Ottawa - Lady Fest and more on gender talkin

It’s difficult not to gently mock our nation’s capital for it’s under-abundance of independent culture, but I’m learning to ease up on poor O-town. After all, what they may lack in blazing electro hiphop or whathaveyou they make up for in earnest state sponsored stateliness which looks pretty under the snow, and pockets of serious sweetness.

I drove down to Ottawa this weekend with a contingent of my highschool girlfriends, led by Serah-Marie who makes a regular pilgrimage to attend a few specific craft fairs and do distribution runs for Worn Journal. The craft fair she represented at this Saturday was a branch of Lady Fest and turned out we were one among a whole fleet of Montrealers heading west for it. When we arrived Saturday at the start of the fest we were instantly struck by two things.

1. about 50% of the vendors were Montrealers (that’s my squinty guesstimate, based on the fact I felt like I knew every other table from back home, a very dear surprise out in the angloy wilds =)

2. Ottawans get up earlier then Montrealers. (the place was packed from the moment the doors opened, Montreal vendors still setting up and rubbing the squinty from their eyes.)

It was a beautiful collection of artists and from what I heard everyone did ridiculously well. I think Serah said that it was her best sale last year and this year she doubled what she’d done the year before. Pretty incredible. Other friends who made the trip:

Honey Flower
Parnell
Supayana
Headquarters (Crazily enough, Angie came without Tyson because someone had to be back at Headquarters for the start of the vernissage party “It’s probably worth more then that 2″ which Angie had baked for, and was hustlin back to after a full day of vendoring! Indie art stars work fricken hard is all I’m saying.)
Furni
Roadkill
Broundoor
So much more!

I did some guerrilla-quick shopping and then we headed out of the over-packed Jack Purcell community center where the fair was held (maybe somewhere bigger next year?) to see some shops, which turned quickly into “it’s freezing, let’s settle.” The pubs to everything else ratio in Ottawa is insane, (I think it’s the politicians?) But a true pub is a fine thing on a cold day, and we found one with small booths enclosed entirely in darkwood paneling, even a door you could close for the exact flavour of privacy most conducive to girl talk.

I got an email from Tessa this morning querying our trip, and suggesting it might have triggered new thoughts on the gender debate we started a raging over here in an Indyish post called Gendered Spaces for Art.. I could unpack an epic at this point, but instead I’ll give you one thought on the porousness of privacy. I’m not sure this is a gender privilege, I think men can do this together too, trading intimacies, I know I can do it with certain men who are dear friends. But it defines in part the nature of my close pack of girls (the other part is defined by hysterical non-stop laughter and sometimes tears). I think it’s something lots of women do instinctively, as Emilie put it this weekend “you know when you’re bonding with a new girl friend and you both kick into confessional mode?” Yes. Yes I do.

Confidential or “This doesn’t leave the bar booth/car” - over the course of the weekend all of us uttered some version of these words. We shared deeply private relationshipy things and “issues” right alongside political intrigue, trade secrets, and what we are doubting, planning, scheming behind closed doors. We tread a fine line based on trust in these exchanges, but also I think the kinds of information traded under the banner “this doesn’t leave here” are the kinds of things that are dangerous only in context - only at work, only for the next 6 months before it happens, only if you tell the wrong people at the wrong time. If you keep within the unspoken but very clear boundaries of the trust, then sharing the information lets you all learn from what goes on behind the public selves. Also, as we all know, the trading of dangerous knowledge hooks us deeper into eachother, making it possible to be those kinds of friends who can meet again after 6 months with no sense of distance because you’ve been trusted with the core of the individual and time don’t touch that.

To get extra geeky for a second, we know from network models that links of small and large kinds help us survive failures, crisis, and catastrophe. They are the only reason we ever avoid collapse, I think, and so I salut them, dig deeper and dirtier in my sharing (waaay beyond the over-share) to shore myself up with my friends’ wisdom against inevitable future challenges.

And well, while I’m on it, I think blogging - being a public person - has something to do with this as well.
Don’t you?

ps - Heads up, while the pubs were fun, the best food we had in Ottawa was inexpensive, fair trade, with loads of vegan and gluten free options, and actual good art on the walls at a place called Wild Oat on the corner of Bank and Fourth in the neighborhood with the unfortunately insta-yuppie, made to be hollered high-pitched and gleeful name: “The Glebe!”