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.

do you have any questions for me?

the next doris is going to be partially about questions. so if you have any questions for me, leave them here in the comments. so far the questions I have are - what do you want to do most. who do you want to be most.

road trip, day two

day two. Little Rock.

once, years ago, when I was driving to move to Ithaca NY (but got so tired I ended up just moving to Asheville instead), and the truck was so full of stuff there was no where for me to sleep, and the roads kept icing over and the freeways kept shutting down, I ended up in Little Rock, at Rice St. house. It was a big old house with lots of kittens and people. It was the first time I traveled alone and got to call friends of friends and be just welcomed right in to their house like I belonged there. and now these years later, we stay at Collins house. this big beautiful sort of falling apart house, that he's fixed up some but says there's raccoons in the attic and if he ever buys the house he's tearing down the back half and adding another floor.

Down the street is a house show that we get the last song of. Old punks. still rocking. and they come over to Collins house, and Anna from Sofie Nun Squad which was this amazing punk dance band with like 10 people in short shorts and so many instruments and so much dancing and movement. from the moment they hit their first note to the last, they were jumping up and down and running around, and it was the best, the absolute best. Collin is working as a restorator now. Up on scaffolding, scraping paint off and trying to get to the old original art underneath things. and Theo came over and I'd never met him before, but it was like I had because he used to run a distro for a long time that distro'd my zine, and he wrote too. He's a botanist and loves it. He says - every day I am happy to go to work. He has a kid now and I say "I'm thinking of having kids" and he says, "you should totally do it. It is the best thing ever."

parent death

One of the biggest things when my mom died, was I thought I had to get it all figured out. All the complexities of our relationship, all the unsaid things, all the unmet needs, all the mixed feelings of love and abandonment, betrayal and goodness. I was afraid that there were all these things left undone that now I would never be able to resolve. But the truth was, maybe I never would have been able to resolve them, and maybe I would have been able to. and in time, even with her dead, I have. There is this peace about it now. In the sorrow and bitterness, in the beauty of how she moved and how she survived, and the strength she passed on, and in her pain.

The thing that surprised me was how long it took. Like, for years it hurt. The first three years were the worst. I think if I had know in the beginning that it was going to suck for three years, I would have may be taken it easier on myself.

Not that it totally sucked all the time. There were times when it was easy, times when I would forget. Times when I was worried that I wasn't sad enough. Times when I was worried that I was more sad about my failing relationship than my dead mom. I thought I had to get it right. There is no getting it right, it will all come. there is time for it all.

What I needed most was for the people around me to know that I couldn't hold up my side of things. Every task was difficult, most of the time. Cooking, figuring out what to do with my day, holding up my side of the friendship, calling people, reaching out, making plans, answering the question "what do you want to do". I couldn't care take. I needed taking care of.

I read a lot of trashy books. Weird pseudo-feminist mystery novels like by Elizabeth Peters, or Rita Mae Brown. Trashy pseudo-historical fiction, like Zorro by Isabel Allende. Paperbacks. Best Sellers. Shit I didn't have to think about. I read a book a day sometimes.

Part of what I needed was just to get through the day.
Part of what I needed was to do the normal things I did.
Part of what I hated was people being normal around me.
Part of what I needed was for people to be normal around me.

I wish more people had just brung up questions about death and mom in the beginning of each time we hung out, so it wouldn't be looming over us, waiting to see if it would be addressed. Like, they could ask questions about my family, about funeral stuff, about if there were things I was realizing I needed, about what she was like, about did I want to talk about how she died. did I want to talk about my relationship with her. did she read to me. did she know I wrote a zine. did I have ideas about what happened when you die. anything. anything to break the ice. And if I didn't want to talk about it, I could have just answered shortly, abruptly, I could have said I didn't want to talk about it right then. I could have said anything, instead of always waiting to see. Instead of feeling like a freak and a burden. Instead of feeling so locked up and terrible and pretend.

road trip

tour diary
day one. escape from Asheville.

How do you leave a place you've lived for 12 years. with bitterness and sorrow? with tenderness and pain?

I got out. It felt like I was just leaving for a little bit. everything in storage. Michael in the seat next to me.

First stop, Ida.

Ida is some land in Mid Tennessee, near the Radical Fairy land, it is transgender sanctuary land. two houses, a few trailer, a few barns. Maybe ten people living there, something like that. Big gardens. and in September, the Ida Palooza music festival. The first time I went there, I fell so in love. I cut them wood. I made tortillas. This time they were rebuilding a barn that seemed unsaveable. they are good at saving seemingly unsavable things. like me. like my heart.

quotes

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."

-Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury

quotes

Dorothy Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change."


http://www.dorothyallison.net/

read these three books: Trash, Bastard Out of Carolina, Skin: talking about sex, class and literature.