Music

Yesterday on Ujima – Manuelita, Barnett, Pinborough & WEP

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s radio seemed to go off OK. Here’s the traditional round-up post.

We began with a live interview with the fabulous Tamsin Clarke of the Popelei Theatre Company. Much of the conversation was about Manuelita, the one-woman play based on the life of the South American revolutionary leader, Manuela Saenz. We also talked about theatre more generally, and about other projects that Tamsin is currently involved in. If you are in Bristol on Saturday evening and you don’t have a ticket for Against Me! then you can catch Tamsin and friends in Carved, a Christmas dinner of absurd anarchical performance and cabaret for the sinful and undeserving, at The Cube.

Next up was an interview with David M Barnett about his forthcoming novel, Calling Major Tom. David and I recorded this at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in October, but there was no point airing it until now as the book isn’t out until January (and then only as an ebook). Obviously I had to play Amanda Palmer’s version of “Space Oddity”. Not only is there the Bowie connection, but David’s editor, Sam Eades, used to be Neil Gaiman’s UK publicist.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

The second hour began with the interview I did with Sarah Pinborough at BristolCon. I think this is the first interview I have done that involved two large glasses of Merlot. Sarah is great fun to interview. She has a great story to tell too. Thanks are due to Gareth Powell because I based a bunch of the questions on Sarah’s Guest of Honor interview, which Gareth conducted.

Finally on the show we had my report on the Women’s Equality Party conference. That includes a whole lot of comments from people who were at the conference, including Stella Duffy, Catherine Mayer and Sophie Walker. I was joined in the studio by my colleagues on the show, Frances and Judeline, and was pleased to see that they liked what WEP was doing.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The full playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Edwin Starr – War
  • Cat Stevens – Peace Train
  • Otis Redding – Try a Little Tenderness
  • Amanda Palmer & Jherek Bischoff – Space Oddity
  • Martha Reeves & the Vandellas – Nowhere to Run
  • Diana Ross & the Supremes – Reflections
  • The Temptations – Ball of Confusion
  • Sly and the Family Stone – I Want to Take Your Hand

Amanda aside, all of those tracks were taken from the soundtrack album of the V&A’s new 1960s exhibition which I reviewed here.

Records and Rebels at the V&A

~ Cheryl

Thanks to meeting some lovely people at the Speaker’s House in Parliament on Wednesday night (more of that some other time) I got to spend yesterday afternoon as a guest at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was there to see a new exhibition titled, “You Say You Want a Revolution: Records and Rebels 1966-1970”. It really was a remarkable period in Western history. It saw the flower power movement and anti-war activism, the start of the gay rights movement and the black power movement, the burgeoning of second wave feminism, the birth of the environmentalist movement and the first Moon landing. We got a lot wrong back then, primarily because we didn’t talk to each other, but there was much right too.

As the V&A recognizes, music was key to much of what went on. Pop music was a relatively new thing, and musicians were at the forefront of many of the political movements. If you take the headphones around the exhibition you get treated to some of the finest anthems of the era along the way. Cleverly the V&A is selling an album based on the exhibition. It has no Beatles, because they are still very protective of their output, but most of the other important songs are there.

Obviously the exhibition very much caters to people like me who were kids or teenagers at the time. Nevertheless I think it is hugely important right now. We need to recapture that spirit of revolution, and this time we need to do it right.

Introducing #Piracity Music Week

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

What ever else you might say about pirates, I think we can all agree that they love to sing. With that in mind, I’ll be spending this week tweeting links to songs for and about pirates. Hopefully you folks will join in too. Just tweet a link to your favorite pirate song, using the #Piracity hashtag, and I’ll include it in the final round-up.

To kick things off, here is one of my favorite bands, Dreadzone, with “Captain Dread”.

Yesterday on Ujima – Art, Books, Steampunk

~ Cheryl

It was a busy Women’s Outlook show on Ujima yesterday. It started with a full studio as three artists came to tell me all about this year’s North Bristol Arts Trail. SF&F readers will be most interested in the work of Lou Gray who is a set designer, costume maker and puppet maker. I’m very sad that I’ll be out of town the weekend of the Trail because I would love to see her work.

For the second segment I welcomed Rebecca Lloyd, whom some of you may remember was a World Fantasy nominee last year for her collection, Mercy and Other Stories. Her latest book is Oothngbart, which is one of those delightfully uncategorizable novels. Hopefully the interview will give you some idea of the flavor of the book. I’ll try to get a review soon, because it is a lovely story.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Next up were Kate and Tina, two fabulous ladies who are setting up the Bristol Steampunk Museum. They are looking for all sorts of fun steampunk things to exhibit and sell. They plan to have an online shop as well, so steampunk fans around the world will be able to order from them. The major interest from my point of view is that they also want to host readings of steampunk stories, and I happen to have an entire anthology full of them. I may end up buying some clothing and jewelry too.

Finally I had a pre-recorded interview with Tade Thompson about his newly released novel, Rosewater (which I warmly recommend) and other forthcoming work. We also discussed the newly-formed African Speculative Fiction Society, and there was brief mention of Piracity.

There’s a lot more of that Tade interview. Some of it has been badly mangled by the Internet, but I hope to be able to post a much longer version on Salon Futura in due course.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The playlist for yesterday’s show was as follows:

  • Get Up, Stand Up – Bob Marley
  • Expression – Salt ‘n’ Pepa
  • You Gotta Be – Des’ree
  • Working Day ‘n’ Night – Michael Jackson
  • Night Train – James Brown
  • The Ascent – Ren Stedman
  • Automatic – Pointer Sisters
  • Loving the Alien – David Bowie

I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the new Ren Stedman single. It is a charity record. All proceeds are donated to Hesten Lodge Activity & Wellbeing Centre to raise the money to build a sensory room for adults with severe learning disabilities. You can buy it for as little as £1 here.

Trans Pride On Ujima

~ Cheryl

Today I devoted the whole of my show to the South West’s first ever Trans Pride. I was joined in the studio by Sophie Kelly of the TPSW committee, and Tara Fraser who works with our friends ShoutOut on BCFM.

Our one non-trans guest was Liz Sorapure of Bristol Mind who is helping set up a new helping specifically for trans people. Liz is looking for trans people who would like to be trained up to be helpline volunteers, because it makes a big difference to know that someone with similar life experiences is on the other end of the phone.

I had a whole pile of pre-recorded interviews, mostly from my trip to London last week. These included Ruth Cadbury, MP; Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch; Jay Stewart of Gendered Intelligence; and journalist, Jane Fae. Obviously they were all talking about the state of the campaign for trans rights.

Later in the show I spoke to Henry Poultney of Off the Record who talked about issues facing young trans people in Bristol.

All of the music on the show was by trans artists. I also included an interview with the headline act from trans pride, Ren Stedman. I played three of Ren’s songs, including a new one he tells me has never been heard in public elsewhere.

Apparently we were off FM briefly at the end of the show. I’m told that there were some power cuts in Bristol and the building that houses our transmitter was hit. Thankfully the studio was OK. Internet streaming was unaffected, and the Listen Again links are fine. My apologies to anyone listening on FM in Bristol. Hopefully you can catch the missing bits of the show via the links below.

You can listen to the show’s first hour here, and second hour here.

The playlist for the show was:

  • I Am What I Am – Amanda Lear
  • What I Have Become – Ren Stedman
  • White Wedding – CN Lester
  • You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) – Sylvester
  • Grow Up – Ren Stedman
  • Love Will Save the Day – Koko Jones
  • Alfred Parks – Ren Stedman
  • True Trans Soul Rebel – Against Me

The Chalk Playlist

~ Cheryl

Work this afternoon has been accompanies by the playlist for Paul Cornell’s forthcoming novel, Chalk. It is mostly classical 80s pop — things like Human League, Culture Club, Duran Duran and of course Let’s Dance era Bowie. However, there are a few older songs in it too. I have a couple of tunes I’d like to highlight.

First up, Tracey Ullman’s cover of Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know”. I love just about everything that MacColl wrote. This one was a huge hit.

I have two things to say about this. The first is that I was never a Bay City Rollers fan. The other is that I used to own a pair of pink slippers exactly like the ones that Tracey wears in the video.

Here’s the other one. This isn’t the video used in Paul’s playlist but it is more appropriate. White Horses was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid and I particularly loved this song. As I said to Kevin in email just now, I was such a girl, it is a wonder no one noticed.

There was Follyfoot too, of course. Mind you, what I really wanted was Comet, not a Lipizzaner. And Streaky to go with him.

This Week on Ujima – Pete Sutton, Hate Crime & Teenagers

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s Women’s Outlook show was supposed to kick off with Sarah Hilary talking about her fabulous new crime novel, Tastes Like Fear. However, Sarah is not well, and Pete Sutton gamely stepped in at the last minute to talk about his debut short story collection, A Tiding of Magpies.

Special congratulations were due to Pete and Ian Millstead (both of whom are in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion) because their stories in North by South West got honorable mentions in the latest Year’s Best Horror anthology from Ellen Datlow. I apologize profusely to Ellen for describing her as the Simon Cowell of the horror industry, but I did say that she’s a much nicer person.

Pete and I also talked briefly about the forthcoming Bristol Festival of Literature. We provided a sneak preview of some of the exciting events that will be happening.

Next up I talked to Jaya Chakrabarti and Paul Breedon about a Peace Picnic that they organized in Knowle West last weekend. There have been some fairly unpleasant hate crime incidents in south Bristol since the Brexit vote, and the community wanted to do something to stand in solidarity with the victims.

You can listen to the first half of the show here.

The second half of the show was given over entirely to a group of young people on a National Citizenship Scheme training program. We had them in the studio as a sort of work experience thing, part of which involved getting interviewed live on air by Paulette and myself. They did very well.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Chic – My Forbidden Lover
  • The Pointer Sisters – We Are Family
  • Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Peace, Love & Understanding
  • The O’Jays – Love Train
  • Marvin Gaye – Abraham, Martin & John
  • Stevie Wonder – Superstition
  • Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up
  • Jimi Hendrix – Voodoo Child

A Little Pop Representation

~ Cheryl

Tegan and Sara have a new video out. The song is called “Faint of Heart”, and the video features a whole lot of young LGBTQ artists cosplaying famous pop icons. Being an old lady, I don’t know who most of the kids are, but according to this post we have: Cooper Treibel as David Bowie, Tyler Ford as Prince, Ella Giselle as Madonna, Dominic Ravina as Elvis Presley, Olabisi Kovabel as Grace Jones, Eli Erlick as Sara, and Ni Ching-Marino as Tegan. Ella, of course, was on Season 2 of I Am Cait. I’ll have to check the others out.

If you look carefully you can find Tegan and Sara in the audience shots. And if you know what you are looking for you can also find two fine trans actresses: Angelica Ross and Jen Richards (stars of the Emmy-nominated Her Story). The producer, Devon Kirkpatrick, gave them roles as two mothers helping their kids make the costumes. That is a wonderful thing to have done. Well done to everyone involved.

Update: The ever reliable Mey over at Autostraddle has done a post about the video. She knows far more about the young stars than I do. As I suspected, most of them are trans-identified in some way. Even the director is trans. Thank you again, Tegan & Sara.

Today on Ujima – Cat Valente, Rape Prevention, Hate Crime & Brexit

~ Cheryl

Sorry about the weird company, Cat. That’s the way it goes with radio some days.

Today’s show began with an interview I did with Cat Valente at Finncon. As usual with such things, I was only able to broadcast about half of it. All of the in-depth writerly stuff got cut. The full thing will appear on Salon Futura in a few weeks. Cat and I seem to have done a lot of giggling in that interview.

In the second half hour I was joined by Charlotte Gage from Bristol Women’s Voice to talk about the “R U Asking 4 It” fiasco, in which members of Avon & Somerset Police were taken to task by a group of Bristol teenagers for entirely inappropriate comments on rape prevention. I should note that following the initial disaster the response of the police has been fantastic. Very senior people have got involved, and I understand that today another email went around the force reminding officers of the need to be on message over such issues.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Next up I spoke to Jennie Darch from SARI about the rise in hate crime following the Brexit referendum. SARI is a charity that specializes in helping the victims of hate crime, and there is no doubt that their case load has increased dramatically since the vote. Charlotte also mentioned women talking to BWV about a sudden upsurge in racist harassment.

I was delighted to see that during the music breaks Charlotte and Jennie were busy comparing notes and thinking of ways in which their agencies could work together to tackle this problem.

The final half hour was given over to vox pop interviews about Brexit that I collected at Finncon. My thanks to the many lovely people from around the world who were willing to share their views.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The music this week was mostly on the theme of immigration. That included “Get Back” by The Beatles which was very much on an immigration theme before the Fab Four thought better of it and re-wrote the lyrics to be more politically safe (including some casual transphobia). The full playlist is as follows:

  • Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
  • Jama – No Borders
  • Bob Marley – Buffalo Soldier
  • Horslips – The Man Who Built America
  • Tabby Cat Kelly – Don’t Call Us Immigrants
  • Maryam Mursal – Lei Lei
  • The Beatles – Get Back
  • Fontella Bass – Rescue Me

Remembering Wendy Carlos

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

As I have probably mentioned before, one of my TV addictions is music documentaries. Recently I have been watching a few about electronic music. Now when you think of the history of electronica you probably think of people like Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, but synthesizers had been about in popular music since the 1960s. Historically, of course, it can be dated back at least as far as 1928 when Léon Theremin patented his truly bizarre musical instrument. Two early pioneers of the use of synthesizers in rock and pop were Pete Townshend and Stevie Wonder. But the synth-only album was quite another thing.

My favorite synth composer from when I was a teenager was Isao Tomita (and I’m playing Snowflakes are Dancing while I write this). But he wasn’t the first on the scene. Back in 1968 Wendy Carlos had an unlikely commercial hit. She had realized that the metronomic precision of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was perfect for synthesizers, and created an album called Switched on Bach which reached #10 on the Billboard album chart and has sold over 1 million copies.

Although she produced several other classical-themed albums, Carlos’s career quickly moved sideways into films when she was hired by Stanley Kubrick to write the score for A Clockwork Orange. She re-united with Kubrick to score The Shining, and was later hired by Disney to produce a soundtrack for Tron. That’s not a bad career for a woman composer you have probably never heard of.

If you find an early copy of Switched on Bach you may see it credited to someone else. That’s because, back in the 1960s, in addition to becoming a pioneer of electronic music and a pop sensation, Wendy was also undergoing gender transition. Trans women are awesome.

Oh, and Wendy is still with us. There’s someone I would love to meet.

The Bowie & Prince Panel

~ Cheryl

Jareth
There’s not a lot to report from this panel as we didn’t really have a reading list. However, there are a few things I want to mention.

Firstly I opened up with Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff, because what better way to start an SF&F convention panel on Bowie than with Neil Gaiman performing the countdown from “Space Oddity”. I’m very fond of the Strung Out On Heaven album, but it wasn’t until I was listening to a music documentary this morning that I realized that on “Space Oddity” Jherek had done with strings what Bowie had originally done with a Mellotron. On the 1969 recording it had been played by a young session musician called Rick Wakeman. (Wakeman also played piano on a number of other huge pop hits, including Bowie’s “Life on Mars” and Cat Stevens’ “Morning has broken”.)

As I was the only member of the panel who had grown up in the UK, I probably had more of a connection to Bowie than most, but Cat surprised me by revealing that her step-mother was a huge Bowie fan.

For Cat and Suzanne much of their connection to Bowie came through fantasy rather than science fiction. Labyrinth seems to have been a very important film for lots of people. I can quite understand why.

Cat, having grown up in the US, was invaluable when it came to discussion of Prince. The UK barely bats an eyelid at the sort of thing the Purple One got up to. He didn’t even get banned from Radio 1, though he did have to make a small change to the lyrics of “Sexy Mother Fucker”. The USA, on the other hand, went into full scale moral panic over “Darling Nikki”.

Bowie did so many SF concept albums that we had no trouble finding things to talk about. Cat said that parts of Blackstar sounded like a story she might have written. Hopefully one day she will be able to do it. Prince only did one SF concept album: Art Official Age, which is a “sleeper awakes” story (and features Lianne La Havas as the doctor). After the panel, Iia Simes reminded me (and I had indeed forgotten) that Prince wrote the music for Tim Burton’s 1989 movie, Batman.

As both Cat and I noted, Prince may not have written much SF, but everyone agreed that he must be an alien.

I ended the panel by going a little off topic because there is a recording artist who has managed to combine the legacies of Prince and Bowie. Prince played on some of her early work, and that work involved the creation of a character every bit as vivid as Ziggy Stardust. Take a bow, Janelle Monáe Robinson, a.k.a. Cyndi Mayweather.

janelle_monae_archandroid_
Finally, for those of you who have no idea what I meant when I said that Cat and I re-created the famous Bowie/Ronson hug from “Starman”, here are Ziggy and the Spiders in that famous Top of the Pops performance. Everyone sing along now.

This, On Repeat, All Day

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I get that people are angry, but they are not angry in a vacuum.

They are angry because their standard of living is falling, their jobs are disappearing, and their rents are skyrocketing.

They are angry because their social security benefits are being cut and they are fed a constant diet of newspaper articles and TV programs suggesting that other people are gaming the system.

They are angry because they are constantly being told that everything wrong in the world is the fault of other poor people who happen to look different, behave differently, or speak a different language, when they should be angry that social inequality is increasing at a rapid rate.

They are angry because the media will let any lie, no matter how outrageous and hateful, slide by unchallenged if it causes controversy and increases the traffic count on their websites.

Sure people’s freedom is at stake. It is at stake from people who want to take away their civil rights, take away their social security net, and put them on zero hour contracts; and who hope to distract people from these things by endless scaremongering about immigrants.

Stand up, people. It is time to take our country back from Rupert Murdoch and his minions.

Yesterday on Ujima: Carers, Harassment, Flash, Trans & Faith

~ Cheryl

Yesterday’s show on Ujima began with a celebration of Carer’s Week. Caring for relatives or friends who are unable to look after themselves is an activity that falls disproportionately on women. With the current fashion for austerity politics, social service safety nets and support for carers are both being cut back. I talked to Jan from the Carer’s Support Service and Fadumo, one of her clients.

From 12:30 Frances and I took a look at some of the issues surrounding the recent campaigns to combat internet harassment. It is a sad commentary on how politics is done these days that the main political parties (Conservatives, Labour and LibDems) have to run their own campaign separate from that run by the minor parties (Women’s Equality Party, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru), but that’s where we are.

Then again, I don’t think that the major parties would have done anything had WEP not come up with the idea. That makes it an example of how having WEP around forces the bigger parties to pay attention to women’s issues. Of course the big party campaign has Twitter, Facebook and Google as partners. That pretty much ensures that they won’t come up with any meaningful action, and of course the PR disaster of the Demos report they used has pretty much derailed their campaign.

Anyway, congratulations to the LibDems who have decided to back both horses and who on Monday are putting forward some amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill that will specifically tackle the issue of revenge porn. See here for how you can pester your MP to support this.

Ultimately, of course, what we need is a change in social attitudes, and that can only come about through education. Later in the year I will be doing a more in-depth show focusing on the campaign for compulsory personal, social, health and economic education in UK schools. That’s something that even Teresa May supports, so how lefty and progressive can it possibly be?

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

At 13:00 I was joined by Kevlin Henney and Freya J. Morris to preview this year’s National Flash Fiction Day. Both of them had brought stories to read.

Finally from 13:30 I was joined by Surat Shaan Knan of Liberal Judaism. Shaan is a good friend of mine and the person behind the Twilight People project. Obviously we talked about trans people and faith. Many thanks to Shaan for coming all the way from London to be on the show.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The playlist for the show starts with a Muhammad Ali tribute and then goes into a funk festival:

  • R Kelly – The Greatest
  • James Brown – Make it Funky
  • Patti LaBelle – Lady Marmalade
  • AWB – Pick up the Pieces
  • Parliament – Children of Productions
  • Prince – Alphabet Street
  • Janelle Monáe – Dorothy Dandridge Eyes
  • Chic – I Want Your Love

Because of Finncon I won’t be on air again until mid-July, but hey, that is a good excuse.

Music for Wednesday

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

That’s R Kelly with a the song from the soundtrack to the 2001 movie Ali (starring Will Smith, obviously). I’m astonished at how many of the songs about Ali are by white people. Even the chart-topping “Black Superman”, which Ali allegedly hated, was written by a white guy for all of its reggae rhythms. I’m glad I found something I can use.

I have this weird vision of Ali and Spartacus sitting down together to have a little chat and see who really was the greatest. I expect that Ali will win, because while he might have been a brilliant fighter he didn’t believe in killing people.

This Is What It Sounds Like…

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Prince - Brian Bolland
… When Gods die.

The original art is by Brian Bolland. The animated gif was made by Scott M. McDaniel and is part of this fascinating analysis of the image.

My May 4th show on Ujima will be a Prince tribute show. Obviously there will be guests, but all of the music will be performed or written by Prince. And yes, that is an excuse for me to play The Bangles, but also Chaka Khan.

Rock on, purple people. At least we know there’ll be great music to dance to in the afterlife when we get there.

This Week on Ujima: Cavan Scott, Suffragettes & Art

~ Cheryl

My first guest on this week’s Women’s Outlook was Cavan Scott. Cav is a very busy boy. We first talked about his Star Wars tie-in novels, one of which was chosen for World Book Day and went on to become the best selling book in the UK for a while. We talked about his forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel, The Patchwork Devil. We talked about his comics and radio play work on Doctor Who. And of course we talked about The Beano, for which he writes Mini the Minx and several other strips.

For Bristol people, Cav’s book launch for The Patchwork Devil is on April 30th at Forbidden Planet. It is a lunchtime event.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

Next up on the show was our expert on suffragettes, Lucienne Boyce. She was in to tell us all about a local screening of Make More Noise, a compilation of silent film coverage of actual suffragettes from the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Finally I welcomed Ruth Kapadia from the local office of The Arts Council. We talked about the sort of work that The Arts Council does, and how people can apply for grants.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Of course I also talked quite a bit about the cricket. West Indies are currently world champions for the Twenty20 format at under 19 level, in the women’s game, and in the men’s game. The entire Caribbean is celebrating, and we celebrated with them. All of the music was related to the cricket in some way. Here’s the playlist:

  • We are the Champions – Queen
  • Dreadlock Holiday – Boney M
  • Champion – DJ Bravo
  • Da Cricket Loba Gatama – Latif Nangarhari
  • Cloth – Bullets
  • Come Rise with Me – Machal Montano & Claudette Peters
  • Gavaskar – Andy Narell & Lord Relator
  • David Rudder – Rally Round the West Indies

Bath Ruby, A Very Different Software Conference

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I spent today in the Assembly Rooms at Bath. There was a definite air of eccentricity in having a software conference in such a stately, Georgian venue, but if you are going to hold a conference in Bath, why not?

I was at Bath Ruby because I had been asked to present a talk on Trans*Code. It was only going to be a 5-minute lightning talk. I expected most of the day to be given over to tech stuff. I was very wrong. My how software conferences have changed.

It didn’t seem that way at the start. There were around 500 people at the conference. The vast majority were young, white and male. I think the women marginally outnumbered the people of color (though of course some were in both categories), but if you removed the sponsor representatives, who were probably not tech staff, the numbers might have tipped the other way. I may well have been the oldest person there.

Then the conference started, and the very first piece of admin mentioned in the welcome session was the Code of Conduct, which mentions Gender Identity. That set the tone for the rest of the day. Now sure there were technical talks, but there were other things too. There was a talk about how to get involved in open source projects. There was a talk about getting fired — how employees can cope with it, how employers can do it better. And there was a talk about unconscious gender bias. A longer version of this talk.

Which was awesome. (And there’s lots more good stuff from Janet Crawford here.)

I don’t suppose that all tech conferences are like this these days. However, the Python community and the Ruby community seem to be very progressive. It is very heartwarming.

My talk seemed to go down well. People listened respectfully, and applauded when I was done. A few people came and thanked me afterwards. Job well done, I think.

And the tech stuff? I got to see the best tech presentation I have ever seen in my life (except possibly the one where Kevin Roche had us moving individual atoms with his software). Sonic Pi is a seriously cool thing. And it is bundled free with every Raspberry Pi computer.

Today on Ujima – Football, Lesbians, Rhodes and Bowie

~ Cheryl

I was hosting the Women’s Outlook show again today on Ujima. We started off with an interview with some football (soccer) players from a local sports club. Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls are perhaps most famous for the fact that Banksy was once their goalkeeper, but they deserve to be far more famous for the wonderful work they do in the community, and around their world. They have a slogan, “Freedom Through Football” and they have done amazing things in places like Mexico and Palestine. The main reason that they were on the show is that the Cowgirls team has just got back from the West Bank and they are going to be showing a film about their trip. What the Palestinian footballers have to put up with is beyond belief.

The club is also very inclusive, taking players of all ages and abilities. They now have netball and cricket teams as well as football. And they are fully LGB and T inclusive, and multi-ethnic.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

In the second half of the show I was joined by my lesbian author friend, Bea Hitchman. She’s doing a PhD about lesbians in fiction, in particular addressing the fact that their stories so often come to a sad end. I suggested that she talk to Malinda Lo. We were joined in the studio by my colleagues, Judeline and Frances, both of whom had seen Carol, and we talked a bit about the film.

For the final half hour we were joined by playwright, Edson Burton, and poet, Miles Chambers. They had some events to plug, and in return they joined us in discussing the legacy of Cecil Rhodes and the Rhodes Must Fall campaign currently being waged by students at Oxford University.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The music for today’s show was all Bowie, but many of the tracks were covers by black musicians. Here’s the playlist:

  • Let’s Dance – David Bowie & Nile Rodgers
  • Heroes – Janelle Monáe
  • Young Americans – David Bowie & Luther Vandross
  • Life on Mars? – Seu Jorge
  • Ashes to Ashes – Warpaint
  • Sound & Vision – Megapuss
  • Modern Love – The Sunshiners
  • Starman – Culture Club

There’s one cover that I wish I had included. The show before me played it. It is a ska version of “Heroes” performed by the Hackney Colliery Band. Here it is:

Well That’s Just Perfect

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I have been looking around for some Bowie covers by black artists, because I want to play all Bowie on my next Ujima show and I don’t want to get in trouble for playing too much white music. Of course my absolute dream result would be to find one of my favorite Bowie songs covered by Janelle Monáe. So here it is.

Suggestions for other tracks to play are welcome. Please note that I do know about Seu Jorge and I have the We Were So Turned On album. I reckon I have a good excuse to play “Let’s Dance” too.

The Next Day

~ Cheryl

Things happen. There is an outpouring of grief. Then life moves on.

I’m interested in how the world reacted to Bowie’s death, and there are things I would like to write about. However, I am stupidly busy right now and I don’t have time to deal with drama. (A follow-up post on The Danish Girl is being shelved for the same reason.) However, there have been some really good posts, a couple of which I’d like to share with you.

Charlie Jane Anders did a great obituary on io9 about Bowie’s status as a champion of the outsider.

There’s also a really good post by Lou Anders. Lou makes the excellent point that two people could be fanatical Bowie fans, but be fanatics about two totally different incarnations of the man.

Lots of people mourned Bowie using his own words, and there was quite a lot of variety in the words chosen. As far as queer folk go, I think that Helen Boyd probably had the best choice.

And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through

Meanwhile, back to work and to playing lots of Bowie albums.