Last Sunday, I met up with my friend Curran at United States Art Authority to attend Homoscope, an international queer arts festival. The first portion of the event was a screening of a variety of short films. Two titles I could find on the YouTube include Dino Dinco’s El Abuelo and the music video for The Hungry Hearts’ “In Your Face-The International Lesbian Anthem.”
Other noteworthy offerings included:
Lares Feliciano’s Push On, about two women who meet by chance on the side of the road.
Vince Mascoli’s Dear Dad, Love Maria, an animated meditation on a transitioning MTF confronting her father’s scorn.
Jonesy’s Poised and in the Throes, a collage piece featuring male pin-ups and Jeanne Moreau’s “Each Man Kills the Things He Loves.”
Gina Carducci and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s All That Sheltering Emptiness, which documents a New York City call boy’s experiences.
I stayed for some of the second half of the festival before carting myself off to bed in anticipation of another work week, which meant I regretably missed Chainbow. But I’m glad I stuck around for Katastrophe, a San Francisco-based rapper whose flow and charismatic personality reminded me a little of Themselves‘ MC Doseone. Many of Katastrophe’s songs address depression, confront transphobia, or focus on the mundane details of daily life, but take to these topics with humor.
From left: Katastrophe, with Original Plumbing editor-in-chief Amos Mac; image courtesy of villagevoice.com
In addition, Katastrophe also helps publish Original Plumbing, a quarterly devoted to trans men. I picked up issue #4 at the show and have been poring over profiles on a baker, a stunt man, drag performers, and a business professional. In short, Katastrophe’s efforts and worth both a look and a listen.
Patti Smith with Steve Sebring; image courtesy of gerryco23.wordpress.com
Before I went on vacation, Kristen at Act Your Age told me that PBS was going to show Dream of Life, a 2008 documentary by Steven Sebring about Patti Smith. Then yesterday, as I was sorting out my house, my friends Jacob and Melissa reminded me that it was going to be on later that night. It should be noted that I received reminder messages from them within the span of five minutes. I’m fine with being the music geek friends send these sorts of notices to. Thanks, everyone.
First, a disclaimer. I’m not a Patti Smith fan. What I mean by that is, I don’t know Smith’s music very well. Several of my friends got to know her through her music, perhaps developing their feminist and/or queer identities as a result. I’m sure the same could be said for readers of this blog I don’t know personally. This isn’t to say I’m not open to listening to her work. I’m just not very familiar with it. If there is interest in subsequent posts wherein I listen to her albums in chronological order and document my thoughts about it like Carrie Brownstein did with Phish earlier this year, show me the way.
Next, a confession. I haven’t until recently been interested in listening to Patti Smith’s music. While I haven’t listened to Horses in its entirety, I am familiar with her, and the ways in which I’m familiar with her give me pause. Here is why.
1. Each time I see a documentary where she is discussed, the opening chords to “Gloria” fade in and a bunch of musicians wax pretentious about how her music melded the sacred with the profane, or that she was not a musician but a poet and I get pissy. Not because of the song, but because of the purple prose being recited over it. I actually hadn’t heard the song in full until I was well into college.
2. With some exception, these superlatives tend to come from men: Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore, Legs McNeil, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Richard Hell, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Michael Stipe are but a few names. I remember Alice Bag talks about her influence in the supplemental feature about women in punk in Don Letts’s Punk: Attitude and I know riot grrrl pioneers like Kathleen Hanna were inspired by her, but the praise mainly comes from the men. Established or well-regarded rock and roll dudes. Legends, if you will.
3. In some of the things I have read on Smith, she wasn’t very kind to the women and girls around her. Blondie’s Debbie Harry talks about how dismissive and unfriendly she was during their CBGB’s days in Please Kill Me, an oral history on New York punk collected by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. It was also reported in Mark Spitz and the late Brendan Mullen’s L.A. punk oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb that Smith was nasty to The Runaways after they tried to visit her backstage after a concert, leaving a baby Joan Jett particularly crushed. Now, oral histories are tenuous at best and Smith is not asked to comment about any of this. Also, Bebe Buell speaks favorably of Smith in Please Kill Me. Kim Gordon has a prolonged friendship with her as well. But this, coupled with the fact that she doesn’t identify as a feminist makes me feel weird about her status as a feminist rock icon.
4. Add to this the very apparent sense of malecentric hero worship Smith evinces and I feel really weird about her. While I like that she likes Maria Callas, The Ronettes, and Christina Aguilera, I don’t get the sense that she had much use for women. She cut her hair to look like Keith Richards. She learned to hail a cab by watching Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back, a man who would later tune her guitar. That same guitar was a gift from Sam Shepard. Tom Verlaine apparently has the most beautiful neck in rock music, though her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5 possessed something altogether else. Pablo Picasso made inimitable art until Jackson Pollack created paintings out of the drippings from Picasso’s Guernica. Willem de Kooning’s paintings made her want to touch the art in museums, an “offense” she gleefully committed on more than one occasion.
In addition, Smith’s most well-known for covering songs by men, reclaiming Them’s “Gloria,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” and Nirvana’s “About A Girl.” Of course, she redefined those songs by singing them as a man without changing the male-female pronouns or amending them to be about Patty Hearst or Kurt Cobain. And, as I’m sure my friend Curran would be quick to point out, Smith often aligns herself with queer men like Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Michael Stipe. Curran may also posit that this makes Smith more closely as a transgendered person, which makes sense given Smith’s commitment to androgyny and sexual ambiguity.
However, I’ve always felt that Smith’s indebtedness to men has aligned herself at with a more liberal feminist, at times heterosexist view of how women play the game of rock (i.e., play the man’s game). While I get how others believe that she’s expanded how women can look and sound in rock, to me it still feels more like she’s abiding by male definitions of performance and sound rather than redefining it for female artists, a group she may not in fact feel that she is a part of.
To be clear, I don’t need her to be feminine. I’d like it if she were a feminist, but I’d be happier if it just seemed like femaleness wasn’t so burdensome or powerless or safe to her. However, this is how it’s often seemed to me that Smith views or once viewed my sex category, and with it my gender, and this has always been our wedge. I’ll let her state her case.
Of course, this outlook may evince some potential transphobia on my part. I also might be privileging binaristic norms around gender and sexuality instead of championing fluidity. This nagging feeling keeps me coming back to Smith as an idea. But maybe I should get to know her better. And with that, the documentary.
I’ll be blunt again. For the most part, I found this documentary to be indulgent yet slight. Smith of course is the subject, but I was disheartened by how much she seemed to dictate the narrative (I find it just as frustrating when men do this, though I did like when Smith ordered filming to cease backstage before a performance). I would have liked more context.
I also would’ve liked to have been surprised by it more. I didn’t learn much about the artist or the person behind her mythology. I also didn’t get much of a sense of time and place. I could deduce the passing of time by watching her children mature. I understood when we were watching her tour the Trampin’ album because she was speaking out against the Iraq War and the Bush administration. I gather that dancing on the beach in Coney Island with Lenny Kaye was fun, but don’t know why it needed to be shown in slow motion. I know that losing her husband and her friend and long-time collaborator was traumatic because she said so. I don’t know how she felt about the loss of her parents during the 2000s. I saw that she loved playing with her guitarist son Jackson, who toured with her, but I know very little about her daughter Jesse past a gender-bending pubescent trip to the bathroom and, later, a carriage ride with her mother. And past some previously captured interview footage of Smith, I don’t know why she left mundane New Jersey to become a punk poet in New York, though I think I can imagine why.
That said, there were little snatches of Patti Smith the daughter and the artsy gender rebel that I enjoyed and did help me get to know her better. Seeing her eat hamburgers at her parents’ time-warp home. Seeming both proud and embarrassed when her father admits that he can’t go to his daughter’s concerts anymore because he lost his hearing at the earlier gigs he did attend while wearing one of her concert t-shirts. Trading chords with Shepard. Reminiscing about eating hot dogs in Coney Island with Maplethorpe. Holding up her children’s baby clothes and proudly declaring their cleanliness and her refusal to use bleach. Talking about how wanting to touch original paintings in museums is easily satisfied by making your own art. Playing woodwinds with Flea on the beach and swapping stories about how expertly both musicians can pee into bottles while traveling. And seeing her performances and hearing her words, her songs. I wish I was given a timeline to find out when all of these works were created, but I’m content to find out for myself. Let’s start by revisiting ”Redondo Beach.”
Yoko Ono's 2003 performance of "Cut Piece"; image courtesy of commondreams.org
If you’re a follower of this blog and haven’t gotten a hold of the new issue of Bitch, I heartily recommend it. I also recommend that you get a subscription, something I intend to renew after the holiday season. As luck would have it, the current issue came in the mail just as I was heading to Fort Worth for Thanksgiving, and its theme is all about artists. In it, you will find articles about mediated representations of female artists in television and film, the troubled history of contemporary feminist art, and an indictment of the patriarchal implications of Donald Judd’s artistic take-over of Marfa.
Anne Elizabeth Moore penned quite the invective against Donald Judd's presence in Marfa
While I’d like some more coverage of iconoclastic artists like Kara Walker and an extension of the term “artist” to include women like contemporary dancer Louise Lecavalier, I recognize that the good people at Bitch only have so much negative space to fill and loved the issue all the same. It was just the thing to read while running on the elliptical machine in the guest room when in need of some solitary quality time. I am an only child, after all.
I saw Kara Walker's My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth two summers ago and it blew my mind; image courtesy of blackhistorymonths.files.wordpress.com
One person I’m really glad Bitch focused on is Yoko Ono. By having 20 female artists contribute their words and feelings about this great woman, Ellen Papazian helps shatter the myth of rock’s dragon lady widow and considers her influence as an artist, musician, Japanese immigrant, feminist, mother, wife, and woman. Importantly, these women also challenge the notion that Ono’s cultural position as feminist conceptual artist was trite and instead suggest ways in which it was revolutionary and brave. Let’s think about this when we look at works like “Cut Piece,” wherein Ono invites audience members to cut off pieces of her clothes and hair — sometimes to dangerous effect at the hands of misogynistic participants — or “Y E S,” which is comprised of a ladder, a magnifying glass, and three affirmative letters scrawled on a board overhead.
Another lady I’d like to shine a light on, especially since she wasn’t featured in Bitch‘s Art/See issue is composer and fellow Houstonian Pauline Oliveros.
Pauline Oliveros with her accordian; image courtesy of paulineoliveros.us
I’m in the process of putting together a couple of entries for an encyclopedia for American women in popular culture. I’ve sent off two, but am stalling on an overview of female composers because, frankly, beyond Ms. Oliveros, Libby Larsen, and film scorers like Wendy Carlos and Shirley Walker, I actually don’t know too many myself and was hoping to use this assignment as an opportunity to broaden my own understanding. A Pandora guide I inherited from my friend Emily will hopefully expand my own knowledge base, but feel free to throw out American female composers I should discuss. In the mean time, I thought I’d share a piece by Oliveros, an accordian player and pianist who emphasizes the importance of breathing in music-making, cultivates the idea of deep listening in contemporary classical music, and incorporates it into her music for feminist reasons.
Let’s toast these female artists and others who’ve carved spaces for themselves and, as a result, tried to bridge the chasm between subject and spectator, hoping to forge that most feminist of ideals: communal space. Here here! I sip my Lone Star in their honor.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls poster; image courtesy of wikipedia.org
So, I saw Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls last summer (thanks again to my friend Curran). I meant to write about it, but kinda didn’t know what to say. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the sordid tale of mixed-race girl band The Kelly Affair making it big by changing their name to The Carrie Nations and losing their minds in the big city. I do know that I liked it more than Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls, adapted from Jacqueline Susann’s wildly successful pulp novel about a group of girls who seek fame and instead wrestle with debilitating addictions, which just left me numb and bummed.
The unrelated sequel’s campiness, stodgy dialogue, illogical plot development, crazed characterization of Los Angeles, and parade of late 60s tacky couture made it an ideal movie to watch while drinking and cackling with friends. And I was pleasantly surprised by Roger Ebert purple, at times oddly perceptive, dialogue and how it synced up with Meyer’s arresting imagery. And having read a write-up about Meyer muse Tura Satana from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, I know that some Meyer icons have a feminist following.
And yet. I think seeing this movie with friends and laughing at it from an ironically detached position was key to my enjoyment. Without them, I think I might have been saddened by the movie’s clearly regressive gender and sexual politics. The director was in love with big, bare breasts? Duh. Lead singer/grifter Kelly MacNamara uses her wiles to get ahead in show business? Shocking. Bassist Pet Danforth is coerced into lesbianism by predatory, be-taloned fashion designer Roxanne, only to be killed in a mansion orgy that apparently was based on the Manson Family murders? Yeesh. The fact that the orgy is orchestrated and the murders executed by The Carrie Nations’ Phil Spector-like producer Z-Man, who reveals himself to be transgendered? Double yeesh. The fact that surviving members McNamara and drummer Casey Anderson distance themselves from their hedonistic past through marriage? Fail.
One thing I will give the movie full credit for is awesome music. If The Kelly Affair were a band (I prefer this name over The Carrie Nations), I’d totally listen to them. I love Lynn Carey’s voice, who fills in for “actress” Dolly Read. And others seem to agree. The Pipettes re-created the scene where the girls get discovered at an industry party in their video for “Pull Shapes.” Feel free to watch it alongside the original scene.
For this post, I gotta credit my dear friend Kristen, whose ability to think critically and mine great news items and articles is invaluable. She may wanna remain behind the scenes, but that’s not fair.
So, Hercules and Love Affair made 2008 their year, as did the music press, who gave them tons of love. And this is great to me, as I was a big fan of their debut album. Who doesn’t love a multi-gender, multi-racial, queer disco band? Isn’t it time for one, America?
The song that got the most praise, it seems, is “Blind,” a stirring anthem about growing up queer and the heartbreak, struggle, determination, and — hopefully — defiant joy that comes with it. No disrespect for the song. I’m happy about it and was pleasantly surprised when Pitchfork named it Single of the Year.
However, one of favorite songs on the album is “Athene,” a song Kristen and I giddily talked about when we had both had a chance to process the band’s debut. While the band has been aligned with the gay community (a diverse, heterogenous group that nonetheless is presumed by many to be male, perhaps even white and male), there may exist the assumption that songs like “Blind” are speaking particularly to a gay male experience — though doing so ignores that singer Antony Hegarty doesn’t identify as male. However, I think most of this can be attributed to Hercules leader Andy Butler, who is a gay man.
We love “Athene” because, apart from being a groovy little dance gem, that’s totally queer but also from a female perspective. Dyke disco! Plus, it boasts the vocals of one Kim Ann Foxman.
Now, she’s a dyke to watch out for. I love the gender tension at work in her on the butch side of androgynous look. And did you know that she’s a jewelry maker? Fierceness.
Also, I love her voice — kind of mumbly, but no less powerful. And I love her interplay with singer Nomi Ruiz (who, like Antony, is also transgendered) in this clip. You really get a sense that they make room for themselves in the collective. And of course, it goes without saying that I love that the performance on the roof, the New York skyline at sunset serving as a backdrop for their set.
So, yeah. Big ups to Kim Ann and big ups to Hercules and Love Affair for creating a visible space in dance culture for multiple identities within the LGBT community.
