rose-coloured glasses

Today the casket of Rosa Parks lies in the centre of the US Capitol Rotunda, she is the first woman to be so honoured. Lest we forget, almost exactly fifty years ago, on Dec. 1, 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery (Alabama) bus to a White man. She was arrested. Martin Luther King Jr helped launch a strike against the city bus system that lasted over a year. The strike ended when the segregation rule requiring Blacks to give up their seats to whites was declared unconstitutional.

In 1994, Parks published a book called Quiet Strength.

Parks' action is usually framed as "the power of one little act". But actually, Parks had been dissenting for years, was a secretary for the NAACP, had many times stirred things up by trying to register to vote, and regularly argued with bus drivers. She was by no means the first woman to stand up to segregation law. Parks' story is beautiful because she was unrelentless and because, with the engagement of thousands of other people, she won a small mercy that has led to many other small mercies. Relentlessness and the engagement of thousands are still necessary for change...

the pretenders

ariel levy's 'female chauvinist pig' is profiled the same week the cover of maclean's spreads fear about the wussification of men. on the weekend of all weekends to play dress up it is a good a time as ever to wonder about who we are pretending to be.

i agree with levy: girls and women are participating with faux consent in the hyper objectification of their bodies through avenues like the 'girls gone wild' series and every-day 'slutty' ready-to-wear. at the university where i work i have walked by women who wear t-shirts with such enlightened catch-phrases as 'i'm too pretty to do math' and 'some girls are just born lucky'. sex and the city has been off the air just over a year and already the popularized and 'classy' sex-interest and slow-to-intimacy of samatha has been squeezed out by juvenile narcissism as the post-feminist height of female sexuality.

there is no confusion: the epic lengths of petty effort invested in paris-hiltonizing a female body is a sure substitution for women's real contemplation of pleasure, beauty, and desire, let alone anything else worth thinking about and working for on this earth. female chauvanism is just the newest manifestation of an eternal history of cultural rejection of the subversive act of women wanting. women and men need to be independent enough of the raging, gluttonous consumer machine to try themselves out, know who they are, and discover their individual understanding and expression of attraction and love.

which brings me to the monstrous, poorly-written, elementary maclean's essay on 'poor men don't know how to be men anymore' i just forced myself to read. god that was terrible. if men are feeling so threatened by sophisticated gucci ads shot in milan that they refuse to be emasculated further through housework, they are just as duped as drunken, topless and underage girls in cancun. that's like me refusing to drink skim milk because i was so hurt by the thin models in vogue. i don't know what is more idiotic, actually thinking such a thing or coming up with the theory that that kind of thinking is behind the supposed crisis in masculinity.

there is no crisis. there are a lot of distractions. this halloween let's try to ignore them and pretend to be real people.

i have to warn you...curiousity KILLED the cat...

i bumped into cynthia enloe on the elevator today, i almost elbowed her in the head. but it was not for guilt that i later attended her poorly attended lecture; she is a feisty speaker, and i needed to catch curiousity again. i think she invented the phrase 'curious feminist': it is the title of her latest book. (her less recent book, Bananas, Beaches & Bases, explains my posting of the adjacent photo. Doesn't that woman look happy carrying a container of under-priced over-sprayed bananas on her head?).

dr. enloe began by saying 'ever since i became a feminist, and one has to become a feminist, no one is born one, but when you become one, you see things anew'. she went on to describe how her analysis of the lives of but four regular women is enough to understand the basics of the american war machine.

i like it when i get to go to lectures like this one; it surprises me how unconsciously i lose stamina when i am discouraged from asking about the lives of girls and women. it only takes an hour with dr. enloe to rekindle that early hunch that if you are pissing people off with your curiousity it is because they are attached to the status quo. and the status quo has GOT to go...

voodoo raggedy ann

yesterday we attended the ribbon-cutting for the fredericton craft college's new gallery, 'the gallery', starting off its white-wall life with whitefeather's fifth solo show.

the image above was the only whitefeather piece google could find (credit the struts gallery), and it exemplifies WF's cheeky textilian feminism (what would be more clever than the cherry chintz? the frayed white cotton edges?). but let me describes her latest show-

the key piece in "beautiful/grotesque" is the poppet series- about two dozen little voodoo raggedy ann dolls scrapped together with fabric oddments, animal remnants (including a snake skin, bird skulls, feathers and fur), wax and real human hair. The poppets are nasty creatures with gorgeous bridal lace and blonde curls. they are all that is disgusting about our mortality and contrived cutural symbology- the poppet characters are instantly recognizable, beneath driping waxen features, as virgins, spinsters, witches, slaves, church ladies, prisoners, warriors and whores. and they are as tantalizing as barbie dolls.

WF also wows the technically curious with a huge woven "hair net" (much like a very nice hammock) cast over a corner of the room. Next to it is a braided rope of hand-spun hair fit for mooring a cannibalistic pirate ship. (everyone asks where she gets the hair and doubts the straightforward response that she buys it).

i urge everyone to check out whitefeather's profile:

http://www.cbc.ca/artspots/html/artists/whitefeather/

and more of fredericton's impressive art offerings:

www.silverfishphoto.com

www.emergeartists.ca

www.galleryconnexion.ca

www.gallery78.com

www.unbf.ca/arts/finearts

swaddling clothes

what would you choose to wrap if the choices were endless?

the other day i caught the christo and jeanne claude exhibition at the NS art gallery, the day before it was to close (sorry, by now you have missed it). a good friend and i ran into the basement show from a haligonian tempest- all the fabric implied quickly dried us. i have never seen a c&jc 'piece' in person...it really isn't the point i guess...the process is...

the show was much more breathtaking than you might predict a show of relics to be: video footage of the 28 month building of the 'curtain between two mountains' in colorado- a mammoth piece that withstood all of 28 hours of gusty weather (gutsy weather?); photo-quality pastel sketches of the 7500 saffron gates in nyc; many tactile mockups of wrappings- of trees, offices, and the german reichstag.

if c&jc were to ask for some new material, i would suggest wrapping up the fredericton trainbridge, in a rich velvet like the upholstery of old trains or theatre curtains...i would suggest the wrapping to take place over the autumn and end sometime when the river was frozen white, the trees bare, and the bridge like a lipsticked smile across one stark shore to the other.

reptile news

karen connelly has a new novel described by critics as beautifully cinematic.

" Inside his solitary confinement cell, Teza, who once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship, now applies his acute intelligence and Buddhist patience to finding meaning in the interminable days...But even in isolation, he has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire the conscience-ridden senior jailer to radical change. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Overturning our expectations, Karen Connelly presents us with a world that celebrates human spirit, and spirit itself, in the midst of injustice and trauma."

i can't wait to read it. i have admired kc since one morning in the mid-nineties when she came into the old cafe du monde on queen st in fredericton. she was wearing an overgrown whole wheat sweater and lopsided earrings. back then she was a writer in residence at unb. she told me not to ever go to college...it was venomous to creativity. boa constrictor-ish, maybe...

in other lizard news today researchers have discredited the idea that our present-day birds are the residue of dinosaur life...i am relieved, pigeons being frightening enough already...

bees' knees

this afternoon we walked into aganetha dyck's walking closet in the hamilton art gallery, a newly renovated grand shiny downtown box that gives me a new lease on life in steeltown, with steel sculpture gardens and rooms and rooms currently full of food art...including mary pratt's entirely familiar cantaloupe vagina, such a strange relic for anyone to have of childhood in fredericton...
but dyck! dyck has hung hundreds of clothing hangers in boutiquey rows, you are to walk along and in-between and press your nose very close to these hangers...these hangers sumptuously, decadently oozing honey! she left them in her husband's apiary...and they are coated in honey comb...i smell very good this evening...

she had said this and i love it: i do not know what i will understand, we will have to wait and see, the questions have just begun...