Newly formed, Fem Maggots is a female/female-identified/queer band that is quickly making a name for itself in the Montreal music scene. Channeling the spirit of Riot Grrrl – the 1990s feminist punk movement – Maggots’ sound blends equal parts joy and rage, resulting in a ragged wall of sound that’s punctuated by screams and chants. Staunchly feminist and anti-capitalist, they monitor their musical message seriously, infusing their music with frustration and political struggle. And yet, for all their seriousness of purpose, they do not take themselves or their band too seriously; at shows, they’ll draw on moustaches and unibrows, paint their faces, or strap on surgical masks. Pringle has been known to dress up as Prince. The wild costumes hype up the band and help make the performances genuinely performative, explains Marie Deckers, who plays accordion.

The crazy costumes and jokey attitude also serve as an important foil to the thoughtfulness and carefully channeled fury that fuels their music. As Brooks puts it in an e-mail, Fem Maggots are, at the core, about “expressing rage,” but also about “creating an auditory world that expresses deep unease and a good dose of weird humanity.” At a recent show at La Brique, as the thrillingly female and queer mosh pit surged up towards the Maggots, this humanity was on full display. Fem Maggots and the crowd moved together, in conversation, energized, angry, and euphoric.

The idea for the band was hatched in an apartment shared by bassist Anniessa Antar, keyboardist Portia Larlee, guitarist Kaity Zozula, and Pringle, who discovered their shared dream of starting a band during late night pillow talk sessions. “We wanted to invite every cool woman, or woman identified person, or queer person we knew to be in [the] band…,” says Zozula. “I think there were probably 15 people asked at the beginning.”

The band eventually boiled down to its current members, adding Brooks after they leapt out of their seat while watching Fem Maggots practice at a cafe and spontaneously began singing along. Some of the Maggots have been involved in music before, but for many, the instrument they play in the band was new to them. Antar, for example, had never played the bass until joining the band. Creating a space to learn and make mistakes is a core Maggot value, an answer to a music scene that can be exclusive and unwelcoming to new musicians. “I’ve often felt unsupported [being] a beginner musician in different male dominated music scenes in Montreal,” explained Candice Cascanette (who plays electric guitar and noise flute) in an e-mail. As newly minted drummer Julia Yudelman put it, “[Fem Maggots] felt like a space to experiment, like a safe-space. Most of the time in bands you get judged super hard.”

Screaming, thrashing, and dressed to distress, Fem Maggots take up a lot of space, and they know it. Pringle explains: “I think we really dissect what we’re putting on the stage. I still personally feel uncomfortable sometimes taking up space and performing. I’m not sure that I’m someone that should be onstage or if it should be some other voice expressing some other struggle.” One of the best things, they say, has been the effect Fem Maggots has had on its audience. “[People have been saying,] ‘hey, I want to do this too!’ Having that idea planted that anyone can create, anyone can use space, anyone can get on the stage and say ‘I don’t have to watch, I can say what I want.’” This sentiment seems to encapsulate a lot of what the Maggots are all about. Of course, you could also put it more lightly, as Antar does when she jokingly says of the band: “It’s just like cool chicks learning shit together, y’know? Beautiful.”

The post Meet the Maggots appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Below are excerpts from the conversations. Be sure to check out the complete interviews on the Unfit to Print page.

Charles Foran on staying in versus going out (a.k.a the Proust vs. the Hemingway)

“It happens to be that, for me, it was the world that turned me on. Gaining slowly and steadily an appetite, and a humility, about the complexity of life and the complexity of human society has fuelled and continues to fuel my work.”

It’s different for everyone. […]People at university now, at your age, I honestly think your job at this age is to be watching, and listening, and doing things. I don’t think young people, even if they have the  great itch to write, should be worrying too much about the writing yet. There is probably at the end a value to having done things, having had experiences.

Life does a job on you. It simply instructs. It instructs on tragedy, comedy, it instructs on failure, on success, on love, on loss. You’re going to write more powerfully and with greater authenticity and depth about those things if you have simply experienced them. And you don’t have to leave your room to do that – all those things will come to you. Or you can go out and find them. There are two different paths – there is the path of a Hemingway, who at 19 went off to basically find a war so he could write about it, or there’s the Marcel Proust, who really never wanted to leave his house in Paris. And both wrote great books from it.”

Tim Wynne-Jones on the book and nostalgia

“I read a statistic just recently – and I have no idea if it’s true, but it sounded like it might be. 26 per cent of the population reads books with any kind of regularity. And 26 per cent of the population wants to write books. And it’s really sort of funny…Increasingly, our society is much more oriented to other forms of entertainment, but that hasn’t stopped people from wanting to become writers. I think the book has become kind of iconic – even in an age when we do everything on our laptop and phone, there’s something kind of magical about a real book.

Our lives have become really small in some ways. We watch TV, movies, read a newspaper on their laptop. Everything is so small…It’s really nice to then turn to something that’s big. And by comparison, I think a book is kind of big because there it is, it just sits there, and it has no other purpose. It doesn’t tell you the time, it has no apps. It’s just this one thing – and there’s a kind of stillness to that.”

Jay MillAr on his first poetry reading while in university

“I’d never been to a poetry reading. I was interested, I’d been sort of tinkering with my own poems, so I thought I’d go down and check it out. We were sitting around [at the reading], they’d set up the chairs in a circle, and I was trying to pick out who the poet was. I decided it was the guy in the mock-turtleneck sweater and the tweed jacket. And then that guy stood up – and it turned out that he was a professor from the university, and he introduced to the audience Bill Bissett.

[Bissett] then stood up, pulled a maraca out of his back pocket, and start[ed] doing his thing. He was singing and chanting and tapping his foot and dancing around and doing a lot of things I wouldn’t expect out of a poetry reading. And it really freaked me out! It made me not only really curious…but very afraid.”

—

Unfit to Print airs Monday, November 5 at 11:00 a.m. on CKUT  90.3 FM.

The post This week on Unfit to Print: Canadian writers talking life and work appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In a recent episode of his podcast, “The Savage Lovecast,” Dan Savage, the columnist best known for his syndicated sex column “Savage Love,” entreated feminists, lefties, radicals, liberals (my people, he added) to get the stick out of their ass concerning sexuality in Halloween culture. The thrust of his argument was this: whether flashing a crowd at Mardi Gras or dancing on a float made out of condoms at a gay pride parade, people of all orientations crave moments of public sexual display. Halloween, with its wild parties and elaborate, often sexual costumes, is no different. And why should it be?

Savage, ever sex-positive, made me ashamed of myself. Like many women in my lefty milieu, I looked down on women who I felt dressed in a “slutty” way at Halloween. Like many others, I took a secret pride in de-sexualized, “funny” costume choices. And yet, on paper, I believed women should be free to wear whatever they wanted, to pursue whatever sexual identity or encounter they desired. I walked in a “slut-walk” – last year’s feminist protest rebelling against a policeman who entreated women to dress less slutty in order to avoid being attacked. Apparently, I didn’t really understand the message. A woman’s body is her own, to reveal and use as she sees fit. Period.

The dissonance in my own view of Halloween has roots in a deeper dissonance between sex-positivity, feminism, and, when it really comes down to it, heterosexual sexual identities (if you need proof of this, just look at the debate surrounding feminism and porn). Sexual desire and political righteousness make uneasy bedfellows.

Girls who choose to dress up as Little Red Riding Hood or as a sexy genie are doing something they have every right to do, which is experiment with their own sexual identity and dabble in the world of fantasy. That a woman would want to be a Red Riding Hood to some guy’s big bad wolf appalls some people – but it shouldn’t. These women are entitled to their play.

To assume that sexy bumblebees are somehow passive prey to those whose desires they might stir is to assume they are powerless. To assume that by choosing a sexy costume girls and women are the playthings of deeply ingrained patriarchy and societal pressures to reveal themselves is to deny them their sexual agency. One can’t label them instant-victims because they’re wearing tube dresses. Maybe I want to wear tube dresses, and be looked at, and feel attractive. Maybe I am just having fun. And, harder for many to swallow, maybe I just want to get laid.

We can look to old school puritanism as well as misguided feminism to explain why this prospect might be met with revulsion and derision by other women. This is slut-shaming. We bristle at some buffoons’ remarks about how short skirts make women more likely to be attacked. To then turn around and bristle at those same short skirts is nothing short of hypocrisy.

By day, Kate McGillivray is the mild-mannered Multimedia editor at The Daily. By night, she’s known to rock a tube dress. Reach her at kate.a.mcgillivray@gmail.com. The opinions are all her own. 

The post In defence of sexy appeared first on The McGill Daily.

We Are Legion.

We Do Not Forgive.

We Do Not Forget.

Expect Us.

So goes the credo of Anonymous, the online community of hacker-activists profiled in Brian Knappenburger’s new documentary, We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. In the movie, Knappenburger reverently charts the online collective’s rise from humble origins in the comment threads of 4chan.com to the position it holds today, as an often-feared, thousands-strong group of hackers capable of large scale interventions on the global political stage.

Anonymous has run a neo-Nazi broadcaster into the ground, waged war on Scientology’s culture of censorship, staged countless virtual sit-ins by overwhelming servers and taking down websites, and even helped remotely facilitate last year’s Arab Spring. Several of its members are facing charges of cyber-terrorism. Several have already served time. And to think – it all started on an image posting site better known for its vicious sense of humour and penchant for anime pornography than its moral compass.

To the average internet browser, the pages of 4chan.com look like a window into the mind of a teenage boy – the threads of comments and images are choked with insults, video game references, porn, and anime. In this dark corner of the internet, only two things really matter: lulz (a corruption of lol) and loyalty to other 4channers. And it is here that Knappenburger begins his story, focussing in on the explosive section of 4chan known as /b/, the “random” forum, as the true birthplace of Anonymous.

Jokes and pranks at the expense of others had always been a mainstay of /b/ culture, but everything began to change when they decided to go after Habbo Hotel, an online social avatar game. Creating identical afro-sporting avatars and entering the game, hundreds of anonymous 4chan users, called “Anons” for short, lined up in the shape of a swastika as other avatars looked on. The outrage of the other young players and their parents only sweetened the deal for the Anon pranksters. Lulz were obtained, and for the first time, the strength in /b/’s numbers was tapped and many anonymous users became one Anonymous.

Knappenburger then devotes himself to frenetically tracing the development of Anonymous from nihilistic jokers bent on pissing off the world to an ethical and engaged group bent on improving it. We hear from the men and women who were major players on the 4chan stage, some of whom wear masks and disguise their voices with electronic equipment, and all of whom point to one moment as the moral awakening of Anonymous: the online war against Scientology, known as Project Chanology. Taking on the church for its practice of vicious legal action against any naysayers, Anonymous dished out toxic amounts of prank calls, server-busting internet traffic, and, most notably, organized in-person protests at Scientology headquarters around the world. As the barrage progressed, a sense of righteousness took hold, and a moral code began to develop. As the Anons repeat over and over throughout the film, “information wants to be free.”

That sense of righteousness has galvanized and intensified as the years have gone on, resulting in a variety of online actions and making “hacktivism,” a conflation of hacking and activism, a household word. From defending WikiLeaks to ensuring that revolutionaries in the Middle East were able to communicate online during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, Anonymous has come a long way since their days as message board dwellers in reckless pursuit of cheap laughs.

Knappenburger’s portrait, though overly reverential at times (Anonymous is described, variously, as a “kaleidoscope,” a “flock of birds,” and a “phoenix”) is informative and inspiring. Like a modern brood of Robin Hoods, Anonymous does what it wants. Luckily, what it wants for the most part is to combat censorship  and keep the powers that be from getting too comfortable.

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