We just got word of a rockin’ all-ages fundraising show happening this weekend in Toronto. Check it out:

Hosted by former MuchMusic VJ Hannah Sung, RADIO OPERA: A Benefit Concert for CARE Canada will feature Constantines, Jason Collett, comedian Sabrina Jalees [who was featured in Issue 1 of Shameless and has made you laugh at several of our launch parties] and DJ Rory Them Finest. Money raised will go towards CARE-led youth peace-building projects in East Timor.

WHAT: RADIO OPERA: A Benefit Concert for CARE Canada

WHERE: Lee’s Palace, 529 Bloor Street West, Toronto.

WHEN: Saturday, December 2, 2006. Doors open at 1:30 pm.

HOW MUCH: $16 in advance (at Rotate This, Soundscapes or Ticketmaster), $20 at the door.

With our Fall/Winter 2006 issue at the printer (check your mailboxes in a week or so!), we’d like to announce that Shameless co-editors, Melinda and Nicole, will be looking for a new editoral crew to take over running the magazine so that we can retire from indie publishing to pursue other projects. Here’s a sneak peak of the letter from the editors from the issue:

We always laugh when people ask us where Shameless HQ is located. Though we get a kick out of mentioning our headquarters in the magazine, the truth is, Shameless HQ doesn’t exist.

As a grassroots independent magazine funded entirely by subscriptions, newsstand sales and limited advertising, we’ve simply never had the budget for an office. Over the past few years, we’ve worked out of dozens of bedrooms, kitchens, post offices and coffee shops and been chased out of several restaurants for loitering. To us, Shameless HQ is wherever we happen to be sitting at any given moment.

The world of small magazine publishing is not as glamorous as you might think. Sure, we get to air our opinions in the media, spend time with smart, creative folks and throw ourselves parties to celebrate new issues. But we also lug heavy boxes of magazines across town on subways, streetcars and bikes, and come home from our stressful day jobs to be greeted with more work (this time unpaid) that keeps us up too late and sometimes makes us cranky.

Still, seeing Shameless evolve from an idea we conceived in journalism school to the success it is now has been amazing. Running the magazine has taught us a lot about publishing, media activism, grassroots marketing and event planning, and introduced us to some of the smartest, sassiest young women (and men!) in the country, from our writers and artists to the members of our teen editorial collective.

But we’re tired. After almost three years of running Shameless (and a couple of years of planning before that), we both need a break. And so, if all goes according to plan, the Spring 2007 issue will be our last as co-editors and co-publishers.

On that note, we’re starting our search for energetic, talented folks to take over the magazine while we shift to an advisory role and focus on other projects. We have a fantastic community of writers, artists, readers and supporters whove made Shameless a part of their lives (thank you!) and we want to see this community and the magazine grow.

We’re seeking people who are passionate about our mandate, have a strong vision for the magazine, get along well with others and can work from home in their spare time, on a volunteer basis (and if youre someone who can figure out how to make this magazine pay its staff and contributors, then we need you, too!). If you’d like to discuss the application process, contact us at submit@shamelessmag.com.

Whew… now that I’ve had a chance to unload my bag of photocopied goodness from this year’s Expozine, I thought it high time to draw your attention to the work of one lady I met there: Arlene Texta-Queen, who does, among other things, nude portraits of friends and acquaintances using felt-tip markers, the kind you probably bought for art class in eighth grade.

Admittedly I’m kind of a sucker for any high-intensity project that uses a lo-fi means of production to a nifty end, but even if you don’t give a care about stuff like that, her drawings are still well worth checking out. Her body of work forms a sort of alternative pin-up calendar of queer/underground/counter-culture/hottt ladies (and some fellas) in their altogether - not the kind of folks you usually see in your standard nude portrait. And definitely not rendered in glorious techni(Texta)colour. As exposed and extroverted as nude portraits can be, there is nonetheless something very tender and touching about seeing these people represented in their day-to-day lives - writing, riding a bike, lounging on the sofa - except naked. Do check her stuff out. I’ll be back with more tidbits (and hopefully less parenthetical yuk-yuks) soon.

I’m beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that posting on any event outside Toronto on this board might be a little academic, so let this be my attempt to woo readers from outside the Big Smoke, specifically those in Montreal and surrounding areas. This Saturday is the fifth annual Expozine, Montreal’s yearly fair of all things stapled, photocopied, folded, bound, silkscreened, glued, BeDazzled, beglittered, hand-tinted, and read all over. Take a look at the website for info on where and when, and also for details on the fifth anniversary party taking place the night of.

I’ve been tabling at Expozine since it began in 2002, and it never fails to blow my mind (and empty my pockets). Not that it’s all fun and games - as my friend Angie so rightly pointed out, the zine fair basically takes people who don’t generally like being around other humans (hence the time spent hunched over photocopiers and wielding x-acto knives with mind-boggling precision) and shoves them into a room together for eight hours straight. Needless to say, some chaos ensues. But there’s always some amazing gems to be found amidst the jostling shoulders and sweaty palms. I’ll get back to you soon with my findings. In the meantime - Montrealers, bonne chance et bonne fete. And Torontonians, eat your hearts out - and then go write a zine about it. I’ll traydja for it.

It’s taken me a long time to write this review, likely because photojournalist Lauren Greenfield’s Thin (Raincoast) is such a powerful and moving publication that I was paralyzed to properly do it justice. Greenfield’s previous publication (her second,) Girl Culture, had a similar effect on me when it was released in 2002. In Greenfield’s decade long exploration of female body image via photography and narrative, she has revealed an uncanny ability to expose the devastating effect American Pop Culture has on girls and their self-image, while still maintaining a sensitive and honest approach in her depictions. Her photography allows her subjects, primarily teenage girls, to speak for themselves, without external judgment, while still viciously critiquing the larger systems that attempt to trap them.

With Thin, both a book and an award winning HBO documentary of the same name, her subjects are patients at the Renfrew Center in South Florida, one of the best-known residential facilities for the treatment of eating disorders. In her introduction, Greenfield states that “the stories of the women were incredible and the atmosphere raw and honest.” It is also clear that this project, unlike Girl Culture and Fast Forward, is less about the destructive effects of American media and values (although the connection is evident,) and more about the very personal effects of mental illness on the individual.

The book, which Greenfield describes as a “companion” to the movie, is an attempt to “tell a broader story about the diversity of the population affected.” It includes not only intimate depictions of many of the women she met at the Renfrew Center in the decade she has visited it, but also their own narratives and journal entries. The overall voice is not Greenfield’s, but rather the voices of the women who so generously and candidly let her into their lives, women whose “modus operandi is (as part of their illness) is trafficking in secrets, lies and manipulation.”

At times reading Thin is a difficult, infuriating and frustrating experience. It refuses to edit out any of the self-destructive facets of having an eating disorder, nor does it choose to take a clinical or what Greenfield calls a “talking heads” approach to explaining the disease. Instead she simply and beautifully tells the story of individual women dealing with their own trauma, pain, confusion and healing.

Greenfield does not choose to tell the story of how culture and media and our value systems are to blame for this illness. These women, despite their often misunderstood battles with a misunderstood illness, are so thoughtfully depicted by Greenfield that they are revealed not as freaks or victims, but rather as the strong survivors they are.

A recent study found that 4.8 % of women in Ontario currently have full or partial eating disorders. For more information about eating disorders, go here.

I couldn’t say it better than this bulletin from Adbusters regarding tomorrow’s Buy Nothing Day (Friday, November 24th) - so here it is, posted wholesale (oh the ironic word choice…).

Dear Jammers and Cultural Creatives,

This year’s Buy Nothing Day has a special poignancy. Never before have
our emerging environmental crises been planted so firmly on the lips of
the policymakers and the general public. Rather than screaming from the
fringes, high-profile economists and scientists are sounding the
warnings in respected journals and the halls of parliament — warnings
that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we
are setting ourselves up for the most massive and widest-ranging market
failure the world has ever seen.

All of this points to a profound need for a shift in the way we see
things. Recycling, protecting our waterways, driving hybrid cars — all
the old environmental imperatives — are great, but it’s becoming
obvious that they don’t address the core problem: we have to change our
lifestyles, we have to change our culture, and we have to consume
smarter and consume less.

This is the message of this year’s Buy Nothing Day, and there are only a
few days left to get that message out onto the streets. From the quietly
sublime to the crazily anarchic, the ways in which you can mark BND are
only limited by the imperative not to spend. Strut your stuff as if the
fate of whole planet is resting in your hands, because even if each of
us only does one small things to contribute, 96,847 small things sure
add up!

At the BND campaign headquarters - that’s http://www.adbusters.org/bnd -
we’ve already featured upcoming actions in Japan, the UK, Canada, and
the USA, with more to come from all over the world, including Brazil,
Colombia, Denmark, Hungary, Spain and Sweden. You can also download
posters and other resources, as well as connect with activists in your
own little corner of the globe.

Remember: Make a scene. Make people laugh. Make them think. If you have
to, make them angry. Just get out there.

P.S. Remember to send your songs, photos, posters and video to
bnd@adbusters.org — we’ll feature everything we can at adbusters.org,
and the best will find there way into our BND 2006 wrapup in the next
issue of the magazine.

So, Michael Richards, better known as Kramer, freaked out at a comedy club on Sunday night and dropped quite a few “N-bombs” when a couple of African American men heckled him. When they yelled back that his slurs were uncalled for, he replied by saying “that’s what you get when you interrupt the white man!” Bizarrely, he went on the David Letterman show the next day and uttered the now famous quote: “the crazy thing is, I’m not a racist person!” I was amazed that a person could say, “I’m not a racist person” virtually hours after screaming essentially the worst racial slur in the English language.

You can watch a video of the whole awful incident on youtube (with subtitles!). After Richards screams “He’s a n*****! He’s a n*****!” the object of his hatred responds by calling him “a cracker-ass washout” (or something of the like.) Richards does not even reply to the word “cracker.” I remember a story my white friend once told me about how a car full of people of colour rode by him on the street and screamed “honkie!” He thought it was funny, if not a little odd. If someone screamed “chink” at me out of a car window, I would cry my eyes out (that is, because I am Chinese, not just because I’m highly sensitive.), or at least break something. While I’m obviously (and please don’t interpret it as such) not saying I demand more high quality, hurtful slurs for people who are not of a marginalised group, it strikes me as strange and problematic how all the slurs for someone who is male or white or not queer or not poor or not disabled (and so on), no matter the hateful intention behind them, are usually greeted with amusement or indifference.

The other day I was telling my friend about a co-worker who had called his girlfriend a f****** b****. I was saying how I literally gasped at the violence of his words. She asked why, and asked if would I be as upset if my co-worker’s girlfriend had called my co-worker a f****** ass****. Obviously not. And I don’t think that’s a double standard. Because these words occur within a particular context where a hurtful word is not just a word, it’s a reminder to whoever the word is lobbed at that even in their own home culture, they are at the bottom of the rung, they are not powerful, in fact, they’re powerless. That’s probably precisely why Richards used the n-bomb - his heckler made him feel small and weak, and he came up with the exact word that would remind the heckler that he was nothing, and that a little over a hundred years ago, it was illegal for people of his race to read and write.

On the topic of damn racism, here is a great article about asiaphilia, or as it is more yuckily known, yellow fever. My favourite part in this article is the condemnation of Gwen Stefani and the four Japanese girls she drags around with her (when did it become acceptable to use human beings as accessories?) - I could never quite put into words what horrified me about Gwen’s use of people of a particular race as adornments, but this writer articulates why it is just so disturbing and repugnant.

An anthology of 24 essays by geeky women, Shes Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff “celebrates women who have flourished in the male-dominated realms of technical and cultural arcana. Editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders bring together a diverse range of critical and personal essays about the meaning of female nerdhood by women who are in love with genomics, obsessed with blogging, learned about sex from Dungeons and Dragons, and aren’t afraid to match wits with men or computers. More than anything, She’s Such a Geek is a celebration and call to arms: it’s a hopeful book which looks forward to a day when women will invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, and run the government.”

The She’s Such a Geek website and blog is also up and running now — specializing in entries on geeky topics as they relate to women and girls.

I thought I’d post the book info today, as it doesn’t look like either amazon or
chapters have tonnes of copies stocked (hopefully indie stores will do better), and this book seems like a great, reasonably priced Festivus prezzie for the geeky girl in your life…

For the past 8 months I have been in the neurotic and distracted mess of a headspace brought on by a cervical cancer scare. From a questionably “bad PAP” in June to a biopsy in October, and a thousand questions and confusions in between, I have been navigating the unclear world of my cervix and its wayward cells. As someone who has been avoiding a PAP for far too long (not recommended), to suddenly have that many people looking at my sickly cervix was a tad overwhelming.

Lately HPV (the most common sexually transmitted viral infection in the world) has gotten a lot of awareness campaigns, press and attention with the recent release of an HPV vaccine available to women, but I was amazed to hear that 87% of teens had not heard of the disease. For those of us familiar with HPV, we’ve heard the statistic that HPV is responsible for 90% of cervical cancer cases, and that up to 1 in 3 women have the virus, but statistics such as these can cause the average owner of a cervix to panic and expect the very worse. And expect the worse is what I did. In the past 8 months I have gone from being stoic and reasonable, to crying hysterically in front of med students, convinced I was at death’s door with few answers to console me.

The problem with HPV is that there are so may different varieties (over 100) with so many varying degrees of worry- some will indeed cause cervical cancer, but others cause very treatable genital warts, others do nothing and some simply go away on their own. Testing for HPV is also not very common - my personal HPV testing only tested for a small number of high risk strains of the virus and had to happen at a hospital, not at my local doctor.

In all my neurotic panic stricken 8 month madness, I did find some solace in this piece of advice (half way down the page) that I came across by accident while waiting for my biopsy results. Sasha’s advice to a partner concerned by his girlfriend’s HPV diagnosis answered a whole wack o’ questions the doctors in all their “doctor-speak” simply couldn’t:

“HPV doesn’t help its intelligibility at all by being so deranged. Transitory, incurable, cancerous, benign… Jesus H., make up your mind!”

Yesterday, my biopsy came back cancer-free and my HPV results negative. My cells are still a bit wayward but I’ll take the follow up exam over the confusion any day. If you want to learn more about loving your cervix and what you can do to take care of it, read more here.