2001-08-17 - 12:38 p.m.

Everyone on earth has better outfits than me.

Last night I went to the opening night show of Ladyfest Midwest. AWESOME. I got there a couple hours into it, & there were a million cute ladies everywhere. The Congress Theater is big & old & fancy, & I went inside just in time to hear the Butchies play. They were fun, & really sexy. The drummer made us all put our arms up & make a limp wrist for the chorus of a song I think is called "Galaxy is Gay."

Next, Amy Ray played with the Butchies backing her. She was lovely, despite looking quite like Steve Zahn, & her music was good. I didn't know, I didn't think I'd like her even though everything I read assures me that her new album doesn't sound like Indigo Girls. At one point she was asking if Kelly Hogan was there, wanting her to get up on stage to sing the song she sings on her album. I didn't know that, wish she'd been there. A few people came out for a kickass Buzzcocks cover, & then Amy called everyone out to sing the finale. All these awesome young queer artists & this sexy drag queen all stood on the stage rocking out & pointing & screaming at the audience "You don't! have! to live like a refugee!" So that was super cool.

2 spoken word artists came next. They were 2 young Asian women & they each read a poem. The first was great, the second was incredible. She read a poem called "Asian Rage 2: Boy with Asian Fetish Meets Girl with Asian Rage." It was so violent & angry & awesome, all about white boys' bullshit Asian fetishes, & all the violent shit she wants to do to the one the poem is addressed to. It was hard to hear sometimes because the entire place was screaming & clapping so loud after some lines.

Lastly was Le Tigre. They had on sexy pink shirts, & had a screen over them to play images with their songs. They sang lots of stuff from the album I have. You know, that one. Like "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes" & "Hot Topic". For Hot Topic, they didn't do all the yelling of people's names, but instead showed all these supercool book & zines & albums on the screen through the whole song. They played a song about police brutality & made everyone count to 41 which sounds retarded but was quite something. They played a new song called "My Art is Better Than Your Art" which Kathleen says is about people who have a problem if you're doing art that's actually about anything, like street harassment or rape or other things affecting womens' lives, & are just like "Oh, I've seen that before." Her response - "Where, exactly? Where have you seen all this before?" I totally related & feel like men generally think it's a big drag for women to write or make films or music or whatever that has to do with depressing shit that women go through, & it was good for me to hear it addressed. Fuck that. And another song - "50 Y.O.R", from an idea in Shulamith Firestone's "Dialectic of Sex" about how historically for every 10 years of resistance there are 50 years of ridicule, & they were saying we don't need to give in to that shit, just forge ahead despite the ridicule.

The curfew made it stop sooner than everyone would've liked, including the band.

My lunch hour is over. No big summary. Boo hoo. Coochie coochie coo. Hot doggery.

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