My name is Sara. I live in Portland, Oregon.
I'm a poet and a musician. I'm the sole constant member of The Dykings.
I like: non-fiction, poetry, indie rock (whatever that means), quotes by artists I admire about their creative process and their work, talking about my own creative process, public art, talking about what it means to make art as a non-straight non-male artist, trying to make great things.
Can I just stop you for a minute and note how fucking amazing it is that one of our greatest living cartoonists is not only teaching this class, but she’s letting us all follow along? Incredible.
2. Prolific doesn’t mean good. Sometimes, it just means someone has produced a lot of mediocre writing. Do you want to be known for writing a lot or for writing well?
“You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
“I personally feel like a lot of the ways people (and critics…usually men) talk about Newsom and discuss her music is really, really intensely sexist. Like that SO much of the language used for her (“fey”, “precious”, “elfin”, etc) are really just code-words for “feminine.” And related to this, she gets described as “crazy” and as being some wild muse that needs to be hemmed in by the more “rational”/”intellectual” male collaborators like Callahan, O’Rourke, Banhardt, and [Van Dyke Parks]. But the thing is, Newsom IS intelligent, and her music isn’t some “wild” thing, nor is it “precious” or “childlike” or “fey”. It’s complex, intelligent, intricate, creative, technical and also very mature. It feels to me like Newsom is a very extreme example of people’s perceptions of gender conditioning and distorting their perceptions of art and artists. The Newsom I read about in reviews has NOTHING to do with the Newsom I actually encounter in her music. And the former seems like it’s just a myth mostly constructed from fear of recognition of women’s intelligence, creativity, and proficiency. They’d rather cling to a storybook wild pixie filled with some magical, incomprehensible female inspiration than actually accept that a woman can be every bit as capable a songwriter as their beloved Leonard Cohens, Tom Waitses, Bob Dylans and so on, and as capable a composer as their [Van Dyke Parkses]…Seems to me a perfect example of sexism prevalent in music journalism and “hipster”/indie sub-culture, amongst people who pose themselves as more “enlightened”/sensitive than the rest of society.”
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Natalie Reed, in conversation with me on twitter, on the sexist, infantilizing, and reductive media narratives about Joanna Newsom. She brilliantly synthesizes what we have been saying at Blessing All the Birds since the beginning.
I also think the “fey” words are code for “we do not want to actually engage with this music because doing so would actually mean acknowledging a woman’s words are powerful and intellectual and thus, threatening to patriarchy in music (and the world).” Those words, most importantly, bespeak of the fear of Newsom’s intense and subversive femininity.
I found out about this album through an interview with Neil Hagerty of the Royal Trux. When I listened to it for the first time, I feel like I was given the context for a bunch of albums that use it as inspiration. (My love for Wild Flag grew three times that day.) Of course I was going to love this album, I love great guitar work and I love non-indulgent jammy jams. I love how urgent this album it is and how it climaxes into open spaces.
