The heaven of ’07

The late comedian Bill Hicks has been on my mind lately. It would ha ve been his 46 birthday on December 16 and I’ve also been reading his essays in preparation for a show I’m working on. One quote from the collection Love All the People has lingered: “I believe the audience seeing that one person can be free to express his thoughts, however strange they may seem, inspires the audience to feel that perhaps they too can freely express their innermost thoughts with impunity, joy and release, and perhaps discover our common bond—unique yet similar—with each other.”

Some pretty cool things happened to me and my vagina in 2007 (and I do mean my vagina, not my vulva) but the one I’m most excited about is that I finally, after having my period for 25 friggin’ years, bought a menstrual cup. Just like when I quit smoking butts, this decision has brought out the raging lefty in me. No more giving my hard earned money to the man! No more polluting the environment with my leftover filters and applicators! I won’t shut up about my Diva Cup and I’m telling you girls, no I’m beseeching you, please consider it or another long term option like the Keeper as your new method for 2008. Remember when we were all up in arms over the fact that tampons were deemed non-essential in the GST debate? Guess what? THEY ARE.

There were no new sex toy designs that caught my eye this past year but one of those link fiestas that began at 10 a.m. on Peter Bagge’s page at Reason.com and ended with me still in my pajamas at 4:30 p.m. with nothing but a cup of coffee and a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise in me, revealed a fantastic new item: a condom embossed with the mug of Bagge’s deadbeat legend Buddy Bradley. I just love arty, serviceable sex gear and the line, by Condomania, also includes J.R. “Bob” Dobbs from the Church of the SubGenius and his girl counterpart Connie—perfect icebreaking paraphernalia for apprehensive Gen-Xers on the scene after their first divorce.

Of course, I read a slew of books on the big topic this year, but one I especially liked was Black and White and Blue by Dave Thompson. It’s an exhaustive history of adult films from their inception at the turn of the century to the advent of the VCR. Thompson’s a bit of a litigator for the genre—it often comes across as his harangued client rather than his subject—but film geeks will love his ferreting style and I was all over his early-porn-as-punk analogies: “Punk was constructed around excitement, spontaneity, immediacy—if a song couldn’t make its point in three minutes flat, it was dead. Stag films had around 10 minutes but the immediacy was the same.” And for porn itself, I’m digging Anna Span at the moment.

You all know I have a great fondness for comics, adult and otherwise. One artist I recently discovered thanks to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival—it was a succès fou and so nice to see my old pals Billy Mavreas and Rupert Bottenberg—was Steve MacIsaac. Steve already has a few innate qualities which endear him to me: one, he’s from Nova Scotia, two, he’s a bear. Like he needed to be talented on top of it, but his comics Sticky and Shirtlifter are terrific and feature my aforementioned favourite gay subculture doin’ it as well as being complex, emotional fellows.

As for sexy tunes, on heavy rotation in the boudoir in 2007 were Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem, Boxer by the National, The Stage Names by Okkervil River, The Reminder by Feist and Andorra by Caribou.

Enjoy the rest of your holidays, friends. And hey, if you’re feeling a little blue, have a listen to Werewolves and Lollipops by Patton Oswalt, especially the monologue “I Tell a Story About Birth Control and Deal With a Retarded Heckler.”

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM