Nobody (except maybe Roy Orbison) knows crying like Irma Thomas. If you wanted, you could make a mixtape exclusively of songs she’s recorded that are about crying or tears - Cry On, In Between Tears, Cry Cry Cry, Hold Me While I Cry. And, you know, it would still make me happier than most bubblegum pop. Okay, Aretha has a bigger voice, and Otis Redding is more enjoyably melodramatic, but for my money Irma is the soul singer I want with me when the chips are down. Her songs are heartfelt, but also complex - heartbreak isn’t the only danger in Irma’s world… or, okay, it is, but leading to heartbreak are things like gossip, long-distance relationships, forgiveness, and too much rain. It makes ya think, and it rhymes. Plus, she’s been at it for about five decades, so you know she means it. Fun fact: She, and not the Rolling Stones, was the first to record the I’ll-get-you-yet classic Time Is On My Side.

Irma recently played the Pop Montreal festival, and my co-conspirator Angie Wilson caught up with her and interviewed her for our radio show. You can download the Venus podcast and hear her chat about getting older, hurricane Katrina, and bein’ a sweet soul queen here; just click on Venus and follow the download instructions. The interview is in hour 2.

After the cut is one of the most awkward fan videos of all time featuring my favorite Irma Thomas song, Two Winters Long. There are better quality recordings out there, but the hand! The awkward hand! You know you love it.

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Sometimes life is hard. Sometimes your bike doesn’t work right, and the people you love are far away, and don’t return your phone calls, and there is a weird smell coming from under your kitchen counter that’s probably not going to go away, and you stay up at night worrying about things like the Hadron particle accelerator creating a black hole that will swallow the earth before you have a chance to say you’re sorry. Sometimes it’s like that.

And sometimes a pair of Swedish teenagers go into the forest and record the MOST BEAUTIFUL SONG YOU’VE EVER HEARD.

(what I do know: The band is called First Aid Kit, and they are covering a song by Seattle’s Fleet Foxes)

Picks from Planet Venus is going to be on hiatus for a bit due to my aforementioned book tour. So until it resumes, please enjoy the video for Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield. Oh Pat, when do I get to join your gang of rebel taxi-dancing girls?

I just came across a rather alarming discovery, in Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us. We all know that plastics break down slowly in the environment and are hazardous for sea animals, who swallow undigestible chunks of our garbage and either choke to death or die slowly of intestinal obstructions. Well, as it turns out, one source of nearly-microscopic plastic is coming from, you guessed it, women’s beauty products.

You know those facial scrubs that contain “micro-scrubbers”, exfoliants which are supposed to scrub your pores clean and leave your face soft and blemish-free? Clean & Clear Daily Pore Scrubber uses them. So does Proactiv Solution, which I’ve been using for about a year now due to two of life’s cruellest words: adult acne. Those “micro-scrubbers” are, I found out, made up of tiny spheres of polyethylene. Plastic. Tiny plastic balls which are sold to be washed directly down the drain, into our water system. And they’re so tiny that they are basically impossible to filter out.

Now, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, I should say that so far no one has really raised the alarm about this, and there’s not a lot of hard proof out there that micro-scrubbers are killing off ocean life. I did find this article, which mentions that it may pose a “minor threat”. Thing is, plastic has been around for so short a time that we don’t really know its long term effects at all (though more and more evidence is cropping up lately). But it seems to me that millions of people inserting unmeasurable amounts of microscopic plastic into the oceans is probably not going to be okay.

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Yes, it’s true, I edited a collection of short stories. And indeed, I am amazing - er, amazed at the talent amassed therein. But enough about me. I’m very pleased to announce that we’re launching this baby into space in four cities over the next couple weeks. If we happen to pass by your town, please come out and say hi! There will be readings, laughter, tears, etc. All launches are free to attend.

Cover design by the talented Megan Fildes, image by the amazing Kit Malo

13 SEPT: MONTREAL
Redbird Studios, 135 Van Horne, 8 PM
Readings by Dan Gillean, Anna Leventhal, Jeff Miller, Vincent Tinguely, JB Staniforth, Michelle Sterling, Teri Vlassopoulos, and Sean Michaels.

14 SEPT: KINGSTON
Novel Idea Bookstore, 156 Princess St, 3:30 PM
Readings by Stephen Guy, Vincent Tinguely, Anna Leventhal, JB Staniforth and Jeff Miller

19 SEPT: TORONTO
This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, 86 Nassau, 6 PM
Readings by Anna Leventhal, Michelle Sterling, Teri Valssopoulos, and Wasela Hiyate

21 SEPT: OTTAWA
Octopus Books, 116 Third Ave
Readings by Anna Leventhal, JB Staniforth, and Sean Michaels.

About the book:

The Art of Trespassing is an anthology of 13.5 new stories about sneaking in, crossing over, and breaking through. Written by thirteen wire-cutting writers, each piece in this collection invites us to consider the relationships between people and the spaces they move through—real or imagined, geographical and personal—and reminds us that sometimes the best stories lie in the places between, the cracks where the weeds are poking through.

According to those who care about such things, in Arizona and New Mexico there is a geological phenomenon known as the “crystal vortex”. Underneath the desert, such people claim, is the largest growth of crystals and gemlike things on the continent. Because crystals are known for their properties of vibration, aura-mending, and general healing, this area has a disproportionately large amount of, well, good vibes. This is why so many new-age type people are drawn to the place, and why so much strange rugged individualism and “alternative lifestyles” flourish there.

For a long time I was obsessed with wanting to visit the crystal vortex. But then I realized that all I had to do was listen to Black Mountain.

This video is for the song Wucan, off their latest album In The Future.

My first post ever for Picks from Planet Venus was about Sarah Mangle, the singer-songwriter who plays the mini-ukulele and writes curious, queerious campfire songs for city kids.

So it pleases me to no end to announce that, one year later, she’s acquired a terrific backing band of string-players and they will be launching their album, congratulations ha ha ha, tomorrow night. Here’s an idea of what said band, Wet NOSE Hero, is like:

Imagine you’re watching a string quartet. I don’t know enough about classical music to tell you the shape and colour of their skill, but I can tell you they are drawing sweet and urgent strains from their instruments. Standing in front of the string quartet is The Little Prince. She is wearing a sailor hat and holding a ukulele that is barely bigger than a toy. (Maybe you remember that, like Peter Pan, The Little Prince is always played by a young woman.) She bounces up and down on the balls of her feet and yells into the microphone like she’s enormously frustrated. Then she’s singing in a voice that’s startling clear and melodic. She’s singing about construction sites and bad ideas and how her mom taught her to write love letters. You start thinking that the last time you saw your dear and far-away friend she was doing karaoke - she jogged on the spot and looked like an adorable pony, and you forgot to tell her. Okay, I lied. That’s not what Wet NOSE Hero is like. That is Wet NOSE Hero, plain and simple.

Here they are playing Congratulations at Burritoville in Montreal.

The launch takes places tomorrow, Friday the 29th at 9 PM, at the Eastern Bloc, 7240 Clark Ave. In Montreal. $6 gets you in the door, or pay $15 for the door and the album together, which is obviously the more sane option.

Okay, so the RCMP spying on women’s groups in the 1970s isn’t totally hilarious, but the idea of them infiltrating Rita MacNeil concerts to catch potential dangerous feminist elements kind of is.

Witness Canada’s Most Wanted Folksinger, in this photo clearly trying to conceal her identity.

According to recently declassified documents, MacNeil was among a group of activist women the RCMP had under observation due to their feminist leanings - of course, back in the 60s and 70s feminism was only the gateway drug, which was sure to lead to worse things like Communism, hostile foreign takeovers, the complete collapse of society, and so on.

Part of the file also described a feminist conference in Winnipeg as “consisting of about 100 sweating, uncombed women standing around in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing.” Kind of sounds like a typical Lesbians On Ecstasy show, actually.

What is maybe most potent to me about this story is that it reminds us of feminism’s potential for radical disruption. I mean, I joke about it, but wouldn’t it be cool if feminism actually did play a part in bringing down patriarchal structures, dismantling (or restructuring?) capitalism, and, well, unravelling the messed-up tangle of societal norms? These women believed it could. And so did the RCMP, apparently. (Though not as much as if men had been in charge - one point the CBC article makes is that the federal police did not treat the women’s groups as as much of a threat as other, male-dominated, movements.)

I actually had no idea that MacNeil was a feminist activist back in the heady days of the Second Wave (she apparently represented the Toronto Women’s Caucus at the aforementioned conference). I guess it just goes to show that subversive elements are often where you least expect them. Go Rita.

Thanks to Ted for the tip.

Astute readers may have noticed that I’ve missed a few installments of Picks from Planet Venus over the past few weeks, things being what they are. So to make it up to you, here is something epic in scope and length.

Jazz saxophonist Matana Roberts has started a video blog to address some ideas about feminism and creativity that have been buzzing around in her head (and cropping up in interviews) for a while. Like a written blog, she meanders casually and candidly around and through topics like distinctions between black and white feminism, the definition of gender, and the development of her own voice. It’s like she’s giving you the interview of a lifetime and you don’t even have to ask her any questions.

Roberts is involved in a veritable panoply of amazing endeavours, like teaching at the School for Improvisational Music, and working on Coin Coin, an ongoing musical project based around her ancestor Marie Thérèse Coin Coin, a Louisiana woman who, after being freed from slavery, became a businesswoman and founder of one of the earliest communities of freed black people in the United States. She’s also an incredibly engaging storyteller, and has hung out with Alice Coltrane!

Learn more about her continuous investigations of the links between her history and her art at her blog, Shadows of a People.

Watch parts 2, 3, and 4 of her musings on gender and creativity after the cut.

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