted their results obviously have artistic training, most people who contribute don’t, so what you get is an incredibly fresh, unpretentious collection of bits and pieces of strangers’ lives. Also wonderful is July’s enthusiasm for the project - she ends the instructions for one assignment (“make a poster of shadows”) with the sentence “my god this is going to be beautiful”. LTLYM never fails to get me excited and inspired about the creative possibilities of everyday life. But, in the words of the immortal LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it! Get out there and make something, tiger!

According to pitchforkmedia.com, Chicks on Speed’s Alex-Murray Leslie has put together a new 3CD compilation that “celebrates and reclaims music-by-women in several landmark ways”. I have mixed feelings about Chicks on Speed, and I know some of us were burned by the “Women and Songs” series (not to mention the dismal imitators that followed). But Girl Monsteras this compilation is calledlooks pretty stellar. It has an intriguing mix of musicians from a variety of genres and decades, and a bunch of previously unreleased tracks. I haven’t been this excited since the first volume of Alright, This Time Just the Girls!

Track listing, release date, and more information here

For several months now, I’ve been involved with a campaign called Hotel Workers Rising, a North America-wide effort to raise the living standards and working conditions of hotel workers. As the campaign slogan goes, there are a million reasons to support hotel workers, especially if you’re someone who cares about cities, workers’ rights and the multiple ways in which women’s work is (under)valued. You can read something I wrote for This Magazine about the increasing workloads room attendents are facing, and what workers are doing about it.

If you’re in Toronto, you can show your support at a big demo taking place at Nathan Phillips Square on Thursday (Sept. 28) at 5 p.m. Basically, hotel workers and their union, Unite Here, have been in contract negotiations for several months now, and the hotels — major, multinational corporations that are seeing record profits — won’t budge on certain issues, including job security. There have been exciting victories for workers in other cities, so now is an important time to show your support for Toronto workers. See you there!

I stumbled across the website of artist Deborah Colotti (thanks to our new blog buddy Sharon Lamb at www.packaginggirlhood.typepad.com) and I was pretty fascinated by her Barbie-based art collection called The Barbs. Colotti melts, mutilates and glues Barbie dolls into new, unusally ghoulish configurations - but it’s not just for a good time.

As Colotti explains in a statement about the Barbs, (and I would highly recommend you read this before viewing the Barbs, if like me, you are dense when it comes to art) “[Barbie’s] life has always been stiffly perfect. Mine has not. None of my friends’ lives have been either. How could we possibly identify with something so elusive and uniquely bland? Rather than trying to make myself as frozen and superficial as a doll, I decided to make Barbie more like me. And more like the lives I see around me everyday.” Take back the Barbies!

Mutilating Barbie was one of my favourite past-times when I was 12. My mother never let me play with Barbies when I was little, for fear that I would grow up thinking that only blonde, blue-eyed white ladies with anatomically impossible proportions and missing vulvas were beautiful. But I finally inherited a collection from an older cousin when I was past the impressionable ages, only to find that after all those years of lusting after Mattel commercials, it was really far more entertaining to colour Barbie’s face purple and give her punk-rock haircuts before asymmetry was cool.

Hmm, maybe me colouring Barbie’s face purple was an unconscious though radical attempt to make her more like myself, as a woman of colour…

Make Your Own Comics with Shameless Cartoonist Roxanne Bielskis!

Five-week workshop starting on Wednesday, October 4th at the Parkdale Public Library (1303 Queen St. West) in Toronto.

Would you like an introduction to the exciting process of telling your stories through comics? Come learn the theory and technique of comics storytelling with Roxanne Bielskis, creator of Poverty Comics and Shameless‘s own Poverty High! This is not just some workshop that will teach you how to draw an amazing Catwoman - this five-week workshop places a strong emphasis on helping you find your own artistic and literary voice by teaching you how comics work in telling a story, helping you translate your own stories and characters onto the comics page, and introducing you to the work of other cartoonists working in Toronto and all over the world! You’ll learn how to use the tools of a cartoonist and methods of the self-publisher, and by the end of the course, you’ll have your very own comic book to trade with your friends and even sell in the shops!

Spaces are limited, email rbielskis AT yahoo DOT com for a registration form. There will be a materials fee of between $15-$25 depending on the number of participants. If you can’t pay this fee, it may be subsidized.

All workshops are from 6pm-8pm at the Parkdale Public Library.

Week 1 (October 4): How do comics work? (theory, grammar and lexicon of comics)
Week 2 (October 11): How do I tell my story? (developing plots, characters, themes, issues in writing for comics)
Week 3 (October 18): Approaching the page (layouts and formats for putting your ideas on the page)
Week 4 (October 25): Materials and Technique: (the fun stuff! How to use the materials of the comic artist)
Week 5 (November 1st): How do I get people to read this? (publishing your comic book)

In my somewhat misguided, albeit typical youth, my girlfriends and I would reserve a special evening a week to worship at the altar of certain sacred California zip code. Beverley Hills 90210 defined my middle school experience, with its boring sunkissed blond and exquisitely beautiful (although suspiciously, ahem, older) high school students and the drama that was their (also suspiciously) perfect high school lives.

For one season and one season only that beach-front perfection was dismantled with the entrance of one bad, bad, very bad girl named Emily Valentine, her over-bleached blond hair cropped short, and her ability to set cars on fire differentiating her from the rest of the pretty plastic BH gang. Emily entered on a motorcycle, made everyone uncomfortable with her inability to be a good and sane girl, unabashedly tore the serenity of the spoiled zip code to shreds, and then disappeared, blotted out of the show as if that kind of reality was too uncomfortable for my middle school companions to tolerate.

This is why Zoe Whittalls new book of poetry is so aptly titled. The Emily Valentine Poems (Snare Books) is the long awaited follow up to her 2001 poetry collection The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life, and this new release does much the same thing to poetry as a whole as Miss Valentine did to me, my friends and the fictional 90210 gang. It is a necessary and beautiful dose of reality in an otherwise plastic and episodic world.

This collection is not in any way objectively distanced from its subject matter, which is not to say its candor is a bad thing. Quite the contrary; it is deeply personal, digging in and getting right to the splintered and bruised bone of human experience, with all its beautiful wounds and flaws. The result is exquisite, not to mention refreshing, in a literary world of boring Beverly Hills blondes.

Whittalls writing is unapologetically confessional (while confessional women’s writing has been apologizing for years) and is therefore uncomfortably intimate, her words so honest and pure that the reader becomes an enraptured and guilty voyeur of sorts. We view the tiniest details of a brutal urban girl world through Whittalls neurotic yet ingenious lens. Not only does the collection push us through some of our more broken emotional moments in love and life, but it also makes us laugh, at times hysterically, at ourselves and the ridiculous moments that define us:

Writers make bad housewives but/ excellent stalkers

This book is perfect in a way that only truly honest writing can be, leaving no detail of our experiences unexamined, every image and feeling so clear and precise that we are made to endure the most visceral and magnificent of human emotions with painful familiarity.

She is setting things on fire and we are all the better for it.

Whittall will be launching The Emily Valentine Poems this weekend at Torontos Word on the Street. And if you’re in Montreal on the 22nd of October check out the Coach House/ Snare Books Launch at The Green Room, hosted by “Montreal literary impresario” Jon Paul Fiorentino. Oh and if that wasn’t enough, this event will be fantastic.

Here at Shameless HQ, we’ve always had an uneasy relationship with advertising. While we know that ads make publishing a magazine possible, we want to avoid the publishing model that aims solely to deliver audiences to advertisers, and treat our readers with respect. That said, thanks to our talented ad sales managers, we’ve managed to have ads in the magazine that fit our aesthetic and politics: small, often women-run, independent businessnes and organizations concerned with social justice, feminism and environmentalism.

One of our longest advertisers is Secrets From Your Sister, an amazing little bra boutique in Toronto’s Annex. Secrets is the kind of place where you walk in and overhear the owner, Jennifer Klein, explaining to a customer how the dynamics of body image, advertising and pop culture combine to make women feel bad about their breasts, which are often larger/smaller/differently shaped than the breasts we’re bombarded with in ads and pop culture (for more on this see “Breasts: an owner’s manual,” in our current issue). The staff are knowledgeble, respectful and smart ladies who make the often painful and frustrating experience of bra shopping a pleasure.

On that note, it’s not surprising that Jennifer and her staff are putting on an event called Tit Tales, a fundraiser for WILLOW, a breast cancer support organization that provides timely access to unbiased information and compassionate support.

This decidedly corporate-free event (very important in light of the fact that corporations that produce products loaded with carcinogens are usually the major sponsors of breast cancer fundraisers. For more on this visit Think Before You Pink) features women aged 17 to 65 sharing stories, monologues, poetry and songs, all about breasts.

Also featured: writer, comedic performer and musician Shoshana Sperling; novelist, poet, filmmaker, director, actor and drag queen extraordinaire, Sky Gilbert; The Strong Breast Revolution (who will perform their one-act topless play that explores issues of breast cancer awareness, sexuality, breast feeding, adolescent body image, and the fun of playing with your breasts); and Beryl Tsang, founder of Tit Bits (knitted breast prosthetics).

There will be a bra fashion show and auction featuring unique, one-of-a-kind bras from 12 different Toronto-based designers such as Erika Connor and Christian Paré.

Tickets are $20 ($15 for students) and available in advance at Secrets From Your Sister (476 Bloor St. W; 416.538.1234) and Ms. Dress-Up (1461 Dundas St. West; 416.532.3337) or at the door. They add that men are welcome at the event.

Thursday, October 5th, 2006
7:30PM 12AM
Show starts at 8:30PM
The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W), Toronto

Here’s an unusual story: according to the BBC, the wives and girlfriends of gang members in Pereira, Colombia have told their partners that they will not have sex with them until they give up their guns. They are calling it “the strike of crossed legs.”

It’s not the first time women have tried this sort of anti-violence campaign. If you go back to Ancient Greece (clearly, a hotspot for non-violence) in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, the women of warring states withhold sex from their mates in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian War. According to Wikipedia, one of Aristophanes’ intentions in writing Lysistrata was not quite to suggest a creative way of ending violence, but to critique the fact that the women of his time had no way to make their voice heard except through their, uh, vulvas. It’s discouraging (to say the least), that 2,417 years later women are still finding that their hoo-hoos speak louder than their mouths.

At the same time, the Colombian story offers some good insight into how gender roles oppress both men and women. The article suggests that men are drawn to gang violence because of a “desire for status, power, and sexual attractiveness.” So if men get into gang violence because gender roles have taught them over the years that powerful, fearsome men attract hot women, the intention of the strike is, in the words of one of the participants, to show that “violence is not sexy.” Whoohoo deconstruction of gender roles!

(thanks to accusehistory for this tip!)

I will be blogging from Edinburgh, Scotland for the next eight months or so, while I attend school here. Generally Canada is ignored by the UK media (and that is fine with me) but after this week’s shootings in Montreal we are on front pages internationally.

I’m just posting to point out an article available online from The Guardian. It is mostly about the other Montreal school shooting, at L’Ecole Polytechnique, where Marc Lepine murdered fourteen women. The article is obviously intended for non-Canadians, but I think it’s worth checking out if (like me) you are too young to remember Lepine. It’s pretty tough reading, though.