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Pregaming for Houston next week

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Rodrigo said she’s “always loved rock music, and always wanted to find a way that I could make it feel like me, and make it feel feminine and still telling a story and having something to say that’s vulnerable and intimate.” She beamed, her eyes bright under light winged makeup, talking about how artists she admires are “using rock music, but they’re not trying to recreate a version of rock music that guys make.”

O.R. on feminizing rock

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Hard to overstate my love for the new Hurray for the Riff Raff album "The Past Is Still Alive" and in the spirit of the title phrase I've been in a HFTRR YouTube-archive rabbit hole that I hope never ends

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Laurie Anderson skewering the concept of "experts" on late nite TV in 2010. When I saw her at BAM in October she added a line about the so-called "experts" who condone bombing hospitals.

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There's one line I'd cut. But wow

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Who knows the story? Who knows what happened?

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A song I can say changed my life

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Joan Baez and her sisters Mimi and Pauline posing for a draft resistance poster 1968

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Short profile of Annette Peacock in 2000

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Max Roach and Margo Guryan at the Lenox School of Jazz 1959

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A screenshot from Anohni's website

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Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn't considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl. She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow—no, that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

— from "The Quick and the Dead"

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Part of my job, the job of my body, was to be a bridge for certain stories to walk across my back from one era to another era. And I realize that now. That’s what I’ve done. That’s been my work. And I used to think, “Oh, I chose that.” But actually, it was assigned to me by fate. It was assigned to me by all the gay men who were my mentors and who were dying. They put it on me. It was assigned to me the day I met Marsha P. Johnson and kissed her hand, six days before they found her body in the Hudson River. It was just assigned to me by fate and by my own temperament. I was called a screamer, a hysteric, theatrical, overdramatic, and told that I took myself too seriously, all because as a queer-bodied person, I could feel it. I felt it.

Anohni 2022

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I had certain mentors as a teenager who told me, “Oh, the Earth is definitely your mother. This is a feminine world, and the sky is a feminine pantheon.” I’ve come to imagine that it’s just one thing. It’s not a binary. It’s all feminine. The feminine gives birth to masculine aspects to help perpetuate herself. For me, the masculine is a subset of the feminine. It is forged from feminine materials, and it is encompassed by the feminine, just as stars are encompassed by the darkness. I don’t really believe in the whole idea of opposites. In my mind, the feminine is a whole. It’s not just half of a whole; it’s actually the whole. She doesn’t really have another half. The universe is purely feminine.

Anohni 2022

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Live on the radio in Austin 1981

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“When I was teaching at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, I had an opportunity to meet Flannery O’Connor, who lived just a few miles away at her farm called Andalusia. I’d say, ‘you call ‘em stories but I just think they’re long poems,’ and she’d say, ‘well, you call ‘em poems and I think they’re short stories.’ It got to where I’d go over there every two or three weeks and Lucinda, who was five, would go with me. Flannery let her chase her peacocks. We became dear friends and in 1961, LSU advertised for a poet to teach in their writing program. Though I had only had three hours of freshman English formally, she saw the ad and, without mentioning it to me, wrote them and said the person you want teaches biology at Wesleyan College. They couldn’t believe that, of course, but they couldn’t ignore Flannery O’Connor. So they sent me word that said, ‘Would you send us some of your work?’ And I did.”

From a profile of Miller Williams, Lucinda’s dad, titled “The Hank Williams of American Poetry” (2005)