girl to the front - a brief love letter
I’ve been reading Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus, and gosh do I love it. As someone who had sought out the riot grrrl scene (with mixed success) in my own youth, I feel a little silly that I’ve waited this long to pick up Marcus’s exhaustively researched account of the movement. It’s not like I hadn’t been meaning to, but when I got out West I remembered why.
Nikki Darling, who I won’t pigeonhole as a music writer, or a feminist, or as one of my best friends from college - though she is all of those things, let me stay in her sweet little back house when my work out West was done and we got to talking about Girls to the Front. I spent two weeks in May traveling throughout Southern California for work, and did my best to sneak in some quality time with Nikki when all was done and done. This is documented on her blog, with an image of me looking awesome as we did face masks and drank rose tea - a tea which I’ve been led to believe doesn’t exist outside of her home. Nikki’s blog is one of my favorite things about the internet.
Now she and I actually got to talking several times before we got to Nikki’s place, and she may have referenced Marcus’s book during one of those instances, but I don’t know that the chronology is that important here. We spent some serious time on the 10 before we made it home, a memory which I’m now wearing as a badge of having some vague understanding of the freeways in LA. She and I also froze our bums off on the beach the night before (entirely work related), and went to dinner with my boss, who has made a career out of communicating her own feminism to a very unlikely market. I felt an enormous relief to sit and dine with two other women who had been Clinton supporters in ‘08, and strange to acknowledge that this had been a rare occurrence.
24 hours later, we washed our face masks off and Nikki tossed the book on the bed. Oh yeah, I thought, and recounted some of my own experiences looking for the the riot grrrls, looking for the music in Chainsaw and KRS mailers. My friends all went punk at the same time, I stuck behind and found some other music, unclear as to if I wanted a scene, a community, new friends or just some records. I was a little late and a little early, and ultimately found a community in youth glbt organizing - for awhile anyway. Being young is funny that way, you figure out your thing and then you are different.
The next morning Nikki took me to Occidental so I could see where the college years of Beverly Hills 90210 were filmed. We got coffee and she drove me to the LAX, we listened to the new EMA record and I got weepy.
Back in Brooklyn the next week, my East Coast best girl and I rode the B43 down to the botanical gardens, a distinctly Western bit of June Gloom hanging heavy in air. ”Oh” she said, “so I’m reading this book..”
8 months ago • 0 notes