In her review of Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, The American Prospect's Jessica Clark does some fan-girl reminiscing of her own. Like Piepmeier, Clark recalls her first encounter with feminism, which was facilitated in part by the proliferation of grrrl zines. While zines are closely related to the punk movement and its hardcore, tough-guy posturing, riot grrrls and DIY-feminists turned to the photocopied pages as a way of ripping apart pop culture and pasting it together again in collages and text that was at once both rebellious and celebratory. Piepmeier zeroes in on the physical process of creation as a way in which zines can be connected to earlier gendered forms of media:

[Piepmeier] connects them with what she identifies as earlier forms of feminist "participatory media": the scrapbooks kept by suffragettes to document and respond to sexist characterizations of their work; the pamphlets that transmitted contraband information about contraception and sexual health to women in the early 1900s; the mimeographed flyers that called women's libbers to consciousness and revolt. "Participatory media represent a way of engaging with unfriendly mass culture and transforming it — if not always on a broad scale, at least at the level of the local," she notes.

Zines are perhaps one of the most democratic forums for disseminating ideas and concepts. In contrast to glossy fashion mags, zines provide a rough-edged place in which to cut and paste, tear and build. The almost Dada-ist aesthetic of haphazard construction plays with and speaks to "feminine" arts and crafts while also partaking in the angry sneers of the punk/grunge/riot movements. While the material inside is fascinating, Clark rightly focuses on the unique form. She writes,

It's not just the content of these zines but their form, their look and feel, their "girl style," that make them noteworthy. Early-'90s grrrl zines made liberal use (and fun) of both contemporary and retro sexist images — apron-wearing housewives with vacuums, tattooed pinup girls, bikini models torn angrily from ads, ironically juxtaposed with princess and Hello Kitty cartoons — developing a distinctive visual vocabulary that set them apart from both earlier feminist newspapers and zines about other topics. Piepmeier describes them as "sculptural media," notable for the pleasure that their makers experience in constructing them and for the small thrill the recipient gets in opening up a hand-decorated envelope or finding a tiny, raging, perfect zine in a crammed independent bookstore.

But like print media in general, zines have been threatened by the rise of new media. Clark cites feminist blogs including Feministing and the women's writing community She Writes as progenitors of the energetic third-wave feminism found in zines. In a way, there's a certain sense to this: Zines evolved as a way to quickly and easily spread a message. Like blogs, they give anyone an opportunity to be the writer/editor of their own stories. And blogs make it even easier to borrow and steal material, taking images from one source, throwing them casually into another. They also provide the opportunity to reach a much larger, almost unlimited, audience.

Both Piepmeier and Clark are quick to point out that they don't believe zines are going away anytime soon. Despite the fact that the muddling and mixing of pop culture, retro reappropriation and punk symbolism has "mutated in the toxic sludge of commercial culture" and become as commercialized as anything else, Clark argues that there is hope for the zine yet. This debate is somewhat reminiscent of the whole Kindle vs. Book crisis that has been popping up in op-eds on and off for the past few years. Yet like books, zines have the something that blogs don't: Presence. Blogs may offer a large audience, but they're still somewhat distancing and intangible. And this may be purely anecdotal, but it seems that the prevailing trend in blogging is a kind of twee girlishness that bares little resemblance to the anger and energy of riot grrrl culture. Perhaps most importantly, blogs provide a certain polish that zines purposefully lack. Both forums may give an outlet for confessional outpourings, but there is a strange intimacy to be found in an object so carefully constructed and stapled, delivered from hand to hand. As much as I love blogs (and Kindles, and iPods) there is something to Piepmeier's argument for the fragility of the real thing. So if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some glue sticks and glitter.

Girl Talk [The American Prospect]

Image via Steve Rhodes Flickr

[Blackpool, August 7. Image via Getty.]

BLACKPOOL, ENGLAND - AUGUST 07: Punks enjoy the sea air on the promenade as they take time out from the Rebellion Festival on August 7, 2009 in Blackpool, England. Thousands of punks have descended on Blackpool seaside resort for the annual Rebellion festival, featuring bands from the heydey of the rebel punk rock movement The festival held in Blackpool's Winter Gardens lasts three days. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Paternoster is the frontwoman to what has been called the biggest punk band in New Brunswick. New York Magazine explains that although this may sound like faint praise, New Brunswick has a long tradition of supporting local musicians, which stretches back to the early nineties.

Paternoster started Screaming Females in 2005, when she met drummer Jarrett Dougherty, 25, and bassist Mike Abbate, 19, both New Jersey natives. She is the musical focal point of the band, and has become famous for her tendency to break into loud, awesome solos. However, "the guitar solo is a dangerous thing to perform or even consider," she says. "It's such a dated, cheesy thing. It's hard to do it in a way that doesn't come off as corny."

In a recent interview with The Trip Wire, Paternoster joked about her shredding skills, which the interviewer believes may lead people to question her sexuality. In response to a question about whether she "wears her sexuality on [her] sleeve," Paternoster said:

Yeah, if I saw me, I'd say "Look at that lesbian shredding!" But you know, yeah you're right. I would automatically assume that any girl that shreds is a lesbian. I'm going to assume that Marnie Stern is a lesbian, and who else plays guitar? Yeah they're all lesbians. Don't write that down.

Screaming Females Lead New Brunswick's DIY Punk Movement [NY Magazine]
On The Cover - Screaming Females [The Trip Wire]

Vicious has always been the prime suspect in Spungen's murder; the hunting knife that provided Spungen with the single stab wound to the stomach that ended her life was traced to Vicious, who claimed that he had no memory of the murder, as he was drugged up beyond belief and only noticed Nancy's condition when he woke to find her on the bathroom floor, surrounded in blood.

Vicious was never brought to trial for the murder- he died of a heroin overdose while out on bail. Vicious' mother, who committed suicide in 1996, always believed that her son was innocent, and asked film maker Alan Parker to help her prove it, which he hopes to do with his new film, "Who Killed Nancy?"

"I just wanted to clear his name," Parker says. "Of course I wasn't there, I can't swear on the bible he didn't do it, but people involved have always told me to keep digging, keep digging and when you do dig it just does not add up."

Parker's film points out a list of shady characters who might have been responsible for Spungen's death, including a drug dealer named Rockets Redglare, a drug addict named Michael, and Spungen herself. "To me, she just did it herself because that's what people like that do, like teenagers who cut themselves," Howie Pyro tells Parker.

Though the film will most likely present more questions than answers, it will succeed in furthering the Sid and Nancy mythology; an extremely screwed-up love story that people seem to romanticize more and more as time goes on. And much like the documentary Kurt and Courtney, Parker's film will ensure that people on both sides of the mystery will have more to discuss, and Sid and Nancy's names will continue to be forever connected, in love or in misery.

Documentary Claims Sex Pistols Singer Sid Vicious Did Not Kill Girlfriend Nancy Spungen [Telegraph]

Spungen came from a suburban Philadelphia household, and she was so disruptive as a child that her mother Deborah wrote a biography about Nancy after her death, called And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder. From Deborah's point of view, Nancy was an unreasonable, mentally ill child who "trashed" her life. If you look at things from Nancy's point of view, according to friend and photographer Eileen Polk, "Like most kids who are 17, basically her statement was, ‘I hate my family'…All the things that she loved and thought were important in the world, they told her were stupid. I think she had a really stifling middle-class upbringing.”

Polk has more to say about Nancy:

She was blatantly honest about [using drugs to meet musicians]: She bought drugs for the bands. She was honest about being a prostitute as well, which I thought was refreshing. The punk scene, like any other scene, had its little hierarchies. There were groupies that had been around for a long time because of their looks. In order to be a groupie you had to be tall and skinny and have fashionable clothes. There were a bunch of girls like that on the scene. And then here comes Nancy. She’s not trying to be cute or charming. She wasn’t telling people she was a model or a dancer. She had mousy brown hair and she was a bit overweight. She basically said, ‘Yeah, I’m a prostitute, and I don’t care.’ 

Legs McNeil offers that Nancy wasn't the only outrageous person on the scene, and adds that Nancy "wasn’t any more fucked up than Dee Dee [Ramone] or me. Joey [Ramone] was paranoid schizophrenic. Joey pulled a knife on his mother. We were all a little disturbed.” But as Schoemer notes, Nancy remained an outcast, perhaps because she was so sexually and generally aggressive. Because she didn't fit the groupie mold, Polk said that she was generally shunned. To this day, even though Sid Vicious confessed to Nancy's murder, people don't believe he killed her. "Everyone has a different theory: drug deal gone awry, robbery, or just a mistake that came from having too many knives around," Schoemer says. "Bassist Howie Pyro, who was with Sid the night he died, believes Nancy might have been so desperate for attention that she stabbed herself, thinking Sid would come to her rescue, but that he was too stoned."

If she had been a less aggressive or better liked woman, would people have believed that Sid killed her? Sid died of an overdose four months after Nancy's 1978 death, so he'll never tell. There's a movie currently in production about Nancy's death called Who Killed Nancy?, and it seems the question remains hanging in the air.

The Day Punk Died [NYM]

Village Voice:

If Patti Smith's narration to Dream of Life was simplified into a stanza, it might go something like this: As long as I can remember I sought to be free/Bob Dylan once tuned this guitar for me/My mission is to give people my energy/Fred, Jesse, and Jackson are my family tree/New generations, rise up, rise up, take to the streets/Me and Flea talking about pee. Her much more long-winded monologues are just as randomly assembled in the actual documentary, 109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials: When Patti sprinkles the ashes of "Robert" onto her palm, we're momentarily left to guess that's Mapplethorpe; when she and erstwhile paramour Sam Shepard are acoustically jamming and their respective tattoos come up, the playwright muses, "That was a weird night at the Chelsea." More, please?

New York:

Eleven years in the making, fashion photographer and artist Steven Sebring’s gorgeous, up-close-and-personal doc about the legendary rocker is both a journey into Smith’s storied past and a portrait of her life today—less a movie about a musician than a transfixing meditation on her own iconography.

Salon:

"Patti Smith: Dream of Life" is frequently beautiful and intermittently haunting and could be called a meditation on aging and mortality, an intimate study of a peculiar variety of fame and a portrait of a genuinely remarkable person. It has played at Sundance and Berlin and all over the film festival world, at least in part because everyone's so amazed it actually got finished. Still, while "Dream of Life" succeeds on its own terms, I can't help feeling there's a missed opportunity here, an opportunity to make clear to younger women and men just how amazing Patti Smith's journey has been. (Maybe, like Julien Temple's wonderful "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," that kind of film can't be made while the subject is alive — but I'm not quite sure why that would be so.)

The New York Times:

You may not learn everything you want to know in “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” an impressionistic portrait of that punk godhead, but you learn just about everything you need. Created over a heroic 11 years, it was directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring, a high-end commercial photographer whose perseverance and conspicuous unfamiliarity with, or disregard for, the conventions of nonfiction cinema (not to mention the apparently deep-enough pockets that freed him to follow his own muse) have inspired a lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

Variety:

The titular rocker-poet gets a suitable portrait in Steven Sebring's "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," which runs radically against the grain of American-made pop music docs. The result of 11 years of filming (much of it in wonderfully grainy black-and-white 16mm), pic is designed as a stream-of-consciousness experience, following Smith as she revives her music career and considers every aspect of her life. Death, too, plays a stark role, and the textured, thoughtful results may prove too cerebral and abstract for auds beyond Smith's hardcore followers, but long-term, this will be a loss-leader that gains much respect.

What Sebring — a fashion and pop photographer, painter and commercials maker — doesn't know about doc filmmaking never hurts the film. Starting in 1995, when Smith recorded her comeback album "Gone Again" and toured with her idol, Bob Dylan, after having not performed live for 16 years, Sebring's project clearly developed as it went along, and the effect of watching the film is seeing something in the making — like rummaging through Smith's closet, and stumbling across interesting stuff.

The Hollywood Reporter:

A knowledge of Smith's landmark contribution as a rock 'n' roll pioneer is not essential, and the film should be a joy for anyone interested in pop culture of the past 40 years.

Sebring does not take a conventional route here, which is fitting for his subject. The long gestation period for the film has afforded an intimacy and ease that allows him to penetrate Smith's inner and outer worlds, weaving back and forth in time from her arrival in New York in the late 1960s to raising her two children in Detroit with husband Fred "Sonic" Smith to her triumphant return to performing in the mid-'90s. Structure is anchored in the bedroom of Smith's cluttered New York apartment and jumps around from there as she reflects on her life and art.

Time Out New York:

But having privileged access and elucidating a mysterious figure are two different things. Sebring makes the crucial mistake of assuming his viewers are all Smithologists. (Even for them, the film might be too vague to become a holy object.) Amazingly, there is no testimony to contextualize her impact on the punk world, nothing at all about the horrendous 1977 onstage injury—she broke several neck vertebrae—that almost cost Smith her career. The live footage is choppy and interrupted; almost perversely, we never hear Smith’s gorgeous hit “Because the Night.” And the great question mark over Smith’s life—why she retreated from the spotlight along with her husband, White Panther and former MC5er Fred “Sonic” Smith—is not probed.

Instead, we get a lot of the singer’s poetry and recent political activism, and many sweet moments with her children and doting parents. Sebring is a sentimentalist, and his film comes alive when Smith melts into warm memories of going to Coney Island with Robert Mapplethorpe and getting hot dogs. But the opportunity to introduce newbies to a serious music-world icon—and her significance—feels squandered.

'Patti Smith: Dream of Life' opens today in limited release

If you ask me what I think people should be getting next season. I'll tell you what I'd like them to buy - nothing. I'd like people to stop buying and buying and buying.

There's something really awful about the way people dress now. Everyone looks the same. Everyone wants to look neutral... Why do people think that if you don't dress up, others will appreciate your beauty more - that style will somehow emanate from you? It's rubbish. If you dress up it helps your personality to emerge - if you choose well.