Life Harvester #10: Praying, Demystification #2, The Films of Sarah Jacobson

Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for free throughout the United States and for low cost individual subscription.

IT’S FINALLY FALL
Congratulations to all of us for surviving shorts season and making it to the time of year where we get to wear our cutest layers. Happy birthday to Sylvia Plath, Celia Cruz, and my girlfriend & editor, Rebecca Giordano.

A SMALL BUSINESS OWNER AIRS A GRIEVANCE
     In the September Life Harvester you mention that punk is incredibly stupid & a waste of time. I think you are doing a serious disservice to the genre and subsequent lifestyle by not mentioning it is also a waste of money.
—John Villegas, owner Cruel Noise Records

PRAYING
     When I was a kid my parents had what I would call a tolerant atheism. Neither of them believed in God, but they were good liberals so they would never tell me or my sister that believing in God was wrong. Theywouldn’t dream of it. In fact they suggested that I, and perhaps Emma as well, explore religion on our own and choose a faith if we so desired. They also telegraphed their tacit disapproval in constant subtle ways, which led me, as a child, to internalize the notion that I could have a religion if I wanted to, but religion was for the weak-willed and weak-minded who can’t stomach facing the world every day without some sort of crutch.
     I’m not saying that they were bad people or wrong for doing this. As a full-grown pushin-40-ass adult, I have some entrenched beliefs I probably couldn’t avoid imprinting on a child no matter how I tried. I think they were both traumatized by their religious upbringings in their own way, and so my childhood was without it. Nevertheless, I prayed almost every night without even realizing it.
     As a kid, I was primarily afraid of three things: kidnappers, vampires and drug dealers, all of whom I believed would sneak into my window at night and perform various nefarious acts—kidnappers were dressed like a ninja and would steal me from my home to sell on the black market, vampires looked like Karl Lagerfeld and would suck my blood, and drug dealers, who I imagined as well groomed white men in lab coats, would shoot me with heroin in my sleep and I would wake up a junkie. There’s probably a lot we can extrapolate about my childish conception of the world from these assessments, and I encourage you to write me a letter or lengthy email with a full psych workup, but I gotta get on with it.
     My fear of these bad actors was paralyzing to the point that I would lay in my bed at night unable to sleep, and because I had no religious framework to provide me with supernatural comfort, I had to create my own. At some point I decided that my blanket was a magical barrier that protected me from Ks, Vs, and double-Ds. This worked for a few nights until I realized that while I was securely protected from kidnappers, with my head and neck exposed a vampire could still suckle or a drug dealer could shoot me up in my neck. After a couple more semi-sleepless nights, I figured out that the top of my blanket was actually a transmitter and the top of my of my pillow was a receiver for a force field that protected me from vampires and drug dealers but was permeable by my parents and my stuffed animals. How convenient!
     This, once again, temporarily satiated my anxiety and I was able to sleep. But a few days later, a new fear crept in. If these nocturnal fiends were no longer able to target me, they would surely move on to someone else. I was specifically afraid for my sister in the next room. What if a vamp snuck in my window, was rebuffed by my protective barrier, and simply walked into the next room to vamp my kid sis? I focused my thoughts and sent a force field into her room, I pictured it surrounding her bed and I grew less concerned. I knew I didn’t need to send a force field to my parents because they were grown ups and didn’t need protection, but I knew many kids, and they were all susceptible to this trifecta of terror, so I thought about each kid I knew. First I thought about my close friends and cousins, then I thought about kids I simply knew, then I thought of kids I didn’t like. The last part was my favorite because I savored the sweet, smug satisfaction it gave me. I realize there’s a lot going on here, and again, I invite you to write in with your assessment of my mental health as a child. 
     I don’t know how long this habit lasted—could’ve been a few weeks, could’ve been a few years—nor do I remember when or why I stopped, though I imagine it had something to do with getting old enough to know that vampires weren’t real and that my conceptions of the other two categories were completely off base. I do, however, remember a moment as a teen, very high on weed, watching a movie where a kid is praying to God before bed to protect various friends and family members where I realized that I had done something like that every night as a child without ever calling it prayer.

DEMYSTIFICATION #2
I put out my first fanzine ca.1997 (Just looked at the first couple issues to see if I had thought to include a date anywhere, but I didn’t so we’re stuck guessing). The first zine I can remember reading was Fresh Meat: Get It Here, a goofy, chaotic, full-page zine by four older girls (they were in HIGH SCHOOL) who I thought were the coolest. There were a bunch of zines in the little punk scene we had in the suburbs North of New York City in the 90s, and they all, mine included, were what I would call “scene zines” (this was before the word “scene” had any mall emo connotations), in that they documented the local punk scene and followed roughly the same blueprint—local show reviews, local zine reviews, demo and record reviews, some kind of teen political insight (voting is stupid, “coolness” was made up to perpetuate capitalism, Valentine’s Day was made up to perpetuate capitalism, you get the picture), and a smattering of MAD Magazine-style social satire. As an adolescent and teenager, the possibilities for a zine seemed infinite, even if me and my peers all seemed to be endlessly iterating the same concept.
     As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t grown out of fanzines (I mean, duh), but my taste in them has consistently changed and I’ve started to think more about what the medium means. There were a few years after high school where I wrote these solipsistic perzines that were basically just lengthy personal ads. I stopped self-publishing for a few years, ultimately reaching a point where I thought that there were only a few options for zines. They could be hyperspecific, like my friend Johnny’s 8 Letters, containing interviews about people’s knuckle tattoos and nothing else. They could be well-established, like Doris or Cometbus, or they had to be so big and so comprehensive that they created an entire world for the reader to inhabit, like Scam or NUTS!.
     Sarah Elaine Smith, author of the novel Marilou Is Everywhere, was on my podcast last month and she expressed a desire to return to zines as a form after publishing a novel. She described zines as “a container that’s just big enough to hold exactly what you want it to hold.” And there’s something beautiful there. Maybe you just want your zine to hold some funny/upsetting Tinder screenshots like Jesse Riggins’ phenomenal this is my honesty :))!!. Maybe you want it to hold a bunch of really sweet and considerate dating and life advice like Maddy Court’s TheEx-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend… series. This is a far more generous perspective than I had previously held, which accounts for criticality but is still nearly as expansive as my childish notion that a zine can be literally anything.
     I say all this to say, I been in this game a long time and I’ve rarely seen a zine as wide-ranging yet cohesive as issue #2 of Washington, D.C.’s Demystification by Ambrose Nzams & Paula Martinez. The interviews alone cover so much ground. For music, there’s a conversation with Texas band Chronophage (who’s Prolog for Tomorrow LP on Cleta Patra has been in constant rotation in me and Becca’s house since it came out) about physical vs. digital media and being a band today; a discussion with photographer Ed Marshall about his recently reissued early-90s New Age House project, Dreamscape; a discussion with Davon Bryant, a DJ and singer from D.C., who’s music sounds like a younger, less talented but more playful Blood Orange, at least to me, an idiot. There are also two interviews with visual artists—a short q&a with young Texas painter Brandon Thompson and a deeply engrossing, longer conversation with multimedia artist Diamond Stingily, who talks about her practice as an artist and race in the art world and in punk. These last two segments particularly benefit from the fact that Demystification is printed in full color, a choice that I’ve gotta admit I was skeptical of when I first got the zine but before I dug in.
     There’s also a fashion component of the zine that is an absolute delight. NYC punk superstars Warthog contribute a photo-diary from their most recent European tour, which, at least in my eyes, is all about outfits and haircuts. There’s an exploration of metacamouflage, intentionally conspicuously patterned military clothing that evolved from traditional military camo. The longest piece in the entire zine, is an oral history of Nike Air Force 1s’ presence in hardcore. This piece is incredible in that it’s about two things I’m fundamentally uninterested in (Nikes, straight edge hardcore), but is such a deep dive that it had me riveted the entire time. Well worth a read, even if, like me, you spent the 90s protesting Nike and thinking straight edge hardcore was for uptight jocks.
     This issue is rounded out by some zine reviews, a pullout, centerfold poster by Beck Levy, an advice section (what zine doesn’t have one these days?), a sweet eulogy for a guy named DiploDerek87 who was a prolific poster on an unnamed music pirating website (send me an invite), a history of lies told by Aphex Twin. And did I talk about the cover yet? It’s a gorgeously composed photo of four perfectly manicured hands with letters on each nail spelling out DEMYSTIFICATION. Everyone knows I love a manicure. 
You can buy Demistification #2 as well as many other great zines from demystification.bigcartel.com.

THE FILMS OF SARAH JACOBSON
     I feel like I’ve always known about Sarah Jacobson, but I have no clue where I first heard of her. Maybe it was her diligent championing of punk cinema classic Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, (a movie which I’ve owned bootlegs of both as a VHS and subsequently a DVD that was actually just a virus in a DVD box that destroyed an old computer of mine), or because her films, feature-length Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymoreand short I Was A Teenage Serial Killer, have been talked about in underground and counter-culture circles for decades now. What I do know is that whether I heard about her first in a zine or read her article about The Fabulous Stains in Grand Royal Magazine, when I saw that the American Genre Film Archive was putting together a home release of her work, I knew I needed it. So I bugged Jake Fogelnest on twitter to buy me this Blu-Ray and he very graciously did. Thank you, Jake.
I Was A Teenage Serial Killer opens with a young man’s dead body sprawled in a garbage dump, while a chorus of women chant the hook to Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill A Man” over sparse drums and guitar. (This song is unattributed in the credits but if you’re a Bay Area old head and can tell me who it was by/point me towards a full recording, I’d kvell.) The rest of the film, described aptly on the back of the case as “Slacker meets Valerie Solanas,” involves the film’s protagonist Mary, played by artist Kristin Calabrese, murdering her brother when he lectures her about abortion, a stranger who catcalls her on the street, a man who slips the condom off during sex, a boyfriend who lies to her, before a final exposition where she explains that the small indignities that women suffer every day just by living, have boiled over into a rage she can’t contain, and Heavens to Betsy’s “My Secret” plays as the credits roll. Its rough around the edges production lends the film a sense of urgency. It was no surprise to learn that Jacobson produced it under the tutelage of underground film legend George Kuchar during her time studying at the San Francisco Art Institute.
     Jacobson’s less graphically violent but equally powerful feature film, Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore, turns the teen virginity romp on its head by focusing on the budding sexuality of Mary Jane, a suburban high school student working at a movie theater in the city. From its opening scene, where Mary Jane “loses her virginity” during an unfulfilling sexual encounter with some shitty older punk dude on a blanket in the cemetery, the film  maintains its focus on female sexuality and pleasure. The overall unsatisfying nature of Mary Jane’s first sexual experience sets her on a mission to discover whether sex is even worth it by asking all of her older coworkers what their first sexual experiences were like. The tone is almost pedagogical. Like this film is an educational tool to teach teen girls not to be afraid of their bodies. In one seen Mary asks her coworker Ericka (played by Beth from the Loudmouths!) about sex and Ericka suggests she masturbate. Mary Jane looks absolutely scandalized and asks, “you mean I’m not a loser if I masturbate?” To which Ericka responds, “you’re a loser if you don’t masturbate.” 
     While some of this stuff might seem pretty obvious to teens in 2019, it definitely wasn’t in 1997, and there’s probably a kid somewhere today who could use this information. But Mary Jane isn’t just an instructional video for teen girls to learn about their bodies, it’s a wonderful snapshot of the San Francisco punk scene in the mid-90s, with cameos from Blake Schwarzenbach, Jello Biafra, Davey Havok, and this guy Chank who I think used to make weird computer fonts that he would send me to use in my zines, who appears as “the guy with the monkey at the party.” It’s worth noting that Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore was largely funded by Tamra Davis, the director of the greatest film in American cinematic history, the 2002 Britney Spears vehicle, Crossroads.
     Jacobson died of cancer in 2004, and it’s hard not to wonder what she could have done if she hadn’t gotten sick. I think about this a lot with my own dead friends, and comfort myself with the fact that even if I’ll never see the work they could’ve done, I can still visit with the work they made. Oftentimes my biggest hope is that their work meant something outside of our circle, that you didn’t have to be there, that people who were too young, or too far away, or not interested in what we were doing at the time might find a record Jamie or Barker recorded, hear a song Dan wrote, read a zine Travis put out, and it’ll mean something to them. And I feel like this release did that for Sarah Jacobson, at least for me.
You can get your very own Films of Sarah Jacobson blu ray at americangenrefilm.com and information on the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant can be found at freehistoryproject.org.