Like many women, I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with makeup and beauty products. I was raised by two parents who were firmly against them–my mom wore no makeup and warned me against its addictive nature (‘Once you start wearing it you won’t be able to stop…’) and my dad frequently let me know the beauty industry was out to suppress and oppress women, and my purchasing and using makeup and beauty products would mean I was falling their prey.

I respected (and respect) them both greatly, and the truth is, they were in some ways very right. But I’m an incredibly curious person and another member of my family, one of my aunts, is a model and actress. Besides being physically beautiful, she’s one of the most wonderful people I know, so I respected (and respect) her, too. I relished going into her bathroom and examining what seemed dozens of jars of sparkling dust in titillating colors, rows of brushes poised and propped elegantly, bottles of sweet smelling perfume. To my parents chagrin or not, once I turned 13, she started giving me really nice makeup as birthday and Christmas gifts. So began my journey.

Over the years I have called into question my use of makeup and the construction of my physical self quite a bit. There is no denying that a woman is perceived very differently depending on her use of makeup and beauty products, and that it gets not only expensive but time consuming, pulling women out of other more potentially cerebral projects. But I also don’t think using makeup/constructing one’s appearance is necessarily negative or wasteful. Rather, I’ve discovered that the subject is fascinating, incredibly layered, and pulls so many issues around gender, identity, sexuality, labor and capitalism along with it.

I recently came across writer Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s really interesting project, The Beheld, a blog dedicated to the exploration of beauty and what it means. I asked her if she’d be willing to let me ask her some questions on the subject, to which she kindly said yes, and provided some really great responses.

Rebekkah: Thanks so much for talking with me and RADAR! How did you first get interested in taking on beauty as an intellectual project?

Autumn: I became friendly with the TNI team through a friend who edits there, and when I did my month-long mirror fast he asked me if I’d like to write an essay for them about it; the blog entry I used to draw on the final essay [which is here: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-mirror-slave-dialectic/] was more conventionally intellectual than what I normally do. So when TNI was mapping out their relaunch and asked me to be on their blogger roster, my first thought was that they’d be disappointed–it’s not like most of my blog posts quote Hegel! But the more I read TNI and learned about their ethos, the more I saw how committed they were to considering gender not as a special women’s issue, but as a way of understanding how the world works. Without considering gender we can’t fully consider labor issues, or politics, or philosophy.By asking me to syndicate The Beheld at The New Inquiry, they were demonstrating that a blog that treated beauty as a serious topic had a valid place in a larger conversation–and the best part is that the team there wasn’t looking at it as some sort of big feminist-progressive step to have a beauty blog there. I don’t necessarily consider myself a political blogger, but contextualized, much of what I do indeed becomes that. I also liked that TNI wasn’t doing some tokenism thing–about half the bloggers are female, and it’s not like what I’m doing there is relegated to some special ladycorner. I’m a big believer in spaces directly targeting women, but unless women are a part of the broader conversation we’re not going to get anywhere.

Autumn: I’m nearly finished with Linda Grant‘s The Thoughtful Dresser, which Terri Lowry of Rags Against the Machine recommended to me. It’s a fantastic look at the ways in which fashion matters–it looks at the role of fashion in, say, times of catastrophe and women’s emancipation, but it’s more of an essay collection than a historical view of fashion. I’m actually glad I didn’t read it before I started The Beheld because it’s so wonderful that I could see myself subconsciously attempting to mimic Grant–it’s just a lovely read. Also, I pretty much always have Susan Sontag’s On Photography or John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in my bag. I’ve read them both several times but I feel like I have much to continue to learn from those two texts.
Rebekkah: What issues are you really interested in tackling or exploring more deeply, both with The Beheld and otherwise?

Autumn: I use “beauty labor” to mean any of the work women–I consider it specific to women, though I know men have their equivalents–do that goes beyond hygiene and grooming and that has the intent of enhancing our appearance. Running a brush through your hair isn’t necessarily beauty labor, but styling it is. But what I’m actually more interested in is what I call “emotional beauty labor”: the constant vigilance women pay to how we look, in ways that go beyond making sure our lipstick is on right. Emotional beauty labor is that feeling of, “I need to make sure my lipstick is on right”; it’s the near-desperate urge to find a mirror to make sure everything is as it should be. Emotional beauty labor is carrying yourself in a certain way when you’re dressed well, or poorly; it’s the knowledge that by being a woman in public, you’re being looked at, and the ways that knowledge affects us in ways we probably can’t imagine. Emotional beauty labor is sensing that someone is admiring your appearance and changing your affect–however slightly or subconsciously–because of it. Emotional beauty labor can be playing the role of the pretty girl, or of rejecting it. I think much of the time emotional beauty labor is a burden, but I also don’t want to neatly cap it as just “Oh, it’s insecurities.” Yes, insecurity can drive some emotional beauty labor–but so can flirting, or feeling beautiful, or feeling dutiful. It needs examination.

Autumn: The biggest surprise I had was that I quickly found out that I didn’t want to let go of the artifice of beauty–rather, I quickly learned that my instinct to engage with that artifice wasn’t something that must be overcome. Before starting The Beheld I was much more binary in my thinking about beauty: I knew I felt fascinated by it, but I wrestled with feeling ashamed of that fascination because all that was fluff, right? And beauty labor was a way of trying to not feel bad about the way I looked, right? But once I started formally interviewing other women and articulating more of my own thoughts on beauty, I realized that wasn’t the case much of the time. For example, I began to see my use of makeup not just as a daily nod to the patriarchy–which it is, in part, I admit–but as a way of defining my public face to the world, and of articulating how I wish to be seen.

I feel more passionately about the articulation of femininity and gender than I did before starting The Beheld. I’m working now on seeing the diversity of how femininity is expressed by different people–how someone who isn’t what you’d call “girly” might express her femininity, if being female feels like an important part of her identity. Perhaps there are some people for whom their sex doesn’t feel terribly relevant to their identity–it feels enormously relevant to me, and I know ways that plays out in my self-presentation, but I want to know more about how it plays out with other people. One of my favorite interviews was with Kelli Dunham, a wonderful boi comic and founder of Queer Memoir. She identifies as butch, a boi, and she doesn’t really perform femininity. But as she put it, “A new haircut is a butch accessory.” So what I would call beauty work was still a part of her gender expression. She was rejecting traditional beauty work but it wasn’t entirely absent either, and that illuminated for me how a binary way of looking at beauty work wasn’t going to be helpful. *

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano began her writing career in New York as an intern for Ms. Magazine. She’s since had an extensive reach as a freelance writer, her essays having appeared in Marie Claire, Salon, and Glamour. Her work in copy–editing beauty pieces for women’s magazines led to the creation of the Thoughts on a Word series, in which she examines the etymology and usage of words used to describe women’s appearance, as well as The Beheld.  She has also just become a regular blogger for The New Inquiry.

Your Favorite Cookbook  
My old-reliable favorite cookbook is Vegan With a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz even though I’m not vegan anymore. I think it’s because it’s one of those cookbooks that has a lot of anecdotes between the recipes which I used to think were really boring, but now in my old age kind of love. When I’m really stressed about why-the-fuck-is-the-Uhaul-website-down, I can just imagine all of the seitan I’m going to make in my new kitchen and bliss out.

Below is an article I wrote for a recovery-themed web site. After pitching some topics at them, we settled on a personal essay about being queer in Alcoholics Anonymous. I knew this was somewhat controversial, but the taboo being broken was anonymity – a guiding philosophy of AA that has been recently questioned by younger, urban members of of the program. While protecting the anonymity of other members of AA is obviously super important, it has always confused me that I can’t be honest on a public level about being a member of AA. As a writer I have written A LOT about getting wasted. Now I find myself with almost nine years of continuous sobriety, and being unable to write or speak honestly about how that happened is not only personally frustrating, I think it sends a dangerous and false message to anyone with a drug or alcohol problem looking for inspiration to get sober. Unable to talk/write about AA, it looks like I just ‘got sober’ – like, on my own, through my very own will power, which most alcoholics find impossible. It was certainly impossible for me – on my own, my sobriety was a heartbreaking succession of brief triumphs and baffling failures. It wasn’t til I got into AA and learned about what it really is to be an alcoholic that I was able to stay sober. I can say with 100% certitude that I wouldn’t be sober today if not for AA, and it’s also my opinion that 99% of people trying to get sober outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous will not be able to do it. The odds are grim for alcoholics in any case – AA has the highest rate of sustained sobriety than any other method, yet even in AA the majority of people who try it will not stay sober. With such a lousy hope for recovery, why not go with the program with the best results is my thought. So, that’s why I’m choosing to override AA’s tradition of personal anonymity, knowing that a lot of people within the program are going to think it’s shitty. Here’s an article that elaborates on the current trend toward forgoing anonymity in AA.

I wrote my article about being a queer person in AA without really knowing what would come out. I sat down and followed some ideas and what I got was the essay below, which didn’t get published on the recovery web site in spite of the editor saying it was ‘great — incredibly well written, full of excellent points and so very different from anything we’ve done before.’ Because I speak about having been a pretty strong man-hater in the past, and because I briefly site some reasons why women might become man-haters (in case no one is paying attention to, um, life), the editor wanted me to add that I know some ‘wonderful men’, – I guess to make the (male?) reader feel less threatened by the piece. I pushed back, saying it is a pet peeve of mine that when making a strong critique of maleness in our culture, a woman has to then give soothing pats to whatever ego might have gotten stung. It goes without saying that I know a ton of great men. If I was writing an article about awesome men, I’d tell you all about it. But I wasn’t, I was talking about misogyny, and the insertion of someone else’s opinion into the piece felt insulting. The editor responded that she and her editorial director were adamant about just a single sentence that assured the reader that I know some wonderful men, otherwise the piece sounds ‘a bit hysterical.’ Anyone who took an Intro to Women’s Studies class ever knows that hysterical is the word that gets slapped on women who speak out about the state of women in the world. It is so ridiculous and Victorian it’s astounding that it would still be used, today, by editors trying to lighten the harshness of a feminist critique.

I added the sentence. I wanted the $200! Most blogs pay $0 – 50, so this was sort of a cool assignment. But it sat very badly with me, and I got very resentful that an angry feminist just can’t be all angry about it every now and then, when there is so very much to be angry about. The ‘hysteria’ accusation sat especially ickily, hysteria being the Victorian malady that afflicted only women and was often treated (see above) by the visit of a vibrator-wielding doctor who gave the discontented lady an orgasm because, as many women upset by sexism, they just need a good fuck. Probably Victorian women did need a good fuck, but I bet they’d still be pissed about misogyny. As many alcoholics know, resentment is very hurtful to one’s sobriety, so I pulled the piece, started a thread of Facebook about women writers needing to console men in their writing and people of color being pushed into saying that ‘not all white people are bad’ in critiques of racism, and felt pretty awesome about my decision. Anyway, here is the essay!

Oh – and when you Google Image ‘hysterical’ one of the sub-categories is ‘hysterical woman’! And when you search ‘hysterical woman’ the sub-categories are: ‘screaming woman’ ‘angry woman’ ‘crazy woman’ ‘crying woman’ and ‘sobbing woman.’

I had a Mexican friend who had to stop going to a particular AA meeting because of too many white guys sharing about running with Mexicans as part of their bottom, as if they’d been fed a steady diet of 70s-era cops-and-robbers shows depicting Mexicans and other brown people as criminal elements and were unable to shake it from their skulls. My city, San Francisco, is teeming with Mexican people not doing drugs with bottoming-out white guys, but it only goes to show where these particular honky alcoholics had been spending their time. It bummed me out so hard to hear my friend’s grievance, though I know not why—eight years in the rooms of AA have shown me that alcoholism does strike a baffling cross-section of humanity. Nice, smart people and ignorant buttholes can all become alcoholics—and then become well in AA. It’s just that some people’s “well” is more well than others. As my sage ex-sponsor-in-law once said, “In AA, you sometimes hear about alcoholism, and sometimes you hear…alcoholism.”

I try to remember this when I hear an equivalent tale shared during AA drunkalogues—and then I was hanging out with, well, Transsexuals! In the Tenderloin! Such shares aren’t common but they’re not rare, either, and when I hear them my stomach drops and my ears get hot and I send kill vibes at the guy speaking, then spend the rest of the meeting silently tormented about if I should say something (No Cross Talk!) or let it slide (Coward!) I know that, since I have a lot of trans friends I’m more sensitive to this than most people but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that more people aren’t sensitive. With all the trans-visibility in pop culture during the past years, the one that seemed to really stick is “hot tranny mess,” a phrase I’ve never heard put forth by a trans person but one which resonates with our contemporary archetype of the fucked-up trans woman, teetering around in her heels with her wig askew. Or something.

In San Francisco, the Tenderloin is a neighborhood populated with immigrant families from Southeast Asia and South America, poor white and black people, a multicultural bouquet of young people renting the cheap apartments, and transsexual women. And yes, a lot of the trans women are prostitutes, and a lot of them have drug and alcohol problems. You might be a prostitute, too, if no one would hire you because you’re transsexual. And you’d probably have a drug and alcohol problem, too, if you were among the class of people most likely to die from violence—a demographic that deals with intense street harassment on the daily; a people whose condition often requires medical intervention not covered by insurance. That is, if you could get a job with insurance, or a job at all. I turned tricks and drank and used heavily in situations not nearly as stressful as these.

I came into AA a paranoid, man-hating queer, and one of the most transformative affects the program has had on me has been relieving me of my man-hate. The world sure didn’t change—if you feel like hating men, there are always a hundred million facts and figures to keep you secure in your stance. I actually think hating on men can be a normal and healthy stage for women to go through—most all women I know have been fucked over majorly by sexism and misogyny, and we’re bullied into seeing these obvious societal patterns as isolated incidents. But if one out of six women have dealt with a rape or attempted rape, how many men out there are rapists? That’s a statistic we don’t get.

Like all unhealthy coping mechanisms, my man hating served its purpose for a moment but by the time I came into AA, it had turned against me as harmfully as drinking. It was holding me back in my intimate relationships, holding me waaaaaay back in the world at large, and it was hurting my heart. It doesn’t feel good to hate people. In AA, I listened to men that had suffered badly. I watched men cry as they spoke about how they struggled today. I heard men confess how sick their hearts and minds had been, and inside those confessions were sometimes real sorrow at how they had treated women, or regarded queer people.

I always knew sexism and homophobia hurt straight men as much as anyone, but you rarely get an opportunity to see that. In AA, where men were desperate and vulnerable, I saw it.

All this contributes to why I get so pissed when I hear guys elaborate on their bottoms with tales of trans women. I have seen how working the program can really raise consciousness, and it feels like such a fail when people aren’t able to regard the women they spent their bottoms with as addicts just like them, and addicts with perhaps fewer resources than the average addict—if you consider trans phobia in the rooms to be a barrier, and I do.

I’ve heard a lot of people in AA speak out against the idea of labeling those we spent our darkest days with as “lower companions”—those rotten, morally bankrupt, tainted people we had around us when our real friends had fled.  Obviously, we were all someone’s “lower companion” at the height of our debauch; to think otherwise is totally arrogant. Before calling out the sort of folks you were hanging in the gutter with, it may be worthwhile to pause to recall that someone was probably slumming it with you.

Yeah! I wrapped it all up at the end with a nice little moral! Cause that’s what you do in magazine writing! Okay, thank you and good night.

“You qualify for a free scalp and hand massage at your appointment today,” the receptionist at the hair salon told me. “Lisa will get you started. Follow me right this way.”

She motioned her long fingers, and I followed the swoosh of her dress to a room in the back where I was laid in a reclining chair. Lisa was already there waiting for me.

“So, what type of scented oil would you like for the massage? We have vanilla, grapefruit, jasmine, sandalwood or lemon grass.”

“Vanilla.”

Lisa put herself to work right away, lifting my hair into the bowl behind me, running her oiled hands through the strands, then moving her fingers back and forth along my scalp.
I could see the crux of her armpit as her hands moved over my head and I could smell the light scent of her perfume. I watched the line by her ear where her concealer ended, leaving slightly lighter skin. She was wearing a dress with a flowered skirt and a gold belt. She didn’t speak to me, remaining completely focused on her task.

Once she had finished with my hair, she lifted the chair forward and asked me to hold out one of my arms.

“Vanilla still?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Once I was upright, I started to look at the other women in the salon. Two women were seated to my right, also receiving their complimentary massage treatments. The expressions on their faces were pleasant and relaxed, lots of half smiles.  The women working on their arms and heads were like Lisa, brisk and business-like but all well dressed and coiffed.

“I had the Brazilian blowout treatment at this one salon,” I heard a woman across the room, who was having her hair trimmed, say to the stylist working on her. “It was a nightmare.”

“Really? Where? Can you tell me the name of this salon?”

The place smelled of slightly burnt hair and the intermingling of different perfumes and shampoos. It struck me fully at that moment that I was seated in a room full of all women, women bent over one another, women all working in one way or another for beauty and maintenance and validation.
For a moment, I smiled at this thought, placing it in the context of positive communal experience and embracing the pleasure of having warm, soft hands rubbing mine, of being made beautiful, of being in the presence of beautiful women.

But I felt and always feel a sharp twinge of resistance to this somehow. An edge seems to exist in all these places that pricks. Every compliment—“What a great pair of boots—where did you get those? But I could never wear them anyway, I’m too old now….”—“You have such beautiful hair– and the color! What do you use? You don’t color it? It’s natural? I hate you. I would kill to have a natural color like that”—contains a bit of violence and self-loathing.

I have never been in a salon, or women’s clothing store, or make up counter, and not heard self-deprecating comments from women of all ages, shapes and sizes.

Last year, I went to a swanky, women-only “Clothing Swap.”.

There was a bar at the event and they served sweet sugary drinks in childlike pink and peach colors. The bartenders were all women in corsets with bright pink lip gloss and bleached blonde hair that had been curled into sticky looking ringlets. They asked: “What would you like, honey?”

There was a huge tapestry draped over the top of the bar featuring a rendering of a beautiful, leggy woman in a black leotard with slits cut out along the sides of her ribs. She was wearing strappy black stilettos and was lying on a bear skin rug with her back arched. Her long, black hair was draped alongside of her, bangs covering part of her eye and face. She was holding a martini glass and had one long, milky white leg bent upward, the other stretched out along the white fur of the rug.

“That’s what I look like every night when my husband comes home,” my friend joked, gesturing her peach filled glass towards the tapestry. “More like I’m wearing sweats and my hair is a disaster.”

I stood with my drink in hand, listening to the sound of all the high heels sliding across the marble floors, watching heavily manicured hands delve into piles of dresses, seeing slick, dyed heads of hair snap back and forth.

Many men have said to me: “Don’t you get it? Women have all the power.”

But it’s not women themselves—it’s beauty–and particular kinds that have power. Beauty is made out of impossibility: it’s ephemeral, never completely attainable, barely graspable, always fleeting.

And we are not the gatekeepers. It is only deference to this larger force, pulled from time and place, from fabric and pixels, that we might qualify.

Of course I want it—perhaps even have some of it–but it scares me. I’m petrified of the extent of its power, its control, but its pleasure perhaps most of all. I work towards it, just like all those women at the salon, at the clothing swap. I invest time and I invest money in creating and maintaining it. There’s even investment made in looking as if there has been no investment at all.
I won’t deny I often smile when examining my own image, taking pride in the success of my construction. Of course compliments pertaining to my looks are sources of flattery. But there’s also the memories of sobs of defeat in dressing rooms over ill fitting items, moments of panic when catching sight of myself in an unflattering photo or store window. It leads to the jagged fear that I’m too ugly to deserve the body of a woman.

A few months ago, I walked once more into a salon. There was a woman getting a pedicure, and when one of the over-eager attendants encouraged her to also get waxed, she shook her head and laughed.

“Oh no, honey, I’m married! I don’t have to try anymore.”

“You’ll be married in a couple of years,” an older man once told me upon us discussing the question of female beauty maintenance. “You won’t have to even think about it.”

But the fear I articulated to him wasn’t desiring to be soothed via a permanent relationship, nor do I believe it will go away as I age. It’s about something deeper, it’s more about recognition, about wanting to build something people will come to.

And the trouble is, so much of what’s available to me dictates I have to start with my body, that the splash of my face and the turn of my waist are where both I and home belong.

Heather Acs + Zari Esaian as Michelle + Iris

Silas Howard was one of the first filmmakers signed up for the Valencia movie project, as I brainstormed the things whilst hanging out with him at a Frameline Festival some years back. Silas is a great filmmaker. By Hook or By Crook, a feature he made with artist Harry Dodge, remains an important, beautiful queer and genderqueer classic. Frankly I don’t know of another movie before or sense that shows such embodied trans-male characters, and that they’re these San Francisco 90s outlaws pulling scams and being tender bro-besties just flings it over the top. Have you not seen this movie? It rests among Times Square, Ladies and Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains, The Outsiders and Over the Edge as my favorite films about queer punk underdogs wild in the streets. So yes I am psyched about Silas making a chapter, AND I am psyched about his cast as it is brilliant: performer Heather Acs as Michelle – I watched Heather acting in Silas’ short film Blink nightly on Sister Spit, and she was enthralling, playing a doomed speed freak in a spooky relationship with another speed freak, played with twitchy menace by Ben Foster, who I just watched betray Mark Wahlberg in Contraband! Zari Esaian, one of my favorite people ever, takes a break from her blog Bad Mantality (in which she details the many transgressions of men and illustrates with photos of them taking up way too much space on the subway) to play Iris! Iris’s sister is portrayed by freaking Erin Markey, whose brilliance I have literally written essays about.

Okay, let’s talk to Silas about Chapter 9!

MICHELLE TEA: What happens in your chapter? 

SILAS HOWARD: Michelle decides to go to Iris’s sister’s Southern Baptist wedding, thinking it’ll be cool, “like an anthropological study”. Instead they find homophobic kids, a co-dependant mom, monster bride and of course Daisy’s tragedy.

MT: Tell me about your cast and why you cast them? 

SH: I worked with Heather Acs in my short film Blink, co-staring Ben Foster and Julia Weldon, which has played all over the place (from SF Int’l film festival to San Paulo, Iceland and Bombay). I saw Heather perform her solo show and was blown away by the fierceness and badass honesty of her stage presence and performance.

I knew that Zari was interested in acting and thought of her for the role early on. She’s an cool NYC DJ, a union carpenter, and a secret Cher impersonator. Zari is an incredible natural with effortless timing and willingness to do crazy antics like pretend to have sex while 7 of us hovered over her and Heather instructing their every move. Sexy.

Erin Markey is one of my favorite performers, her work both brilliantly absurd and yet often centered on the neurotic suburban world of the Mid-West.  She was cast as Iris’s neurotic sister, and on set her delivery of the line “Why, Daisy, Why!?” in response to Daisy’s tragedy actually gave poor Fufu diarrhea, it was so tragic and comically disturbing,

I’ve been obsessed with Lisa Hass, cast as Iris’s Mom, ever since I saw her in Laura Turroso’s amazing film “Dyke Dollar” and then got to see Lisa’s talents go even further in Madelin Olniks super hit feature “Codependant Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same” which premiered at Sundance last year.

Fufu, the poddle who co-habituates with Nao Bustamante, has her own IMDB pageand is an incredible character actor. Catch her playing a Buffalo (yes!) in Nao Bustamante’s film, Untitled #1, Earth People 2507, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance film.

MT: Where are you filming?

SH: I filmed in Troy, in upstate New York, at the home of Nao Bustamante who was also ended up producing, location managing, AD, craft services, gaffer and dimmer box controller – oh and wedding photographer coordinator. She  made us a pot roast feast on the last day  - though we never saw her cooking – and could not imagine when she could have found the time! I believe she is a witch.

MT: Does your chapter have any special challenges?

SH: YES! Dealing with Fufu (a poodle, and of course a natural diva)  and the special effect of Daisy’s eye popping out. At one point I ran around as Daisy’s body double to give the actors an eyeline as they chased me around the lawn while cameras filmed them. It was one of the weirder things I’ve done as a director.

Here I have to do a quick praise singing to my DP, Ben Peyser, a nice boy from Jersey,  who I’ve collaborated with since our time at UCLA. He even convinced his step mom  let her 10 year old play the homophobic kid, along with her best friend. When I tactfully asked how the mom felt about having the girls say “hey homo’s” and “yeah faggot” she said “Oh, we’re a liberal family, it’s fine!” Not entirely sure the logic there but they were AMAZING kid actors and very sweet homophobes. As were the dynamic duo, Erin Greenwell (sound and editor) and Janis Vogel (2nd camera).

MT: Are you sticking to the story or messing with it?

SH: For budget reasons I filmed the chapter it in the north rather then the south, but having grown up in a northern small town and friends who grew up small town southern, there are a surprising amount of similarities, especially when talking working class towns. I really felt like the heart of this chapter is every one’s selfishness and judgement, out of fear and real insecurities,  and how families can bring that out. I like stories where every one is a bit wrong, that’s interesting to me.MT: Where were you in the 90s and what were you doing? 

SH: I was based in San Francisco. The band I played in, Tribe 8 toured a lot, so I got to leave the bubble quite a bit. When not on tour I worked at a cafe I started with Harry Dodge, Judith Moman (who left after the 1st year) and Lori Hartman called the Bearded Lady.  I rode a motorcycle around pre-helmet law and had a lot of messy drama. It was fun.

MT: If you could bring back something lost from the 90s what would it be? What are you happy to see go?

SH:Hummm that’s a tough one. Maybe I’d bring back some of the anger we all had and that almost smug rejection of mainstream culture. It was nicely instigating. We knew our party was way cooler then the celebrity show ponies. It was a time when a band like Nirvana could get hugely famous on a song that made fun of the crowd that made them mainstream.

But I am happy to see some of the self-righteous part of the anger go. Exciting to channel it in different directions. Excited to see protest become a practice again with an even wider cast of characters. On a good day it seems there’s more room to be different, increasing room for all kinds of gender expressions and types of homo outsiders in a big messy pile or crowded little tour van.

My favorite quote from my godson, Lenny, (who is 5), when asked about his new little brother on the way: “I’m excited… but you know even though we know it’s supposed to be a boy, it might feel like a girl,” he shrugs his shoulders, hand up in the air, “so who knows I might have a little sister!” Wow, my god son is more gender advanced then I, his transguy uncle. That wouldn’t have happened in the 90′s. So, rather then glad to see anything go, I’m glad to see an evolution of compassionate radical politics.  Oh my, I am long winded here…
MT: What was your first San Francisco makeout? 

SH: It was with a woman I had a big crush on but who was dating a guy at the time. We all worked together at a lesbian owned cafe called Cafe Commons. That was my first “real” job in the city and exposure to cafe culture. I worked with Jenni Muldaur (Maria Mouldar’s daughter who wrote the hit “Midnight at the Oasis” and meet Harry Dodge, my oldest pal, at that cafe too.MT: What are you obsessed with right now?

SH: Tour guides. I just returned from New Orleans- I went on several tours (vampire, bijou, cemetery) and am thinking this could be a new career path for me.

MT: What was your last project and what will you work on next?

SH: I’m finishing a feature I co-directed with Ernesto Foronda , co-written by Valerie Stadler (of major 90′s music fame; actually Ernesto also comes from 90′s homocore fame as well) called Sunset Stories. It has a great cast including cameo by Justin Vivianne Bond and Sandy Martin (amazing butch actor who plays a man on Big Love), Nao Bustamonte, Sung Kang (Fast & Furious films, Better Luck Tomorrow), Monique Gabriela Curnen (Half Nelson),  and Joshua Leonard (Humday).

I hope to finish my book this year and plan to make Chelsea Whistle as my next film.

Hi! I call this column overdue books because it is a a romp through this huge stack of books I totally mean to review but it takes me, like, a month or two to get around to! I worry – is it too late? Am I talking to you about books you now already know about? Did I miss the publicity train? And then I think – who cares! The cool thing about books is that you can read them whenever you want! Like, I just this week tore into my Collected Poems of Alan Ginsberg, a book that not only has been sitting on my bookshelf forever, but contains poems written in the 1940s! Books are totally eternal! So, with that giant excuse for my procrastination, let us begin.

Erin Bried is the author of these How To books that are wicked popular – How to Sew a Button and How to Build a Fire. My guess is it is super hard to get an entire book out of sewing a button, which is fairly straightforward, and so these books must have bunches of ultra-handy how-tos packed inside. How to Rock You Baby does in fact tell you how to rock your baby, or a baby you are perhaps nannying or have recently kidnapped. You got to hold them close because those little fuckers can’t hardly see when they’re just born, and you should sway, and if you have a particularly cranky little bad seed you can squat while you sway, and also gaze deep into their half-blind eyes the whole time for extra bonding points. This book looks awesome, especially if you, like me, see a baby in your future and are concerned that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. It tells you How to Assemble a Nursery (I sort of want to keep my baby in a dresser drawer like a depression-era mother) How to Pack Your Hospital Bag, How to Breathe (like, while there is a baby coming through your vagina), How to Keep Eating Well for Two, How to Change a Diaper (thank you!), How to Cut Tiny Fingernails (because those little bastards will slice up your face with their paper-thin, razor sharp baby talons!), How to Knit Booties (too advanced), How to Make Homemade Blocks (for maximum control over every little thing your child comes in contact with), How to Write a Thank You Card (for the feral mothers of feral children), How to Keep Your Relationship with Your Partner Healthy (the author is a gay! Extra emotional intelligence!), How to Read a Bedtime Story, How to Make a Handprint Plate – hello, this book tells you EVERYTHING! I can’t wait to get pregnant and use it! Also the author went and got tips from the moms of famous people like Jonathan Safren-Foer (Did she name her child ‘Jonathan’ to assure literary success?) and Rachel Maddow.

‘Please ignore the horrifying art on the book cover,’ Pleads author Lewis DeSimone in a note stuck into the galley of his forthcoming novel The Heart’s History. WHEN will publishers allow their authors to influence their own book covers? The authors nearly ALWAYS have better ideas than the publishers and the fearful, superstitious decisions they make. Hey, publishers of gay male fiction – STOP PUTTING PICTURES OF SHIRTLESS, BUFF MEN ON YOUR BOOK COVERS! And, don’t think you’re balancing some sort of scale of depressing aesthetics by adding a picture of the most style-less faggot in the history of faggotry (backwards baseball hat, khaki shorts, untucked button-down). That’s what they call adding INSULT to INJURY. I’ll tell you, with Sister Spit Books, our forthcoming imprint on City Lights, I’m always letting the writers pick their cover art! Anyway, back to the book: Lewis DeSimone is a great writer. His prose is thoughtful, deep, layered and real. His characters are living. It’s about love and sex and AIDs, about human connection and the ultimate unknowability of another person. It’s about the slow assimilation of a larger gay culture that used to be more angry and badass. It’s a really good book written by a very skilled author and I look forward to seeing it in the cover it deserves!

Ohmigod I love Annah Anti-Palindrome and I love the beautiful CD/zine/manifesto/button she gave me as I scooted out of our reading at Pegasus Books last week. I had to run back to San Francisco to get inseminated, so I missed her act and I am so sad about it I will book her in a RADAR very soon! Annah is a musician, a singer-songwriter I guess, and her songs are so sweet and layered with what sounds like the voices of little baby angels who assembled themselves into a harmonizing girl group. There is rudimentary beat boxing and pretty guitar and some songs sound more whimsical and some more soulful and they are all infused with a sort of girl-ish melancholy and true sincerity. And the lyrics are wonderful -love you like steel wool/like cold handlebars/like porcupines trapped in mason jars. It’s something to hear the lines I want to open my head / Dissect my brain in such a tender voice. The CD (‘Handmade because you’re worth it’) comes with a little booklet of notes about the songs, as well as a card titled ‘Resisting Palindromes’ which movingly explains Annah’s punk name: after her mom died of a morphine overdose, Annah tossed an ‘h’ into her given name of Anna, disrupting the palindrome as a way of disrupting the repetitive, violent legacies a childhood can leave you with. Change your name, change your life! You should check this person out.

Poet Michael Warr’s Adrienne Rich-blurbed (score!) new poetry collection, The Armageddon of Funk, is full of life and death: people living with the scars life gave them, people dying of religion, living on public transit. It travels from San Francisco to Chicago to Africa to Stockholm, carried on the poet’s smart, observant, opinionated shoulders. Conversations with cab drivers, setting Clarence Thomas straight about what it is to be lynched, the passing of time wrapped in culture. This is a really strong collection, with A REALLY STRONG COVER! Look at how handsome a book can be when the publisher lets the author pick the artwork! Tony Fitzpatrick’s ‘The Oil Beast’ flicks it’s creepy-magical gryphon-y tongue at you, and the poet thanks him with a dedicated poem and lots of love and the bookshelves everywhere rejoice at the arrival of a hot-looking volume. If we’re going to fight the good fight against digital readers than publishers need to step it up with covers! So, get this book, enjoy the poetry and then turn it face-out on your shelf like the piece of art it is.

Okay this has not even cracked into the pile of books I have to show you. I’ll be back!

by Lena Brooks

Wow! I just got back from Japan! Have you ever been to Japan? Neither had I, in fact I’d never been out of the country except to a handful of Mexican border towns and those don’t really count. Now I’m so jetlagged that I don’t remember my own name, but I do remember that this was the best trip ever and everyone should go to Japan right now. Like, right now right now.  And did you know that you can even get a free plane ticket over there thanks to recent natural disaster type things? Obviously you’re already convinced to book your trip since you like free things and Lost in Translation, so I’m just going to cut to the chase and tell you about all the awesome things you should do when you get there.

1. Go to Tokyo and go to Shibuya and go to 109
Well you’re clearly going to go to Tokyo when you’re in Japan because who doesn’t go to Tokyo when they’re in Japan? Shibuya is one of the big, neon-y neighborhoods with general sensory overload and a lot of shopping. If you want to distill Shibuya and mainline it you should go to 109 which is sort of like Japan’s Forever21 and also sort of like a fish market. Inside is eight or nine floors of madness. You’re packed in so tight you can only slowly shuffle toward any pair of Jeffrey Campbell knockoff shoes you want to examine, store employees are yelling constantly into paper megaphones, and a different dubstep remix plays in every kiosk. Since I was there during New Year’s, a big sale time, my experience was probably even more bizarre as armed security guards ushered us into an underground holding area before even letting us in to the store.  If this is all too much for you, Japan’s rough equivalent to Target, Mega Don Quijote, is a respectable substitute and chock full of delightful and inexplicable souvenirs like the 3D hologram portrait of a beagle wearing glasses that I picked up.

2. Use a toilet
You can probably manage that right? Bathrooms in Japan are really cool, but this is also coming from a person who wanted to make a bathroom Zagat for her college campus (Which ones have the most insightful graffitti? The people need to know!). About half of the toilets in Japan are these high-tech deals that have about 10 buttons a piece. Things get really stressful really fast when “flush” and “bidet” aren’t marked in your language though. But you’ll soon be soothed by the bird songs or babbling brook noises that a lot of them play, unbidden. Unfortunately, the rest of the toilets are traditional and are pretty much a hole in the ground that looks like you set a urinal on it’s back.  These are either awesome or awful depending on who you ask and how much they like low squats.

3. Eat street food
If you’re in Japan during a festival time like New Year’s or Obon there will be a bunch of street food and it will all look really cool. You should probably eat all of it.

4. Get a little culture
I could tell you to go visit Japan’s awesome art and historical museums or beautiful shrines, but what I am going to tell you about is the pop group that’s sweeping the nation that you should become as fascinated by as I am.  AKB48 is Japan’s number one girl group right now. It has 59 members (at least one of which is actually a computer-generated amalgamation of ideal physical characteristics), scores more “trainee” members, and a general underage-school-girl theme.  There’s AKB48 branded everything and they’re constantly on TV and the radio–I did not choose to become so transfixed by AKB48 that I extensively researched them, but does anyone ever really choose these things? Watch this music video only if you are ready to be confused and amazed.

5. Drink what you realize only later is Japanese 4Loko and throw up in a Tokyo subway
Maybe don’t do this. But what you remember of it will make a pretty good story.

6. Go to an onsen
What I learned from frequently messing up shoe removal etiquette is that Japan has a lot of feelings about hygiene. Bathing is a big pastime and public baths are popular. If you feel comfortable being naked in front of strangers who are probably silently judging your foibles in operating the pre-bath shower, DO THIS. I happened to be in an onsen on my birthday and turned twenty-three in an outdoor hot spring under a gentle snowfall. It was magical. I want everyone to do this. A note to the not nakedly inclined: foot onsens are also a thing.

7. Shop at a konbini
A konbini is just a convenience store (say it out loud), but it’s an interesting snapshot of Japanese life just like an AM/PM is of America. I think places like this are kind of interesting everywhere and I love breaking at truck stops whenever I’m roadtripping to buy novelty lighters and marvel at weird regional snacks.

8. Visit Daikanyama/Little San Francisco
Japan doesn’t really have a Little San Francisco, but one Tokyo neighborhood is so eerily Bay Area that it can’t be a coincidence. Daikanyama is full of vintage clothing stores, record shops, vegan restaurants, and microbrew coffee houses at a concentration I didn’t encounter anywhere else in the country. They had a vintage camera shop. I wasn’t sure if I felt at home or parodied, but I did get some really good coffee.

9. Go to a cat cafe
What is a cat cafe you say? Well, imagine that amid the deafening blur that is Tokyo, you were able to ascend an unassuming staircase that opened into the most peaceful place you have ever been. Everything is warm pastels, piano versions of 70′s hits play softly in the background, and for 1000 yen (~$12) an hour you get unlimited access to coffee, cocoa, and a pack of mildly sedated cats. Essentially the best place in the world. After arriving and being given a run down of the rules you’re introduced to your soulcat (mine was named Mochi) and invited to pet/bother the felines to your heart’s content.  If I open a cat cafe in America will you promise to come so I can be rich in both cats and money?

Alright, that’s everything! Also the south of Japan exists, but I didn’t go there. So maybe you should? They probably have cat cafes and Japanese 4Loko down there too, but I’m not making you any promises.

This wasn’t in the script.

Channing Kennedy is super cool. He is a writer and blogger for Colorlines, a maker of movies and of art in general, and sort of a magical person overall. When I found out he wanted to do a Valencia chapter I was psyched, because I knew he would do something very excellent and unexpected with it, and he has. Read on.

Michelle Tea: Hi, Channing! What happens in your Valencia chapter?

CK: Mostly tone, since this chapter has higher stakes than the ones preceding it. But the story itself is pretty universally relatable.

MT: Are you sticking to the story, or messing with it?

CK: We’re sticking as close to the chapter as possible while also making it a ghost story from the year 2034, when Michelle is 63.

MT: Where were you in the 90s, and what were you doing?

CK: Most recently, I’ve run support for (and acted/sang/operated puppets for) Emily’s new movie, Gold Diggers of 1829, which took three years to finish. Plus we got married in July, and that involved designing an unzippable ring pillow shaped like a gutted fish, and a talent show and Powerpoint presentations and the release of a wedding zine full of comics by our friends about us. Plus the usual weddingy stuff. I feel like we could’ve gotten an artist grant to cover our wedding if we’d been smart. In general, I’m very lucky to be doing creative work at my day job, creating video and writing for Colorlines.com. For the coming year, I’ve got a few scripts and comics ideas in very early stages — they’re all kinda scifi stonerish comedies about the internet and sex and intersectionality.

1. Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
2. William S. Burroughs – Port of Saints
3. Denis Johnson – Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
4. Mary Gaitskill – Veronica
5. William T. Vollman – The Royal Family
6. Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers
7. Dennis Cooper – Period
8. Clive Barker – The Books of Blood (I-VI)
9. Anne Sexton – Transformations
10. Eileen Myles – Cool For You
11. Chester Himes – Lonely Crusade
12. William H. Gass – The World Within the Word
13. Kevin Killian – Shy
14. Dodie Bellamy – Pink Steam
15. James Baldwin – Giovanni’s Room

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