Life Harvester #16: Androids of Mu, Quarantine Dates, Choose Your Own Dykeventure, Matryoshkas, File Sharing, Drug Church
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription. (Get in touch for non-Patreon options.) Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
For the foreseeable future I’ll be donating all Life Harvester profits to mutual aid funds. This month I’ll be donating to the Pittsburgh Covid-19 LGBTQIA Emergency Relief Fund organized by Sisters PGH.
SPRING HAS SPRUNG
A zissen Pesach. Happy birthday to Marguerite Duras, Maya Deren, and no one else. April Fool’s 2020 was eleven years to the day since Becca & I met. A joyous occasion. Celebrate by pranking someone you love TODAY.
ANDROIDS OF MU - BLOOD ROBOTS
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with this Androids of Mu record, Blood Robots. Originally out on Fuck Off Records in 1980, it was reissued by the stellar Water Wing in 2013. I got it then and spun it some. Lately, I can’t seem to get enough of it, despite the fact that the opening track is almost unlistenable because there are so many bomb explosions. (I pretend Funk Flex is doing the samples and then I usually get through it.) I think this has turned people off of a really good record though! The bomb explosions stop, and the rest of the record is beautiful, shambolic chaos. I heard a rumor that Androids of Mu were courted by Crass records, on the condition that they replace their drummer with Penny Rimbaud, and they refused. I love it!
While this is clearly a post punk record in every sense—sonically, lyrically, melodically—it also fits firmly into a multi-genre category that I call Girls Having Fun (GHF). Other bands in this category are: City Girls, ESG, The Loudmouths, Skinned Teen, Spice Girls. Suburban Lawns might be GHF but for one thing they’re mostly dudes and for the other it doesn’t seem like Su Tissue is having fun. Songs in this category are: Free Kitten covering “Oh Bondage Up Yours,” Hey Girl covering “Always Be My Baby,” Icona Pop ft Charli XCX “I Love It,” Lil Kim’ “Not Tonight (Ladies Night Remix)” ft Angie Martinez, Left Eye, Da Brat, and Missy Elliott. “Give Him A Great Big Kiss” by the Shangri-Las might not be GHF as a whole, but the talking parts definitely are.
The song on Blood Robots with the strongest GHF energy is definitely “She’s A Boy,” which, it seems, is about the singer having a crush on a drag queen. Are there any songs besides this and “Tranny Chaser” by Tribe 8 that are about queer women having a crush on trans women or drag queens? I want to hear them.
QUARANTINE DATE NIGHT
Two days into the first week of social distancing, two-time skanking competition winner Rebecca Giordano asked me if I’d like to go on a date with her. I agreed for two reasons. First, I love to go on dates with Becca, and second, because I was curious what the mechanics of “going on a date” might be at a time when we aren’t leaving the house much.
First we walked the dogs around the block together. Then we went to Badamo’s, the literal only pizza place in Pittsburgh (so weird that a city this size only has one place to get pizza), where Becca bought me a pie even though she can’t eat it because she’s been vegan for 20 years. Don’t worry, it was sanitary! We paid with a credit card over the phone, took the pizza from a window. Everyone wore gloves.
After the pizza, we came home and Becca showed me two movies: Working Girl (1988) and Legally Blonde (2001), feminist classics that I hadn’t yet seen! First up, Working Girl. A quintessential cross-class switch ‘em up. Melanie Griffith stars as Tess McGill, a Staten Island secretary trying to make it in the man’s world of investment brokerage. She’s too smart for her dead-end neighborhood boyfriend, Mick (Alec Baldwin with a bunch of gold chains), and she’s belittled and sexualized by the men she works for. It seems things are looking up when she gets hired as assistant to Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). A woman boss! Surely things won’t be as bad as working for a man. But Katharine proves to be untrustworthy, so when she breaks her leg on a ski trip, Tess assumes her identity and sets the gears in motion to broker a huge deal. Will she get away with it or get caught by Katharine? You’ll have to see it yourself to find out.
This movie was so fun to watch. There’s a lot of revenge against men. Joan Cusack plays Tess’s Staten Island BFF and has incredible hair. At one point when Tess is flirting with possible love interest Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), she tells him “I have a head for business and a bod for sin.” I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say the word bod in earnest, but I loved it! Great movie. 6,000 thumbs up, for Katherine’s $6,000 dress that Tess was afraid to wear.
Next up was Legally Blonde. No one could believe I had never seen it before, but it’s true! I missed out on a lot of great stuff because in high school I was too busy either doing drugs in a playground or reading Adbusters and pretending I was better than my peers who were all a bunch of sheep. Literally only dickheads think like that. Luckily, I grew out of it. Legally Blonde is a comedy of manners pitting affable Bel Air diva Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) against her stuffy classmates at Harvard Law School who don’t believe she’s smart because of her cartoonish, over-the-top femininity. This movie rules. The ways that the story is completely implausible are a lovely departure from the everyday—give me a world where rich women spend holidays with their nail techs, sexual harassers get their comeuppance, dogs are allowed in college classrooms. Legally Blonde is a perfect artwork in that it made me experience both emotions: laughter and crying. 179 thumbs up—one for every point Elle Woods scored on her LSAT.
Overall I would give my date 50,000 thumbs up. The activities were fun, the food was good, and the person I was on the date with is super hot. I would do this exact literal date again because I think both movies warrant a re-watch, but I also look forward to future different dates, though I’m VERY nervous that whatever date I plan when it’s my turn will not be as good. Kinehora poo poo poo. Cross your fingers for me.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN DYKEVENTURE
The newest publication by memer-turned-zinester Maddy Court, who’s prolific output, both digital and print, has never let me down, and this zine is no exception. Following in the footsteps of Caroline Paquita & Erica Lyle’s fantastic Zine Libs, this zine takes the classic choose-your-own-adventure children’s book format and applies it to lesbian dating. To quote the introduction, “you are the dyke at the center of this story,” a story that begins at brunch with your “dependable butch best friend” and the foggy memory of an ill-advised make out the night before. The first choice you’re faced with is a decision between almond, oat, or soy milk for your iced coffee, and the paths they lead you down are many. Will you end up alone? In a threesome? Indebted to a sewer deity?
I won’t give any more away, but what I will say is that this zine is a departure in tone from the pervasive kindness of Court’s The Ex-Girlfriend of My-Girlfriend… advice zine series. It’s more a showcase of her incredible sense of humor, though Dykeventure is not without its warmth and it’s clear that the subject matter is near to her heart. Court's real comedic gift lies in her precision and attention to detail, not unlike The Sopranos, tbh. It’s the little things—the hat a character is wearing, the name of a restaurant, the song playing on the radio—that create an atmosphere of loving parody.
Becca and I spent an afternoon reading aloud, choosing adventures back and forth. It felt like such a relief to consume a form of entertainment we could share besides streaming television or movies. You can get your own copy at maddycourt.com. Do yourself a favor and check out the dog blog while you’re there.
MATRYOSHKA DOLLS
Matryoshka Dolls, sometimes called Nesting Dolls or Russian Dolls, are sets of little grandmas that stack inside each other. As you open each one, you find it contains its duplicate, only smaller. Sometimes there are variations in color. Sometimes they are different ladies. Sometimes they’re a gag, like the set of Cold War-era Gorbachev nesting dolls I saw recently at my best friend’s dead grandpa’s condo.
I don’t remember where I saw a set of them for the first time, (likely at an older Jewish relative’s house or in the home of my mom’s artsy best friend), but I was mesmerized. I was a little dork who read fantasy novels and carried a bunch of rocks around in a velvet pouch tied to my belt, and I desperately wanted to find the magical item that would take me out of my life and teach me to be a hero. “Who among us…” am I right?
The point is, I’ve always had a thing for these little fuckers. Not enough of a thing that I collect them or have ever even owned a set myself, but a thing nonetheless. I think about them all the time, because I find it incredibly satisfying when one thing fits neatly inside another. And I’m not just talking about physical objects, I’m talking about figurative nesting as well. Nesting tasks are one of life’s greatest delights. Kitchen Matryoshkas are especially plentiful. For instance, while I boil the water for Becca’s and my evening tea, I do the dishes. Most nights I get the dishes done in the time it takes for the kettle to heat. And it feels good, fitting one task neatly inside another. Cooking, when you’re in the zone, can be like this. When you have exactly enough time to prep the rest of the veg while the onions caramelize? Magnificent. When you fix your side salad in the precise time it takes for the second side of your grilled cheese to crisp? Exquisite.
Another favorite nesting doll in my life is what I call the Procrastination Matryoshka. It’s less satisfying than the Kitchen Matryoshka, but arguably more important. The Procrastination Matryoshka is premised on the notion that I am unable to focus on a single task for more than an hour max. Left to my own devices and with no fail safes in place, I’ll zone out, watch a rap video because I have a song in my head, then start watching conspiracy vids about how all the rappers are secretly gay illuminatis and then boom. It’s midnight, I haven’t eaten dinner, my cat needs her medicine. Wasn’t it just 8:30?
With the Procrastination Matryoshka, I exclusively procrastinate tasks with other tasks. For instance, this afternoon I’ve been procrastinating difficult work on a novel by working on this month’s Mixtape Club cassette. And I’m writing this newsletter while I listen to the mix’s current iteration. Two necessary, urgent obligations being dealt with while I temporarily put off work on a bigger, scarier one. This isn’t sustainable, of course, because sometimes you need to take an actual break, but as a scatter-brained dipshit who didn’t retain any of the organizational skills they taught me in high school, I find it very helpful.
Becca calls this system of practical distraction “workrastination,” but she cautions that it will likely backfire if you have a TON of tasks that need completion at the same time because you will inevitably leave the one you most want to avoid unfinished. She’s very smart, and she’s much busier than me, and thus has infinitely more experience managing multiple deadlines, so take that under advisement.
Ultimately I should probably just learn to focus better, but no one can argue that using this productive procrastination technique is preferable to watching hours of conspiracy videos about whether the arrangement of Jay-Z’s hands in a photo mean he’s in league with a secret cabal of lizard men who pull the strings on world government from their lair in the center of the earth. And if I’ve learned anything from years of sobriety, it’s this: I can call any bad habit “harm reduction” as long as there’s a worse habit it’s helping me avoid, and then abracadabra, it’s not a bad habit anymore, it’s self-care.
FILE SHARING
I recently downloaded a peer-to-peer file sharing platform, in order to find a copy of classic downtown dyke crime drama All Over Me, which doesn’t seem to be available to stream, even for money. A success! Since then I’ve been downloading a lot of comic books because I can’t get anything out of the library. Before you write in to chastise me for stealing intellectual property, know that I really don’t care. I’ve made just about everything I’ve ever done available online for free. This newsletter, Slice Harvester zine, my book. I buy a lot of books and comics, but I also get stuff from the library and I can’t right now because the library is closed.
ANYWAY, getting movies and comic books is fine, but I honestly have … access to enough of those things that I don’t really need more. And while it’s nice to find obscurities like All Over Me, the real joy of file sharing is the “browse user’s other files” feature because it gives a miniscule glimpse into another person’s life. The person who shared the Nancy Drew comics where George is gay organizes their music into a single folder called “1909-2009” and then ten subsequent folders for 2010-2019, where each year gets its own folder. What kind of weirdo does that??? The person I downloaded My Cousin Vinny from seems to have a video of every Orioles game going back to 1982. I downloaded Paper Moon off someone who’s ONLY other shared file was an ebook called How To Be A Wordpress Rockstar. I downloaded the full run of the comic book Blood Syndicate from someone who was sharing pdfs of every issue of TV Guide from 1982-1998 in a folder called “Literature,” and a bunch of third tier Rawkus Records rap like The High & Mighty. People are so strange! I love them!
I’m not saying what filesharing program I’m using because I don’t wanna blow up the spot, but if you can guess, I’m dipsetxmas on there. I’m just sharing my itunes library—a weird assortment of things that remain from the age before ubiquitous streaming, but that means that this afternoon a stranger downloaded a recording of the Sun Ra Arkestra playing at Lincoln Center on what would’ve been Ra’s 100th birthday that I recorded on my phone to send to Sweet Tooth. I messaged the person to explain the origin of the recording and they responded “:) :) :)” Another connection forged across the cold void of cyberspace.
DRUG CHURCH
A friend of mine who works with young people recently texted the group chat to ask if we were familiar with the band Drug Church. A young person she worked with had discovered that she was into hardcore and thought she might like them. She was curious if any of us other aging punks were acquainted. None of us were. The two women with boyfriends in the chat asked their beaus, though, and the boyfriends were in agreement: Drug Church sucks. “They’re Ceremony-core,” it was reported that one boyfriend exclaimed. “The singer masturbates and eats it because he ‘won’t spill his seed’,” said another.
I was curious about a band that had provoked such ire in the male partners of two women I hold in high esteem, so I gave them a listen. Drug Church make music that I can only describe as “Pissed Jeans for stupid people,” or maybe “incel Wrangler Brutes,” palatable grunge fronted by a former male model. The lyrics, by and large, are sardonic send ups of middle-class convention, oftentimes told in the second person. The narrator of the songs is addressing a “you,” the presumably male listener, failing to live up to bourgeois standards. The major faults here are that the singer isn’t smart or funny and that he seems to perceive himself as a victim. While bands like Pissed Jeans or Wrangler Brutes trade in similar subject matter, those bands respective lyricists are both brilliant and funny writers whose lyrics evoke the claustrophobia of late capitalism, aware of the absurdity of their circumstances and their powerlessness to change them without whining about how hard it is to be a cis white man.
This is now a review of the singer: store-brand Sam McPheeters with V for Vendetta politics. Imagine if Ricky Gervais had a neck tattoo. Most pictures of the band I was able to find online are taken from angles that make him seem taller than his bandmates, when in a handful of other photos he actually seems to be shorter than them. My least favorite kind of insecure man. Becca says he looks like Tony Hawk, suggests we call him Wony Walk in the classic Mario/Wario naming convention. I found an interview with him in Forbes (LOL) where he claims that he is “punk’s big bad wolf” because he’s a fearless truth teller, letting loose such eye-opening insights as “religion, straight up, is fake as hell.”
Can you handle the raw, unbridled truth? Do you think the biggest problem with hardcore today is that it doesn’t sound enough like Bush? Are you prepared to have your pathetic, venal nature laid bare for all to see? Would you like to have your mind blown by the black sheep son from a family of lawyers? If you answered yes to these questions, Drug Church is the band for you.