Summer Solstice Newsletter
Sticks and stones and arts and crafts.
Litha/the Summer Solstice is here.
“A lesser known Wheel of the Year celebration, Litha occurs during the Summer Solstice between June 19-22 [in the northern hemisphere]. More commonly referred to as Midsummer’s Night, Litha is believed to be a time when faerie folk pass into the human world at Twilight and offer blessings. Litha is a time to celebrate the abundance and beauty of Mother Earth. Flowers are in bloom and gardens are producing fresh vegetables and fruits. Gather family and friends to celebrate the longest day of the year and coming harvest season.” (from Mabonhouse.co/litha)
Abundance, more light and flippin’ fairies!!! This summer I’m focusing on the zillions of projects that I’ve started recently and in the past. Emptying out the supply bins and using what I’ve been collecting. LINDALAY’s Lil Art Shop will be featured at a community festival at mid Lughnasadh- the start of the harvest (the end of August). Underneath my lil red tent at the West End Fest will be the results of my work. You can see more of the process on Instagram: @lindalaylindalay
ART
I’m following my intuition with this art fair thing. It’s a return to my shop-space identity. Seeing what that looks like now, through the “doing.” I have no expectations aside from it being a temporary space that I’m in control of that will allow conversations between me and people who wander by. Like when I had a shop on Hollywood Blvd, I’ll be able to hear rando judgments from day-drunk strangers having to do with whether or not anything I make is real art. I’m guilty of doing similar things at art fairs, so it’s only fair. (Ha! “Fair,” get it?)
It’s also a return to my installation and performative work in that the lines feel rather blurred between shop-person and a kind of absurd artist “host” that I have been in my previous shop spaces and also in performances I’ve done where I made a kind of temporary environment. I’m big on exploring the hand-made, the idea of the DIY and the “upcycle” from the perspective of a person who has to use what is available, what is disregarded or not-valued. Meaning it’s not coming from a place of, “my mission is to save the world through reducing waste,” which is a very good mission by the way, but from the perspective of someone who wants more but only has access to a few resources- the garbage, the rejected..
Once again I’m brought around to the idea of “the remix,” as I’m formally coming to some kind of new terms with what feels so much like my life’s work- to take in data and see what I make out of it and stand by it with a confidence that commands the works as being something. I can’t help but feel as though this is my big challenge as an artist.
When I type this I feel the roots of all that I do as an artist, from birth or childhood- as though I’m battling something giant by taking the scraps and garbage that is my specific birthright or inheritance or maybe it’s karma and turning it all into something I value. By sharing I’m seeing if others also find value. They often don’t. Mostly it’s a rebellion.
BOOKS
Rebel Girl
Kathleen Hanna just published her autobiography called Rebel Girl, from the title of one of her Bikini Kill songs and I bought the audio version and zipped through it in no time, as one can with biographies of people they appreciate.
While there is so much to learn from her life, and it’s so good to have it presented by her as opposed to others, I feel that it’s a great book to contemplate the roots underneath anyone who has ever been labeled as a “slut,” and I guess more importantly, the roots underneath anyone who uses that term to hurt others.
In my lifetime, the memories of cutting moments where peers and authority figures have directed the essence of that word toward me for reasons that had more to do with their own fears and pain than the actuality of any kind of “sluttiness,” are ones where I still have to do the work to step in as my own imaginary parent and refuse to accept that hurt on the behalf of who I once was. The intention of that word or any one of its synonyms, sometimes invented, sometimes disguised as concern, sometimes appearing as full sentences or even mantras that help lock in damaging neural connections to developing minds is: cruelty.
It’s awful, how easy it is to be in denial or unaware of how harmful it is to tell someone that they are so apparently recognized as using their own bodies for the sake of pleasure, gain, or attention. The symbolic weight we give the body- something we all have and in some way want contact with in others. The perception of being a devious manipulator if it seems we are using it to control people or situations, or even for personal pleasure. It seems that many times the judgments come from people who are unaware of their own lack of power or self-love or joy. They believe they are being honest, forthright and helpful and dispensing “tough love.” It seems that many times these cruelties are thrown out carelessly as a reaction to hurt feelings- a temporary heartache leading to misguided retaliation in the form of something like a metaphoric injection of cancer as revenge into someone vulnerable enough to take it. That’ll show ‘em.
Of course you also have the predators who are engaging in long-term emotional abuse on their victims. Breaking them down and setting them up to feel that being the target of constant cruelties is just how things are. In Rebel Girl, Hanna shares such thoughtful insights on that word via her experiences and work in trying to change things on all possible levels.
Hanna even mentions Andrea Dworkin, whose lecture I attended at Bookshop Santa Cruz in the late nineties or maybe it was 2000 or 2001. Around that time I discovered a paper copy of Bust Magazine at a hair salon. I was drawn to an article about a performance artist who was an acquaintance of mine, via a good friend from high school. They had gone to New York City after graduating college, were best friends and roommates and were both paying their dues to grow their craft and make it big in their respective fields. The discovery started a series of changes in me. I wasn’t attending any literary or feminist events at the time, but through that magazine, local weekly publication articles, and things I searched out during that era of the internet, I was growing aware of feminist thought relative to sexuality and I can see now that sex confused the heck out of me. Through things I read I found there seemed to be a sort of “beef” between the writer and activist Andrea Dworkin and the sex-positive author, journalist and performer Susie Bright, who had gone to UC Santa Cruz and had a presence in the area. This is how I became aware of Dworkin.
During the decade of my twenties I was living inside of a very “toxic and cis male” idea of sexuality while being sexually and emotionally abused and manipulated by my older partner. I was young and by his design, felt trapped. I couldn’t let myself live through the “feminism 101” Kathleen Hanna describes in her book and I certainly could not inhabit Dworkin’s radical feminism, even though they both caught my attention. No, instead I felt compelled to feel defensive of creepy men like the one I lived with. Like a lot of young women I cringed at the word, “feminist” and probably declared that I was not one. I now credit some of that, or maybe a lot of that to my youthful deep-dive into the diaries of Anaïs Nin. It was the skewed lens through which I read her words that did me wrong- My attraction to her and subsequent obsession was an attempt to find a kind of freedom but I got lost along the way.
Bust Magazine hit me near the end of my twenties. I had started growing up, I guess. They had a page available for ads that people could pay little for and through these DIY blurbs I discovered personal blogs (we called them websites then) by women who were simply living their lives and documenting their experiences. They also played around with 1950’s housewife imagery and sold crochet and craft items. My love of diaries found a new form and I wanted in. I had access to the internet and it’s how I started to consider different ways to perceive my own life and inhabit it.
So.. I was inspired to go hear Dworkin speak and found the bookshop was PACKED.
The author did not look healthy or happy. I believe she used a cane and wore drab overalls. Everyone else seemed to be wearing whatever they had put on in the morning. This was just a part of their day. I remember feeling so out of place after spending so much time on my look, specifically for this event. I wore platform sandals, an animal print minidress and my signature bright-red lipstick. One “little girl” plastic butterfly barrette held the side of my two-toned blond (with intentionally dyed brown roots) hair back. I did my best to look like the Riot Grrrl feminist I had started learning about. My much needed prescription glasses with thick, plastic tortoise shell frames felt like the finishing touch. I was just playing the part, accustomed to the attention my youth and looks usually gave me and taken by surprise by this new environment, where that wasn’t happening and it didn’t matter.
Standing next to me was a young bearded man who I assumed was a UCSC student, of course I always assumed anyone about my age who seemed to frequent Bookshop Santa Cruz or certain local coffee houses were college students, because they often were. Without any kind of warning I was able to recognize, he broke out into this gut-wrenching and semi-silent sobbing as the author spoke. Tears poured to the floor as he hung his head downward. Low. I’ll never forget it. I was not at all used to seeing emotion that wasn’t anger expressed so openly from a man, and especially not in reaction to the pain of a woman expressing a suffering that I recognized and was living through. I narcissistically read the moment as though there was some kind of triangular energetic space between him, Dworkin and myself and like a terrible shock he felt what I was living through and allowed it to release in a way I could not. But of course it was not my life that brought this emotion- it was what Dworkin was saying and most likely he held the weight of his own very painful, traumatic life experiences and abuse.
I can’t remember exactly what she said from her podium but she railed against pornography and discussed sex and rape and spoke about being abused and well if you want to get a sense of her life’s work, look up her writings. I appreciate this 2019 article about her: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/the-radical-style-of-andrea-dworkin and from it I learned that Johanna Fateman (in the band Le Tigre with Kathleen Hanna) helped edit a recent anthology of Dworkin’s writings called Last Days at Hot Slit. I plan on reading it.
That afternoon at the bookshop stood a straightforward embodiment of what I somehow secretly was and possibly what my life would become. That’s how it felt. Her anger toward pornography felt totally against things I had been ideologically in support of, but as a victim of sexual abuse and rape, I felt myself also whole-heartedly agreeing with her. Finally, someone was saying it, and finally, there was a man in my view expressing sorrow for it all.
Seemingly on the other side of things I had Susie Bright, who created a magazine called On Our Backs that was a woman-owned erotic magazine for a lesbian audience. I believe Bright was openly bisexual at the time, and had a regular article in the local Santa Cruz weekly paper called Good Times. The openness by which she approached sexuality and acceptance felt in line with what I had been pretending to be and kind of was, but she made me uneasy. I never said it out loud but I felt as though she held “too much” concern for sexuality and it reminded me of my abusive partner.
I lacked critical thinking skills and things would have been different if I had a connection to sex that I felt in control of. I couldn’t hold the nuance between the two extremes of these two figures- but I knew they were both something I needed. Knowing I couldn’t choose one side or another terrified me.
If only I had been open to Bikini Kill and other feminist women who were my age and in real-time (then) growing into a world of strength for girls like me who were raised dirt-poor and in toxic households. Instead I latched onto the euphoria offered by the era’s indulgent rave culture and searched out comforts I never had, at whatever cost. I needed to feel and feel special and in looking back, I bought into the idea that I could be seen as such by perceiving women more as competition than allies. I lacked a good balance of female friends and had no idea how to live with my own sexuality. Nice job, patriarchy.
I’m glad for Kathleen Hanna’s story- that she shared it. I’m her same age and I needed it. Aside from her words bringing me to consider my past with feminism and the weight of the word “slut” in my own life, I also love how it’s all blended into the realm of art, as well as activism, pop culture and music. For instance, she explains a time where she transferred difficult feelings into eating a foot-long hotdog, and then allowed that experience to morph into a performance art project meant just for herself and the person working at the drive-thru window who served her said hot-dogs, bringing up the questions of how an artwork is conceived, who is expected to be the audience of an artwork or performance and what does art transmutate? Who makes the rules? Why do we follow them?
Other books and brewing thoughts.
I also listened to The Misfit’s Manifesto by Lidia Yuknavitch, Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley and I just finished Miranda July’s All Fours. Maybe I’ll have things to say about some of these during my next newsletter.
Outside of my book lists and more connected to observations I’ve made from what I’ve been telling my art students all year; seeing how my teaching relates to things I, myself need to learn- I’ve been challenging my ideas and routines surrounding perfection and control. I’m coming out of a time where I gave myself the gift of taking time to make things exactly “right” and now it’s time to move in another direction. It’s time to trust what I learned from leaning into a more obsessive process and seeing how that practice will affect a newer and “easier” approach. This relates to so many areas of living, not just my creative processes. It’s difficult but exciting.
Other than all that- the weather is warmer where I am, but not too warm, which I’m thankful for. I’m letting myself have more time in the sun and with trees. Putting my feet in the water. My Litha ceremonies have been spontaneous and personal. Garden things, seeing abundance and getting my body moving a bit more. It’s all connected and I’m glad for it all.
Thanks for reading.
Great post! Ah, so much to relate to here, incl. Anais Nin, Susie Bright, Bookshop SC, abusive relationship, , etc. But that's for another time and place....