// Category Archive for: Feminism

Book Review: Rookie Yearbook Two

By Chelsea Spear

If ever there was a website that required a print counterpart, that website would be Rookie. The smart, bracingly honest site founded by wunderkind Tavi Gevinson has in part made its name on its gorgeous photography, endearing handwritten content, kaleidoscopic collages, and lovingly curated vintage images.

Holding Rookie Yearbook Two between the palms of your hands and idly flipping through its pages is a satisfying experience. The opening and closing papers contain autographs from some of Rookie’s bold-faced friends and contributors, like comedienne Julie Klausner, photographer Autumn de Wilde, and punk rock renaissance woman Carrie Brownstein; the book is printed on heavy matte-finish vellum paper, and the shifting, girly page backgrounds of quilts and textiles gives the book an inviting appearance. Tavi and her colleagues even included some pages to rip out, like a mini-tarot deck of photos from a photo shoot and a foldout of stickers for a build-your-own-shrine feature.

Writing this much about the appearance of a book—down to the card stock pages on which it was printed—might sound a note of foreboding that the images might outshine the words. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Rookie’s graphic design, online and in print, will enchant readers, the content will engage them past the first glimmers of glamour.

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Assemblog: October 4, 2013

Locke

New this week on Popshifter: Jeff is terrified of V/H/S/2, besotted with Sunset Graves’ Variant, and a little embarrassed about “Torn Between Two Lovers”; Paul provides a fascinating treatise linking Blade Runner to The Weeknd and Janelle Monáe; Melissa might be in love with both Blitzen Trapper’s VII and The Wood Brothers’ The Muse albums; Chelsea thinks Just Desserts, the new Waitresses retrospective, is quite tasty; and I thrill to White Lies at Toronto’s Opera House, and recommend new music from Blouse and Terry Malts.

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Music Review: Blouse, Imperium

By Less Lee Moore

Not sure how Blouse’s debut passed me by, but I’m certainly glad to know of them now. Their second album, Imperium, is a shoegazer’s daydream: echoey, deadpan vocals and layers upon layers of reverbed guitars and bass. From a lyrical perspective, Imperium is fixated on looking and seeing, themes that recur frequently in the band’s clever lyrics.

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Music Review: The Waitresses, Just Desserts: The Complete Waitresses

By Chelsea Spear

To bite a phrase from The Simpsons, is there a more misunderstood and underrated new wave band than the Waitresses? Those familiar with them in these post-millennial times probably only know their trio of radio hits—”I Know What Boys Like,” “Christmas Wrapping,” and the theme song from the sitcom Square Pegs. While these songs don’t misrepresent their work, their songs were weirder, complex, and more interesting than those three tracks would suggest. For many years, the only way curious listeners could hear the band’s deep tracks was to seek out The Best of the Waitresses, a remastered-for-CD compilation from 1990. Omnivore Recordings has finally given the Waitresses their Just Desserts with a two-disc collection of their recordings for Polydor.

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FanExpo Canada 2013: Top Ten Picks

By Less Lee Moore

The Cybertronic Spree
Photo © Paul Hillier Photography

FanExpo Canada 2013 runs from Thursday, August 22 through Sunday, August 25 this year. The annual four-day event is crammed with stuff to do and see across multiple fandoms, like anime, comics, gaming, horror, science fiction, and now, sports. It can be a little overwhelming to plan out your days.

My favorite part of FanExpo is always Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear, but with so much to choose from, there’s always a bit of crossover. I’ve come up with my Top Ten Picks of this year’s FanExpo, which I think will satisfy all of your fandom-related urges.

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DVD Review: The Hot Flashes

By Chelsea Spear

On one level, The Hot Flashes is not a remarkable film. This chicken soup-comforting feature will play as well as a basic cable favorite as it did during its truncated theatrical release. The broad sports comedy follows a beleaguered basketball team made up of middle-aged women (hence the title) who play a series of games against the current high school champions to raise money for a travelling mammogram truck. The script hits all the Save the Cat high points, all but one of the narrative guns from the first act goes off in the third, and the movie leaves its audience on a plausible high note.

Though the film has an agreeably mainstream approach, The Hot Flashes is made with care and has a winningly self-aware quality that elevates it from standard seat- and schedule-filling fare. Director Susan Seidelman made her name on edgy, feminist-minded features like Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan, and the goodwill she earned on those films has granted her a good audience base.

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Assemblog: August 9, 2013

Michael Fassbender in The Counselor

New this week on Popshifter: Stuart likes the way Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980 – 1989 tells a story with music; Melissa thinks that the debut of The Fun Boy Three still sounds immediate after all these years; Paul compiles a listener’s guide for R&B in this new millennium; I throw chum into the water in the form of a blog post about Frenzy, an illustrated novel with a Kickstarter campaign; and recommend the sweet and the bitter in Minks’ new album Tides End.

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Assemblog: August 2, 2013

Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori in Pacific Rim

New this week on Popshifter: Brad reviews yet another Scream Factory reissue, this time it’s The Burning; Jeff finishes up this month’s Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums series with Replicants’ eponymous album; Paul informs critics that being average is not worse than being bad; John pays tribute to The Olivia Tremor Control’s Bill Doss; I embrace the post-punk transvestite stylings of The Garden on their new album The Life And Times Of A Paperclip; and enjoy a lot of good movies new on home video and in theaters: Trance, Kiss of the Damned, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, and Berberian Sound Studio.

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Assemblog: July 26, 2013

Idris Elba in Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom

New this week on Popshifter: Brad is a big fan of two new Scream Factory Blu-Ray releases: Ninja III: The Domination and The Howling; Jeff rethinks not having given Bulletboys a chance before and urges others to give the 2006 version of The Wicker Man another chance; I review the vinyl reissue of White Fence‘s self-titled debut as well as the splendid Lenses from Soft Metals, and marvel at the brilliant, hilarious Computer Chess.

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Music Review: Soft Metals, Lenses

By Less Lee Moore

Soft Metals is an appropriate name for a band whose members initially bonded over analog synthesizers. The music of Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks has a hypnagogic quality that’s both solid and liquid. Their newest album, Lenses, continues this liminal exercise with various lyrical visions of love and lust. How you interpret the songs can depend on your mood or point of view.

Rather than relying on harsh textures, the washes of synths on Lenses are mostly fuzzy, sometimes squishy, but rarely piercing, and even then, only when it’s most effective. Hall’s chilly, voluptuous delivery is appropriate for music that’s overflowing with icy sensuality, frequently sounding like the lost soundtrack to a sci fi film from the late ’70s or early ’80s.

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