I'm finally putting pen to paper to create another (but new nonetheless) riot grrrl zine. i'm after submissions from all riot grrrls and boys anywhere in the world!
here's what i'm looking for:
articles/stories on any of the below topics:
* how you first discovered riot grrrl
* what riot grrrl means to you
* how riot grrrl has helped you and your grrrlfriends
* how has riot grrrl/feminism changed the world in your point of view
* important issues that still need to be fixed
* grrrl love
* stomping out grrrl hate
* being a grrrl in the punk rock scene
riot grrrl manifestas
comics
artwork
cd/book reviews
grrrl bands in your area (if possible, include link to their site/myspace/facebook/etc.)
you're also welcome to include photos of you and your grrrlfriends to accompany your articles/stories!
here are some examples of what we are looking for: the “click” moment when you realized you do or don’t identify as a feminist; growing up with/without feminism in yer life; stories from childhood, inspirational people (in yer families, culture, literature, etc.); introduction to women/trans/people of color’s work & theories in high school/college/etc.; relationship to past feminist movements (first wave, second wave, third wave, riot grrrl, etc.); in-depth essays about feminists of the past; history of witches, the clitoris, scientific/religious/philosophical views of female sexuality; past feminist movements that might not be well known (in africa, south america, etc); looking back to compare the state of women now to the state of women in the past; what you foresee in the years to come; what your ideals are for the years to come; HIV/AIDS and the queer movement; the importance of preservation for queer/POC/trans/disabled groups; social constructions of sexuality, race, gender, etc.; what it means for you to be a survivor of sexual assault (even a story about yer assault); the history of yer hair (POC & having “natural” or chemically straightened hair / the decision to stop shaving body hair in relation to feminist politics); having an “alternative” family (gay parents, adopted, cared for by grandparents, living in foster care, etc.)
also, we really need artwork! individual drawings, paintings, collages, or comic excerpts are all desirable! if you need more time to come up with something, or will be unavailable to mail us something before then, e-mail us and we can work something out!
all submissions can be sent to: riot.girlz@hotmail.com
domingo, 28 de novembro de 2010
sábado, 27 de novembro de 2010
quinta-feira, 25 de novembro de 2010
terça-feira, 23 de novembro de 2010
segunda-feira, 22 de novembro de 2010
domingo, 21 de novembro de 2010
Rebel Girls: Asking Sara Marcus about Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl RevolutionDespite my familiarity with the American undergro
Despite my familiarity with the American underground, I used to think of Riot Grrrl in a limited way, as a regional and stylistic subgenre of rock like her Pacific Northwest brother, grunge. Short bangs and slut scrawled on skin were the counterparts to flannel shirts and long johns worn under army shorts. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy were sister bands to Nirvana, the Melvins, and Seaweed.
Sara Marcus’s new history, Girls to the Front, reclaims Riot Grrrl as something much more important and complicated. Riot Grrrl emerges as a movement of girls seeking to redefine feminism using, in part, the ethics and techniques of punk and indie rock. Through zines, activism, meetings, art, and community, as well as fashion and music, riot grrrls seized some space in their own lives, as well as at the front of the crowd at rock shows—turf usually dominated by moshing boys.
Marcus tells the story in a counterpoint that is simultaneously with the girls pounding furiously at typewriters and trap sets, and mellowed with age, perspective, and erudition. The book includes poetic and insightful analysis of the music and zines (“…‘Rebel girl rebel girl rebel girl you are the queen of my world,’ sung-chanted to a beat that could govern a drill line of revolutionaries in vulva-shaped berets…. With this incantation, the girls raise the shade of the role model, the someone they’ve been longing to see…. They make of each other that girl. They make her themselves.”), and also reflections on what was so vital about Riot Grrrl and what broke it up.
I asked Sara a few questions about Girls to the Front over e-mail, and her responses are really sharp. Read on:
1. Even before your DIY exhortation in the Epilogue, I found myself pausing my reading to pull my guitar out of the closet and play for the first time in a long while. How did you do that? Or, not to take credit away from you, how do you think the story of Riot Grrrl inspires that get-off-your-butt enthusiasm?
Josh! I’m so glad that the book got you to pick up your guitar! One of my favorite e-mails I’ve received so far is from a young woman who wrote “It kind of hurts to type right now because I decided to start playing guitar.” Yes, this effect is a result of a sort of collaboration between me and my material. I very consciously sought to tell this story not in the conventional rock-history mode of “Here were these amazingly special souls who made magic things”—not at all to diminish the gifts and talents and vision of the people in the book, which are considerable—but rather as a story about how valuable it is for everybody to make things that they’re passionate about, even if they’re not “the best.” This was a central idea of Riot Grrrl, one that had a lot to do with the permissive DIY spirit of the punk scene in Olympia, Washington. That scene was all about encouraging everybody to make whatever they could make, rather than leaving music to the Real Musicians and writing to the Real Writers. For people who are a little overachievery, and particularly people who live in a major city like New York, where there’s so much greatness at every turn, it can be hard to maintain a hold on what’s to be gained by doing something creative just for the love of it, and I’m glad the book seems to be helping people to pay attention to the value of simply creating something and being part of a conversation with a community.
2. Compared with other subcultures, it seems that Riot Grrrl had vastly less time to mature in the underground before getting shoved into the spotlight. The predominantly male punk/indie rock scenes had a good share of the ’80s to develop their codes and culture before Nirvana came out, whereas Riot Grrrl got almost immediate attention, as you lay out in the book. Was this just bad luck of Riot Grrrl’s happening to appear just before punk broke—or do you think it was somewhat inevitable in our society that a girl movement would, like the girls themselves, be objectified in its early adolescence?
I love the elegant parallel you draw, but I think the timing—the fact, for instance, that Nevermind came out two months to the day after the first Riot Grrrl meeting, and went gold two days before Nirvana and Bikini Kill played a show together in Seattle (it went platinum a couple weeks after that)—actually had a much greater impact on how quickly the media latched on to Riot Grrrl. Adolescent girls are easy objectification targets for media, sure, but condescension and dismissal are even stronger forces. Narratives about hysterical, passive girl fans (see: Justin Bieber) or puerile girl rebels are usually the trump cards in media coverage of young women (unless the young women are predominantly poor and/or not white, in which case of course entirely other narratives hold sway). What I’m getting at—and this is all highly speculative, of course—is that I don’t think the media would have known how to see these young women as cool or important had they not been linked (by geography, by scene) to a male phenomenon that was already seen as cool and important.
3. That mainstream media attention was profoundly damaging to Riot Grrrl, but as you reveal in your Author’s Note, it was a Newsweek article (which one girl called “the worst possible thing that could have been written”) that threw you a lifeline as a teenager. Is there any way to resolve that contradiction? Was it worth it for the most idyllic form of the movement to be martyred so it could save a much greater number of girls?
It’s true: Some people hated the Newsweek piece and felt really hurt by it, while I and others were inspired by it and drawn to the movement by it. Same thing with the Spin article—the experience of working on that piece led many of the DC girls to swear off media forever, but the group in Vancouver, BC, started directly as a result of some girls reading that article.
I’m going to go out on a limb, and perhaps offend some people, by saying this trade-off was worthwhile, because if you look at the stated goals and vision of those participants in that earliest “idyllic form”—getting more girls to start bands, to talk to each other about sexism, to save their lives and one another’s lives—the media attention really helped that to happen. Of course it’s lamentable that the media attention sullied the experience for other people, and the distortion enacted by the media attention led some people to feel that their ideas were being hijacked. That’s legitimate. But if I’m to do a John Stuart Mill–style analysis of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, the fact that the basic ideas of Riot Grrrl were able to spread so far, albeit in watered-down or distorted form, has had long-lasting positive effects on our culture, and although I wish Riot Grrrl could have had another year or two to shore itself up internally before the media invasion came along, I don’t wish the media had never paid attention.
4. There was something really moving about your Postscript, a collection of short bios of many of the book’s players a decade or two after the heyday of Riot Grrrl. They run the gamut from various kinds of activist to very quiet, conventional lives to Mixed Martial Arts fighter to professional sauerkraut maker. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so beautiful about these bios. Have any insight?
I just started a Tumblr blog yesterday, and the website gave me a menu of about forty preprogrammed templates from which I had to choose one, and that was what my blog would look like. Becoming an adult is a lot like that: Based on everything you’ve done up through your late teens or early twenties, there’s a set of options that you’re expected to choose from. You could choose something else, of course, but nobody really tells you how, and meanwhile there’s this whole menu of templates just waiting for you to pick one and follow it. Personally, I remember being a senior in college and actually drafting letters to people whose class notes in the back of my alumni magazine made their lives sound interesting, and my letters—none of which I ever sent—were all asking, How do I chart my own course through this stuff?
Riot Grrrl was a community of people trying to help one another come up with new ways to live. Toss out the prefab list and make up something else. When I started writing the book, I knew that several Riot Grrrl zine authors had become successful writers or journalists, and I half expected everybody to be doing in a professional capacity whatever form of self-expression they had found through Riot Grrrl. Instead—and this is what you found moving about the mini-bios, I believe—I found out that each participant really had built herself a completely original and individual life. Which is even more exciting than if all the musicians were running nightclubs and all the zine people were working at newspapers and all the convention organizers were working at NARAL. Everybody remained committed to making their life a work of art and making it up in as original and creative a manner as possible.
(Click here to see video epilogues and reflections on Riot Grrrl. Also, there is an exciting book-release event on Saturday, October 2, at Bruar Falls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other events across the USA in the next few weeks.)
Sara Marcus’s new history, Girls to the Front, reclaims Riot Grrrl as something much more important and complicated. Riot Grrrl emerges as a movement of girls seeking to redefine feminism using, in part, the ethics and techniques of punk and indie rock. Through zines, activism, meetings, art, and community, as well as fashion and music, riot grrrls seized some space in their own lives, as well as at the front of the crowd at rock shows—turf usually dominated by moshing boys.
Marcus tells the story in a counterpoint that is simultaneously with the girls pounding furiously at typewriters and trap sets, and mellowed with age, perspective, and erudition. The book includes poetic and insightful analysis of the music and zines (“…‘Rebel girl rebel girl rebel girl you are the queen of my world,’ sung-chanted to a beat that could govern a drill line of revolutionaries in vulva-shaped berets…. With this incantation, the girls raise the shade of the role model, the someone they’ve been longing to see…. They make of each other that girl. They make her themselves.”), and also reflections on what was so vital about Riot Grrrl and what broke it up.
I asked Sara a few questions about Girls to the Front over e-mail, and her responses are really sharp. Read on:
1. Even before your DIY exhortation in the Epilogue, I found myself pausing my reading to pull my guitar out of the closet and play for the first time in a long while. How did you do that? Or, not to take credit away from you, how do you think the story of Riot Grrrl inspires that get-off-your-butt enthusiasm?
Josh! I’m so glad that the book got you to pick up your guitar! One of my favorite e-mails I’ve received so far is from a young woman who wrote “It kind of hurts to type right now because I decided to start playing guitar.” Yes, this effect is a result of a sort of collaboration between me and my material. I very consciously sought to tell this story not in the conventional rock-history mode of “Here were these amazingly special souls who made magic things”—not at all to diminish the gifts and talents and vision of the people in the book, which are considerable—but rather as a story about how valuable it is for everybody to make things that they’re passionate about, even if they’re not “the best.” This was a central idea of Riot Grrrl, one that had a lot to do with the permissive DIY spirit of the punk scene in Olympia, Washington. That scene was all about encouraging everybody to make whatever they could make, rather than leaving music to the Real Musicians and writing to the Real Writers. For people who are a little overachievery, and particularly people who live in a major city like New York, where there’s so much greatness at every turn, it can be hard to maintain a hold on what’s to be gained by doing something creative just for the love of it, and I’m glad the book seems to be helping people to pay attention to the value of simply creating something and being part of a conversation with a community.
2. Compared with other subcultures, it seems that Riot Grrrl had vastly less time to mature in the underground before getting shoved into the spotlight. The predominantly male punk/indie rock scenes had a good share of the ’80s to develop their codes and culture before Nirvana came out, whereas Riot Grrrl got almost immediate attention, as you lay out in the book. Was this just bad luck of Riot Grrrl’s happening to appear just before punk broke—or do you think it was somewhat inevitable in our society that a girl movement would, like the girls themselves, be objectified in its early adolescence?
I love the elegant parallel you draw, but I think the timing—the fact, for instance, that Nevermind came out two months to the day after the first Riot Grrrl meeting, and went gold two days before Nirvana and Bikini Kill played a show together in Seattle (it went platinum a couple weeks after that)—actually had a much greater impact on how quickly the media latched on to Riot Grrrl. Adolescent girls are easy objectification targets for media, sure, but condescension and dismissal are even stronger forces. Narratives about hysterical, passive girl fans (see: Justin Bieber) or puerile girl rebels are usually the trump cards in media coverage of young women (unless the young women are predominantly poor and/or not white, in which case of course entirely other narratives hold sway). What I’m getting at—and this is all highly speculative, of course—is that I don’t think the media would have known how to see these young women as cool or important had they not been linked (by geography, by scene) to a male phenomenon that was already seen as cool and important.
3. That mainstream media attention was profoundly damaging to Riot Grrrl, but as you reveal in your Author’s Note, it was a Newsweek article (which one girl called “the worst possible thing that could have been written”) that threw you a lifeline as a teenager. Is there any way to resolve that contradiction? Was it worth it for the most idyllic form of the movement to be martyred so it could save a much greater number of girls?
It’s true: Some people hated the Newsweek piece and felt really hurt by it, while I and others were inspired by it and drawn to the movement by it. Same thing with the Spin article—the experience of working on that piece led many of the DC girls to swear off media forever, but the group in Vancouver, BC, started directly as a result of some girls reading that article.
I’m going to go out on a limb, and perhaps offend some people, by saying this trade-off was worthwhile, because if you look at the stated goals and vision of those participants in that earliest “idyllic form”—getting more girls to start bands, to talk to each other about sexism, to save their lives and one another’s lives—the media attention really helped that to happen. Of course it’s lamentable that the media attention sullied the experience for other people, and the distortion enacted by the media attention led some people to feel that their ideas were being hijacked. That’s legitimate. But if I’m to do a John Stuart Mill–style analysis of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, the fact that the basic ideas of Riot Grrrl were able to spread so far, albeit in watered-down or distorted form, has had long-lasting positive effects on our culture, and although I wish Riot Grrrl could have had another year or two to shore itself up internally before the media invasion came along, I don’t wish the media had never paid attention.
4. There was something really moving about your Postscript, a collection of short bios of many of the book’s players a decade or two after the heyday of Riot Grrrl. They run the gamut from various kinds of activist to very quiet, conventional lives to Mixed Martial Arts fighter to professional sauerkraut maker. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so beautiful about these bios. Have any insight?
I just started a Tumblr blog yesterday, and the website gave me a menu of about forty preprogrammed templates from which I had to choose one, and that was what my blog would look like. Becoming an adult is a lot like that: Based on everything you’ve done up through your late teens or early twenties, there’s a set of options that you’re expected to choose from. You could choose something else, of course, but nobody really tells you how, and meanwhile there’s this whole menu of templates just waiting for you to pick one and follow it. Personally, I remember being a senior in college and actually drafting letters to people whose class notes in the back of my alumni magazine made their lives sound interesting, and my letters—none of which I ever sent—were all asking, How do I chart my own course through this stuff?
Riot Grrrl was a community of people trying to help one another come up with new ways to live. Toss out the prefab list and make up something else. When I started writing the book, I knew that several Riot Grrrl zine authors had become successful writers or journalists, and I half expected everybody to be doing in a professional capacity whatever form of self-expression they had found through Riot Grrrl. Instead—and this is what you found moving about the mini-bios, I believe—I found out that each participant really had built herself a completely original and individual life. Which is even more exciting than if all the musicians were running nightclubs and all the zine people were working at newspapers and all the convention organizers were working at NARAL. Everybody remained committed to making their life a work of art and making it up in as original and creative a manner as possible.
(Click here to see video epilogues and reflections on Riot Grrrl. Also, there is an exciting book-release event on Saturday, October 2, at Bruar Falls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other events across the USA in the next few weeks.)
sexta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2010
quarta-feira, 17 de novembro de 2010
domingo, 14 de novembro de 2010
sábado, 13 de novembro de 2010
quinta-feira, 11 de novembro de 2010
Reality as it is:
Parents try to keep a children's mind innocent and full of fairytales (true love, happily ever after shits etc) but, well well, we're in 2010 now, and children are not like they used to be. You should thank T.V.
terça-feira, 9 de novembro de 2010
sexta-feira, 5 de novembro de 2010
terça-feira, 2 de novembro de 2010
Why 2010 will be the year of the Riot Grrrl revival
News of the donation was excitedly received by many sectors of the internet, from feminist twitterers to punks on social networks to hipster music bloggers. Though everyone has pretty much been celebrating the same things (Riot Grrrl being recognized as a legitimate feminist movement, libraries continuing to be awesome despite massive cuts to their funding and staffs), there’s a small but growing voice that goes further to ask, “Will 2010 be the year of the Riot Grrrl revival?” A very good question, indeed.
Young Creature was the first to posit the possibility of a revival when news broke on Friday, pointing out that the donation comes on the heels of Kate Wadkins’ (ex-Carnal Knowledge, ex-Cheeky) announcement that she’ll be officiating a panel on the Riot Grrrl movement for Sarah Lawrence’s Women’s History Month Conference in March. 2010 is clearly the year of the long awaited Riot Grrrl comeback!!, wrote YC’s jacqueline mary, and in a typical fashion, that idea spread out across the Internet over the weekend.
Most are hesitant to be as blunt as jm, however, tweeting instead hopeful “Revolution grrrl-style 2010?”-type questions in a way that kind of annoys me, to be honest. Because if we wait for the Sanctioning Body of Riot Grrrl to give its blessing, that revival we all want probably ain’t going to happen. More importantly, if you’re waiting for someone else to take the lead on starting said revival, then it definitely isn’t going to happen. And you’ve missed the point completely, to boot.
You’re probably thinking, “Well then, how CAN we start the Riot back up again,Debbie Downer?!?” Lucky for you, I’m a pushy Jewess with no shortage of opinions on the matter.
First, let’s review the roots of Riot Grrrl. As you probably already know, the Riot Grrrl movement was, in its beginning, a reaction to the sexism of the DIY punk rock scene of the late ’80s/early ’90s. Women were traditionally absent from the stage of most hardcore shows, and were pushed into the sidelines by the violence of the mosh pit, but not for their lack of dedication to the scene. Early ladypunks were laughed off stage by their male counterparts for a lack of technical mastery, which forced them to funnel their energies primarily into the development of fanzines instead.
A few short years later, it was zines that brought the forerunners of the Riot Grrrl movement together. In those pre-Internet days, most young punks traded news of bands and record distros and even ideologies through writing and trading zines. Zines are how Bratmobile and Bikini Kill founders found out about the youth-centric, do-it-yourself (DIY) philosophies of DC punks Minor Threat and Nation of Ulysses, and they are how those young women fleshed out their own philosophies of feminist living and art before they were put to music.
These young punks quickly inspired others to pick up instruments and start bands of their own. Seeing their friends on stage spewing forth breathless feminist rhetoric and confronting dudes of the scene with all their bullshit sexism was a revelation for many. News of these ladypunks–now called “Riot Grrrls”–spread across the world relatively quickly through zines, and a movement was born. Women and men all over the world were now part of a “boy-girl revolution,” and all it took to do so was to get together with some friends, borrow some instruments, learn how to play a few notes, and put on a show in your parents’ basement.
Punk was finally liberated from the dudes who insisted on conformity to a particular sound or set of abilities, and it was politicized in a way that feminists could identify with. Which brings me to my next point…
Literally: I could have done that. And so could you.
Besides, do you really think that our Elders even go for this reverence that we have for them? Do you think they would really want us to defer to them on what makes for good Riot Grrrl? I don’t think they would…
You just have to have something to say and enough confidence to get onstage.
So, while it’s valid to wish for a Bikini Kill reunion (I’d personally give my left tit for one), it is truly more “riot” to start a Bikini Kill cover band. Or, better yet, start a band that plays your music.
All it takes is an idea, some free time, friends with instruments (or your own), and some dedication. That’s it. You don’t even have to know how to play, you just have to have something to say. You’re thinking, “What could I possibly have to say?” and the answer is this: have you ever thought, “Why isn’t anyone singing about ________? It’s a really important issue.” Whatever you fill in that blank with is what you have to say/sing about. So fuckin’ do it already!
Zombie Dogs. Photo by Cristina http://crustina.blogspot.com
I mean, other people are already doing it, they’re just not called “Riot Grrrls.” Look atDes-Ark, Cheeky,Zombie Dogs,Condenada, Bromance, etc. They’re playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, organizing their own tours, distributing their own records, and making their own merch. They’re overtly DIY, feminist, and are finding a good home in the punk houses and non-profit spaces that have been around for years. You can do the same!
Realize that we are the nu-Riot Grrrls. The sooner we start jamming with our friends and blogging about our tours and making our own shirts and living outside this stupid slacktivist system we’ve all bought into, we will really be Riot. We need to make friends with ladypunks (and duderpunks) who are into feminism and social justice and anti-racism causes the same as we are, we need to support their shows and buy their records, and we need to be just as committed as they are to documenting our beliefs in our music. That is, quite simply, how you build a scene or stage a revival.
Face it, we NEED a revival. No less than Carrie Fuckin’ Brownstein herself was on her own soapbox in November (we shop at the same ‘box boutique), decrying the marshmallow beard-rock that shies away from engaging in the uncomfortable or confrontational. And Pitchfork celebrates, even elevates, apolitical musicians above the rest, leaving us all to think that there’s no place for politics in our scene.
I say, “Fuck that.” And, while we’re at it, “Fuck Pitchfork” and “fuck co-opting of the female experience” (how many all-dude bands out there are called Girls or Religous Girls or Women??). We need confrontational, feminist music now more than ever, what with the continuous assault on reproductive rights, equal rights for lgbtq individuals and immigrants, the erosion of workers’ rights, and many, many other human rights issues. What better way to spread word and awaken consciousness than through some catchy friggin’ jams?
So, in the Age of Information, why don’t we stage a rebellion? Let’s use all these great tools we have at our disposal–Facebook, Ning, Twitter, etc.–to look for possible bandmates, record our songs, write about our records, create our own art, distribute our CDs.
LET’S DO THIS, PEOPLE.
Let’s get organized. So, what is it that you can offer? Do you want to start a zine or contribute to a blog? Are you aching to start a band? Do you have the means to start a collective to put out records and hold art shows? Do you have a garage that could serve as practice space for yours and other bands? Can you organize a consciousness-raising night for ladypunks in your city? Will you teach other women how to use Photoshop (or, better yet, the open-source alternative, Gimp) so they can make their own show flyers and CD covers?
The possibilities are endless. Let’s “stop bitching,” as they say, and START A REVOLUTION."
Source: by SISSY
SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? GET UP YOUR LAZY ASS AND DO SOMETHING!
DO SOME ACTIVITY GRRRL!!!
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