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Originally Posted by Cooking With Satan
This reminds me of the interview Mark Prindle gave with Branden Kearney (Archipelago Brewing Company, Caroliner, Faxed Head, Heavenly Ten Stems, Three Doctors) re: the infamous Heavenly Ten Stems gig.
Kathleen Hanna is mentioned in the last few paragraphs...
Hey, dig this Jack. What was up with that crazy thing that happened at that Heavenly Ten Stems show? What happened and what were your feelings about it?
The free press needs a muzzle, if you ask me.
Was it "overly PC," or do you think that their perception of the band was understandable, considering that they didn't know you from Adam?
Their perception was understandable. It was willfully ignorant, emotionally crippled, and more than a little unfair...but still understandable. I honestly don't think that they were wrong to be concerned, but I think their way of expressing it wasn't too constructive, for them or for us. What happened is that we were playing covers of pop songs from India, Japan, and China. The singer, Lara, was wearing Peking opera make-up. She also had a dress on that was supposedly a Korean wedding gown. I say "supposedly" because we were told this by the people who attacked us, who were fountains of misinformation in other areas. But for the sake of argument, let's say it WAS a Korean wedding dress.
Mark Davies painted his face with gold paint, which seemed to bug these people, but I didn't understand that. He didn't want to look like himself, but he wasn't trying to look specifically Asian, or even specifically human. I think Mark, like me, looked at shows-- any shows--as a chance to take on a completely new appearance. I saw what he was wearing as pretty abstract. Asians don't have metallic gold skin. No one does.
Alex, the keyboardist, had on a sari. Well, she was white, and she was wearing Indian clothing. Guilty as charged. Roshani, our violinist, was wearing traditional Pakistani clothing. But she's Pakistani, so she's allowed, it seems to me.
The other three members--me, Phil Franklin, and Brently Pusser-weren't wearing anything remotely Asian. In fact, I was wearing the same clothes I'd worn at a Steeple Snakes show not long before.
So in the middle of one song, there was a lot of shouting. Then this woman jumped on stage, said something like "They forgot one thing," and threw a container of yellow paint on us. There was a bit of a scuffle...I remember one of the women who attacked us tearing at poor Roshani's Pakistani scarf and screaming, "What IS this shit? What are you wearing? What do you think you're doing?"
Who WERE these women? Did you ever find out?
Yeah, one of them was actually someone whom Lara had previously considered a friend. And somewhere she had gotten these other two demented women to join forces with her. That's the thing that really got to Lara, was that this woman knew about the show--she'd been invited, in fact--and she could have called Lara and made her feelings known at any point. And Lara wouldn't have worn the clothes or the make-up and that would have been that. But they were going way beyond the clothes...they were saying that we were just making up faux-Asian lyrics, just making nonsense sounds. The fact is, we worked hard to get the lyrics down, and when Mark's Cantonese co-worker heard them, he could understand them. And both Lara and I were studying Cantonese at City College.
So they were pissed because they thought you were MAKING FUN of Chinese culture? That was their point?
Well, to some extent. I mean, we explained that we weren't doing that. But the thing is, even if we could have been exonerated from that one alleged act of wrongdoing, they could still have come up with a thousand more. What it came down to, I think, is that we made them uncomfortable. That's why I don't want to come down on these people too much. You figure there's legitimate pain involved, and when someone else is acting out pain on that level, you want to step back and give them some room. I'm not them and I don't know what it's like to be them. I know that racism exists, and I'm sure they've had to deal with it. But at the same time, you strip away the revolutionary rhetoric and these were very assimilated young ladies. They listened to indie rock and French pop and they hung around with white people. And I don't know to what extent we were breaking some sort of magic spell. I do know that we were an easy, easy target. No one had to worry about getting beaten up for protesting us, unlike at a Klan rally. Or a Dwarves show. I suspect we were a convenient lightning-rod for people who had some tremendous-and probably legitimate--pent-up resentments. Which would have been fine, if they'd treated us like reasonable people who were capable of dialogue, instead of using us as an opportunity to strike self-mythologizing poses.
Speaking of Klan rallies, would you mind telling the good people about the high times at Unnamed Chemical Company? Between you, Gregg, John Singer (Gregg's partner in the Zip Code Rapists) and Margaret Murray (of U.S. Saucer and Three Doctors Band), you had quite a large chunk of the SF music underground inhaling noxious fumes on a daily basis!
Let me finish up my thought on the HTS thing first.
Oops! I'm sorry. While you're doing that, did you guys continue performing in makeup and costumes after that incident?
Yeah, for the one show we played after that. But no one wore anything that was in any way "ethnic." For instance, Lara dressed as a Midwestern farm girl, and I dressed in drag...a black velvet gown and high heels. I always felt that gay transvestism displayed a certain level of hostility towards women, yet it was kind of a sacred cow in the Bay Area- -especially among women--so that seemed to be the way to go.
There are a couple of things that sum the whole situation up for me. There was one woman who wrote a letter criticizing what we were doing, and passed it out at our show...the same show where we were attacked. I thought she was kind of loopy, and I was very angry about the whole thing, but I nonetheless ended up talking to her for a while a few weeks after the show...not least because she'd told me that she thought the woman who'd physically attacked us had some emotional problems that went beyond the racial issue. Besides that, she was at least willing to debate the issue face to face, unlike these people who'd thrown paint at us and then vanished down the rabbit hole.
One thing I told her about was the support we'd gotten from people who weren't white. Lara had spoken to a touring Chinese opera singer who was excited about the band, and gave her make-up tips. Mark's Chinese co-worker translated the songs into English for us, and helped him with certain phonetic things. An Indian family in Nashville helped us find the soundtracks we needed, and they were really happy that we were doing those songs. I told this woman all these things, and she said, "Well, some people are more assimilationist than I am."
And I thought, "Here's someone who runs an underground record store, selling odious shit like Pavement and the Mountain Goats, and she considers herself less of an assimilationist than Indians running an Indian music store in Nashville? Or a Cantonese opera singer from Kowloon?" The Indians had never had a friendly conversation with a white person in their lives until we came in their store! And it burned me up that I was supposed to accept the opinions of two Asian women from the Bay Area as the last word on the subject, and simply dismiss any Asians or Indians who had different ideas as "assimilationist."
Anyway, like I said, we dropped the Asian or quasi-Asian costumes for our next show as a gesture of goodwill, but these folks ended up calling in threats to the club. When that didn't work, they sent observers from some sort of Asian-antidiscrimination group. They were smiling and applauding by the end of the show, so I guess they weren't too bothered by us. And we didn't do any more shows after that...it wasn't worth the trouble. I'm glad we did that last show, though.
Again, I don't really have a huge problem with what those people did. The people I think are unforgivable are the ones who made judgments about the show without being there. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, for instance.
What did that talented chanteuse do?
Oh, there was an article in "Rollerderby" on the whole situation, and Kathleen Hanna wrote in a complaint about how it was biased. Lisa was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, I guess. The thing is, she had completely misread the article. She was complaining about how we'd compared the people attacking us to Hitler, when in fact it was they who'd compared US to Hitler. And she was holding forth about what happened on stage, basing her observations on an article by a San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist who also wasn't at the show. Lisa was actually at the show, and had a videotape of it, and that tape does not bear out the version of events these people were putting forth. I think that it was amoral at best to distort what happened, when a videotape was available...she could easily have gotten the tape from Lisa and watched it before writing that letter.
I guess you can become reactionary--as so many people have--and start saying that anyone who is vehemently opposed to racism or sexism is ipso facto as stupid and vindictive as Kathleen Hanna. But that's not true, to say the least. What you finally have to recognize is that there are people of good will and people of ill will...people who put finding common ground first, and people who prefer to exaggerate the moral distance between themselves and others.
Now, what was that next question?
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