Happy New Year from Shameless magazine! See you in 2009!

Our beloved Thea Lim over here at Shameless has not yet departed to the United States and will grace us once more before she goes with her intelligence, brilliance, and general feminist awesomeness this Sunday at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape for their monthly Feminist Activist Herstory Forum!

If I weren’t in the US myself, I’d be there! So I hope you can be!

Here are the deets:

Date: Sunday, January 4th
Time: 2-3:30pm
Where: 17 Phoebe St, The TRCC/MWAR Centre (Just northeast of Queen and Spadina)

This is a FREE event open to all and includes snacks

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Tiina, you’ve inspired me. I was going to write something mopey about how this time of year makes me feel like a sailboat caught in the doldrums, no wind in sight (though come to think of it, when is wind ever in sight? Whoaaa), facing the prospect of a long and dreary paddle, and how all I can bear to listen to is stoner drone from Baltimore. But then I read your Top 10 list and thought, yes! There are things to celebrate! So without further ado, here is Picks from Planet Venus’s top albums by female artists or bands from 2008. Again, totally biased, personal, and undemocratic, and in no particular order.

1) Valet - Naked Acid
2) Yo Majesty - Futuristically Speaking… Never Be Afraid
3) Gang Gang Dance - St. Dymphna
4) Duchess Says - Anthologie Des 3 Perchoirs
5) Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
6) Black Mountain - In The Future
7) Wet NOSE Hero - Congratulations Ha Ha Ha
8) Laura Barrett - Earth Sciences
9) various - Bearded Ladies
10) Marnie Stern - This Is It…

Details after the cut!

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Okay, I’m not saying I support hierarchies, or that all art needs to be graded and ranked, but I LOVE top ten lists. So here’s my totally biased and completely personal list of the best comics of 2008.

10. Omega the Unknown
9. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
8. Runaways: Dead End Kids
7. Janes in Love
6. The War At Ellsmere
5. RASL
4. Skim
3. All Star Superman
2. Swallow Me Whole
1. Emiko Superstar

Details after the jump.

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Every Thursday I profile a new incredible woman, each from a different walk of life. Different professions, causes, backgrounds, ethnicities, orientations, and anything/everything else!

So without further delay, let me introduce the jolly Mary Claus…

Mary Claus at a PETR Protest at the North Pole, December 13, 2008.

Very little is known about the woman who is so commonly referred to as Mrs. Claus. More than just Santa’s partner in life and co-manager of the most famous toy workshop in history, Mary is a crusader for labour rights, advocate of children’s causes, and founder of PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Reindeer). With all that she has to manage during this busy time of year, she still takes a moment to tell us why she’s not just Santa’s Mrs., she’s also a Shameless Woman!

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Big Foot Memorial Ride arriving in Porcupine, South Dakota 2007

Amidst all the holiday hub-bub nonsense what with all the rampant shopping, grotesque overspending, power eating, and under-the-weather feelings many of us encounter, I cast my eyes to my brothers and sisters who use the holiday season to do something remarkably different.

Two rides take place in the United States every December to commemorate some of the largest massacres in Native American history, where communities, families, Elders, and youth alike gather from all across Turtle Island to ride in the footsteps of our ancestors who put their lives down so our peoples could carry on the very culture that sustains us today.

On December 10th, the Dakota 38 Ride started on the Lower Brule reservation in South Dakota, and will end up in Mankato, Minnesota on December 26th. It commemorates the result of a federal policy and a newly formed state to remove the Dakota people from their lands and led to the largest mass hanging in US history on December 26, 1862.

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Following in the footsteps of Anna and her musical solution to holiday stress, I offer my own plan for surviving December: The Guilty Pleasure Movie. Everyone has one hidden under the bed or at the back of the entertainment unit. A movie that, despite endless viewings and despite its lack of any apparent value, still rewards the watcher with a mindless sense of serenity. In the interest of full disclosure, I will cop to my guilty pleasure of choice. It’s a little something I call The Always Entertaining Film Career of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I started watching out for the big screen appearances of Ms. Gellar way before I had ever even seen Buffy. I loved her particular blend of vacuous bimbo, catty bitch, and evil trollop parts. The more offensive to my feminist sensibilities, the more I loved her work. From Scream 2 to Cruel Intentions to Southland Tales, Sarah Michelle Gellar just warms my heart with a combination of excellent comic timing and horrible career choices.

To this list of mostly awful, but always entertaining movies, I add Simply Irresistible. Sure, it’s a rip off of Like Water For Chocolate, and sure, the dialogue is full of sexist stereotypes, and yes, the male love interest is a irredeemable chauvinist pig the entire movie, but who cares? It has Sarah Michelle Gellar playing a cook granted magical kitchen powers by a muppet crab sent down from heaven by her dead mother! A muppet crab that she talks to and carries around in her purse! And she vanquishes all the bad guys with orgasm-inducing eclairs! Plus, a supporting cast that includes Patricia Clarkson, Betty Buckley and Dylan Baker, all of whom could make a recitation of the phone book funny and awesome. Simply Irresistible is my new cure for the holiday blues!

What about you? In the holiday spirit of shamelessness, what are your most embarrassing guilty pleasure?

For a gal with all the powers of Superman, Supergirl has had a pretty rough go of it. In the sixties Superman sent her to live in a crappy orphanage and only got her out when he needed a pawn in some plan (usually to make Lois jealous). Her origin story is confusing: She’s Superman’s cousin? She was sent to earth to kill him? She was built by Lex Luthor? In the past few years, she’s often been drawn less as a teenage girl, and more as a creepy male fantasy. Oh yeah, and she totally died.

But things are looking up for Supergirl lately, in the main DC universe and otherwise. She has her own new, all ages-friendly series, Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in 8th Grade.

Issue one was adorable, fun, and surprisingly, a little complex.

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Shameless web editor and blogger Cate Simpson has written a great post over at This Magazine about the difficulties the holiday season holds for queer people who don’t always feel welcome at the family table, which I highly recommend you check out:

For some, it’s that they simply can’t go home — either because they were shown the door after their first adolescent fumblings were met with more than the usual amount of horror, or because they’ve fled their small towns for urban centres and can’t afford the trip back. For others, it’s that they themselves are still welcome at the family dinner table, but evidence of their “alternative” lifestyles must be toned down for everyone else’s comfort levels. For many queers, this means enduring questions about the dates they’re supposedly going on with members of the opposite sex, while questions about their true spouses are conspicuously absent.

Simpson suggests that because of this kind of tension, queers have led the way in terms of forming alternative holiday traditions. And the idea of reclaiming the holidays from the clutches of Wal-Mart and the annual family bicker-fest is looking like a better and better idea to lots of people.

I myself didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas so I suppose I’m lucky in that the holiday season has always been a time for me to construct my own rituals while others were out performing theirs, willingly or not; for many years my Jew-mas tradition involved my best friend and I going to 7-11 for takeout coffees (it was the only place open on Dec. 25th) and driving around marvelling at the eerily empty streets of Winnipeg, followed by a screening of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian at my parents’ house.

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