Studio

RIOT GRRRL

RIOT GRRRL MANIFESTO

BECAUSE us girls crave art records books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways.

BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other's work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other.

BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings.

BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.

BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.

BECAUSE we want and need to encourage and be encouraged in the face of all our own insecurities, in the face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can't play our instruments, in the face of "authorities" who say our bands/zines/etc are the worst in the US and

BECAUSE we don't wanna assimilate to someone else's (boy) standards of what is or isn't.

BECAUSE we are unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary "reverse sexists" AND NOT THE TRUEPUNKROCKSOULCRUSADERS THAT WE KNOW we really are.

BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock "you can do anything" idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.

BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.

BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives.

BECAUSE we see fostering and supporting girl scenes and girl artists of all kinds as integral to this process.

BECAUSE we hate capitalism in all its forms and see our main goal as sharing information and staying alive, instead of making profits off being cool according to traditional standards.

BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.

BECAUSE we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and/or turned against us via the internalization of sexism as witnessed in girl/girl jealousism and self defeating girltype behaviors.

BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.

 "The Riot Grrrl Movement began in the early 1990s by Washington State band Bikini Kill and lead singer Kathleen Hanna.The riot grrrl manifesto was published 1991 in the BIKINI KILL ZINE 2"

Love Letters from a 'Fucking Cunt'

     My Love,

                  I wish I knew how to better articulate my feelings. Unfortunately I am always assuming you know everything I am thinking and feeling and the words that come pouring out of my mouth are like thousands of pounds of garbage filling a landfill much too fast. I am creating an island of trash for me myself and I to inhabit. I am filling my island with stories of which you are already a part, a silver statue of junk that will someday combust due to flying too close to the sun. When all is engulfed in flames I will be the one putting out the fire and saving relics from a forgotten era alive in the present moment. There is magic everywhere and I am not sure if people are blind or just too dumb to see that as all is passing, the trash on the road is composed of folklore too tired to speak, so instead of thriving becomes entombed in the casket of the displaced streets, a time capsule of Atlantis that abides not within the metal carcass of a decaying space ship, but rather within my very own arms where I will tenderly keep all that has found its way to my embrace safe, carrying it with me till death do us part. I  am addicted to lost treasure. I have married myself to trash and the stories it tells. I am in love with forgotten lives because all I want to do is remember. 

               I love you. 

I want my ideals and fantasies to come true, which is why I am happiest when I allow myself to imagine, inspired by the road and driven by a persistence toward carrying out my dreams which I have found become real when I get 'lost.' In order to get my head straight, reflect on all I have thus far collected and to free myself from what had become a burden of obligation, I felt it was necessary to retreat from civilization to the very essence of nature and creation, which was the woods.  

               I was living by a lake that I could not leave because in the morning as the sun rose it broke my heart to see the reflection of fire on water, like a million sparkling flames that rippled with the breeze while wild trout would leap up from the brilliant surface, birthed by the lake, dancing in the air, snapping up mosquitos and plunging back into the water, breaking the sparkling surface to reveal the dark abyss of the lake's endless bottom. I would swim out into the lake's middle each morning until an overwhelming sense of fear would shake through me as I would franticly realize I had swum too far out where the water was cold and dark, when all I had wanted was to reach warmth and light. Getting back to the shore I would lay out on the mossy forest floor and imagine myself growing into the dirt and leaves and sucking up all the elements of the earth, becoming like a tree I would try and feel myself growing up old and wise and strong with a mossy tree beard and a birds nest for a hat. I made paper boats out of the newspaper I had been collecting from each town I would visit (it always amazed me how much the news would change from town to town) and place nuts and twigs and pieces of my hair in them and send them off to sail before becoming soaked with water and pulled down to an inevitable watery grave. I imagined the nuts and twigs and hair becoming part of a primordial soup which I imagined to be the lake, where my delicate strands of DNA could safely co-mingle with the fish and trees and water and air, a part of me going on to live forever there. I embraced the idea of myself as infinity and fearlessly walked the forest making friends with birds and foxes knowing they were all an extension of myself through the perception of sight and sound. I felt wonderfully alone but never lonely. I felt at home and at peace. 

             You too have also been home to me and I am trying to find my way back in the dark. I am exploring new ways to reach you. I am discovering new forms to take to try and get there. I am learning how to stay safe. I am trying to speak different languages. I am disguising myself in funny costumes in order to surprise you. I am trying, with reckless abandon, to build a nest on a cliff that I know has already crumbled, the preservation of memory now my sole concern. When called a 'fucking cunt,' I can only hope to one day be that again to someone who cares enough about love to remember with me what it was once like to become alive. I am hoping that someone is you...

              I know I can't follow you but I can sure as hell try and blaze my own way to try and find.....

US?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

-July 16, 2011

i am free to be loved 

i am free to be hated

i am free to be

i am free!

Displace Displaced Displasia

No Free Lunch

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." -Kafka

Free Our Shapes Sounds Symbols Letters Colors...

Mind Matter Sprouts Substance

 Every thought I have fostered has been germinating through centuries of forgotten peoples populating the earth's freak show to create a circus within the present. A precarious juggling act, Atlas shrugged, and what is dropped today shall be picked up for tomorrow's primordial soup. The future sparkles within the rays of earth's sunshine, spitting up glass mirrors, windows to jump through....

I LEAP IN THE DARK

Toward eyes so bright

 Beacons in the dark

Like a fly circling shit

I am drawn to light

Drawn to my negative

Glowing silver in the dark

My tongue is coming in

And my voice a foreign sound

Taste buds blooming inside

A rotting cavern of decomposing words

Mouth of shit 

Stench so strong it tears down walls

Revealing food for thought

Sweet, sweet energy divine 

Let me be so lucky 

As to lick your skin

Realizing your sticky-sweet

Sugar soaked skin

Tastes of salt and vinegar

Stinging my tongue like acid

I retreat in search of alkaline

To sustain my blood

Blood red as wine

Flesh of my flesh

Why dost thou betray me

Bitting the apple - not the first sin 

But lusting for the scarlet gem 

Hung upon the tree of life

Smelling the fruit pulled from limbs

Ripe and ready to burst

You thirst

And with the bite of life comes the prick of death

Mourning the son while birthing the moon

 Crying lakes of fiery tears 

Spitting flame and bleeding poison out your veins

Placing band-aids on wounds in need of stitches

Your pipes so rusted they bleed gold

Diamonds are rocks that blind from rainbow-rays

And now all that is seen is black

A coal mine covered in soot

Blood diamonds exchanged for caged birds that sing

A world coated in darkness, how, you ask,

Were you to know to run when everyone was 

Stuck in hot tar sidewalks 

Asphalt and plastic

Concrete and glass

Metal machine monsters

Without home

Desolate disturbed despair 

I can not sleep among the wreckage of Atlantis

A lost city of forgotten dreams

Sparkling within the crystal globe

Of glittering guts and glory

Glory hallelujah!

The Saints are marching in

Machine gun marching in

Father Son and Holy Ghost

Gunning them down

Women and children

Gunning them down

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

While they blow bubbles 

And bake bread, burping

Their babies until they turn blue

Mouse on house let all the rats in

Until the city was over-run with vermin

And I am sick

I am sick

Dope sick

Breathing combustible carbon

You like to equate with power

Throwing up neon lights

In patterns of blue yellow green purple and red

And orange

Code orange, to liberate hate,

Throwing up orange out my eyes ears nose

Mouth fingers and toes

Till it soaks my heart and filters through

My mind toward the unknown dimension

Of time eternal

Infinite jest

I will never know the jokers face for he is 

Forever changing

Peeling off masks to reveal

A mirrored reflection of myself

Don't Look Back

Heaven and hell on earth

The Saints are marching in!

Into the sparkle of glittering eyes 

Darkness and light

Cockroaches trailing through shit to pave the way

A field of orange blossoms left behind

Heaven or hell on earth

You decide....