Faber and Faber Inc.

Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Having been born in the late '80s, I always felt I missed out on everything cool in music. I wasn’t there to see the birth of punk. I wasn’t there for New Wave. I was too young for grunge, and I was too far away from Olympia, WA for riot grrrl. In the 1990s, I bought Sublime’s self -titled album along with Alice Cooper’s School's Out, and that was the extent of my musical awareness. So I always enjoyed reading about riot grrrl, putting on my Heavens to Betsy CD, and pretending I was more involved in it than I actually was.

Yes, I remember 1991. Sure, I was only five years old, but still, I was there. I expected Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music to help me keep up my own personal time capsule, going on the title alone. While the first few chapters do go into depth about riot grrrl’s evolution, the rest of the book moves forward in time from where riot grrrl left off, and this is where Meltzer hypothesizes leaves off as well. Post-riot grrrl, Meltzer traces the evolution of a few obvious late-90s "angry" female artists, such as Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and Paula Cole, along with all the women from Lilith Fair, but then veers into a weird direction with The Spice Girls.

A lot of this book, in fact, goes into detail about The Spice Girls, and Meltzer keeps attempting to drive home her point that this girl group was actually pretty feminist. Now, this is something I actually was there for (although I try not to think about those dark times). Being a young girl coming of age when The Spice Girls were popular, I never got the impression that they were feminists. Maybe I’m just biased here, but the constant mention of this group kind of rubbed me the wrong way. That being said, Meltzer has some interesting points about them. (The Spice Girls, in effect, got the term girl power out there, and started some little girls thinking about their potential, but calling them feminist still seems like a stretch to me. It was a good, long, head-beating attempt by Meltzer, but by the end of this book, I was not convinced.)

Meltzer also touches upon a few modern day female pop stars, like the young women from High School Musical and Taylor Swift, as she attempts to draw a line from riot grrrl to girl power. This book may be aimed at younger girls in the hopes that it will get them thinking about their own generation of musical trends, and inspire them to look more critically at the media. Girl Power shows a lot of promise for spurring conversations between feminists of different generations, but for anyone born past 1990, Meltzer could leave you feeling bitter and jaded. Then again, maybe it’s just me.

Written by: Jen Klee, February 14th 2010

How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time

admin — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 17:49:00 +0000

By Kara Jesella, Marisa Meltzer

Faber and Faber Inc.

Before female adolescents in America had Oakland/Portland’s Bitch or Chicago’s VenusZine for feminism 101, there was New York City’s Sassy. In How Sassy Changed My Life, readers are given a magazine-size book that reads like a nostalgic love letter chronicling one of women’s crucial marks in journalism's history. Known as the 80s lovechild of founder Sandra Yates of Australia’s Dolly and then 24-year-old Jane Pratt, the youngest editor-in-chief of a magazine, Sassy shunned the “come get me boys” themes of teen publications with blonde, blue-eyed, bulimic models. For the first time, two female writers carefully analyze Sassy’s impact on insecure, teenage girls seeking refuge from YM and Seventeen through interviews with former staff members and the many readers that created an online cult following.

How Sassy Changed My Life starts off by answering the frequently-asked question: why would anyone write a book about a teen magazine? While Jesella and Meltzer give a brief, but convincing explanation for exploring Sassy’s rich, cultural history in American media, the chapters remain faithful in giving an in-depth look behind the magazine’s main competitor. With Seventeen’s “Where to Spy Guys” and “Learn How to Be a Secretary” ads, Walter Anneberg, the publication’s owner (who had a gold-plated toilet seat in his private plane), surely wasn’t risking his sales with features on homosexuality, AIDS and premarital sex. Yet, when Sassy arrived at 1 Times Square in 1988, they covered “The Dirty Scummy Truth on Spring Break (or, Where The Jerks Are),” included ads for Doc Martens and featured pixie-haired models with bandanas. Jesella and Meltzer manage to successfully show with crisp, tight language, the staff’s many personalities that collectively provided a voice for those wanting to learn about their inner girl power with “13 Reasons Not to Diet.” Former reader Sarah Kowalski commented, “The magazine was so personal it felt like a community, like people that you hung out with-that was very important. I was kind of an outsider type. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school. You wanted to find your people.”

One of the major concerns in How Sassy Changed My Life was Pratt’s portrayal in the magazine’s birth and downfall. Pratt, initially viewed as “the extremely charismatic leader,” who made her writers “go through as many as 15 story drafts,” was detested by Sassy_ites for the betrayal known as _Jane magazine. Jesella and Meltzer spoke with Jane’s arch-nemesis, Lisa Jervis from Bitch, who retaliated against Pratt’s vision for a more girl-friendly periodical that even included a column by Pamela Anderson. In responding to Bitch’s “10 Things I Hate About Jane,” Jervis explained, “Those of us salivating in front of the newsstand were hoping for something that took Sassy’s early vision of self-confident girl power and critical thinking a step forward.” Ultimately, How Sassy Changed My Life concluded with Pratt being a pretentious publisher whose feud with Bitch magazine seems more appealing than her celebrity-fueled glossy. While the conclusion leaves readers torn, Jesella and Meltzer lets their audience decide whether Pratt should be celebrated for her role in leading Sassy or hated for her false promise in keeping the dream alive.

Whether you grew up reading Sassy or are just discovering its famous April 1992 cover of grunge's Sid and Nancy, How Sassy Changed My Life is a cultural tour de force that embodies the best of modern feminist writing. Readers will finish Jesella’s and Meltzer’s testimonial feeling confident about their femininity and hopeful for womankind’s future, just as Sassy did for six years.

Written by: Stephanie Nolasco, July 1st 2007

Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:07:00 +0000

By Phyllis Birnbaum

Faber and Faber Inc.

Readers interested in art, Paris, Tokyo, or multiculturalism in the first half of the twentieth century will enjoy Phyllis Birnbaum’s carefully documented biography of Foujita’s tumultuous life as an aristocratic playboy and fiercely dedicated artist, both acclaimed and vilified for his controversial works. She chronicles Foujita’s five marriages, repeated moves to France from Japan and back again, travels in Latin America and the United States, whimsical moods, political shifts, and mastery of a unique style fusing Western oil painting techniques with Japanese brushwork.

In 1920s France, Foujita painted elegant nudes, scandalizing his Japanese compatriots, and during WWII, in Japan, he created propagandistic war paintings that got him in trouble with almost everybody after the Allied victory -- Japanese, Europeans, and Americans. Even today opinions are divided about works such as Last Stand at Attu, 1943. Sasaki Shigeo compares these paintings unfavorably with Picasso’s Guernica, while the artist’s nephew, Ashihara Eiryo, defends him: “In the same way that Foujita believed that women were merely ‘flesh,’ so a gun or a flower was all the same to Foujita.”

Indeed, even though Foujita’s favorite painting subjects were women and cats, singly or together, his affectionate appreciation for them did not make him respect them. Birnbaum quotes without comment his oft-repeated statement to interviewers: “… women and cats are absolutely the same. If you treat them nicely, they are submissive, but if you don’t, they will turn on you. Just think about it – isn’t a woman just like a cat if you put on some whiskers and a tail?” A feminist analysis of the artist’s complicated ambivalence toward women would have strengthened this biography, but Birnbaum, while a noted biographer of Japanese women and their works, reminds us that she is “not writing the woman’s story this time around.” Her duty to Foujita, she believes, makes it necessary for her to take his point of view in everything.

Still, Birnbaum does an outstanding job of presenting her main thesis, exploring in intriguing detail the artist’s dilemma as a man between two countries and two cultures, and in the process she gives a vivid picture of the international art scene during the World Wars, background vital for understanding many of today’s cultural clashes, misunderstandings, and surprising fusions.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, February 20th 2007