Love it #2: Bojana Stancic

If you live in Toronto, and you stroll down Ossington or Queen West on occasion, you may have glimpsed this glamorous creature. A millennial soul with a voice as smoky and mysterious as Nico, Bojana is an artist and set designer who frequently collaborates with playwright/director Alex Wolfson.

You can see her set design work in Wolfson's play "And so, the Animal Looked Back" at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), an installation running until March 12th, concluding with live performances on March 11th and 12th, each at 7:30 pm. For tickets and information call 416-736-5169.

Love it #1: Waffles

After a century of political disasters- mass movements that lead to murder and war at worst, or disappointment and disillusionment at least, the utopian impulse that lingers in the hearts of dreamers is lacking in the social fuel that turns spark to flame.

Lately, activists and academics seemed stalled in a phase of critique and deconstruction, rather than proposing and constructing, building and bettering. (There are valid reasons for this- but it's a topic for another time.)

In hopes of moving beyond the 'negative turn,' the BB blog is going to take some baby steps towards dreaming big again, by occasionally making post-it notes of pure positivity.

The first 'Love it' note, is this photo of an amazing breakfast. Yes, I confess, there are paper cups, cartons of questionable recycle-ability, but look beyond the clutter, and there is evidence of a big breakfast being shared. "Who will help me bake this bread?" Several people who passed through the kitchen in this photo would be happy to help you bake your bread. Those are veggie sausages, by the way, just in case your eyebrows were wiggling.

Don't Smash Your Teeth on the Punk Rock. We're Touring with Woodpigeon!

Woodpigeon, Mark Hamilton's prolific pop ensemble from Calgary, Alberta, have invited Betty Burke along as openers on their upcoming tour in Ontario and Quebec. Native speakers of Frenglish, we are focussing on improving our French, and polishing off new songs for the adventure.

Just add snow and trees to the photo above, and you will have a sense of what awaits us on the 401 Hwy, as we weave our way from Hamilton to Wakefield to deliver our ballads to your door. In case you are wondering about the dot in the right hand corner of the image, it's a beautiful green tractor. Oh glorious tractor, perhaps a ballad will be composed in your honour.

On February 14th, en lieu of a Betty/Woodpigeon show, I will be playing a gig with my old band The Barcelona Pavilion at the Wavelength 500 festival. This will be our first time playing together in many years, and I am pretty excited.

I broke two of my front teeth with The Barcelona Pavilion in 2003, jumping of a table with a microphone in my mouth. Don't ever do that. Smashing a guitar is a waste of money, but breaking your teeth might cost even more if you consider the price of periodic repairs over the course of your lifetime. That's not jamming econo!

The dates for the Woodpigeon and Betty Burke shows are as follows:

February 11th: Toronto, Drake Hotel
February 15th: Hamilton, The Casbah
February 16th: Sudbury, The Townhouse
February 17th: Toronto, Buddies in Bad Times (Betty only -see below)*
February 18th: Montreal, La Sala Rosa
February 19th: Quebec, Le Cercle
February 21st: Wakefield, Black Sheep Inn (near Ottawa, ON)

On the 17th Woodpigeon will be playing The Mansion in Kingston while Betty plays the opening of The Rhubarb Festival in Toronto. Woodpigeon has a few more Ontario dates lined up that Betty won't be at, but you should go see them if they hit your town.

Darger on the Battery, or "Radio Waves are Alive!"

The little girl daydreaming in this photo sits on a rock on 'The Rock,' Newfoundland. She spends her bleached days under a bakeapple tree in the Battery, overlooking The Narrows between the natural Harbour of St. John's, and the open Atlantic. Not far from her perch, Marconi received the first wireless Transatlantic signal, a repeating beep representing the letter 'S.' Marconi was told many times that it would be impossible, yet, on December 12th 1901, the signal sent from Poldhu, Cornwall in the UK reached Marconi's receiver on Signal Hill.

What strikes me about this little dreamer from the Battery is that she looks exactly like one of Henry Darger's gender defying Vivian Girls, the warrior innocents that populated his Realms of the Unreal, fighting dragons, insects, and adults in the paintings and novel found in Darger's Chicago apartment after he died. The little Vivian Girl from the Battery has left her fictional realm to guard The Narrows where the open, unknown, and undefined realm of the impossible meets the Harbour of what is known, accepted, safe, and predictable.

What we live with today is not all we will ever be stuck with. As my friend Chris Korte often says, quoting the late Zoe Lund, "That which is not yet, but which ought to be, is more real than that which merely is." Or as Herbert Marcuse put it in One Dimensional Man, "...the artistic universe is one of illusion, semblance, Schein. However, this semblance is resemblance to a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one." Like this Vivian Girl, and the radio signal that reached the hill behind her in 1901, the impossible things the dreamer sees eventually come to life, interrupting the course of the world we know.

"Are you man enough to be a woman?"

Recently, NME blogger Rae Alexandra asked, "What Happened to All the Ferocious Female Punks?" Joel Gibb, Chris Korte and I were asking the same question recently over a casual cup of tea with the artist G.B. Jones.

A living legend, G.B.'s work has been compared to Tom of Finland (with female cops instead of bears) and was a member of the proto-riot grrl band Fifth Column. She has recently returned to music with the band Opera Arcana, with Minus Smile from Kids On TV and Julie Faught of the Pining.

Between G.B., Joel, myself, and Chris, (a curator who has performed with Norwegian opera creators Vinge and Muller), we thought up a seemingly endless list of amazing women in bands from the 80s and 90s- Chris noted Siouxsie Sioux, Exene Cervenka, Belinda Carlisle (who wore garbage bag dresses before superstardom) and Grace Jones, Joel mentioned the L7 tampon incident, and GB told us stories about the Toronto music scene in the 1980s, which, among other things, was home to Carol Pope, Canada's first (out) lesbian popstar. We also sang the praises of Frances McKee of The Vaselines, and Bikini Kill. And it wasn't long ago that the amazing genderqueer presence of artists like Divine and Jayne/Wayne County demanded of audiences "Are you man enough to be a woman?"

Compare that to the situation today, and it seems like apart from wispy folk and eccentric but non-threatening electro, there's not as much of a female presence as there was ten years ago. We have MIA, we have Peaches, but for the most part righteous anger seems to be taking a nap.

While NME blogger Alexandra partly blames the popularity of Suicide Girls for the dearth of angry women on the proverbial mic, there seems to be a deeper root to this regressive wave in music. I hate to be repetitive, as I recently blogged about cultural devolution that has seen the unapologetic and/or unthinking sexism rise like Phoenix from the ashes of the PC 90s, but it's a topic that won't go away.

It's time to take inspiration from the best of the past- not for nostalgia, but for illumination. The following clip is a love song, but let's think of it as a love song for a revolutionary moment, one we just need to get back to. In the spirit of optimism, here's "Right Back Where We Started From", by Maxine Nightingale.

Maybe she was just well raised

On Saturday night at the Opera House I had a memorable encounter with the monitor person, Chantal. Chantal joined my friend John Power and I for fries before the Hidden Cameras gig, and she was concerned about overhearing an intimate conversation. We assured her that, as the monitor person, she was already intimate, and would be the one guarantor of a smooth performance, so it was in fact best for her to know us better. Not only did Chantal do an excellent job on the monitor mix, she also helped us out with a linguistic quandary that had me stumped for at least ten years.

I was chatting with John Power about whether being a faghag is a genetic predisposition. Being a faghag isn't really a choice. Some women just adore gay men, and are equally adored by the gay men they encounter. It's only right and natural. The only bad thing about it is the word itself- 'faghag' just doesn't sound like a nice thing, even though it represents a beautiful reality.

In support of my foolish and dangerous genetic theory, I gave John and Chantal the example of one particular faghag who is the daughter of another faghag. "Maybe she was just well raised" offered Chantal.

Chantal couldn't be more right. Not only is it a terrible thing to assume that people are totally determined by their genes, and by their biology, "well raised" is also a way better term for the Liz Taylor/Madonna phenomenon. The Madonnamenon, if you will.

From now on, this blog will retire that old, dated term that has its roots in the fear of strong, single women, and the prejudice that women should confine themselves to coupledom, rather than deeply intimate nonsexual friendships. A woman who loves gays, a woman who gays love- she is just well raised.

And just to make things crystal clear, while this blog entry is fixed on the death of an exclusive, restrictive word, BB loves all LGBTQ people, and will always love all LGBTQ people, until the sun goes supernova and rains glitter on the dusty remains of the world.

Yours,
BB

A ballad of survival against all odds

Truth is stranger than fiction, especially along the St. Lawrence River, and for people born in towns around its tributaries.

Here is a link to a song of ours about a man from Alexandria, a little town at the North end of Glengarry County, Ontario. He moved out West to work in mining, and had a few unfortunate encounters, the worst of which was with a wrench that fell from high enough above to break through his helmet, and into his brain.

I often try to imagine what must have been going through his head, besides blood and metal, when he was at the bottom of the mine, refusing to die. Maybe the thought of unfinished business, or unresolved matters of faith, kept him going.

Here is "El Dorado"

The footage is from a live performance at The Dakota Tavern in October. The musicians include one of Newfoundland's delicious exports, the rhythm section of Jon Hynes on bass and John Power on drums; the prairies are represented by Saskatchewan's Shaun Brodie on acoustic guitar, and Alberta's Holly Andruchuk on the electric. I'm the one accidentally channeling Jello Biafra. The photo above is of Jon and John.

Thanks to John's excellent drumming, I have to recant the earlier commitment to the 'play only what you can carry' rule. Nobody is an Island, so I guess the rule is now 'play only what we can carry together.' Together we can carry a whole drum kit.

We will be playing a string of dates with some friends from out West in the new year, so stay tuned, as details will soon be posted. Though it has yet to be confirmed, I must confess I've already been using Skype to rehearse a Hank Williams duet with one of said friends, for said dates. Which tune? Which towns? All will be revealed in due time.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope to see you face to face before long!
Love,
BB