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| From Funkylb: Sunday, 2.19.2006 MUSIC OF THE WEEK! This boy makes me happy to be breathing! Be sure to click on "You're All I Need."
Get to know Philly import, spoken word artist and painter, Tamarah Ynise, a little better in this recent interview. Y'all know that Tamarah is currently one of my favorite writers & favorite all-around aesthetes. Her book of haikus, Liquid Verbs, is now available. BUY A COPY HERE and see why I think this exceptional artist is a rising star (and a pretty great person, too). I routinely walk around with my copy of Liquid Verbs somewhere on my person 'cause Tamarah's got that 5-7-5 magic on lock!!! Ya heard me? Y'all missed my debut as a live bass player on 11/19, but you can catch me every 3rd Saturday as Karen "Smitty" Smith and the Lattee Lounge (816 North 4th Street in Philly's Olde City) Present Open Mic Poetry. The talent on display at this event (from poetry to music and fine/graphic arts) gets progressively stronger and stronger. It gets hot up in there! This event happens every 3rd Saturday of the month, so put it in your calendars & palm pilots. I hope everyone's been watching Ian-Patrik Polk's series Noah's Arc. It is America's first black gay TV series. New episodes air Wednesday nights at 10PM on LOGO. I'm already addicted to this frank, sexy show!!! And for the record, the music editor on this show deserves a raise/promotion!!! I'm just sayin'..... The new FUNKYLB MUSIC PLAYER is up and running. Enjoy a playlist of my original tracks with no clicking or complicated downloading necessary. You do need a fast internet connection, though. With one, songs will load in a few seconds. This is a beta version. I'm still tinkering... Holla at me with suggestions etc... FUNKYLB LIVE! Yep, you heard right. I'm putting it down at Smitty's Annual Harvest Party. If you have an invite, use it suckas!!! WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes came out as a lesbian this week. ESPN's Mechelle Voepel talks about the league-wide and cultural aftershocks HERE. Afterellen.com weighs in, as well, HERE. Mark your calendars: every 3rd Saturday poet/musician/playwright/ screenwriter and all around aesthete Karen "Smitty" Smith is hosting a poetry reading at The Lattee Lounge at 816 North 4th Street in Olde City from 8-10PM. Each reading boasts a featured reader and an open mic for other poets. Newbies and seasoned vets alike are welcome. I attended the inaugural session in October where there was outstanding talent on display. The featured reader that night was spoken word artist and abstract art designer Tamarah Ynise. Tamarah's work is socially astute, challenging, visceral, moving, quixotically musical and ultimately transformative. Check out her WEBSITE, and make plans to attend the next reading in November. The house was packed in October! You'll wanna come early and stay late.
BOOKS 8: Lillian Faderman's To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America--A History: I borrowed this hefty tome from the library when it was originally published in 1999 and recently bought myself a copy now that it's out in paperback. The awkwardly wordy title may give the impression that this book is one of those rather shallow surveys that tries to cram decades upon decades of historical information into a slight volume. It is not. Nor is it one of those corny "great and little known facts & contributions books." What it is is a scholarly and exhaustively researched (mostly from primary sources) account of the lives of dozens of late 19th and early 20th century women whose eschewal of compulsory heterosexuality allowed them to pursue college, graduate and professional degrees and careers. Resisting the "cult of true womanhood" allowed them to fight for the inclusion of women in heretofore all male institutions and professions like medicine and law. It allowed then to found and to sustain colleges for women like Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr and Spelman. It allowed them to fight for women's suffrage, for better working conditions for women and minorities, for the end of illegal child labor, for decent health care for poor women and children and for other social reform. Faderman uses extant letters and journals of women on the vanguard of suffrage and anti-slavery, education, law, medicine, social work etc. to prove that many were unmarried and living in romantic/affectional and sexual relationships with other women. Faderman argues that the freedom from the duties of wife and mother in the traditional sense that these women enjoyed was key to them being able to make significant contributions to American life. We enjoy many of the fruits of their labor today. A few of the women chronicled in the book are: Bryn Mawr's first female president M. Carey Thomas, Mount Holyoke president Mary Woolley, suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw, social reformer Jane Addams, medical pioneer Emily Blackwell, among others. Faderman is a fantastic social historian here: she avoids over analyzing things, but does a great job of giving the reader a clear sense of the cultural, political and historical elements bearing down on the women about whom she writes. Her prose style is scholarly, yet still highly accessible. Honestly, this is one of the more reader-friendly history books I've encountered. There is, though, a paucity of information about women of color. There is some mention of Mary Mcleod Bethune, Rebecca Jackson and NAACP attorney Paule Murray, but none of those portraits are in-depth. I don't think this was some kind of purposeful exclusion, though. Faderman relied heavily on letters between friends and sweethearts and on written journals. If the primary sources weren't left behind or made available, then Faderman couldn't include the women. Faderman talks at length about how common it was for potential historical subjects to destroy any written documents that might out them to the prying eyes of future historians. If white women were doing that, then for sure black women did the same but to the nth degree. Farah Griffin, in her text Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (2001), writes about a mid-19th century romantic/affectional relationship between two African American women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. Griffin's book relies heavily on Addie's letters to Rebecca. None of Rebecca's letters to her beloved could be found, and Griffin notes that they were likely destroyed because of their content. In any event, read Griffin's Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends and read Faderman's text. They are both deeply rewarding. The Faderman book, in particular, is so rich with buried history and stories heretofore improperly told that it warrants several re-readings. SEE ALL BOOKS OF THE MONTH My band, Jackie Brown!, is looking for a woman in the Philly area who can play bass AND either guitar, keys reeds or brass. We're a trio of women (percussion, keys/guitar/bass, and cello/bass) who get together for the fun of it right now, but we'd like to play out in the near future. We need a bass playing hyphenate because 2 of us play bass, too, but we'd rather not occupy that chair on every song. The band does classic soul/r&b, neo-soul and funk covers plus a few originals. Contact FUNKYLB. The Village Voice has posted its latest QUEER ISSUE. Be sure to read comic Marga Gomez's piece on attrition, if you will, in the lesbian community. It's hysterical and she ain't lyin'! DVD Alert: Brother to Brother, a feature length narrative film by Rodney Evans, builds a link between a present day Black gay artist (played by She Hate Me's Anthony Mackie) and the Black men who were on the creative vanguard during the Harlem Renaissance. The DVD is available at Amazon beginning June 14th. So, everyone should have the new Antigone Rising record, From the Ground Up. It's only available exclusively at your neighborhood Starbucks. These chicks just rock. Dunbar, I know you tried to turn me on to them @ 3 years ago. Well, I finally get it!!! You can see the band performing live HERE. Me'shell has a new album Read about the new project HERE. Buy it HERE. What's one of the coolest things about NYC....HER! And the 8th Wonder of the World is....Danielia Cotton !!! I saw/heard her play at the TLA on May 7th, and she shook my very foundation. If there is any musical justice in the world, Danielia will be a rock god in the near future. She's just that much of a show stopping, gut wrenching, sangin' like she in church (but over rock riffs) performer, musician and songwriter. I 'heart' her immensely. Buy her EP HERE. Shout out to my girls Angie and Sunshine for venturing out to get our headbang on!!! There are a few new Funkylb tracks up in the VIP room. Please feel free to COMMENT on the songs. It's the only way I'll get better. I think I finally figured out how to make lead vocals stand out in a track without clipping and distortion. Yay for me!!! Thank god for the ZOOM MRS-802B. It's much kinder to me than my computer DAW software. The only problem with the ZOOM is its limited number of tracks. I should have sprung for the 16 track version. PART 8 of my Queer DVD Reviews is up, and it's an all lesbian affair this time. BOOKS 7: The queerest, most hysterical and lucidly astute piece of fiction I've read in quite some time is Abha Dawesar's second novel, Babyji. Nowhere else in literature will you find a more erudite, quick-witted and audacious female character of color. D.E.B.S. is coming!!! Angela Robinson's much anticipated (by me, at least) first feature opened March 25th. This is a feature length film based on Robinson's critically acclaimed short that can be summed up as Charlie's Angels meets lesbian camp. For those of you who saw the short film, you know it was hilariously good, but ummm...all too brief. I've heard that studio bosses at Sony didn't force Robinson to tone down the lesbianism at the center of this story for the feature. Good for them. I can't wait to see this. D.E.B.S is coming to DVD on June 7th. The folks over at Afterellen.com have launched a similar site for men here Pedro Almodóvar is back with a provocative, humorous and always twistedly queer film, La Mala Educación. It's playing in wide release as of mid-January. I spent an engaging 2 hours watching Almodóvar complicate Catholicism, sexual predation, queerness, identity and truth. Don't miss this one! It's now available of on DVD. Would the person who used the email form to ask me about improving recorded vocals on @ 1/22 please email me HERE? You didn't include a reply address. I'd like to talk about equipment & processes & stuff. Check out the the HBO original film, Lackawanna Blues on Saturday, February 12th. It's gay director's George C. Wolfe's first foray into film & his first major gig since stepping down as the artistic director of NYC's Public Theater. Mos Def, Jeffrey Wright, Macy Gray, Louis Gossett, Rosie Perez and a long list of black & latino actors appear in this film about the (queer & straight) inhabitants of a black boardinghouse in Jim Crow America. Queerfunkster Me'Shell N'degeocello is responsible for the film's score. Hey!!!! Be sure to see Clare Danes and Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty. It opened nation-wide in October. The film tells the story of a late 17th century queer English actor (Crudup) who is famous for his portrayals of females in theater productions. Danes plays his dresser who aspires to act on stage as well, but at the time, women were forbidden to appear on stage in England at all. The first third of the movie moves a bit slowly, but thereafter the film is deeply affecting. It's funny as hell, too! Good writing overall. Crudup is astounding as a queer man who really believes himself to be a truer woman than he is a man. Ruppert Everett is genius as the sexually epicurean King Charles II. The film is now on DVD. So, I saw SHE HATE ME, the new Spike Lee Joint. True to form Spike had a lot on his mind (destructive & greedy corporatism, the myth of the Big Black Stud, America's disdain for people who really "do the right thing" & gay families etc...). As usual, though, he couldn't figure out how to make all of those disparate themes gel into a coherent narrative. He does get a high five from me for casting the ever lovely Kerry Washington & Dania Ramirez as the main lesbian (sorta) couple. Anyway, Spike sat down with The Advocate to talk about this movie, and about what he views as the misconceptions about his position on gays, white people and women. You need Adobe Acrobat to read this INTERVIEW in pdf form. The very Almodóvar-esque (with a lesbian focus) Spanish film, My Mother Likes Women, (A Mi Madre Le Gustan las Mujeres) is now on DVD. The film was written and directed by Inés Paris & Daniela Fejerman. I liked the film overall very much. Didn't believe the May-December lesbian romance at its center for one bit, but I did love the chemistry between the youngest daughter and the mother's girlfriend. The film should have been about them. Go see it to find out what I mean. On Monday, June 7th Showtime is premiering The Opposite Sex: Jamie's Story, a documentary about the transition of a male to female transsexual. This film will run the entire month of June. You may also be able to catch last month's offering, The Opposite Sex: Rene's Story, about a female to male transsexual. Rene has been living as a man for 15 years and is about to undergo surgery to complete his transformation, but his wife of 12 years is finding change difficult. This film was fantastic! I became very attached to Rene and Wona, his wife. SIGN UP FOR THE FUNKYLB.COM NEWSLETTER: Finding things a bit too unwieldy here at funkylb.com? Not sure where to begin, with respect to reading content? HERE is an example of one of my newsletters. It's always brief, to the point and usually kinda sexy (LOL!) . Sign up HERE to get the newsletter every month delivered straight to your INBOX. Getting your QUEER FUNK couldn't get any easier! (Note: I swear I'm gonna write a jingle and make a short commercial for the site and newsletter using iMovie. That should be fun!) Also, currently out on DVD is Neema Barnette's Black chicks in prison film called Civil Brand. Everybody's in this movie: Tachina Arnold, MC Lyte, Brooklyn Harris, LisaRaye (one word, y'all!), Lark Vorheese etc...You'll probably have to ask them to get a copy at your local video store. I had to do that at TLA. I'm sick of TLA!!! My main gripe with TLA is that they kill themselves to buy and make available for rental every insipid, borderline porno gay male title, but really fall short with their overall lesbian film catalog and their indie Black film catalog. It takes them months to get new titles in those two sub-genres. I usually have to remind them to get something. They'd better stop playing with me. I'm serious about my movies! Don't forget to check out the lesbian web soap opera, The Complex, online. $8.00 gets you a 90 day subscription whereby you can download and watch multiple 5-7 minute mini-episodes. It's something to keep you busy in between The L Word seasons on Showtime. Check out WendyandLisa.com. It's the new cyber-home of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of Prince and the Revolution days. Wendy and Lisa have matured into phenomenal musicians, songwriters and composers. Until recently, they had been romantic and creative partners for nearly 20 years, but only the latter is true now. I'm glad they're still working together, though. They've made a solid name for themselves composing music for film (Soul Food, Hav Plenty, Dangerous Minds, Jawanna Man, Second Skin) and for tv (Crossing Jordan and the HBO series Carnivale). Also, they've really carved out niche for themselves as studio session players. Wendy is all over Me'shell's Peace Beyond Passion & Bitter and Sheryl Crowe's The Globe Sessions playing guitar. Lisa is responsible for some of the more dreamy, ethereal beauty evinced in the piano playing on Me'shell's Bitter album. If you know me well, you know Wendy and Lisa are just IT for me, musically speaking!!!! I love them!!! They are in my QUEER FUNK PANTHEON, baby. If you don't already own it, buy Wendy and Lisa's 1998 Girl Bros. album. It is such a whimsical, funky and breathtaking collection of very personal songs. Check out my girls!! PART 7 of my suggestions for queer films on DVD/VHS is up. 1. Dolly Parton: Just Because I'm A Woman: The Songs of Dolly Parton. A tribute disc with women singers/songwriters/musicians (Shelby Lynne, Shania Twain, Joan Osbourne, Norah Jones, and Melissa Etheridge, among others ) doing Dolly penned tunes. I just love this cd. Dolly is one of my top 10 singer-songwriters living or dead. I fell in love with her voice first through the two Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstandt, and then I later discovered Dolly, the songwriter. Hearing her songs covered by other artists really allows you to step back and fully appreciate the prodigiousness of her songwriting gift, and it also reveals how positively attenuated the lines between blue-grass, country, blues, gospel and soul really are. Stand out performances here are turned in by: Allison Krauss--she covers the disc opening "9 to 5" and heaps some serious, slowly-percolating hillbilly soul and blues on that tune; Me'Shell NdegéOcello (Dolly herself called Me'shell and asked her to participate) doing a very sexy take on "Three Doors Down." The best track, in my opinion, is Allison Moorer's reading of "Light of a Clear Blue Morning"; it's achingly delicious! If you appreciate good song craftsmanship, you've gotta check out this disc. Dolly is ever masterful! 2. Monica McIntyre: Blusolaz. The Philly music scene has never been so fortunate! This recent import to our little town is a songwriter, vocalist and soulfully feral cellist of some magnitude. Her debut, self-produced album is all acoustic (not a drum, machine, sampler or even synthesizer in evidence) and covers vast musical terrain very well: blues, soul, jazz, and funk (I think). At the center of it all is the most expressive cello and violin playing courtesy of Monica and her sister Marcia. Lyrically, I think, Monica best fits into the self-confessional and raw blues idiom of old. She tells you like it is, but with language deeply steeped in modern poetics. These tunes, instrumentally and lyrically, are head and shoulders above anything currently perched at the top of the charts. 3. Maya Azucena: Maya Who? Indie debuts aren't supposed to be this self-assured, this lyrically substantive nor this sonically even on the production end. You'd think Maya has been churning out records forever. This NY native, who I knew as an undergrad, has a very BIG voice (makes sense; she's a classically trained opera singer), charisma for days and a mighty, mighty pen. She wrote all the songs here, and listening to them is like having a bird's eye view of her creative and personal journey up 'til this point. You'd better catch Maya before she blows up commercially. The R&B, pop and soul milieus will never know what hit them. On this disc, I especially love the slyly metered "Walk for Miles." Maya's purposely lagging phrasing of the lyrics on this tune creates such a funky odd-meter effect. Maya is consistently astute about time and phrasing throughout the album. That gift is usually only found in singers much older than she is. I also love "Get Ya Self Up"; it makes me wanna do just that. There are NO so-so tunes on this album; they're all outstanding. And the voice?...well...it's ineffable. 4. Nick Drake: Way to Blue: An Introduction. The late British folkster's best of collection for newbies, really. All of the wonderful singles that we've all heard in films and on TV commercials are here such as "Pink Moon" and "Northern Sky." Drake was a melancholy romantic of the highest order, and we all know how I love the musical depressives, man! It's a shame he took his own life, though. It astounds me that Drake was so unsure of the beauty and structural elegance of his songs! I like to spin Drake, Joni Mitchell's Blue, The Best of Donny Hathaway, Eva Cassidy, the Miles Davis collected disc Love Songs and Shuggie Otis back to back on my cd player. Great stuff for a slow, chilly, and meditative Fall Sunday. Try it! 5. Ledisi: Feeling Orange, But Sometimes Blue. This album is actually a little more than a year old, but I still play it constantly, and most folks have not heard it. Ledisi is a force of nature! The Bay Area music fans are so lucky to have her in their midst on the regular. Ledisi, her band Anibade and a host of guest instrumentalists recast jazz standards like 'Round Midnight," "Autumn Leaves," "In a Sentimental Mood", and "Straight No Chaser" with self-assurance and inventiveness. While many of the offerings on the disc are classic jazz tunes, Ledisi and the band don't provide rote straight ahead reinterpretations of them. Everything gets twisted in the best way. D'Angelo, for one, must be kicking himself and, perhaps, hiding his head in shame after hearing Ledisi's interpolation of his hit "Brown Sugar" reformulated into a seriously swinging jazz piece. Ledisi combines this tune with another jazz composition called "Sugar", adds some lyrics to both and just goes to work stretching the new song's melodic and harmonic innards. This is my pick for best album released by a vocalist in the last 3 years. Yeah, I said it! If you haven't bought it, you need to redress that right away. I reviewed both of Ledisi extant albums HERE. Soulsinger was recently remastered and re-released. 6. Robin Thicke: Beautiful World. Thicke cut his teeth as a producer and co-songwriter with pop (Marc Anthony) and R&B acts . He's signed to BabyFace and Andre Harrell's NuAmerica imprint. This disc, his first solo effort, is what it would sound like if the Beatles were still (all alive &) together and had decided to focus on churning out R&B and soul records. I'm not even overstating things, either. "Beautiful World" and "Flowers in Bloom", I'm sure, were written after a weekend of aural binging on Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. I've been spinning this disc non-stop for months. It's just lyrically whimsical, has beautiful, but not overly ornate melodies for days, and underneath it all, is just a serious celebration of life. Who would have thought that Alan (Growing Pains) Thicke's kid would turn out so funky? 7. Badu: Worldwide Underground: Personally, I think this disc is filler after the first 3 tracks. I just don't hear Badu reaching for anything of substance here, especially after the lyrical and melodic superfluity on display on Mama's Gun. Folks seem very polarized with regard to whether this album is feast or famine. All I have to say is that Badu is first and foremost a storyteller, and the narratives evinced on this disc are slim to none. Second, there's nothing on here that screams black genius to me, and Badu, on a normal day, is black genius. Still, "Back in the Day" and "Bump It" make me wanna shake my ass or, at the very least, nod my head real, real hard. The raw materials in the grooves are all here for a solid piece of work. What happened after the grooves were laid down, I don't know. These tracks feel unfinished. This disc feels and sounds like an artist at a stalemate with her record label for whatever reason. Maybe I don't know nothin, 'cause this disc surely just went gold as far as sales. Badu sho' nuff had me for the first 12 or so minutes, but after that stuff gets real pedestrian. Make up your own mind, though. There seem to be a bunch of people who vehemently disagree with my assessment. 8. Rosie Thomas: Only With Laughter Can You Win. If you could clone a musical personality from the DNA of Victoria Williams, Gillian Welch, Shawn Colvin and Jonatha Brooke, Rosie Thomas would be the progeny. This singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist writes some of the most poignant, earnest and honest narratives I've ever heard. Marry those things with beautifully assembled folk/pop melodies, and you have Rosie's music. She is only 2 albums into her recorded & published oeuvre, but I feel like I've been listening to her for my whole life, and as a result, my time here on earth has been made infinitely better. Get her debut disc, When We Were Small, as well. You won't regret it. Rosie did a live set on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic this past summer. Go HERE to listen to that session. 9. Me'Shell: Comfort Woman. These are Me'Shell's super-funky meditations on love, sex, politics and God post-9/11. This disc has sensuality, spirituality, space, vibe and ever solid musicianship to spare! It will definitely make my top ten list for 2003. You haven't heard earthy, smoky, atmospheric invitations like "Come Smoke My Herb" anywhere before. And the stabbing, palm muted funk guitar chords that support "Body" makes me wince (joyfully) from their sonic tartness. This album feels especially intimate to me, partly, I think, because Me'shell plays most of the instruments (Cato and Doyle show up for screaming guitar solos here and there) and does all of the vocals on the album. Everything feels like it's happening underwater in the best way. That might be due to Me'shell's liberal use of laid back, elastic keyboard bass, dreamy synth pads and other analog synth textures and sounds. If you prefer the tastes of Bitter and Peace Beyond Passion, this is the album that pulls those 2 faces of Me'shell together into one package. 10. Joss Stone: The Soul Sessions. Joss is a British soul import. She's under 18 and fond of old school soul ala Betty Wright and Aretha Franklin. This disc is a promising start. She definitely has an innate gift for emotional and deeply soulful phrasing, but I can hear her influences a bit too starkly. I'd love to hear what she sounds like on album #3 or #4 when, perhaps, she'll feel more comfortable and more entitled to letting who she is shine through. I mean, she's only 16, right? Maybe writing her own material (all of these songs are penned by others) will facilitate that, too. It must be a bit stifling, though, when your record label is selling you like some kind of curiosity: "adolescent, white girl from Britain who sings American soul music". Ummm... what's novel about that? There was Dusty Springfield (who was the best, man!), Lulu (when she feels like it), Annie Lennox (who does it very well when she's not trying so hard) Lisa Stansfield blah, blah blah... In any event, I really adore this EP's first single, "Super Duper Love", and am heartened by how ambitious Joss's melodic changes/choices are on her cover of the Isley Bros. "For the Love of You." This girl is too much for me! I hope the powers that be let her mature unfettered. If that happens, she'll be phenomenal, I think. Singer-songwriter-cellist, Monica McIntyre owned the Five Spot on Friday, 10/10. Monica hosted the release party for her debut cd, Blusolaz that night. It was a fierce party of original blues, soul, funk and jazz tunes with the most expressive cello (courtesy of Monica) and violin (courtesy of her sister Marcia) playing at its center. Singer-Songwriter-Musician extraordinaire, Cassendre Xavier sang backing vocals with that gossamer soprano of hers. I had a fantastic time at this show. Do yourself a favor and purchase this cd. Hot Damali's online diary about being a single lesbian and negotiating the dating world, The Dyke Chronicles, is being developed into an indie feature film. The diary entries are hysterical, sexy and engaging. I really look forward to the film. BOOKS 5: July's book of the month is Bonnie J. Morris', Girl Reel: A Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2000). Morris, a Women's Studies professor at both George Washington U and and Georgetown, writes about her life long love of movies beginning as a pre-adolescent in Southern Cal and in North Carolina in the late 60's and 70's. She tracks her developing consciousness of her lesbianism and nascent feminism through the prism of the films she watched over and over. Besides being an engaging and funny writer, Morris provides a great case study for how one can be "other" (in her case a Jewish, lesbian feminist) and still really love Hollywood films where the white, straight male is the constant subject. Her story offers a first hand account of how to allow yourself to escape into a film, but also engage it critically and provide resistant readings to it. Morris provides astute critiques of films and her oppositional relationship to them without much of the academic, theoretical language that might have made this book less accessible to the casual reader and film lover. Now I can give my friends or family members this book when they question me yet again as to how I can sit through all of those movies where there aren't any women, or any Black people or any Latinos or any queer folk. This text is the handbook for the ethnically/racially/sexually, gendered minority cineaste with dissociative personality disorder like me. Yay! BOOKS 4: June's Book of the Month is journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's debut novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club (St. Martin's, 2003). I have to admit that when I first heard about this book's premise, 6 former college girlfriends lament about life and love, I thought, "oh brother...this is just Sex and The City or Waiting to Exhale, but with Latinas set in Boston." The book is reminiscent of both of those multi-media hits, but it is so well written and funny that it doesn't matter. The women in Valdes-Rodriquez's novel quickly move from being types (the beauty queen, the career woman/entrepreneur, the perfect and multi-tasking stay-at-home mom and wife, the artist etc...you get the idea) to being real, complex people that the reader cares about deeply. To her credit, Valdes-Rodriguez manages to give equal time to each woman and goes to great pains to disambiguate the umbrella term, "Latino." The women in the book are Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican/Chicano, Colombian or some combinations of the above. Through the characters, the author is able to tackle color politics (light vs. dark skin), class differences and language issues, among other heady themes. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the women is a lesbian. How and why she comes out of the closet is a major sub-plot of the novel. Valdes-Rodriguez, who is straight and married with a child, has crafted a smart and funny novel that is also very queer positive. This is definitely one book you want to have on your summer reading list. EAR CANDY PART 3...Stuff I'm listening to and loving right now: 1. Lizz Wright: Debut album, SALT, just released on the Verve label. Lizz is a writer and vocalist in the jazz milieu, but her voice is equal parts pop, gospel and soul. Her own compositions on this album are introspective and uplifting. She does a beautiful arrangement of Walk With Me, Lord. It just smokes, baby! Sanctified and funky! The title track is one that Lizz wrote, and it is one of my favorites from the album. Great musicianship from a supporting cast of jazz and pop veterans, especially drummer/percussionist Brian Blade. You'll love this album. 2. Roy Hargrove: The RH Factor: Hard Groove. This is a fantastic marriage of jazz, hip hop and neo-soul. Jazz trumpet "Young Lion"Hargrove has callabos with Me'Shell, Badu, Common and D'Angelo, among others. D's offering is my favorite from this album of percolating funk and soul. I also love Badu, Q-tip and Me'shell on a tune called "Poetry." 3. Lisa Germano, Lullaby for Liquid Pig: I love this geeky, ethereal and expressive melancholy romantic. Germano is a multi-instrumentalist and storyteller extraordinaire. No one writes quite like her about weak, lost and desperate people. Check out Lisa's live in studio performance of some of the Liquid material on Morning Becomes Eclectic on Cali's famed KCRW. 4. Rachel Z., Moon at the Window: This album features the jazz/pop pianist's forward thinking, but still reverential covers of Joni Mitchell tunes. This album takes my breath away!!! Rachel's jazz arrangements of these Joni tunes really makes apparent what a brilliant composer Joni is, to say nothing of the astounding wordsmith we all know her to be. 5. Charlie Hunter, Right Now, Move: This is easily this 8 string guitarist's funkiest album from beginning to end to date. He's playing with a quintet that includes trombone, tenor sax, bass clarinet and some tasty harmonica playing. As always, Hunter makes astute choices of sidemen. This group shows such musical symbiosis. The stellar track on this disc, in my opinion, is Hunter's take on the traditional, Wade in the Water. Also, the funk/soul workout, Oakland (available for download from his site.) makes me want to practice my bass more. There's also a track called Mali whose varying tempos and grandiose harmonica playing just slay me. I still can't get over how Hunter plays such funky bass lines while simultaneous playing ridiculously intricate guitar parts. His 8 string guitar (for the uninitiated among you) is actually a bass/guitar hybrid wherein he uses the top 3 strings to play bass and the bottom five to play guitar. Boy has chops for days, don't he? While y'all check him out, I'll get back into the woodshed with my instruments. I got some work to do. 6. Peven Everett, Studio Confessions: This disc is actually a year or so old, but I can't put it away, and most people missed it when it was released anyway. Everett is a musical prodigy (having mastered many instruments), who went on the road playing trumpet with jazz legend Betty Carter as a teenager. He wrote, produced and played all of the instruments on this album of house inflected jazz, funk and soul. His production style favors really dense percussion and rhythm tracks placed deep in the mix with jangley acoustic guitar, spare brass, ambient keys and voice up front. It's very interesting, the sound he captures on this disc. This kid is special. 7. Brad Mehldau, Largo: What to say about jazz's enfant terrible (in terms of scary, limitless talent)? If I could write like Brad, I would. It would be better still if I could play piano as liltingly as he does. He covers Radiohead and Lennon & McCartney on this album. There are also original tunes as well where Brad continues to limn the boundaries between jazz and pop/rock for the thinking man and woman. I adore him!! While I'm on the subject of Mehldau, check out a French film called My Wife is an Actress (2002) starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. Brad provides the film's score, and it is just breathtaking. I'm really upset that I can't find the score on disc anywhere. Good, if self-indulgent, movie, too. 8. Julie Dexter, Dexterity: A British Soulster who writes, produces and arranges her own songs, in addition to being a multi-instrumentalist. Dexter's sound doesn't fit neatly anywhere given that her songs are a loose, unique and funky amalgam of soul, reggae, dub, pop and jazz. This album gives a taste of all of those styles and Dexter proves she can legitimately do it all. This album has been in my cd player since winter. Do yourself a favor and buy it. 9. Dwele, Subject : You know the voice from hip hop hooks for Slum Village (Tainted) and Bahamadia, among others. Detroit's latest export has a voice and vibe that are just butter! He's a multi-instrumentalist, but his true gift, I think, is in the tone and timbre of his voice. Dwele is definitely a student of Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway in terms of phrasing. His voice is also very cool, confident and confessional. Dwele's self-released and self-distributed (as in, out of the trunk of his car) first album/demo has become an underground bootleg hit. I downloaded it from Kazaa. It's ridiculous!!! Some of the first album's/demo's tracks are redone on the new album. ANGEL is my favorite track. Be sure to check out The BBC TV Series Tipping the Velvet on The BBC America Channel Friday, 5/23 through Sunday, 5/25 at 10PM. If you live in SW Philly (West Side!) and have Urban Cable, BBC America is channel 140. The TV series is based on Sarah Water's novel about lesbian entertainers in late 19th century England. The novel is wonderful, and I hear the series is pretty faithful to it. The series is scheduled to air in its entirety several times this Memorial Day Weekend. I think BBC America may show it a few times after that weekend as well. Post Script, 5/26: Hey, this mini-series didn't suck! Go figure. It was pretty faithful to the book, although the story felt rushed along in places. The gender bending/vaudeville aspect didn't feel as organic as it did in the book. I imagined Kitty and Nan as a bit more show stopping on stage than the actresses who played those parts were able to convey. The lesbian sexuality was very graphic for TV. Those Brits seem stiff, but really they're all freaks. Good acting all around for the lead and supporting actors, and some well respected film actors turned up in key roles. Well done, I say! Oh and...long live the Queen (Charles!). I'm just playin'. The NY Times recently ran an article on queerness and hip-hop, a very popular topic among academics and regular folk of late. Read it here. Since you have to register (it's free, though) and log in to access NYT online articles, I printed it and posted it instead. All My Children's Bianca had the soap world's first lesbian sex scene (well, kiss, really) on Tuesday, 4/22 on ABC. Yea for Daytime TV! Don't tell nobody, though, that I regularly check in on this soap to see what the lesbian is up to. Oh and ...Maggie and Bianca forever! Post script: The kiss was typical soap fake, but it looks like Lena will be around for a while. AMC brass are exploring Bianca's love life over the long haul. Let's just hope she winds up with Maggie. I heard, though, that ABC did a viewer poll, and, while the majority of red necks (oops!, I mean viewers) don't mind Bianca having a girlfriend, they don't want it to be the person she has the most chemistry with, Maggie. Naturally! Whatever! Showtime's hit drama, Soul Food, is going queer, at least for a few episodes, this season. I told y'all last season that they were setting up Bird to have a little sumthin' sumthin' going on with cutie guest star, Teri J. Vaughn (The Steve Harvey Show). It looks like things get heated between the two women starting with this week's episode. I'm curious to see how this will be handled on a Black drama. The SF message boards have been abuzz for 2 weeks about it. Surprisingly, most folks seem to be positive about the show moving in this direction. Soul Food airs on Wed nights at 10:00 and is repeated throughout the week. Post script 5/26: The episode with the actual kiss is called "Opposing Attractions". Okay, so Bird (Malinda Williams) and Eva (Terri J. Vaughn) kissed and Terri (Nicole Ari Parker) caught them. Bird admitted to Eva that she is attracted her, but only her, not women in general. Where have I heard that before? Then Bird pulled the typical straight girl act and accused Eva of sabotaging her chances at hosting her own talk show because Bird wouldn't take the kiss to the next level. Eva, then told Bird to step if that's the kind of person Bird thinks her to be. Terri acted like a homophobic ass and Maxine was suspiciously laconic about the whole situation. Maybe Maxine was, as Terri suggested, "turned out" by one of her sister circle friends. LOL! This story arc seems unfinished. I'm guessing that Eva will be back or Bird will be doing a lot of onscreen soul searching about what the kiss meant about the person she believes herself to be. In any event, the writing for this story thread was only mildly cagey and stereotypical. Bird had a pretty thoughtful reason for why she was attracted to Eva. She said (paraprasing), it feels like you really know me, really see me, and when I'm around you, I don't have to be anything else but myself. The Black people get a B- for taking the show here. Lifetime TV is at it again! Lee Rose, out lesbian writer/director (The Truth About Jane, A Girl Thing), has written and directed a movie called An Unexpected Love about a married mother of two who falls in love with her female boss. The film premieres on Lifetime on Monday 3/24 at 9PM. I don't know, man...Lee Rose movies are hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to the gay stuff. The first vignette in A Girl Thing with Kate Capshaw and Elle MacPherson playing queer was just abominable! The Truth About Jane, about a high schooler coming out as a lesbian was pretty good, though. It mostly avoided the "after school special" vibe. Having Stockard Channing play the ambivalent mom was a smart move. So, we'll see about Lee's latest offering...Post script: Lee Rose has a problem with the finer points of narrative. This script was all over the place. The movie wound up being much less about the two women's developing relationship and more about a divorced woman's search for independence and for fulfillment outside of her children. Wendy Crewson as the gay boss was wasted here, but she looked DAMN GOOD! She got the "butchy femme" thing down pat. Lee Rose's track record is 1 win/2 losses so far. TIDBITS: It's no secret that I love TV! I'll cut a date short in order to be home to watch my favorite shows in real time. And frankly, with the dearth of quality feature films of late, TV has been my saving grace. I just wanted to stand up and come out as a TV junkie. Anyway, the best show on TV is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Resident wicca and lesbian, Willow, is getting a new love interest in the second half of the season. Cool! This may be the last season (its 7th) of this show, so don't miss it. Also, seasons 1-4 are all on DVD now, so you can see what all the fuss is about. Over on Lifetime's The Division, it turns out that newly upgraded Inspector, Raina, has two mommies. On Sunday 1/19 at 8:00 watch Debbie Allen (of Fame fame) ham it up as one of Raina's lesbian mothers [Postscript 1/20: this storyline was very well done. I often forget how good an actor Debbie Allen is. And she's still soooo lovely! Sally Struthers as the other Mom was a mess! Don't see it happening. LOL! But this subplot wasn't badly done at all. They left the "lesbian divorce" storyline open-ended, so we may see them again. I hope so.] Also, you know "we're living in the last days", as my grandmother constantly says, when there are queers in Smallville. On Tuesday, 1/14 at 9PM on the WB a crazy lesbian tries to take over the world and also win the heart of young Superman's main squeeze, Lana. [Postscript 1/20: This was a bunch of ridiculousness! It reified the "lesbian as pathological predator motif." I don't know why they bothered with the queer angle if they didn't actually want to show any of it. The crazy lesbian took the shape of two men in order to woo Lana, so we never saw any girl on girl action. And, of course, the lesbian dies in the end. Lame!] . This Friday, 1/17 at 8PM on Fox's Fastlane Tiffani (no longer Amber) Thiessen goes under cover as a lesbian or something to catch a killer, Jamie Priestly. I hear that this is the first step in the character coming out as bi. We'll see. [Postscript 1/20: Hey, this epi rocked! FOX was not timid about the overt sexuality. There were 3 full on kisses between various combinations of women. There was a dyke bar/club scene that actually looked believable. Even in lesbian films the bar scenes are always so hokey. Of course, the show is trying to hook male viewers under like 35, so there was the residue of soft porn for boys, but still this epi shocked me with how genuine the relationship between Tiffani and Jamie Priestly played out despite its "cop gone undercover" premise. They seemed to try hard to walk that line between telling a good story with explicit depiction and full blown exploitation. I think the writers are setting up Tiffani as a bi character.] NOT! THIS SHOW HAS SINCE BEEN CANCELED! Oh yeah, the second best show on TV is ABC's Alias. It's a knock off of La Femme Nikita and Run Lola Run, with a female CIA double agent, Sydney, kicking major ass every week. It's a great show with fantastic escape and fight sequences. There's a cliff hanger every week, and the show's creator had the good sense to hire Lena Olin as Sydney's double dealing Russian agent mother. Watch it every Sunday at 9PM. There are no queers on that show, though. Buy this Music #2 !!!... 1. Vivian Green: Philly raised neo-soulster pens a deeply personal and confessional concept album called A Love Story. While at her site, check out her EPK (electronic press-kit); it's very illuminating about the germination of this audio project. I really love the writing on this album. 2. Goapele: Oakland-based, sorta neo-soulster with a large helping of bohemian. Again, deeply personal lyrics. I love how she layers background vocals on tracks. The song "Closer" is gorgeous. 3. Cody ChesnuTT: The King of the Black Bohemians! This kid is equal parts classic rock, Beatles pastiche, hip-hop, punk and soul. Too, I really dig his sartorial član. Cody made his 2 disc set, Headphone Masterpiece, in his bedroom with just $10,000 worth of gear. He's releasing the tracks pretty much in demo state. Brave...!!! Good songwriting, here, though. "Serve this Royalty" is an ironical masterpiece! This boy is bad! 4. Susan Tedeschi: Wait For Me is the third album from this Boston blues woman. Tedeschi plays a mean blues guitar and sings the hell out of a lyric. Once you see her photo, you'll have a hard time reconciling it with the deep-rooted, southern fried soul of her voice. I love this woman! 5. Conya Doss: I nearly fell off my chair when I heard the song "Heaven" from A Poem About Ms. Doss. Doss will probably be placed with the neo-soulsters, but she really doesn't fit the category very comfortably. There's something a bit off-kilter (in a good way) about her approach to melody and harmony. 6. Donnie: Someone called Donnie's music "Afro-powered soul." That is such a perfect distillation for what this preacher's kid does. His is an original voice with respect to both sonic texture and in his lyrical abilities. Donnie is with folk like Jill, India and British soulster, Omar who can marry a deep, funky groove with poly-syllables and pithy storytelling. "Big Black Buck" is my current favorite from The Colored Section. 7. Melissa Etheridge: Live and Alone is a double DVD set from a tour stop in December 2001. In the deluxe package is a two hour concert and a 'life on the road' short film. The concert is pretty good, considering it's just Melissa and her guitar (no band) the entire time. The best part, though, are the glimpses of tour life BOOKS 3: Check out James Keller's sorta academic look at queerness on TV and in film in Queer Unfriendly Film and Television (McFarland and Co., 2002). Keller brands the current state of queer TV and films as "accomodationist and not at all revolutionary." Keller looks closely at TV's Will and Grace, HBO's Oz and Showtime's Queer as Folk. He also examines recent Hollywood and Indie films like Beautiful Thing, I Think I Do, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Gladiator, Gods and Monsters, The Next Best Thing, Kiss Me Guido, Billy Elliot, and on and on. The book is fairly accessible with respect to critical language (mostly post-structuralist and cultural materialist), meaning it's not too heavy on theory. For the most part it's just good, clear and accessible writing. Also, Keller uses queer in this instance to mean just gay male. SEE ALL BOOKS OF THE MONTH
BOOKS 2... I've been happily reading Rhonda Wilcox's edited volume called Fighting the Forces: What's At Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman&Littlefield, 2002). In this volume academics and theorists write about the deeper levels of meaning, symbolism and narrative structures at work in the popular UPN television series. There's some great stuff here: there's a reading of Kendra, the West Indian Slayer, as a tragic mulatta figure; there's a discussion of why the Buffy/Willow relationship resists a queer reading; there's a provocative id/superego dyad posited for Faith and Buffy and, of course, some thoughtful discussion of Christianity in the face of rampant demonism, sexual taboos, gender disruptions etc... great, great book. I found it useful to juxtapose some of the essays here (especially the ones that look closely at the female figure in the horror genre) with Barbara Creed's seminal work, The Monstrous-Feminine : Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993). If you're into film theory, queer theory and feminist theory, you'll wanna, perhaps, put these two works in conversation with each other. SEE ALL BOOKS OF THE MONTH Out lesbian musician and recent funkylb.com cover girl, Patricia Barber, is profiled in October's issue of OUT Magazine. I scanned the article and posted it. Click here. She's a highly original composer in the jazz milieu and I dig her voice. The strongest work in her oeuvre, I think, is Cafe Blue. I've mentioned JAZZIZ, a monthly jazz magazine, before, but I want to make y'all aware of their compilation CD's. The magazine does a woman's issue every July, focusing on female musicians in the jazz idiom (liberally defined). And like every month's issue, the women's issue comes with a CD with 10 or so tracks from women you should know. Those CD's are available on the JAZZIZ site right now; they only cost $5.00 plus S+H. I suggest July 2000, July 2001 and July 2002. Trust me, it will be money well spent. The magazine has a good track record for picking unknowns who then later blow up. They tapped Norah Jones and Karrin Allyson early in their careers as "stars on the rise." Go here to order the CD's. BOOKS 1... Long time Rolling Stone music journalist Gerri Hirshey's We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000) has been released in paperback. Read this book! It is the best and most ambitious treatment of women in popular music in the modern era. Hirshey is an intelligent writer, insightful music critic and pop culturalist of the highest order. She's interviewed everybody who's anybody in pop music and brings decades of experience and observations to bear on the subject of women who live and breathe music. Hirshey didn't just throw together some interviews but interweaves them with social historical research and her own road tales and winds up with an engaging, pithy narrative. Everyone is here: Ronnie Spector, Carole King, Aretha, Janis, Tina, Ruth Brown, Cher, Diana Ross, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Laura Nyro, Glady Knight, Dusty Springfield, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, Cissy Houston, Missy Elliott, the Go-Go's, Salt and Pepa, Courtney Love, Madonna, Patti Labelle, Linda Ronstandt, Karen Carpenter, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim Annie Lennox and on and on and on. I can't recommend this book strongly enough. See BOOKS 2 and 3 Check out the Links page. This is a work in progress; the lists will grow and grow. Send me any useful and related links you think should be up on the page.
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