Cue documentary.
Because documentaries make me feel objectively smart and create great discourse for myself whenever I do happen to have conversations with other adults outside of my home, I tend to let them play in the background while I pretend to be fully engaged and also clog up my que so whenever I happen to open my Netflix I have a plethora of things I may or may not want to know about. (Like the time I watched Bronies. For God's sake I pity the generation after me because of that film).
Please stop.
Today I actually had time to watch about 90% of one about punk rock and the feminist movement in the late 80's/early 90's.
Disclaimer: I don't consider myself a feminist. I appreciate it and what it's done for women, but I am not one to take every day and make it about advocating for equal rights or trying to be a voice for women. I'm not that way. Maybe it's because of the educational background or even social background I've had, but I see too many differences between the sexes that I just don't see being realistically treated equally. It's kind of like trying to make affirmative action an equal rights issue. It's not. It actually goes the opposite way.
Anyway, I'm not trying to make this about feminism and I'm not trying to have that dialogue in this post. Please save it for some other time. I'm running on very limited sleep and my caffeine crash is about an hour away, so I really am not on it in terms of having discourse about feminism and equal rights. Just know I'm a fan and it's a great thing.
Back to my original point-I was completely inspired. I was inspired by the fact that there are groups of women who get together and talk about women's issues, and that there's so much intellectual discourse that should continue to be brought up among us today and that with the punk rock movement things like fanzines and music shows and fashion and politics all came together and created so many awesome avenues for art.
I want to do that. I want to create an avenue of my own. I don't want to copy what they did though. I could make my own fanzine no problem. But there's no depth in that. I liked that there was this alternative form of media when it came to talking about music and the music scene and politics and social issues that seemed so much more raw and real than some high gloss newspaper or magazine. I liked that it seemed dirty and scrappy.
Everything today is so neat and aesthetically pretty and "designed" that it takes away the appreciation of the craft in and of itself it took to make something. I remember looking at weddings on pinterest and thinking, "Jesus, it's like looking at the same wedding but with different people." Or then there's themes and they're all cliched and overdone. Alice in Wonderland, circus, medieval, hippie, zombies, country (or God, the country/barn theme needs to die like yesterday), beach/destination. I'm so over it all. It's like once hipster became a thing it killed anything else. It was like a black hole of pop culture and sucked out anything people wanted to enjoy. There's no more diversity anymore.
I kind of want to bring back the punk movement. Not like, omg, why are we reliving the punk movement, that's like trying to make the bad 80's fashion a thing again (which totally happened and I'm so glad I never went there), but the idea and the idea behind the aesthetic. That you had something inside you that you needed to express and it didn't exist in the commercial sector, so you patched things together and stitched it all up with absolutely no idea what you were doing but that you had to get this thing out into the world so that people could witness it. Because you needed to make that impact. I'm over the whole, "let's relive our childhood pop culture" ideology because it's completely unoriginal. It's been done. Stop trying to redo it. It's actually smothering me.
No. Instead I want to take ideas and push them out into the world and make a splash. Have people challenged to think about their lives and the decisions they've made in them. I want to do that in my art-in my medium.
I think it ties with the #YesAllWomen wave going on. Instead of victimizing ourselves, let's use this as our women's group. Let's use this to put that dialogue out there to share the ideas we hold inside ourselves because we don't feel we have a voice, or anyone who will listen and not try to cover us up like we're just acting like first world problem brats. Instead of spreading doom and gloom about our lives, let's be positive about making a change, making a shift in our society. Let's educate one another and let's also share how much we care when it comes to people's lives other than our own. Shed the selfishness and the capitalist greed that's so engrained in our culture and just for once listen to one another. There really is no harm in that.
