PUMPKIN CITY!
The bottom of mine rotted out (who knew that rotting pumpkin smelled so bad?), but I carved the hell out of it!
You can’t tell, but Sam’s is a green squash-like thing. Mr. Kleen, actually.
October 2008 Archives
“Hey Jenn, what are you dressing up as for Halloween?”
“Oh, just a necromancer from a young adult high-fantasy novel. You know.”
(I’m sewing my surcoat this week, dusted with silver keys. My bells come in the mail in a day. I’m still working on the bandolier. OMG NERD CITY! I have been brainstorming this shit for a year, it will be so fantastic.)
(Relatedly- do you have my copy of Sabriel? I know I loaned it to someone recently, and cannot, for the life of me, recall who borrowed it.)
With my back to the heater, I sit on the floor of my room reading “State By State” and wearing my new hat.
All of my roommates had one except me. Now I am no longer the black sheep at house meetings AND I stay warm on these cold nights.
All I care about is “Cortez the Killer,” over and over again, in all its three-chord extended-jam glory.
Neil Young as birthmother:
I’ve been spending most of my time with Built to Spill’s twenty-minute jam from their 2000 live album, hanging on the ripest notes before getting lost in spiraling guitars around the eleven-minute mark.
Somehow, somewhere, the remarkably linear variation captured on Live morphed into the effects-pedal-laden monstrosity below. (But the other one is worth it, I promise, even if the words “twenty-minute jam” turn your heart to ice.)
And then, of course, there’s the Screaming Females’ version. The vibration in M.P.’s voice on “galleons and guns”- it does not put too fine a point on things.
Gamine Thief is, unfortunately, no longer playing music together; but Heather has taken those knotty, sinewy Brownstein-ian guitar lines of hers + applied them to a new band, LEMMY CAUTION.
It says this movie has folks in it from "Mika Miko and other L.A. underground musicians." I guess those other LA underground musicians are people from No Age, Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond, and Mike Watt.
That sounds pretty cool. Maybe I will watch it sometime.
My house is damp. The moisture seeps into the walls and settles in my lungs. The condensation gathers on my window in the morning, nurturing a black mold that creeps along the frame and swells the glands under my jaw.
one.
In July, I saw Calvin Johnson and Ian Svenenious perform at What the Heck Fest in Anacortes. There were a few girls on stage with them, about my age, untouchably cool. The girls looked super mod: tights, turtlenecks, long straight hair; ties and slouching hats pulled low over their eyes. There was a video, something about revolution and outer space and intentionally-bad acting. One girl played tambourine. One played bass. They were accessories to the main event of D.I.Y. godfathers, at the end of an evening of guy bands; all movers and shakers and names-worth-knowing. CALVIN JOHNSON, one of the kings of Olympia, founder of K Records and DIY culture and indie rock patriarch. IAN SVENONIOUS, heart of Nation of Ulysses- to paraphrase wikipedia, the band that was not so much rock and roll band as “political party;” author/tv show host/general punk rock provocateur.
two.
Last week, the Evangelicals played in Bellingham. The bassist had taped some pictures of underwear model girls to his amp. Anjali asked the band about it afterwards- it was left over from a show in Amsterdam, a funny tour souvenir from a band they played with.
IRONIC OR NOT? INTENTIONAL OR NOT?
If no one in the audience can tell the difference, does the distinction even matter?
If I’ve only seen men on stage all night, and then the only girls who take the stage are in the same sidelined roles they were in forty years ago + are twenty years younger than the men with whom they’re on stage-
Or they’re underwear models cut from a magazine, and these guys never even considered that some people might find that really alienating and misogynistic-
Referencing “you’re a girl/here’s the tambourine” is only ironic if there is distance from that regressive ’60s zone yr referencing. And in the basement of Anacortes City Hall that night, there was no distance.
Without context, without explanation, these things stand alone, author-less; and if all the evidence suggests one interpretation, it’s probably gonna be read that way. Girlfriends stood with arms crossed in fury and frustration for the rest of the night, engaged in fiercely-whispered debates between sets.
Because, you know, I’d expect this from dude rock, from rock history in general, from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin; and I’d be ready. It’s low-level patriarchal radiation, we’re kind of used to it. But this is none of those things- in this subculture, my chosen community, these idolized indie rockers are supposed to be allies, advocates of the same things I believe in. These guys fucking toured with Kathleen Hanna, they were there for the birth of riot-grrl, they are the roots of the Oly-D.C. axis.
And those nasty rumors you heard about how Calvin likes to hit on girls who are half his age, maybe and sometimes not even legal yet?
(Yeah, I’ve heard them, too.)
IT DOESN’T COUNT AS IRONY IF NOTHING’S CHANGED.
And sometimes, if this all just seems like a cataloging of the tiny and constant injustices that are part + parcel of being a woman in this place- well, maybe I’m not as immune to the low-level radiation as I wanna think, maybe its weight never gets lighter, maybe someday all of our camel backs are gonna break, and I don’t even know what’ll happen then.
At what point did "radical" become synonymous with "fanatical," and "socialist" again became a slur?
As Carol Hanisch, author of "The Personal is Political," writes,
The academy … [is] where a good many former activists fled when the ’60s movements began to fall apart … I’ve only dipped my toe into the academic waters, but what I see is a great disconnect to the discussions going on there and the on-the-ground ongoing organizing and theory work, limited as it may be in today’s anti-radical, anti-activist climate.
NO REPLASTERING, THE STRUCTURE IS ROTTEN.
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My past 35 hours were Screaming Females-filled. It’s impossible to say without sounding condescending; but Marissa reminds me of nothing so much as Hester Prynne’s Pearl, with her bowl of dark hair, deal-with-the-devil guitaring, and caustic, muttered NJ humor.
Last night, the band put on corpse paint for the house show in Seattle- a Libra birthday party for Tacocat with Hot Grits. The basement was empty when they began, and I tried to pretend I wasn’t a groupie for following them down the freeway for two shows in two nights.
Tonight: Connecticut Four + Screaming Females in my living room.
You know how one time, you missed that one absolutely MIND-BLOWING show that still has everyone talking, months or years later; and you’re still kicking yourself for not going?
(Mine: Sleater-Kinney at the Showbox, December 2005; Electrelane at Sasquatch 2007; Angela Davis at WWU, April 2007.)
Yeah, this is gonna be one of those shows. You should probably find your way over to Friendship City around 6pm.
Come with me to Homo A Go Go this summer! It’s in San Francisco, July 29-August 2, 2009. Radical queer artists! Punk politics! Favorite bands, writers, thinkers, activists! I’ve never been, it only happens once every two years, and it sounds like queer punk heaven to me.
Seriously, I really want to go, and I don’t wanna go by myself. Let me know if yr down.
Can we talk about how liberal all the feminist blogs are?
Every time I get bored at work, I’m all, "Oh, maybe I’ll check out feministing, read something on Bitch’s site, you know, check out some Carnival of Feminists." Because I get all hopeful about fourth wave feminism, because it’s OURS! We can name it + make it what we want. And anyway, I was wishing hoping dreaming for the fourth wave, like, three years ago, so I have some pretty ownership-of-movement issues going on.
As I see it, fourth wave feminism goes hand-in-hand with the New Sincerity- appreciation of histories without irony. Also, fucking radical. I’d like to argue that third wave feminism- as essential a step as it was- was fundamentally a liberal feminist movement, with Manifesta and the Feminist Majority Foundation, etc. I was profoundly disappointed when I saw Jennifer Pozner speak in 2004; during the Q+A section (after she had talked about how shitty reality TV is), I asked her what we could do about it.
"Write letters to NBC" was her answer. And yes, it is important to pursue change through conventional channels; but shit, all the progress that third wave feminism made in "thinking outside the box" of historical feminism, and this is still the best answer you can give us? Not that J. Pozner needs to have all the answers and be some sort of feminist magic 8 ball, but as somewhat of a leader in the third wave movement, I expected something more interesting than that. Could’ve figured that out on my own.
My fourth wave? Not this; closer to this. Let’s get radical again. I’m tired of safety and patience and being so afraid of misrepresenting feminism, because we all know that FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY. And if I say what I believe in my heart-of-hearts, I’ll probably drive away all of the newbies, because I have come to embody so many of the stereotypes of what feminism is-you know, the hairy women who will recruit your daughter, and the next thing you know, she’s joined Dykes on Bikes.
Revisit the second wave. Learn our histories- something that third wave feminism, in many ways, discounted, as though third-wavers were the first feminists to discuss issues of race, class, power, sexuality. Less assimilationist tendencies, more "nobody passes." Bring back the angry feminists.
Tangentially related: I’ve been watching way too much of The L-Word lately, commiserating with Sam about it, which makes me excited about two things:
A] Reading the L-Word: Outing Contemporary Television , which takes care of some stuff that I would have to write about, if no one else was going to get around to it- we have essays on "Demonologies of Lesbian Bodies," "Compulsory Monogamy on The L-Word," "Is She Man Enough? Female Masculinities on The L-Word," and one I’m especially stoked on: "Hot Stuff: Music as a Language of Lesbian Culture."
B] And, uh … this.
You shoulda seen the toes of my Chucks when I was seventeen. And the margins of my notebooks when I got bored in class? I would transcribe the lyrics to entire ALBUMS.
“This thing used to happen where you’d get a record and listen to it in your room and have feelings. The feelings would be pretty intense, and either you wouldn’t tell anybody about them or else you had, like, one best friend, and you told her about them, and then you were desperately in best-friend love forever. You’d write the lyrics from the record in the margin of your math notebook, you’d draw the band logo on the cover and on the white rubber part at the front of your chuck and on your jeans, but mostly you’d feel like everybody else was totally stupid and didn’t have as many feelings as you because they didn’t know about that record. Pretty much that’s what we’re going for.”
Re-reading The White Boy Shuffle, how did I NOT write my paper for Post-Modern American Lit. in Winter 2006 on the queer subtexts in the book? How did I not notice the overpowering hetero vibes in every single piece of literature I read as an undergrad English student? In my senior seminar class, even my professor commented on my failure to address the veiled homoerotic female interactions in what was an otherwise-thorough commentary on gender in 19th-century Capitola the Madcap.
I tied gender issues into every single paper I wrote, but I remained blind to all of the gay stuff I could’ve written about- was I really so oblivious, or so afraid of what I would find?
For a while, after I graduated, I worried that I would lose my grasp of academic language. But now, when I read these old papers of mine (these ones that I was so proud of, where I imagined I was engaged in the academic equivalent of direct action)- that is no loss. I pity the professors who, year in and year out, have to read 1500-word papers that expound upon ideas that were interesting before they were neutered by the watered-down indignation of “However!,” “Perpetuate!,” and conclusions that hedge all your previous assertions.
How do those same professors not stab their eyes out with the utter blandness of this academic writing they teach, grade, themselves employ? It’s leached of expression, and instead of using “fuck” when you have something important to say, you use “incendiary” or “subversive.”
(“Subversive” was the single-most overused word in my undergraduate academic vocabulary.)
Re-reading those books and papers, I’m struck: have I radicalized so much, pivoted identities, become so angry in the past 1.5 years that academic words fail me, and constrain the force of what I have to say?
From Angela Davis’ short story The Erl-King :
The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lacinating cold of the approach of winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezes it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.
And I’ve been listening to a lot of harvest-time Beat Happening.
Apparently all I do these days is post youtube videos. LAME.
Actually, my non-internet life consists of much more than just youtube videos. Things like GHOST ZINES! Pumpkin muffins! House shows with fucking brutal bands from Philadelphia and Seattle! Also, internet-ly, I have been listening to Hollow Earth Radio constantly.
I think it is making me fall in love with radio again.
Because I’m listening, I’m digging it, I’m like, "Oh, they’re playing the Wipers. Best Friends Forever. The Magnetic Fields. Heavens to Betsy. And all of these other bands that I haven’t heard of, but sound like they’ll soon be my favorites, too."
I rode my bike home on Tuesday night along South Garden Street. It was the witching hour, my bike light was weak, and I rode past big dark houses and under tall dark trees. I jumped when I thought I saw a man leaning against a truck, but it was only a shadow.
In my bike basket, the tape player was quietly playing Frida Hyvonen to keep me company, and maple leaves crackled as I rode over them.
Let’s celebrate! (below = better than ABBA)
This is a really clever & enchanting video for a song from the new Deerhoof album.
Best part? It’s directed by Clyde Peterson, aka Yr Heart Breaks, aka #2 Most Played Album in my house over the summer (#1 was Rumours).
Um, could someone please dress up as Miss Viola Swamp for Halloween?
That would be great. Thanks.
The guitars in this song are loose-limbed, tendons barely still attached to the drums.
