Life Harvester 27: I Killed Kurt Cobain, This Shirt Sucks, Some Records I Love, Dykes To Watch Out For

Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription via Paypal or on Patreon. 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.

MARCH ME RIGHT OFF A CLIFF WHYDONCHA
Spring me from the prison of my corporeal form, am I right? As my friend Lola said on the phone the other day “time doesn’t exist anymore. We’re finally out of the One Endless Day, but it just feels like we’re in the November 30th of March 4th, 2020.” To quote Helen Honeywell’s single line in Happy Gilmore, “get me outta here!” Happy birthday Cory Feierman, Ornette Coleman, Rosa Luxemburg, and Queen Latifah

I KILLED KURT COBAIN
I been thinking a lot about Kurt Cobain because it was just his birthday and every trans girl on twitter posted that picture of him wearing a gown with a caption like “WE MISS U QUEEN” or whatever. The tackiness of ascribing queer identities to the dead aside, I take great joy in situating Kurdt among my pantheon of trans-foremothers. Partially because, as Morgan M. Page put it, “the fun thing about the Kurt-as-trans meme is that she would've loved it, regardless of its veracity,” partially because he was such a magnetic and enigmatic figure, and partially because, for a long time, I thought of him as a punchline. The recuperation of his life and his struggles, at least in my own memory, feels like personal growth.

Kurt was an out-sized figure in my childhood. I loved grunge as a kid, and though I’ve always tended to shun a front-runner on principle, Nirvana were undeniably the best of the bunch. When I was 10, I heard Kurt’s suicide announced on Z100 in the mini-van carpooling me to school. I didn’t really understand suicide, but I pretended to hang myself by my belt from the monkey bars on the playground at recess that day.

In Middle School I got into punk and kissed the mainstream, long-haired preening bullshit of Nirvana goodbye for the mainstream, mohawked, preening bullshit of Rancid. Via Rancid I found my way to the local punk scene of my suburb, and the larger scene of New York City. I was envious of the ecstatic abandon I saw in the faces of the other teens at shows. They all looked so cool and seemed to know each other, and I knew I wanted to look cool and know them too.

Fundamentally, punk in its ideal form, is about participation rather than consumption. Feeling too insecure to start a band, I published a fanzine. Soon after, a friend taught me to screenprint, and I designed two t-shirts to sell at shows, along with my shitty publication. One shirt had a picture of the state of New Jersey captioned by a crude cunnilingus joke: "Kiss Your Girlfriend Where It Smells, Take Her To New Jersey.” The other shirt just said “I KILLED KURT COBAIN” in an almost-Comic Sans font. It seemed like the right kind of message. No respect for rock stars. No reverence for the dead. This was punk, afterall.

My freshman year of high school I wore one of those shirts to a party at my friend Andrew's house. His parents were divorced and it was a classic one parent’s outta town bait-n-switch. Andrew's step-sister Kristen was a cheerleader and she invited all her football friends. Andrew invited our crew (me, Bruno and Carlos) and we smoked bongs in the attic and like, listened to bootleg Operation Ivy tapes Carlos brought back from the flea market in Mexico City, which we would've been doing even if Andrew's dad was home.

Eventually we wandered downstairs to find a bunch of dudes from the football team getting drunk in the kitchen. Imagine a room full of wasted Moose Masons, but listening to Biggie Smalls. I was a young Freak on a Leash back then so I was wearing my brand new from 8th St Gripfast combat boots with neon New Kids On The Block laces I stole from one of the t-shirt shops on St Marks Place, some big black JNCOs, my I KILLED KURT COBAIN shirt, and my hair was bleached a ratty orange.

Some of Kristen's football friends fleeced us on Budweiser 40s for $5 a pop, and we started to drink and hang out with them. We were all getting along fine, us young freaks and these older preppies, until this one gigantic dude pointed at me from across the room and shouted, "TAKE THAT SHIRT OFF!" I chuckled, a little nervously, but assumed he must be kidding. All of a sudden he was right in my face, butting his chest into mine and talking through his teeth. "I SAID TAKE THAT FUCKING SHIRT OFF!" 

I was still laughing, albeit a little more nervously, because I thought he was fucking with me and was gonna laugh about it too any moment because why would some jock care about my I KILLED KURT COBAIN shirt?

When he shoved me against the wall and held my collar so I couldn’t move, I got scared. Kristen was like, "oh no Travis put him down leave him alone" but it was clear that she was actually so stoked on his display of raw masculine power. I scanned the room. Everyone was watching. I hated it. Very quickly and very quietly I asked him "what's your fucking problem, man?" 

And then in that placid voice that shitty dudes get right after they Hulk Out and it’s time for the lesson meant to accompany their violence, he was like, "My problem? My problem is with that shirt. I love Nirvana and I love Kurt Cobain you little faggot.” He paused and surveyed the room triumphantly before returning his gaze to me. “So take that shit off."

To be called a faggot by a high school running back defending Kurt Cobain’s honor felt more surreal than intimidating. I busted out laughing with my whole body, so intensely that my would-be bully simply dropped me on the floor and walked away, mumbling that I was crazy. Like three hours later he asked me to teach him how to play "About A Girl" on Andrew's dad's acoustic guitar and I politely declined.

THIS SHIRT SUCKS
A memory: I’m 11, in the park with my cousins, and I walk up to an older grunger because I like his shirt, an image from the cover of the Nirvana “Sliver” single. This would’ve been 1994, so Kurt may not have been dead yet. My uncle Kevin had given me a CD of Incesticide the year before, and I was ob-sessed. I’d sit in my room reading and re-reading the liner notes—an essay Cobain wrote about loving the Raincoats and hating rape culture—while letting the CD repeat in my boombox. “Sliver” was, by far, my favorite song.

And so I saw this kid in this shirt and I was 11 at the park and I just walked up to him and was like, “hey man, cool shirt.” And he looked down at me, completely repulsed to be addressed by a child, and he goes, “this shirt? This shirt sucks.” And he walks away. 

I was mortified. I’ve played that interaction through in my head probably hundreds of times in my life and it wasn’t until I was like 26 that I realized how bad he was playing himself. He was wearing the shirt that sucked. I’d just liked it. 

SOME RECORDS I LOVE AND HOW I HEARD THEM
Tara Jane O’Neil - Tara Jane O’Neil. I was a huge fan of TJO’s fifth record You Sound, Reflect after my friend Nate invited me to see her play in 2006. She performed solo, using a bunch of loop and effect pedals with her guitar and voice to build out these incredibly rich songs, piece by piece, right before our eyes. The audience consisted almost entirely of women, save for Nate and I. I ran into my friend Amelia between TJO and the opening act and she seemed shocked to see me. “YOU like Tara Jane O’Neil?” I feigned incredulity, even though I’d never heard her music before, “Why wouldn’t I?” Amelia looked at me, gestured around the room, raised her eyebrows and said, “you’re not a lesbian.” Little did either of us know.

This autumn I revisited You Sound… and found myself loving it even more than I remembered. Looking at O’Neil’s bandcamp, I was surprised to learn that she’s been continuously releasing records since then, but had somehow dropped off my radar. (Maybe it's not surprising that I would block out the work of someone who would reinforce my latent lesbianism.) My favorite of her past 15 years worth of releases is 2017’s Tara Jane O’Neil, an album of Beatles-via-Elliott Smith pop, only a slight departure from the “what if a post-hardcore bassist had a folk project on Olivia Records?” vibes of You Sound, Reflect.

Ralfi Pagán - Con Amor. Some time last year, Pisces King Cory Feierman, posted an image of The Brooklyn Sounds’ Libre: Free LP to instagram, a surreal photo collage of the Sounds’ eight band members floating nude in the East River. I spent last spring playing Libre: Free loud through open windows, pretending I was back in New York.

From there I did the standard exploration of anyone who learned about punk before the internet—I started researching the label that released the album, Bronx-based Salsa Records. From Salsa Records I made my way to their parent label Mary Lou Records. Listening through their singles brought me to Puerto Rico’s Frank Sinatra, Raul Marrero. Via his smooth as silk 1968 LP, I began to dig through the Miami-based Fania Records catalog, which finally led me back to the Bronx, to Nuyorican crooner Ralfi Pagán’s impeccable second full length, Con Amor. 

The b side of the album opens with an impeccable cover of Bread’s “Make It With You,” a song I always thought totally sucked. Turns out the original version is just terrible, because Pagán’s arrangement makes for perfect soul. His buttery voice floats over a sparse arrangement of bass, vocal harmony, a sprinkling of keys and guitar, finished off by a more Latin-inflected percussion than your average Motown release. The song’s lyrics imply that what Pagán wants to make with you is a life together, though in 1971 the phrase “I wanna make it with you,” had a particular implication. Pagán delivers the ham-fisted double entendre with such convincing sincerity that I believe that he believes his own shtick. 

The rest of the record drifts between pitch perfect Latin Soul and early-70s Salsa. Though I first began to listen to it regularly in the depths of winter, I couldn’t help but imagine myself driving somewhere in no particular hurry with the windows down or biking slowly underneath an elevated train on a hot New York night, Pagán blaring from a boombox in the basket of my bike.

Harold Budd - Pavilion of Dreams. I was talking to my friend Clue about music to sleep to and she suggested a handful of ambient albums, including this Harold Budd joint. The first night I listened to it, I was laying on a heating pad, under my weighted blanket, with the dog and the cat both sleeping on top of me. The first track is so serene and blissed out I fell asleep almost immediately. 

But Clue had forgotten to warn me that the rest of the album is spooky Castlevania music! It must have crept into my subconscious, because that night I dreamt that a friend & I were trapped inside a big, unfurnished, Beauty & The Beast-type mansion that was growing increasingly hotter as time passed. We wandered from room to room, the radiators whistling, unable to find the thermostat. I woke up dazed, in a sweaty heap. When I relayed this dream to Clue, she apologized, but it was unnecessary. I love the surreal feeling of waking from a strange dream.

THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR 
In June of last year, I read that Bluestockings Books was being forced out of their lease and my heart sank. In August, they found a new space, and began to fundraise for the move. It’s been a nailbiter. But in mid-January, they met their goal and will be able to go forward with the move. A tiny victory in a terrible time, but let’s find hope where we can.

Bluestockings is the first feminist bookstore I hung out in. I haven’t been there more than sporadically in almost a decade, but it was a formative place for me, perhaps the first “women’s space” that I ever felt comfortable entering. I’m overjoyed that they’ve been able to find a new location, but it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to the old one. Everywhere I went to punk shows and did activist work when I was young is gone. The world we live in increasingly feels like a dystopia that is simultaneously more horrific and more boring than I ever could’ve imagined.

Alison Bechdel’s stellar serial comic Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran for a quarter century from 1983-2008, is a reflection of hope in an increasingly terrible world. The strip follows the lives of an ensemble of characters over the course of it’s run, but it also tells the story of places: La Lentille D’or, the upscale vegetarian restaurant; Cafe Topaz, the lesbian coffee shop; characters Sparrow, Lois, & Ginger’s collective house; and perhaps most importantly, Madwimmin, the feminist bookstore. 

It’s appropriate that I first read Dykes To Watch Out For in Bluestockings. It was a hot summer, and I was idling around the LES like I did for years. I often sat at Bluestockings drinking coffee and reading books I was “considering buying,” though I rarely bought much, and no one ever pressured me to. I can’t remember why I picked up Dykes To Watch Out For, or which of the many collected volumes I grabbed off the shelf. I imagine I was intrigued by those smaller editions. Their wide, squat, landscape-bound pages looked like the Garfield collections I’d had as a kid, but inside, they were a world away from the animal hijinx at John Arbuckle’s house.

Like most of my 20s, I remember those comics only vaguely, and it’s hard not to reread them through the lens of my nascent transness. I was a gay woman resigned to my fate as a straight man, contending with my conflicting desire to hang out in women’s spaces and fear that my very presence would ruin the spaces I sought so desperately. 

What I do remember from those early readings, is a sense of resonance I felt with the character Mo, who I’ve always assumed was a magnified caricature of some of Bechdel’s flaws. Mo is a neurotic white woman so stuck in her head she has a hard time experiencing life as it’s happening to her. An activist at heart, she frequently finds herself so bogged down with the intricacies of enormous systems of oppression, overwhelmed with her inevitable entanglement and complicity in environmental racism, commodity culture, you name it, to the point of paralysis. She’s difficult and judgmental, a hypocrite, and her analysis frequently lacks nuance. She’s like many writers and comics people I know.

I found myself thinking of Mo a lot early in the COVID crisis and even more so with the election of Biden. Every time anyone expresses any relief, justified or not, I want to tell them the sky is still falling. I don’t do it, though. So many people are just looking for something to hang a little bit of hope on. Who am I to take that away? But it’s a difficult urge to fight.

With Mo on my mind, I decided to reread the whole strip, most of which is collected in a single volume. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For starts with the introduction of Mo, who exists as a single node in the network of friends, foes, & lovers who populate her world. Bechdel writes a diverse cast of characters, and they all lead full lives. Through the strip’s 25-year run, there are loves, heartbreaks, pregnancies, adoptions. People buy houses, get jobs, grow out of the habits of their 20s while struggling to maintain their connection with the community that nourished them when they needed it.

The sheer volume of strips is in itself an accomplishment, and really highlights the possibility of building a massive body of work incrementally. Even if they weren’t good, this would be a feat. Of course there are plenty of comic strips that have run for far longer than a quarter century. Nancy or Peanuts immediately spring to mind. But their characters remained static throughout, locked in a stasis year after year. The real brilliance of Dykes... is that the characters grew in real time, constantly changing and evolving, responding to current events.

I’ve always looked for parallels to my life in works from the past, especially those of other punks or queers. Discussing Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia in the very first Harv I wrote, “depending on the mood I’m in, it can feel either invigorating or deeply depressing to be reminded that people have been struggling with some of the same issues as me and everyone I care about since before we were born.” Though Dykes… was written entirely in my lifetime, it evokes a similar emotional response. Mo’s anxieties about Clinton are my anxieties about Biden. Jezanna’s struggle to keep Madwimmin afloat in a gentrifying Minneapolis is Bluestockings’ recent lease crisis. 

In this particular moment, desperate for any hope to pin my dreams on in an increasingly barbaric world, I simply bask in the sense of resonance. I feel connected to prior generations, and through them connected to generations further back, ad infinitum, all the way back to Lilith or Sheela Na Gig, I suppose. And this feeling, of being a woman in a continuum of women, comforts me.