I had an idea for a zine called HP Magazine, where every issue would take a different theme with the initials HP, and would be made in collaboration with other artists and writers. (I have an idea for the first issue but I’m still working on it). The theme for this issue is HOUSE PARTY and it’s out now.
I wrote this text a few years ago on a trip to Berlin, to visit my friends, the brilliant Lauren John Joseph and Sophie Iremonger. I asked them to contribute to this zine, and I am so proud to get to share my work next to theirs. I don’t want to give too much away or oversell it, but it features three very strong and I think beautiful stories, one from each of us. HP Magazine Issue #2 is produced for Bird Girl Records (SF, CA).
A beloved song about Berlin, which I listen to all the time, especially while jogging.
Hole – Drown Soda
The original version, produced by Kim Gordon, appears only on the Teenage Whore single, released in Germany which I wrote about recently. I think this version, which is looser and subtler, is preferable to the more famous live versions.
PJ Harvey – Somebody Down, Somebody’s Name
Because PJ is a character in my story (mask), I wanted to include my favorite b-side.
Kid & Khan – Washing Machine
A party jam from my trip to Berlin. Not sure who put this on, maybe Sophie? Anyway it’s from the fantastic Bad English album, which Kid Congo Powers said came about because of an affair between him and Khan. BEYOND hot.
Babes in Toyland – Bruise Violet
Featured in the zine as well, and always worth revisiting, including Cindy Sherman’s cameo.
Cibo Matto – Know Your Chicken
Also featured in the zine. Another anthem to life in NYC but, again, to me has another meaning: I’ve always heard this song as a queer anthem. Something about taking over the butchery, two babies, Magenta and Blue, and the whole chicken thing. Licking fingers.
Mrs. Miller – Catch a Falling Star
Another jam from the party. I am certain that Lauren put me on to Mrs. Miller, punk icon. So thankful to have a friend like them.
Ray Parker, Jr. – Ghostbusters Theme
Sophie definitely put this on at the height of the party. Peaking. Climax. The ultimate sophistication and revelry.
Hope you enjoy.
I am going to make my old blog private, shortly. If there’s anything else you wanna see from there, go look at it now. Was thinking of a substack but that seems kind of exhausting. Final issue of Scorcher is in the pipeline. Making some long overdue adjustments and updates, leaving something of a sticky breadcrumb trail from one to the next instead of building and branding, and I feel real good about that. I feel I’m less Handsome or Gretyl than the Witch, but breadcrumbs nonetheless.
What a strange, terrible year 2021 was. I’m not really a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, and most of the things that meant a lot to me this year were made a long time ago, or represent the culmination of a long process. Certainly, like many people, I suffered more in the last year than I have in many years before (maybe ever?). New kinds of pain, both physical and psychic. Levels of experience I didn’t think I had access to. I also think I’ve become more patient in the last year. I hope so. I fantasize that I’ve become more expansive, my understanding of the world and of myself has grown and become more nuanced. Again, this is my wish and my fantasy for myself. Trying to make sense out of senseless destruction and death. I assume everyone else is as well but that’s probably naïve of me — probably some people don’t want to make sense, would like to bear down and move through it without knowing and I Don’t Blame You. For me, I’m trying to force myself to allow for the possibility of growth and grace, even in the face of true horror, worst fears coming true, and loss. Because often it doesn’t occur to me, so I’m trying to force my imagination and my consideration to allow for less terrible contingencies. It’s a challenge. I’m up for it.
Some of the better things that happened this year, that sustained me in the face of ongoing, inexorable collapse, and some things I enjoyed this year. In no particular order:
– I ran the 50th annual NYC Marathon.
Picture of me, blissful and in tremendous pain, taken by the wonderful Julia Norton. I had been slated to run in 2020 and it was canceled, so was able to register for the following. I’ve been a runner for many years, but training for a marathon is a different beast. Normally, on my own, I run 15-25 miles a week, but this summer I was doing up to 50. A lot of time spent running. The Race itself was pretty spectacular, a very joyous and unique way to experience NYC. I really wanted to break 4 hours, and I came in at 4:01:07. I’m being a good sport about it. I haven’t signed up for the 2022 marathon but I’m kind of tempted.
– I finished the Mandarin module on DuoLingo. I’d been plugging away at it for months and months, and I’m really proud I finished. I’m not at all literate or fluent or anything like that, but I could probably find my way to the bathroom and apologize in a few different ways, which is enough for me. Learning another language feels, emotionally and psychically, like massaging my brain. I usually practice while hula-hooping, at the end of the workday, to sort of reset my mind. Now I’m working on Arabic.
– I got into grad school. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I am now going to begin (very slowly) studying Psychoanalysis and hopefully, someday, become an analyst myself. I think it’s fascinating work, it feels “right” for me, and I’m excited to begin the journey, one class at a time.
– I quit smoking weed at the end of May. This was a pretty big change for me. I certainly didn’t think I could or would, but I’m glad I did. I had a tiny taste when I was in California for the holiday, it just confirmed my decision. It feels like doors opened up inside of my mind, inside my feelings. Certainly I feel less depressed and less anxious, less hopeless. My experience of being conspired against, persecuted, excluded, and threatened – all of that is much less acute. It had like been 15 years. And, relatedly,
– I’ve been dreaming again. Probably I’ve been dreaming every night. Isn’t that the science? That every single human being dreams every single time they sleep? But I haven’t been remembering my dreams for years and years. I told myself I didn’t want to remember my dreams, because they were so often terrifying and stressful. But I was just trying to convince and console myself. Once I quit THC, they came flooding back. Sometimes as many as four or five different episodes in a single night. Sometimes quite inspiring, sometimes funny. Not at all the scary, fearful experience I was afraid of. It feels like getting cable TV; I have so much more context and information. Sometimes my dreams have other languages. Maybe a snippet of Chinese or, once, in a dream, I was able to read, phonetically, a phrase in Arabic. I had to look it up when I woke up – Al’Aqbar الأقبر (the grave).
– I learned to play Mahjong this year. I took classes with Linda from the Manhattan MahJongg Club, and I have a pretty okay sense of how to play now, but I haven’t been able to get a game going or meet other people to play with, so I hope I don’t forget how! I even won one (1) round, during class.
This is a very nice Prada Mahjong set that I saw in the store and thought was gorgeous.
It costs $6,000. I’d have to win a lot of games to get that much together.
– I got to read at the Segue Reading Series at Artists Space, opening for the LEGENDARY Edmund White. The reading was curated by Lonely Christopher and Venn Daniel and I was thrilled to get to be invited. I read two new stories from a book I hope to publish someday. Video is below:
Aside from milestones or big changes, I’m really happy that I kept up my other routines. In the last year I meditated every single day. Almost always for 10 minutes, sometimes less if I was traveling, sometimes more. I also wrote my morning pages/journal, again every single day, for about the same amount of time, often longer. Have not done a lot of Writing writing, zines or stories or things I can share. I’m moving slowly. I hula hooped almost every day, and on most work days I did my Baduanjin (八段錦) Qigong routine.
Also, two people in my extended love family circle had beautiful little babies, and I got to hang out with them this year, which was a fantastic thrill. I made it out to the west coast three times, quite a bit for me. I kept in touch with friends, or tried to. I have a group of buddies I talk to almost every Friday night, which has been a real source of joy and comfort this year (we started in 2020, and Danny and I were having happy hours for years before that).
Outside myself, some things I loved this year that I did not do or make.
MUSIC:
I spent many many hours listening to Blonde Redhead and Unwound this past year. I’d been something of a BR fan in my teen years, and have been thinking about them a lot in the last year, as they figure into the next zine I’m writing, and really dragging my heels on. Unwound I never got super into as a teenager, and only sort of only gave their final album Leaves Turn Inside You a cursory listen in college. It is sprawling and brilliant. For some reason I really went in this past year, buying reissue LPs, obsessively listening while running, and fantasizing about the worlds these bands conjure for me. Am overeager with anticipation and premonitory grief about the next and supposedly final Blonde Redhead album, Sit Down to Dinner (title apparently inspired by Joan Didion – RIP).
Blonde Redhead – “Symphony of Treble” (Single Version)
If you read the comments, and if you know the album version of the song, you know the 7” was misprinted and uploaded to YouTube incorrectly. The versions on this 7” were produced by Guy Piccioto. All Blonde Redhead has sparked my interest the last year, but particularly the Fake Can Be Just As Good LP, which seems a kind of platonic ideal of noise and melody, abstraction and logos.
Unwound – “Here Come the Dogs” & “Corpse Pose” live at Yoyo-a-Gogo in Olympia, 2001
I was actually (shamefully!) at this show but left before Unwound played. I had just seen the Need perform a stunningly powerful set and I left the Capitol Theater when Unwound began. I don’t remember what I did that night. I want to say I went to a party or something but I don’t know if that’s really true. I missed Unwound. I wasn’t into them at the time and now I can never see them perform live. Vern Rumsey died last year, 2020. He was a brilliant musician.
Some other music I listened to a lot this year, including my most listened-to song, “Princess Carwash” by Queenadreena.
How many times did I listen to this song this year? Too many to count. It got me through many difficult, painful training runs. I couldn’t say what it’s about, but I love that there’s a reprise.
KatyJane Garside is, was and hopefully will not always be criminally underrated. Fearsome, tuned-in, visceral. A true rock star.
Blistering, funny, propulsive punk rock from Perth. Their debut LP Hot & Flustered is fantastic.
Moroccan punk band I found out about by reading Maximum Rocknroll. Their cassette tape Victory Belongs To Those Who Fight For A Right Cause is really great for running, even if I can’t understand the lyrics, which the band says are about religion and capitalism.
Just a beautiful ambient album from 1986 which I heard for the first time this year. Wonderful for writing, cleaning, just being with one’s thoughts.
A banger from Elza’s 1976 Lição de Vida LP. A gorgeous song that makes me happy. I fell, also, that Elza Soares is of the generation of women from the 50s, 60s and 70s who are kind of punk progenitors. I’m thinking of the postwar modernists, Bubbe-core punk rockers including artists like Barbra Streisand, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Miriam Makeba, Umm Kulthum, Celia Cruz, Mina. Thinking as well, like, Helen Frankenthaller, Jay DeFeo, Elaine deKooning, Yayoi Kusama. Clarice Lispector and Elfriede Jelinek and Kathy Acker, of course. Vivienne Westwood, Miuccia Prada and Rei Kawakubo — this is all a rant for another day. “Hot Topic”, indeed.
Another song I love running to, from her final (hopefully not?) album, 1996’s Whore.
Finally, toward the end of the year, Wynne Greenwood announced she’s working on a new album, and released a new song, “Distant Dream”. So there’s much to look forward to in the new year.
BOOKS:
Lauren John Joseph – At Certain Points We Touch
Lauren JJ is a dear friend of mine, and while I am biased in the sense that I love them, I don’t have to pretend to write nice things about their upcoming formal literary debut, At Certain Points We Touch. It’s going to be out on Bloomsbury very soon, and I can’t wait for more people to read it and enjoy it. The book really shook me up! Not since Michelle Tea’s Black Wave has a novel gotten under my skin and flipped me out like this. Lauren’s book is many things, simultaneously, an elegy, a memoir, an epistle, a séance, a sigil. Formally and psychically inventive, it really fucked with me (in a good way) and I can’t wait for more people to read it soon.
Paper Girls written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang
I got the first book on a trip to California this summer, where I picked it up at my longtime favorite store Alameda Sports Cards & Comics. I have a glancing, remote affection for comic books. I did love Bone for a long time, and would read it when I came home drunk from bars in my 20s. I never found a series I truly loved until Paper Girls. I devoured it. I ordered the rest of the series from Patty in Alameda, and tore through them. I have not had a comic make me weep… ever! But this one did. I never saw Stranger Things but I understand this series bears some similarities. It has many things I love in fiction and literature: tough girls, monsters, dystopia, multiple dimensions, a soupçon of sapphic thrills. Truly, truly outrageous and gorgeous. Fun for kids of all ages. Don’t walk, run (or ride your bike) to go get your hands on a copy. You can’t borrow mine.
MOVIES:
JT Leroy – by Justin Kelly and Savannah Knoop
It took me two years to finally watch this film but it was definitely one of my favorite things I saw this year. The “actual” JT LeRoy, back in 2000 or 2001, was hugely influential to me. I absolutely bought into the fantasy. A very close friend of mine had an ongoing e-mail correspondence with JT where they bonded about their troubled teenage years, what it was like to be a teenage junkie gay boy. My friend got a measure of support and consolation from those e-mails, he felt really seen and validated somehow. I was, of course, tremendously jealous that he got JT to write back to him. I had nothing to offer JT and I don’t think I ever reached out to him via e-mail. A few years later, when the story unraveled that JT was a confection of a few brilliant imaginations, my friend who had written to him had already passed away. I remember thinking how pissed off my friend would have been to find out that he was writing to Laura Albert. I felt sort of shameful and upset about knowing that was how this little miniature story ended.
But the movie is great. In 2019 I read Savannah’s book Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy, which is really fantastic. It’s also brilliantly written, and about much more than a literary persona– it’s about Savannah and their multiple journeys of self-discovery during their own teenage years. It’s a story much bigger than the film. The Movie, though, is pitch-perfect. Dark, and funny and mean and gratifying and human. Courtney Love is wonderful in it. Admittedly, I’m buddies with Savannah and Justin, and I was in the Bay Area during the late 90s/early 00s, I understand the feeling of being both totally backwater as well as at the center of a very strange world.
One highlight of the film is a cameo appearance by my bandmate/guru/soulsister Daniel Sander. As you can see at the :28 mark in the trailer, Kirsten Stewart as young Sav holds up a copy of Sarah and says “Who is this kid?” alluding to the author photo then being passed off as JT. As you may remember, for a long time before JT had a real-life performer, all we ever saw of him was this photo, which looks to me (then, and now) like Beck.
In the movie, it’s a selfie young Perfect Li’l Danny took of himself.
Drifting Clouds by Aki Kaurismäki
Dark and funny and grotesquely sad, with a real nice gratifying narrative arc. It made me want to learn Finnish. Also everyone smokes the whole time, which I love.
Lydia Lunch – The War Is Never Over by Beth B
I feel about Lydia Lunch the way I’m told gay guys in the 50s and 60s felt about Judy Garland. She is, to me, the ne plus ultra of contemporary culture, so I loved this documentary. We get a little of her biography, sure. We get a fair bit of context for how her projects came together, but sadly no mention of Harry Crews. However, for me, really, was Lydia and her acolytes parsing her relationship to power, brutality, desire and violence (her central themes). There’s a shocking, brilliant admission from Dame Lunch toward the end of the film, about how a thwarted desire for one experience transmutes into its almost polar opposite. A kicky inversion of the “trauma plot“, it highlights the casual brilliance of Lydia Lunch’s work and legacy, the scintillating intelligence and the bravery of her aesthetic. I don’t know if it will win her many new fans, because I’m such a fucking convert to her church of depravity that I can’t conceive of anyone who’s not. Get in loser, we’re going to find the secret of life.
OTHER:
Two beverages I drank maybe the most of this year.
Tart Cherry juice. It helps with sleep and it helps with muscle recovery from running. I drink it almost every day and maybe you should too.
Vignobles Pueyo Tellus Vinea Bordeaux 2019. I’m not really a wine person, per se, but I’m obsessed with this. It’s only sometimes in stock at the wine place near my house, but is fantastic (I’m drinking a glass as I finish this post). I got it because I thought it was organic, it certainly tastes funky and disgusting and dry and wood-y. Again, not really a wine person, but I’ve never even vaguely considered buying a case of anything, and when this was sold out for a few months I considered drastic measures. For now I have a steady supply (fingers crossed).
The first time I saw U.S. Girls (a.k.a. Meg Remy) perform was October 30, 2017, the day before Halloween, when my friend Logan Sibrel’s band Sister Pact opened for her at the Mercury Lounge. I came very late to U.S. Girls, despite many people urging me to check her out. I had only recently heard Half Free just before the show, I was kicking myself for not getting into her earlier. That night, though, she didn’t play anything from Half Free, at least not that I recognized. Instead, backed on that 2017 tour by what looked like a heavy metal band, she performed the about-to-be-released In A Poem Unlimited, a mystifying set of funk, jazz, disco, joyful rage and revenge fantasies. She performed as a front-woman and at one point jumped into the crowd to sing and dance. I mention the 2017 show because that night I heard her play new songs I’d never heard before and I went home and went to bed and I woke up on Halloween with a raging fever.
The last live concert I saw before the pandemic was just over a year ago when I saw U.S. Girls perform at The Dance in New York City.
U.S. GIRLS at The Dance, NYC Feb 18 2020: Statehouse (It’s a Man’s World) 4 American Dollars Born to Lose And Yet It Moves IOU Pearly Gates L‐Over Rosebud Overtime Woodstock Red Ford Radio
I’d never been to the Dance before but apparently it was shutting down, the U.S. Girls show was going to be the final event in the space. It was an airy, bright loft-y space downtown, with the stage at the end of a long hardwood floor, like a dance studio. A spiral staircase from the presumably upstairs “backstage”, for a bit of built-in drama. A valedictory feeling, for sure.
Remy and co. were touring the newest album Heavy Light, and the tour was only three dates long: Toronto, Montreal and NYC, and promised to feature seven singers. The band that night was Kassie Richardson, Carlyn Bezic, Dorothea Paas, Geordie Gordon, Maximilian Turnbull, Ed Squires & Evan Cartwright. They all gathered on stage and the three backup vocalists began performing “Statehouse”. The gloriously serene harmonies building to a righteous and threatening wall of power, sort of Valkyrean, sort of Misfit (in the Holograms sense), sort of Bacchanalian but also very technical, skilled and in control.
When a girl is being watched She holds her head like in a studio They told her so, told her so I saw her remember things she thought That she had lost so long ago
The song is telling a story, setting a scene or a mood, and as the band performed it Remy slowly descended the spiral staircase and approached the microphone center stage. A very tall very loud queen from closer to the stage cried out: “There… she… IS!!!” I was immediately furious and jealous to not be the biggest tallest nelliest U.S. Girls fan. Even though I know I’m a dilettante and went for years without going to her shows. As Remy reached the microphone she seemed to pick up a kind of wooden instrument and clapped it, like a clapperboard in a movie. With that, they launched into “4 American Dollars” which had just been released the previous week.
I’d been looking forward to this show for months, for years, even. Since I last saw her perform, I worked a really tough retail job, which had a curated soundtrack that included “Velvet 4 Sale”. I love that song. I spent most of that year, whenever I had to work on the sales floor, staring off into space and thinking about that song. I listened to a lot of In a Poem while jogging around Manhattan. I thought a lot about that record during the last few years in Amerika, the seething rage and disappointment. I love the video too, because it reminds me of a John Carpenter movie, like the one my mom starred in.
I fell in love with Remy’s work in this, her second phase. I love the scintillating anger. Truly Brilliant. She’s spoken a lot about how her early work, the noisier and more abstract and experimental work was part of a process of discovering her sound, at her own pace. It seems like the content, however, was already there. If not openly in the lyrics, if the political acuity hadn’t come fully into focus yet, the rage has always shone through. “I get so angry.” Remy says, “That’s my default, almost. I’m beyond angry. I’m in mourning. But it’s good to feel. If you’re feeling it you’re thinking; you’re paying attention.”
The collection was inspired, [CdG CEO and husband Adrian] Joffe says, “by Rei’s anger at seeing a Gap window filled with banal black clothes.” Kawakubo concedes, with an ambiguous grimace that might just be a grin, “I may have been especially angry at the time, but I’m more or less always angry anyway.” (From Judith Thurman’s classic profile of Kawakubo-san, “The Misfit”).
At some point during the set last year, Remy looked around the venue, “I don’t know what this place… is,” she said, as if remarking on the fact that the venue was closing, “but I like it.”
Of course we had some idea about the pandemic then. My friend who I was with had just gotten back from Hong Kong and had a strange but harmless fever for a few days on his return. We didn’t know about asymptomatic spread yet, we made jokes about how Björk who was promoting something recently in photos wearing an elaborate face mask, would likely survive the pandemic because of her get-ups. Someone interjected that she wears face masks as a response to sexist and ageist beauty standards. I felt like an asshole.
And yeah I was jealous that there were other queens, older bitchy gay guys who’re long-time fans of U.S. Girls, who already knew all the words to the songs. The queen who squealed when Remy entered, was a little bit later in the show talking between songs, saying some kind of nonsense, and Remy responded. Staring beatifically into the spotlight, she feigned a patient interest in what the chatterbox has to say. “Oh? What? Sorry? Were you saying something?” The queen quieted down. “Oh…” Remy said, pretending to be surprised as she adjusted the mic stand, grunting slightly as she unscrewed it. “I thought you were saying… something… important.” With that, the lights shifted and she was backlit by a brilliant wash of bright white light, and launched into “Rosebud,” which begins with:
Stop. Let’s take a moment. You are what you are. I’m no alarmist.
The set ended with “Red Ford Radio” an older song that was rerecorded for Heavy Light (along with “State House”). It is, to me, a haunting paean to childhood, power, freedom, escape and self-determination. It’s a song performed in the round, and often Meg and her co-vocalist unplug their mics halfway through, the song going from a performance to a chant. Meg and the rest of the band slowly ascended the spiral staircase, and the show was over.
There was no video of the performance, that I can find, but there is a great video of the same band performing in Brooklyn the next day at the Bunker:
There was a point around the turn of the century when my teenage friends and I went from listening to punk rock to listening to what was then broadly known as “Oldies” — music from the 1950s and 1960s. The radio sucked, MTV sucked, the underground wasn’t safe anymore, so we had to go back in time. Let’s all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born. It was less about celebrating a popular form, admiring a so-called “classic,” and more about scouring the past for an indication, a hint, a gesture or a premise that we could find ourselves under. Some of us went to the archives for alterity; it was usually safer there from bullies (so I thought, at least). We scavenged our parents’ record collections, wanting to reconceive ourselves. I think of this image from the Gossip’s page on the K Records site from 2000, the handwritten bio by Brace Pane, please note “we listen to the Oldies station & that’s all.”
Maybe just a little bit of self-mythologizing there. The Gossip had also just opened for Sonic Youth and Brace’s boyhood zines No New Science Fiction opined the breakup of Bikini Kill, and was written just before he and Beth joined original drummer Kathy in Olympia.
The point is that like the Gossip, my friends and I went from listening to contemporary punk and indie rock bands to listening to Oldies; my primary interest became early soul singers and girl groups. The Gossip are only a few years older than Meg Remy and I, and I wonder if she had a similar epiphany around that time too. This would have been after the Electronica age of the late 1990s and before the garage rock revival of the 2000s. I found an article about her recalling herself going to see Glass Candy and the Gossip in Chicago during high school. Reading Sam McPheeters’ wonderful, wonderful Mutations this week, there’s a nice, if brief, chapter on the Gossip’s early year’s which summed it up nicely: “They are the kind of band that can change the life of a sixteen year-old, that can bestow confidence upon the insecure.”
The first time I heard U.S. Girls, I wondered if I was hearing a previously unheard, breezily noisy avant-garde song from an 80’s Ronnie Spector moment, maybe something from the pre-Siren years, or a Suicide collaboration. Remy’s voice can sometimes sound like Spector’s; a complex, refracted sob, an active, rhythmic vibrato. So I wasn’t shocked when I read in an interview that Remy said she wanted to sound like Ronnie Spector.
But then I read elsewhere that Remy said she moved to Portland because she loved Glass Candy (& the Shattered Theatre, as they were then known). Ida No has a similar “catch” in her voice as well, a gently postmodern critique of the thing-in-itself, the sound of sophisticated pop is one which interrupts itself. After all, the dead pussycat sings, from its little coffin: a boombox. I thought that to cop to such an influence was kind of incredibly brave, grown-up, and made everyone else seem really lazy and unworthy. Meg Remy just seemed really intelligent as an artist.
I was obsessed with her when I was younger. I moved to Portland, Oregon because I just wanted to live in the same town as Glass Candy. I was obsessed with them, because I saw them at the Fireside in Chicago in ’99 or something. That’s when they just had a drum machine. And Johnny Jewel was playing bass or something. And her just doing her fucking thing. I haven’t really seen many performers like her. Her voice can go from very sweet to super harsh. She can really do it all. She can scream, she can sing like a little girl, she’s such a good dancer, she has great lyrics. I don’t know what she’s up to. But when I moved to Portland, I moved into this apartment in northwest Portland, and I was going to shows and stuff like that. I went to Fred Meyer by my house one day, and Johnny Jewel and Ida No were working there. And my mind exploded. Johnny Jewel worked in the produce section, and Ida was just stocking shelves. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Because it was so good for me to see these people that I really idolize having to work. You know what I mean? I was like, “Oh God, you’re just like me. OK, we just like music but we have to pay our bills.” It was just so leveling. I was still in awe of them. They looked like beautiful angels while they were working. You would see them and you’re like, They’re special. You could tell they’re different. I’m not comparing myself to them, but it was a really big moment for me.
I remember a similar feeling when I was 15, and went to Ladyfest, in Olympia. I saw Beth Ditto working at a kids toy store downtown (is that right?) somewhere where she was washing large glass window storefronts with paper towels and a spray bottle of blue liquid. Her hair was perfect, of course. In those years I think she was also doing hairstyling, from her apartment? I remember during Yo-yo A-Go-Go the next year, a friend of mine asked if she would give him a haircut and she politely demurred, saying she only did ladies hair. And I think she was like, in middle of a lovers’ quarrel too, he asked her drunkenly late one night when we ran into her outside the Thekla. No WONDER the Olympians hated us, we just blew up their tiny little community every summer for a week. I bet some people just wanted to get out of town, to avoid the mess. But I wanted to go and stay, to wind up like street trash. I’m resisting the impulse to throw myself into the traffic, into the truth of the short story.
In an interview, Remy said she composed Poem with samples, and then worked with the band the Cosmic Range band to recreate them. I’m desperate to hear the demos, with the funky old 70s samples, she’s a renowned record collector.
This reminds me of Liesbeth Esselink p.k.a. Solex, who as I recall made her first album (Solex Vs. the Hitmeister) from samples of unsold LPs in the record shop she owned in Amsterdam, but later, when faced with the task of clearing the samples for licensing (this was 1998) she ended up deciding to recreate the samples herself. Now I read about Hitmeister and it doesn’t say she recreated them — maybe they’re really the samples themselves and I’m imagining.
The band name, written phonetically as You Ess Girls, made me think of “Us” girls, as in we, ourselves as girls. This makes me think of the BIkini Kill song “Don’t Need You”:
The whole life of the Young-Girl coincides with what she wants to forget.
There is something as well in the name of U.S. Girls, as the moniker of a solo artist who operates from and outside of amerika. As an expat, she’s quite literally got out of amerika for one thing, but also somehow able to find a way to escape, survive or break free some some cyclical tragedy of culture or history. As if by living through dreams, and making the caterwauling noisy dark punk records, the tapes of girl groups lost to radio static, she was able to find herself, somewhere way out west and up north, up above and beyond the bullshit. She got away, after all. She’s like an astronaut.
Part of the appeal of U.S. Girls’ project, to me, is the desperate, vital and exhilarating joy of survival, escape and transcendence. Remy seemed to have escaped by flying straight into and through her obsessions, obliterating the self. In interviews she’s clear that she sings songs about people almost as characters or stories. Freed from necessarily singing about personal experience. The muffled murmurs and furtive skits and voicemail messages of her earlier records gave way on Heavy Light to clear-eyed, tumbling personal reflections, on, say, “The Most Hurtful Thing”. The effect is musical and choral and also pointing to drama. Remy has been implying she may write a play someday soon.
Remy has often said that her favorite album is the first Suicide LP, and you can tell she’s not just putting on. Her work comes from a very noisy and confrontational place. If her sound has gotten poppier over the last few years, that gesture towards palatability has come with a deliciously dark trade-off. Like the late great Alan Vega, Remy’s vocal stylings are often a red herring for her morbid, brilliant lyrics.
If U.S. Girls has moved towards a clarity of sound, a lightening of purpose, the subject matter of the songs, is now heard much more clearly. The early work of U.S. Girls can be seen as a long night of struggle, and the newer, “poppier” sound could be the break of day so gorgeously depicted on the new LP’s cover art. If this is the dawn, then the message of Meg Remy’s music, and the territory of righteous anger, rage, grief and power that she describes is indeed, a very Heavy light.
As one of the tour t-shirt says:
There is a chthonic vitality to Meg Remy’s work. Symbols of both life and death, emergency and activation. A scary and thrilling and inspiring feeling. All this makes me think of a few other references, such as Snowpony’s brilliant song “A Way to Survive”:
It’s not a matter for discussion But a way to survive: A way to get by First we’ll have a smoke Then we’ll cruise the night sky: The city build on blood Our love built on new lies
And then also this piece by Jenny Holzer:
With regard to so many things, including the pandemic, white supremacist capitalist imperialism, global ecological collapse: we’re not out of the woods yet, right? Personally I almost never remember my dreams. But in the work of U.S. Girls, I see a way out, and that does fill me with joy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this song “Incidental Boogie” which Remy performed in 2017, it was mystifying then and now. A statement of purpose, a story of getting free almost by accident.
This month Meg Remy has a new book out, Begin By Telling. It’s illustrated by the brilliant aforementioned Logan Sibrel and I can’t wait for my copy to arrive.
I’m thrilled to say that this week I will be going on a mini tour, as the opening act for two of my genius friends who have books out right now. Two of the great joys of my life as a writer and as a person are Brontez Purnell and Lauren JohnJoseph. They’ve very generously invited me to open for them at these two star studded events. I will be reading new and different work and hope you will join.
Tuesday March 23 @ 7:30PM EST EXPERIMENTS AND DISORDERS LIVE on ZOOM @ Dixon Place, NYC
Featuring Brontez Purnell, Torrey Peters, Jackie Ess and Max Steele Registration is free, but donations are welcome! Here’s the link for registration. A Zoom link will be sent to you prior to the event.
EXPERIMENTS AND DISORDERS is Curated by Christen Clifford and Tom Cole Fiction, nonfiction, poetry and performance texts by the most adventurous cross-genre established and emerging writers. Dixon Place Literary Programs are generously supported by the Axe Houghton Foundation, Poets and Writers, and donors like you!
Torrey Peters (top left) is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, published by One World/Random House as well as the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She also holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. Torrey rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont. For the past few years, Torrey has been part of a trans literary movement based on trans people sharing their work among each other without barriers.
Brontez Purnell (top right) is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. Recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers for Our Time by T: New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, the co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and, most recently, the documentary Unstoppable Feat: Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for over 18 years.
Jackie Ess (bottom left) is the author of Darryl (CLASH, May 2021), a writer in several forms and under several heteronyms, unified for the moment. So far, her writing has appeared in the Vetch, The New Inquiry, the Zahir, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Peach Mag, and of course Twitter (@jackie_ess), to name a few highlights. Darryl is her first novel. Check out or preorder her novel, Darryl, here or here.
Max Steele (bottom right) is a writer and artist in New York who makes text-based music and performance. He makes the zines Scorcher, Door Girls and HP Magazine and wrote the blog and hosted the reading series FAG CITY from 2006-2017. He was a resident artist at BAX/Brooklyn Artist Exchange and performed at the New Museum, Joe’s Pub, PPOW, Dixon Place, the Knitting Factory, La MAMA, the Poetry Project, and the Queens Museum of Art. He is a junior prose editor at A Gathering of the Tribes, and his newest project is the poetry zine EPSILON b/w VALENCE. Check it out here.
Wednesday March 24th @ 3PM EST (7PM GMT) BEYOND! Writing Queer Lives LIVE on ZOOM @ METAL Peterborough UK
With three events over three weeks, we’ll be talking gender, autofiction, and new transhistorical forms with the queer literati. Please do join us from the comfort of your living room/bed/cupboard under the stairs; it’s all free and it wouldn’t be the same with you, lover!
With host Lauren John Joseph and guests Max Steele & Golnoosh Nour
Max Steele is a writer and artist who makes the zines Scorcher and Door Girls and the blog Fag City. He makes music and performance and his newest zine is EPSILON b/w VALENCE.
Golnoosh Nour is a published poet, prose writer, and lecturer. Her debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published under her then pseudonym, Sogol Sur. Her short story collection The Ministry of Guidance and Other Stories was published in 2020 by Muswell Press.
Lauren John Joseph is the author of the experimental prose volume, “Everything Must Go” (ITNA, 2014), and the plays “Boy in a Dress” and “A Generous Lover” (Oberon, 2019). Their novel, “At Certain Points We Meet”, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2022.
This event will be BSL interpreted. Presented in partnership with METAL and Arts Council England
I’ve always wanted to go on tour. I still want to go on tour in person, it’s probably my biggest dream. I love, really love, being an opening act, too (there’s less pressure). You can still order my newest zine EPSILON here.
Easily the best new song I heard in 2020. I’ve been a big fan of Azita Youssefi’s work for a long time, and this song brilliantly described the last year (for me). It’s from her forthcoming album Glen Echo.
Mina – Il Cielo In Una Stanza
This is a song I’d hear for a while, but just found this really nice video of. I love a song where someone does that thing “screalting”, or the combining two forms of vocalization, screaming and belting. Also quite evocative of 2020, “Sky In a Room”. Suppose I should have used that as the blog post.
US Girls – “4 American Dollars”
Much much more to come on Remy’s latest genius opus, but this song ticked a lot of boxes for me, and when I was able to start running again I listened to it on repeat.
I’ve been doing the Duolingo Mandarin app for a few years, and slowly trying to expand my recognition of the language have been listening to Mandopop. This one is a highlight for me.
It’s Bacurau, the best movie I saw all year long. Big thanks to my friend the brilliant comedian, film critic and writer Max Bernstein for turning me onto it. Scary, utopian, modern and an instant classic.
A bop I hadn’t heard before this year, but stuck in my head for most of it. Again, running in the Parks and listening to this song got me through a lot.
I do this qigong exercise video almost every single work day over the last year. The Baduanjin has been around for a long time, and is beingused in against COVID. It’s also just a nice way to wake up for the day and re-center your body. And the woman sort of reminds me of my grandmother Estelle (Rest in Power, Bubbe).
The new zine is a split 8.5″ with w/ myself. The A-Side is mini-epick about disappointment unrequited love, fantasies and mysticism. B-Side is revenge; getting what you wished for, luxury fashion and the apocalypse. Incl. notes of fruit, nightlife, collapse, memory and biting your own teeth. Atari Midlife Riot. Produced for Bird Girl Records, CA. Recorded 2017-2018; mastered and produced 2020 for Black Friday. Released November 27, 2020
In November 2000 my best friend J and I went from our little suburb of Alameda to downtown San Francisco to participate in what she’d heard was going to be a really cool protest, for Buy Nothing Day. We were 16. When we arrived at Union Square we quickly found the other protestors within the fray of Black Friday shoppers. Standing around waiting for the march to start, a murmur went through the crowd. Someone next to us gestured to a fat older white guy in wraparound shades and baseball cap a few yards away, leaning against the window of a department store. “Pig.” the crust punk next to me said. “Undercover pig– thinks he’s so fucking sneaky. Hey Pig WE SEE YOU!” He screamed at the man, who pretended not to hear. I’d never seen an undercover cop before, I thought they’d be more intimidating. This looked like another soccer dad, just with a very obvious black earphone connected to a wire that ran down the back of his neck. It seemed insulting and ridiculous to have a police listening in on us. As the rally got into formation for a march down Market St. a short woman dressed in black with big 60s sunglasses and a red headband seemed to be in charge. She and J huddled briefly, then waved me over. J turned to me excitedly. “We’re gonna carry the banner, okay?” I was thrilled. Unlike the crusties in dyed black, J and I’d dressed as if going to a party. She wore a leopard print skirt and a long white scarf, and tons of trendy bracelets, I had bright blue hair and a white t-shirt that said Kill Rock Stars in amerikan flag font. Two adorable overly enthusiastic little teenagers; we were definitely virgins and were happy to carry the sign. There’s a photo of it on the Wikipedia page for Buy Nothing Day and in it you can see me carrying the banner which said “STOP SHOPPING / START LIVING / BUY NOTHING”
The next summer, we were 17 on the bus to Gilman talking about heartbreak and revenge. I had recently broken up with my first boyfriend, and was hoping we wouldn’t run into him that night. 924 Gilman Street, the all-ages punk club in Berkeley was my first experience of nightlife. They didn’t serve alcohol but I think back then that smoking was still allowed indoors. Lots of moshing, of course, somewhere between wholesome and grotesque, like sports without the pretense of fitness. The liquor store up the street was iconic, we’d have to find someone over 21 to buy us vodka. We went to Gilman almost every weekend, it felt like a community. Along the wall of the club there’s a row of tables where touring bands sell their merch, but other vendors peddle stuff as well. Food Not Bombs, local labels, people who made patches and buttons with little Anarchist aphorisms. In the relatively sedate and well lit “Stoar” of Gilman, we’d heard people got scabies from sitting on the couch, so we sort of crouched with our feet on it, trying not to let our backs touch the back of the couch.
924 Gilman
J and I determined my ex wasn’t there and I was talking about getting even. She suggested I write a kiss-off song, and even helpfully wrote several lines of excellent lyrics from my perspective. I had another idea, which I tried to convince her to execute with me: a kissing booth at Gilman. I was trying to reverse engineer a situation in which it’d be okay to ask for affection, get paid to dispense it. That was the fantasy, and admittedly not my own.
My friend Amber told me about how when the Need played in San Francisco recently (at an 18+ show I couldn’t go to, unfortunately) there were tour girls on a road trip who set up a kissing booth at the back of the punk show. They charged like $3 for French Kiss and $1 for Emo Style. Sort of cheeky and a cute thing to do at a mostly queer punk sho, in SF where everyone mostly knows each other or are there to meet. I thought this was fantastic; a way of being part of the spectacle of a queer and punk scene without having to learn to play an instrument or perform or something. I could get people to kiss me, I could get them to kiss me in public, be gay with me, and even to be a little bit clever too.
And then the following summer at Yoyo a Gogo in Olympia, a girl my age had a kissing booth at the concessions stand at the Capitol Theater. She was selling regular kisses for one price and another price with pop rocks. I bought the pop rocks one, I was so sad I’d just broken up with my first boyfriend and kissing a girl made me feel very bisexual and affirmative, though she seemed pretty queer herself. The girl turned out to be a local legend, sort of. The way I wish I could be, and I imaged herself like an idealized nominally female version of me; not aristocratic white either trashy or jewish, curly hair freckles and androgynous in a toothsome way. Outgoing and like me played the cello, I’d find out later. She was a twin and had been babysat by all my favorite Riot Grrrl heroines. But paying $3 for it made me feel weird, even as a teenager. I knew I wanted to be on the other side of the transaction.
J interrogated my idea. Would I have mouthwash? What if someone really gross wanted to kiss me? She’d name various crust-punks we’d ran with over the years. I smugly supposed that if they paid, then I would have to kiss them, wouldn’t I? She asked what I would do if Chuck came, and that deflated my idea. My friend Chuck said he had a crush on me and I didn’t want to kiss him. This was really stupid of me, and I came to regret it when he died a few years later at 22, after we’d both moved to NYC.
In 2017, when I was 33, I worked in luxury retail on Black Friday. I’d been obsessed with what I thought the world of fashion could offer me (freedom?), and spent years worming my way into a job in the industry. I’d never worked in sales before and was officially an office administrator, just helping out on the floor when it was busy. We’d all been dreading Black Friday, as it was the beginning of public Sale. What I didn’t know before working in retail was the private sale, or pre-sale, the three weeks leading up to Black Friday, during which treasured, most valued clients can reserve items they’d like to purchase on sale, and we’d take them off the floor and hide them. On Black Friday, we ring them up at whatever nominal discount they get, before letting the public purchase the rest of the merchandise on discount. Ideally, we’d move enough during pre-sale to not have to offer much during public sale. But that year, we had a big party during Black Friday. The crowds lined up down the block to buy things nobody needs at prices nobody can afford. It was so crowded inside the store I couldn’t see across the room.
peanutbuttermjs.wordpress.com 