“Africa and its artists don’t need love. They don't need recognition. They don't need to be discovered by some new Christopher Columbus. They just want to be left to perform their craft,” writes Cameroonian curator Simon Njami in November’s Juxtapoz (articles not available online).

So begins the “African Art Issue.” Clearly, the U.S.-based arts magazine is uncomfortable assuming authority on the subject.

And they avoid doing so at all costs, by recruiting African curators and thinkers to weigh in on the state of African art and allowing the artists to speak for themselves whenever possible.

Many critique the whole premise of the issue, questioning the label “African art.” Multimedia artist Ghada Amer, for instance, resolutely shuns such narrow geographic classifications, arguing that they unfairly limit the reception of an artist's message. Critics routinely interpret her art as commentary on the role of women in Muslim nations, and she resents the mischaracterization of her work, which she describes as “between cultures and about all the women of the world.” Meanwhile, self-described Afro-futurist Wangechi Mutu worries that the moniker implies an untrained, outsider status, leaving no room in contemporary art circles for artists of African descent. She wants her art, which includes conceptual installation work and mixed-media collages, to be taken seriously so that she and others can be recognized as “players in the making of art history.”

The issue's end result? No orderly definitions of African art, but that’s probably the point.

Though several Asian countries practice the art of vehicle decoration, Pakistan takes the custom to a higher level. Across the country just about every kind of transportation, from trucks to fruit carts, has vibrantly decorated examples among its ranks.

Amherst religion professor Jamal J. Elias has spent years researching this form of expression, and has found that the embellishment is not just aesthetic, but also represents the “religious, sentimental and emotional worldviews of the individuals employed in the truck industry.”

This kind of adornment doesn’t come cheap. It costs about $5,000 to decorate a truck completely, most of that money going to structural modifications such as additional levels and extended roofs. (Note that the country’s per capita income is only about $2,000.) Most transport companies will even foot the bill despite the lack of a discernible business advantage, illustrating the importance of the tradition to drivers.

“Since trucks represent the major means of transporting cargo throughout Pakistan," Elias concludes, "truck decoration might very well be this society’s major form of representational art.”

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

Image courtesy of Murtaza Imran Ali, licensed under Creative Commons.

Todd Sklar is hitting the road like a rock star. But instead of churning out guitar riffs, Sklar is entertaining audiences on his 22-city fall tour with screenings of four indie films, including his own debut feature, Box Elder.

The films on tour were all well received on the festival circuit but not widely distributed. Sklar hopes his new distribution model will help put the films before audiences that appreciate them but might otherwise not have access to them. As Anthem points out, when Picturehouse and Warner Independent Films recently closed up shop, it didn’t bode well for the future of indie distribution. But Anthem thinks Sklar’s “proactive search for a sustainable distribution model may very well prove to be the shining beacon of light that independent filmmakers are looking for.”

In addition to Box Elder, the tour is bringing On the Road with Judas, Registered Sex Offender, and In Memory of My Father to cities and college towns across the country. Find the full schedule here.

“I am, unabashedly, pro-fort,” writes Morgan Meis. Meis is a founding member of the New York City-based arts collective Flux Factory and a contributor to the 2008 Art Issue of the Believer, out this month. In his essay “Classified Report from ‘The Secret Clubhouse’ ” (excerpt available online) Meis opines on the artistic value of forts, be they minimalist sheet-and-pillow shelters or the decidedly luxurious structure built by his friend, which included indoor plumbing and electricity.

Who can forget the whimsy of entering a fort you’ve built from found materials around the house, transforming daily activities into clandestine operations of the highest degree? Meis and Flux Factory recapture that magic with their own creations, having famously occupied a room in the Queens Museum of Art for several months in 2002, building and rebuilding a gigantic fort.

Meis’ essay seeks to explain what creates this special connection to our forts: “Take two identical objects, one built to be a toolshed and the other built as a fort. They look exactly the same. But once you know that one is a fort, it transforms. You approach it with diffidence, with the respect of someone entering a sacred space….It is the same with works of art. You don’t treat them as mere objects even if, strictly speaking, there is nothing in their material makeup to differentiate them from mere objects.” Meis offers Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and Marcel Duchamp’s Prelude to a Broken Arm, which is simply a snow shovel, as examples of everyday objects we view as art.

Forts are not the only artwork covered in the newest issue of the Believer. You can also read articles about—among other things—passport photography, a bad-luck painting, imposing public art, and interviews with Global Seed Vault artist Dyveke Sanne, painter and printmaker Frank Stella, author Lynda Barry, mechanical-pencil artist Robyn O’Neil (full text online) and cartoonist Keith Knight.

Image by tastybit, licensed under Creative Commons.

David Klein was an illustrator and art director best known for his Broadway window cards and TWA travel advertisements in the 1950s and '60s. His work has been adopted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a recent Klein Estate auction at Tepper Galleries yielded tremendous results: More than 90 percent of the 300 works brought to the block were sold.

His website allows you the opportunity to browse his collections of vibrant posters, window cards, and illustrations that fit perfectly into the current popularity of retro images. For those who contend that graphic design isn’t art (a hot debate in recent years), they need only look at his playful work to see evidence to the contrary.

To see more classic graphic design, check out Utne Reader's story on WPA posters.

Image courtesy of the Estate of David Klein.

Singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson’s Beautiful World is one of the best folk albums of 2008, with lyrics that tackle tough social and political issues set amid crisp acoustic music that makes these themes easy, even enjoyable, to swallow. Gilkyson has clearly mastered the delicate art of the topical folk song, avoiding the cringe factor that plagues so many well-intentioned but ham-handed protest singers. Her dusky voice and lilting melodies are alluring enough on their own; her knack for insightful analysis just adds another layer of meaning to her multifaceted music.

Beautiful World’s lyrics carry warnings about the wages of excess (“The Party’s Over”), an impending “Great Correction,” and the human carnage of Web porn (“Dream Lover”). But the album also has an old-timey ode to a spring-fed swimming hole (“Wildewood Spring”) and offers plenty of handholds for optimists clinging to the cliff of doom, especially on the two closing songs, “Beautiful World” and “Unsustainable.” I recently spoke with Gilkyson by phone from her home in Austin, Texas, about community, collapse, and the still-coming great correction.

Beautiful World came out in the spring. You must be quite proud of yourself for having predicted the economic crisis and the downfall of the Bush regime with “The Party’s Over” and “Great Correction.”

(laughs) “Yes, well, I had read The Collapse, you know, and I think I felt that we were treading on thin ice for a long time. At first, when the record came out and the collapse, the correction, hadn’t occurred, I was thinking, God, everybody’s working so hard for Obama right now that the timing isn’t right on this because everyone’s all excited and everything, and I’m writing a record about a collapse. (laughs) But it turned out that the timing was right.”

What did you have in mind when you wrote “The Party’s Over”? Did it start out as a political song, or a personal song, or something in between?

“I did not mean to write it about the Bush regime, by any means. I was writing it about First World consumers. That’s really what I was targeting in this recording. It wasn’t red state, blue state in my mind. It was First World nations being the major consumers of energy and raw materials—and that it’s unsustainable and we’ve come to the end.”

“The Great Correction” is about a sea change for the better. Is Barack Obama the Great Correction?

“Not in my mind. That’s a blip on the screen. I actually really like Barack, and I’m hopeful that he will at least be honest in his accounting of what he’s doing. But I still see the Democrats and Republicans as being part of an unsustainable system. I think capitalism, the way it is now, is unsustainable, so I don’t see Barack Obama coming up with—he’s going to come up with compromises that I don’t think we can afford, so I still think we’re going to have to see a greater correction than the one we’re seeing.”

I understand that your inspiration for the album Beautiful World sprang in part from a monthly community forum called Last Sunday that you and author Robert Jensen hosted in Austin. Can you tell me what these forums were about and how they led to the album?

“Yes, we had decided that we wanted to address issues that were important to us—everything from immigration, racism, gender issues, economics—but we really wanted to put it over the overarching feeling that things were coming to a huge change. That either we get off fossil fuel now and have a collapse, or we prolong it longer and have another kind of, probably an even more intense, collapse.

“So we thought, let’s get the community together. Let’s see if this is attractive to the community. Let’s see if what I consider to be the progressive community, can we all get together in a room and have meaningful conversations around these issues? We brought in speakers, and we brought in a very left-leaning Presbyterian minister who I think is just brilliant, Rev. Jim Rigby. He’s really thinking cutting-edge thoughts along the lines of spirituality and religion and the real teachings of Christ, in a way. He’s a very far left thinker, and not a particularly religious person.

“The first ones we had were really successful, and then what we found was that we had every manner of left-thinking group or person on board, and each person had an individual agenda, and everybody thought, ‘This is what we need to focus on.’ There was never any consensus about where we are in history, about what needs to be done, who we turn to, how to organize. It was actually a great big lesson in why we haven’t been able to organize a cohesive movement in the left. It didn’t mean there weren’t some brilliant people there, and brilliant ideas, but the ability to agree and to come up with even a session where there was some cohesion, that never really jelled.

“So it was a learning experience for us. I wrote these songs for each of the different agendas. I mean, I didn’t sit down and think, OK, now I’m going to write a song about this, but I just kind of let myself kind of free-form create during that time period, and these are the songs that came out of it.”

So the forums, while they weren’t especially valuable in leading to solutions, at least led you to create an album.

(laughs) “Exactly. Well, what was interesting was that we realized that we didn’t want solutions. We wanted community, and a lot of them wanted solutions right here and now. I don’t feel that we’re capable of coming up with overriding solutions right now. I think it would be more in our best interests to really educate ourselves about how we got here and where exactly is it that we are before we go forging ahead with solutions.

“And I think there’s more analysis that needs to take place. But these songs were about that process more: Where are we as human beings? Where are we—in time, in history, culturally, as individuals? That’s where the songs came from. So that did come out the [forums]—personally I got a lot out of it.”

Here at Utne Reader we’ve long been involved in the salon movement, which is much like the community forums that you’re talking about. So I’m curious: Did you learn anything about how you might better approach forums like this?

“I really wish I had a pat answer for that. If anything, at this point, I think I would rather see us come together first as a community. What I loved best about Last Sunday was [Rev.] Rigby, because what he did was he put everything in a spiritual basis without it being new age, airhead, everything-is-beautiful—he really got into the challenge to us as individuals, the kinds of ways we need to change how we live our lives and how we view the systems that are in place. And he did it in a way that was so moving and touching that I felt that community spirit—I felt that communal relationship between all of us.

“I think the music [on “Beautiful World”] did that, too, and I think the ideas came across better once we had established that sort of spiritual bond. And if anything, I would say that sense of communal bond has to be there first, or else we are a bunch of individuals with a bunch of varying ideas and agendas. I think that is one of the big problems.”

There’s an undercurrent of optimism to the album, with lines about keeping your heart open and the light burning brightest at the darkest time. Are you ultimately an optimist at heart?

“I am. I just default to joy. I don’t know why—it could just be the way I’m chemically made up or something. But I am optimistic. I’ve been trying to train myself to become more open to a collapse of the system that we live under, and not be afraid of that, to embrace it, because it will mean the end of something that just plain hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for the last 250 years, the whole capitalist extraction model. It hasn’t worked, and even those of us who lightly prospered by it, we’ve lived beyond our means.

“So I don’t want to be afraid of it. I want to feel joy about what will come instead of the system that’s in place. I want to start looking forward to it. The problem is, of course, that you grieve the losses. There are so many losses, certainly in terms of the natural world—there is this grief that’s going on at the same time that we kind of cling to what is dear to us. And that’s what this record is really about—processing the grief and preparing to do battle at the same time, preparing oneself mentally and emotionally for a transition that will really try even the most emotionally stable of us.”

There’s a real trick to writing songs that are political without beating people over the head or seeming shrill, and you seem to know something about this. What’s your secret?

“I’ve studied this. I really have studied it. First, you want to make good music and good poetry. I mean, first and foremost, it’s got to fly on its own as art, and that’s really what I concentrate on when I’m in the studio, that’s what I concentrate on when I’m writing. There’s a cathartic, artistic process in the writing. You can’t come at it going, ‘Now I’m going to write a song about this,’ and sit down and just churn it out. You have to get into a very creative process with it, and really treat it as art first. And that’s abstract, but that is the process for me. It’s very abstract. It’s got to resonate with some sense of emotional catharsis in a way—so in other words, I’ve got to personalize it.”

You seem to be one of those songwriters who thinks that music has the power to change minds. Is that so?

“I think it has the power to make a person feel safe enough to consider other ways of looking at things.”

“Dream Lover” is about the damage inflicted by Internet porn. What inspired that song?

“Well, Robert Jensen, who is my partner, has written a book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. It’s a great book, because this is a subject that the new feminists really don’t touch because they’ve pretty much sanctioned the sex trade industry as being a woman’s choice. But after having really studied this issue, I really see Internet porn as being a huge and powerful bastion of patriarchy that is being allowed to grow at a phenomenal speed and really do treacherous, dangerous work in terms of the social conscience, and the cultural underpinnings of our society. Because, really, what we’re looking at is not the porn that maybe people from my generation remember as pretty much maybe straight or group sex or something—this is violent, degrading, abhorrent treatment of women. And it’s only getting worse, this gonzo porn—it’s like an addiction and it only gets worse.

“And I think it needs to be marked not as a moral issue against these women who are choosing this. What we’re seeing is that these people are suffering. These women are suffering, and they have suffered probably their whole lives. Ninety percent of them were abused as children—I mean, even if a porn queen is telling you this is what she’s chosen to do with her life, you have to really ask yourself, is this a profession that you would want your child to aspire to? I think society has to look at this industry—a huge industry run by men—and ask ourselves the tough questions. And I think it’s really a lot on the men: Is this what I want intimacy to look like?

“I think these are ethical questions we need to be asking ourselves, not hitting yourself over the head with ‘You’re going to go to hell.’"

You’re appearing with Jensen at a few events around the country that are a fusion of music and literature. How are these events structured?

“We’re just starting to experiment with this. Right now I do a few songs, he speaks; I do a few more songs, he speaks: We take turns.”

And you’re tying some of your songs to the things he’s speaking about, or at least loosely?

“Yeah, loosely. I think in the case of a bookstore, where we’re doing this kind of thing, we can be closer to the subjects. Because when I do a show, the issue stuff is very hidden inside a playful night of a broad expanse of topics and music.”

And these events put them more at the fore.

“They really do. People know what they’re coming to hear, and in a lot of ways I’m setting up Robert. He’s such an eloquent speaker, though I don’t think he would agree with that assessment. The songs are kind of a way to get yourself into the emotional space, and then he gets into more specific analysis.”

“Beautiful World” is a very impressionistic, unconventional song, kind of unlike anything you’ve done. It’s almost a meditation. Were you consciously trying to step outside the verse-chorus-verse folk song structure when you wrote that?

“I was—and it’s natural for me to do that. I have stuck closer to the folk format for the last four or five records because I had been labeled as a new age artist years ago, and so I was very cautious. I wanted to really establish my honest roots as a folksinger, because that is really where I come from, and so I spent a lot of time building a foundation around a very simple, straightforward folk approach and production, as a writer and a producer.

“But this record I really felt that I just owed it to myself to just be a little bit more free-form, because I do write that way, especially on the keyboard. So it was kind of fun to just let it go.”

“Unsustainable” is another song that’s unconventional for you. It’s more like a jazz standard than a folk song.

“Mm-hmm. It was so fun to sing.”

“Wildewood Spring” is a more in the vein of a traditional sound. It almost sounds old-fashioned, if not for the lyrics about engines idling and other modern images.

“Yeah, it was kind of old-timey—kind of back hills, almost. And that was the point on that one, because it’s a song about a community, and I just wanted it to be sweet and almost corny. But then of course, it is with the backdrop that when you go into the springs in Austin, especially at 5 o’clock, you can hear the traffic moving, but you’re in this bucolic setting with these sacred springs, and you can see that just three minutes away is this whole other reality in the city. So it was just pitting that one image against the other.”

So Wildewood Spring is a spring right in Austin.

“Yes. Barton Spring pours right out of the ground, and it’s a huge pool that thousands of people can swim in at once.”

Are you already writing songs for your next album? Are you always writing?

“No, I don’t always write. I really have to screw my head on a little different when I’m writing. It used to be, when I was younger, I was able to kind of write songs on napkins as I went, but these days, touring is so grueling that I really just get into sort of a road warrior place, and it’s not as creative a place. It’s really much more about just keeping my body in shape and my voice intact, and getting enough sleep (laughs).”

Image courtesy of Red House Records.

Marnie Stern, the woman Pitchfork calls the “Sorceress of Shred,” has risen to prominence in part due to the fact that there just aren’t that many women doing what she does: frenetic, virtuosic electric guitar alongside high-strung vocals. This is bad news for gender parity in the world of Awesome Guitar Skillz, but good news for Stern, for she is truly one of a kind.

Since the release of her dizzyingly titled sophomore album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, Stern has been garnering a lot of attention, receiving a benediction from Pitchfork, who also showcased her hilarious video “Ruler,” a workout/boxing montage a la Rocky. She also stopped by the University of Minnesota’s Radio K for an in-studio performance last week.

This Is It is definitely worth checking out, but might not be for everyone. Its instrumentation is loud and brittle, comprising Stern’s blistering fretwork and the unconventional percussive grammar of Zach Hill, the drummer for freak-prog outfit Hella. For guitar geeks with eclectic taste and a healthy sense of humor, however, Stern’s high-energy music, her playful videos, and her plans for a rock-festival kissing booth ($100 for “some tongue”) will be a revelation. 

Image courtesy of rephlektiv, licensed by Creative Commons.

 

In troubling economic times, arts funding is almost always put on the chopping block. But thanks to United States Artists (USA), an arts advocacy nonprofit, at least 50 lucky artists won’t be feeling the pinch this year.

The organization, which was founded only three years ago, just announced the winners of its 2008 fellowships, worth a sweet $50,000 to each recipient. The New York Times writes that in USA’s short history it has “won recognition as one of the few new sources of artists’ grants at a time when federal financing from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts has diminished,” particularly for individual artists.

This year’s fellows include architects, dancers, musicians, writers, visual artists, and craftsmen, among others. Here are just a few of the fellows that piqued my interest:

Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, an Alaskan filmmaker whose short film Sikumi, or On the Ice, about an Inuit hunter who witnesses a murder, is the first film made entirely in the Inupiaq language. “That was really important to me,” MacLean told the Anchorage Daily News. “Hearing Inupiaq in film and hopefully TV someday, as well, will help us re-teach ourselves the language and preserve it.”

Sweetgrass basket weaver Mary Jackson, whose craft is “the oldest art form of African origin in the United States,” according to USA.

Julie Bargmann, a landscape architect from Virginia who specializes in making Superfund and other nasty, toxic sites both beautiful and healthy again. Archinect writes that Bargmann “works to transform the waste produced by a century of manufacturing and consumption into something culturally and ecologically productive.”

Photo: Vase with Handle, 1998, sweetgrass, pine needles, and palmetto, 19" x 15". Photo courtesy of Mary Jackson.

 

Did hip-hop play a big role in the ascendance of Barack Obama?

Absolutely, hip-hop author Jeff Chang told Eli Lake of the New York Sun on Bloggingheads.tv. It was still before the election—October 29—but Chang already saw change afoot.

“Potentially what [an Obama victory] could mean is the beginning of the undoing of about 40, 44 years of really nasty racialized politics in the U.S.,” he said. “And I think it is in large part due to hip-hop, actually. Hip-hop, in a lot of ways, culturally prepared the way for the U.S. to be able to seriously look at a young, biracial candidate for the highest office in the land.”

It’s a point Chang makes at greater length in the cover story “The Tipping Point” in the November Vibe (excerpt available online).

And it’s one made much more concisely by British hip-hop star Dizzee Rascal in a post-election interview with the BBC. “I don’t think [Obama] could have won it without hip-hop,” Rascal told anchor Jeremy Paxman. “Hip-hop is what encouraged the youth to get involved.”

Rascal also told Paxman Britain could one day follow the U.S.’s example and elect a black leader.

“I think a black man, purple man, Martian man could run the country. Whatever, mon. As long as he does right by the people.”

 

New York-based photographer Tim Barber curates a stunning collection of art books at TV Books, a bold new on-demand publishing project that hints toward a sturdier future for print publishing—and art, for that matter. Barber, a New York-based photographer, designs the books, advertises them on the site, and prints copies via the self-publishing site Lulu as orders come in. About a week later, voila! The book shows up at your door. And art consumers know exactly what they’re getting: For each book on the site, there’s a super-short video in which someone’s hands (often Barber’s) flip through the monograph page by page.

Barber’s ingenious project eliminates the huge costs typically involved in print publishing: printing presses, distribution, storage space for finished copies, ink and paper (which are especially pricey for high-end art books). He’s just giving artsy types exactly what they want, when they want it.

It’s as easy to lose hours of your day poking around the TV Books site, which currently exhibits 18 books, as it is to lose them at Tinyvices, the online art gallery Barber has run since 2005. The TV Books project is a natural extension of Tinyvices, he says: “I wanted to take that project and make something tangible, and I’ve always loved making books.” He’s also working with the nonprofit arts foundation Aperture, which will publish a series of monographs from Tinyvices photographers.

From the first words out of his mouth—“I don’t really like recordings, you know”—veteran producer T Bone Burnett is a font of eccentric studio wisdom in a rambling interview with Tape Op (article not available online), which calls itself “the creative music recording magazine.” As the mastermind behind one of last year’s unexpectedly great albums, Raising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, as well as many other first-rate recordings, Burnett has the studio cred to back up his sometimes surprising statements and old-school ways. Here are some of the interview's highlights:

Following up on his opening statement, he explains, “I love recording but I don’t really love recordings. I hardly ever say, ‘Wow! That’s a great recording.’ I say, ‘That’s an incredible song or an incredible piece of music.' ”

“I don’t particularly like processing. What I really like is hearing … a group of musicians playing in a room. … I love the sound of an instrument bouncing off a wall and into a room when you hear that pure, deep sound.”

“I never tell anybody what to play. … Usually the first thing a musician plays is the best thing he’s going to come up with. … I take what they give me and I’m very grateful for it.”

“Everyone [in my studio] knows that tape is rolling all the time. There’s no reason not to record.”

“We’ve developed a system for releasing records called CODE. It’s a system for the production, manufacture, and distribution of records in this age. … We’re gonna offer records in three forms: high-resolution vinyl … high-res digital discs … and high-res files. If you buy any one of those three, we’ll just give you anything else that you want.”

“I don’t blame people for not buying CDs anymore because they’re not as valuable as records were … We’re in a position now where, if you go to a show and hear a band and you buy the CD or MP3—it’s like going to a museum, seeing a painting and then somebody takes a photograph of the painting and then somebody takes a Polaroid of that at then somebody’s trying to sell it to you.”

Stories in the Los Angeles Times and Wired go into more detail about Burnett's CODE music format. "Our aim is to democratize high-fidelity," he tells the Times.

Image courtesy of  Tboneburnett.com . 

Jillian Tamaki, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and art instructor, recently posted an elegant essay on her personal creative process, explaining step by step how she creates her work and offering advice to those who hope to be effective artists.

Step One, the most important, is "Be interested." Everyone, artists and appreciators alike, should be aware of the aesthetic qualities of the world around you and also of the world that came before. "You might be surprised to learn that your favourite artist is really a knockoff of someone from 100 years ago."

The essay is an excellent insight into not only the creative process of an artist, but also the process behind appreciating art and creativity. Her advice boils down to one straightforward concept: "The viewer should be charmed, intrigued, empathetic, repulsed, provoked. SOMETHING. They should be touched enough to want to cut the illustration out of the magazine." It really is as simple as that.

(Thanks, Drawn!)

Image courtesy of  lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Kate Bornstein didn’t go through with her sex change operation with the intention of tackling gender theory.  “No, I went through my gender change with the intention of being pretty,” the artist and author said at a performance last year at Virginia Commonwealth University. “I never set out to deconstruct a gender binary. I didn’t have a clue of what that is. I just wanted to be a pretty girl.”

But 22 years after going under the knife, Bornstein has four books, countless performances, an entire system of postmodern gender theory, and a new coalition of sex positivity to show for her work, as highlighted in the Summer/Fall issue of Shameless.

Bornstein’s performances focus heavily on pleasure and joy, and avoid excluding those of us who might not relate too closely to a “transsexual polyamorous sadomasochistic dyke pornographer,” as she calls herself. Though her entire audience isn't always queer, Bornstein acknowledges everyone's identity despair in her perfomances and books, most notably in Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws, now in its third printing.

The article’s author and Shameless editor Megan Griffith-Greene tames the tone of Bornstein’s lectures for the magazine aimed at teenage girls, and focuses mostly on the artist’s credo: “Don’t be mean.”

“The world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they do,” Bornstein writes on her blog. “The world is healthier because of its outsiders and outlaws and freaks and queers and sinners. I fall neatly into all those categories.”

Shameless took a chance in celebrating such a subversive figure among essays about summer camp and female inventors, but it’s a positive sign that the indie publication is filling a much-needed niche, and that Bornstein’s refuse-to-be-silent words are being heard.

“I’m giving myself permission to feel sexy,” Bornstein said at the VCU performance. “and that’s making life a whole lot more worth living for me right now. It’s giving me some time for myself that’s not all about politics and art. It’s just about joy. So do you feel sexy?”

Image courtesy of Kate Bornstein.