Sister Spit, a legendary-in-certain-circles group of writers and performance artists, is in town today and tomorrow.  Led by the eternally awesome Michelle Tea, the raggle-taggle group of wordy gypsies will be hosting workshops at Brown starting, like, an hour from now, and continuing through tomorrow night.

Sister Spit was founded in 1997 as a means to tour queer, feminist, outsider, and otherwise marginalized poetry, spoken word, literature and performance.  This year’s tour (Sister Spit: The Next Generation) features Michelle Tea, Beth Lisick, Rhiannon Argo, spoken word champion Kirya Traber, photographer/curator Sara Seinberg, transgender performance artist Ben McCoy, and Ariel Schrag, whose name I still can not see without immediately singing this song.

I saw the tour last time it went to Boston and it was super, super, super.

Full schedge after the jump:

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The nominations for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards came out today, and as usual they’re horrible and boring, with nominations going not to the best videos so much as the videos for the songs that twelve-year olds might think are the coolest.  And Eminem, for whatever reason.  How annoying, when so many awesome videos came out this year.  Here’s one I just discovered about ten minutes ago, for the song Dance Steps by Swedish group Lucy and the Teenage Monster.  The jerky dance-punk is a lot of fun, but the video is totally amazing.

I especially like the girl in the orange tutu.

You know how the other day I was complaining about how the Bangles are underrated and too fondly remembered for one of their weakest songs?  Well, it’s true, but you know who’s even more underrated and even more often remembered for one of their weakest songs?

Berlin.

Berlin are awesome, and if you think otherwise then you have mold in your ears.  Though they were pooh-poohed in the early eighties as a Blondie knockoff, singer Terri Nunn and pop mastermind John Crawford nevertheless made whole bunch of really awesome singles in the early part of that decade, starting with the attention-grabbing “Sex (I’m A…)”  Even better, though, are “The Metro” and “Masquerade,” both of which appear on the same fabulously trashy and New Wavey Pleasure Victim EP.  [Note: A couple of years ago I dressed up as a Pleasure Victim for Halloween, THAT'S HOW GOOD THIS RECORD IS.]
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