If you delve into the archival folders of your computer, you (if you’re me), find the darndest things.

In a Word document, all by itself on the page, just this sentence:

Avoid reference to an adult female as girl; to women collectively as the distaff side; or the fair sex; to a wife as the little woman; to a female college student as a coed; to an unmarried woman as bachelor girl; spinster; or old maid.

In a folder labeled FRAGMENTARY which is housed in a folder labeled CANADA SEPTEMBER 2002. What was I trying to tell myself? It’s like sifting through someone else’s subconscious.

I miss writing about pop culture. Once upon a time it was all I did all day long and it was grand. Today I go back to my roots on the Huffington Post.

While writing this post, “When the Soundtrack Is Better Than the Movie,” I had this sensation that I hadn’t had since writing for Girls On. Like writing editorial about entertainment could be fun and funny and in some small way important. Because it was diverting and it made you laugh and agree and disagree and it was a respite and it didn’t make you feel that dirty for that long for not focusing your energies on far worthier causes. Like monks being killed in Burma. Which makes writing about movie soundtracks seem…a tad insignificant.

The Girls On writers were phenomenal. I wasn’t even a founder of the site–I arrived after the original Girls had departed and we had just been bought by Oxygen and the whole thing was a late-Internet era dream project and in the blink of an eye it was over. But we did some amazing stuff. I remember the Judy Blume Retrospective, where all the writers chose their favorite Judy Blume books and wrote about reading them as teens and then again in their 20s. I remember the first piece I wrote when I started my job, a review of that TV trainwreck Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, and how it was 1000 words too long and totally OTT but it was funny so we ran it anyway (maybe minus 500 words). That was the thing. If it made us laugh, it ran.

Now there are zillions of entertainment sites and every mainstream newspaper has its media critics online and we’re not the blazing funny-lady pioneers we once were. But it was actually a Girls On writer who hooked me up with the HuffPost to begin with, specifically to write about entertainment, which I plan to do far more frequently if I can manage to figure out how the posting system works and I can manage to get my mitts on some preview screeners of Gossip Girl. Or at least watch it when it airs.

Sleater-Kinney’s busting up. I’m not sad about it, because while it was my inclination to write that this was sad news, I think there are much more urgent things to be sad about, should one be inclined to be sad. (One is not, for the record, looking for things to be sad about. That’s just masochistic.)

I would like to go on record as one of the band’s trillion once-obsessed fans. The tracks “Dig Me Out” and “Call the Doctor” on repeat took me through more than one dark night of the s
oul. Seeing them play live was divine. I actually bought a SK t-shirt at their Irving Plaza show in 2000 even though I do not buy band t-shirts, having learned my lesson after spending a mint on several hideous and cheap knee-length crapster-tees in high school, including Erasure, Squeeze, The Cure and a red-and-green Sting number (I went to a Sting concert?) that had a giant airbrushed Sting-head surrounded by what I can only remember as a the-holly-and-the-ivy Christmas motif. Criminal. The only t-shirt I bought that I wish I still had is the black “Death to the Pixies” shirt with Frank Black depicted as a baby all curled in fetal position. I made two friends in college simply by wearing that shirt. It attracted the right element. Maybe I can find it on eBay. Maybe I have banned myself from eBay because every time I get on there I end up with some shitty “vintage” glass tumblers that are sitting collecting dust in the cabinet, like so many hideous Sting-head tees. (Update.)

Revenons à nos moutons. A million years ago when “All Hands on the Bad One” came out, I interviewed Sleater-Kinney for my dearly departed Girls On. I took photos of them and giggled like a Japanese Prime Minister at Graceland and asked them a bunch of generic questions that they chose from a pack of cards that I’d put together for the purpose of conducting fast Proust-questionnaire-style celebrity interviews:

Takes Five With…Sleater Kinney
Five Minutes. Five Questions. Make it snappy.

by Melissa Kirsch
August 2000
 
What’s the last book you read that really floored you?

Corin: Right now I’m reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
I had such a liberal arts education that I never read some of the
classics. It’s really great for me to go back now when I have time to
read things that have really influenced literature. It’s such a really
interesting, fascinating portrait of people and how they work with each
other. 

Who are your heroes, both living and dead?  Who do you most admire?

Carrie: Some authors I admire for their philosophical approaches: James Baldwin—he was really involved in the Civil Rights movement and wrote a lot of great books like Go Tell It on the Mountain or Notes of a Native Son. I think that NPR had an archival interview with him. He was a really incredible man for not only having really strong convictions and really doing a lot in terms of issues of race in our country, but also issues, like queer rights. He was a really powerful speaker in a really metaphorical and complex way. I always go back to him, every couple months, as someone to be inspired by.

Presidential debates, genetically-engineered tomatoes, high school violence? What current event has got your attention?

Corin: Ladyfest is being organized for Olympia,
Washington August 1-6. It highlights women’s bands, music, politics,
art, film. A friend of mine who was involved in the original Riot Grrl
stuff organized it after we were interviewed together for a historical piece for Riot
Grrl. The women who are involved with that now are ten years older than
they were, and we were just talking about how we really should do
something, all of us here together. So my friend got the people
together, got the ball rolling, getting all these bands together,
getting all these people coming out. We’re having women doing all
the organzing—it’s all women-run and open to everyone. The proceeds are
going to non-profit organizations, mostly.

You’re 85 years old. Where are you living? Are you still working in the same industry? What’s your ideal scenario?

Janet: I’ll probably still be living in Portland, and maybe I’ll
be playing the accordion with old folks…I imagine I’ll be playing music
of some sort, but I hope to have a much calmer lifestyle by then. This
is a difficult lifestyle to sustain for 45 years, but I think music
will always be a part of my life.

 
What would you tell women in their 20s who have read every interview
with you in other magazines, adore your work, and want to know
something about you that no interviewers have ever asked?

Carrie: I think sometimes, people ask this but then have a
hard time relaying it. I think the complexity of us as people. In
journalism, what the audience requires is a really succinct description
of people or a really easy category to put them in. We always try to
come across as anybody would, which is as someone with contradictions,
who makes mistakes, and goes forward and goes backwards, and has a life
that isn’t just linear. Things come around—it’s kind of more cyclical.
Us as people—we’re three individuals who make up a band. We each have
complexities and contradictions that don’t come across when people are
trying to pigeonhole us.

What’s a project you’€™d love to work on but haven’t had the chance?

Janet: This is really the only project I want to be doing. I think we all have a lot of choices open, but we choose to do this.

Back in the day when I reviewed everything under the sun and moon for Citysearch, I wrote this. I knew I’d sat through a cringe-worthy account of the Beat era before. I anticipate Hettie Jones’ book to be far less irritating.

DATE: May 12, 2003

TITLE: -1 (Minus One)

WRITTEN BY: Gyavira Lasana

DIRECTED BY: David Willinger

THEATER: Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, New York, NY

A reheated tale of racial tensions in 1950s Greenwich Village.

Talking ‘Bout a Revolution
On the eve of the American Civil Rights Movement, we meet black poet and activist Leo Lepard. Lepard is searching for the lesser of two evils between his white school chums, who consider themselves counter-cultural because they “smoke tea” and date “spades,” and the equally dicey Uncle-Tomming black establishment that would like to use him as their propagandist mouthpiece. Radical, and increasingly violent, racial politics beckon, and Lepard heeds the call.

Play à Clef
Minus One is based on the early career of LeRoi Jones, better known as Amiri Baraka, controversial New Jersey Poet Laureate. Shannon Bryant turns in a fine performance as the beleaguered beatnik, but the script is a stale version late 1950s American history, so oft-portrayed it’s become almost cliché. The sets don’t help matters—Theater for the New City offers a spacious stage, but the space is woefully underused.—Melissa Kirsch

If you’ve been to my apartment in the past six months, you’ve witnessed a terrifying demolition project going on outside my window. Four buildings have been torn down to make way for a luxury hotel that hasn’t been approved by the city but seems to be going up apace. In the midst of the rubble stands one lone building, gutted on the bottom two floors but with tenants on the top two.

In the morning I drink my coffee and watch the women in the windows with their windchimes and orchids and flora drink their own coffee, all of us peering out into the the pit of destruction below.

So, this being NYC, a city where I can see Bob Kerrey at the coffee shop last week followed by unscripted personalities dining al fresco and then just today Nicholas Kristof and his family on the subway to Queens, it turns out that one of the two tenants refusing to be bought out of the crooked little building two feet away is none other than legendary writer and feminist Hettie Jones, former wife of LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, aka severely rabble-rousing Beat poet/former poet laureate of New Jersey.

Tonight I accosted her on the sidewalk outside my building and thanked her for resisting the buyout offers (the hotel will have to be built around her building because she’s not giving up the loft where she’s lived forever, evidently a haven for the Beats when she lived there with LeRoi). I told her I was a poet and she asked my name and I did that thing people do when in the presence of people they admire, I said I wasn’t famous like she was and she said “Well, that’s okay! One day you will be!” and I think now why did I take a neighbor-to-neighbor moment and turn it into an idol-worship one, but anyway she was so kind and said “You should read my book, How I Became Hettie Jones, because it tells the story of everyone and everything that went on in that apartment!”

She also said I should wave to her when I see her in the window, probably a little freaked out that I admitted I’ve been watching her across the abyss for a decade.

So I was reading up on her and found this tremendous interview with her and Joyce Johnson who I’ve always adored (Read In the Night Cafe and Minor Characters if you haven’t already.) And now I feel it’s essential that I stop not knowing enough about Hettie Jones. Check it out:

How did your group contribute to the women’s movement at that time?

Jones: By physically taking a stand, rather than
intellectually, or through any particular writing. Simply by saying,
“Okay, I’m going to live on my own. I’m going to acknowledge that I am
a sexual being and I’m going to have sex and I’m going to practice
birth control. I’m going to be a responsible person comparable to a
man-I’m going to live what is generally regarded as a man’s life. I’m
going to have my own apartment and I’m going to have a job and I’m
going to be self-supporting.” Even among the young women I knew who
were slightly younger than I, all this was really considered an
accomplishment. You just weren’t supposed to leave home until you got
married and already lived under another man’s hand...

Also, clothing! Young women today don’t have any
idea of the discomfort. I always talk about this when I make
speeches-that to take off your girdle was a radical move-first came the
girdle and then came the bra-but to take off your girdle! Ah! And be
able to think and walk and move without feeling blistered all the time.
To acknowledge that you could have an ass. And to wear pants!

Now, the 7am construction and imminent loss of light and privacy seem somehow part of something larger Well, maybe I’m trying to put a glossier sheen on a bad jackhammer situation, but maybe this is a wake-up call. Maybe this is the clarion call urging me to stop reading memoirs of coke-addicted art fraudsters and spoiled socialite spawn and actually read something historically relevant and inspiring.

Hey, remember cursive? C & P and I spent about an hour hooting and chortling as we covered a paper tablecloth with that weird little pi-symbol “r,” that insane lowercase “z,” the impossible curlicues of capital “G” and “D.” Remember that paper with two solid lines and one dotted line in the middle? Does anyone “write in cursive” anymore?

Ahahaaahaaahaaa!! I love it. I order you to go write your name in cursive right now. Now write my name. Now make that ridiculous “Q.” That “Q”!!!!