NYC Summer of 78

nunsny1
Originally uploaded by alice_bag

This is a photo of me and my Canterbury roommate Shannon Wilhelm hanging out in NYC with our pals from the west coast, The Nuns. It's the summer of 1978. We're on the roof of The Chelsea hotel. That's me in the lavender t-shirt on the tower and Shannon is under my butt. I'm writing about this trip in my online autobiography, www.chicaviolenta.blogspot.com and I have more photos from this trip than I can possibly fit into the story but I've always liked this one and wanted to post it. Enjoy!

Why Do I Do This To Myself?

Ever try to make yourself do something you're not good at and then struggle through the process until you wonder what the hell made you want to do it in the first place? I took a Pilates class recently that sent me fleeing for the comfort of my old Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons video tapes.

I guess I do the hard new stuff to push myself, which leads to me the next question: is it worth it? Would I be a better human being if I mastered Pilates instead of The Jane Fonda Workout? I don't know.

For the past six months I've been working on a blog project that started off as a comic book idea, turned into a therapeutic exorcism and has recently left me feeling like a passenger in a vehicle driven by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Every weekday I sit down at the computer for at least two hours and force myself to write something, anything. Did I forget to mention that I'm not a writer? I'm not even much of a journalist. If it wasn't for my husband's incessant nagging, telling me "Write something for your blog!" and guilting: "You should be writing instead of wasting your time on Facebook, or MySpace." (Funny how he hadn't listed his marital status on Facebook until I joined.)

I struggle to pull out my story from its age old hiding place where it's been covered with piles and piles of newer and fresher memories, innocuous memories that cover the old ones. But they are like the undead, those old memories and if you poke around they come to life, jump into the driver's seat and beckon, "Hop in!" When an old memory takes me for a ride it always takes unexpected turns; sometimes it's a fun ride, other times the ride is sad and painful.

But I'm getting ahead of myself because there are plenty of times when I feel like a pedestrian trying to hail a cab on a busy city street and I can't find a driver. It's then that the two hours in front of the computer turn into anxious tea and coffee guzzling. I start to type, then delete; start to type, then delete. I have to imagine myself as an old prospector, patiently filling my little tin pan with sandy water, swishing and swishing, hoping for a little gold dust. It's time consuming and not always fruitful but I do it anyway.

I write something every weekday when my kid leaves for school. I've learned that by allowing my memories to drive me instead of trying to remember specific events, what is meaningful and memorable to me eventually comes to the surface but it's not always fun, more often it's work, much like exercising when I'd rather be painting, or sewing, or playing music. I just don’t enjoy the process of writing in the same way I enjoy making music or painting, which are a joy by comparison. It's at those times that a little outside motivation really helps. Seeing that I have blog followers makes me feel like I owe it to them not to cop out. Getting comments from readers is huge. A reader recently wrote that they'd spent four hours reading my Violence Girl blog from the beginning (not an easy task since the blog format forces you to read from the last entry to the first) and the idea that someone who doesn't know me would take that much time out of their busy day to read about my life just floored me.

So I write, grudgingly, with clumsy fingers and awkward phrases and no idea where I'm going with my story, but I write.

Holiday Hiatus

As the year draws to a close, I've been struggling with a terrible cold that has left me practically unable to speak and barely able to function. I finally broke down and went to see the doctor, hoping to get something to wipe out this crud. Fortunately, I've been able to communicate using text messages and emails.

One person with whom I've recently been in communication lives far away in England. She's someone who I had practically given up hope of speaking with again because our friendship had fallen apart along with our old punk band the Bags but I am hoping that the expression "time heals all wounds" will hold true and my old friend Patricia and I can pick up where we left off so many years ago.

Maybe it's the season or perhaps it's just the timing of this reconnection, coming as it does during the year of my 50th birthday, but it feels good to be back in touch with one of my dearest friends and someone who was once such an important part of my life. Patricia and I have lots of catching up to do and she has already sent me photos of her gorgeous daughter. It's also a remarkable coincidence that we are trading emails while I am writing about the early days of the LA punk scene and the Bags on my Violence Girl autoblogography. Patricia remembers details that I've forgotten, like why we kicked Geza X and Joe Nanini out of The Bags.

I'll be taking a break to recuperate and enjoy the holidays with my family but will be back with more episodes in the True Life Adventures of Violence Girl in 2009. Thank you all for continuing to read my blogs, your comments and words of support really keep me going. Here's hoping that 2009 will be a much better year and that time really can heal all wounds.

Panic In Detroit - Thumbs Down

In the bad old days of Imperial Rome, the fate of political prisoners and gladiators was sometimes decided by a quick poll of the citizens gathered to witness the bloody spectacles at the Coliseum. If the audience cheered loudly enough to spare the prisoner, the Emperor would raise the "thumbs up" sign, thus saving the person's life and allowing them to fight again another day. If the audience voiced their disapproval and the Emperor gave a thumbs down, well, then the lions had fresh meat.

Today, Ford, GM and Chrysler similarly find themselves exhausted, depleted and at the mercy of the people as they await a thumbs up or down in our own political Coliseum. The Big Three, who are responsible for so much damage to our country and our planet, who killed the electric car, who conspired to destroy and derail clean and cheap public transportation, who have lobbied against every effort to reduce harmful vehicle emissions and fought the mandatory implementation of safety features such as airbags and safety belts, who continued to pump out gas-guzzling Hummers and SUV's in gleeful partnership with Big Oil, who sold us exploding gas tanks on Ford Pintos in the '70's and rollover death traps in the 80's, who have fought every meaningful attempt to bring fuel efficient, clean vehicles to the marketplace are pleading for their lives.

This citizen's voice joins the chorus calling for a thumbs down resounding through the halls of Congress. Or throw them a $34 billion lifeline and see how much things will really change; corporate greed doesn't die until the corporation itself dies. It's not about individual players, it's about nameless, faceless greed that rolls on steel belted wheels in the name of shareholder value and profit. Save the planet. Let the Big Three die.

"Why don't cha take the day off and try to repair
A billion others don't seem to care
Better ideas are stuck in the mud
The motor's running on Tucker's blood
Don't let them tell you the future's electric
Cuz gasoline's not measured in metric
Thirty thousand wheels a spinnin'
And oil company faces are grinnin'
And now my hands are turning red
And I found out my baby is dead"

The Big Three Killed My Baby - The White Stripes

Happy Birthday To Me

I will be taking a very brief hiatus from posting new entries in my ongoing autobiography
True Life Adventures of Violence Girl while I mark my 50th year on the planet. Violence Girl will be back with more stories of Plungers, Weirdos and the early LA punk scene next week.

XO,

Alice

Election Euphoria

I'm still smiling over the exciting election last night! The sudden countdown to the West Coast states' poll closing followed by an unexpected projection that Obama had won the presidency was like the giant orb dropping at Times Square on New Year's Eve. My daughter and I clapped and cheered in our living room last night, surrounded by silent neighbors here in Phoenix, Arizona: McCain Country.

Congratulations to all of my friends who worked so hard to get Obama elected. Even though we did not back the same candidate, I hope you will allow me to bask in your triumph. After all, I was a Democrat for most of my life before deciding to go Green. Voting Green this election was a personal triumph for me and my own contribution to political diversity but last night I celebrated a different sort of diversity along with the nation and the world. My heart was jubilant at seeing our first African American president-elect and at the seats the Democrats gained in the house and senate. I was proud of John McCain, whose concession speech was gracious and upbeat. And when Obama spoke about being a president for all of us, I allowed myself to hope that he wasn't just speaking to the far right but to the far left as well.

It wasn't all good news. The right to a legal gay marriage was denied or lost in some states, including California. But after witnessing Obama's impressive victory, I can't help but be hopeful that these are temporary setbacks and that tenacity and tolerance will triumph in the end. President Obama has inspired me to dream of a day when Gay, Lesbian and Transgender couples will once again be able to say "I Do." After all, it wasn't so very long ago that the idea of an African American being elected president was almost unimaginable. Let's all join in the hope that some day soon all Americans will enjoy equal rights under the law and we will live in a country free from discrimination.

It's A Big One!

It's almost my birthday! It's funny the way we sometimes attach so much meaning to birthdays and other times we completely ignore them, well, at least some people do. I don't think I've ever ignored my birthday. I may have had quiet birthdays and loud birthdays but I always know they're there and I wouldn't want to ignore them.

This birthday is impossible to ignore. It's my half century mark. I still remember turning twenty and crying on Craig Lee's doorstep because I was so old and felt like I had done so little with my life. Craig was older and much wiser and assured me that I still had many, many years to make my dreams come true. I didn't dare tell him that I was certain I was going to die at the age of 24. That idea had just popped into my head one day and over the years it had grown roots, irrational roots but when I was young it was much easier to do a doublethink, or to think one thing and believe the opposite. I can't seem to do that anymore, notwithstanding the fact that I still buy lottery tickets and engage in vivid fantasies about spending my winnings when I know what my odds are. But 24 came and went and I lived. The failure of prophecy didn't deter me. Like those psychics who every now and then predict that California is going to fall into the ocean, when the expected event doesn't arrive we simply change and update our prediction; thus, my new expiration date was moved ahead to age 34. Obviously, I lived through that one too. Not that I was afraid to die; mind you, I felt liberated by the fact that I didn't fear death. I think if I feared anything it was the fear of being old and brittle and forgetting things. Now that I'm old, brittle and forget things, I realize it's not that bad.

It looks like being old is in my cards. I even had a baby beyond my expiration date. At age 36, I already considered myself a mom of two beautiful stepdaughters, then I had my own kid and I was suddenly filled with a freaky fear that I would die before she could talk, then walk, later finish elementary school, etc. Every year, for the first few years of motherhood, I saw the Grim Reaper around every corner. Now I did fear death, not because I didn't know what was on the other side of that filmy veil between life and death but because I wanted to be around to watch my kids grow up. No offense to the fathers out there but I saw the difference in the way my hubby and I related to our girls and well, I thought they needed me.

Then my step-kids got older and stopped coming around as often. They had those damned boyfriends they wanted to spend time with instead of me! My little one was in school and she had special needs so she still needed me, but being a parent advocate is all work and no play.

Throughout my life, I had been playing in different bands pretty much non-stop since I was seventeen, up until I was about 6 months pregnant, which is when my doctor told me I had to be on complete bed rest. I was playing, practicing or recording until the last possible minute. I remember tripping over a PA monitor on stage when I played with Goddess 13; I turned to the side as I fell, trying to protect my swollen belly. I was playing with Cholita during that time and I had to hold my guitar over to the side because my fingertips couldn't properly grasp the neck of the guitar while reaching over my baby bump.

I took a few years off to be a full time mom and with no music in my life, I became a ticking time bomb: angry, resentful and with no creative outlet, I was a real Stay At Home Bomb. I formed a new band to express my frustration. That - together with a long overdue hysterectomy - gave me a new lease on life. Suddenly, I felt excited and in charge of my own life in a way that only music has ever made me feel. I had no delusions about the viability of a forty-something rocker chick but it didn't matter. All that mattered was playing, writing, singing, collaborating with musicians I admired and respected. I think that's when I started to understand that my best years were in front of me, not in the past.

I went out to lunch one day with a bunch of my middle-aged girlfriends whom I affectionately call The Rolling Crones and as we sat around sipping Margaritas, I thought about how strong and powerful we were. We laughed out loud, comfortable in our own (slightly) wrinkled skin, confident enough to intimidate younger men, knowing that we could and would do whatever we wanted. Every woman sitting around the table that day was talented, beautiful and wise and it made me proud to be in their company.

In about a week I will be turning 50 and I am excited about it. I think of it as the beginning of part two of my life. It's a time to try new things, to bring out those old, stored dreams that I never got around to and dust them off. I want this year to be a year of closure and rebirth. Already I'm behaving differently. I'm writing my autobiography, The True Life Adventures of Violence Girl. Last week, I sent in my absentee ballot and voted for the candidate I like best instead of the candidate that seemed least offensive. That's a first for me and it felt good, really good not to compromise. I also signed up for an oil painting class at a nearby community college. I've been wanting to learn to paint with oils ever since I walked into the Los Angeles County Art Museum as a kid; how I got to be nearly 50 without ever doing it is a mystery to me. I'm finally going to cross that off my to do list.


"Maribel With Marigolds" - I just painted this last week for Dia de Los Muertos, it's one of my very first attempts with oil painting and I can't wait to do more.

Sure, age has it's setbacks. My knees are messed up and I can't drink everyone under the table the way I did when I was young but there is so much that I can do better and with more confidence and conviction that I have to say I wouldn't want to be any other age. I don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up, but whatever it is, it's going to be fun because now I know that the journey is more important than the destination.

Mexicans have a special holiday to acknowledge the inevitability of aging and death while at the same time, celebrate living. It's called Dia de Los Muertos and is celebrated on November 2, All Soul's Day. It's the perfect time for remembering those friends and family who have passed through the filmy veil separating this life from the next and taking stock of which dreams we have accomplished and which ones we have yet to accomplish. In that spirit, I'm off to watch one of my favorite Mexican films, Macario.


Death shows Macario that life is as brief and vulnerable as the flame of a candle. From the great Mexican film, Macario.

Viva la vida!

Deleted Scenes - The Marbellite

Another deleted scene from my autobiography in progress, Violence Girl. You can read the full work in progress here. At the time when this story takes place, it's the mid-seventies and I am going through a mad obsession with Elton John. I'm enrolled at a private all girl Catholic school called Sacred Heart of Mary and I'm going by the nickname of Ziggy.

The Marbellite

I joined the Marbellite staff almost as soon as I got to Sacred Heart of Mary High School. I'd never had a journalism class and felt a little out of place on the school newspaper. Unsure of my writing skills, I opted for what I thought would be the easy way out; I volunteered to be the resident cartoonist and to my delight the teacher agreed. I went right out and bought a pen and ink and would have started up immediately if I'd known what to draw. I began with a few drawings of the cheerleaders and some poor caricatures of students and teachers engaged in a variety of activities throughout the school. It turned out that I sucked at being a cartoonist, which was much more difficult than I'd imagined. You can't just copy a picture the way I'd done in the past, you had to have something to say, you had to infuse personality into the characters who were like silent screen actors speaking with their faces and gestures. I had no idea how to do that and after a few of lame attempts, I decided to try to write an article instead.

The dilemma was that Ms. Milton, the teacher who supervised The Marbellite staff, was very open minded. She allowed us to choose our own stories based on what interested us. Some of the girls were writing about sports, others about certain classes or teachers but none of that really thrilled me. All that freedom and I didn't know where to start, so I called a friend of mine who was on the Montebello High School newspaper. The year before, my friend and I had pretended to be real journalists in order to get tickets to the first ever American Music Awards where Elton John's record Goodbye Yellow Brick Road had been nominated for best album. The award show was new and eager to generate as much press as possible so when I spoke to the woman on the phone and said I was from The Derrick Diary she didn't ask me if it was a high school paper and I didn't tell her. I scored two passes for me and my friend from Montebello High. Sadly, Bernie Taupin, not Elton John had been in the audience and my chance to meet Elton John in person was thwarted once again, but it was still fun going to the event. True to my word, my friend wrote about the award show in The Derrick Diary. Now we were hoping to do it again.

The American Music Awards had been a huge success and the organizers had moved the show to a larger location, the Santa Monica Civic auditorium. Weeks before the show, I started bombarding them with calls that they easily ignored. When I finally got through to someone she informed me that yes, she realized that The Derrick Diary had been invited before but now the show was more popular and there was much more interest in attending. We were off the list.

Never one to take no for an answer, I decided to show up anyway to see if I could figure out a way to sneak in. By sheer coincidence, Elton was again nominated for an award. Hoping to have better luck than the year before, I got together a small gang of Elton fans and our posse showed up early to wait outside the venue. We broke off into teams to ensure that Elton couldn't get past us and to see if anyone could find a way in. Yes, this was supposed to be about the awards but true love is more important that journalism. We met a few people who worked behind the scenes as they went in early. One of the people we met that day was a man named Sherwood Schwartz; he stopped to talk to us and find out why we were there. He didn't help us get in, but I still thought he was a really sweet man whose name I knew because he produced two of my favorite TV shows: Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch.

While I was busy talking with Sherwood Schwartz, the lookouts had spotted Elton's gold limousine and they ran over to tell me. EJ had entered the building and his limousine was now pulling up to a parking space behind the building. We rushed over too late; the security guards saw us and though we tried to evade them, they caught up with us and evicted us from the property.

We got some snacks from a store across the street and sat on the sidewalk watching as fancy cars, stars and paparazzi started to arrive. It could have been depressing but it was actually kind of fun sitting there on the ground, snacking, laughing at ourselves, loving Elton. We'd met a cool TV producer, spotted Elton's limo and been chased away by security guards, nothing to write a newspaper article about but it sure beat staying at home.

I had wasted so much time with cartoons and award shows that I eventually had to ask some of my classmates for help to meet the newspaper's deadline. Since I didn't have anything real to write about, I decided to dissect some classic literature. I started re-telling the story of Chicken Little and got the others involved in adding crazy details. We made up our own ridiculous version of the story. It was bad, really bad and only funny to us because we were giddy with the absurdity of the whole thing but it went into the paper. When the story finally came out in print, I was embarrassed to see my name attached to the piece. I thought to myself, "I don't ever want to be a writer!"

White Hot Interview

A new online article by Sandra Vista about the Vexing exhibition just appeared at WhiteHotMagazine.com. You can check out the article here.

Pink Viscera—A Permanent Triumph


Here are the original interview questions and my responses:

-While looking at your website I saw a current photograph of you in Phoenix. Your face appears soft and characteristic of a time of peace. (cara lisa) How do your experiences as being part of the East LA Punk movement contribute to what you are doing today-musically, with your family life and other creative aspects?

Yes, I'm cara lisa as opposed to that scary, angry gorgon that I used to be in my punk days but you don't have to scratch the surface too hard before the gorgon reappears! I don't know if I can honestly say that I'm at peace. I think I have figured out a way to negotiate a truce which allows me to express myself in positive ways, or at the very least, to be less impulsive than I once was. I still have the capacity to rant and rave when I'm angry and I still consider myself fairly uncivilized, but with age and experience, I learned how to channel my energy in different ways. Peace is a big word, I can't isolate a few events in my life and say that I'm at peace when all around me the world is getting fucked by corporate interests and our country is waging war.

-How is East LA, as a community, responsible for the Punk movement that you were associated with in the l970's and 80's? Does the community still have a reservoir of creative energy for the current generation of musicians and artists?

My part in the ELA punk movement is really as someone who helped set the stage for what would transpire later. I was part of the Hollywood Punk Scene which was a well integrated scene that preceded the scene at the Vex. As part of that earlier scene, I, along with other Latinos was performing alongside other punk musicians in integrated bands. My band, The Bags, was one of those bands. I know that some of the younger kids who shared my gender, ethnicity or economic level were inspired and motivated by seeing a woman from a poor, working class family from East L.A. play and sell out the most popular clubs of the day. I wasn't singing about being a woman or about being poor or about being Latina: I was simply being who I was and singing about a broad range of topics.

By 1980 when the East L.A. scene at the Vex was going strong, The Bags had broken up and I was going back to school for my B.A. in Philosophy. I still attended and played shows infrequently but I didn't consider myself part of a scene at that time because my focus was elsewhere and to be part of a scene, I think you really have to be immersed in it. I played the Vex with The Castration Squad, an all female proto-goth ensemble and I also played with other groups. Although I was not immersed in the East L.A. punk scene, I was immersed in East L.A. I moved back to my parents' house in East Los and worked my way through Cal State L.A. by working at a Franco Florist in Montebello. I worked all day and practiced and played gigs at night.

I am traditionally associated with the Hollywood Scene that centered around the Masque and predates the opening of the Vex in 1980 by at least 3 years. East L.A. is where I was born, grew up and spent most of my life. My experiences there have shaped every aspect of my life. I was in my late 40's when I moved to the Westside of L.A., then to Phoenix, and now San Diego. Every community has a reservoir of creative energy. There is no ethnicity, gender or socio-economic group that has a monopoly on talent. The problem is that not everyone has the opportunity to make his/her voice heard and that the dominant culture controls the means of production, distribution and promotion and they select artists based on corporate goals rather than artistic ones. Of course, that has all changed radically thanks to punk rock's DIY ethic and the internet. There is a more level playing field today but it is by no means an equal playing field.

Qualifications To Be Vice President

After receiving various emails from friends asking me to weigh in on whether I feel Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States, I took a quick peek at Wikipedia to see what the actual qualifications are. They are:

1. You must be a natural born US citizen.

2. You must be at least 35 years old.

3. You must have resided in the U.S. for the past 14 years.

There are no other legal barriers or guidelines.

These 3 criteria are not exactly open to debate; either Sarah Palin meets them or she doesn't. If she does, then legally she is qualified to run for the Presidency or Vice Presidency. If we are unhappy with these criteria, then perhaps we should change them; however, I don't know if we want to do that. Having these very loose guidelines allows inexperienced people to run but it also allows for a fresh point of view. If we institute too many requirements, we effectively limit our choices to career politicians.

The question of whether Palin is qualified to be VP is not really a question about her qualifications. It is a question about her beliefs. I don't agree with her beliefs, so I'm not going to vote for her. It's that simple. I refuse to participate in Palin bashing because she has openly stated what she stands for. It is the voters who are responsible for knowing what they stand for and voting in accordance with their beliefs, not simply choosing a candidate based on that candidate's personality or his or her portrayal in the media.

We are a nation where name recognition, financial backing and the ability to woo the media are much more important to winning an election than experience, knowledge or wisdom. We are a nation where movie stars, pop singers and wrestlers can and are elected to public office, why then is Sarah Palin being singled out as unqualified? Is it because she is a mother, because she is a fundamentalist, or simply because she is a woman who will make history if elected? Perhaps it's a little of all these things.

I would suggest that we move beyond discussing Sarah Palin's qualifications and focus on the candidates' voting records and what they stand for. We don't need to pull another woman down to feel superior. It isn't necessary and it distracts from the real issues. I applaud Sarah Palin's desire to break through the glass ceiling but I will not vote for her because I disagree with her, not because she is less qualified.

For the first time in my life, I intend to vote for the Green Party candidate. Her name is Cynthia McKinney. I've decided to vote for the candidate I like best regardless of her viability because this election year, I've learned that the Democratic party is too big to be responsive to me. I want to take steps towards correcting this situation by helping the Green Party take at least 5% of the vote and help legitimize it's goals. I think diversity in people as well as in political parties is a good thing. Perhaps some of you will feel like I am helping the Republicans win by voting Green. I have used the same argument in the past to convince others to join me in preventing the Republican party from winning but all that did was make the Democrats complacent. Once assured of my vote, they promptly sought to win the votes of centrists by pleasing them instead of me. My relationship with the Democratic party is over. I don't want to be in a relationship where I do all the vote giving and I get taken for granted in return. I understand why people feel that we have to choose between the two major parties; I believed that myself for many years but if we never change the way we vote, we'll keep getting the same results. This time I'm voting for long term change because that is change I can believe in.