Q: When does a feminist blog concern itself with men? A: When we’re talking about New York City’s MEN, a band made of JD Samson (of Le Tigre and moustache fame), Ginger Brooks Takahashi (who’s also appeared in The Ballet and the wonderful Black Mountain Music Project, with Mirah), Michael O’Neill and other special guests. MEN make sounds in the proud queerio dance music tradition of Lesbians on Ecstasy, The Ssion, and Tracy & the Plastics. The video for Off Our Backs by K8 Hardy (who also produced the wicked tree-vulva video for the Lezzies on X song Sisters in the Struggle), below, is the kind of visual garage sale/image stew/eyecandy that half makes my head explode and half makes me want to go out and, like, be somebody.

MEN will be performing this Saturday in Montreal at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) with a veritable panoply of loud and proud women, including Alexis O’Hara and DJ Lynne T, who has been spinning up a storm of late.
They play Toronto June 24 at Wrong Bar and June 26 at Lee’s Palace as part of Vazaleen. For more details and tour dates, check out their Myspace.

Why should Portland have all the fun? This August Montreal is hosting its first ever Rock Camp For Girls, a five-day camp where girls learn to play an instrument, form a band, and finish up by playing a show for their hysterical, screaming, panty-tossing fans.

From the organizers:

Rock Camp is a space where girls discover and express their talents, and become leaders in creating their own kind of cultural production through music. Female musicians and community members support girls through instrument instruction, tech tutorials, band practice and skill-building workshops.

RCfG is putting on a number of fundraisers over the next while to help finance the camp, one of which is tomorrow night, and features Giselle Numba One, who I posted on long ages ago, Nightwood, Little Scream, and DJ Lynne T of Lesbians on Ecstasy. There’s a word for it: “ladysplosion”. No, wait, I mean “awesome”. And also “not to be missed”.

Key details:
Saturday June 13th
Il Motore, 179 Jean-Talon Ouest
Show starts at 9:30pm
$10

Here’s Giselle Numba One with a little taste of what you might find on Saturday.

For more details on Rock Camp For Girls and related events, check out their site.

Reading the story posted below, I was struck by a couple of things. One is that although we hear a lot of reasons as to why women should have the freedom to choose what to do with our bodies, we don’t hear a lot of stories of actual women making that choice. At least not lately; I remember the good old days of Degrassi Junior High (1987), when Erica got pregnant and her decision to have an abortion sparked controversy and discussion - but at least it was out there. Why is it that we seem to have devolved since the 70s and 80s? Many women are afraid to talk about abortion, for fear of reprisal from anti-choice factions, or even just friends and family.

I’ve been living in a shed for the past two weeks at the Anchor Zine Archive and reading a lot of Doris zine by Cindy Crabb, and remembering just what an amazing writer she is. Her stories of her three abortions are frank and frankly empowering:

When I was pregnant I forced myself to look at the diagrams. Memorize the text instead of blocking it out. The eggs are formed in the ovaries, they go down the fallopian tubes… I only read it when no one was around. I locked the door and was jumpy and nervous, scared someone would catch me. I hid it like pornography.

It seemed almost cliche, but learning about my body and the changes going on in it, and knowing that it wasn’t out of control, it made me feel like my body was strong and mine. It was a way I’d never felt before.

The abortion itself wasn’t too bad. I had it done at a feminist health clinic and the women there took care of me the way it should be done. They held up a mirror, and that was the first time I’d seen those parts of me. They explained every touch and every second of the procedure. Now you’ll feel the speculum, this is the local anesthetic, you’ll feel some cramping now as she dilates the os, breathe deep.

(more inside…)

The Girls Action Foundation (formerly POWER Camp National/Filles d’action) has a whole whack of activities coming up, and the time to register is now!

The Girls Action Foundation video team hard at work (Girls Action Foundation)

From a national retreat, where you can meet and learn from activist ladies from all over the country, to workshops on building leadership and creating programming for young women, this is a great chance to hone your feminist activist skills and get connected with like-minded individuals.

To learn more and register for the various activities, go to the Girls Action Foundation website.

I am big sucker for animation. And when it comes with Neko Case, well, say no more, I’m sold.

Neko is a woman after my own heart - besides being an incredibly talented musician, she is always quick to give props to her influences, especially women who have inspired her. She’s also hil-freakin-larious in interview - I highly suggest checking out some of the archives on her website to hear about how what we call PMS is actually anger that comes from not being allowed to “mate”, and how Poison Ivy‘s guitar-playing can get you pregnant. Her travelogues and biography also read better than most fiction out there. In short: a gem.

This is from her fresh-off-the-CD-burner album Middle Cyclone.

Thinking about summer plans? If you live in Montreal and are between the ages of 10 and 17, this is your chance to be the media! CKUT 90.3 FM is offering its first ever radio camp, a chance for future journalists, DJs, music enthusiasts, writers, and documentary makers to learn the ins and outs of radio. From the CKUT website:

Over a week long session campers (ages 10-13 and 14-17) will write, produce and act in a radio play, conduct interviews and create short documentaries, learn to dj and at the end of the week will produce and host a live radio show on CKUT!

This could be you. (venus collective)

This is an amazing opportunity for young folks to get involved with something that, for me at least, is inspiring, exciting, edumacational, oh, fine, I’ll just go ahead and say it - life-altering. Participants will learn such skills as how to make sound effects for radio, DJ skills like scratching and beat-matching, how to interview bands and artists, how to put together a documentary or radio play, and sound-editing. Plus you’ll get to hang out with other media-enthusiasts and wave-makers, and meet musicians, DJs, journalists, and all the other usual suspects who make for a vibrant media landscape. Who knows, you could end up karaokeing I’m Too Sexy with members of Les Georges Leningrad and Lesbians on Ecstasy (see image) - anything can happen.

Sessions are one week long and run all summer, from June 29th to August 21st. To find out more information and register, go here.

Whew! I’m still spent from last week’s rant on community radio. While I gather my energies for the next round, please enjoy this “music video” from Dutch band The Shocking Blue. I really appreciate that period in musical history (the 60s?) when someone had the idea of recording and broadcasting bands, but the whole thing was so new that you mostly just got a lot of awkward standing around in random locales (are they at a zoo? A medical laboratory?) with, like, two cuts, and “special effects” meant flashing an image of a record cover or Mariska Veres’s face really quickly to implant subliminal messages. Enjoy!

I have something a little bit unusual to share this week – instead of a music pick, I am putting forth what some may call A Rant. Nicole’s post about the situation at CKLN has got me thinking about community radio. It’s still not totally clear to me exactly what’s going on at the Ryerson station, but what is obvious not just there but everywhere is that the relevance of community radio is being questioned, mostly by students at universities, who are the ones who most often provide crucial funding to these stations.

Here’s how it works: Universities give campus/community radio stations a big chunk of the money they need to operate, and some (or all) of that money is gathered by charging students a fee – usually around $4 a semester – which in exchange gives the students membership privileges at the station, meaning they can use its resources and become volunteer hosts and programmers. Some universities have been giving students the option to opt out of these fees, and it seems like many students are keen to save a few bucks by withholding money from a service which they feel isn’t relevant, useful, or interesting. In a world where you can carry around 80,000 songs in your back pocket, get newsfeeds from the most reliable (or most obscure) sources around the world, and read highly entertaining, informative blogs, why would you bother tuning into a bunch of amateurs who are just learning when to press the On Air button, or even more so, why would you want to become one of them?

Okay, I too have been a broke student. I’ve re-used teabags, felt overjoyed at finding a nice pen on the sidewalk, gotten friends to cut my hair, and worn sweaters until they were more hole than clothing. I know saving bucks is important, and no one wants to feel like they’re throwing them down the (radio) tubes. I’ve also been a volunteer at a community radio station for close to ten years now, and I think I come from a pretty good position to talk about why community radio is worth supporting. So without further ado, here are my REASONS WHY COMMUNITY RADIO IS WORTH ONE LESS LATTE A SEMESTER.

1) Community radio creates a space for community and media engagement, not a product to be sold.
(more inside…)

Very pleased that the mighty Sister Suvi will be launching long-awaited full-length album Now I Am Champion at the end of the month. Basically because I think anything Merrill Garbus (aka Tune-Yards, who I profiled waaaaay back when) touches turns to diamonds. But not blood diamonds. Maybe more like crystals - perfectly formed crystals you find in a cave somewhere that seem like they ought to have been manufactured by elves wearing tiny hardhats and riding magic ponies, but they really just grew that way, because that’s their nature.

The launch happens in Montreal on Sunday March 29th at Il Motore, 179 Jean Talon Ouest, at 9 PM, with Takka Takka and Postcards. The Toronto launch is March 28th at Lee’s Palace.

Here Sister Suvi plays live in Ottawa, with surprisingly good sound quality for a video recording:

In other news, I can’t wait for another show coming up this weekend, as part of Montreal’s Radical Queer Week: it’s called Folk as Queers, and it features Sarah Mangle, Rae Spoon, and The Inappropriate Hymns and Hers, a band which started last summer at a band-off where names drawn from a hat determined the members, and the rest was up to ingenuity and badassitude; eight months later they’re still going strong, and word has it that a recording is in the near future. If the Moldy Peaches in their weirdest, most perverted incarnation (I’m thinking like Who’s Got The Crack and Steak For Chicken Moldy Peaches, not that soppy song that Michael Cera eviscerated) teamed up with the Indigo Girls, they would still be less awesome than this band.

This one happens Saturday March 14th at Le Chat des Artistes, 2205 Parthenais, at 9 PM. Check out the Radical Queer Week facebook page for more events listings - they are a-plenty.