Author Archives: Becca Klaver

WEIRD SISTER at Popsickle Tomorrow!

WEIRD SISTER is very excited to present readings by regular contributor Naomi Extra and our friend Rosebud Ben-Oni at this year’s Popsickle literary festival!

Saturday, June 20, 2015
9:00 p.m.
The Living Gallery (1094 Broadway, Brooklyn)

Naomi

Naomi Extra

Rosebud

Rosebud Ben-Oni

popsickle

POPSICKLE is Brooklyn’s literary arts festival. Now in its sixth year, the fest aims to unite Brooklyn’s array of reading series, publishers, and literary organizations into one weekend-long megareading. POPSICKLE 2015  is coordinated by Niina Pollari, Zane Van Dusen, and JD Scott. POPSICKLE is free and open to the public.

Find more info and RSVP on Facebook here.

Hope to see you there!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Events

The Zack Morris Cell Phone Aesthetic

zackmorris
I was thinking about the aesthetic Marisa and I invented, the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic, and I guess it’s in the same family as the Lisa Frank Sticker, Hello Kitty Lunchbox, Which Baby-Sitters-Club Character Are You aesthetic (which are part, but not all, of the Gurlesque aesthetic), but in lots of ways it’s the opposite. Because it’s fun to put stickers and songs in your poems—there’s a pleasure in the nostalgia and in the flipping-off of those who want to police the pop out of poetry (say it like “police the fuck out of poetry”), but the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic has to be slightly embarrassing. Like that feeling you get when you see a giant cell phone or a boxy computer monitor on an old TV show. Like, you’re trying to pay attention to the story but you can’t, because god that thing is so big, uhhhhhhh…. It is pure spectacle, that thing that freezes narrative. But it wasn’t distracting at the time: that was just how life looked then. For most of human history we don’t have tons and tons of examples of how life looked so now that they’ve started to pile up and life has started to look so different so fast it’s kind of mortifying. Like your mom did something humiliating but “culture” = your mom. “Your mama’s cell phone is so big….” To get this kind of feeling into your poetry you’re going to have to dig out not just the memorable kitsch but the toys you never told anyone you played with. Your secret collections. Maybe that bag of troll dolls with their hair cut off you found in a closet at your mom’s could count, but that might be too cool. To achieve the Zack Morris Cell Phone aesthetic you can’t be a complicit consumer in a winky way, it has to be something you’d prefer to never tell. Is this just Confession all over again, but with more stuff? (And what would it mean to want it more than wanting to stand in line outside the store to get the six, seven, eight, nine, ten…?) What it offers for nostalgists like you and me is the reminder that the past isn’t always cute, but also full of space junk. And we play Kick the Can in the landfill of our own obsolescence.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

The public cry-in for Ana Mendieta organized by Jennifer Tamayo is going down today! Bring your paprika, chalk dust, and blood tears for siluetas in the snow:

silueta erasure by Jennifer Tamayo

 

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

This year I learned that Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Yoko Ono were all born on February 18. Can we scrap that holiday called Presidents’ Day and call it Radical Women Artists Day instead? Or, even better, let’s just call Lorde, Morrison, and Ono “presidents,” since they rule my world and no one really seems to know what Presidents’ Day is, anyway.

audrepowerful

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

Finally, a Google Chrome app that “changes the word ‘man’ to something more appropriate”! And it’s called, you guessed it, Not All Men.

As you probably heard, since for some reason this news story turned everyone on social media into a total snark, Harper Lee will be publishing a second novel. Go Set a Watchman is a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although Lee wrote Watchman first. And okay, okay, some of those posts were pretty funny, like this one that riffs on that Kanye-and-Paul-McCartney joke from a few weeks ago:

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup

Feminist Bookstore Super Bowl Tweets from Portlandia

Great news for feminists headed to Super Bowl bashes tonight: Now you will have something besides booze and puppy chow to keep you company. In Other Words, the real-life feminist bookstore in Portland, Oregon, will be taking over the Portlandia Twitter account and live-tweeting the game (and, I hope, the commercials). Here’s one from last year to give you an idea:

What, exactly, is getting made fun of here?! It might be football; it might be me. All I know is I like being in on the joke.

I’ll be posting some of my favorites below, and you can play along with hashtag #FeministBookstoreSaysWhat. In the meantime, check out this deep-cut Feminist Bookstore video from 2009, back when Portlandia was in its incubation stage as Thunder Ant:

 

*UPDATE* Check out these feminist lolz:

Continue reading

1 Comment

Filed under Everything Else

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

 

The world wants you to find extraordinary women threatening. Undo that training. When you feel threatened, it’s a great sign that you have just found an ally who will bring you new energy and insight and together you will rise. Never stop growing your crew. There is always room for another homie if you find someone special enough. Give them everything and they will give back in return. Have faith in the women in your life and you will be ok out there. Also, HR departments work for your company, not you. You can’t tell on patriarchy to dad. Brace yourself for things to be exactly as bad as they say it is, and go out in the world anyway. If your work is good, you will always land on your feet.

The New Inquiry founder Rachel Rosenfelt’s advice for women 

 

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You’re not just imagining things. It’s tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times. Girls now are also faced with different problems. I’ve been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. I became really good at this and I don’t even notice it myself. I don’t really have an ego. I’m not that bothered. I just want the whole thing to be good.

—Björk in an interview at Pitchfork about her new album Vulnicura, which she just released early after it was leaked online

 

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup

New Sleater-Kinney Video for “No Cities To Love”

One of my favorite music videos of 2014 featured California indie dream rocker Jenny Lewis singing her song “Just One of the Guys” backed by a celebrity-studded band, including Kristen Stewart and Anne Hathaway. Now, there’s new Sleater-Kinney video for the title track from their surprise album No Cities To Love (what do you call a surprise album when the surprise party’s over?), and the band has “asked some of their friends to film themselves singing the title track”:

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under Everything Else

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

 

LITERARY LINKS

We’ve been following conversations on Facebook about this week’s Poetry Project event, “Short Texts on the Future Nature of the Reading.” CAConrad writes: “THOSE OF US WHO WERE AT THE POETRY PROJECT LAST NIGHT WILL NEVER EVER FORGET WHAT EILEEN MYLES SAID!! There are some FUCKED UP old man poets who are the Bill Cosby’s of the poetry world RIGHT NOW. LET THE RAPIST, MYSOGYNIST CREEPS BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE!!” Jennifer Tamayo asks: “I have questions about accountability. what happens after names have been named. what happens after bodies have been counted. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER.”

Slate logs the textual alterations Claudia Rankine has made before each printing of Citizen, such an instant classic that it’s now in its third printing.

Continue reading

1 Comment

Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup

 

If you were to argue that the only things to look at on the internet this week are pics of dogs in Santa hats, entire families in matching jammies, and your couple friends posing for ironic holiday card portraits, you’d be wrong, but you wouldn’t be that wrong. But fear not: WEIRD SISTER is dedicated to pleasing all you feminist news junkies home for the holidays, feeling your weird sister (or weird brother) roles afresh, experiencing that particular ennui known as “No one in my family is interested in debating the nuances of Beyoncé’s feminism,” and desperately scrolling your phone for something to remind you of your core values. Your hardcore pop literary feminist values.

Well, you’ve found it! Here’s this week’s links roundup:

90s nostalgia now has its own TV show, called Hindsight, debuting soon on VH1. (And if I didn’t feel called-out enough by the “What if you had been less Angela and more Rayanne?” ad I saw in the subway the other day, it turns out the protagonist’s name is Becca. :/ ) You can watch the trailer for the show here.

Speaking of subways, the NYC MTA about to launch its campaign against man spreading, and Gothamist recently interviewed men on the train about whether they were familiar with the term. My favorite response is from the guy who says, “If you notice, every man on the train has their legs wide open, am I correct? But you have to.” But you have to! Such simple, straightforward, elegant illogic.

 

In year-end music news, Ann Powers writes about how “Beyoncé set the bar for the several other women who scaled pop commerce’s heights with her in 2014, to present selves and songs defined by a feminist concept of abundance” and Jezebel rounded up a bunch of smart cultural critics to talk about “Nicki Minaj’s Ass and Feminism.” I also loved this little piece at The Toast called “Requests Made By Blondie During ‘Call Me,’ In Order Of Reasonableness,” wherein “Call me any day or night” is slotted in the “High-Maintenance But Nothing Unusual” category.

It only took 91 years, but this year Disney finally realized that audiences love female protagonists interested in more than just getting married. Marvel’s got some catching up to do, but plans to release Captain Marvel, its first movie with a female lead, in 2017. Manohla Dargis tells us how bleak the situation is for women directors trying to get hired by the six major Hollywood studios, which only released three movies directed by women this year. That’s right, T-H-R-E-E. Dargis reminds us that this probably isn’t a conscious act of discrimination, but the product of ye olde subtle, insidious sexism, which “often works like a virus that spreads through ideas, gossip, and stories about women, their aesthetic visions and personal choices, and doubts about whether they can hack it in that male-dominated world. Of course, the end result is that female directors don’t get hired.”

I loved this interview with Taja Lindley or Colored Girls Hustle on Feministing, which reminds us of the ways fashion and ornament have been historically devalued because they’re aligned with femininity:

Anytime we choose to enjoy and celebrate our bodies, it is a big middle-finger-up to all of the systems and people who would like us to hate ourselves instead, that would like us to be dead instead. Honoring and affirming our bodies by ornamenting them with adornment is a pleasure ritual. It is a freedom ritual to discover and express pleasure in a body that is under constant, severe, calculated, and systematic policing, surveillance, hypersexualization, demonization, marginalization and other forms of attack.

“If I was the fountain, she was the crank”: Dawn Lundy Martin’s essay on moving to San Francisco at 22 at learning from Angela Davis is worth it for the gorgeous prose alone, and is also very wise and very timely.

Last but not least, Ms. has a list of the top ten feminist hashtags of 2014. For me, it was the year of the affirmative hashtags #YesAllWomen and #BlackLivesMatter: yes and yes.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Everything Else