The Best Critique? Make Something New
A portrait of the artist as a young crank
Is She Weird
When I was a teenager, I had a lot to say about how much certain things sucked. The fact that my high school marching band would, in all seriousness, hold a prayer before the halftime show? Sucked. My math teacher who routinely ignored the girls when we raised our hands to answer a question? Sucked. Titanic? Sucked, although to this day, I haven’t seen it. (I was, and am, beautifully skilled at forming opinions of things I haven’t seen.) Once I got my hands on Bust magazine, Bitch magazine, and package upon package of protointersectional feminist zines that went deep on the Michigan Women’s Music Festival’s transphobic nonsense (sucked), I got a whole new framework for describing the suckage.
I was, more or less, a tireless rant that only stopped to sing along with the Violent Femmes, pore over a dELiA*s catalogue, or eat Morningstar Chik’n Nuggets. Most of my sentences began thus: “Do you know what I really hate?”
Looking back on it now, I think this era of my life was a perfectly understandable one. Northern Appalachia isn’t the kindest place to grow up as a feminist art freak. Before I gained access to my critical vocabulary, I just sort of felt wrong all the time. It was incredibly powerful to be able to…
