I’m coming home!

After 8 years of living away from Pittsburgh, I’m coming home. Even though I moved back to Pittsburgh for 2 short summers in 2006 and 2011, Canada has been my home base, where I’ve worked, studied, and grown. Today I was offered a job creating a city-wide mentorship program for Pittsburgh Public School students. I’ll be working in the mayor’s office and putting this education degree to work in a way that feels really fitting for me. I love Pittsburgh more than any other city I have ever lived in. It’s my dear home, and I’m so looking forward to being there again.

I’ve kept this sign in my room for the last few years as a reminder…

Interview with Caroline Azar and GB Jones

Last summer I went to the premiere film screening of She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column and fell in love with the women of Fifth Column.

Fifth Column was an all-women punk band that formed in early 1980s Toronto. Throughout its nearly two-decade run the band released three albums: To Sir With Hate, All Time Queen of The World & 36C, featuring memorable songs like All Women Are Bitches and Detox Killer/Erotic Thriller. This fantastic feminist force led the way for the queercore and riot grrl scenes across Canada.

This week we are celebrating Fifth Column with, SHE SAID BOOM: FEMINIST ZINE MAKING SYMPOSIUM. This D-I-Y 3-day event features a pay-what-you-can talk on Friday April 26th by Fifth Column founders drummer/guitarist/singer GB Jones and lead singer/organist Caroline Azar on their involvement in zine-making throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto. The symposium opens at the University of Toronto on Thursday April 25th with a screening of She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column followed by a talk with Director Kevin Hegge. View the entire schedule of events here.

I had the pleasure of recently talking with Caroline and GB about how they started making zines and what kinds of projects they are working on these days.

EO: How did you two meet?

GB: I first saw Caroline at a screening of Andy Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” at The Funnel.

CA: And concurrently, I was sick in love for the iconoclastic “Bunny and The Lakers” LP that GBJ was a big part of.  The most perfect noise and melody I had ever heard. I used to play that LP for hours. The neighbours complained to my parents and to the police.

So when we met at the Shaw-a-go-go band practice space, there was this double take…yet, we didn’t speak to each other for weeks since we were both very shy. Our first conversation happened at The Subway Room (at the Spadina Hotel, now gone). Our first show was with these performance and video artists from OCA. My art teacher from High School, Angelika came to see us… She let us spray paint the art room with the titles of Sex Pistols songs and play Eraserhead on a projector after school hours.

EO: What is the ‘She Said Boom’ lyric about?

CA: “My girlfriend bombs monuments and I just don’t know what to do!!” In the 80′s “bombing” had a different meaning, which was to ‘tag’, to spray paint, to graffiti. The narrative in the song is about a young boy confused by his girlfriend’s independence, given her obsessive graffiti hi-jinx.

GB had taken spray painting to a whole new level with the “Fifth Columnists Strike Back” graffiti series all over Toronto and parts of Canada, where we toured. You can see it in Bruce La Bruce’s footage in the video for “Like This”. She used to spray paint walls of banks with the slogan, “This will fall down”….what a mystic, she saw it coming…ha!

We had also noticed a decay in our city: destroying lovely and precious monuments, and the mention of architecture and historical milestones in the lyric was a way of cuing up memory for the future.  “March 23rd, 24th, 25th, 1982, North America, was a time regretted by most, when Casa Loma started to roast…”

Essentially, “She said boom” are 3 simple words that, for us, mean being responsible for your own pocket-sized revolution, and that one’s exasperation with what is false can be said aloud: “I say boom, you say boom, she said boom!” A great punk fanzine called Sick to Move (from Pasadena, CA) had a great slogan they need to be credited for: “REVOLUTION BEGINS IN THE MIRROR.”  The tragedies of late that are making this decade a dour one have perverted the onomatopoeia known as “boom” with fascist anguish imposed. We now need to clarify this in respect to the “here and now”.

EO: How did you get into zine-making?

CA: GB really sparked all of us early on in the 80′s, with the notion of making our own zines.  At the time, there were these art magazines in Toronto like FILE and Impulse, highly stylized with a new wave academic sensibility. Both were done in Toronto and GB studied with Eldon Garnet, editor and publisher of Impulse. One of the class projects was to make this beautiful bound print mag the size of a biggish single cover (obviously using the resources of the college).  It was called (sic). Artists like John Brown collaborated on it and writer Donna Lypchuk contributed to it, and GB was already exploring and introducing the historical relevance of Tom of Finland in one of her pieces. I came up with an application for one of her pages, which accompanied GB’s lyrics to the Fifth Column song “Modern Diseases”. It seemed like a satisfying task for an 18 year old lost girl. And GB insisted: “You guys should do your own zine.” So Candy, Kathleen and I did HIDE. GB became a very important element and major voice as well as contributor to HIDE.

GB: At the same time, I had an amazing instructor named Barbara Astman who introduced me to Photocopy Art and the photocopier. So I was working on my photocopy art and also this small press magazine (sic), and of course I soon realized that zines were the best of both worlds. I started out helping on HIDE,  taking photos and so on, and Caroline had the idea of turning it into a cassette zine as well as a print zine. This was the dawn of “cassette culture”, and I think HIDE was really the first cassette zine. When the other editors left, Caroline and I put it out ourselves. We released five issues, and we sent the cassettes to all the college radio stations throughout Canada and the U.S., and K Records distributed it in the U.S.

Then I started J.D.s with Bruce LaBruce, which was an opportunity to put into practice some Situationist theories I was interested in. The scene around J.D.s just kept growing, and by the time we had finished it was just getting started in other parts of the world.

By then though, the so-called “zine wars” had already started and I just wanted to leave all that behind. So one night Caroline, Jena von Brucker, Johnny Noxzema, Rex and myself came up with the idea to do Double Bill. We stayed up all that night making the first issue and mailed it out in the morning. Five issues came out, the last one in 2001.

EO: What do you hope will come out of the ‘She Said Boom’ feminist zine-making symposium?

CA: A spring calling-card to our burgeoning community welcoming your voices. I think a zine has a tacit and arduous beauty that a blog may never have.

GB: I agree with Caroline. Everyone is rediscovering the wonders of vinyl and cassettes lately, and I think zines are next. Although, make no mistake, a lot of people never stopped making them! I contributed to zines like Every Reason and The Filth Zine just in the past year, so I know the zine scene is still alive and well. I also know that feminism is anything but dead but in these times it’s more important than ever for younger women to find out there’s an alternative to the misogyny that’s rampant nowadays, and I hope the “She Said Boom” feminist zine-making symposium can help. It can’t hurt!

EO: What are you working on these days?

CA: Writing plays based on some severe content that has been heating up my heaven and hell…they will be produced by 2014-15. One play is called DINK and the other is for GB starring GB that is a multi-media piece called THE LOOKSIST. All performative work.  And I teach…working with writers and actors in a creation capacity. I might be dramaturging and directing something for the Hamilton Fringe this summer called THE WRONG SEX by Sonny Mills. Just in case I don’t do it, Mills deserves a plug… awesome humourist whom I adore.

GB: I am working on getting two short movies into distribution, an older film first made in 1985 called Unionville, starring Caroline Azar, and a newer one made this year called Hot Dogs, which premiered at The 8 Fest here in Toronto. I’m also working with Caroline on THE LOOKSIST, and doing artwork for The Hidden Cameras. As well, I play in a band called Opera Arcana with Minus Smile and Sianteuse. We are devoted to anything and everything that could be considered Southern Ontario Gothic.

Originally published here on the Toronto Media Co-op

she said boom: feminist zine making symposium

poster by amy egerdeen

I am so ridiculously excited for this epic 3-day affair. I am organizing this with the wonderful GB Jones and Caroline Azar of Fifth Column, Amy Egerdeen, Shannon Gerard, Tara Bursey, and Mary Tremonte. This is my last big to-do before leaving Toronto at the end of this month. I can’t think of a better way to part.

in support of disagreement; against raising tuition

Today I gave a speech at a meeting of the Governing Council, the body that oversees all of the high level decisions that are made at the University of Toronto. I pointed out that the people with voting rights in the room had often not even bothered to raise their hands when it came time to vote on important issues. Aside from that, I asked that they please not vote in favour of increasing tuition. Following my speech, the final vote was called for increasing tuition. Everyone shot up their hands enthusiastically. Unanimously, the University of Toronto voted in favour of increasing tuition fees. After the vote, the chair of Governing Council said, “Ms. Oldynski, I’d like to point out that EVERYONE voted that time.”

Too bad the point was not for Governors to vote *more enthusiastically* in favour of tuition fee increases and serve as a final rubber stamp on a pre-made decision, but rather to have actual *debate and disagreement* on such issues.

—-

To the University of Toronto Governing Council:

Last month I addressed the University of Toronto Business Board and spoke against the proposed 4% tuition increase for most graduate programs and the proposed 6 to 8% tuition increase for some doctoral and professional master’s degree programs at the University of Toronto. At this meeting of the Business Board, members voted to support tuition fee increases. I would like to note, however, that when it came to the vote, a majority of members neither voted for nor against, nor did they raise their hands to signify an abstention from voting. It is disheartening to see this level of non-participation among voting members on the single most important issue for all students in this province.

However, I am here today to respond to the recent provincial announcement of a revised tuition fee framework for 2013 – 2014. Graduate students are pleased to see that this new framework reduces the cap on tuition fee increases for incoming graduate students from 8% to 5%. However, we are disappointed to see that the University plans to increase tuition fees for international students from an average of 5.6% to an average of 7.2%. Although the University of Toronto justifies its high tuition fees for international students by comparing itself to private universities in the United States, the University of Toronto remains one of the most expensive universities in this country for international students.

Graduate students understand that Ontario public funding for post-secondary education is 23% below the Canadian average and that this insufficient funding forces the University to find other ways of balancing its budget. Overwhelmingly, however, proposed solutions by the University continue to place a greater share of the burden onto international students and their families.

As I previously stated at the Business Board meeting, we hope you agree that education is a right and that pursuing graduate studies should be affordable and accessible for everyone, regardless of income or citizenship. Post-secondary education is a social equalizer only if everyone is ensured equal access. The Graduate Students’ Union is therefore calling on the University of Toronto Governing Council to introduce post residency fees – reduced fees during the thesis-writing stage of degrees – for all graduate students, both domestic and international.

High tuition fees for domestic graduate students and even higher fees for international graduate students have created a huge incentive for students to pursue studies elsewhere. If the University of Toronto wishes to increase graduate enrollment, shorten graduate completion times, and increase retention rates, post-residency fees must be reinstated.

Although the University of Toronto has instituted post-residency fees for the final year of PhD studies, we are calling for the introduction of post-residency fees for the entire post-residency period of our studies. Graduate students who finish the course component of our degrees and are working on our research utilize fewer university resources. We also make significant labour and research contributions to the core functions of the university. Reducing fees during this period would therefore recognize that senior graduate students are a net gain in resources for the University.

A report by the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies reveals that as many as one third of doctoral students in Canada do not graduate at all. This amounts to lost personal investments for students, additional costs for the post-secondary education system, and a failure to graduate skilled individuals.

We hope that you will seriously consider how the introduction of post-residency fees for the entire post-residency period of all graduate programs would result in a net-gain both for the University of Toronto and for graduate students. We look forward to working with you to make graduate studies truly accessible for everyone.

Sincerely,

Erin Oldynski, External Commissioner

Graduate Students’ Union, University of Toronto