sweetheart redux

 "SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL"  (Cover Photo by Dusti Cunningham) PLEASANT GEHMAN, AUTHOR OF “SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL” BIOGRAPHY Pleasant Gehman is a true renaissance woman: writer, dancer, actor, musician and painter. A Hollywood icon, during the 1970’s, she was one of the first punks in Los Angeles, documenting the scene she helped create in her fanzine “Lobotomy”. During the 1980’s, she toured across North America fronting her three bands, all of whom released multiple recordings: The Screaming Sirens, The Ringling Sisters and Honk If Yer Horny. She was also the booker for the seminal Los Angeles clubs Cathay De Grande and Raji’s.  Since the early 1990’s, under the stage name Princess Farhana, she has appeared internationally as a professional belly dancer and burlesque performer and teacher. She has danced and acted in numerous motion pictures, in music videos and on television. She has appeared in many documentaries on belly dance and burlesque, performin...

I often use the word 'camp,' and I particularly used it in Grad School to describe Kurt Vonnegut's loving but critical portrayal of normal people, but I could never put it into good words until I came upon this essay, by the amazing, real genius writer Susan Sontag.  I thought her essay may be useful to those of you who try to describe why gay guys love Liza Minnelli (stereotypically) or why you covet Aunt Rose's collection of Hummel Figurines. super-camp hollywood-camp                                                                                     Notes On "Camp" by Susan Sontag Published in 1964. Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility ...

(photo from http://j-walkblog.com) mockingly, shockingly light as a feather i flew on my broom through all sorts of weather brazenly, lazily stiff as a board i flew to the moon i felt like the Lord. i felt like a teen i felt too, too nice then i was drowned, the lake froze, and  i lay in the ice. i soon was a ghost i killed half the town that's what you get when you make a girl drown.

Em Kwissa is a young writer who has already achieved so much:  she is a founding member of Canada’s first rural spoken word collective, who, at the age of fifteen, was the first minor to compete nationally at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, as well as competing in two other festivals; she runs popular writing workshops for youth in their schools, and has been involved in the Champions for Kids Foundation; she was a Poet of Honour at Canada’s first national youth poetry slam; and lastly, she is a passionate advocate against domestic and dating violence, attending youth events, protests and meetings with legislative assemblies as an advocate for abuse survivors.  This last focus of hers is what caught my attention, when I read about her activism in the feminist blog Jezebel.  I asked her to write about the experience of having her memoir,  Am I Not , made unavailable by ebook publishers Lulu.com, in an act of censorship I find astounding and senseless.  Chec...