November 2008 Archives

we accidentally wore matching outfits and I watched my best friend get birthday drunk.

the lights atop buildings on 5th ave. (seattle) shone through the thick fog, and I used valet parking for the first time ever.

new Mirah album (a)spera out in March!

Quick quick quick!  You have only two weeks to download some previously-unreleased songs from Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony’s old project!

The Spells released one ep (The Age of Backwards ) back in 2000, a brief collaboration between two of the most challenging female guitarists of the 90’s.  You can download the dissonant millenial nuggets from CB’s hit-or-miss NPR blog.

Lucinda Williams was born in 1953, the same year as both of my parents.  When Coty and I saw her on Thursday in Seattle, her eyeliner was thick; her hair was high; and (to sound like my mom) her lungs were hanging out.

She was smoking hot.

She played a custom Telecaster with silver roses on it.

She sang "Come On," a song which, she explains in this video, started out as a parody of cock rock.  Now it’s become an anthem of sorts.  "Pussy rock," she tentatively calls it.

She deserves every accolade that can be heaped at her feet.  No one else can do it like her.

Need some ideas for the sexual assault posters you want to put up around town?

This Canadian crew can probably get your creative juices going.

I wrote this in response to a request for articulation and clarification of my thoughts on fourth wave feminism.

why we need a fourth wave:

I have great love for Bitch magazine, and I think pop culture criticisms are an essential part of feminism.  However, third-wave feminism has produced very few major works of feminist theory.  I think that third-wave feminism was a very, very important ideological step for feminism- concrete articulations of intersectionality, opening up meanings of sex and gender, etc- but I think that queer theory, over the past twenty years, is where the most substantial theorizing and difficult questioning is occurring.  To quote Bitchfest, “The self-dubbed third-wave feminist movement … could be described as the better-funded, better-organized, liberal-agenda-driven counterpart to riot grrrls’ diffused radicalism.”

On a superficial level, I couldn’t relate to much of third-wave’s cultural reference points- I was in elementary school when Sassy was popular, I didn’t discover riot-grrl until the 2000’s, but it’s only recently that I’ve been somewhat able to articulate a more coherent understanding of where I’m at in relation to third-wave feminism.  This past summer, during a conversation about feminism, someone commented that “feminism is so safe these days”- and that sums up my position.  Third-wave feminism has placed such an emphasis on being a movement for everyone (which it definitely should be!), that most texts produced by the movement read like Women’s Studies 101.  But I don’t need to be told, yet again, why feminism isn’t dead and sexism still affects my life.  I sense a sort of desperate evangelism in third-wave writing: the desire to seem always reasonable/never shrill in your critiques; and to be as nonthreatening as possible, so

second wave histories/fourth wave futures:

I’ve grown so bored by this sort of safeness- I crave radicalism, praxis, grassroots feminist organizing.  Despite ideological differences, I sometimes wish we had an Andrea Dworkin around now- someone to be furious, challenging, militant.  I want more anger- shit’s still fucked, and I’m tired of being polite about it.  For me, this means more confrontational politics; being angry and speaking my truths without worrying if it reflects all of the scary parts of feminism; finally addressing the conflicts that caused the fractures in second-wave feminism; developing feminist ways of dealing with conflict; engaging in direct action; producing deep theory again; revisiting the crucial histories of previous waves of feminism so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

If you’ve seen “Born in Flames,” that’s basically where I’m at.  Bringing energy, fury, contradictions back to feminism.  And I’ve been hearing more and more about women revisiting many of the markers of second-wave feminism; there’s a sort of under-the-radar groundswell going on that fascinates me.  LESBIANS and Lezzies on X are both incorporating super second-wave vibes into their music and image, referencing Olivia Record’s back-catalogue.  The Garneau Sisterhood in Edmonton is invoking old-school-style grassroots action as they deal with rape in their community.  Women are trying to start up consciousness raising groups again.

This may, in part, be nostalgia for a romanticized version of second wave feminism; but it appeals to so many feminist women that I’ve talked to lately.  It makes me think that third-wave feminism has left a major void unfilled in our feminist lives; we’re finding part of what we need in older, more radical styles of feminism, but also infusing it with third-wave consciousness.

I am perpetually fascinated by hanky codes.  And baffled.  Most code lists are pretty standardized, but variance exists- lavender might mean you’re into group sex, or that you engage in gender play, or that you like drag queens.  It started out as a thing for gay male communities, so traditional hanky code charts probably won’t give you much to latch onto if you’re a lady.

Over the past year or so, I’ve compared lists, read online articles, and accumulated a not-so-small stash of hankies for myself.  I think this is my favorite hanky code website so far, but I still wonder- where does one buy a holstein-patterned hanky?  What if you’re not just a top or a bottom, but a switch-hitter?  What if you don’t want to define your sexual repertoire by one act?  And if I’m wearing brown, it’s just because it matches my shirt- I’m not into scat play, I swear.

If you’re in the market for handkerchiefs, fabric stores are an obvious choice.  REI is also a good place to start for basic colors- it’s where my dad get his hankies, which he uses for sunburn protection when he’s climbing.  (My favorite photo of my dad: he’s standing on a mountain peak, looking like an ad for Backpacking magazine.  The light hits the rock, the range rises behind him; and falling from his baseball cap, flapping like a nun’s habit and making him look completely ridiculous, is his well-worn hanky.)  I’m sure he has no idea that such a thing as hanky codes even exist.

What if we floated an alternate set of lesbian hanky codes?  I know this has been suggested before, and I don’t want to get all prescriptivist about it (because that never works).  But what would our list look like?  Pink in your right pocket means you’re looking for femmes; maroon for menstruation, of course; and lavender?

You’re into second-wave scenes: left pocket if you wanna be Betty Friedan, right for Rita Mae Brown.

This is Alison Bechdel.

This is Dan Savage.

Same haircut?

I am sick.  Sick sick sick.  Snotty sick.  Woozy sick.  The kind of sick that renders me unable to do anything actually productive, but isn’t dramatic enough to make sick days seem fully necessary.  Especially when that sick day coincides with my fourth day on a new job; but at 6:45 this morning, I was about to pass out, and I was in no shape to slice tomatoes and onions all morning.  As the sun rose, I stumbled back up Holly Street and returned to bed.

My Tuesday has, therefore, strongly resembled most of my Tuesdays of the past five months: sleeping in all morning, sitting on the couch in my sweats at two in the afternoon, spending too much time on the internet.  It seems that sick days lose their novelty when they resemble precisely your normal routine.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to go to work tomorrow.  It would be bad form to call in sick again, but it would also be bad form to pass out in the sandwich meats.  Already I am developing a backup plan, in case they fire me; this mostly involves the idea of "freelancing" or becoming an apprentice carpenter.  I do not know what I intend to do as a freelancer, but it’s vague and makes it sound like I know what I’m doing.  And it comforts me to have a fall-back.  As for carpentry, I have no upper-body strength, no background in or knowledge of carpentry (nor interest, I should add), but I like the idea of having an actual trade.  Supplement all this book-learnin’ I’ve got.  Besides, someone will have to know how to build things when we establish our future intentional community.

While rewinding "Do-It-Yourself Home Maintenance Without Him," one of the many VHS gems that our house acquired from the recent sale at the public library, I informed Jessica of my carpentry idea, and its usefulness once we establish our commune.  Except I said "colony," instead of "commune," making an already slightly out-there idea into full-on science fiction.

If you join our survivalist outpost community in the mountains in twenty years, we won’t be all Octavia Butler-ed out, I promise.  But it’d be cool if you knew how to milk a goat.

Now I’m going to eat chocolate pudding and watch a marathon of The L-Word and probably fall asleep on the couch in a pile of kleenex.

ATTN: HOMOS!**

I’ve got a new zine project and I need your help.  I want to collect coming-out stories: yours, your friend’s, whoever wants to share.

WHY: It’s really important to hear coming-out stories and know that you’re not alone. Because mine isn’t linear, it has no beginning-middle-end, and there’s never been a lightbulb-above-the-head epiphany (and thus, doesn’t fit within the usual mold for coming-out), I’ve really questioned my story and, by extension, my identity.

So I’m being selfish. I want to collect all different sorts of coming-out stories and then share them with people (via zine)- document them, pass them on, and maybe help some other folks out along the way.

“Coming-out” relates to many things other than just gender and sexuality, so please consider including your story if it relates, even tangentially, to this theme. I want the messy ones, the straightforward ones, the weird ones, the funny ones, the awkward ones, and the ones where you’re not even sure if it counts as coming-out.  Please spread the word to any + all interested parties.

TO CONTRIBUTE A STORY: You can give me a written version. You can do it anonymously or attach a name to it. You can email it to me: noise.art.movement at gmail dot com.

IF YOU WANT TO BE INCLUDED: Please let me know my Nov. 15th. Please get your story to me (one way or the other) by the END OF NOVEMBER. I’m hoping to have this done by early December.

**also, anyone else who wants to contribute, queer or otherwise.

As I was looking up Le Tigre videos to link to for that last post, I got sidetracked reading youtube comment threads.  A representative sample:

All these folks talking about how unattractive JD is.  JD Samson, lesbian sex symbol, cited by the NY Times as "an icon of nerdy cool"! I love that lesbian culture has succeeded in creating a standard of hotness that continues to completely baffle some straight people.  The gender confusion!  The degree of not-getting-it about female masculinity!   And the fact that there’s a whole world of sexiness available to people that has nothing to do with the usual boring ways of being hot.

Post Post Fuck Fuck played a Loa Records show on Friday with Cheetah Speed and Connecticut Four. Pre-show, as we were collectively writing a Post Post Fuck Fuck Wombinifesta, it occurred to me just how deeply we, as a band, are indebted to Kathleen Hanna: grrlfriend revolution. Megaphones. “It was the middle of the night in my house.” Inviting girls from the audience to make noise with us. Manifestos. We took turns reading theory aloud in the midst of our set, culled some of it from the liner notes of Le Tigre albums.

Woman casts a long shadow.

And in the four months since we started this noise experiment, I’m already braver and louder. It’s funny to see such tangible gains- in the middle of covering “Boom Swagger Boom,” I realized that I was singing (singing!) a song, on my own, to a roomful of people. It made me trembly for a moment, but then I cast that aside and stepped back up to the mike to finish out the verse.

Even if this is all we ever have to show for it, it will have been more than worth it.

I’m trying to get through Gender Trouble. I’ve never actually read it cover-to-cover, and it’s been sitting expectantly on my bedside table since August.

It feels like homework, a sensation that probably isn’t helped by my method of getting through it- I’ve assigned myself 20-30 page segments to read each week, until I finish it. Mercifully, the edition I have is only 150 pages.

It’s four o’clock, and the sky is already starting to get dark. God bless November, full of sad bastard music and blustery evenings made expressly for hibernation.

I’m glad this was made.  Watch until the very end- the cover in the last minute must be seen to be believed.

This is the best summation I have seen so far. It makes me feel so good and hopeful and still pragmatic.

(photos from Paul Israel)

If you show up at Babeland between now and Nov. 11th and can prove that you voted (via voter registration card, voting stub, or scout’s honor), they’ll give you a free Silver Bullet! Those things retail for about $15, I think, and are a total classic.

If you’re anywhere near Seattle in the next few days, go take advantage of this. Seriously. As though you even needed additional incentives to vote.

Maria told me a story recently about a guy who decided to be vegan because of the odds- lots of hot vegan girls, not many vegan guys.  She started the story by saying, “Everybody does things to narrow their dating pool,” which may or may not be true, and which is something I hadn’t really considered before.

If you’re queer, your dating pool is narrowed.  Most estimates put the numbers at somewhere between 2-7% of the population.

So, you’re gay- you’ve already got a small chunk of people to chose from.  But what if you’re even pickier?  What if you’ve got some unusual kink, or preferred body type, or subscribe to a particular subculture? Uh-oh.  You’ve reduced your dating pool even more, probably beyond what the faux-vegan would consider good odds.

I have a (small) community of queer friends.  I have a (large) community of punk rock friends.  Let’s face it- outside of queercore (which pretty much peaked when I was 9), there’s not much overlap in those Venn diagrams.

Kurt B. Reighley, who usually writes about American roots music OR gay stuff, rounded up some dudes to talk about this, in a big, gay roundtable. Of Juan Velazquez, from Abe Vigoda:

Velazquez has plenty of gay friends at home in Los Angeles. “But they don’t go to the Smell all the time or hang out at shows.” And that schism makes life awkward. “Music is my primary interest, and that’s where I feel most comfortable,” he says. On Abe Vigoda’s last pass through Washington, D.C., he hit it off with Ruffian Records proprietor Hugh McElroy, formerly of Dischord band Black Eyes. “I had no idea anybody in that band was gay.” They hung out till the wee small hours, just talking about music, dating, and being queer in the rock scene.

KBR talks to some other musicians, too, and it reassures me to know that I’m in good- albeit fractured- company.