May 2012
13 posts
Some more music news - You can pre-order the first... →
This is my first time playing guitar and singing on an actual record! It feels very surreal to me that an idea I once heard in my head has become a physical object. Most ideas I have are pretty ephemeral and don’t go anywhere. Some, I write down. Only rarely does an idea become something real—something I can give to the world outside myself. I’m going to start thinking of myself...
My song "Halfway" is Spinner's free mp3 download... →
According to Spinner, we sound like Patti Smith and Sharon Van Etten!
Permanent Wave Benefit for Pussy Riot - featuring... →
FREE PUSSY RIOT! This is a benefit for their legal defense fund. Three alleged members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samucevich, charged with “hooliganism,” have been remanded in jail. The three women are facing up to 7 years criminal punishment for allegedly participating in the punk-prayer “Virgin Mary, Send Putin...
Commute
The subway is a Wonder Wheel and I am obsessed with all the lives I do not have. Each person’s face travels down to me from way up high like a car on a Ferris Wheel and each face glows with an odd fluorescence before it turns away. It is late spring now. Children are restless. Everything is turning over and over. When the light glosses on someone’s skin, there are carnival colors,...
My friend Sophie started a fiction blog. She... →
Current Reading List
Sometimes, I start a million books at the same time and don’t finish them. Here is what I have been reading recently and how far along I am:
1. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Read chapter 1
2. IQ84 - Up to page 80. I feel pretty good about this because the book is the length of Infinite Jest and therefore is intimidating to even open—let alone lug around on the subway.
3. The...
Here’s the second track by Leda. It’s...
My new band Leda is premiering two songs today. We...
Upcoming Concerts
May 11th - Hilly Eye at the Acheron with Lost Weekend, Claire’s Diary, & the Shivering Brigade, 8 PM, all ages. http://www.facebook.com/events/388257937871734/
May 15th - Leda!!!! (my new band!!!) at Big Snow Buffalo Lodge with Emerald Lakes, Young Unknowns, & Cindy Lou Gooden, 8 PM, all ages. http://www.facebook.com/events/225119890925426/
May 19th - Leda at the Cuddle Cave with...
April 2012
5 posts
“This week’s episode ends with a scene unlike any I’ve seen on television before,...”
– Emily Nussbaum on Twitter, Technology, and Girls, quoted on the New Yorker blog
“WO: How do you see the book-review culture changing?
SSR: I think these big...”
– A conversation between book reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds and writer Willie Osterweil, quoted in The New Inquiry.
I have been immortalized forever in an animated...
gimmetinnitus:
Hilly Eye @ Dead Hearing Animated with Loopcam for iPhone.
“Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we need to worry that we might...”
– Marianne Williamson (via militanthope)
“women” can definitely be an interchangeable word here, but it’s still relevant.
(via suzy-x)
March 2012
9 posts
My friend Courtney wrote this piece about the... →
Swimming
So I have this idea to write a short memoir about swimming and the different things it has meant to me throughout my life. Here is a rough draft for the beginning of the memoir:
I have always been an amphibian, caught between two worlds. My whole life, I have been a swimmer on the edge of a great deep feeling I cannot understand. My mother sealed the deal by swimming regularly when she was...
In Which Jeremy Lin Teaches Us How to Dougie
With all the heat surrounding Jeremy Lin over the past month, one music writer found she couldn’t keep her mind off a single, burning question: What’s on Jeremy Lin’s IPod?
It’s a real testament to Lin’s air of affable charm that I, who have about as much chance of ever meeting Lin face-to-face as I have of scoring Knicks tickets in the next year, felt the need to question Lin, as if he were one...
New Hilly Eye track “Robbie’s...
Wondering what I have been working on for the past... →
Check out our new website—and click on New York to learn about the chapter I’m involved in! I started Permanent Wave a little over a year ago in NYC—but new chapters have grown in Boston, Philly, and the Bay Area as well. Clearly, a lot of young women are looking for a way to make feminism a part of their lives right now. There are consciousness raising groups springing up all...
An Important Day
For a long time, it has felt as if I am looking for myself behind a closed door. I knock on the door and there is no answer. I know there is someone behind it because I’ve imagined her in my head. She is exactly the kind of person I am in my imagination. She has the kind of voice that people listen to, because she speaks in a certain voice that no one else has—but she is very shy, and...
February 2012
7 posts
Not Pretty
lareviewofbooks:
Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago. Jonathan Franzen’s piece on the occasion in the New Yorker got VICTORIA PATTERSON mad. Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com
Victoria Patterson’s work has often been compared, for good reason, to Edith Wharton’s. This Vacant Paradise, Patterson’s first novel, is a contemporary retelling, quite consciously and intelligently, of The House of...
In the Guardian, a theory of how false images of... →
“In both city streets and war zones, men are far more likely to rape in groups. They feel they must uphold the cult of masculinity in the eyes of other men. As one soldier in Democratic Republic of Congo reported to Swedish researchers: ‘You feel you have to do something bad. You mix it all: sabotage, women, stealing, rip the clothes off, killing.’ Military officers sometimes...
"The thing about 'overwhelming' music, though, is... →
One of my favorite music writers, Nitsuh Abebe, absolutely nails what it is that attracts me to genres like metal, screamo, and noise: The more crushingly overwhelming the music, the more it fills me with an unshakable sense of calm. The truth is that a brutal sonic assault usually feels like an antidote to all the confusion in my head. It’s like, instead of thinking about all the colors in...
David Grossman wrote about Permanent Wave for... →
"The Komen controversy...has ramifications beyond... →
A good argument for why we need radical feminism in 2012:
“The past decades have seen the rise of a nominally apolitical marketing campaign masquerading as feminism, with Komen merely the most visible symbol. Komen aligns perfectly with what Linda Hirshman labeled ‘choice feminism’—a moral-relativist approach to feminism that tries to scrub the movement of politics and value...
January 2012
8 posts
The Last Thing I'll Ever Write About Lana Del Rey
So it’s kind of weird that people are now quoting me about hating Lana Del Rey. I don’t actually hate her, although I know a lot of people who do. Actually, I can count the number of people I hate on one hand—and none of them are pop stars.
The piece that I wrote about Lana Del Rey many months ago was about us more than it was about her. It was about our willingness to devour a...
Ten Anthems for a Feminist Revolution →
I wrote about one of my favorite subjects for Spinner. Enjoy!
Cool News: My band Hily Eye is going to release a... →
Read all about it here! Expect some psychedelic noise rock headed your way in 2012!
La Maestra Esme →
Here’s a photo of Esme—and also a really touching statement about what it means to volunteer at Girls Rock Camp. For anyone in NYC who would like to support Esme’s family, Jo Schornikow and Permanent Wave are organizing this benefit show to try to help.
ericabadont:
I first heard about Esme Barrera’s death on New Year’s afternoon, after I had spent the afternoon having brunch...
Esme Barrera, Girls Rock Camp Austin volunteer and... →
When I heard the news, the first thing that came to mind was the murder to Mia Zapata from the Gits. The similarities stood out to me—a woman walking home late at night—Esme from a party, Mia from a bar, the way the two women loved music and used it both to inform and to uplift, and the seemingly random nature of the crime. Except neither crime was as random as we’d like to...
December 2011
9 posts
Kate Zambreno on Writing the Feminine →
“The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also takes the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unraveling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college.”
Why can’t the feminine...
Nisennenmondai Comes to America
In 1999, guitarist Masako Takeda, bassist Yuri Zaikawa, and drummer Sayaka Himeno met at a meeting of their University’s music club, formed a band and named it Nisennenmondai, after the impending Year 2000 Crisis. The name stuck, and the band kept playing—even after Y2K itself turned out to be something of a dud. Looking back, it seems pretty quaint that we all expected every machine on the planet...
“As marriage has become less necessary to support yourself, to gain...”
– From an article on the website Good.is focusing on the reasons why marriage rates (presumably among straight couples) are declining.
RadioActivists Rock for Japan!
WHEN: Thursday December 22nd, 8pm to 12am
WHERE: Big Snow Buffalo Lodge - 89 Varet Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206
WHAT: Live music show, bake sale, video screening, speakers to address the current situation in Japan, calls for solidarity with women’s movement to protect children.
WHO: Permanent Wave (organizer)
FOR MORE INFO: Click #here# to go to the Facebook page for the event. ...
I Talked with Cyndi Lauper about Overcoming Sexism →
“I think the only reason that I’m still goin’ now is that I don’t listen. I think you can’t listen. You listen what works and what doesn’t work for you and you just ignore people. Understand where it is you want to go. Then picture yourself there. If you can picture yourself there, then you can be there. Bottom line.” —Cyndi Lauper, REAL TALK
