April 2005 Archives
yeah but according to the production notes, for Missy's "on and on", Neptunes have sampled Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick "The Show," which may be wrong. as far as i can tell it slips a transparency over the beat and maybe flips the synth. Inspector Gadget so creepy, like "BEWARE," and then "BOING BOING, BOING BOING"
In the final verse, Missy says something about the "batty boy"--I've listened to it ninety times and can't decipher what she is SAYING about the batty boy--yay or nay?--and the content basically hinges the direction of my aesthetic relationship w/her music. Please help. If you can figure it out you get a prize.
watched "boyz n the hood" the other night, for multiple work/research purposes, for the first time since the '90s. saw it like 30 times when it came out, so i was surprised when i lost it like a lil bebe, like heaving-crying at the end even tho i already knew the outcome. what a brilliant, important film--the part where a young Dough Boy gets carted away by the cops for shoplifting while the five stairsteps' "ooh child" plays in the background still ranks as one of the best uses of irony in film ever--so subtle and that song is a melancholy wilter, anyway, and i think, always held some inherent level of irony: for one, the five stairsteps were kids themselves, in their teens when they recorded it--for two, it came out of chicago in 1970, this resonant young-idealist soul track, a year after COINTELPRO went fuck-all on Chicago Black Panther party & assassinated Fred Hampton. "ooh child, things are gonna get easier."
i think back then i read an interview w/boyz' director, john singleton, about how he used "the godfather"'s death scene/boistrous happy music method as template, but i could be mis-remembering.
been emailing about ying yang twins' "wait: the whisper song" with the dapper young Dylan Hicks to be printed in a future episode of City Pages. we talked about its greatness, its rudeness, the fact that smurf wrote the beat directly after hearing "drop it like it's hot" in pharrell's studio, at least according to caramanica's excellently subtle piece in the new issue of XXL.
so anyway, after days of this, i'm walking back to my apt. from the store, and a ford astrovan rolls up to the light and it is bumping "wait" at 499 decibels, and i look over at the dude driving, and he looks back, and screams out his window, "skeet skeet, ho!"
empirical sociological reportage, thank u v. much.
My love for the Urban Honking massive is endless, nameless like Zeus--not crazy like that Linda Blair of a Pope. They are, after all, the posse that brought us Miranda July's blog and The Ultimate Blogger, America's first reality blog (predated by that reality article series about high-school ladies in Elle Girl, but only slightly)--WITH A $500 PRIZE PACKAGE~ sign up to compete now. Y'all think you love blogging, but I promise you don't love blogging like these kids do.
And, after 10 months of other-bizzzness and half-hearted attempts to unscramble that labyrinthe of a mac account, Faculty Lounge, Jessica's and my long-awaited mp3 blog, WILL DEBUT A WEEK FROM TODAY! FOR REALS!
It may not look fancy... but teachers don't got to floss.
jessica SAID she was making us all anita hill t-shirts, but until then, you should definitely sign the petition against sexual discrimination at the Source, created by hip-hop feminists Elizabeth Mendez-Berry, Joan Morgan and Jeff Chang. The "whys" are all in there.
I'm cooking right now: some things involving the production of sound and the situation of words. More as it unfolds. Psyched, but my blabbermouth can't blabber quite yet.
Click here for Part 1 of my book-length notes on the Feminism & Hip-Hop Conference.
kris ex has just phoned to demand a retraction to the link (at left). I take it back, he is not secretly a dork.
Our fave photographer Shayla offers a terrific pictorial log of the haps.
For the cynics among us betting which hardline anti-feminist, anti-protected-sex homophobe might be chosen to lead the New Catholic Church, a friend of C'n'P's takes a wild guess. We noted earlier that, beneath the mugshots of the contenders in the Sunday Times, all the captions essentially read, "Fierce intellect. Wildly compassionate. Hates gays, women and Islam." Addendum: Chris just called to tell me apparently God's Rottweiler was "forced" into Hitler Youth. Pardon me, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. Keep that black smoke coming, papis.
Peripherally related: in the new issue of National Geographic magazine, there is a photo spread of Cheney and Rumsfeld's illegal prison camp, Guantanamo Bay--soldiers, prisoners, its isolation. In one of the photos, an off-duty soldier, can't be older than 24 with a lackadasiacal dye-job and black-rimmed spectacles is dining on homemade Cuban food with her cohorts and, ironically, wearing a Bright Eyes t-shirt. Wish I could interview the woman wearing it--whether she hates it there, whether she only listens to the love songs. If you happened to get Conor's number from Paris Hilton's leaked sidekick, give him a call and ask him what he thinks.
Back from the last two weeks in Chicago and Seattle, and NYC's been molting something fierce--even winter-maudlin ol J-Shep cannot resist the aroma of possibility. Right now, Daddy Yankee is trying to push up in my windowpane from the street, so maybe I'll go out there and dance to toast the change, my newly weightless insides.
Complete notes from the Feminism and Hip-Hop conference, and thoughts from the EMP Pop Conference, coming soon. Until then, please note how serious this shit was. I look like I am shooting lasers into the audience.
Regarding EMP: Elijah Wald, oh lo of the self-sewn cowboy shirt, lamented lack of tubas in hip-hop production: if everything goes as planned, the next album from Ms. Ford Prefect, plus the dudes from the Drumline, will remedy this in June. Also see: Ciara's "Roll Wit You," from the Coach Carter soundtrack, produced by mebbe Lil Jon mebbee I don't know whom, cause I don't have the liner notes and google is an empty chasm. There's some synth-low tromboney or tuba shit on there, saying "hello" to my ass in the low end.
Hello, ass.
Hello.
New Republic film crit Christopher Orr gets it right again, this time about the criminally under-Oscared Hotel Rwanda. He does, however, omit the brilliant performance of Sophie Okonedo as Tatiana (he also omits her name), who absolutely should have won Best Supporting Actress, and maybe even out-acted Don Cheadle.
Because my notes are so lengthy, so thorough, and because I've barely had a chance to mentally unpack everything, I'll probably just post what I wrote panel by panel or person by person, for archival purposes, and eventually try to come to some conclusion.
Essence Health Editor Akiba Solomon has, time and again, struck a balance between fierce feminism and honest emotion with these issues, so I'll start with hers: "Sexuality and Agency in Hip-Hop," also starring Professor Imani Perry and super b-girl Ana "Rockafella" Garcia.
[Consider most of these quotes paraphrased but mostly direct, unless otherwise specified.]
Akiba starts off the panel by saying that at some point, you start thinking in negative numbers in terms of your humanity, because you have to spend so much time proving you're "not a ho, not too ugly to be a ho, or not too ballbuster to be a ho." She advocates reclaiming sexuality as a human interaction, not as an agent of the market force, and compares the portrayal of black female sexuality in times of slavery, with its portrayal now in popular culture, and especially popular hip-hop culture: "Black female sex is characterized as dangerous, forbidden, and irresistable," she says.
Her caveat: now, there's an extra layer of commodification, because demeaned flesh is not just being used to sell sex, but also to sell product: hip-hop albums, videos, cars, video games, clothing, etc. She calls a woman's willful use of body as economic power as fitting into "Hood Darwinism," her own term. She points out that hood tenets--Money, Power, Respect--are, in this script, only attainable for poor black women via sex, which never leaves room for agency--an ability to exist on the womens' own terms.
Akiba calls much of current popular rap "commodity masquerading as hip-hop. There are a core audience of fans who love and consume the culture, but now that hip-hop is pop culture, it's just a product"--reinforced by the idea that a woman who calls herself Superhead can be seen as part of quote-unquote "hip-hop culture," though her role is in fact a part of hip-hop commodification.
Akiba observes, "the market force is so potent" that to many non urban-center based kids, "this is what hip-hop IS--24-7, all they see is sex objects.. mistaking "Hip-Hop culture for Hip-Hop Consumerism." She takes it the next logical step, saying that when Essence started their "take back the music" campaign, they found that most consumers of CDs (not sure if she meant ALL CDs or just RAP CDs) are white men between the ages of 18-35, and that there needs to be a real outreach/education effort to white communities, to counter the effects of white supremecy and sexism that can accompany/result from hip-hop consumerism.
Later, Imani Perry says the counter to this rampant exploitative imagery of women of color amounts to a "crisis of the imagination," and that in order to remedy it, some people find themselves erring on the side of being anti-sexuality, reinvesting in the Victorian notion of purity and black sexual subjectivity.
[Here in my notes I wrote "Do not be hating on women for other shit," which I think means that disregarding, disrespecting or hating other women for they way they execute their sexuality is antifeminist and counter-productive. I believe this in my heart, but I don't always practice it, especially with women--and men--who maneuver sexually via infidelity and dishonesty--but that's more of a personal moral issue than a universal feminist one.]
Akiba counters to Imani: "It's not ABOUT our sexuality; when videos portray women only from the waist-down and with gyrating buttocks, that's not sexuality, that's OWNERSHIP. It's not a conversation about real sexuality. It is ownership, it is power structure, it is psychological warfare."
The above tri-lingual razzle-dazzle is to distract myself from the mortal shame that accompanies an email from young homes Sean Fennessey, telling me I am totes making orgasm-face on the Fader blog. Subject line: "The Letter, not the Omarion Single." At least schnookums and I can cancel our order for that mirrored canopy now.
Here is a photo collage of how much fun we had on the extracurriculars of the Feminism & Hip-Hop conference, at the Fader vs. Pitchfork deathmatch. Chicago really holds it down.
Feminism flags at half-mast for our popess: one of our greatest, most vocal thinkers, humanists, feminists, writers has passed away. Peace to you, Ms. Dworkin, and may they take you more seriously wherever you've gone.
C'n'P's favorite professor/columnist/critic/veejay/professional roller-skater is on the floss with an audioblog. It is Jew-wise and Latin-centric, hott cadre 9000.
Again, these are just my notes, and they are transcribed verbatim, though I will try to explain what they mean where necessary. The following comes from a panel including Spelman College professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall, cultural critic Joan Morgan (who wrote seminal work When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist) and Professor Tricia Rose.
Panel begins with Sheftall on Spelman and the boycott of Nelly's "Tip Drill." She reads a couple of the letters received after the boycott got mass publicity, but clarifies the letters they do not represent the majority opinion, which was generally derisive of the boycott. (It led to Nelly's rather gutless cancellation of his own concert, and the "Boycott" was in fact just a plea to Nelly to discuss his content with Spelman students like Moya Bailey.)
The first letter she received is from a man who is incarcerated: it includes: "Sunday morning is the only time people can watch rap videos..the guards love the videos and know all the lyrics. Black and white guards love the lyrics which demean black women."
The second letter is from a black mother of a two year old, talking about her "struggles in this nation which continues to hate the poor." That there is a pervasive historic precedent of obscene racial/gender stererotype circulating around the black woman, Sheftall says, "as sexual beings who deserve whatever behavior men subject us to." She then derides the glorification of pimp culture, the fact that 76% of young black men watch BET for six hours a day, and the negative images of black manhood in a racist, sexist culture. She describes strippers in videos as "half-naked slaves," and calls out the heterosexism and homophobia in rap lyrics.
JOAN talks. Defines "hip-hop feminism" as "not an easy sell," though gets teary and says she is "elated and empowered" that the conference is happening (she's been working towards this since she was one of the first hip-hop critics ever for the Village Voice in the '80s, and was a pioneering voice for hip-hop feminism). She says, "hip-hop feminism has never been a comfortable relationship" and then says most rappers today are "badly behaved and not that interesting" and that "hip-hop as I knew and loved it is pretty much dead to me," and that she "misses the golden era aesthetically" and that most of all:
"Sexism is bad for art, and it's bad for hip-hop." "Sexism poisoned the art form." "Hip-hop is stunted by sexism, intermalized racism, and capitalism."
Joan talks about the multiplicity of women's roles in the golden era and then talks a bit about Lil' Kim, that in her early days she was offering "real stories in terms of women who had power," but that when she fell "madly in love with biggie" she felt she had "no voice without him" and Kim, who was once an MC with a potent message, became became a caricature of herself. She recommends the book The New Black Man by Mark Anthony Neal--black male feminist, one of my favorite writers, and Morgan's childhood friend.
Morgan says that she doesn't mourn hip-hop's death, because "If hip-hop dies, I know another black art will follow. It always does." But that "You are being handed something vital and if you care about this music at all, please recognize your power," and then the hip-hop quotable, "Feminism: I live that shit like a verb." She stresses the importance of "cross-generational, intra-racial alliances" in combating sexist hip-hop.
TRICIA ROSE. She begins: "Hip-hop is in a state of crisis for two reasons. One: misogyny. Two: capitalism. Hip-hop has always been an indirectly commercial art form that's used reformulated commodities. It has always played a part in the marketplace by using spraypaint, turntables, other purchased items. But in 8/9 years it became completely immersed in consumer culture, internalizing the logic of consumption." She talks about the pimp/hustler idea as being side-effect of internal exploitation, marginalization, and legitimate participation that takes up the logic of explotiation: "be a player or get played."
She says that in this capitalist rap climate, the traits of compassion and vulnerability are marginalized in order to reduce the risk of explotiation. She talks about the iconography involved, that you cannot be valued in hip-hop culture without going from the "producer to player to platinum," (money/power/respect) and she indicts the "paucity of language about gender consciousness." That in the larger culture there is great hostility towards:
black culture
poor people
women
AND pop culture
which produces blanket attacks on the music to further marginalize all of the above. What is wrong with hip-hop, she says, is that it has "taken up this conversation and normalized it" (What Sasha always describes to me as "people who listen to rap lyrics" vs. "people who believe in them").
Rose then shows her "manipulation of the funk" card: "what wouldn't I listen to over a hot beat?" and talks about the idea of the underground as political progressive sphere: "The underground isn't saving us just cause it's underground," and anyway, the underground is generally relegated to the "sophisticated internet-based fanbase, which is not where most hip-hop fans are listening."
JOAN says we must examine how misogynistic hip-hop affects women and our sense of agency and complicitness, and that it's also a self-esteem challenge. That feminism is a constant ongoing process and we must look at how hip-hop informs black female desire, how it influences black America and how America's version of the criminalized, hypermasculine black man influences black womens' notions of desire. Joan says that hip-hop feminism requires constant internal exploration and analysis and you have to be willing to DO THE WORK and CHALLENGE THE PATRIARCHY and see how it informs our NARROW NOTIONS OF LOVE.
Tricia Rose says: this is bigger than Nelly and that record labels and major corporations like Viacom are part of it, but that "I don't expect anything else from Viacom... I do expect artists to be responsible; artists claiming a stake in the community [claiming they are street] and acting as if they're not responsible for what goes on there is bullshit; they're affected by it, but they're not irresponsible."
She says "hegemonic forces say we're not in charge, but we need to illuminate the fissures in the system." I.e. what Moya Bailey did at Spelman.
Tricia Rose then brings up the idea of the "ride or die chick," as being passive/submissive, and wonders how women are complicit with our own plight. Some solutions: "more progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-racist classes for grades k-12; get young black women and men to start reading."
Bevery Guy-Sheftall, oh so fierce, interjects: You do not disrupt the patriarchal white supremacy by sitting around watching BET.
Joan suggests we look to positive role models as we look for power that isn't totally male identified, and addresses the idea of Lauryn Hill as feminist icon; that perhaps it wasn't just the god factor in Hill's disappearance, but that perhaps she's been disallowed to be one: "I'm Jamaican," says Morgan, "and those Marley boys are tuff." Then Morgan cites New York's barbaric Rockefeller drug laws as a factor influencing the increasing number of women in prison.
Rose talks about consumer resistance and says "don't buy it if it sells over gold," and addresses consumer power: "Don't be overly romantic about it, but don't be so cynical to think that it won't change the world."
Someone in the audience brings up the fact that we are discussing women in hip-hop but it's not just "video hoes" acting like "hoes," that there are plenty of white women like Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild flashing their breasts on camera etc.
Rose retorts, "You can have a thousand whorish white women but it doesn't result in the whorification of white women as a group."
Morgan responds: "Paris Hilton is extremely empowered in white society and she has captured the public imagination, which carries large cultural currency."
Rose says the "diversity of black experience and black reality is totally absent in hip-hop. They are talking about a thumbnail of it: a dominant fantasy about black criminality."
Audience question: "How can we be feminists and enjoy hip-hop?"
Beverly Guy Sheftall, fierce again: "Stop buying music that insults black women and black men."
friends of PDX's OG rock and roll camp for girls: the BK version has a date and venue. NOTE: don't let rock title fully mislead, i know karla & crew are making serious efforts to include DJing, MCing, a hip-hop class as well. become their friend at www.williemaerockcamp.org
and donate instruments if you can!
> Dear Friends of Rock Camp,
>
> We have some great news! The 2005 session of New
> York's rock n' roll camp for
> girls will take place August 8-12 at the Society for
> Ethical Culture at
> Central Park West and 64th Street. We are very
> psyched to have the use of the
> great space there.
>
> Applications for campers are posted on the site now,
> as well as scholarship
> forms and volunteer apllications. Equipment
> donations can be made at two
> neighbor shops in Williamsburg -- Rejoice and Pet
> Supplies 9. More info at the
> site.
A few months ago, when I was talking to someone about attending the Feminism in Hip-Hop conference, he asked me, "Are there any hip-hop feminists?" This weekend has answered his question: hundreds of scholars, activists, journalists, high school teachers, public health workers, students, regular everyday hip-hop feminists, female and male, showed up and built at the University of Chicago. It was enormously important--historical--for both hip-hop and feminism, and I'm further convinced they need each other more than ever.
I wrote 45 pages of notes but I'm exhausted, boarding a plane at 5 am, finishing my EMP paper, fielding deadlines, and probably won't get to blogging at length for a minute. But I am also inspired, empowered and energized, and want to impart a quote from panelist Joan Morgan, because the real challenge is translating what we learned into real-world work:
"Feminism: I live that shit like a verb."
Scandal rags and barely conscious Americans are destroying Australia, reports The Age, and ruining its moral compass:
I am absolutely appalled. When I visit Australia, where can I turn for advice on the pimiento ambrosia?
I'm in Chicagoland til SUNDAY pour le feminism & hip-hop conf. If you're in Chicagoland and feel like making trouble, email me. Meanwhile, stay tuned for live updates on the haps, and the Hops.
MORE MAGIC THANK YOU
JSHEPHERD
While I douse myself in the Medea-fire of last-minute Courtney and write 40 other musicky and art reviews in the between-space of the next week and a half, please accept my humble offering, the story of someone else's roommate.
My ole partner in crime "Ben" was a performance artist who got into the Museum School in Boston, a mondo fancy and supertuff art school for hyper-gifted not-fuckups, despite the fact that many of his pieces involved habanero peppers and full-frontal nudity. He was also fixated on becoming a rockstar hybrid of ziggy stardust and jarvis cocker, and operated on 150 percent sharp and debauched at all times, one time drew a black star in eyeliner over his right eye and wore it for like three days straight. It looked totes fresh with his Izod polo.
His roommate was another story. BEN was living with this other Museum school dude, "Dustin," who was not just performance-arting, but going through a serious Buddha phase, one that made Billy Corgan's reverent love for god appear about as pure as whoofing taco bell seven-layer gorditas up his nostrils. Dustin was dick-deep in the symbolism of purity; he shaved his head, was eating a macrobiotic diet, refused to wear anything but unbleached cotton or linen, and had discarded every last piece of furniture, draperies, and clothing from his bedroom---with the exception of his white votive candle collection, which he had carefully arranged on the floor in the shape of an OM SYMBOL.
BEN thought it was kinda monastic but fuck it they were in art school, and it was not going to stop him and his other roommates from having a booze party while Dustin was out. They threw a rager, full of pent-up 19 y.o. art kids, dropout kids, punk kids that used to hang out at "THE BEACH" (massholes, back me up on this one) and stamp out their cigs on their own hands, "kids" who dropped out of the Museum school after one crazy night at The Factory in the '70s and had been nursing their junk habit ever since. They were partying and they were partying in Dustin's room. Even some of the Mass Art kids were invited. Maybe Tinuviel was there, and Aimee Mann, I don't know. It was too crowded to keep tabs.
I've long wondered how Dustin felt when he came home to the party, opened the door to his bedroom, and discovered an unknown couple drunk and FUCKING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE VOTIVE CANDLE OM. I would pay to see the horror. He ran downstairs after screaming "WHAT THE FUCK" and left for a couple days. When he returned, he'd snapped out of "Buddhist" mode and, no shit, started an aw-shucks kind of feyish indie pop band, in the vein of Belle & Sebastian.
TRUE STORY
I have finally joined my personal canon of Jessica Hopper, Britt Barton-Lindsay, Keith Harris, Laura Sinagra, Jon Dolan, Melissa Maerz, Dylan Hicks, M. Matos, Jeff Johnson and whatever other brainy Midwestern firecrackers I am loving-loving who ever wrote for the Minneapolis City Pages. And my Ellen Allien cover exclusive for XLR8R is out now; it is an exercise in barriers (of language, of email interviews). The layout is fucking awesome. I would also like to say part of my writing process involved forcing kris ex to listen to her new album about 40 times while staring at my trippy flashing La Virgen de Guadalupe lightbox, an experience he unfavorably likened to scarfing mushrooms and hitting the rave tent. Note to all: kris does not like German techno.
The XLR8R piece is also timed conveniently since about a week ago, Ellen decided to push back the release of Thrills like, five weeks so she could go on holiday with her boyfriend--a freespirited move by an incessantly hard-working woman--a decision I totally respect and admire.
For all the drama surrounding Terri Schiavo's death, I think the saddest part is how a young woman ended up in her situation to begin with: like Paula Abdul, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, and Justine Bateman, Terri Schiavo suffered from bulimia, the anxiety-addled shamefest that is binge and purge eating. As a result of Schiavo's eating disorder, she was lacking in potassium, which caused a heart attack, which cut the oxygen to her brain, which resulted in her vegetative state. Here, Feministing drops a little post about it.
It is true that bulimia is a manifestation of psychological disorder, related much more to physical, emotional and sexual abuse than to the media's mandate of miniature waistlines. It is also true that family, friends, even spouses can be totally unaware of its existence, because it's a very secret, lonely thing--a way to keep oneself separate from other people--I don't know what the Schiavo husband and parents knew about her bulimia, but it's entirely possible they were in the dark. (I know of a man whose wife engaged in bulimic behavior for their nearly 20-year marriage, who had no idea it was happening until she told him.) Something Fishy is a good basic resource for info on bulimia and other eating disorders.
First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Art Museum are the fucking jumpoff. They have dance parties and paintings and lectures and brooklyn philharmonic and kris says in the summer there are block parties, too, but I don't know about that. Tonight was reggaeton night, is what I know. And that 1500 salsaing adults, some fabulously dressed (I was particularly intrigued by the pairing of a glittery sari with a cream satin adidas bomber) and a few mew-faced babies in the third-floor atrium, surrounded by the Basquiat exhibit and watched over by a glinting chandelier, dancing to reggaeton hits ("gasolina," "culo," Tego Calderon's "Lean Back") plus a whole platter of salsa I didn't know, to which those babies sung every word--is, nay, beyond the jumpoff. It is the American dream: Much Love, and Free Party. B. said it's hard for him to dance Latin because his hip-hop gets in the way and I said you know, in the spirit of reggaeton, so we uprocked our cuban motion & spun to dizziness. Dear New York: next month, you totally have to go.
and since I'm on memory dispension time, i'll tell you the story of how I got heatstroke for the Pope. I was forced by my intensely catholic mother to attend World Youth Day 1993, which meant "making a pilgrimage" (nee "driving") to Denver Colorado, walking six or seven miles in 100 degree weather across a plain entirely barren but for sagebrush and prairie dogs--only to arrive at a campsite where food and beverage was provided by McDonalds in tents designated by country, limp $4 weiners christened "brats" and being hawked at the Germany spot.
We had a mass, I got my grandma's rosary blessed from 300 miles away while the pope sermonized from under a plexiglass balloon, and on the way back, I collapsed, sunburned and blistered, delirious, possibly hallucinating and definitely dehydrated. It is possible my heatstroke was God's punishment for my renunciatiion of faith a few months before, after a debacled yet thankfully shortlived experience as 16-yr-old church cantor; or perhaps because my best friend Marie, who was not Catholic but who attended on my invitation, had popped three hits of LSD and attended mass with my mom and I a few months before that (she was so guilt-stricken by the stained glass of the Passion that she ran to the bathroom and flushed the remaining 4 hits from her pocket before father got to the homily). At any rate, I recovered with some rest and water, and never returned.
Jessica and I did visit the Vatican a couple summers ago, however, marveling at the ancient cobble walks, the milling nuns with their long linen habits in the Roman sun, the great pillars topped with saints in gold. I bought my mom a hand-carved, rose-scented rosary from there, as an apology more or less, and I think she forgave me, though she still has not let me forget her years of worry, martyrdom and tears, and prayers for every time I said the words "goddamn" or "jesus fucking christ." I love her anyway, though I hope the next pope is softer on choice; Pope JP's anti-abortion stance was the sole and solitary reason she voted for GW Bush.
Cheyenne Books and Records is where I got my first copies of Valis and Sister, possibly on the same day, although that could be my rosy revisionism, a perfect coincidence of my own memory. The mind will go to great lengths to make itself believe it is cooler than it actually is.
He had used punk cassettes lined up in rows in a case under glass, all flossing Nickelodeony-cartoony cover art with handlettering--some of which I would later learn was Vermiform--or washed out, distorted photography, the hallmark of the shoegazers. The man who owned them, and the store where they were sheltered (they were so rare in my world, I always saw them as artifacts rescued from the bulldozer of capitalism, of homogeneity, of the Steve Miller Band mixtapes everyone was passing around at my school), was a 28-yr-old Armenian intellectual named John; he wore thick black glasses, a closet full of blue-and-black checked flannel Pendleton buttondowns (or one he wore every day?) and a deep, full, constant stubble that never seemed to grow past five o'clock. John stood behind the counter, nodding approvingly, offering backstory, and lighting incense. He thought it was cool when I picked out a Citizen Fish (!) cassette based on, as usual, the cover art--which I thought was cool, too; didn't know it was Subhumans sideproj, and the spritely venom in my fourth-gen copy of Subhumans' "No" had left a real stamp on my angry/alienated young tragidrama. (I can sing the lyrics to you now: "No, I don't believe in Jesus Christ/My mother died of cancer when I was five/No, I don't believe in religion, I was forced to go to church/I wasn't told why! No, I don't believe in the police force/ police brutality isn't a dream!" Then, an anthem; now--in my grizzled cynicism--charming, so simple are they, and formative.)
When I asked John about the Minor Threat tape, he handed it over gravely, cause he kinda knew.
I went home and filed it in my alphabetized tape case next to Mint Condition. Later I'd write fan letters to Dischord with my checks and orders, to which the lovely lady Cynthia Connolly would always respond, "We don't get much mail from Wyoming."
I am writing this story, maybe for the third time, because the awesome Sassy ladies came over the other day to interview me, about what the magazine turned me on to while I clocked time in a cultural island, pre-internet, in the yrs 1990-1994. It's a great thing they're doing, a chronicle bigger than a magazine about a blip of an era where everything changed, as if we all knew and were milking our final seconds of Ludditism until the infostream revved up and hit 950 mph with no rearview.
