Smashing patriarchy daily.

My PC finally called it quits on me, so I decided to buy myself an early graduation present. I had to, come on! Just look at it in all of its 24 inch glory. Plus I need something powerful enough to run Avid when I get out there in the “real world”. She’s a beaut. Absolutely gawgeous.

Anyway, our gender-bending burlesque performance is this Saturday and I’m getting so excited! You know me, I’ll take any excuse to strip down to nothing but tasseled pasties. We’re going to have tons of props such as whipped cream, cherries, condom balloons, dildos, butt plugs, strap-ons, and confetti. It’s going to be a fucking riot! Other than stressing over the show, my days have consisted of casting, script writing (it’s finally done!), and location scouting. The tentative title for the film is A Man Possessed but I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with it yet. Something will hit me once we start shooting, I’m sure.

What’s everyone doing for New Years Eve? I can’t decide if I want to go downtown, check out a party, or just stay at home sipping champagne and watching Firefly with my boy toy. My New Years resolution? STOP SMOKING 2009. Holy jesus, it’s about time.

My holiday break is going really well. I’m actually being productive! We are almost done casting for the film and it’s going to be an all non-white cast, which I’m very excited about. The script is in the revision stages but should be done after Christmas and the shooting will begin two weeks from now. I hope this project is worthy of submitting to film festivals. I have a really good feeling about it.

On Saturday January 3rd, House of Commons will be having a house show featuring six bands and a burlesque performance by the house. We will be performing three different raunchified songs from The Sound of Music–in drag! It’s BYOB but well worth it. Come out and see me wearing a mustache and shaking my pasties!

Now that I’m on Christmas break I finally have time to read again, so I’ve been tearing through Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I was a bit skeptical at first, but the book is actually less moralistic and personal than I had expected it to be. Jensen essentially targets society’s expectations of a socially constructed masculinity as the source of violence and woman-hate within pornography. Rather than placing blame on any one group, he asks that we move away from masculinity toward a world where we can simply be human.

Jensen was very much inspired by Andrea Dworkin, one of my favorite radical feminist authors and activists. Many people (feminists included) think that Dworkin was too bold, too offensive, and too radical, but I think otherwise. The only real feminism is radical feminism–fuck sugarcoating the issues to appease the mainstream. Dworkin was an activist who spoke out and acted against rape, domestic abuse, and pornography. She fought adamantly against the left-wing liberals and libertarians who insisted that porn was about freedom and self-expression, an argument that I have never been able to comprehend. One of my favorite quotes from her sums up my bewilderment totally: “In pornography we literally see the will of women as men want to experience it.” As long as we live in a patriarchal society, porn will never reflect the true sexuality, experiences, desires, thoughts, hopes, dreams, will of women.

I will be reading pieces of Dworkin’s essays and speeches on Lip Service tonight at 9 pm so be sure to listen.

I recently added a few recorded shows from Lip Service under the Radio section. The ladies and I now have a blog as well, which you can check out at lipservice917.blogspot.com for updates and more recordings. This week we will be reading some of our feminist writing as well as pieces that have inspired us, so make sure to tune in!

My films will be uploaded soon, I promise! They are such massive files (several gigs) and take hours to upload, so I may need to compress them (grudgingly, of course). Speaking of which, the screening of Growth will be this Thursday, December 11th at 8 pm. Everyone is welcome to attend and there will be 9 other short films. Get in touch with me if you want directions.

Wade is moving into House of Commons tomorrow! Stoked!!!

Well, Thanksgiving was a ton of fun and a much needed break. I started the day off with lunch at my best friend’s mother’s house. It’s somewhat of an annual hippie fest–plenty of vegetarian food, a prayer circle, folk songs, and doobies. Later in the evening Evan and I headed down to H-town to hang out with my family. We played a lot of chess, sampled some Tofurkey, and went to the movies to see Twilight. I haven’t read the series yet but I enjoyed the film nevertheless. If you can bear with the high school melodrama and the occasional campy moment, it’s actually a pretty great movie. Very erotic too!

This week is the last of the semester for me and it’s going to be absolute hell. I have a film due tomorrow that’s still lacking some sound and music, another due Wednesday that needs some serious cleaning up, and a final on Friday. I guess it’s going to be another week of all-nighters! Christmas break will be amazing though. I’ll be looking for a production internship, collaborating on a feature-length with some friends, getting the burlesque troupe geared up for our first show in January, and possibly making a road trip to Mexico. Bring it on.