Blame it on Bikini Kill from Victoria Marinelli @ Square One 05 May 2008 3:26 am
Earlier today I could not get enough of listening to Bikini Kill’s 1994 album, Pussy Whipped. Specifically, I had to hear Rebel Girl over and over (I even stopped to tweet this fact), as well as Alien She, which includes these lyrics:
…She wants me
To put the pretty, pretty lipstick on
She wants me to be like her…
I want to kill her
But I’m afraid it might kill me
Feminist
Dyke whore
Pretty, pretty
Alien
And all I really wanted to know
Who was me and who is she
I guess I’ll never know…
For reasons that will be evident to some of my longtime readers (though I can’t refer you to past explanatory blog posts, which is just as well because all that material has gone back into the proverbial cauldron for its eventual repurposing), these lyrics are searingly relevant to me. Due, I will simply say, to a woman named Lee whom I met late in 1992, shortly after I’d left Olympia for Seattle (with a New York art colony sojourn between), and following which the course of my life was violently and inexorably altered - as indicated, perhaps most clearly, by my official status, with law enforcement in Washington state, as a “missing person” in the summer and autumn of 1993 (although police in two additional states, plus the FBI, also wound up tangentially involved).
And even if those particular lyrics weren’t so immediately relevant to my history, there is also the touchstone fact that I had been in Olympia at the same time Bikini Kill was emerging. The riot grrrl scene was an alternate universe against which my own was being played out; many nights in late 1990 and early 1991 had found me standing guard for my sociopath girlfriend, Amy, who, without the slightest sense of irony, was spraying graffiti around town protesting violence against women1. (Note: she was not only a serial batterer of her lesbian partners - see her hometown’s newspaper for crap she would still be doing more than a decade later - she also claimed to have a juvenile record for attempted murder.)
So, while I stood guard (the alternative to which was: trust me, you wouldn’t want to know), Amy would be spraying Dead Men Don’t Rape across the facade of the furniture store downtown. Then we’d go around a corner and she’d be hoping to attack another surface with her hilariously inappropriate sloganeering (which I came to regard as her preemptive strike against the credibility of the women she’d battered and raped; by attaining, under false pretenses, her “folk hero” status among the radical feminists and lesbians in town), out of nowhere there’d be some fresh new graffiti up, saying only Bikini Kill. And we had no idea what the fuck Bikini Kill meant (only later learned it was a new punk band, which would go on to define the riot grrrl genre), we only knew they were taking up precious wall space and really kind of pissing Amy off.
Despite the radical life-interruption that was Amy, though, it was, most substantively, the prelude to what would follow, in Seattle, with Lee.
Which is why, perhaps, this morning I struggled for what seemed an eternity to wake from a certain, apparently chaotic dream, the meaning of which I could not discern until I had physically written it out, on paper (as is often the case with me; it’s like, with the action of pen on paper, puzzles can be put together in very clear ways, even when, at first, I had not known there was anything besides chaotic and, most likely, meaningless fragments in play).
To read the full-sized journal entry, click here, otherwise you may be able to make out the words as they appear below2.
Nope - the past still isn’t dead.
___
1 The Olympian ran something or another in some crime or public complaint column about Amy’s exploits (not that anyone outside the lesbian community knew who was behind the graffiti); ironically, she’d had been an employee of the same newspaper when I met her in October of 1990. (Hey Olympian: check your HR records, if you have ‘em that far back. I can also tell you about the security guard she met there, with whom she committed robberies - or at least, so she was given to boasting while drunk.)
2 Re-reading the bit about Pearl Jam’s song, Jeremy, coming on the radio as I was writing it, I think, inevitably, of where I once lived, on Jeremy Street, in a San Diego suburb, when I was thirteen. Then I go read the Wikipedia entry on that song, and I learn that one of the song’s inspirations was a disturbed junior high school student in San Diego. Um, wow.