Tag Archives: le tigre

A Sample

My roommate had an odd look on his face. It was an unsettling mixture of trepidation and something close to embarrassment. I thought either someone was dead or I’d won a lottery I didn’t know I’d entered.

“You have a voice mail,” he told me, “from Kathleen Hanna.”

Kathleen Hanna had called me because I’d emailed her about doing an interview for the zine I had just started. I named it Jes Grew, after a “disease” in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, a novel about race and the influence and spread of black culture into the mainstream. Said novel was one of my many obsessions and a driving influence behind Record Ignite!, the band I’d formed a while ago. But that band was no more, and so this zine was where I thought I should channel my creative energy.

I’d emailed Kathleen at a generic info-type address on her website, so I didn’t have a huge expectation I’d actually hear from her. It felt like asking for a million dollars–this probably won’t work, but it’d be awesome if it did. When I’d formed my now defunct band, there were a select few groups in my pantheon of what I wanted it to be, and Bikini Kill was one of them. I admired their commitment to doing something that was genuinely dangerous, and was also sympathetic to their brand of feminism, though I realize now my understanding of exactly what feminism entailed was rudimentary at best. (Now that I have a daughter, I feel like I understand feminism better than I ever did before, but that’s another post entirely.)

In other words, getting a call from Kathleen Hanna was an enormous deal in my universe. My roommate left the room so I could listen to the voice mail, sensing that this was something he should allow me to enjoy by myself. Hearing a recording of her voice address me was enthralling and terrifying all at once. She sounds just like she did on that Mike Watt album!

I eventually reached her on the phone in person, which was even more terrifying, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Soho for the interview. The day we met was a gorgeous late fall afternoon, just the faintest chill in the air, summer stubbornly hanging on. At this point in my life, my only interviewing experience came as part of a group affair when Jello Biafra came to speak at NYU. Me and another editor at the school’s humor magazine lobbed questions at him along with 20 other “reporters,” one of whom took a good 10 minutes to ask Jello if he would lend his time to something called the Million Marijuana March.

I did plenty of advance work to prepare for this interview, and yet was still frightened beyond comprehension before it began, afraid that I’d say or do something unspeakably wrong. That feeling faded quickly once I actually met Kathleen, because she was unbelievably warm and engaging, completely putting me at ease about talking to someone I considered a hero. (I imagine she had extensive experience doing this.)

We talked for 2 hours, in large part about her new artistic direction, since her first solo album Julie Ruin had just come out and was quite a musical departure from Bikini Kill. But we also covered the gamut of politics and feminism and music, and I somehow managed to sound coherent on these subjects while cognizant of the fact that I was discussing them with Kathleen Fucking Hanna.

Before we parted, I gave Kathleen a bunch of 7 inches from the label my friends upstate had started, including my old band’s sole release (seen to your left). I can’t say why I did this. Perhaps because I felt I should offer some kind of token of appreciation for taking the time to talk to me, and I had nothing else to offer. I think my rationale was, We all love you, so here’s something you, in essence, helped make. She demonstrated far more thankfulness than she needed to, and left. I hadn’t the slightest idea, really, of what I’d just done.

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The Terrifying Monolith of My Own Voice

This is your FINAL REMINDER that I shall be reading tonight for the Show and Tell Show at Union Hall in Brooklyn. Be there or be elsewhere!

An event requiring me to speak into a microphone and through speakers reminds me of the most terrifying encounter I’ve ever had with my own voice.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my voice throughout my life. Mostly hate when it comes to how it’s used naturally. Whenever I hear recordings of me just talking in a non-performance-type setting, I cringe. It sounds too high and pinched, and I uptalk like a Valley Girl.

Plus, I can hear these unnecessary ironic emphases that I put into certain words when I’m trying too hard to make people laugh. This technique was impressed on my brain from years of hearing my father on the phone, sweet-talking a business associate or schmoozing someone who had something he needed. I always made fun of him for these phone calls behind his back, and my punishment for this insolence is to inherit every single one of his verbal mannerisms.

But he was an excellent mimic, too. He could do “voices” extremely well, and I’ve inherited that trait from him. So what I do like about my voice is its chameleon qualities. I’m good at imitating accents, picking out the idiosyncrasies of someone’s speech and repeating them. I also have the curious skill of being able to hear voice work and identify the responsible actor, even if I don’t know their names. This ability was honed by years of watching kids shows, whose rosters of voice talent are small and incestuous.

So I often feel like Peter Sellers when it comes to my voice: I’m more comfortable when I’m not Me.

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