MRR column 1

I started writing a column for the magazine Maximum Rock and Roll, here's the first one, sort of an introduction one.
...
I didn't become a punk until my mid 20's. In highschool I was a loser, freak, drama-fag, posuer, stupid, wannabe, so and so's girlfriend, that other guy's girlfriend, the girl on the back of the motorcycle. My friends were over punk already, but we could still listen to a couple things: the Bad Brains, The Replacements. We still worked shitty jobs so we could buy shitty records. Music was still our lives.

I knew there were secrets out there that I couldn't find. I searched the city as much as fear would let me. I searched into other people's lives. I was from the suburbs, 3 cats, 3 sisters and a brother, 2 alcoholic parents, one elementary school teachers salary, spotty child support payments from the real father, secrets and forgotten memeories, screaming and did he really throw her to the floor and kick her? Not too violent to forget. It had been as spotty as the money was now. Now there was the incest pushed under the rug, forgotten by them but not by us, never by us. We protected our parents the way they never protected us. We kept secrets.
I didn't have the courage to leave for real, but I did find out how to make it to the city, the bus or hitchiking if I had to. There was a corner where the weirdos hung out: the soon to be junkies and the highschool girls trying to hide their age, slicked back hair and red lips or long skirts and henna, or whatever, anything, 50's housewife dresses, men's suits and shoes. There were the street musican hippies and the anti-racist skins. It's not like there were a ton of people really, but it was a funny mix. Public space and meeting ground. There were punks across the street from where we hung out, and they spare changed and fought with the christians who would sometimes come to preach. They hung out at the McDonalds and got drunk. They had Exploited painted on their new leather jackets. There had to be something else.

I hear people sometimes complaining about the kids now, buying punk, it's just another thing for sale. Everything in America is co-optable. Captialism takes our resistance and turns it in to commodity, ripping out the soul, ripping out the meaning. It's true, but punk was never so pure or perfect. I sometimes sit on the newspaper rack downtown and watch the new kids walk by, plaid skirts, suspenders, suit coats, strange mixes. Maybe they are posing just like we were, trying on anything that has a potential to lead them someplace more real.

Once I was hanging out with my cool-boy-motorcycle-boy clique I was accepted into by being a girlfriend and tough, not hysterical or talkative or giggily, and they were talking about this girl who was so hot. They all agreed they would marry her. They all agreed she was so hot. She was in the Babes in Toyland band, punk band. I hated her, had never met her. Couldn't wait to meet her so I could hate her better. I had ideas of how she would be, beautiful and skinny and long pretty hair and perfect features like a model, probably french, probably really sexy and smooth talking, a flirt. And when I met her, this Laurie Barberos, she was smiles and welcome. She made sure to talk to me, another girl, she was not a girl hater like most of us were. She was not super skinny, her nose was not perfect American model, but turned up sort of squishy and her hair was huge and dreaded. She was not flirty sexy style and didn't try to be. She didn't play the game at all. She was fully herself and so nice. I thought - if punk girls get to be like that and still be wanted and loved and respected, then there is something to punk I don't know about. something of punk I need.

I moved to a tiny town, population 1,000, and there were no punks there. Actually, once a punk came for the summer. She was more metal than punk and had a plan that metal was a real place of potential resistance. She was going to bring information about anarchism to metal shows and try to convert them, but the next time I heard of her she had started a punk band. If I rememeber right, she said they didn't know how to play yet.

The idea of girls playing music together sounded crazy to me. The idea of girls playing music on their own terms.

When I lived in the country, I read about anarchism. It changed the whole way I saw my life. Every fundamental thing, like the way we sectioned our lives off - work time and learning time and leasure time. The way we viewed growing up as becoming numb and giving up. It talked about how people have been turned into consumers - how our identities are formed by the products we buy, or the products we want. It talked about becoming human again. Forming community, self-reliance, community reliance. Gardens on rooftops, no more cars, no more suicidal despair. It talked about the history of oppression, the history of resistance, the failures and sucesses, and the need to get rid of all forms of domination. the need to look deeply into all our actions and intentions, our conscious and subconcious. It talked about active citizenship (and by citizenship I don't mean offical papers, offical existance, I mean creating community and decision making processes to organize to fulfill our own local needs.) It talked about living a life worth living. It talked about being able finally to feel alive, to love without defenses, to be safe at home, to be safe. To be whole. To be real.

Anarchism gave me an idea of a new world, and eventually I found the punks who were living something of it.

Every movement has a million cliques and subgroups that may be don't even have that much in common. I remember when I thought punk was something solid and cohesive that I couldn't understand. There was Laurie Barbaros, who was just how I wanted to be, and then there were these punks in my livingroom in Portland, spiked up jackets and sweet but getting drunker, and then drunk, talking about porn. and they were friends of my best friend, and I was trying to talk about how porn had played a part in the continuum of objectifiction that led up to me being sexually abused. They didn't care. I wasn't trying to demonize all porn. I was trying to say that it wasn't always funny for all of us, and that there were serious sides to it, there were real reasons to think deeply. that objectification was real and killed us in real ways.

Then there was Kyle, also portland, also spiked jacket, who stood with me and my sister in the kitchen while we listened to some kind of girl folk music and mixed up a big batch of squash bread for all our friends and neighbors. He said "You two are the punkest girls I know."
So punk meant this too: mixing bread with all your arm muscles. loving your friends. Giving. Dancing in the kitchen. Not caring if people thought your music was stupid. Trying to be true to yourself. Trying to change everything.

The punks I ended up with were the ones who usually maybe only hesitantly identified that way, but they were the ones that, depite the depair, couldn't really crush the life inside them. They wanted life, all of it. They wanted community and family no matter how fucked up we all were. hop trains but no bragging. swim. walk. We lived together in crowded houses, challenging american ideals of individual space, individual lives, alienation, nuclear family. We didn't let the corporate control of media keep us from writing. We wrote zines, we passed them out to eachother, at shows, on the street, to strangers. We took up public space. We danced like crazy, we screamed our heads off, we held eachother up and carried eachother home.

I am not writing a eulogy, this is still what I love about punk, these same things.

I love the farm punks, the punks building shacks on forgotten land, the self-defense punks, the bike punks, the girl punks refusing silence, the awkward punks trying to find someplace to fit in, the finding out new ideas and being passionate and finally sure about something, the self-righteousness - not that I really love self-righteousness, but I remember the power of feeling sure and strong after a life of no power and no certainty. I know that for most people the self-righteousness fades. I love the ways that despite everything being against us, we create culture, we create resistance, we create ways to live with integrity.

quotes

"People are really, realy hungry to feel some hope about anything. The simple idea that because of challenges people face with the environment, over the next 40 years things must change is daunting. But if you say it's a great opportunity (for this generation) to build a new civilization - that generates hope. We've spent the last two decades being so discouraged and detached, that need to feel some hope is a latenet urge that has been long neglected. In the end there is no practical alternative to hope. Only a certain proportion of people are montivated by despair. The rest of us are motivated by hope."

(I ripped this out of the paper and forgot who it was quoting)

getting out

How do you get out with your soul intact, away from your family who maybe loves you but wants something different for you, away from friends who want to sit still, away from mindsets that want to hold you close, close you off, defend shallow thinking, defensiveness.

you can let life happen to you, or you make it your own. please make it your own.

i remember when every sentance I said, I wanted to apologize for. when I thought I was so stupid, and half my struggle was unlearning that. Learning things helped. learning physical things that I could feel confident in - like how to fix broken radiator hoses, how to use a chainsaw. learning history helped, understanding that it was not just me, but a world based on keeping us stupid feeling, keeping us wrapped in a silence of competitiveness and gossip and feeling never enough.

When I was too shy to talk, I used to copy articles I liked, political essays and poetry, and put them into little pamplets with beautiful covers and set up tables at anarchist gatherings, selling pamplets for donation. Sometimes it seemed like there was so much talking and not enough poetry, and no one reading black women's words, and I wanted to change that.

As much as there was too much talk and not enough poetry, I remember how amazing it felt to be around lots of people wanting to change things, lots of people who thought along the same lines as me, and it gave me strength to go back to where ever I was from, where I couldn't find the right people. It gave me hope that I would find them someday.

I remember when I started to take more responsibility for my life - when I saw how my self-hate protected me, kept me from challenging myself in fundamental ways. And I knew I had to take these chances - to learn to say what I thought, to learn to say what I felt, to learn what it was that I thought and felt outside of what I thought I should feel and think because I thought that's what someone else wanted me to feel and think.

if that sounds convoluted, that's because it was. that's how my mind was. how a lot of our minds are.

to take responsibility for yourself. deep self-reflection. deep self-forgiveness. taking on a daily practice of become human and strong and fragile. stop hanging out with people who don't want to go beyond shallowness. start risking real conversations. learn. teach.

imagine the impossible

"One must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible."
-Ursula Le Guin

"...a whole bunch of us were talking about how we imagine recreating ourselves and our society, and so many said they just couldn't imagine any other way to live..." - excerpt from letter.

Imagine the impossible.

they want us to believe there is no other way to live, that things have always been this way, that there is no way out and no reason to try, no reason to resist. I rememember learning about Paris, 68, when the students took over the university and the workers had a general strike, and the city was shut down, and people talked about what they would want in a post-revolutionary society. On the walls were slogans. It was a time of great slogans. Imagine the Impossible, Make Your Dreams Reality -- Slogans that are these days used for car commercials. But in those days, my parents days (even though my parents were in office buildings and schools and had no involvement in any of this, aside from that my mom read Anis Nin, and my dad loved a history that said white people weren't the first and smartest people on this earth), in those days the slogans meant that plain Marxism wasn't enough anymore. There was something more that movements for social change were going to have to incorporate.

When I was growing up into politics, there was a whole debate about lifestyle anarchism vs social anarchism. (I can't even remember the titles now. Social?? I don't know.) Whatever we were, we hated lifestyle anarchists. We thought focusing on how you lived was a real waste of time and very self-indulgent. I remember one debate we had about Food Not Bombs when that was just starting, and we decided it was more or less just charity, despite it's pretentions of revolutionaryness. We did not live in collective houses because in the 60's people lived in collectives and it turned into such drama and sucked the life out of real social action and organizing. I lived in a little apartment with my dog. I was very lonely.

But there is a thing that is real. My friend Dave said to me the other day -- I know what I want because I have felt it in moments. -- Moments of communication, moments of protest or parade when we move like one being, times of collective decision making when decisions are made with respect and without fighting, moments of creation when true connection is real and present. Living together outside of nuclear family. Building houses together, feeding eachother, dancing. Times when you can see that another world could exist - this is what I ended up liking about lifestyle - trying to figure out a way to live with integrity, how to live in a way that would feed me and ground me and give me inspiration to keep fighting, keep figuring out how to do more outward struggles for social change.

I have a clear utopian vision. Not clear in the details, but clearly I believe that we could have a world without hierarchy and domination. And for me it becomes embodied in the vision of a world without sexual abuse. For someone else maybe it becomes embodied in a world without the torture of animals, or a world without pesticide use, or a world without schools that turn us into robots. A world without racism. A world where culture can flourish without being turned into commodity. A new world. A world we are told we can't imagine -- but we can. Imagine it. Fight for it.

anarchism, feminism, punk, part 2

This is from a blog I was doing for punk planet, and then decided not to do it there any more.

Punk, Anarchism, Feminism, pt.2

One of the things feminism taught me was that the patriarchy was deeply embedded inside my mind and inside my body. from the hollywood fairytales I'd been force fed, the prince in shining armor, the soul mate, the person who would complete me. It taught me about the feeling of incompleteness. It taught me to look at it critically instead of looking to fill it with promises that couldn't come true.
One of the thing Anarchism taught me is that the feeling of incompleteness is part of the neurosis of living in a world that robs us of our humanity by turning us into consumers and vacationers. work time and weekend time. Our feeling of incompleteness was partially due to the attempt to fill our needs with empty products, fill our loneliness with empty fun.
One of the things punk taught me was to scream.
I was a girl who hated girls. I was not one of the mean girls who was mean to girls outloud, but one of the quiet haters who just didn't hang out with girls much. I was one of the girls who got her self worth from men, and more than that, from my desirability.
I had learned from my abuse that if I let someone close to me, they would want that, sex. that my only worth was sexual, mostly. There were the logical parts of me that knew that wasn't true, but when you are sexually abused young, (or ever) the logical parts aren't the one attached to your soul.
I had learned from the media a whole array of woman hating things. Maybe you can look at one media image and laugh at it, but it is the endless repetition, the torture of it seeping in through the edges of your eyes when you're just walking down the sidewalk. The way brainwashing works, repeat, repeat, repeat, until you deny that you've been effected, but you have.
One of the things feminsim taught me was that change does not happen on it's own, and the feminists of the 60's weren't hairy leged, man hating complainers. The Conciousness Raising groups I'd heard about and seen depicted as just a bunch of women sitting around talking shit, were actually mostly groups that really seriously talked about and deconstructed the ways patriarchy (not individual men) had sunk into them, and what they could do to unlearn it and confront it and change the world so it wouldn't happen all over again. They read and talked and related ways patriarchy showed up in their daily lives. They started health groups and newspapers and worked to change the laws that made it legal for a man to rape his wife (like my dad raped his), and they worked to change the laws that made it legal for a man to rape a prostitute. (although both of these things are still a nightmare to fight in court.) The feminsits started rape crisis centers (like the one I went to for free counciling), and sanctuarys for women who were victims of domestic violence. They started publishing houses to publish books by women, and fought to bring women's studies departements to colleges. They worked to uncover forgotten and hidden history of women's acheivement and women's struggles. This is just a surface scratch of things they did.
Another thing I learned was how the ideal of womanhood is embodied.
I started paying attention to how I walked, how I took up space, who I made eyecontact with, who I looked to for approval. I started trying to unlearn. Not that I wanted to walk like a "man," or any of that, but that I wanted to be able to walk into a room and feel like I belonged there. I wanted to be able to walk down a sidewalk and not always be the one stepping out of the way, I wanted to sit on a bus and take up the amount of space I needed, and not always be crossing legs and making small while the guy next to me took up twice his space. It was the feeling of entitlement. I didn't want abusive power, but I did want to be entitled to live in this world fully.
pt. 3 coming soon.

punk, anarchism, feminism part 1

punk, anarchism, feminism.

I have a sort of mythology about how I became a punk. It's not exactly the true story but it goes sort of like this - I didn't become a punk until after punk died -- when Green Day first signed to a major label, and I didn't even know who they were. In Berkeley, where I'd just moved to, there were people sitting on curbsides, taking up public space, making invisible places theirs. They said they weren't punks any more, that punk had betrayed them, that punk was not going to change the world. They were ex-punks I guess, but I don't know. They seemed like punks to me. What I loved about punk was the way we actually lived in the world, walking everywhere and exploring every abandoned building. I liked the hope behind the desperation, and I liked the desperation. I was tired of pretending. Although, honestly, that was something that was hard to unlearn.
What I liked about the music was the songs about real things. Songs about tearing down the capitalist system and building a new world in it's ashes. Songs about the real life of growing up girl in this fucked up society. Songs about killing rapists and songs about loving our friends. What I loved was the drama and the sticking together. The way it encompassed everything and made it possible to forget. I loved the shacks built in forgotten places, and figuring out how to live on almost no money at all, and how life became so much fuller when time was spent living instead of just going along. I still love these things, except not the forgetting.

There were things I was glad that I had before my punkness, like the strong poltical belief that we had to change the world and that there were a million ways that it needed to be done, that ridgid dogma and pure lifestyle weren't the answers. I wanted collectives and alternative schools and alternative health care, small farms and deep thinking, organizing work and cultural work and that if you thought you knew the 100% true answer, that meant it was time to really rethink your assumptions. I was glad I came in to punk with a love of intellectualism and the way theory could push my brain and help me think of things I hadn't had the framework for, and also a hate for the ways intellectualism made some people into pretentious, unliving robots, cut off from the realities of life.

I am glad I came into it with a strong background in feminism, because there was a lot of friends I made who were really reactionary against it, and who refused to see their complicity in perpetuating the values of patriarchy. There was a lot of "we are all just people" and a lot of blindness to the real things that silenced me and so many people I knew. There was a lot of fucked up sexual dynamics, same as with the rest of the world. A lot of unaknowledged sexism and a lot of the attitude that we had to laugh it off or tough it up.
What I loved was the punk girls who looked insane. Who wore blue eyeshadow around their eyes like a raccoon, and prom-dresses and whatever else. Who grew out their mustaches and screamed on stage and also cried in public and organized. Girls doing bike repair for girls classes, and self-defense, and teaching other girls how to play guitar.

This is a little mini introduction into what this stuff has meant to me. This is the kind of things I'll be writing about. Punk and feminism and anarchism, and also about healing and abuse.

If you want, you should check out my dorisdorisdoris.com. there's a speech I gave recently about these things that a lot of people have told me was useful to them and you can read it there. thanks.