Last, please send support + love to our friends & allies in Toronto. It got ugly there this weekend at the G20 and while a lot of peoples’ resistance is blooming, they can use support too as they resist the criminalization and brutalization of their rightful protests.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 8, 2010 – Femme Collective

Press Contact: femmecollectivemedia@gmail.com

Femme2010: No Restrictions Features Dynamic Line-up of LGBTQ Speakers, Performers, and Activists
The Femme Collective is excited to announce the keynote speakers, featured performers, and workshop line-up for Femme2010: No Restrictions, a conference for and by queer femmes August 20-22, 2010, in Oakland, CA.

Femme2010 welcomes people of all genders who are interested in learning, teaching, connecting, and building femme community, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of femme identity, culture, and history.

This year’s conference will feature world-renowned author, playwright, and performance artist Kate Bornstein and self-proclaimed “trouble-maker-at-large” and activist Paulina Hernández as keynote speakers. In addition, Rosie Lugosi, an award-winning high femme performance artist from the UK, and Alotta Boutté, the Bay Area’s own songstress and burlesque artist extraordinaire, will be joined by dozens of other exciting performers, showcasing talents from spoken word and live music to steamy burlesque and drag.

Femme activists, artists, and academics of all varieties will present more than forty workshops, panels, and skill shares on identity, sexuality, and politics over the three day conference. Panels on responses to violence and community organizing will be joined by how-to workshops in social media and sign language, among many others. Artists and vendors will be showcasing their work. Femme2010 also features a film and video screening, including works from over 20 artists, including the award-winning Lucha and the documentary Diagnosing Difference.

Jessica Humphrey, Conference Co-chair, says that Femme2010 “builds on the history of femme contributions to queering identities, gives voice to femmes of all kinds, and seeks to build unity, coalition, and solidarity in our queer communities.”

As stated on the conference website, the conference organizers are dedicated to “creating a Femme-positive environment; selecting programming to honor differences in ethnicity, physical abilities, and gender expressions; and highlighting the intersection of queer Femme identity with issues of race, class, age, and body.”
The conference will be held at the Oakland Marriott City at 1001 Broadway, Oakland, CA, August 20-22, 2010. Registration, which includes all day and evening events, is currently $75, going up to $95 after July 15.

Please visit www.femmecollective.com for more information.

Advertisers and vendors may contact Jessica Giusti jess.giusti@gmail.com.
Media inquiries may be directed to femmecollectivemedia@gmail.com.
Photos and interviews available by request.

Oakland Marriott City Center
1001 Broadway
Oakland, California 94607
August 20th – 22nd, 2010
www.femmecollective.com

Femme2010: No Restrictions is a multi-threaded conference and forum for those who think about, talk about, and create Femme as a queer gender and identity.

Following our Femme2006 & 2008 conferences in San Francisco & Chicago, where hundreds of femmes and allies gathered for workshops, panels, films, visual art galleries and performances, we again invite community members, artists, academics, homemakers, geeks, techies, activists, femmes of all kinds, and their allies to continue the conversation by participating in Femme 2010 as presenters and participants.

We are invested in having Femme2010 continue to reflect the diversity and complexity of femme gender, identity and contributions. We hope for this conference to be a community building event, as well as an exploration and celebration of what it means to build and live queer femme identities.

Submissions of all kinds are welcome, particularly submissions by femmes. We encourage proposals by and for people of color, working-class people, fat folks, elders, youth and people with disabilities. We encourage submissions that work outside and alongside identity and gender, as well as those reflecting directly upon identity and gender. Femme2010 will continue the community dialogue from Femme2006 & 08. In particular, we hope that the intersections of femme with race, region, class, access, ability, privilege, and marginalization will be talked about, given space, meditated upon, constructed, and deconstructed. Finally, we also encourage submissions based on this year’s theme: No Restrictions.

We began this conference in 2006 out of a desire to see femme explored and discussed from a variety of perspectives. We wanted a conference that held the complexities of Queer Femme as its central focus, while building community. We feel we accomplished that in 2006 & 2008 and in 2010, we want to continue to build femme community and bridges, supporting each other across borders and differences.

We hope to draw participants from across disciplinary, medium, and social boundaries. We encourage submissions from anyone interested, regardless of gender or sexual identity. We do ask that you read our mission statement before submitting.

We are soliciting contributions from anyone interested, including (but not limited to):

> workshops
> panel presentations
> performances
> research presentations
> skill shares
> activist & organizational topics
> visual art
> video or film

Submission deadline is April 15, 2010.

Please submit your proposal through the following links, located at www.femmecollective.com:

Program Submission click here

Performance Submission click here

Film Submission click here

**Please note that the more information we have on your submission, the more likely we will be able to accept your submission and include it in the conference schedule.

To learn more about us, our mission and to contact us with any questions, comments or concerns, please find us at our website: http://www.femmecollective.com

woohoo narcissism!

ONE So every once in a while I’ll google my name[s] to see what comes up. And this time around I learned that you can get two songs from Ice 9 and two tracks from Exquisite Witness on the illustriously sketchy beemp3.com. This is surely payment for all the [legal, ahem] files I have gotten from that site…

TWO My friend plays a game whereupon you try to google a phrase that gets as few hits as possible, while still getting some kind of hits. I once got only two hits by combining “troubadour” with something I now can’t remember.

Where people have looked at one of my websites from this week

THREE Lastly – are *you* tracking the stats* on your websites? You can use Google Analytics or Stat Counter or look up your stats via your server, but whatever you do, don’t deny yourself the pleasure of checking it every once in awhile to see where in the world people are checking *you* out from!

*”stats” are the statistics about/information on visitors to your website/blog. You just sign up for an account at one of the services I list above, enter your website domain name, and the service provides code you must copy and paste into your webpage’s HTML. Using that code the service can see when, where, using what keywords or referring sites and for how long visitors come to your site from! Narcisstically good and also useful if you want to see where you might want to advertise, or if your efforts to reach out into the world are working…

Programs

Audio on a PC has always been relatively easy because there are about a thousand good free programs out there for PC users to make music:

• Start –>Accessories –>Entertainment –>Sound Recorder–>talk — aaaand done.

• Being real, the last time I was on a PC [was when I made my first album using $40 of RAM I installed myself on a machine running Windows ME, but even though] my technology was crap, and I easily ran Modplug Tracker — great audio creation [not recording] software. So good and intuitive to use I sometimes bust out the PC virtualizer on my Mac so I can play with it.
• And you have Audacity…

Audio on a Mac has gotten basically awesome in the last few years, in part because of Garageband, yes, but also you’ve got:

• Audacity which is so perfect my friend who pays $$$ for techy grad school got taught it in class. It’s free and available for both Mac and PC and lets your record via your computer’s mic input and/or import all kinds of audio files to mashup and play with.

• and if you want to get cray* and record audio in other ways, say an interview via Skype, you can use Soundflower** [brought to you by the makers of Max/MSP/Jitter, the A/V program I want to marry*** and spend all my time with. Someone give me $$ so I can, please]. With Soundflower you can record any audio from one program to another: iTunes to Audacity, for example.

Hardware

RAM you probably have enough memory [RAM] on your computer to record sound without crashing the thing and frustrating the shit out of you. But just in case, do you?

Microphone You can get a mic at many dollar stores for $2. You can get a mic at radio shack for $15. You can get a mic at a pawn shop / on ebay for  $50-$100. You can afford it! Just make sure it has a 1/8″ stereo plug. If it has the common 1/4″ mono no problem – you’ll need to get two adapters at radio shack / your local electronics corner stort for $3 a pop. One will decrease the jack to 1/8″ and the next will go from mono to stereo.

1/8 - stereo, note the double black lines

1/4 - mono, note the one black line

*a familiar form of “crazy”
** thanks to Sébastien McLaughlin for pointing me to this software!
***maybe marriage is the right goal after all?

The Things that People Make Interview – part 2

In this interview I talk about Sex Worker Activism [and my friend Sadie Lune], Femmes Fight Back and public femme rage, and the power of Taking Our Selves Seriously [TOSS: the wonderful concept originated by my friend Ally].

Sarah’s blog + podcast is These Things That People Make, and she’s interviewed a bunch of awesome folks, most recently including Mattilda.

Today, we look at file sharing. Getting a large media file from my computer/camera/etc. to your email/social network/website/etc.

1. Email that sucker! Is it a sample of a picture for your CD cover or a draft of your latest song?? It’s probably small enough to email.

+ fast and dirty
- giant files clog up people’s email *especially* if their email runs off their website [me@mywebstie.com] and not giant email metropolises like gmail.
- now you have a hundred copies of your image/song/video out there, and maybe you don’t want that because it was a draft or a version that will be changed and that gets confusing [this is called version control! by the way].

2. use yousendit.com – it’s like a single-use email account for really big files, where you set up an account and people use yousendit to create a link that the reciever can click to download the big file.

+ send up to 100MB files
- only 100MB [not great for video]
- you have the file-duplication problem from email, though at least not in your email
- links you send people only last for one week unless you sign up for an account [$]

3. Use a server and FTP software to transfer the file, then send a link - doing this you basically make a “webpage” that is only the media item you want to share [the "page" is an automatically embedded  image, song or video file].  For example: http://www.hadassahsbizzare.com/mp3/Craigslist.mp3. That page is just the song, and I can send the link to people to say, “hey! isn’t Craigslist dating tragic? Listen!”

+ upload any size file and send people a URL [web address, readable in a browser]
- you need to have your own website server space**
- uses your servers’ bandwith
+/- You’ll need FTP [File Transfer Protcol] software. Your server might have a WebFTP or httpFTP [which might limit the size of files you can upload to 5 ot 10MB, smaller than gmail, so check  it out]

FTP software looks like this

. You can download Cyberduck FTP software, it’s free+ great if you’re on a Mac, or try download.com for free PC FTP software.

**You can get a free website account, however, and just use it for files that you need to share. A bit annoying because of all the sign-up time? Sure. Free. Oh heck, yeah.

4. burn a DVD/CD or use a portable drive

+ maybe the cheapest method
- you have to physically hand it off [with the drive, anyway] or mail it.

If any of you have better or other suggestions, I’d love to hear them! In short, it’s so awesome that we have videos and songs and giant pictures to share, but does get a little sticky when our work gets large.

I’m looking forward to introducing my newest out of control [OOC] persona, Miss Taffeta Chiffon. Because when there’s that much sissy around, this Lady can only get fluffy and nasty.

My new post: “I did it!”

Customizing a blog to look almost exactly like an existing site is no small feat. And what, I did it, after several annoying hours with PHP and CSS and the DIY attitude that got me here in the first place – yay for DIY!!

This got me thinking on other things that I cast in my skill set net which are special: parallel parking a conversion van, customized rope body harnesses, troubleshooting the A/V, designing/producing print media for the revolution. And that was just today. What kinds of things are *you* especially good at – and when do you use them?

Then as if I wasn’t feeling magical enough, on Dec 28/09 the brilliant performer Jordan Arsenault, aka Aiden Kakenballz, guest-hosted CKUT’s Dykes on Mikes as part of their Montreal Queer Year In Review. During which he gave me a really sweet shout out and deemed me an honorary Montrealer, which – as an ex-Torontonian, is really exciting! Listen to it here:  Dykes on Mics Dec 28/09