This past month has been so incredibly crazy and wonderful and eye-opening. I traveled to California for the first time to visit Mills college and see a friend, started the layout for the magazine I'm co-editing, have been prepping for finals as well as the ACT (which I took last weekend) with hours and hours of tutoring, and got accepted to my first college (the American University of Paris) :-)
With the first semester coming to a close and my hands busy scrolling through student reviews of colleges I've applied to, everything has really been put into prospective insofar as how little time I really have left in Austin and how much I am going to miss it here. I've always had an appreciation for Hyde Park, but now on my way home from school or during walks to the coffee shop near my house I am noticing more and more just how beautiful my neighborhood's streets are, lined with awnings of trees draped in faded foliage and made of narrow little hills and cars of assorted eras and guitar-weilding lumberjack looking men and bikers and pink-blue skies. My sister and I often play songs on the front steps of my house, and while I strum at guitar chords I can't help but feel that the music sounds so much better because of the atmosphere of my strange, quiet, dead end street. Everything feels so peaceful in the place I'm in, mentally and physically. The only slight discomfort I feel is in the thought of having to leave this little slice of heaven right when I feel I'm finally getting in the swing of living here. It's exciting to think of the future, but also terrifying.
Here is a photo diary of some of my favorite moments from the past several weeks.
waiting for my ride on the drag after an ACT tutor session.
Me and Joseph shot and interviewed the lovely Jennifer for Cream :)
Mills College in Oakland, CA!
After the Mills tour I went to visit my friend Natalie, who took me to a secluded cliff where the Golden Gate bridge could be seen as if it was right in front of us.
With Natalie at my first In 'N' Out Burger experience
Our San Francisco local coffee shop experience was A+
I love the idea of effortless, boyish clothing like a baggy T-shirt and non-fitted denim paired with luminous makeup. I think what I find the most enthralling about this is the ability to carry the look with confidence and see how people react. On a personal note: I'm looking forward to experimenting more with this as an exercise in confidence and shaping myself as a stronger dresser, someone more capable of taking risks and having them pay off. I spend too much time being concerned with wether the items I wear flatter my body type, which oftentimes restrains me from representing aesthetic tastes that I really do enjoy and want to achieve. I think that wearing more baggy looks will better empower me to dress for myself, and not for the sake of appealing to others' tastes, to the same affect that cutting my hair into a pixie was such an empowering experience because I had cut my hair knowing that a lot of people wouldn't like it because it was so masculine; hence, other peoples' opinions became irrelevant to my own aesthetic decisions. I feel like fashion in general can be such a vessel for empowerment and finding oneself through utilizing vanity as a creative tool; I don't think one needs to have a lot of money or a certain body type to take advantage of the fact, just courage and support of others.
During the July protests against governor Rick Perry's
threat to close all but 5 Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and criminalize
abortion after 20 weeks, 14 year-old Tuesday Cain faced harassment for holding
a sign saying “Jesus isn't a Dick, so keep him out of my vagina”. Passer-byers
responded with hateful comments, including the commentary of an older man who
told Cain and her friend “You should become lesbians! No man will ever want
you! You're ugly!” and another man who called her a "whore". A photo
of the sign was later posted online, provoking further outrage.
What is particularly stunning about why Cain's sign is so
provocative is that her assertion is nothing unheard of. The message is
straight forward, non-discriminating and has been repeated by pro-choicers many
times: she is simply stating that when it comes to making laws about
reproductive rights, the bible has no place in the matter. Tuesday’s father Billy
Joe Cain reiterated his daughter’s views on twitter, tweeting, “Women should
have access to all needed health care based on scientific facts, not political
ideology”. The protests were likely to have been abounded with many signs
arguing for lawmakers to keep religious biases out of the decision-making
processes when making choices that would impact the health of people of
numerous, or zero, denominations. So what made Cain evoke such a strong and
hateful response?
The same factors that make Cain's sign so clever is also
perhaps the most threatening to those who attempts to intimidate and silence
her, in that the words she chose have been construed by harassers as an implication
that Cain is sexually active.
The irony of this is that supporters of Planned Parenthood
are protesting the Senate Bill 5 in part for the purpose of sustaining the
accessibility of health care and contraceptives so that women, including girls
Cain's age, are not left with the burden of unwanted pregnancies. One criticism
among anti-choice citizens is that by providing contraceptives, Planned
Parenthood is giving young girls more incentive to be sexually active.
Therefore, in the eyes of Senate Bill 5 supporters, the solution is to limit
availability of contraceptives; in this way the anti-choice movement is not
only taking away the right to safe abortions from women, but pushing abstinence
as the only option for minors, leaving only unsafe sex and the risk of unwanted
pregnancies as the alternative. What Tuesday Cain's sign evokes is
anti-choicers' widespread response to the fears that fuel the Planned
Parenthood boycott: a girl who does not view sex as something strictly
prohibited to minors such as herself. The personal pronoun in Cain’s sign
allows the sign to be construed as some statement that Cain has sex, possibly
casually, possibly because she does not see the almighty consequence that so
many anti-choicers see attached to the act of minors having sex, regardless of
it being consensual and protected. It goes without saying that the sexually
frank attitude of Cain’s sign poses a threat to anyone who thinks abstinence
should be the only option for minors; that is, it is a threat to anyone who has
looked into the services of Planned Parenthood and still supports Senate Bill
5. In the same way that criticizers pellet Planned Parenthood as an operation
turning young girls into “whores”, the criticizers of Cain pin her as the
representative of every girl who has been brainwashed by said machine to
believe that minors should be equipped to have protected sex.
It speaks volumes of the general public's discomfort with
the idea of a young girl having sex when hundreds of adults feel entitled to
criticize a fourteen year old based on the whereabouts of her virginity.
Parallel the response to Cain’s sign with the large-scale movement to all but
criminalize abortion with the enactment of Senate Bill 5, and it is essentially
the same ordeal; adults’ discomfort with the possibility of minors having sex
blinds them to the benefits and logic of providing passage to Planned
Parenthoods, which do provide accessibility to contraceptives, but also provide
services that apply to all women, including those who are not sexually active.
I have been in love with Melbourne band Oh Mercy ever since first hearing their album Privileged Woes (specifically, this song). To this day Oh Mercy's songs, ranging from dance-inducing strummed jams to Dylan-reminiscent folk and all beautifully illustrated by intimately written lyrics, remain my greatest adorations.
During SXSW of 2012 I was immensely thrilled to interview frontman Alexander Gow: the poetic brains behind, as well as singer and guitarist of, Oh Mercy.
Originally the band was formed around myself and my friend Thomas Savage. We went to high school together and started making music there and we made the first Oh Mercy album together, not long after leaving high school, and after that he decided he wanted to move to England with his girlfriend and started up a group over there. So since then I've got some other members involved... the current line-up's been together since then, which was a few years ago.
What are some of your influences?
I really love the kind of singer-songwriter.. songbook kind of stuff, like Bob Dylan and Leonhard Cohen... they're probably my two favorites. But I'm also writing to kind of 60's girl groups, like Diana Ross and Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, and stuff like that are some of my favorites so they (my influences) could definitely cross over between that pop thing and the song writer stuff.
How would you describe your sound?
I suppose it's kind of like lyrical-based rock music or something. Like I mentioned, the songwriting aspect of it is the most important to me because that's what I love and that's what I grew up on, but I'm also interested in having fun with the music side of it, as opposed to just being like the troubadour that plays acoustic guitar and sings his heart out. I kind of am more interested in having fun with the sound so it's kind of like, having both feet firmly cemented in the songwriter thing but just presenting it in as many ways as I wish, which is the exciting thing.
So your first album was Privileged Woes and Great Barrier Grief is your second album. How are they different?
Well the first album was made in a bedroom to begin with, with minimal gear, by my friend Miles. We kind of thought we were making some demos but Miles is pretty clever with his computer and whatnot so I suppose we kind of accidentally made an album over a long period of time. Because the first one was kind of successful in Australia we got the opportunity to make another one and at that time we could afford to do one in a studio. I mean the main difference is the environment in which they were made. The first one, we're kind of making do with very little, therefore we had to build and build and build the sounds until it sounded acceptable, whereas the second one we had the leisure of just kind of setting up as a band in a room and having a more simple sound and letting the songs speak for themselves.
Do you think you get a different response to your music in the States than in Australia?
It's kind of hard to tell, we're just at such an early stage in our career over here, really just taking our first baby steps. But yeah, I think that there's probably truth in that. Our music has a little bit of background in Australian, alternative 80's kind of culture. There's few bands that I love, like the Go-Betweens and the Triffords, who are considered kind of quintessential alternative Australian groups. So we kind of had a little bit of that going on in those bands kind of praising us and I suppose no one really knows about those groups over here so they don't quite hear those references. But like I said it's still early, it's kind of hard to tell. We'll have to wait and see.
Are you working on a third album after the tour?
Yeah, after this tour is over we're driving over to Portland to make our third album with an Australian/Canadian produced called Birk Raid. We're also gonna have Steve Berlin play on the record; he's this saxophonist from Los Lobos, one of my favorite groups, so I'm really excited.
What's your favorite sandwich?
I do love sandwiches. I love salty and spicy things, so anything to do with that. You know like some kind of salty cheese, like a feta cheese or a goat's cheese maybe. Maybe some Anchovies.. a little bit more salt. Maybe like salami or something like that.
I've decided to post more interviews on here because I want to dedicate this space to my work, in addition to personal ongoings and silly thoughts/outfits/obsessions. The idea to put on display more of my (very slight) involvement in music journalism and experiences in speaking with musicians was inspired largely by the advice from former youth-spinner/Chronicle writer/journalist extraordinaire/music librarian Zoe Cordes Selbin. Thanks, Zoe <3
That being said, I'll be posting a few interviews I unearthed from several months ago, one even conducted a year ago. Stay tuned!
