June 2008 Archives

My mom called yesterday. Again, I’ve gone way over my text message limit for the month. As of June 1st, I am ‘financially independent’ from my parents, aside from things like health & dental insurance (hence the quotation marks), which I still get for a little bit longer. But I’m still on the family phone plan with my parents and brother and sister. Mom suggested that I just open my own account, something I’d been expecting her to say for a while.

The first 8 months or so after I moved out of the dorms, I paid for a landline for my house, but nobody ever used it. For the most basic service, I think it was about $24 a month. "What if we got a house phone for Friendship City?" occurred to me last week, but, you know. Probably wouldn’t get used much, either.

All afternoon, I’ve been reading Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Dean Spade- queer shame, strategies for wealth re-distribution, applying feminist consciousness-raising practices to discussions of class . I had to dig a little bit, but I found a piece that Dean Spade wrote with Colby Lenz about cell phones/class/environmental impact/health.

Shit, could I live without my cell phone? Not in the melodramatic sense. Well, maybe a little bit in the melodramatic sense. Where is text-message flirtation without cell phones? Announcements about bike gang meet-ups and midnight movies? Handy ways to look busy when you’re waiting for someone?

My mom used to work for Cingular, but she would still set aside newspaper clippings for me about the health impacts of cell phones. Radiation, brain tumors, critiques of industry-funded studies. She got ear-piece things so that none of us would have to hold our phones up to our ears, but I’ve never used mine.

So again, could I live without my cell phone? I’m in the wrong generation to be a complete Luddite- look, I have a blog! But the few cell phone hold-outs I know have recently caved, and when walking at night, I always feel safer knowing that I’m holding my cell phone.

My resume could send potential employers to house message-machines, making job-hunting more 1990’s, in an awkward way. But this is one of those niggling things that would probably make the world a better place, if I’m willing to be a little bit less selfish. And think of all the things we could do with the cognitive surplus , if we weren’t spending all of our time texting/talking/wasting time!

After all, it is the year for Making Things Happen.

(Shoot! Now I post this on the internet/in the public sphere, and everyone will be all, "Jenn, do you still have your cell phone?" And I’ll have to either eat my words or walk the walk. Shoot.)

We’re moved in now.

(photo credit: Rosie)

I have not been this excited about a Bellingham band since the early days of 10 Killing Hands.

SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR is precisely everything it should be: roaring blues guitar licks, channeling mid-seventies Rolling Stones with down-on-yr-knees Danelectro bass solos.

And the drums are a creature unto themselves. Lupe plays them with earth-shattering force, and I have such admiration for women who play drums in skirts- she could care less if it rode up with every pound of the pedals, nonchalantly readjusting after every few songs.

Okay. Okay. I have been doing the same radio show for, ah … about four years.

I play one show per week,

thirty to thirty-five songs per show,

and about fifty-two shows a year.

(That’s a lot of music.)

Point being: IT’S EASY TO GET IN A RUT.

So thank god for folks like Jenny Woolworth. I think I’m digging up obscurities, but when I see her playlists, I realize that she has taken her researching & record-collecting to a whole new level. She’s introduced me to so much good stuff, educated me in the history of women making punk, and motivated me to really dig and research and avoid ruts.

I was super bummed out nine months ago when she announced the end (hiatus?) of her show, TIGERBEAT. But to my joy, she has started blogging - and oh! what a blog it is. She’s uncovering all sorts of girl punk nuggets, like Electrelane side-projects and compilations from early women’s rock festivals (in Germany! in 1981!). Oh, and did I mention that she’s based out of Europe (first Zurich, now London)? Fuck, when I’m in my thirties, I hope I’m half as awesome as she is.

Also, Aubree from now-done Swan Island has started a video blog-type thing documenting Portland-area bands of the female and queer varieties. (Can you imagine: living in an area where there are enough queer and female bands that you could devote a whole blog to them? It makes me shiver with delight.)

And finally, some kids in London took a lyric from a BARR song + created something amazing.

[WHEN YOU ARE BORED AT WORK TOMORROW, YOU WILL THANK ME FOR THIS.]

Kiddos, What the Heck Fest is right around the corner!

Every year for- what, three? four? maybe even five?- years, I have planned on going, only to have new jobs get in the way. No more! No more! I will camp out on Alex’s floor at the D.O.S. for a whole weekend and breathe Anacortes air. Who is playing? Tender Forever ! Katy Davidson ! TacocaT ! Mirah, Khaela, and so many other crushes!

And you know what else is coming up so soon that I can hardly breathe with excitement? PUNKHAUS GRAND OPENING.

Please be there/not square; details TBA, but will probably involve backyard BBQs + sweet-talking the new neighbors.

Because everybody likes to talk about themselves.

Via J. Hopper:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

1. CRYSTAL CASTLES vs. HEALTH - “Crimewave”

[youtube pXkQFjRcjC4]

One of those dark Knife-like grooves with clinical chopped vocals. It makes me hear things that aren’t really there and look in the corners for spiders.

1. FREE BLOOD - “The Royal Family”

But you already knew that. Seriously: every day, in my office, over & over, and singing snippets as I head downtown in the evening.

1. TACOCAT - “UTI”

“Bathwater sex, contraception, I think I’ve got a urinary tract infection!” Turn it up to hear the first five seconds (which sound like the intro to a lost Bikini Kill track).

1. KICKING GIANT - “Fuck the Rules”

This is the definition of early-90’s K Records lo-fi pop. A sweet boy-boy crush song that is pretty much made for teenage mix-tapes.

1. THE INSIDES- “You’re Dead”

Girl and boy engage in a rapid-fire trading of yells over trembling guitars.

1. SUBTONIX - “Black Nails in My Coffin”

Farfisa like “Boom Swagger Boom,” if you replaced Spencer Moody & co. with some badass punk/goth queers. If you’re a little put-off by the “goth” tag, don’t worry- the band’s quality assurance comes from the presence of Erase Errata’s Jenny Hoyston in one variation of the band line-up.

1. NEIL YOUNG - “My My, Hey Hey” & “Hey Hey, My My”

“Hey hey, my my/rock ‘n roll can never die”: it’s that old songwriting trick, write a happy song with sad chords. Oh, but no one ever did it like Neil Young. Who else could have sung this song and done it with the right mix of irony, ruefulness, nostalgia, distortion?

[youtube mUnbNg6HHjE]

I’m putting this out to all of spiritquesting, but in particular:

Kevin, Alex, Chris, Sam, Coty, J.T., and - unlikeliest of the unlikelies - Jessica Jane.

Working in retail has become an almost daily exercise in indignity.

It would be a lot easier if I didn’t love the place I work so much; but as it is, existing alongside my deep affection for this hole-in-the-wall record store, it makes my feelings about coming to work very complicated.

Also, it could be much worse; I could be a barista or a waitress or any number of other service jobs where young women get subjected to unwished-for male attention. And as it is, me ‘hawked and not exactly the poster-child for traditional femininity, I probably receive a lot less of it than other girls would get.

Because I worry about small locally-owned stores, and because I care about this place and its success, and because my first instinct is still always apology and politeness, I can’t go around burning customer bridges. And there are so many phenomenal people I have met through this job, who I can greet by name when they walk through the door and who make me feel like I really am part of a community in this town.

Still, though, I am faced with a quandary that is foreign to my male coworkers. Today, a customer introduced himself to me; I went to take his hand, to shake it, and he kissed it! And I still said, “Thank you, have a good night!” quite cheerfully as he left the shop, as though all of my boundaries had not been walked all over with that gesture. As though everything was okay.

As a matter of sanity, and in order to keep my self-respect and humanity (because really, what good are politics if you leave them out of everyday life?), I need to figure out an adequate response to these everyday assaults on my personhood.

These are small, small things, I know. And as I type this, I can hear the voices of so many men I’ve known, asking me what the problem is- these customers mean well, they probably aren’t bad people, it’s a compliment- and for a second I question the legitimacy of using this space to talk about this. Aren’t there more important issues at hand?

But for me, these violations are a very real reminder of how a male culture still sees me- I am a woman. A small, quiet, polite woman. Should I consider finding power within myself by wearing boys’ clothes or cutting my hair or doing any other small act that I think places me outside of that male-female power system, then just one shift at the record store will cure me of that illusion. These old men, the ones who leave ghosts of stale cigarette smoke in the air after they pass out the door, they still see me as a little girl; and even if I change or subvert all of the symbols that mark me as such, enough will remain (gestures, speech, size) that they will still read me as they wish to, and ignore all of the other ways in which I would like myself to be understood.

This will be a great challenge. To say my piece in a way that they will hear: be true to what needs to be said AND keep their business.

Comics make it more real than newspapers ever can.

http://earthquakestrips.blogspot.com/

Sometimes finishing papers at the end of the quarter is like falling asleep: the harder you try, the less it seems to happen.

The Theodore Donald Karabatsos (sic) Memorial Alleycat is on Saturday. Check-in at 3pm at the Hub; cost = $5; bring bike, lock, bag, & some cash.

Will you be a Nihilist? A Little Lebowski Urban Achiever? Or an avant-garde artist whose work “has been commended as being strongly vaginal”?

more info

February’s Broken Heart Alleycat 

(i’m eating my words)

I THINK MY CLASSIC ROCK PHASE is hitting me about ten years later than it hits most other kids.  Or something.  Because I’ve been cranking Stones and Springsteen choruses, and all I want to do is pump my fist to the FM station as I drive down the highway, all-American loner into the sunset.

[youtube kNT9uP5bW7g]

Every time I play Jason Anderson on the air, people want to know who the Springsteen sound-alike is; he’s just a guy from New Hampshire who sings earnest campfire songs for punks who want something more from music than distance and irony.

[youtube cPA4m0LrSuo]

I have a plan: you should go here right now, and listen to “July 4, 2004.”  It’s July afternoons before family BBQs, it’s kids and sweatband bandanas, it’s 1986 and lemonade.

Tell me you don’t get chills when he hoarses, “Oh, Jason, are you still waiting?”

[youtube OsUKVKfLxUk]

I am going to take a break from this for a while.  I need some time to gather my thoughts.