Talking with J. Rivera (6/26/08)

link i found that correlates with my talking with Jason. (scrapbook of punk bands playing in SF)

Punk Venues in SF/Bay Area:

• On Broadway
• Death Pub?
• The Farm (late 80’s)
• 924 Gilman (late 80’s)
• Keystone (late 80’s)
• Fun Terminal – arcade/venue/The Mutants (fritz fox, name of album)
• Ruthie’s Inn (Berkeley)
• Wolfgang’s
• Stargaze (Fremont, 80’s too, I think)
• The Omni (80’s)
• Echo Beach
• Mabuhay
• I Beam

Records/Recording:

• Aquarius/Rather Ripped
• 415 Records

Bands/People:

• Deborah Lyle
• Nyna Napalm Crawford & The VKTMS
• Romeo Voy
• Pearl Harbor and the Explosions (also)
• The Contractions
• The Stirrups (listed here)
• The Readymades
• The Nuns
• Crime (page)
• Mike Ness (social distortion, apt/venue in fullerton)

The Quake Radio station.

Scribbled Notes:

• Translator –> Nights of Keno -> The Fab Mob
• Linden Street Festival
• Stan Ridgeway/Penelope Houston -> Waller Video

Marion Leonard: “Paper Planes: Travelling The New Grrrl Geographies”

(in Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, Routledge, 1998. pp 101-118)

 

Leonard challenges the notions of youth (typically male) sub-cultural activities existing primarily on the street (place) by focusing specifically on the production and distribution of Riot Grrrl zines as a networked operation that exists inside the home – thus the private space of the bedroom “becomes a site of activity”(107). The production of these zines usually involves just “pen+paper+photocopier” and can contain a variety of topics. Typically the distribution for these zines operated in a sort of mailing list fashion – or were distributed at punk shows (106) – and were produced in small editions. In this way the movement attempted to stay underground, not wanting popular media to represent them or their views. By not being sold publicly these distribution methods encouraged forms of engagement with the zine and their writers [also meants national/international participation: ie not bound by ones location…and this reminds me of online social networks…]. (108) Leonard mentions this regarding e-zines: “Whilst the e-zine has the potential to reach a very wide audience, it does so at the loss of individuality, lacking the personal qualities of paper zines.” (103) Leonards analysis involves examining zines’ as an alternative space for interaction and expression qualities and quotes many of the zines themselves revealing the way the zines were used to insert female, individual voice into history, the scene and contemporary displays of fashion and beauty. “By writing themselves into the text, through relating personal experiences and concerns, riot grrrls have expanded the discursive parameters of the fanzine.” (107) These differences existing in each zine is celebrated by Leonard as it complicates traditional notions of youth subcultures, especially via the lack of a central location and a “unified progression.” (111) The existence of the many pages about riot grrrl on the internet is, in Leonards explanation, a further complication of any “notions of a unified community” [this is tres obvious if one just googles “riot grrrl”] and in contrast to physical zines, the WWW is a space where a certain amount of anonymity is present and thus allows for an open space for women to discuss/express themselves.  (113)

“Using riot grrrl as a case study it will consider how a sub-culture can maintain a sense of ‘community’ when its participants do not meet in the collective space of a club or music venue, but are broadcast over a wide geographical area. This chapter will argue that sub-cultures should not be considered unified groups tied to a locality, creed or style but as dynamic, diverse, geographically mobile networks.” (101)

things she mentioned & i learned about riot grrrl:

1. most members decided to be straight edge (102)
2. many older women did identify with the movement (102)
3. “Riot grrrl is a feminist network which developed in the underground music communities of Olympia, Washington, and Washington, D.C.”
4. “..Kathleen Hanna, singer for Bikini Kill, states that the name ‘riot grrrl’ was inspired in 1991 by the Mount Pleasant riots in Washington, D.C.” (102)
5. “During that time, Jean Smith, a woman we know who’s a writer and musician, said something like, ‘We need a girl riot, too”….At the same time, Allison and Molly from Bratmobile were also in DC, and they heard this and said, “We’re going to start a fanzine called Riot Grrrl”. (Hanna, quoted in Juno, 1996:97-98)” (103)
6. “Zine” is a shortened form of “Fanzine” (earlier: science fiction enthusiasts, later: punk fanatics) (103)
7. “Sara, writer of Out of the Vortex, comments: ‘Only by controlling the medium do we control the message….for this reason zines are extraordinarily unique and powerful political tools’ (quoted in Vale, 1996: 168)” (105)
8. 1992 – National Press creates a disruption in the underground nature of riot grrrl (109)
9. “Those involved in riot grrrl stress that no one viewpoint or cultural product (be it a zine or record) can be taken as representative or indicative of the whole.” (110) Here Leonard offers the description of riot grrrl as “multiplicitous” and continues from this notion of multiplicity into the comparison of Deleuze and Guattari’s “notion of a rhizome”. She concluded by examining the nature of riot grrrl on the internet and relates the many many offshoots of using the term riot grrrl (or just grrrl) back to the rhizome.
10. riot grrrl mostly consisted of middle-class white women

“In spatial terms, Deleuze and Guattari ally the rhizomatic network with a map: ‘the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998:21)” (116)

Resources to Consider:

M. Brake The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures: Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll?

L. Code Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations

Deleuze & Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

A. Juno Angry Women in Rock, Volume One

V. Vale Zines! Volume One

P. Willis Profane Culture

 

Book: Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

read asap. link.

also look into Verso publishers (esp. as opposed to Routledge)

 

Cultural Movements: Dada & Riot Grrrl

What is interesting here is the sound component, which is technically “experimental” in the way that music shifts from being something melodic to a technology of style and opposition to the ‘norm’.

Dada: Kurt Schwitters did lots of interesting sound experimentations. Even if it was just recorded poetry. “African music and Jazz was common at Dada gatherings”

Riot Grrrl: The sound is punk, with a 1990’s feminist spin. Extrapolating punks roots in the late 60’s/70’s, I think Hebdige would say that a large part of forming the culture/sound that is/was punk is the rastafarianism and reggae movements that were a part of the working class (generalized demographic) Black London culture of the time. 

“The fundamental lack of fit between these two languages (dress, dance, speech, music, drugs, style, history) exposed in the emergence of black ethnicity in reggae, generates a peculiarly unstable dynamic within the punk subculture. This tension gave punk its curiously petrified quality, its paralysed look, its ‘dumbness’ which found a silent voice in the smooth moulded surfaces of rubber and plastic, in the bondage and robotics which signify ‘punk’ to the world. For, at the heart of the punk subculture, forever arrested, lies this frozen dialectic between black and white cultures – a dialectic which beyond a certain point (i.e. ethnicity) is incapable of renewal, trapped, as it is, within its own history, imprisoned within its own irreducible antinomies.” 

-Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 69-70

Dick Hebdige …Punk & DaDa

“Like Andre Breton’s Dada, punk might seem to ‘open all the doors’ but these doors ‘gave onto a circular corridor’ (Breton, 1937).”

“Once inside this circle, punk was forever condemned to act out alienation, to mime its imagined condition, to manufacture a whole series of subjective correlatives for the official archetypes of the ‘crisis of modern life’: the unemployment figures, the Depression, the Westway, Television, etc. Converted into icons (the safety pin, the rip, the mindless lean and hungry look) these paradigms of crisis could live a double life, at once fictional and real.”

–Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 65

Ednie Kaeh Garrison on Riot Grrl/SubCulture Technologies

“Recognizing youth (sub)cultures as political spaces and refusing to separate political consciousness from subcultural formations, I argue that the convergence of music, print, and information technologies, the historical specificities of backlash and post-civil rights movements, and feminist conscousness raising multiplies the cultural locations where political activities can occur in the Third Wave.”

–U.S. Feminism-GRRRL Style! Youth (Sub) Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave (p 142)

Topic Development: A general reiteration of some thoughts…

Topic: Cultures of Rebellion: Art and Music in Urban Culture

Smith is interested in how subcultures matter politically, socially and culturally. She is interested in thinking about the relation between subcultures and cultures of rebellion in the 1960s and 70s and today, and exploring the possibilities that subcultures find a space of action and effectiveness in a space between art and political economy. She is working to narrow her focus, to think about Situationist actions, graffiti, music.