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She’s the oft-misunderstood, oft-hyperbolized neo-folk darling who defies categorization due to her unconventional instrumentation (harp), more unconventional voice (squeaky) and still more unconventional disregard for standard pop/rock song structure and subject matter. Her first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, was a compendium of short songs about yarn, seashells, devotion, regret, and imagination. Her second album, Ys, was a five-song collection where the shortest track clocked in at 7:17 and the longest at 16:53, each of them reveling in a rich orchestral background produced by Townes Van Zandt, each of them long enough to fully develop Newsom’s poetic ideas, against a landscape of leafless trees, talking circus animals, and astronomy lessons.

Now we get Have One On Me, billed as a triple album (available in LP and CD), out today on the label that’s been with her from the start, Drag City. Earlier this month, three tracks were prereleased on the Drag City site, and they were awesome (“‘81,” “Good Intentions Paving Company,” and “Kingfisher”). I especially loved “Good Intentions Paving Company” for its soulful edge, with the trademark piano riffs, backing vocals and organ of a previous era.

I’ve had a while to come to grips with the fact that Joanna Newsom is going to be super famous, now. I’m OK with that, though I’m not looking forward to the expanding criticism she’ll face for things like her visibility in the fashion industry or her famous comedian boyfriend. When people come across a young, prodigious musician early in her career, they tend to make her in the image they want, and they want her to stay twee and nubile and childlike. Joanna Newsom doesn’t owe us anything.

You can listen to Have One on Me in its entirety on NPR Music. It’s not usually my style, but in Ms. Newsom’s case, I’m waiting until I have the artifact in my hand, after a trip to my neighbourhood record store.

>>> dragcity.com

Cross-posted to stylusmagazine.ca

So, Stacey was over last night and we were working on stuff, stuff which diverted into an impromptu creative writing exercise that created an imagined controversial and religious-themed southern Manitoba art installation, and thus, an imagined Mennonite name. Stacey told me about how her mom went to high school in Winkler and was the only non-Mennonite in her class. This personal history blossomed into a present-day game where our friend Cam would play a game with her called Shout Mennonite Names!, getting her to announce random Mennonite-sounding names (first and last) on request.

Naturally, this game took on a life of its own. That life included Cam’s boyfriend, Steven Cochrane, making a generator website of the same name.

The site came about in February of 2009 when my boyfriend (who lives in Winnipeg), told me about a game that some of his friends had devised, in which players take turns shouting plausible-sounding Mennonite names at one another. I can only assume that they came up with this in February of another year, when the Winter Crazies were at their peak.

Not being from Manitoba (or, indeed, any other place with an unusually high concentration of Mennonites), my own knowledge of Mennonite nomenclature was far less intimate and far less ingrained than that of the company I keep. I could muster a “Menno Wiebe!” or a “Harry Dyck!” but after that I was more or less tapped out. Still, I wanted to play along, so I wrote a simple PHP script that would randomly combine entries from two lists of common Mennonite given and family names.

The above is from the “What?” section of the site — be sure to read it, because Steven’s work is done with due dillegence and references. He’s got sources.

I myself am not Mennonite, though my ancestors literally lived in villages neighbouring Mennonite ones in Russia. Close, but no cigar. In modern-day Manitoba, being Mennonite is no longer necessarily a religious affiliation — it’s an ethnic one, though of course the Mennonite religion is still alive and well, with several denominations and hundreds of churches in our province alone. I’m trying to quantify why a site like this is so fundamentally entertaining, but I can’t. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown up in a place where the name “Dyck” (pronounced “dick”) is so commonplace as to not be worth a snicker, where two people named “Friesen” can get married and no one assumes they’re anything but very distantly related. It’s a peculiarity of Manitoba, and I enjoy it.

Yesterday I was organizing my filing cabinet and found something — well, two somethings — I thought I had lost in a move in 2007.

I thought I had lost it forever, but it turns out it was in my filing cabinet, safe and sound, the whole time.

What was it?

FAT MAP!

The fat map was a project that Stina of chubbluv zine did a few years backk, where she pasted pictures of fat people, fat animals and tasty food onto maps and sent them to you. I treasured this map, and added to it — the colour images are ones I glued on, including the likes of Camryn Manheim and Leslie Hall. This map dates back to 2006 — the days when I first became more into the fat acceptance/body positivity movement. As it is with most people, it’s a process to get to the point where you can say, “fat does not equal bad/ugly/gross/whatever.” For me, the journey started with my high school art teacher, who was fat and amazing and lent me copies of the now-defunct plus size fashion mag Mode. A couple years later, I started ordering zines from the (also now-defunct) Pander Zine Distro. I read the bio page for Ericka, the distro runner, where along with vital stats like name, age and location she also listed her height and her weight (!) with the parenthetical comment “Fat girls represent!” That kind of blew my mind, opening the pathways so I’d be ready to get into chubbluv and Fatshionista and the like.

Nowadays, you can find Stina at no futvre, where she continues to be excellent. You can find Ericka and her beautiful photography at elbfoto.

The second item returned to my possession by this expedition into my files was this strip of photo booth pics. It’s my brother and me at the airport. I’m probably 15ish and he’s probably 13ish here.

It’s surprising to see us getting along so well at this particular phase in our lives. It was before he grew to be bigger than me, nullifying any physical intimidation I was previously able to use to bend him to my considerable will; it was before we made it through the treacherous waters of adolescence, able to finally be friends as adults. Bro, if you’re reading, we should take another set of photo booth pics soon!

Photo: gdgt.com

It’s been announced. It’s been explained and demonstrated onstage by Steve Jobs (in a presentation of which, for some reason, Apple refused to provide a live video stream, making the nerds of the world resort to listening to crappy cell phone feeds, not that I’m bitter or anything). Discussion of it has taken over Twitter, news sites, Facebook, and every other corner of the internet.

I have a few thoughts on the matter, which I will share with you now.

1. THIS IS SO COOL

Seriously, people. We are getting closer and closer to living in Star Trek. (Minus the faster-than-light spaceships, the end to hunger, poverty and greed and the onset of world peace.) Frankly, I think we’re all getting a bit jaded about the proliferation and excellence of the consumer electronics already in our lives — from the iPhone to the Wii to our super powerful laptop computers. This stuff is awesome, and let us relish that we are among the privileged few on the earth who can possess it.

2. I’M NOT GOING TO BUY ONE

Yet. As much as I wish I were an early adopter of hardware, I’m not. I can’t afford to be. I wait a couple of years for the bugs to work out, which, let’s face it, is important when it comes to Apple products. That said, I do look forward to owning a tablet device in the future. However, I’ll probably buy an e-paper reader before I get a tablet, since, as many have noted, the iPad is not really a must-have device if you already have a laptop and a smartphone. Which I do.

3. ENOUGH WITH THE JOKES

People are asking, “Did the marketing people at Apple not google ‘iPad’ before giving the device that name?” You know what? I think they did. And they didn’t care. Apple doesn’t care about an old MadTV sketch, nor do they care that you’ll be making “macs ipad” cracks for the next few weeks. In the end, they will bend the cultural context surrounding the word to their own will.

So, instead of repeating a tired feminine hygiene joke, how about making a donation to buy menstruation products for Ugandan girls, who often have to leave school for lack of them? [GlobalGiving]

[Source]

So, the backlash against Michael Cera has begun. It might be in full-force, actually.

Backlashes are rather inevitable when it comes to young actors who rise to fame on a string of filmic and televisual critical successes. For Michael Cera, these successes were the best sitcom of the last decade (and in the top ten of all time, if you ask me), Arrested Development, as well as the Oscar-winning hit teen pregnancy dramedy Juno and Seth Rogen’s teen-boy-comedy opus Superbad.

But these days, everywhere I look, it’s disdain for this GTA-raised former child star. He’s getting it from Jezebel, he’s getting it from ONTD (but that’s not surprising, since LiveJournal’s largest community is notoriously fickle).

I’ve been trying to figure out the roots for this hate (if it can be called hate, since I’m not sure Michael Cera is really the sort of personality that inspires that level of emotion), and I’m coming up at a bit of a loss. We can probably chalk it up to his relative ubiquity. He’s 21, Canadian, and has an IMDb acting filmography that is 43 items long.

I’m not usually over-occupied with Michael Cera. It’s just that tonight was one of those nights that my buddy Ian got me free passes to an advance screening, as he periodically does. The screening was of Michael Cera’s latest star turn, in the screen adaptation of Youth in Revolt, a novel which I have not read, nor had I even heard of it before this week.

One of the most frequent criticisms of Michael Cera is that he really only plays one character, and that character is very similar to himself. To that, I say, maybe and so what? There are plenty of actors who build successful, long-running careers doing this — from Anthony Michael Hall to Harrison Ford.

In the film version of Youth in Revolt, I’d argue that M. Cera manages to play two separate characters (within the same movie!), though the one who accompanied me to the movie argued that the characters he plays aren’t really that different. Those characters are the awkward teen boy named Nick Twisp (our hero) and his ultra-suave alter-ego/persona by the name of Francois, a persona he adopts in order to win the affections of Sheeni, a confident, intelligent and Francophile blonde teenage girl who lives with her ultra-conservative religious family in a very fancy trailer home.

Sure, throughout the movie realized that Sheeni is absolutely too good and too smart for Nick Twisp, and in the movie’s resolution hoped that she would tell him that. She doesn’t. My disappointment is not so great that I can’t enjoy the absurdist humour that forms the basis of the rest of the movie, though.

Back to Michael Cera. I suppose I do feel twinges of my own backlash against this guy; like Seth Rogen before him, Michael Cera’s maleness means he can be awkward, unconventional in appearance, and still be a movie star. It doesn’t work that way for girls, and I resent that.

I’m pretty sure I’d never want to hang out with Michael Cera. He’s probably a dick in real life. But it doesn’t really matter to me, because he’ll have to mess up pretty badly to override the immense goodwill I have toward him because of one thing. Well, one character:

George Michael Bluth. Awkward teenage comic perfection. I always loved George Michael because he was the only one of the Bluth family who consistently acted selflessly (even the erstwhile moral centre of the show, his father Michael, was as manipulative as the rest of his maligned and maladjusted family).

The point of all of this is that I can never jump on the Cera hate train. I just can’t. Every pratfall, every ill-timed hand gesture and stutter endeared him to me so that it’ll take more than oversaturation to get me off Cera. (What will be the limits of this goodwill? Hard to say. Actually, it’s not that hard. It happened with Seth Rogen and the horrible date rape joke in Observe and Report. I’m kind of off Seth Rogen now, and not even watching his 18-year-old adorability the series DVD of Undeclared over the holidays has been able to wash the taste of bitter, unfunny misogyny out of my mouth.)

CERA, RECOMMENDED:

Arrested Development - One of many, MANY brilliant shows Fox cancelled over the last decade. If you haven’t already, rent it in order on DVD. Die laughing. Revive. Repeat.

Paper Heart – Cera appears in this fictionalized documentary with comedienne/musician Charlyne Yi, and if you like sweet, nerdy romance, I think you’ll like this flick.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – Not as highly recommended, but if you like movies about teenage misfits wandering the big city, go for it.

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