PenderBlog From The Pender Islands Of Canada

From Leroy McLaughlin:

Introducing Avid MAGAZINE  :: Pender Island, BC
for creative art, music, food, events, expression and inspiration

Avid is Pender Island’s Arts and Entertainment Magazine, focused on the arts and artists of all types.  Featuring musician profiles, artist interviews, stories and more, plus a monthly calendar with community art events and entertainment happenings.

Whether you are showcasing an event, advertising your business or art studio, or looking for arts and entertainment on Pender, Avid is your magazine.

Our first issue has been a great success!  Thank you to everyone for your support and enthusiasm . . .

August 2009 issue is available online at www.avidmag.ca

Avid MAGAZINE is free. Delivered each month to every mailbox on Pender and available throughout the Driftwood Centre and other locations. This will make sure your message reaches every household on Pender Island, as well as the many visitors who frequent Pender year round.

The free-listing Events Calendar is a popular resource and allows for repeat ad exposure throughout the month as people look to Avid to see what’s happening.

We want to know about your upcoming show, opening, concert or special event.  To submit your FREE Calendar Listing, send plain email text to:  events@avidmag.ca  (No file attachments please.  Send as plain email text, thanks.)

For Display Ad rates and sizes send an email to Leroy McLaughlin art@avidmag.ca or call 250.629.0051

September Issue Deadline for Submissions:  6pm Thursday, August 20th

We hope you enjoy Avid MAGAZINE and look forward to hearing from you.

Leroy McLaughlin and Ella Sokolosky,  Avid MAGAZINE,  Pender Island, BC

Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver

Becki L. Ross
University of Toronto Press © 2009

On Sunday August 16 Becki Ross is launching her new book Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex and Sin in Postwar Vancouver at Talisman Books, Driftwood Centre, at 2pm.

Press release:  “After the Second World War, Vancouver emerged as a hotbed of striptease talent. In Burlesque West,the first critical history of this notorious striptease scene, Becki Ross delves into the erotic entertainment industry at the northern end of the dancers’ west coast tour – the North-South route from Los Angeles to Vancouver that provided rotating work for dancers and variety for club clientele.

Drawing on extensive archival materials and fifty first-person accounts of former dancers, strip-club owners, booking agents, choreographers, and musicians, Ross reveals stories that are deeply flavoured with an era before “striptease fell from grace because the world stopped dreaming,” in the words of ex-dancer Lindalee Tracey. Though jobs in this particular industry are often perceived as having little in common with other sorts of work, retired dancers’ accounts resonate surprisingly with those of contemporary service workers, including perceptions of unionization and workplace benefits and hazards. Ross also traces the sanitization and subsequent integration of striptease style and neo-burlesque trends into mass culture, examining continuity and change to ultimately demonstrate that Vancouver’s glitzy nightclub scene, often condemned as a quasi-legal strain of urban blight, in fact greased the economic engine of the post-war city.

Provocative and challenging, Burlesque West combines the economic, the social, the sexual, and the personal, and is sure to intellectually tantalize.”

Becki L. Ross is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British Columbia.