33 rebellions per minute
"Remember to surface; endeavor to dive"
1997
Veda Hille, SPINE
I've been thinking a lot about femininity lately. As is all too predictable for me, the intial cause of this was a book, or in this case two books, both non-fiction. The first, Bernard Lefkowitz's Our Guys: the Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb, didn't start the femininity thread directly: it was much too shattering to inspire coherent thought, at least for me, and I shut down my review column for a week on the grounds of contagious misanthropy. This was not the fault of Lefkowitz, an outstanding reporter, but of his story, a real-life Lord Of The Flies without the stupid conceit of making the grownups be absent: the story of young men getting more and more vicious because they were too handsome and cheerful to ever punish or even criticize. It was entirely appropriate that I finished the book less than two weeks before high schoolers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made national headlines by killing 16 fellow students in a one-hour shooting spree-- both students, after all, had records as burglars and vandals who wore gang colors and wrote fantasies of violence in their school assignments. They were white and suburban, so these signals were ignored, but then, they would be. When I was a kid in elementary school getting bullied, the school's response was to create special group therapy sessions for me and other bullying victims. The bullies didn't need therapy. Boys will be boys. Might as well side with the boys who win.
I wasn't up for more reading about violence after Lefkowitz, but since I do intend to teach high school for a living, there were threads to be followed up. The most surprising-- and presumably aberrant and exaggerated in the Glen Ridge case-- was how the girls acted. The male troublemakers, athletes, focused their social life around parties. At these parties they counted on the voluntary slavery of a dozen or so "Little Mothers": girls who would cheer their sporting and criminal accomplishments, prepare their food and drinks, host their gatherings, let them barge in late at night, and clean up their gigantic messes-- in exchange for essentially nothing except status and the privilege of being In The Presence. Also at the parties were a larger cohort of girls who would provide interchangeable sexual servicing, including serial blow-jobs and various public (spied-on) sex acts, for which the guys would thank them by name in their yearbook memories. Why would girls do this?
So came book #2, Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls, an anthropology of two middle schools in California (one white and mixed-class, one Black/Hispanic and poor). Another excellent piece of journalism, this one was more motivating than depressing, because in the absence of a horrifying central story, it was possible for Peggy to shine bright lights on good things. Still, what the source of cheer comes down to is the number of simple and surprisingly effective ways-- ways I have memorized and fully intend to use-- in which a teacher can act against the book's designated problem: how girls are systematically flattened into quiet, deferential, unambitious people who let their questions go unanswered, their problems unvocalized, their need for food despised, their sexual desires denied and projected outwards onto guys who should or shouldn't be given in to, and their homework done for them by guys who don't explain how to do the work. The methods of counteracting this behavior presumably work because girls don't _want_ to be like that, which is extremely heartening. But the teachers, unless made conscious, cause the flattening; so do the parents. So do the boys: it is statistically provable that brainy girls are unpopular, but apparently everyone except me knew that anyway. What I remember most, though, are two of the scenes in which the girls teach each other how femininity works. In one scene, Lindsay and Suzy, best friends, honor student 8th-graders, discuss Suzy's career plans:
Suzy: "My parents would be proud if I were a surgeon. But it's too gross-- whenever I think about it, I think about the shower scene in Psycho... I think maybe I should be a lawyer".
Lindsay, snorting: "I'm trying to imagine this sweet girl questioning someone on the witness stand. She'd be in a cold sweat".
Suzy, sheepish: "It's true. I'm too cute to be a lawyer".
Lindsay: "Yeah. You'd be like: 'Did you kill him? No? Oh, okay, sorry'".
Suzy, seriously: "It might be interesting, though".
Lindsay: "Interesting????! Well, that's one way of putting it. You'd meet some characters, all right."
Suzy, capitulating: "Yeah, all the guys you'd meet would be murderers. Can you imagine? 'Hi, Mom, this is my husband-- no, he didn't do it'".
Both crack up, and cuteness rescues a girl from a taken-seriously goal that cute guys are free to pursue. In another scene, Amy and Evie and Becca pretend to be horrified when a male science classmate displays a big spider in their presence-- becuase, Amy explains, "guys like it if you act all girly and helpless, so you do". This scene's memorability comes from the fact that Amy had volunteered the three for study. "You gotta study us! We're the feminists", she'd said.
Is any of this news to you? Maybe not. It is to me. I always noticed the loudmouths, the bright and assertive and entertaining, and not until reading this book did I realize how few such young women I'd actually known in school-- maybe one who shouted out in class; three others who were self-confident in their overall presentation, even with males present. Given how rare it is for geniuses to drop out of high school, it can't be entirely a coincidence that two of the most immediately striking women I've met this year had quit school before their 15th birthday, like that was the only way to save their personalities. One, a close friend of mine, quit to do home schooling. Conversely, the other, a garrolous transient named Icarus whose involvement with me will likely never go beyond my offer of a couch to sleep on this past weekend, ran away from home (having already completed Calculus and Physics class in her private school's 9th grade). Icarus-- a pretty 18-year-old whose first impression unto me included an easy smile, blue hair, painful-looking facial piercings, a colorful homemade hemp-and-bead necklace, a flowing Quaker dress, an adorable magenta bondage-geared teddy bear, a backpack hand-scribbled with anarchist and frivolous slogans, and The Collected Writings Of C.S. Lewis-- fascinated me to a degree that quite understandably irritated the hell into my girlfriend. But that, I realized, is exactly the type of girl who grabs me: the sort who displays her brains, playfulness, and defiance right in the open where no-one can miss it.
I hadn't fully grasped this before, perhaps, because I'd never seen such a blatant example. But certainly my tastes in musical women have been roughly compatible. I never knew Ani DiFranco or Liz Phair or Cindy Lee Berryhill in school, so I don't _know_ how they were. But Ani's lack of even minimal empathy for shyness and timidity suggests she's never been that way. Liz may perhaps have been used as a toy, but it's hard to doubt she got smartass remarks in edgewise. Cindy Lee, best of all, seems blissfully oblivious to even the possibility that someone might not want to know what she's thinking.
Veda Hille does _not_ strike me that way. At all. Her first verse on SPINE, her second album but first American release, includes "there was a woman, no head of her own/.../ we are all awkward in this world unknown". Song two, "Sweet", seems to be about SchoolGirls's theme-- "Not suitable for the weak of heart, nor reinforced/ all you will ever be: love, of course"-- and there's no lack of sympathy there or in the (description? advice?) "live alone and love to work/ fill your days with light and dirt". "Bellyfish" is stoic and silent: "fish hook in my leg, sweat it out, sweat it out". "Seasoned" is a love song, but a self-conscious one: "there isn't time, and I'm dirtier than I would like/ I can lie so fear don't see me, a sweater on the floor/ or I can clean, like I never been scared before". Those are the first four songs; I could continue.
The music on SPINE also fights timidity. It's quiet even when it kicks up a relative storm: the 5/4 gypsy dance (with handclaps and folk percussion) through much of "Slumber Queen"; Veda's angular, slamming tenor guitar chords on the choruses of "Bellyfish" and "Song For Snake"; her pounding piano chords on "One Hot Summer". At SPINE's sparest, "Seasoned" is the distant echo of a grunge song; "Instructions" enters and exits on a barely audible Tall Dwarfs-ish loop halfway between a rolled marble and a jugband's washboard; "Shamus And Stone" is half-whispered over a hesitant piano line that half the time harldy exists; and "26 Years" is a dead ringer for Tori Amos's gentle piano-ballad style (with my personal proviso that Tori, for all that she's on my shortlist of favorite artists, hasn't fully matched "26 Years" for quality without using loud noises yet). The chord patterns are unusual and obscure ones, the time signatures are toyed with on purpose. This is presumably not music Veda expects to become a star with.
What it _is_, however, is a thoughtful, careful unveiling of a creative soul, of the sort I've carelessly spent my life not attributing to the girls who hunch into themselves and keep mum as life happens around them. I'm sure I'd've never noticed Veda at school if we'd been classmates, but she used her time observing and drawing connections. She's introspective, sketching relationships that seem to be her own, but she's also a storyteller. Even if she herself is Stone in "Shamus And Stone", or the she to the he in "Strange, Sad", it doesn't change her eye for telling details: about poses and gestures, cats and phones and cigarettes, Orion and starlings and butchered flowers. This is not, frankly, the kind of music or songwriting I'd been used to liking. If Lauren Hoffman's MEGIDDO hadn't been indirect in a similar but more mainstream way that SPINE could remind me of; if Mia Sheard's WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR hadn't arrived at the same time and loose style with a Rheostatics influence labeled on its shoulder; I might not have given SPINE's subtlety a chance. But by sticking in my life, it has altered the possibilities of my metabolism, perhaps: slowed me down and shut me up enough to appreciate Jennifer Kimball, say, or Priya Thomas. But that doesn't mean SPINE has been surpassed in its category yet.
I'll still always like the big gesture, and try to encourage those; they make life more fun. But I am surprised and pleased to find myself learning patience. In Veda's case, after all, the very act of putting out a record, of performing live shows, _is_ an act of self-assertion. Her lyrics are as pro-action as Ani's, just not blithe and cocksure about it:
- "
- Pick it up and put it in your pocket.
- Your name here.
- Hold a towel in your mouth and be reminded of his clean skin.
- Don't let them shrivel on the vine.
- Forget it.
- When you hear a mechanical instrument, think of a child shrieking.
- To all peaks carry water.
- Clean the wound and take note of the metal.
- Buy what you can.
- Don't be afraid to be like her.
- Learn to recognize the beauty of your own back.
- C'mon everyone, drink up.
- Run with whatever you can carry.
- Remember that you bleed more easily.
- Don't think of it as reasonable, think of it as terrifying.
- When blinded, construct images around unknown sounds, and assume you are correct.
- Remember to surface.
- Endeavor to dive."
Last note in a long essay: although SPINE doesn't sound anything like a hit album, I suspect it could sell several hundred thousand copies with the right promotion. My evidence for this is that these songs-- I tend to choose "Instructions", which begins with the 1-18 list, and a varying choice of other song-- have proven extraordinarily popular on mixtapes: five people have bought this album as a result of my mixes, and two of them declare it among their all-time favorites. Another Loud-fan, unrelatedly, declared SPINE the album he's bought the largest number of times, having given it as six gifts, which implies at least a couple went over so well that he knew he had to continue. Maybe Veda's voice just sounds good to people; maybe her weird melodies have an instinctive rightness people latch on to; maybe it's just there's a lot of shy people with room for empathy and encouragement. Maybe it's all of that and more. What I know is, it's incredibly encouraging.
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