text: There are — of course — the more traditional finger sandwiches like smoked salmon and egg salad which are all delicious. But The Allis truly excels with their pastries. The miniature lemon tarts are zesty and flaky (and you can find the recipe here). There are also mini fruit cakes, Peppermint Brownie Bites, Gingerbread men, and — of course — a piping hot selection of fresh scones served with butter and jam.
  As far as lovely, low-key holiday afternoon teas, The Allis is by-far my favorite (and not just because their floral tea set makes me swoon). So if you find yourself needing a tea-heavy pick-me-up on a cold, blustery day, The Allis is the perfect spot!
  
  Would it be a surprise if I told you no really knows what causes PMS? And that means we have to approach the matter of cause from a “contributors” point-of-view
  
  Sadie Benning began making videos at age sixteen when her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning, gave her a pixelvision camcorder for Christmas. The Pixelvision is a small, hand-held, black and white video-camera marketed for children by Fisher-Price in the late 1980s. The Pixelvision failed on the general market for the same reason it has been a hit with experimental filmmakers: grainy images, tinny sound, and a box frame. Benning’s videos can be described in a variety of ways, including autobiography, ethnography, personal films, diary-films, and stories of coming-out. Thematically, her films consistently condemn homophobia, racism, and sexism while concerning themselves with the perspective of young people and women.
  Benning demonstrated an early ability to manipulate images and create sustained narratives. She culls from a wide variety of sources including television, magazines, newspapers and popular culture. Her recent work reflects many of the same themes she explored early on, yet also displays an increased ability and maturity as a filmmaker. Recent films include The Judy Spots (1995), which aired on MTV, and Flat is Beautiful (1998). Her work continues to attract attention and is regularly screened at film festivals worldwide.
  Her intensely personal and autobiographical videos document the dreams, desires, fears, and fantasies of a teenage lesbian in the process of defining self, sexuality, and identity. They delineate the social and sexual straitjacket that girls are expected to conform to, while working out strategies of transgression and rebellion in an effort to create an identity space beyond the boundaries of heterosexuality and gender conformity.
  Combining defiance with a childlike innocence and vulnerability, Benning responds to a world that simultaneously ridicules and frightens her by retreating into the relative, but ultimately temporary, safety of her bedroom and a form of self-imposed exile. Ultimately, the reality of violence cannot be escaped or ignored and Benning is forced to confront her own vulnerability in a world that is often openly hostile and threatening to women and lesbians. The ridicule and alienation she encounters at school derive from her androgynous gender expression and her lesbian sexuality. However, she is quick to note that conformity to the rules of heterosexuality and the gender system, which are expressed most visibly for her by the image of the “good white girl”, is a representation that does little to provide any measure of protection for women in society.
  A devastating film about lost innocence, random violence, and child abuse, A Place Called Lovely (1991) begins with an intensely personal account of her own victimization at the hands of Ricky, a neighborhood bully. Confronted daily with her own experiences of violence, and with sensationalized headlines in the newspapers that detail child abuse, molestation, mass murder and random accidents she quickly recognizes that no one is immune to violence and tragedy: “I was in my Dad’s Chevy truck when I watched a station wagon full of people flip over and blow up. Tragedy, that can happen to anyone.” Fighting back against the neighbourhood bully does little to calm her fears or her overwhelming sense of powerlessness because, as she ultimately recognises, Ricky is just one small part of a larger social problem that has no cure. The opening scenes document the ways in which violence touches Benning’s own life directly, from the police car drawing up to her neighbour’s house and the sounds of police sirens wailing in the background while she stands in her backyard, to the narrated details of her own victimization: “We got off the school bus and his hands were tangled in my hair, it hurt, and I watched clumps of my hair fall to the ground and blow away.” Although she is helpless to defend herself from her tormentor she refrains from directly blaming Ricky for his actions, realizing that the bully is also a victim at the hands of his parents who are “older and meaner.”
  At the core of A Place Called Lovely is the depiction of childhood as a battleground and a fight to stay safe. The school bus, the playground and the neighborhood become the setting for childhood violence, played against a background of adult violence, police sirens wailing and the cries of children. Children’s voices and laughter are inextricably mixed with the wailing sirens. Ricky, as an abused child, takes out his fears, frustrations, and emotions on smaller and weaker children, just as his parents take out their anger and frustration upon him. Expressions of love are confused with abuse and violence. In a child’s voice, but with adult words, Ricky screams “I love you. I love you. I wanna kiss you. Goddamn it you fucker I wanna be alone”, mimicking a confusing and violent adult world.
  Ricky’s abuse has turned him into an abuser. Benning’s response, when she is older and stronger, is to beat Ricky until he cries. Who is the victim and who is the abuser? The cycles of violence ultimately implicates everyone, until innocence is just a word with no meaning and no reality, allowing Benning to dismiss her grandmother’s ineffectual advice that “only bad things happen to bad people, so don’t hang around them.” This version of America, Benning suggests, is both a myth and a dream. The reality of growing up in America is marked by the knowledge that “evil is common,” tragedy can happen to anyone, and victims turn into abusers. She rejects the image of the good white girl not only because it is an American myth, but also because trying to emulate this myth contributes to the continued disempowerment of young girls and women. Recognizing that empowerment is found in self-definition rather than in strict conformity to social standards and prevailing definitions of womanhood, Benning, rather than merely reversing the binary of good/bad, subverts it by demonstrating that conventional definitions of womanhood are designed to prevent women from exploring the possibilities of their own identity and self-empowerment. More importantly, the “bad girl” plunders masculine icons of power and rebellion for her own use, thus allowing her to assume a freedom that crosses boundaries of gender and sexuality.
  Girlpower (1992) opens with a restatement of the themes of violence and disempowerment found in A Place Called Lovely. The only hope of escape from a world both “brutal and needy” is found in the realm of the imagination where teenage girls can, at last, make their own rules: “I built my own world inside my head. I had imaginary friends, make believe love. I travelled to far away places and did as I pleased. I fought the law and, of course, made my own rules.”
  Growing up, Benning’s early childhood play and fantasy involve imitation of teenage male heroes she saw in magazines and on television: “When I was a kid I took my shirt off imagining I was just as sexy and powerful as when Matt Dillon did it for the centerfold of Teenbeat magazine.” These early fantasies involve the direct imitation of male coded behaviour, placing Benning in the role of the active rescuer rather than the passively rescued: “I rode my big wheel down the street pretending I was Erik Estrada riding on my motorcycle to save the life of some girl who desperately needed to be rescued.”
  Benning’s childhood fantasies reverse the conventional images and play of young girls who are encouraged to dream of rescue by the handsome prince. These fantasies extend beyond role reversal and appropriation when she also includes her emulation of female rock stars including Joan Jett, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and the Go-Go’s, early media icons of powerful, independent women. The images of women in popular culture began to change in the 1980s, providing teenage girls with figures of their own, rather than those independently appropriated from male images of power and autonomy.
  After exploring her response to both male and female images of power, Benning turns the camera on herself in order to answer the question “what’s inside of me?” What she finds is an intense anger directed at a world that renders her isolated, alienated, and invisible. Her initial reaction is to withdraw into herself and into a world that is of her own making, free from the loneliness that she is confronted with at home, at school, and within her own family. She establishes her own space of belonging, rejecting the world that is offered to her and that insists on her invisibility and, more frighteningly, her eventual eradication. Using appropriated footage of an interview with a leader of the American Nazi Party who prefers to “gas queers” more than anyone else, Benning vividly expresses the source of her alienation from American society, a source that goes far deeper than mere teenage anxiety and rebellion. She attempts to resolve her frustration with the sense of powerlessness she feels in the face of the overwhelming attempt by Western culture to obliterate and deny her identity as a woman and as a lesbian through a defiance that she renders in a series of inter-titles: “Fuck you man” and “Hear me or Die” and through the active creation of her own heroes rather than those culled from television or magazines glorifying male power and privilege. Benning depends upon her own imagination and a belief in self: “I wondered how I would survive, how I would escape, and where I would go? In my imagination I travelled the world. I was as powerful as a bullet. I survived because I created my own heroes. Nobody needed to know I was somebody because it was my secret.” Girl power has its source from within and must be sustained by the imagination. It is Benning’s secret weapon in a cultural war that seeks to destroy young women by rendering them hapless and helpless in a world bent on random violence and terror.
  While A Place Called Lovely and Girlpower concentrate primarily upon Benning’s developing sense of self in the world, her isolation, and the growth of individual sources of power and resistance in a culture hostile to women and children, Jollies, If Every Girl Had a Diary, and Me and Rubyfruit (all 1990) focus on Benning’s sexuality. If Every Girl Had a Diary is a meditative video diary. Stripped of music and intertitles, and with very little movement, Benning chooses to directly address the camera with a sustained narrative and close confidential style rendering her video into diary form. Employing stark close-up images of her face with a tone of voice that is both confrontational yet contemplative, she announces wryly “last week I almost laughed.”