HIGH BARBED WIRE WALKING

I’ve had a lot of trouble concentrating today. I’ll take this moment to be grateful I’ve not attempted sexual relations with myself or partner yet, because if I did I think I’d just be a little zoned out. Rather than hurt my reputation as a champion fucker, I’d much rather touch on WHY it is I’m so distracted. So, you may recall me mentioning, multiple times, that I’m part of an incredible film called American Mary. This is truly The Little Film That Could.

Hmm. No, that’s not accurate.  Scratch that.

It’s The Little Female Directed Horror Film That Could, Did, And Fucked Your Mom.

Yeah, that’s more like it.

Writers/directors Sylvia and Jen Soska had an uphill battle on their hands with Mary. After making Dead Hooker In A Truck with virtually nothing and still producing a kick-ass grindhouse-style flick at the end of the day, the film world had proof that the girls could spin gold out of thin air. Despite their successes there, Mary proved to be challenging. Maybe it was the audacious, horrific, original script and that was the REAL horror for Hollywood (good lord, something that no one’s DONE before? No formula? The terror!) and I’m going to pull out the ol’ soapbox on this one, maybe the fear was something else… maybe it was because we had two female directors who had fresh ideas, are fearless, and aren’t about to take the Ol’ Boy’s Club shit. Because, let’s face it, Hollywood has long been a place that fears the female who’s in charge. Ladies are allowed in the club, as long as they are front of the camera, which is fine but the moment they want to drive, the men start tugging their forelocks in fear.

And so they should.

It’s no secret that there is a pretty large unrest about the absence of female-directed films at Cannes, and this year is no different. While Mary wasn’t finished in time to make the submission date for the competition, she sure was ruffling feathers in the Marketplace last night, which may be a good wake up. But this isn’t anything new: discrimination against female directors and writers is old as film itself.

As well as an actress, singer, dancer Mae West was writing plays, many of which she adapted from stage to screen. Many of her themes involved racy jokes and sex, and indeed one of her shows was even called SEX. It was a winner, even if it did bring down the morality police on her and she was labelled “Box Office Poison”. Never one to let The Man get her down (but more likely to get him to go down – on her) West nevertheless fired back with her autobio in ’59 titled Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It in which she pulled no punches about her experiences in Hollywood. Better yet, she made no apologies.

Dorothy Arzner had it tough: coming in the Hays era when there were massive restrictions on what could and couldn’t be shown by the morality police meant one fiscal failure could ruin your career. For a female filmmaker, that meant even less of a margin for error. Yet, from ’22 to ’43 she still snuck in feminist thematic elements to her films.

American Mary isn’t just an important film because it’s a great platform for the sisters Soska, but because it represents women in horror as being things of substance, and not content to just poke the scab of our fears, but grab either side and rip the wound wide open. Possibly poke it then with a salt-flecked finger. Because as women, we need a strong voice for ourselves. American Mary is showing us that not only are we our male counterparts their equal, we may even surpass them in terms of derangement.

Remember Halloween horror costume selections? I do. Boys had choices of Michael Meyers, Leatherface, Freddy, Jason, ad nauseum. What did girls have? Bride Of Frankestein or else Sexy (insert witch, bat, spider here). You see my problem? The weird girls that WANTED to be scary? We didn’t have as many role models. Sure, we could be zombies but our unrest has grown like a violated corpse. However, that’s about to change. There is a whole generation of little girls who can grow up and know that we can scare them with the best of them. Cannes knows it now.

Because we are the women who run with werewolves.

You ready?

(Katherine Isabelle as Mary Mason)

Hugs and hisses, from with witch with the most hex appeal,

Little Miss Risk

I’m a bird person. While most people who are bird people are termed somewhat eccentric, I can personally attest to how our minds work. I am the owner of a 4-year old Senegal parrot named Tiki. She, along with myself, is making her debut in American Mary. Last summer, she made a new friend and doing so has doomed me to a life of avian servitude.

There is a fair bit of urban wildlife where I live on the West Coast. Vancouver has Stanely Park which is home to a diverse number of lifeforms and is one of the largest urban green spaces I can think of. We are a coastal and mountain city so everything is free range from black bears, to raccoons, otters, and dogfish.

And crows.

Last summer, a local pair were showing their fledging how to eat. The juvenile had a distinctly different call than it’s parents. For sake of argument I’ll refer to the juvvie as a ‘he’. He noticed that my pretty parrot sometimes likes to sit in my bedroom window and look at the activity in the breezeway. Whether it was the idea of forbidden love or the just found something to talk about, they struck up a friendship and would call to each other through the glass as he sat on the building across the way peering in. I didn’t have the heart to tell either of them it wasn’t going to work out.

That being said, lots of birds find companions outside of the species. There was a Cockatoo that was adopted by a murder of crows in San Francisco years ago, and Tiki even had a flirting session with two Scarlett Macaws on occasion. So it’s not unreasonable to think that the two of them could find one another of interest. Both are smart and seemed to get a kick out of what the other was doing on the opposite side of the window.

However, I made a crucial mistake. Seeing the crows, I decided one morning to dump some seed outside my building for them. It was stuff Tiki had picked through and didn’t eat from the day before. Rather than let it go to waste, I figured the crows could ‘forage’ out front. All was well in the world of animal recycling til the day when I decided to sleep in.

It wasn’t early by bird standards, but I needed my sleep. The night (or technically the morning) before had been a doozy and I was wanting to snooze. So it woke me with a start when I heard a loud caw from what sounded like inside my room. I snorted awake out of deep REM and heard it again. I realized it wasn’t coming from inside room but just outside. On the window ledge. I drew back the curtain in time to see a black shadow flying away.

It was breakfast time, and I had missed it.

So it’s been for the last year and a bit. To the point where, if I leave the house without feeding my murder (yes, there’s more now) I get followed for a few blocks and cawed at. They recognize my different disguises now, but also if they see me in gym gear they wait til I’m home, but fly at me when I’m going in the front; a friendly ‘reminder’ that they’ve waited patiently for breakfast. It’s a little scary to think they not only recognize me but they know where I live…

So I’m to sure what’s more disturbing to me. The fact that they have me so well trained at the routine or that I KNOW they have me well trained, but I still let them run my life. But considering how smart Corvus brachyrhynchos is, I’m wondering if they’d not do better than humans in other arenas of life? Possibly in the House Of Commons? Sports? Arts? I’m unsure either way.

But I, for one, would welcome our new crow overlords.

Caw, caw.

Little Miss Risk

Does anyone recall the film “Footloose”? Not the reprehensible remake (why? WHY? Just make a new movie…honestly) but the 1984 classic with Kevin Bacon. If you’ve not seen it, then please, go rent it. If your a dance movie aficionado, this is a staple of the diet. If you’ve not the time, I’ll give you the skinny: It centres around Ren McCormack (Mr.Bacon) who hails from Chicago who moves to a small town in which, as a result of a local minister (John Lithgow) rock music and dancing have been banned. It’s scary, but the film was based loosely on the events that went down in a small rural religious community of Elmore City, Oklahoma. Yes, for real. It was a favourite movie for me growing up, partly because the thought that you could ban music or dancing was so ludicrous and alien. I mean, why would you do that?

Fast forward from 1984 to 2008 when I was on tour in Bismarck, North Dakota. I had played shows in this town before but the promoter was having a devil of a time securing a venue. As the tour progressed, we’d get word that the show was being moved from venue to venue. It wasn’t until we arrived that we were told why this game of promoter’s Hot Potato was happening. There is a law in Bismarck that in a stage show, unless you are singing or playing an instrument, you can’t dance onstage where liquor is being served. This puzzles me, since I guess they don’t have much ballet or Riverdance there. So being a burlesque dancer who was neither singing or playing an instrument onstage while performing what I was doing was considered illegal, and therefore our poor promoter, Matt, was trying everything he could to make the show happen (which it finally did) but it weirded me out. Why would people go out of their way to legislate a law making it illegal to dance and have liquor?

One train of thought on this is that it was a way to try and ensure there was a town dry of strippers. But in making that law, they force bars that would have burlesque entertainment to close. Yet they’ve also managed to enact a law that denies them of other cultural forms of dance. This also it allows for mass arrests at any and all Scottish weddings when the whiskey starts flowing… But odd as it sounds, it’s not limited to North Dakota. I remember performing in Salt Lake City and the city had ‘zones’ where exotic dancing could happen. Anything else that involved striptease and dance that took place outside of those zones (such as, ALL the places I performed in while there) you were subject to arrests and fines.

It’s easy to shake our heads, being from the West Coast in Canada and cluck about the strange conservative and backwards attitudes of our neighbours to the south. But I recently got word that we had that in Canada too. In Saskatchewan, another place I have performed in countless times, has seen a ban on stripping. The law is that there is to be no stripping of ANY kind (not even a glove) where alcohol is sold. This law has shut down all but one (dry) strip club and made burlesque impossible. When Cherry OnTop, Lola Frost and Burgundy Brixx were hired to perform at a gig there, they were informed they couldn’t remove anything. ANYTHING. Me, being the jerk that I am asked if reverse striptease was acceptable, coming out nearly nude and dressing onstage. Apparently that’s bearding the lion, I’m told. All three are accomplished performers and could do numbers that didn’t involve stripping, but it begs the question, what problem do people have with striptease, dance and alcohol in concert together?

“A decade ago, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear a challenge to the law, which skirts the constitutional issue by not imposing a ban on strippers — only the mixture of alcohol and nudity. Since that time, numerous establishments have been hit with fines or suspensions. One club was fined when a dancer removed her clothes backstage while changing, even though she was not in view of the public. A recent breast-cancer fundraiser that featured Chippendale dancers, who also did not take off all their cloths, is currently under investigation by the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA).”

Source: Jesse Klein, National Post

This takes me back to the fight on Prohibition and it’s attitudes. The idea that people will not be able to control themselves if gives a choice, so the choice is taken away from them. I would like to think of Canada, and indeed America, as an enlightened society. But the fact remains that people harbour this idea that alcohol and nudity will unleash some kind of of immoral Tsunami on us all and we’ll all drown in sin. My rebuttal is that I’m a very strong swimmer, and I would prefer a choice to being legislated against with prejudice because I choose to perform nearly nude in a place where alcohol is being served.

A few battles for the conservatives have been won, but my friends, as long as I’m twirling a pastie, shaking my hips and drinking fine vodka, the war is far from won.

Little Miss Risk

I met the lovely Treacle when she came up to Vancouver and visited me at Lace Embrace. I followed her both on blog and Twitter afterwards (and you can follow her too at @lingerieaddict).

I recently wrote a guest spot on her blog about life in a corset and to dispel a few myths about my choice of body mod. I thought I’d post the link and share.

http://thelingerieaddict.com/2012/05/tightlacing-101-4-myths-about-waist-training-with-a-corset.html

Regards,

Little Miss Risk

PS: More blogs are coming but things are getting crazy again. Par for the course, I guess. XO.