Pop goes the Tart!

June 20, 2007 at 9:05 pm (Britney Spears, Danielle Duval, Paris Hilton, music)

Just went out last week for the first time in FOREVER to a bar to hear a band. And not just any band. This was the lovely and oh-so-talented Danielle Duval (visit her on myspace & hear some of the tunes!) who somehow finds time to run the video for our WILDsound Festival between gigs.

She really shouldn’t have the time. Here she is, a fantastic new EP freshly pressed (L’Etranger), a track record that includes appearances with the likes of Greg Keelor (Blue Rodeo), Sam Roberts, and Jim Creeggan (Barenaked Ladies)… She plays wurlitzer and guitar, the sexiest combination of instruments since Mozart hacked away with his feet on a clavier…

This woman should be famous. And instead, we’re still talking about Britney Spears.

There’s got to be more to women in music than cup size. Or whether or not they can get their pictures taken by Ann Geddes (shudder).

Women can’t rock? Bullshit. Listen to Danielle and tell me that again.

CNN devotes an entire news day to the trials and tribulations of Paris Hilton, whose problem wasn’t being screwed over the fine print but her inability to read anything at all – like the place where it said she needed a license to drive.

I really love a strong female voice singing out over a great guitar riff, playing counterpoint to a barrage of drums. I love singers like Danielle, who hits the stage head on like she’s mounting a battle, and packs a bar with screaming fans of both sexes.

Enough with the PopTarts! Let’s hear some real music!

Continue reading below for an earlier post on the PopTart phenomena! Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment

June 12, 2007 at 5:18 pm (comic books, fantastic four, movies, superheroes)

Super! Heroes and . . . well, me

When I think back to the stories I used to play in my imagination before the age of my heroine Maggie Stuart in The Last Rite, what I am struck by most intensely is the assumption that I, my character anyhow, was somehow special.

Special how? That I had powers, or some kind of strange and exotic background, or that I was somehow very valuable to someone or in some crisis that only I had the key to solve.

My early stories are all peppered with this belief, that like Frodo the reluctant ring-bearer in The Lord of the Rings, I was the sole person capable of fulfilling the particular destiny laid upon me. That I, in fact, was essential to both the story and the greater scheme of the world at large.

I don’t think I got how wonderful a feeling of being necessary was until that feeling started to go away. Around Maggie’s age, thirteen, my fantasies often were leavened with a kind of frustration, that I didn’t fit and had no comfortable although difficult path to follow. I imagined I was a changeling child of parents from another world or dimension, and that here in this place I not only had no real place, but no ability to understand where I came from either. I was without a real identity. I remember lying on the back patio of our house, sleeping out under the stars, and imagining a birthmark on my hand that would light up when my real people were on their way to get me. It was melancholy, and, I know, such a common feeling — not fitting in, not knowing my place.

It was more and more difficult through my teen years to imagine stories in which I was a comfortable hero, or did comfortably heroic things. It seemed like I knew too much about the other side of every act to be gloriously and confidently heroic. My characters doubted their own abilities, doubted their reading of situations, and longed for a place that they could be the hero whil watching others do the things they could only dream of.

Lately, though, I’ve come to a different perspective, and have opened myself back up to heroic imaginings, just a little. One thing I’ve had some fun with is to treat the heroic genre with the respect and courtesy I lost to some extent by feeling like I was excluded from it, and write some straight-ahead genre fiction in which the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and evil and good are as black and white as chess pieces. Provided your chessboard is made up of black and white pieces.

It’s astonishingly refreshing to pretend for a little that moral ambiguity and gray areas don’t exist, if only for a little while. And sometimes there’s nothing as satisfying as writing a truly snarling bastard of a villain.

I’ve also taken a couple of forrays into a more satirical vein, the one I’m enjoying most being The Inner Life of Owl Woman in which a superheroine details the non-glamourous everyday life of a working-for-good girl:

from The Inner Life of Owl Woman

Moody? Yeah, I know one hero who fits that. I won’t name him, naturally, but suffice it to say that he broods a lot and wears a big black cape. No, not him. He’s actually a pretty decent guy. I chalk up the whole maladjusted introverted persona rap to bad press.

No, the guy I mean gives off this choir-boy image, but to his intimates, he’s known as the Poet. Not because he’s a writer or anything, but because in his secret identity, he favours dark turtlenecks, berets, and a perma-sulk. This guy is a downer. And get him on to shop talk, and he’s even worse.

Everything, to him, is a sign of how much worse things are getting every year. He can quote violent crime statistics for the last half millennium. The only thing he can’t do is tell you when things were ever any better.

So he’s a walking contradiction. It’s worse now than it’s ever been, but it’s always been as bad as it is. I don’t get it. I thought caped crusaders were supposed to make the world a better place. He gets me second-guessing myself, wondering if I’m not as high-minded and moral as I think, and am really just working out my anti-social violent tendencies on an unremittently corrupt society.

But what was it one of Isaac Asimov’s characters used to say? ‘Never let your morals stand in the way of doing what’s right.’ That’s it to a T. Only maybe in my case I should exchange ‘your morals’ for ‘the law.’ Hmm.

You can continue on below to the archived blog from July 9, 2005 inspired by the original “Fantastic Four” movie.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

The Third Sex – none at all?

June 9, 2007 at 3:36 am (love & relationships, sexuality)

Once, I lived across the hall from a really interesting guy. He was a Deadhead, and loved music and cooking, and had a really cool cat. I knew he liked me, and I was flattered.

The thing I wasn’t was turned on. I enjoyed being his neighbour, but otherwise, I was just little me at nearly eighteen, out on my own and virginal. I didn’t want to explore sex, not now, not with him. Not that I didn’t think he was attractive and fabulous. I just didn’t feel it.

So when he invited me over to dinner, I carefully stuck my fingers into the noodles and ate with my hands, as messily as possible, trying to gross him out so sex would just vanish from the items on the table. It worked. . . I didn’t end up sleeping with him until a couple of years later when the stakes seemed very much reduced by my greater experience.

At the time, though, sex was the last thing I wanted, and I would have done almost anything not to have to even deal with a proposition.

I’m loathe to admit it, but that wasn’t the only time in my life I thought that asexual reproduction might just be a good idea. I figure no matter how oversexed a person might be, there are always going to be advances that are just unwelcome. Sexuality isn’t an absolute — you can be very sexual and still have lots of triggers for both turn ons and turn offs.

But there are times when I fall out of sexuality altogether. Not lately, I admit, but sex is really a lot like coffee. I don’t remember what I drank throughout the day before coffee, and I don’t remember life before the advent of my own sexuality.

What thoughts like that really lead me toward is the realization of how much of a spectrum sexual feelings actually are. We kind of want to slip every sexual thought into a neat box — gay, straight — but when desire can ebb and flow between those particular boxes, who’s to say that a little variation isn’t normal within them as well?

Another reason sex is like coffee, I guess. Some people need it, and others enjoy it, but don’t absolutely need it to function.

And, I guess, some people don’t touch the stuff.The Last Rite Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

Hum Nietzsche for Me

June 7, 2007 at 11:08 pm (love & relationships)

originally published July 7, 2005; also appeared in the 2005 Owen Wister Review

Someone should tell those guys. It’s old news to me, of course, but they just don’t seem to be clued in. Love is passé. It’s over; it’s dead. Don’t bother.

It’s not just me, and I’m not bitter. I think love was not passé even as recently as when I was born. I think it may have died in my lifetime.

Why anyone would continue to beat a rotten, decaying corpse-of-an-idea is beyond me. Love has been spoiled, spoiled slimy, by long-legged models on television, by exotic lingerie stores advertising edible underwear, by the toothless couple kissing on the street corner.

I have a theory that love is possible only in small towns. Who knows? It may still flourish in those little, off-the-map places where no one has a car because everything is just a skip or a minute away; where you only get one shot at love because the boy next door is, in actual, literal fact, the only one for you. Love is not having a choice. I’m hardly likely, am I, to settle for one person I know when I haven’t settled on a house, a town, a career; when I haven’t decided who I am or where I’m going; when the world is a different place all the time because I do have a car. Choice kills love.

Someone should publish it in the newspaper, like they did for God. Run love’s obituary in big, black, block letters five columns wide. Maybe the fact would sink in if it came with the morning coffee and crossword.

What would it take to sound a death knell the world would hear? I’d personally volunteer to host the wake. We could all sit around and listen to seventies’ songs and remember what it was like to be young and under the impression we were in love.

Closed coffin, of course.

I wrote this a few years back, and even then, I was at heart a hopeless romantic. It’s only romantics who get so emotional about love, after all. I read it at an open stage I hosted at the time, and a couple of days later, received anonymously a single red rose and a poem bewailing the fact that a woman could so lose faith in love.

I believe that love is the great motivator, and that, with thanks to Osho, that we progress in our understanding of love as we develop as human beings, from the desire for sexual love alone to the desire for reciprocal love, eventually, with luck, attaining the goal of compassionate love. Compassionate love demands no return, exists without reward, and can even bear scrutiny without flinching. Your thoughts?

Leave a Comment

More of the different. . .

June 7, 2007 at 4:45 am (love & relationships, writing)

It was almost exactly two years ago, a short time after I first moved to Toronto, that I began to blog. Since that time, so much has happened that it’s hard to know where to begin. I met the love of my life — on the exact schedule I’d set for the fictional heroine I most closely identify with — I beat depression, I started writing like the lit demon I was born to be, and I learned to love baseball. Saw it all coming but the last, actually. Baseball. Huh.

And now, I’m worried about how late it is, because I’m going to the Jays game tomorrow afternoon, and I’ve been up trying and trying to resuscitate my old blog, which appears to have shed almost all of its archive, perhaps in response to my writing about Elisabeth Hasselbeck last week.

And here I am, two years minus a very little bit later, brand new blog site, brand new blog. I do want to give you the opportunity to rediscover some of my old gems, though — a large amount of what I write is not precisely time sensitive — so I’ll be reposting one archive piece for every new blog I write.

I hope to open a bit of a dialogue as well, and may be asking from time to time for your comments and contributions on creative matters. Writing, as far as I believe, is never really finished until someone reads it and has some unique part of them respond to the part of you left in the work. Writing is an amalgamation between the blueprint and the person who creates it, and the architect who constructs an imaginary landscape from it as he or she reads.

Let’s build something together!

Jen Frankel
jenstuff @ WILDsound

Leave a Comment

Newer entries »