Riot Grrrl Thurrrsday (Friday Edition)

Ok, so I love punk, but I also have a deep love for jazz and soul handed down from my folks. So I kinda love artists like Adele, Duffy and Amy Winehouse that have a bit off soul to their voices. This week's riot grrrl Florence & The Machine takes a bluesy voice and backs it with rock sounds a la the White Stripes. The EP A Lot of Love - A Lot of Blood is out this week.



Downright sassy. Love it!

AfterEllen Keeps It Up?

So, I'm surfing lez sites and blogs, of which AfterEllen.com is one of my favorites, when I see this:

Ads for male erectile dysfunction drugs? And more:

What's the what here? Why is AE running these ads on their site? Why would this company choose a lesbian site to run these ads? I've heard of women using these drugs with some varied results, but I doubt this is serious being marketed to those having girl on girl action. The weirdness confounds.

Riot Grrrl Thurrrsday

I'm very excited about this week's Riot Grrrl. I've mentioned Alison Mosshart before. I've always liked The Kills. When their album Midnight Boom came out a little over a year ago there was song called Black Balloon and I thought, "Cool, they did a Goo Goo Dolls cover, this should be good." Wrong, but what I got was even better.

This week, The Kills released a new EP featuring Black Balloon and two new songs. The best part of this re-release? The new video for Black Balloon.



In my first post I talked about having a weird set of interests. I love this video because it manages to bring several of those widely disparate interests together. Beautiful girl, sick voice, alternative music, and last but not least vampires. So. awesome. I have no words, only swooning.

So pretty...look at those lips!

Wait...something's not right....

She's a vampire.

Even hotter. Don't care if that's not right.

Why Cosmo is for Lesbians

I've become a fan of Curve magazine since beginning to embrace my sapphic side, and I adore the many aspects it brings together that define my life. Long before I was savvy enough to discover my love of Curve - and discover my love of, ahem, curves - I spent countless hours leafing through "mainstream" women's mags. And still do for that matter. Cosmo is a staple as are Elle, Vogue, Allure, and Glamour. To a lipstick lesbian (and in the words of Elle Woods), Cosmo is the Bible.

It wasn't just the stilettos and couture duds that drew me in though, which brings me to the second installment of Ways the Straight Girl Knows She's Gay (WSGKSG). Sure, most women's magazines contain a requisite amount of male nudity, but even more so they feature quite a bit of female nudity. Everything from advertisements to swimsuit and lingerie spreads. And to a girl who may not realize she's gay yet, eyes lingering a little too long on certain pages should give pause.

She's not even a little nude (sad, I know), but my the first time I can remember looking a little too long and too often at a girl in a magazine was Selma Blair in the August 2002 issue of Seventeen when I was 16.



There was just something so adorably androgynous about her. I put the page up on my wall, and when my mom inquired I told her I was "thinking about getting my hair cut like that." Right.

Fast forward nearly eight years and it's a lot harder to use that line for Adriana Lima in this one:



Finally, there's the article that prompted this trip down memory lane:



Holy Hell. That's all I could say when I noticed this on Huffington Post while at work today, hoping my co-workers didn't notice me go into conniptions. This is for a feature article for Allure's Nude Issue. This is the epitome of what I'm taking about. If Padma Lakshmi doesn't make you question things just a little bit, I don't know what would. Oh, maybe this:



Eliza. Dusku. For real. Am I the only one who's Cosmo sometimes induced induces naughty feelings? I doubt it.

**Update** Last night I was watching But I'm a Cheerleader. How could I have forgotten the lines:
"Everyone reads Cosmo. Everyone looks at other girls, all the time!"
"But you only assume they're thinking what you're thinking when they look, but they're not"
"I thought everybody had those thoughts..."

In the words of Harvey Milk...

Come out, come out where ever you are!

Riot Grrrl Thurrrsday

This week's Riot Grrrl is Jenny Owen Youngs. She's got a new EP out Lead to the Sea. She's a little more singer/songwriter a la Fiest or Regina Spektor than rocker chic, but she proves that genre can pack as much punch. And let's face it, any musician who can pull off such a great cover as Hot in Herre deserves the Riot Grrrl title.



New song Lead to the Sea



Adorable cover of Nelly's Hot in Herre

Fox Does Joss Right with Jossverse

There are two types of people out there: those who can appreciate and respect Joss Whedon's genius and those who can't. Yes, I realize that comes off as a little fangirl. Let's clarify a little: there are two types of people in the entertainment industry. For instance:

Twentieth Century FOX (Buffy movie): couldn't appreciate Joss
WB (cancelled Buffy): couldn't
UPN (picked up Buffy for seasons 6 & 7): could
FOX (Firefly): couldn't
Universal (Serenity): could

FOX's treatment of Whedon's new project Dollhouse thus far seems fair enough, and I have high hopes for the future mostly because of this:



This is one of FOX's episodes of the Jossverse, part of the extra features they put on their website for Dollhouse. Brief though they may be they give viewers a brief peek in Whedon's world and that in turn gives me hope that FOX will treat this project with respect. Call me optimistic. Cause I just can't deal with another show being destroyed, particularly with Joss Whedon at the healm.

As Goes Iowa...

... so goes the nation. Normally a statement applying to presidential elections, millions around the country today are hoping that adage applies to the legalization of gay marriage. Because today, folks, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state statute defining marriage as only between a man and a woman violated Iowa's equal protections clause in the constitution. Even better, this was a UNANIMOUS decision. All the legal eagles out there know just how rare that is.

IOWA HAS LEGALIZED GAY MARRIAGE!




I'm officially eating my words. Only a few days ago, I wrote about relationship recognition being something only the coastal states were hip to. Crow never tasted so good.

Opponents are already proposing a constitutional amendment through the state legislature. Jokes on them. The majority of legislators in the state support equality.

This is a great lesson in why members of the LGBT community, allies and all progressives should care about all elections. DOMA put decisions about same-sex marriage in the hands of states, so state legislative races are crucial in determining the fate of marriage rights in individual states.

Even more blatant and relevant is the importance of state supreme court elections. These elections have abysmally low turnout here in Wisconsin (generally under 20%), as I imagine they do in Iowa and other states as well. Yet they consistently are (literally) the deciding factor in whether or not a state will allow same-sex marriages. Massachusetts, Connecticut, California and now Iowa all established same-sex marriage through the courts.

So this is my plea to Wisconsinites: Vote on April 7 in the state supreme court race. Get to know the candidates. Make an informed decision. It's the least you can do.

Riot Grrrl Thurrrsday

Emily Haines - Metric

This week's Riot Grrrl is Emily Haines of Metric (also of Broken Social Scene). Girl is wearing that dress and those shoes in the video below from their new album Fantasies. I'm not always a fan of bands that put have a woman as a front and then all male instrumentalists, but Haines is clearly running the show (and also happens to be an accomplished pianist and songwriter).

Also, I'm a huge Rolling Stones fan and the song title Gimme Sympathy (Gimme Shelter + Sympathy for the Devil - my favorite song of all time) just rocks my world.



More pics (cause, like I've said before, I'm a sucker for a cute blonde)