S-er F-er

Spider Fighter are playing the Entry tonight round about 8:00, $6. When they played the Triple Rock a few months ago it bordered on historic. Come say hi--I'll be the tiniest pink stripe-haired lady in the room.

A sound they don't want you to own

The news broke for me today at 2:28 PM, in text message form--the musical equivalent of "yr beloved childhood friend/relative/golden retriever Sunshine passed away":

SLEATER-KINNEY ARE NO MORE :-(

I practically ran out of work, took a deep breath and began making the necessary phone calls. I called Anjanette about 8 times, even though I knew that her phone was broken and she couldn't pick it up.

It's very hard to verbalize what this band has meant to me, how deeply they have influenced my appreciation of music and music history. Seeing them play has made me proud to be a woman, a feminist, queer, and alive, but most of all, it has reminded me that there are others out there for whom music is not just a status symbol or fashion accessory or excuse to get drunk on a Tuesday night. Watching them jump and scream and hammer at axes and drum kits it was always beautifully, vividly apparent that to them, music was a matter of life and hope and breath, not haircuts and scenester posturing.

Rob Mitchum once described Sleater-Kinney as "obliterat[ing] the gender card," and that is exactly what they did. After a certain point in their development, they refused to talk about how being women influenced their musicianship--refused, that is, to be seen as anything other than a band, full stop. And strangely, that turned out to be as feminist an accomplishment as anything they wrangled circa Call the Doctor and s/t. Because while we absolutely, urgently need people like Le Tigre talking explicitly about feminism and insisting that their experiences as (marginalized, queer, abused, objectified) women inform their lives and music, we also need bands exploding the girl ghetto and proving that there is nothing inherently male about rock virtuosity and prowess. We need Janet schooling Bonham. We need Corin unfurling R. Plant soul-howls. We need Carrie windmilling and leaping off monitors and pouring out 1/16 notes with eyes-closed fury and abandon and release, making roomfuls of 30-year-old crit boys ask, "Pete Townshend was who again?" Because when that happens, the still-solid glacier of misogynist rock tradition melts just a little, and gets that much more reappropriable for those of us who were never going to be yr mama or smile pretty, take take the money.

now do you hear that sound
as the model breaks?
take the stage

let the image of him fade away
go back and tear the pictures from the page
it's time for a new rock n' roll age
history will have to find a different face

and if you're ready for more
I just might be what you're looking for

Sleater-Kinney were what we were looking for. After August 11th, we'll have to find it somewhere else.



Lady Mairead delivers a fine eulogy here.

Elephants go oral

Someone would be like, "I scored a Farfisa at the J&J Thrift Center for $40!" So it would be like, "Of Montreal wants a Farfisa on this song. Call Laura." Will Hart scored a guitar organ, so of course there's a little wave where everyone's album has a guitar organ on it. And then I got the zanzithaphone. It's really a Casio digital horn, but I was not about to have my credit on the Neutral Milk album be for Casio digital horn, so I called it the zanzithaphone. It was very much about who found what instrument when, and how long before that instrument broke.

An oral history of Elephant 6.

Blank degeneration

One of many apparitions in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, an 18th century dandy paying visit to a sickly descendent, observes with bemused dismay having arrived in 1985 New York, "The twentieth century! Oh dear. The world has gotten so terribly, terribly old."

Like most ghosts who show up in plays, he knows what he's talking about. The world has become disturbingly antique--it's just that parts of it have a trick about seeming more decayed than others. The United States (if only in stodgy, post-colonialist nation-state terms) is still hardly more than a toddler, wobbling down the transglobal sidewalk on chubby legs and dropping its pacifier in the mud. Compared to a more mature Western country like, say, England, it's got about as much historical depth and baggage as last week's episode of "Wife Swap." The difference is a rich English heritage but also a punishing debt, legacy, and accretion of guilt; that is to say, the weight of a collective national onus more than a thousand years in the making. Imagine what living in the U.S. might be like if it'd been suffering fools and faking wars since 876 rather than 1776.

When Queen Elizabeth I travels into the future to discover her kingdom's destiny in Derek Jarman's Jubilee, she finds an apocalyptic post-Britain driven mad by its terrible oldness. Gangs of girl-Londoners go on public rampages of torture and murder, heaps of rubbish burn seemingly nonstop, and political power has all but yielded to a creepy, bald media impresario called Borgia Ginz. Ginz is perhaps meant to recall the ruthless Italian Renaissance family and mobster collective of his first name, and Jack Birkett, with his bugged-out eyes, maniacal giggle and meth addict's leer, plays Ginz as a kind of queeny, arachnid Cesare Borgia fully prepared to enjoy the benefits of his self-made autocracy. He is orbited by a duo of mute lady supermodel-types (rather unconvincing given the way he ogles Adam Ant) as well as the terrorist gang whose bickerings and crime sprees make up much of the film. Leader Bod (Jenny Runacre), sadist Mad (Toyah Willcox), nympho Crabs (Nell Campbell) and cynical historian Amyl Nitrate (Jordan) share a dingy bunker of an apartment and go on group trips to the corner chip shop to kill the cook.

In the end, Jubilee narrowly misses being a radical feminist film. Its leading female characters seem driven by a righteous, primal rage, as if the accumulating centuries of gender inequality have finally taken their toll and inspired the women of England to take to the streets. Mad ridicules Crabs for sleeping with men, spitting, "Sex is for geriatrics!" and carves the word LOVE into Bod's back with a knife. Viv, a peripheral member of the gang, is having a giddy three-way with two brothers (Angel and Sphinx, who are also happily doing it with each other), and everybody is a prickly, beauty-fucking, androgynous mess. It's a shame, then, that the majority of the gang's victims are women, and not just biological ones. Wayne County has a few seconds of prancy karaoke screentime before Mad and the girls arrive to push her about, shove her to the ground and throttle her to death. Mad's satisfaction in the murder appears to arise from something akin to transphobia, and the scene mimics too many other on-screen tranny-killings in which the perverted she-man is left splayed on the floor, wig torn off, and exposed for the fraud she really is.

Similarly, Angel and Sphinx's deaths at the hands of the police, though granted an emotional gravitas and tragedy rare in the rest of the film, are instigated by Angel's blithe come-on to an approaching officer, "Give us a kiss!" Jubilee has (bizarrely) drawn criticism from some for being politically conservative, and this is the only place in which such a reading holds water; by presenting sexual freedom side by side with corruption, looting and murder as an effect of a crumbling society, the film implies that queerness might not have a place in the reformed utopia for which it longs.

Running through Jubilee like a Manic Panic'd neon pink stripe is the first-wave punk aesthetic that insiders like Vivienne Westwood feared the film would exploit. She needn't have worried; the fashion and music on display bristle with authenticity, and Jarman gets it right. Adam and the Ants turn in a scalding performance of "Plastic Surgery" (note the pointed anti-exploitation, anti-music biz commentary that follows the song) and a decidedly un-skinny Amyl sexes up "Rule Britannia" with snap garters and grrrl snark that foreshadow Corinne Burns in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Like Corinne's, Amyl's trashy rent girl stage persona is an escape ladder out of her oppression rather than an effect of it, even as the flat tone of her "sexy" posturing suggests a behind-the-scenes male puppetmaster, controlling her movements, options, and body-as-commodity.

Jarman's interest in gender and British social history informs a Warholian understanding of the pop star as artificial, irresistible,and a little bit toxic. Ginz's pet musicians (engineered with Malcolm McLaren-like cunning) have lost control of their careers before those careers even begin, giving themselves up to an increasingly deranged popular culture in which art is dead but Top of the Pops is always on. "The world is no longer interested in heroes," Mad tells us. "We now know too much about them." And what are pop stars, if not heroes who've been interviewed in Vanity Fair one too many times? As Jubilee concludes in a last gasp of violence and grief, it becomes painfully obvious that its plea for compassion and realness originates not in a parallel universe, but our own.

Nach David Bowie, die Sintflut

Many Pogo reviews and critiques TK--first, From the Closet to the Charts: Queer Noises, 1961-1978, distro'd by Light in the Attic Recs. Yes, it is a compilation, and yes, the first 20 tracks are sounding stellar to our eager ears; we just need a little more time for digestion and tracks 21-24. All I'll say for now is it's stunning, it's disturbing, and it's what Morrissey listens to on minibreak (surely!).

Second: Jubilee, found today by Anjanette at the library. Take note, Minneapolitans! Yr newly renovated main library offers, gratis, The Color Purple, Mansfield Park, Prick Up Your Ears, Rip It Up and Start Again, the NME, and films wherein "bands of teenage girl punks roam the streets." There is a shockingly uncondescending teen section with copies of Mellon Collie next to stereos and centrally displayed Alex Sanchez novels where you might expect Hanson and Meg Cabot. That is tax money well spent, kittens. We lugged our spoils back from downtown in my bag like so many gold dubloons.

Finally: tomorrow night I may be at this. Will you? I know a lady who knows a lady who plays the elevator operator.

Punks on film

Derek Jarman's Jubilee: now in serious competition around Pogo HQ with Fanmail for Most Dreamily Wished-For Yet Almost Unfindable Obscure Indie Film. Queer activist and film pioneer Jarman ruled the (British!) post-punk music video scene, producing clips for Orange Juice, the Smiths, Marianne Faithfull, and the Pet Shop Boys as well as controversial meditations on icons like St. Sebastian, Edward II, Caravaggio and Wittgenstein before his death from AIDS in 1994. Smartie actress Tilda Swinton, who worked with Jarman on Caravaggio, has an amazingly poignant, witty, dishy and in-depth tribute here.

1978's Jubilee was scored by Brian Eno and promises a stunning who's who of first-wave punk faces and haircuts, including those of W/Jayne County, the Slits, and an outrageously young 'n femmey Adam Ant. And seriously, somebody should retroactively subtitle it "A Punk Fantasia on National Themes" (with apologies to Tony Kushner):

Jubilee doesn't bemoan the rise of a punk counterculture as indicative of England's failures. In the film, what goes wrong is not punk, but England. Here the subculture is posited as a reaction to a social and political environment of diminishing returns. Jubilee depicts a post-apocalyptic England, rife with class warfare and directly reflective of the deep recession and state-imposed three-day workweeks of the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. Working class London literally burns while the rich idle away at country estates. Global ruler and media mogul Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett) has turned Buckingham Palace into a huge recording studio, and Westminster Abbey into a gay go-go boy nightclub. Borgia recognizes his own power and influence when he asserts, "If the music's loud enough, we won't hear the world falling apart."

-Todd Ramlow, PopMatters

W! ASH! ING!/ TON, baby.

After I take her grocery shopping we go back to her house for tea. She dives through bulging cabinets for saffron, but retrieves only a moldy glass jar with some seeds in it labeled "1997."

"Hibiscus pods!" she grins. "I stole them from the British consulate."
"In...1997?"
"Yes! I was downtown at the embassy. I stood up against the gate, leaned over into the garden and brushed them into my jar. Nobody saw me."
"Dodo!"
"Well, they were going to be wasted, falling onto the ground like that."

She brews the tea and I put gingerbread cookies on a plate. I ask if we're going to sit in the dining room or the kitchen and she clucks, "Oh no, we'll sit in the dining room, like white people." I shudder, because 1) this is gruesome, and 2) I am not sure how best to call out an 89-year-old woman on her racism. It is only partially comforting later when we discuss her daughter, the one in the civil air patrol. She flies helicopters over D.C., in part to protect the White House, but Dodo wonders whether it wouldn't be better if hostile aircraft were encouraged to attack Mr. Bush. "How did that man ever get in there?" she spews.

****************************************************************

Later I walk to the ice cream store where all the punk kids used to work and find out that it's closing. They worked at the hardware store down the block, too, where they got to sell hammers to Ian MacKaye and brag about it the next day in school. The hardware store is now a less-than-Irish Irish pub, and the ice cream store, stage for adolescent dating dramas and underage shows alike, is soon to play its last mix tape over the stereo. It was no Olympia (the boys carried the amps while the girls reapplied lip gloss and there was way too much Weezer on those mix tapes) but it was ours, and it gave more than one punk I knew money enough for vinyl and guitar strings and a little independence. Where is the next generation of self-pitying, alienated fuck-ups and closet cases going to gather to discover London Calling and stare at their high-top Converse? The Pottery Barn?

Soon, that'll be all that's left.

We hear swooping guitars

Pitchfork lets me play Lois Lane. Those lucky devils in Seattle and PDX are in for some fun shows, methinks.

Homo hoe-down and calendar

May has shaped up to be the queerest month of recent memory, rippling with so many excellent and subversive new film, musical and literary offerings I'm starting to think the revolution homo-style really is going down in earnest (further evidence: I persuaded a 20-something dude at my bookstore to buy Mrs. Dalloway even after he asked nervously, "Isn't this a girly book?" I also pushed Funeral Rites but he left it sitting on the shelf--can't imagine why). Here's a recap of what's been rumbling in the underground this month, with a preview of queerities to come:

MATMOS, THE ROSE HAS TEETH IN THE MOUTH OF A BEAST [MATADOR]

Just when you thought they couldn't get any smarter, Matmos returns with a brainy concept record so queerly radical on the one hand and experimental, ambitious and ethereal on the other it makes Pansy Division sound like the 700 Club and the Books like Lawrence Welk. The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast (title snagged from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations) is the soul of punk distilled, frozen into cubes and traced against yr fevered brow. There's no gabba-gabba-hey guitar slap, drum snarl or feedback to speak of, but this is punk for the new millennium--decentered, denatured, reimagined, kindred to its '77 self only via lust for the unexplored and a proud refusal to steal an arm or an earlobe from the overpicked corpses of records past. Every track is a tribute to a beloved queer icon, inclusive of the obscure, the cultish, the vaguely-known and the fist-eatingly unheard of (hence "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan," "Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith").

LOCKPICK PORNOGRAPHY

"If I weren't gay, or she weren't a woman, I might consider attempting to ensnare her in the ugly web of a monogamous relationship."

Joey Comeau's flawed debut novel of queer guerrilla terrorism reads like just that--a flawed debut novel--but draws its confused, vengeful protagonist with adamantine sympathy and realism. Our hero may break into people's homes and punch innocent teenage girls in shopping malls, but he's profoundly conflicted about it. He also can't figure out for the life of him why, if gender is a construction, and monogamy unnatural, so many people find themselves stubbornly attracted to the brains and bodies of either men or women. You can read the first seven chapters here for free, but even better than Lockpick are A Softer World, Comeau's collaborative online art and writing project, and his fake cover letters asking potential employers for jobs.

HOMOCORE MINNEAPOLIS

Still soldiering on after Lynn Breedlove's 4/15 appearance and the penultimate Tracy + the Plastics show, Homocore has organized a hip-hop night for May 28th (7th Street Entry, 21+) with seven different artists from around the country. Don't hate on homohop. It's like the line dance they somehow never got around to teaching you in yr elementary school physical education class.

FLAMING FILM FESTIVAL

Minneapolis' own Flaming Film Festival begins this Thursday, May 25th. Skip the treacly hetero liberal-baiting of "All Aboard! Rosie's Family Cruise" but stay for "Is it Really So Strange?", William E. Jones' 2004 doc on Hispanic and Latino Morrissey fans. They're pairing it up with Jem Cohen's Elliott Smith short, and then afterwards local music-types are gonna do live Moz/Smiths/Smith covers. I dare you to go and not sigh expressively. Monday the 29th is the Music Video Showcase, and since the entire festival is hosted by Kill Rock Stars they'll be showing classic and newer vids from E. Smith as well as the SSION, Deerhoof, Sleater-Kinney, Hella and Xiu Xiu.

[Last-minute addenda: Carrie Brownstein in the NYT! Augusten Burroughs in Mpls! Hold him hostage in an elevator with yr loquacity & love--or at least qualms about the film version of Running With Scissors.]

Aja/Shana/Kimber/Bourdieu

Cartoon cult crit renaissance. I'm still waiting for the radical feminist metaethics of She-Ra.

Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!"

Shadowboxer

Your telephoned reports of your visits with Cornell were chock-full of fascinating details, but all I can remember now is the food that was served. Once he invited you to Sunday lunch and served canned spaghetti and peas and carrots. Yum. Then there was the time you brought him a cake and the two of you sat down to drink tea and listen to Dionne Warwick recordings. Suddenly, Cornell burst into tears. You could not take your eyes off the tear-sodden slice of cake that was slowly disintegrating on his plate. Was he crying because he was so saddened by her poignant rendition of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" or "You'll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)"? Or was he distressed by an intuition that she would later lose her girlish figure and become a spokesperson for the Psychic Friends Network?

-Art in America, 1995

Noun/verb/magazine

Recently, I was called a son of a bitch in internet-public (a listserv of 300 people). I am both vaguely flattered and amused by this. As an epithet, SOB is noteworthy but less than fearsome--like a sticky, Ritalin'd five-year-old pulling at yr sleeve to watch him go down the slide. SOB is kind of comical. SOB is half the dialogue of a bad Al Pacino movie or Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride just before he kills the six-fingered man.

I am not backing down, I am not capitulating. I stand by what I originally wrote, and the style in which I wrote it. I also stand by the fact that I called myself a bitch, even though, like SOB, much of the impact that word once had has been drained or ceded to other words (thank you, Meredith Brooks). If a bitch is someone who speaks her mind in public fiercely, critically and unapologetically, then that is what I am. I wrote the clarification post sans vitriol to try and make it just that--clarified. Make no mistake, I love my Frosted Bitch Flakes. I eat them every morning.

Declawed!

Here's what my Slate post might have read like if I hadn't eaten my Frosted Bitch Flakes that morning:

Paragraph 1:
There was a piece in Slate today talking about the debate around S. Merritt's views on race. I'm glad this debate is continuing, because it's really important to talk about music and race and their intersections. The piece's intro, however, made me pause.

Paragraph 2:
The intro uses the word 'cracker,' which has some unpleasant, broadly anti-poor, anti-Southern connotations, and isn't really appropriate here. But the author is using it mainly to show the ways it doesn't apply in this situation anyway, and is picking up on an earlier usage, so I understand.

Paragraphs 3 and 4:
The article then goes on to cite evidence proving why Merritt is an unlikely cracker/racist. These pieces of evidence include his diminutive stature, homosexuality, intellectualism, wit and tenderness as a musician, ukulele-playing, and fondness for chihuahuas and Irving Berlin. I don't see a necessary connection between these things and the likelihood of someone being racist. Some of them also seem to be present in order to reinforce others--a penchant for Berlin and chihuahuas, for example, is often stereotypically (maybe harmfully, maybe not) attributed to gay men. The point, to me, seemed to be to show readers that M. is a recognizable type of person--a fey, sweet gay man--and therefore generally non-threatening and unlikely to be a racist. M. may be this type of person and he might not, but it makes me nervous that a writer would use this technique to disprove someone's alleged racism. Why do we assume that a sweet, musical, fey gay man couldn't be racist? What's the connection? It might be true, perhaps, that queer people are less statistically likely to be racist than straights. But does that really foreclose the issue once and for all? There are a lot of different kinds of queer people out there, with radically different backgrounds and beliefs.

If we really want to be vigilantly anti-racist, I think we should remember here that racism is systemic and institutionalized. We are all susceptible to it, regardless of how sensitive or musical or smart we are. The article suggested to me that it was only recognizing racism in the guise of obvious or stereotypical bigots, when racist ideology today is much more subtle than that.

Paragraph 5:
When the article mentioned M.'s musicianship, it got me thinking about the linkage people sometimes assume exists between artists and their art. Just because somebody makes a lovely song doesn't mean that they themselves are lovely, right? This is an easy trap to fall into, and I feel like the article comes close.

That's a fairly close transcription. I hope it clarifies things.

Röhm if you want to/ Röhm around the world

Anonymous wrote in to say re: my last post that "...your sentence, 'there are a lot of horribly racist queer people in the world'...needs to be clarified with a 'this is ernst and this is what he did' clause." An earlier anonymous poster also wrote, "Ernst Röhm was gay, but not 'openly' so."

So: this is Ernst, and this is what he did. And here is why I think you could argue that he was "open":

Unlike others in the Nazi Party, Rohm was openly homosexual, admitting to associates that he was "far from unhappy" about his sexual orientation. He frequented gay bars, belonged to a homosexual organization called the League for Human Rights, and publicly advocated the repeal of Paragraph 175. An anonymous 1932 article called "National Socialism and Inversion" has been credited to Rohm's influence (or even authorship); the article stated that if Nazi Party members performed their official duties well, they were entitled to private lives of "creative eroticism" and "loving homosexual relationship[s]."

Rohm established a kind of gay network within the S.A., assigning prominent posts to gay friends and lovers. Among Rohm's "sweethearts" was Edmund Heines, whom Rohm appointed first as his deputy and later as leader of the Munich branch of the S.A. Another of Rohm's favorites was Karl Ernst, who was nicknamed "Frau Rohrbein" for his intimate friendship with Paul Rohrbein, Berlin's S.A. commander...Rohm and his close-knit circle [were] dubbed in a Munich paper the "Brotherhood of Poofs"...

As for the rest of the comments, I am going to let the hate mail pile up a bit more before responding.

Cries and whispers

This Saturday night, the Minnesota Film Arts 24th Annual International Film Festival will show what promises to be the best movie about misfit Swedish teenage girls since Show Me Love. And that's saying a lot. What is it about Sweden that alienates its creative ladygirls so? You'd think that social democracy would count for something, but this tradition stretches all the way back through Bergman and shows no signs of weakening. In God Save the King, director Ulf Malmros pays tribute to the power of punk to save us all, whether from the patriarchy, the sausage factory or ourselves. Don't confuse it with God Wears My Underwear--though that looks awfully Orlando-licious and deserving of yr time as well.

Ain't no shame/ ladies do yr thang

Seattle was impossibly green. I couldn't recall much about the last time I was there (1995?) apart from sitting on some dude's roof and seeing a blue heron. This time around, since it was the pop conference, instead of roofs and herons there were name tags, Power Point presentations and Robert Christgau giggling. Falafel pitas were eaten and record stores trolled . Mairead's eagle eyes spotted the Real Janelle EP in Easy Street for $.99 (a steal and a half for the cover of "Where Eagles Dare" alone), and they had Louder Than Bombs for $7.99, so it is officially my new favorite music store. Take that, Cheapo! I also procured two lovely zines:

1) States of White & Green: Writings from the South Bend Juvenile Justice Center (Mairead C., editrix). I got this from Lady M. in lieu of one of her famous perzines, which are out of print, but it is a stunner and far better bound than any of mine.

2) Adventures in High Contrast Living N*23, Pacific NW Special Edition: Babies + Parties, by Shayla H. Babies and parties are rad, and so is Shayla. Marvel and admire here!

My panel went well, despite the fact that I had to follow what might have been the funniest paper of the entire conference: Glenn Dixon's "Boldly Gone: A Personal Trek into the Shameless, Sincere Music of Leonard Nimoy (With an Illuminating Side Trip into the Vocalizing of William Shatner)." All of us in the room, including S. Merritt, grinned and brayed like overly anesthetized donkeys. Other con hi-lites included Jabali Stewart blowing out a Learning Lab speaker with Bad Brains, Sara Marcus exorcising Ani, Joon Oluchi Lee theorizing Courtney Love through Phyllis Wheatley and just about everybody and her mother batting around the words "melisma" and "timbre" like so many music nerd tennis balls. Douglas Wolk's "Complete and Utter History of the Numa Numa Dance" was beautiful, not just for its judicious display of YouTube golden nuggets but also its celebration of misfit pride (the Numa dude was a true pomo freak messiah, preaching his gospel of embarassing yet unabashed love for pop music via webcam).

In general, it was a rapturous, pogo-inducing joy to be around such brilliant and generous people, ladies and men alike, who are helping to tear down the "boys only" sign from the rock crit treehouse. For reals--25 years ago, it would have been floor-to-ceiling Dylan wank-offs and Beatles retrospectives; today we can talk about race! gender! sexuality! and not get backed into the corner with "how is that relevant, exactly?" stares and the threat of girldeath-by-canon. Today I can sit in the audience of a panel made up entirely of women weaving sonic feminism and queerness and Sassy magazine and watch the dudes around me applaud. I felt more than a little twinge of pride in my heart, and I think Jessica Hopper did, too.

Because I was so preoccupied with picking up my jaw from the floor most of the time, my notes were cursory like whoa (M. was far more diligent) but I still managed to scrawl a few choice observations on the back of my entry ticket:

classic 50s chord progression
abjection like in Kristeva; Lacanian presence through absence
Drew Daniel is awesome

I guess that's all one needs to know.

Showtime, Synergy!

I will be in Seattle at EMP all this weekend trying to pronounce Phyllis Schlafly's name correctly. Post-con reportage TK. In the meantime, Pogo Picks:

I Went to Yr Concert & I Didn’t Feel Anthing: Women’s Liberation Rock, Le Tigre, and the Performed Ideal

Hurts So Good: Guilty Pleasures, Black Feminism and Hip-Hop

No Fat Chicks? Weight and Rebellion During a Hard-Rock Adolescence

Squeak of the New Wave Woman

Listening Closets panel

Dystopia parkway

For those of you looking for proof that the project of art criticism (i.e. the effort to represent and explain in words something that exists beyond the verbal realm) stands about as much of a chance at consensus and descriptive success as trying to bake a cake that tastes like E# major, look no further than critical appraisals of mid-twentieth century surrealist Joseph Cornell:

There isn't a sexual image, let alone a trace of amour fou, in his entire output. The most he would permit himself was a gentle fetishism. If, as some have thought, Cornell's imagery had to do with childhood, then it was one which no child has ever known, an infancy without rage or desire. Sometimes he would crack the glass pane that protected the contents of the box, but that is all he allowed in the way of violence - it suggests that the sanctuary of imagination has been attacked.

-Robert Hughes, American Visions

His works, relying almost completely on strange and powerful juxtapositions of everyday objects or elements, are small in scale...but they speak to us in the rich vocabulary of human desire. They whisper about idealized memories of childhood bliss, about smoldering romantic hopes, about dreams that hang by only a slender thread.

-Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

So which is it? Is there angst or desire or isn't there? To deny that there is, I think, misses the point of the shadow box medium that Cornell so expertly cultivated. The people represented inside his boxes--Medici princes, Marie Taglioni, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood--are fetishized objects but also subjects that reflect Cornell's own sense of claustrophobia, unnaturally preserved innocence and enforced stasis in the realm of the child. The glass isn't smashed because an attacker is violating the sanctuary; it's smashed because the person on the inside is trying to get out. The darkest boxes are so powerful as to be almost vocal, calling out to the viewer in whisper-screams for contact and escape.

But judge for yrself:

Caravaggio Prince, Medici Slot Machine Variant

Untitled (Medici Boy)

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall)

Untitled (Medici Princess)

Kiss me, Bess!

Why is there something unavoidably camp about Elizabeth I movies? Is it the farthingales? The wigs? The angsty shouts of "You will never know my heart!" delivered on horseback? HBO clearly appreciates this proud tradition because it cast Jeremy "World's Campiest Man" Irons in its new hellcat virgin queen miniseries. Here, Irons gets to chew up groaner lines like, "Do I not live in the sun of your favor?" and spit them out again studded with rhinestones and silver glitter. In a fantastically feminist move, HBO has also cast Dame Helen Mirren as Lizzy Tudor and ignored the Hollywood law against using actresses over 25 in romantic roles. This means that instead of Keira Knightley trying on her "mature" face we get 60-year-old Dame Helen, hot as hell and with enough career/life experience to maybe carry the part with some class and realism, making out with the baby-faced and hilariously-named Hugh Dancy (30!!!) as Essex. Yes, HBO! I don't even care that all you've done is remake Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth without quite as many overhead shots and heads on pikes--give me Helen Mirren wearing armor and teasing pretty boys and I am sold.

She's so unusual

31 flavors of OH MY GOD YES:

NYT: You were raised by your mother and grandmother in a Sicilian-Catholic home in Ozone Park, Queens.

Cyndi Lauper: My mother wanted to be a singer. She ended up working as a waitress in diners, and that was so heartbreaking for her. I wanted to save her. I wanted to save everybody.

NYT: Are you suggesting that there is an autobiographical impetus to your best-known song, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"?

CL: Yeah, my mother and grandmother never had any fun. They just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. And what do you think happened? I saw three generations of women coming to my concerts — grandmothers, mothers and their daughters. And that felt like an achievement.

NYT: I think of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" as the first feminist-backlash song. It came out in the 80's and goes against the preachy and high-minded tone of 70's feminism.

CL: That's not true! It's totally feminist. It's a song about entitlement. Why can't women have fun?

Ground floor perfumery, stationery and leather goods

"I hear you are having a hard time getting the shoes on the mannequin," he says. This is not some fantastic new euphemism; he is being literal. So we crawl up into the display window together to where the plastic lady lurks, shoeless, but in a sundress and with an Easter hat under her arm. There is a basket by her side filled with too-large speckled eggs, more dinosaur than chicken. He hoists her by the boobs while I kneel and shimmy her feet into the white sandals with silver buckles. We are totally exposed to the sidewalk and streetscape in front of us except for the panel of glass. It is like red-light Amsterdam, only without the prospect of tricking.

"Have you ever seen Are You Being Served?" I ask, buckling.
"No."
"Oh. Well, they were always dragging mannequins around on that show. BBC. It's really, um, great."
"My wife and I collect mannequins."
"You do?"
"Yeah. We set them up in our house and put them in outfits, like, cheerleader outfits and stuff."

This toes a creepiness line. Not crosses, just approaches and regards, thoughtfully. Can we talk about how much you like Bratmobile instead? Or how Ladytron clearly intended "Paco" to be an homage to AYBS? Or at least the charm-weirdness of being asked to make window displays when we do not work in a department store?

"I think she's crooked."
"Oh. Who?"
"The mannequin. Doesn't it look like she's leaning to the left?"
"Yeah, actually, it does."

You're so audio/ don't remove me/ to a movie

Dear Nina Gordon and Louise Post,

When you wrote the song "Victrola" for American Thighs, did you realize that it was the perfect soundtrack for watching a wasp fly around the back of a crowded Minneapolis bus? Because it is. The wasp hung out on the pane of window next to my head for a while, then panicked and started suicidally dive-bombing the girls behind me. Some guy yelled, "Wasp! Wasp! There's a wasp on the bus!" and everybody started yelling and running around while you keened "I am grooving, Victrola" in my ears and yr guitars kicked in loud and deep and fuzzy with that unmistakeable 1994 Chicago squall that you and the Pumpkins used to do so well. It was beautiful. Thanks for making that record in the first place, and for those essays you had in Grrrls--those were awesome, especially the one where Nina talked about identifying as a feminist and having a big nose. I will never say that you ripped off the Pixies or that getting Bob Rock to produce Eight Arms was a bad idea. You can ride on the bus with me any time.

Still can't fight the seether,
Lizzie Pogo

Jem is truly outrageous

Sharpie yr calendars, Minneapolitans: the Walker will be premiering Jem Cohen's new film Chain, starring Mira Billotte (of Quix*o*tic and White Magic loveliness), Miho Nikaido and some empty parking lots, on April 26th at 7:30 pm. "Stark!" promises the Walker. "Disturbing! Universal resonance!" Cohen also made the epic Fugazi chronicle "Instrument," so they're probably not that far off. Cinema Scope, flexing its thesaurus, tagged Cohen "a bricoleur by intuition" and called Chain a "synthesis of the real and the imagined, the poetic and the pedestrian...a very personal response to the impersonal forms of late-capitalist culture." Holy Brett Vapnek! I am there with Marxist bells on.

Cohen is also doing a free public talk at the Walker on Thursday the 27th but I cannot go, because I will be at EMP Pop Con talking about a vastly different Jem. The paper is slouching towards half-finished. There are outlines, and quotes from Gaar, Raha and Shepherd, but the operose, world-on-pause, fingernails-in-mouth writeration has yet to slalom in earnest. In regard to which--if you are a feminist musician/fan/critic/ writer/observer/aerobics instructor and you have been influenced by Jem & the Holograms, I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you thought of the show as a kidlet and whether it affected yr perceptions of female musicians and I will shimmy you into my paper, all eleventh hour-style. Yodel at dancingvioletsnail@yahoo.com.

So where were the spiders?

I had a dream. It was one of Bowie's last-ever shows as Ziggy Stardust, and he was dressed like it--painfully beautiful in black maribou feathers and red vinyl, all coy glances and swinging hips, an otherwordly, cocksure ice nymphet for the ages. He wasn't alone, though. He was singing a duet with a disembodied head sporting a combination medieval princess coronet and flying nun wimple. They were singing "I Got You Babe" terribly sweetly to each other, and after a while I realized that 1) everyone involved was fantastically stoned, and 2) the disembodied head belonged to Marianne Faithfull, awkwardly caught in the long limbo between her "As Time Goes By" and "Broken English" eras. Bowie looked ready to spontaneously combust from his own hotness, Disembodied Nun Wimple Marianne threatened to float up towards the ceiling in a cloud of smack bliss, but the song stumbled on to its heady, horny finish amid superfluous backup singer rump-shaking and the slack-jawed disbelief of all.

ONLY IT WASN'T A DREAM, KITTENS. It was real.

On the playground

THE GOSSIP
w/ Spider Fighter, Panther
The Triple Rock, Mpls, 4/1/06

As a study in contrasts, this show didn't just take the cake, it stole it from a maximum security cake protection facility in San Quentin after months of devious planning. The lineup was so staggered in terms of quality, genre and intent that the crowd started to look mildly disoriented after a while, as if the walls were changing color and getting alternately closer and farther apart from each other. Because the moment Spider Fighter started setting up, things were beautiful--like, time-warp-to-Olympia-circa-1991 beautiful. Four women up front (including Arzu from the Selby Tigers), three on guitars, one on keyboard, shiny and nails-tough in dresses, boots and "Fuck with me, yr spleen is jelly" scowls of macho-rock feminist reclamation. Axes gunning for seismic, crossing into transcendent, nudged by Teenage Whore Courtney screams, elated WUH-OHs and demi-hardcore, slam-danceable, epiphanic sonic glory. It's Bratmobile, it's the Third Sex, it's early Sleater-K, it's why punk will save yr lost girl life and everything good and true and holy in this world. It's also beyond facile comparisons and breathless fanzine gushes--LISTEN FOR YRSELF. NOW. SALVATION IS HERE AND ITS NAME IS SPIDER FIGHTER.

And so it was on the crest of this wow-that-was-like-seeing-Heavens-to-Betsy-at-IPU! euphoria that the girl riot was cruelly shuffled away and replaced with...Panther. Ah, Panther. How do I explain the donkey dung that was his set? First, let me say that, as a rule, I think artists deserve the benefit of the doubt. Most critical pans are lazy, self-satisfied and snark-driven and don't help anybody, especially the artist, who has gone through the labor and general scariness of public performance in order to share her art with other people. However, sometimes the artist in question is so far gone, so egregiously, fist-eatingly off it and painful to watch that it becomes necessary to speak up in order to prevent the suffering of others. Panther, in addition to inspiring some of the deadliest audience glares this side of James Frey on Oprah, is the Anti-Spider Fighter--not good, not girls, not a band. He is one white dude, alone on an empty stage, recycling three or four dubious "dance" sequences and some krump moves he jacked from Rize over rancid cat food un-beats upchucked from his iPod to the PA. Sad highlights: pacing, wheezing, crouching, orgasm-faking, the caveat, "I know, this is awkward." And how, darling.

Ed.'s note: Anjanette liked Panther. She argued he was satirical, and like Har Mar Superstar. She has a point; I just don't want to see the dude's butt crack again.

When it was all over there was much blinking and frowning and brow-furrowing as people struggled to remember why they had come to this show in the...OH YES! THE GOSSIP! It was a long climb up out of post-Panther lethargy, and Beth, Hannah and Brace/Nathan hadn't soundchecked yet, but dammit if Goxxip magic is not so potent, immediate and irresistible it couldn't overcome a hundred missed soundchecks. They ripped up about half of Standing In The Way of Control, a couple from Movement, old standbys Ain't It The Truth and Sweet Baby, and an acappella-ish cover of Aaliyah's Are You That Somebody? Beth said she was on her period and getting over a cold, but roared and thundered like a force-10 hurricane nonetheless. The floor was queer danceteria afterlife, roiling with happy bodies sweaty and free and fat and thin, tranny and non and tiny and tall. My dancing neighbor rushed the stage during the encore and boogied with pals, who looked like they had been born for this very purpose. Panther? Panther who?