big miss moviola/joanie 4 jackie 4ever

According to my text messages, Alex Merrill says hackeysack is coming back. Back from where, I don’t know. State college purgatory, I suppose. Ok.
The sole complaint I had about Me and You and Everyone We Know is that I didn’t think the character Christine Jesperson really would have been wearing Citizens of Humanity jeans. I know, it’s a minor inconsistency in the costuming, but it took me out of the story for that one moment midway through while I asked, “Why is Christine Jesperson wearing Citizens of Humanity jeans?” That shit is like, a one-and-a-half spot, easy. Her character drives an elder-cab and buys her shoes at a lower-tier department store (in my mind, the Sears in Lloyd Center Mall, btw).
But whatever. Because who else makes real, wide-release movies about real artists now? No one, unless they are retrospectives: Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Basquiat. Contemporary artists seem to work within a secret chasm to those of us outside it, and the film’s side-plot is about demystifying that, in its subtle way, whispering “you could be this person, too,” in its all-inclusive subtext. It’s such a secretly riot grrl movie, so much a follow-up to Big Miss Moviola, “a challenge and a promise,” the days when Miranda was making video chainletters and cutting out her own unique space in riot grrrl–she was the only lady in that young RG scene at that time opening for bands with serious feminist performance art, and releasing not-quite-spoken-word, strange and beautiful “time-based art”/skits on punk labels. (Kathleen Hanna doing part of the monologue from Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains on a seven-inch, while amazing, doesn’t count. It was a one-off!) The Binet-Simon Test, KRS296, STILL gives me chills, creeps me out and leaves me digging for fire and double entendres. Wynne “Tracy & the Plastics” Greenwood was her successor in that world (someday I will tell you about the time I almost died driving to Olympia to interview her). So are L.A.’s Janet Pants Dans Theeatre. But Miranda’s presence in riot grrrl made it possible.
Anyway, in true collective Portland style, voting season is on for the PDX POP NOW! festival. Not that I will be there, but I voted for preteen primitive punkers Black Peppercorns and 9000-person hip-hop collective Oldominion, anyway.