My New Year’s resolution, I’ve just decided, is to be more like Laurie Anderson. But I’m not sure what I mean by that. Do I mean:

1) Be in complete and total control of my creative output; incorporate everything I know and everything I possess in pursuit of what I want to express?
2) Be innovative to an absurd degree; if what I need doesn’t exist yet, invent it? (Anderson invented at least two unique musical instruments/technological creations: a new kind of violin involving magnetic tape and an electronic “talking stick”)
3) Be always, always, always critical of systems around me, and challenge them through my work?
4) Wear a white suit all the time and dance like it don’t matter?

Yes, yes, yes. And yes.

Two videos that changed my life (one after the cut):

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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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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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The holidays can be a rough time for many people; what with the excessive family time (“Yes, Auntie Zelda, as a matter of fact I am trying to scare away husbands”), trauma caused by shattering of previously rock-solid resolve to be healthy, and the complete and utter panic attacks brought on every time you hear a “funky” remix of Jingle Bell Rock, the season of joy can sometimes turn into a nightmare. Well, I know what you need. You need a bunch of latter-day Los Angeles hippies dancing down the street in decrepit party dresses. You need Lavender Diamond.

The video for Open Your Heart from last year’s album Imagine Our Love is so feel-good it kind of makes me uncomfortable, like I start wondering what kind of sick creep I am that I keep excepting Becky Stark to get hit by a Good Humor ice cream truck as she wobbles down the street like a new-born deer on her vintage rollerskates. But the thing that saves this video from total saccharine cheesitude is that it’s 100% for real. As far as I can tell, Lavender Diamond are total dyed-in-the-hemp A-1 genuine peace-and-love-loving lovers. (more inside…)

Thought I ought to draw your attention to this project being organized by a group of Montreal-based queer activists:

The PRISONER CORRESPONDENCE PROJECT coordinates a direct letter-writing program for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, gendervariant, queer, 2spirit & intersexed inmates in Canada and the US, linking these communities with people who identify similarly who are outside of prison.

The project also coordinates a resource library of harm reduction practice (safer sex, safer drug use, clean needle care, safer tattooing, etc), HIV and HepC prevention, homophobia, transphobia, etc. The idea of the project is not to match people up romantically, but create accountable friendships where those involved can support and learn from one another.

As an organization, we try to be allies to prisoner struggle, and reject the ways that people a part of these communities are targeted and criminalized.

THE PROJECT IS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR NON-INCARCERATED FOLKS TO ACT AS PENPALS WITH INCARCERATED FOLKS IN CANADA AND THE US! Please get in touch if you want more info on becoming a penpal!

** Though the organizing collective is Montreal-based, you can still become a penpal if you’re not living in Montreal. We’re also currently trying to distribute promo materials in other cities, so please please get in touch if you want to do some out-of-town outreach (even putting up a few flyers or asking a few friends would be helpful!) **

For more information, or to otherwise get involved, please contact
queertrans.prisonersolidarity@gmail.com

In conjunction with a few other activist groups here in Montreal, the PCP (uh, too bad about the acronym) organized a screening of film responses to the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s earlier this week. (more inside…)

Do you find the music industry’s manipulations and machinations to be as confusing as I do? Do music mags’ “What’s Hot and What’s Not” lists make your head spin? Have you ever showed up at a party wearing a band t- shirt that you were sure was the latest thing, only to be told “That band is more out than Ellen Degeneres”? Well, fear no more, friends! Monitor Mix, the blog Carrie Brownstein (of dearly-departed Sleater-Kinney) writes for NPR, is taking the risk out of music fandom by hiring an astrologer and psychic to predict the trends for 2009. Now you can know what’s happening with the big names and tastemakers before they do! Seriously though, this is an awesome idea, and I can’t wait to see which of these predictions come true.

What are YOUR predictions for music next year? I especially am wondering what Neko Case‘s “big announcement” is going to be. Here she is (after the cut) talking about boys wearing girl pants, which is one trend I think we all hope will die a quiet death before it’s time to get a new calendar.

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By which I mean saying goodbye to folk music and civil rights activist heroes. But only two weeks after we lost Miriam Makeba, we now also have to do without Odetta, the American folksinger who helped generations realize how essential African-American music has been to the development of songwriting, in America and elsewhere. She was also a major figure of the American civil rights movement - she performed at the historic 1963 March on Washington, the same march where Martin Luther King told America that he had a dream.

I kind of think of Odetta as the taproot of American folk music; her recordings and performances nourished so many people whose fame in some ways exceeded her own: Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, and Harry Belafonte, among others, cite her as an early inspiration and influence. They packed stadiums with songs inspired by her style and throaty voice, and meanwhile she just kept at it, more or less under the radar of pop culture, recording and touring and performing well into her seventies.

But those who knew her knew her well; I’m proud to say that my hometown, Winnipeg, recognized her for what she was - or at least the Winnipeg Folk Festival did, when they honoured her in 2006 with their Lifetime Achievement Award. My friend’s mom had the honour of being her “driver” that summer, and she said she had never met someone who exuded such warmth and graciousness.

This video of her performing Water Boy is heart-shakingly powerful.

Tributes here and here and many other places too.

We’ll miss you lady.

Krista Muir has been a mainstay on the Montreal music scene for more than a decade now. She’s probably best known for her off-the-wall, food-obsessed, fashionista Teutonic alter-ego Lederhosen Lucil, a blonde-braided German uber-hostess who’s been known to bust out songs that sound like a cooking show set to Casio keyboard sample tunes. But of late, we’ve been getting a chance to see the woman under the wig and hosen; Muir has just released an album under her own name called Accidental Railway, and it’s full of tender songwriting gems.

This sweet video for the track Leave Alight, from the new album, was directed by Kara Blake and features Muir’s skills on the baritone ukelele. It’s kind of a masterpiece of simplicity, IMHO.

And oh, just for the heck of it, here is a video for Lederhosen Lucil’s Semi-Sweet after the cut.

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Have I mentioned how much I love Cat and Girl? Oh yes, I believe I have. The webcomic by Dorothy Gambrell never ceases to be a balm for my overcaffeinated, neurotically self-analytic, black-humoured, Babysitters-Club-loving soul.

Whoa, it’s a countercultural comic about counterculture that I’m using to advertise counterculture. The mind boggleth.

Okay, but the real point of this post is to let you know that YOUR SOUL TOO can be soothed by such products of minds depraved and genius, in material form no less! Montreal’s annual zine fair, Expozine, is happening this weekend, for two whole days of photocopied, silkscreened, stapled, hand-bound, sketched out and jittery madness. 200+ tables of independent bookworks, comics, art, crafts, posters, clothes, buttons, and snacks. Plus I’ll be there tabling with Invisible Publishing, where I’ll be flogging my book, along with books by such Shameless luminaries as Stacey May Fowles and Thea Lim.

Crucial deets:

Saturday and Sunday November 29th and 30th, 12 - 6
5035 St. Dominique between St. Joseph and Laurier (Metro Laurier)
FREE ADMISSION (take that, Toronto!)