Table of Contents
FOR VIOLET
FOREWORD
KATHLEEN HANNA
I grew up in the suburbs and started smoking pot when I was nine. I was wasted for most of my childhood. I think it was the only way I could deal with watching my dad drink his coffee out of a titty mug every morning as I ate my cereal. (I wish I was joking but he really did have a coffee mug shaped like a womans breast.)
My nickname back then was Lil Goodtimes. I was the tomboy sidekick to my hot older sister whose nickname was, of course, Goodtimes. It was my job to hold her hair back while she barfed in the skating rink bathroom. But somehow I knew someday things would change for me; I knew I was an artist.
When I was nineteen years old I took a Greyhound bus from Olympia to Seattle to see Karen Finley perform because I read somewhere that she was a feminist. It was 1989. I had just begun to understand the havoc male violence had wreaked on my life. I worked summers as a stripper to pay my way through college, so I felt pretty alienated from the antiporn feminists of the day. I was equally annoyed at the pro-sex feminists who echoed the 1960s let it all hang out idea without much analysis of race or class issues.
I was struggling with the fact that I wanted to be an artist. I wondered if instead it would be more productive to work at the domestic violence shelter. I worried that being an artist was frivolous compared to doing the real work of a political activist.
I walked over a mile to get to the venue from the bus station. I had no idea that all my questions were about to be answered.
At the top of her show Karen Finley noticed a man videotaping her and told him to stop. This is only happening once, she said, and proceeded to challenge the audience/performer divide in a way most punk bands only dream of. She wasnt hostile or mean; she just ripped open the space between herself and everyone in the room and leaped into the most intensely vulnerable, perfectly crafted performance Id ever seen.
How was she able to stay 100 percent present and also seem to be in a trance? How could she talk about political issues in a way that was funny and tragic, but also make them completely relatable? It was like watching Patti Smith turn into Evel Knievel. I felt I belonged in that audience more than I had ever belonged anywhere.
On the way home I toyed with the idea that doing some kind of feminist performance might be a way I could help other girls feel like they belonged somewhere too. I could be an artist and enact my politics.
I bought a file folder, and labeled it Karen Finley. In it I put every article, review, or notice about her that appeared in magazines like High Performance and Mother Jones, a cassette tape of her recording Jump in the River with Sinead OConnor, xeroxed pictures of her performing, even her managers fax number. This was my inspiration.
Within weeks of seeing Karen perform I was in a band writing lyrics about rape. People told me (to my face!) that I was ridiculous and what I was doing was therapy, not music.
After reading a review of her first book, Shock Treatment, I waited anxiously for it to arrive in Olympias one good bookstore. When it did I realized that reading her writing was just as thrilling as watching her perform. Finally I had found a feminist writer who didnt have to chop herself into bits to be comprehended. Instead she casually blurred the line between the personal and the political and refused to ignore the fact that sexuality is wrapped into everything. And to top it all off, her writing is funny as shit. And I dont mean just ha-ha clever funny, I mean, best friend, middle-of-the-night, pee-in-your-pants funny.
In the nineties my band Bikini Kill began to get national attention, and I was asked to open for Karen when I was touring in New York. I was so fucking excited I spent an entire week memorizing two long pieces so I could feel the room like she did when she was performing. I thought, this is going to bring everything full circle for me.
But on the morning of the show I went into a shock-like state. All I could think was, Oh my fucking god, Im opening for Karen Finley at The Kitchen. I stuttered to my friend that I needed her to call The Kitchen and tell them I was too sick to perform. When I look back on it, I realize this reaction is pretty nuts. I mean, I was already well known, and had played shows all over the world. Why couldnt I do this?
Fifteen years later a friend took me to see Karens 2009 performance, Impulse to Suck. And I was blown away again. Karen Finley can still say more with a weird shoulder move and a sideways smile than most people can convey in a book. That performance is included here in The Reality Shows, and it reminds me that it is one thing to see Karen perform, but to read her work lets you get at so many other layers of meaning.
In her writing, pop culture mixes with rage, which mixes with sexuality, feminism, and danger. In the end you have a book that is breathing. Abundant, overboard, too much. Like her performances I can read her books again and again and get something different each time.
After the show my friend went backstage, but I was too nervous and bowed out. I sat outside in the dark for a while and then something crazy happened. Karen Finley walked out into the courtyard and began calling my name. Kathleen! Kathleen! I stood up, reached out for her hand, said hello, and acted pretty much like a normal person.
I guess all my nervousness about her has to do with the fact that I can never adequately thank her. I learned what punk really is from her and have emulated her ever since the first time I saw her perform. Karen Finley taught me that art really does matter, and that it truly can change the course of someones life.
After meeting Karen, I chatted with my friend about how great the show was, walked her to her train, turned the corner, and proceeded to sob all the way home.
INTRODUCTION
ANN PELLEGRINI
The reality shows, but what? And how? After the US invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Karen Finley returned to and revised an earlier antiwar piece, She Loved Wars. Wavering between first and third person, Finley teases us with the heat of war:
Meanwhile, during the [first] Gulf War she glued herself to CNN masturbating. It was a peculiar metaphor of glued to the set. A desire where she would press her wet cunt to the screen, wrap her legs around the TV and orgasm at the Gulf War jingle but I think the visual is what counts here.
Exactly. The visual is what counts here. As with so many other scenes in the performance pieces gathered in The Reality Shows, what Finley gives us to seeand see anewis both harrowing and hilarious. In a double move, Finley takes us from belly laugh to punch to the stomach, the laughter ripping the stomach open wide enough to let in some unsettling truths: chief among them, the realization that when war comes into your living room, shock and pity are not the only possible nor even the most likely reactions from viewers whose everyday realities are composed of mediatized fragments of suffering as spectacle.
Instead, with a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other, viewers can surf from The Situation Room to endless repeats of situation comedies, with a quick stopover at the Home Shopping Network, where you can buy buy buy. In a commodity culture dripping with the image, shock and awe are as much a product to be consumed as they are emotional branding devices to get us to put our money down on simultaneously one-of-a-kind and interchangeable must-haves, from Doritos (recall its infamous dog shock collar commercial, which debuted during the 2010 Super Bowl), to Calvin Klein jeans and underwear (behold the young Brooke Shields and the well-packaged Marky Mark), to war itself (cue chants of
