May 2008 Archives

Was told that Bellingham had the highest temperatures on this side of the state yesterday. Today, I’m in Fairhaven, spectating all of the Ski to Sea madness and chatting with the regulars. Usually, on sunny days, folks bring out their motorcycles and vintage cars, but today, I have seen an inordinate amount of HUGE dogs. Weimaraners, giant fluffy white things, Dobermans … and one tiny animal with bat ears and pink reflective sunglasses.

I hate the word “Bell-ebrity” (“Bellingham” + “celebrity”), but this website is full of ‘em. Favorite WTA bus drivers, the grumpy proprietor of the News Stand, and Hot Ryan from the Co-op (of Craigslist legend).

“People-watching” is an excellent word to use when you want to disguise the fact that you are shamelessly checking out and/or staring at passersby. I have been doing a lot of this today.

HALLELUJAH SUNSHINE AND SO ON.

I tried for years- oh, how I tried! to be immune to the Stones.  Until that fateful day when I saw the Miss You video on VH1 Classic (during the Summer of Fancy Cable), and Mick Jagger devastated my expectations with a single head-toss.

So, if your Wednesday needs a little brightening, I offer you this: Rolling Stones do twang.

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If you only watch 5 seconds of this video, make sure it is the 5 seconds beginning at 1:36; please observe the deep boredom of Bill Wyman, the humorlessness of Ronnie Wood, the stonefaced drawl of Keef, and- BEST OF ALL- Charlie Watts at 1:40.

It seems like things have been very quiet around these parts lately.

Having less to do means that I spend less time on the computer, trying to avoid the things I have to do.

There have been a lot of scary/worrisome things in my neighborhood lately. A man was fatally stabbed one block from my house. On Saturday night, someone fired a shotgun into a house down the street.

I’m not sure what to do to fill my free time, now that I have it. Yesterday, I spent my evening in the kitchen, baking cupcakes and cobbler; but in a few weeks, I will have a whole lifetime of homework-less evenings, stretching unoccupied before me. I feel a great pressure to fill the space with productive activities, but Lord knows I will probably just spend the time napping and reading blogs.

Also in a few weeks, I will be leaving the house I have lived in for the past two years, and moving into a new house with new roommates and lots of plans. If I spend more time day-dreaming about my house-to-be, then I will have less time to reflect on how much I will miss the Hedge House, which is homey and cozy and quiet in very comfortable and unassuming ways. In my head, I am starting to make lists of what things are mine, and what things are not: silverware dividers, bathroom garbage cans, and all of those small forgettable things that make a house function smoothly.

For the first time, I will be living with men-to-whom-I-am-not-related, and I’m not sure what to expect from that. And there will be that initial honeymoon getting-to-know-you-better period of awkwardness, where we don’t yet fart in front of each other and we go to the effort of putting on pyjamas for breakfast (instead of just wearing our underwear).

There is also that space, after you’ve first moved in to a new place, where you still have all of your old-house habits and haven’t quite yet picked up the hang of the new house.  You turn the door handles up instead of down, you reach for light switches that don’t exist, and you can’t remember where you decided to store the measuring cups. This time, I want to pay attention to that hand-off, when old habits give way to new ones, the transitional in-between.

Of my old house and habits, I know that I will miss Saturday morning kitchen conversations; bellowed summons from Stinka; and the rare times that we would go out as a household.

But I can’t wait for fort parties, apple trees, and house shows.

Dear Bellingham,

The advent of sexy season is upon us. Everyone is on bikes! I smell lilacs on the night air when I walk down my alley.

This weekend, me and/or my friends have been been whistled at; we have had a handful of men address us as we walk down the street; we have been hollered at by passing cars.

A group of girls in dresses on a May evening is an intoxicating sight! But please, stop being so gross and unwelcome and fucking imposing. Sweet city, this is making you seem a lot less friendly.

Yours,

Jenn.

In 8th grade, Todd Yingling had a pink mohawk and his own punk zine, and was the coolest person I knew.

In 9th grade, I boldly slid a picture of Beck (Midnight Vultures-era), cut from the newspaper, into my binder. The popular girls, with whom I had been trying to ingratiate myself for the past four years, caught sight of it. Disgustedly: “What’s this?”

All my life, I have learned niceness, apologies, “keep your voice down!”

My parents had a wooden crate full of records. I would finger through them, all dusty, fascinated by band names and album art. Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen. Rolling Stone’s Some Girls. Hot Tuna. Captain Beefheart. Most of them were my dad’s.

And until I was sixteen, if you had asked why there were no women in my growing music collection, I would have told you that I didn’t care for women’s singing voices. Just not interested.

Dig Me Out made “The Top 20 Northwest Albums of the 90’s” on KNDD’s The Young & the Restless, which I listened to every Sunday night. Despite this critical acclaim, I thought Sleater-Kinney were harsh, grating, and obnoxious.

As a novice music obsessor, however, it was my duty to be decently acquainted with significant contributors to the rock & roll canon, even if I wasn’t feeling their sound. So, I checked out Sleater-Kinney’s All Hands on the Bad One from the Sno-Isle Regional Library System, and by the time I realized that I’d been listening to the CD on repeat for over three hours, I was hooked. “Watch me make up my mind instead of my face” received an emphatic “FUCK YEAH!” stamp-of-approval from sixteen-year-old me.

In comparison, the rest of my music collection was comprised of boys navel-gazing endlessly about their love-lives. Dear male guitar-strummers & keyboard-plunkers: I don’t care how clever your lyrics are, or how catchy your melody is. In light of my girl-punk revelations, I’ve got bigger fish to fry; your casual misogyny is boring, at best.

There’s a vast void in the musical landscape where women’s voices should be, and all I hear is adenoidal boy agony.

It’s not enough to criticize- we must create. And we cannot let technical ability stand between us and immense possibility- c’mon, it never stopped the Slits! “In seeking specific technical information, we discover that behind the hysteria of male expertise lies the magic world of our unmade art.”

When I was seventeen, I went to an all-ages showcase of female musicians and bands, and I saw a whole roomful of girls (only three guys! all standing to the side!) dancing/yelling/singing/grinning/rocking out. I felt safe/free/why did I never notice that it’s all guys at shows? Girl heroes/guitar squall are my cosmos. They are my language of power, my community of support, my feminist inspiration.

But a month ago, when Tegan and Sara played at Western, some dudes in the audience proposed that the Quins get naked. And a week later, when the Blow played the same stage, some indie rock boys (you know, the ones who belong to a “progressive” subculture, so if they’re sexist, it’s ironic, right?) concluded that Khaela sure gets around (what a slut).

In light of all this, I have lost patience. I’ve been waiting, waiting for other women to step forward & prove that girls are more than just acoustic guitars + love songs + objects of male desire, but I/we cannot afford to wait any longer.

Do not expect me to be demure and soft. I am learning to be fluent in dissonance + imperfection, rhythm + detonation.

I will seize drumsticks and wield guitars. You will feel my amp low in your belly, and my backbeat will resonate in the cavity of your chest.

First of all: a celebration of daylight. Because it is 7:30 p.m. and I can still see what is happening in the out-of-doors. This does good for my soul, and makes me think seriously about moving to sunnier climes.

Some of you may know that I am, at heart, a true feminist of the second-wave. Radical militant hairy bra-burning womyn-identified-womyn with occasional separatist tendencies. I have usually tried to tone this down, but in my heart-of-hearts, my fascination with second-wave feminism is more than scholarly and only fleetingly ironic.

WHICH IS WHY No-Bra Night is one of my favorite new activities. It is what it sounds like; a bunch of wimmin get together, drink wine, go bra-less, and talk about female-ness. We’re bringing INTENTIONALITY back to women’s friendship.

GUERILLA GYNECOLOGY. MOON CYCLES. INTO THE WOODS FOR RETREATS/HIKING/FEMALE BODIES.

“Dress Like Your Favorite 2nd-Wave Feminist” potlucks? YES, emphatically. This is totally what I signed up for when budding radical feminist jenn signed up for college at liberal arts historically-hippie school.

It is also fantastic that I started bleeding yesterday, just in time for all this gynocentricity. Let’s take a moment to talk moonflow.

1] BLOOD SISTERS: Used tampons wash up on beaches. “Feminine hygiene” companies used to put shit like asbestos and other chemicals in tampons to make women bleed more. (Most) pads are not biodegradable. Whaddya do?

RADICAL MENSTRUATION!

Sew yr own pads! Try the Keeper (which is like a little rubber plunger you stick up your vag). Stop giving $$ to companies that alienate us from our bodies by giving us the idea that we are stinky, unsanitary, and that periods are deeply, deeply shameful and secretive.

2] I’m fascinated with hanky code; thusly, please be aware that you can advertise your menstrual status by wearing a maroon hankie (in your back pocket, around your neck, on your arm, etc.).

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3] If you don’t like saying, “STEP OFF- MY UTERUS IS BLEEDING,” then you may find an alternate euphemism at TamPontification. Perhaps “Shark Week” suits you better? “Communists have invaded the summer house”? Or, best of all: “The Eagle Has Landed.”

Holler, my babies.

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Every once in a while, I do not write on here for a long-ish time because I have been reading other people’s blogs and I realize how self-indulgent my own is (which is sometimes okay), and because I am pretty sure that Other People write about their experiences in a much more humorous, charming, and insightful way than I do.

It is a funny thing, this blogging. (First of all, the word “blogging” itself should be banished from regular speech, the sort of word that social scientists come up with to describe phenomena, and which is never used by those who actually participate in said phenomena.) But it is funny. Or strange, rather- the lack of acknowledgment of the weirdness of this thing we are doing. Maybe it is because I have spent the past seven years of my academic life tying together strands of similarity to make cohesive theories about authors and audiences; but this is something we all (I think) do- write with specific audiences in mind. Pick our presentation. It’s like when I am about to go on the air and announce the songs I have just played on my radio show: I have to imagine that I am having a conversation with a specific someone that I know (my sister, a fellow music nerd, a 15-yr-old listening in their basement hideout), or else I become overwhelmed by the task of appealing to everyone. And I wanted to talk about this when I first started writing on here, but I was too daunted by everything, the not-knowing of how to do these things, and it has taken me some time to figure out what my voice is here, and how it relates to all of the other voices.

And really? There are lots of people who can write much better than me. Some folks, even, sound nothing on the page like they do in real life; and sometimes this is a bad thing (though often, it is not). Which is to say that I am mostly content with my ability to express myself, and I hope that the letters I peck at on place-of-work keyboards sound, for the most part, like me.

But this is actually a digression, and not what I intended to write about when I opened this window.

Rather:

PUNK HOUSE.

Olympia is mythic. Homeland of K Records, riot-grrl, lo-fi, the International Pop Underground, the Invisible Shield, queercore, Kill Rock Stars, Evergreen, pirate radio stations, anarchists, hippies, punks, art collectives, Yo Yo a Go Go, Homo-A-Go-Go, Ladyfest … and far too many others to name. I think of Olympia in the way that other people might have once thought about Hollywood or Nashville- surely, legends must walk the sidewalk alongside mere mortals! Surely, I will see Calvin Johnson in the produce section and Tobi Vail in the frozen foods.

I know, I know. I have been to Olympia. It is usually gray. It’s very ordinary. It feels, in a lot of ways, like Bellingham. But things happen there, “this feeling that everything important had a line drawn around it and that my town was inside that imaginary border.” The mythology that Eric Grandy gets at in his article about Phil Elverum, Anacortes, and Olympia.

There’s a punk house in Olympia called the Red House. Kathleen Hanna has recorded there. So has Sleater-Kinney. They’ve hosted shows there for a decade and a half (which is longer than most legitimate venues).

Some nice folks made a documentary about this place. Resultantly (perhaps obviously), this has only fanned the flame of my Oly-centricity.

But Olympia deities aside, it is a pretty incredible thing that they have going; and it’s been fueling my punk house dreams lately.

“Sometimes people are doing art that is really important for the handful of lives that it’s going to touch deeply. But it’s not necessarily touching a large number of people. And so, for that reason, you can’t rent a hall that costs a hundred dollars a night- if it’s going to happen at all, it’s gonna happen somewhere where it’s free. …it’s just about people being together, or having fun, or participating in a like-minded endeavor, or trying to change the world.”

If you’re into this kind of thing like I’m into this kind of thing, then this might be the best half-hour you’ve spent in a really long time.