About a year ago, record numbers of garment laborers in factories across Cambodia – which exports 70 percent of the garments manufactured there to the US – were reported to be suddenly and mysteriously falling to the ground, unconscious. Hundreds at a time – sometimes less, although sometimes more. Workers at many scenes reported foul smells, difficulty breathing. Halting investigations took place at select plants by various parties involved: government officials; labor unions; human rights groups; business associations; monitoring organizations; and, weirdly, the international big-name brands that sell the clothes being made. A consortium of factors was considered: hypoglycemia, the direct result of workers not eating enough; minor factory infractions that managers promised to address immediately; a common cold outbreak emanating from Canada; overwork; mass hysteria; workers partying too hard over the weekend; and spiritual possession. In the end, no single cause was named for the nationwide epidemic. Besides a 5$ “health bonus” for qualifying workers, no sweeping policy changes were offered to keep the incidents from continuing.

It seemed to be just more bad luck for Cambodia, a nation still coming to terms with five decades spent surviving a record tonnage of American bombs, the Khmer Rouge, a generation of civil war, a legacy of corruption and endemic poverty. But bad luck doesn’t account for around 3,000 workers reportedly losing consciousness in 17 separate mass-fainting incidents at 12 of the country’s 300 registered garment factories.

The real bad luck for Cambodia – and ethical apparel consumers, particularly in the US, where 70 percent of the goods produced are sold – is that thousands of workers falling ill on the job isn’t enough to catch the fashion industry’s attention.

Read the rest at Truthout here.

There is a quality that certain historic figures are said to share, a nearly indescribable feeling—not that these figures embody, but that they bring out in whoever they meet. The quality has been called intense charm, and magnetism, but these are both insufficient. Former president Bill Clinton is said to possess it. Mu Sochua, the Cambodian women’s rights leader, does as well. Successful cult leaders, I assume, get by on it almost exclusively. An ex-boyfriend once told me that Ann Magnuson, actor and frontwoman of Bongwater, was the same. “She’s one of those people that, when you meet them, you want to marry them, immediately, and devote your whole life to making them happy,” he told me. I didn’t understand what he meant until I met Lynda Barry.

Lynda Barry’s personality fills whatever room she inhabits, certainly. Her loud bray and homey vocabulary command attention, and her signature red hair tie spark a connection to her comics work that is both aesthetic and emotional. She is disarming, on purpose. Her personality redefines the roles others play in the conversation, the situation. Whatever it is. Men who might otherwise pontificate listen. Girls who might titter instead ask questions. The very young are enraptured. It doesn’t matter what their days were like before, their lives. Lynda Barry is in the room with them now so everything from this moment on will be amazing.

The possession of this indescribable quality—the ability to inspire devotion, respect, and even love with little more than your presence—helps make Lynda Barry an excellent teacher, as anyone who’s taken her writing workshop can tell you. It could have made her a political leader. (It may still, when her in-progress project on the destructiveness of wind turbines is released.) But most impactful so far has been her work in comics. In a few lines or brushstrokes, Lynda Barry somehow manages to convey both love and a deeply personal understanding of its absence.

First published in the mid-1970’s, Barry began serializing her comics in the Chicago Reader in the late 1980’s. Her early frenetic linework secured her a place in the New Wave canon of cartoonists, an avant-garde if smallish group who pushed storylines out of the 1970’s navel-gazing underground and into new territories: space, youth culture, post-apocalyptic landscapes. Ernie Pook’s Comeek portrayed the most dysfunctional of dysfunctional families: their apocalypse was internal, and Barry made you feel it.

I found this work in the early 1990’s, and learned to appreciate what comics could be because of it. By then, mainstream newspaper comics had developed a set repertoire of happy family stories. But as I learned from Lynda Barry, comics didn’t have to be prettily rendered, meaningful images of teen relationships, or romping kitties and puppies sharing clever repartee. They could also be raw, painful, and gut-wrenchingly beautiful. It took me some years to get used to. But for a girl just getting into punk in the 1990s, this lesson was profound, and I continue to live by it.

Then about ten years ago, Barry—now 56, happily married, and living on a farm in Wisconsin—started drawing a cute, happy, nearsighted monkey. At first I was despondent. Had the artist I was devoted to, respected, even loved, sold me out? When I had the opportunity to interview her for a to-be-released documentary for the Video Data Bank in Chicago, I asked her about it immediately. What follows are her candid responses to questions about economic precarity, racial and ethnic identity, the potential of creative expression, and finding love where you don’t expect it to be.

AEM: When I first saw the monkey, Lynda—and to some degree this goes for the recent books that feature him, too, What It Is and Picture This—I was not OK about the change to your drawing style. I may have been resentful. Learning to appreciate your earlier work was fundamental to my formation as a person, and the monkey was such a drastic turn away from that approach to image-making. I felt like, “I did all this work to get here!”

Lynda Barry: [Barry laughs, catching the gist immediately.] And now I have to look a monkey?

AEM: Cute animals? No explanation? No apologies?

Barry: [Laughter.] You’re actually sort of describing my experience with what happened after all the catastrophes [that started with September 11]. All I could do was draw cute animals. I had the same experience, like: “No, no, no no no, nooo nooo! I did not work 50 years to end up drawing monkeys!” But yeah—I did, actually.

Read the rest at The Rumpus here.

To understand Cambodian film, or Cambodia, really, you should watch Katanho (2003) crammed onto a vinyl couch with thirty-two women half your age. They should be children of survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime—or, in some cases, the children of Khmer Rouge—a generation not taught in school or the media about the mass killings that took place in their country thirty-five years ago, young people who watch as their government pardons, excuses, or downplays the disastrous attempt by the Khmer Rouge to create an agrarian utopia. This is a generation who did not know until recently what happened in their country in the 1970s. Whether out of shame, humiliation, resentment, sorrow, or anger, their parents did not tell them about it. Entire families: slaughtered, starved, disappeared—the families of these young women, seated on the couch next to you, watching the melodrama to end all melodramas. A socially acceptable way to grieve.

Katanho, or Gratefulness, a Khmer film directed by Heng Tola and starring Ly Chan Siha, is said to be based on the true story of a young girl, named Lyka in the film, even though the plot bears close resemblance to two Thai films, 1985’s Walli and 1999’s Neang Nak. Born to a destitute family in the impoverished provinces, Lyka lives with her hard-working parents and blind grandmother. Each member of her family falls ill in succession; her schoolwork suffers. The Wikipedia entry for the film, written in Khmenglish by a clearly affected fan, describes the remainder of the events in Lyka’s sob story:

“One day, Lyka wrote an Essay which telling a misery life and gratefulness of herself to the class as well as the writing made every classmate including the teacher knew the true life of Lyka. Her essay about her life was published in a newspaper and generous donations flooded in both from inside Cambodia and from foreign countries to Lyka’s family which fed her family and paid the hospital bills for Lyka’s mother. Lyka’s mother life was like the sunset as Lyka was too late to cure her mother from the illness. At the end, we see Lyka was sitting on railway for a moment and then walking along it when thinking of her life at tomorrow while the sunset.”

While watching this film, your young friends on the couch wail, heave, sob, and leave the room to more completely express their grief. Many fought to stay in school past the third grade, when most girls from impoverished provinces are removed from formal education to care for families and tend rice fields. Every one of them understands, then, the frustration of daily poverty, and how illness, disability, and accidents upset your accrued stability. All of them believe that a moment of honesty, of sharing your “true life” causes dramatic and international action. You, on the couch, are sympathetic, but the unending sorrow of your friends agitates you. Not emotionally: Cambodia is a desperately sad place anyway. Just in terms of the wetness of tears, which given your position as the only one in the room not losing your shit entirely, in combination with the heat, has your shirt soaked through and stuck to your chest. Being there is, in every way, very, very uncomfortable. Film in Khmer culture acts as an emotional release for all the hidden things these young people were never told about their history, their families, or their country. Cinema in Cambodia—the medium itself—is metaphor. It stands in for historical memory. It makes it tolerable. And unnecessary.

Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s documentary Enemies of the People, however—the drastically un-Cambodian Cambodian film that won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2010—is not a metaphor. It is instead a “noble masterpiece,” a title Susan Sontag gave Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s 1978 Hitler: A Film From Germany. Like that earlier film, Enemies of the People “spoils our tolerance for the others,” as she writes. It is the true “true life” of Cambodia, not standing in for historical memory and alleviating the need for it, but providing it where it is not wanted. The discomfort you feel watching Katanho with a group of young Khmer women? It is only a hint of how Enemies of the People feels in Cambodia.

Read the entire essay on Enemies of the People at N+1 Film Review.

DECEMBER 24, 11 AM

I arrive in Cambodia thirty hours late, due to a blizzard in central Europe. I am sleeping next to a posh pool in a Phnom Penh hotel, when I get a text from Saem Vun, a singer with a musical group called The Messenger Band.

I have known Saem since I chanced upon a concert she and her bandmates had given a year previous. The group was formed in 2005 by the now-defunct Cambodian NGO Womyn’s Agenda for Change, in order to bring the concerns of garment workers back to the provinces from which these young women originally come. Over 300,000 women uphold the nation’s third-largest industry, directly supporting in the process over 20% of the nation’s 14 million inhabitants by sending money back home to farming families. In fact, young women are often sent by parents to the city for this express purpose. Sometimes proof-of-age documents are forged, and always the girls are pulled from school—and many aren’t prepared. For the hard labor. For the big city. For being away from family.

Or for the corruption. Although it’s an illegal charge, many workers report having paid interview fees of around $50 to be considered for their jobs. New arrivals in the city don’t have that kind of money—it’s close to a month’s salary—and some visit high-interest money-lenders or take on illegal and dangerous work. Right off the bat.

The Messenger Band writes songs in the traditional Cambodian folk style, and choreographs moves to accompany their laments. Villagers are riveted: the subjects of these songs are their daughters, their nieces, their friends. More interesting, the subjects of the songs are also members of The Messenger Band. All former or current garment factory workers themselves, the varying group of women that perform as the band are well-versed in the issues that affect women in Cambodia. Saem worked in the factories from 2000 to 2005, but now works full-time with the band. “We are tired but we say nothing,” one song goes. “We are hard working and much of this money I earn is dollars to help my mother.”

I had sent Saem an email before leaving the US: “I wish to travel with you to your next concert,” I explained. “As you know, I have worked with political punk bands in the US for a long time, so I would like to know how similar it is, to be a political band in Cambodia.”

Her text wakes me from my jetlagged fever dream. “MB is going to hold a concert in Kandal province tomorrow, Saturday 25th. It would be great if you can go.”

“Note:” she adds before her signoff. “We are going to leave early in the morning.”

This makes me nervous: Cambodians wake up with the sun. Here, early turns out to mean 6:30 on Christmas morning, which means I would have to wake up and prepare to leave at 4 am following several 24-hour periods with no sleep.

“Sorry,” I explain to Saem. “I cannot do that.” I can stay awake until 4 a.m. to see a band, sure. But getting up for one on Christmas morning, even as a non-Christian in a Buddhist country, strikes me as morally and spiritually unacceptable.

Easy enough. Saem arranges for me to ride with a friend of hers by tuk tuk, the brightly painted motorcycle-lead benched cart, later in the day, leaving more than enough time to catch the 6:30 p.m. performance in the nearby province.

The previous Messenger Band concert I attended was in a performance venue, intended for Western tourists and ex-pats, but this is not the band’s primary audience. “The voice of garment workers must be used to shout to tell all Cambodian women that to be a servant is very difficult,” they sing in one song, in tones unheard in American pop tunes, and all the more effective because of it. “We have no freedom and no rights.”

It’s a message lost on, say, a recently widowed Australian who came to Southeast Asia for a month to recoup. She has both freedom and rights. The next day I would be surrounded by Cambodian women who had neither, who’d sent their daughters off for a bid at economic stability, but the cost was a difficult life. And somehow I was sure it was going to be fun.

DECEMBER 25, 2:15 PM

Saem’s friend, we’ll call her Neary, is dressed mostly in clean white, with long sleeves to keep out the sun. I have just arrived from a country suffering a seemingly endless series of blizzards. I am wearing black and eager to soak up all the sun I can. We clamber into the tuk tuk.

“It is far away, so our driver will bring someone with, to drive back. Is it OK with you?” she asks. I do not have a problem with this. I am personally only capable of riding a motorcycle for about 25 minutes before the lower half of my body goes numb, and we’re looking at a journey over three times that long. But she’s not asking out of a concern for my social well-being. The presumption here—partially because I have a travel budget, but also because, as a white person, I am perceived to be wealthy—is that I will pay for the tuk tuk.

Our driver is friendly. (Although, truth be told, most Cambodians are friendly.) “Cheung Eck!” the spare driver turns around to tell us cheerfully partway through our journey. To our left is the Killing Fields memorial.

Neary confesses she has never been there. “It is too much for me,” she says.

She is not the first Cambodian I have met that’s passed up the opportunity. In fact, in 2007 a group of five young women asked me to take them there for the first time. One was particularly affected, and when I asked her afterwards why, she explained that it had helped her piece together something that used to happen when she was little. She used go to her schoolyard with a friend to dig up long white rocks, which she collected and brought home to her parents. Instead of praising her ingenuity, however, her parents gave her a scolding. At Cheung Eck, she realized why: her schoolyard had been one of the several killing fields spread around the countryside, spaces set aside to deal with those identified as enemies of Angkar, the name the Khmer Rouge used to refer to their organization. As the four-year hardline communist regime came to a frenetic end, the volume of those identified as enemies grew significantly, until, as recent estimates conducted in advance of the Khmer Rouge Tribunals indicate, between 1.7 and 2.2 million people died or were killed, over a quarter of the population of the country.

Although the terminology is under dispute, this makes every Cambodian alive a survivor of the mass killings, including the parents of Neary, and the members of The Messenger Band. Still, it is not uncommon to come across young people between 20 and 30 who do not believe the Khmer Rouge existed. “Didn’t you see The Killing Fields?” A young man told me once, referring to the film. “The American movie? With actors?” He meant it as proof that the entire period had been fictionalized.

I mention this to Neary, and she tells her own horror story: a lecturer at her university who teaches that the Pol Pot years were entirely peaceful. When my new friend balked at him, the lecturer asked what proof she had that things had really been that bad, since she was a year too young to have experienced the Khmer Rouge years herself.

Neary called horsepockey. “You don’t need to work in the factories to know those women have difficult lives,” she spat, referring to the back-breaking labor, even under ideal conditions, that women faced in the garment manufacturing plants. Neary was a full-time student now, and part-time labor organizer, but had helped run the Womyn’s Agenda for Change when The Messenger Band was formed.

At the time, garment workers earned a base pay of $55 per month, when living wage in the country is nearly twice that. With overtime, many send home around $50 per month, but this still leaves large income gaps—even, again, under ideal conditions. And in 2009, 93 factories closed and 60 suspended work, leaving 68,190 workers—close to 20 percent of the force at last tally—out of jobs, according to official Ministry of Labour records. Work picked up slightly in 2010, with a few new factories opening up in the countryside, but strikes over the summer lead to layoffs of labor leaders in the fall and many were out of their already low-income jobs. Some turned to sex work, an industry—euphemistically called “entertainment,” that boomed at the same time. So too, public health officials charged, did HIV rates.

Neary’s point about the lecturer was that she didn’t need to work in the factories to see that the women who did had a profound impact on the economic and public health of the entire nation. But, as was also the case with the Khmer Rouge years, the real story was difficult to find when people retained a vested interest in hiding facts.

It is this injustice that The Messenger Band seeks to uproot. Just updated. With a beat you can dance to.

DECEMBER 25, 3:35 PM

There is some confusion about the path we must take, as roads outside of cities are so few as to be unmarked. There is, however, a poster I cannot read in Khmer, and because it features females with microphones, it is most obviously The Messenger Band. There simply aren’t any other bands—or, frankly, groups of other, perhaps non-singing women in the country—that it could be.

The lyrics from one of their songs, “The Voice of Garment Workers,” is typical of their approach:

We are all garment workers, we live in bad conditions, we struggle with difficulty…

The song that we sing is about the real life of garment workers, please pity us and consider the life of garment workers.

How we are suffering?

We are faced with suffering and problems because the factory owners exploit us.

When the workers are in trouble, who can help to solve the problems?

Where is justice? When I need you, why do you ignore me?

I inform the navigational team—Neary, the driver, and the backup driver—and they agree: girls with microphones. We are in the right place.

DECEMBER 25, 3:45 PM

We pull up to a dusty field in Chrey Royoung village, Kondok commune, in the Kandal Steung district of Kandal Province. To the left, a metal roof covers a concrete floor. People busy themselves inside it. At the far end, a giant black square sits incongruously on the parched and carved land, plowed after the last rain a month ago, now hardened into grooves about eight inches high. A rusty pickup truck backs towards the shape, and a gaggle of thin, brown young men begin unloading 12 massive speakers.

“That’s a lot of speakers,” I mutter out loud. A woman to my left—she turns out to be a garment labor organizer—agrees.

“But compared to US,” she says, “Not the same sound.” Hopefully not, I think. I spent much of my twenties and a significant part of my thirties standing in front of just one of those buggers, and I’d recently adopted a more mature stance toward music that featured the benefit of allowing me to hear things the next day.

The lone generator intended to power both the sound system and the lights arrives via tuk tuk. A free umbrella distributed as advertising on behalf of the beer company Angkor shields it from the sun. In the US, we might have the luxury to consider such a thing ironic. The Messenger Band sings songs intended to advocate for members of the sex industry, which itself is directly linked to the Cambodian national beer companies, who hire women to distribute their wares and provide other entertainments for customers. They are called beer girls. In a documentary I saw recently, a beer girl explained that she would happily give up having sex with customers for money, if only the beer company paid her enough to live on.

But the luxury of outrage is not available in Cambodia. Here, we must simply appreciate a thing able to shield a generator from the sun.

I chat idly with another labor organizer from IDIEA, the union for motodop and tuk tuk drivers, who tells me what’s on the bill: The Messenger Band will be joined by a group of trans women, and in addition to songs, skits and dances will be performed. Plus, I’m told: a fashion show!

DECEMBER 25, 4:15 p.m.

The kids from the village flirt with me by walking by slowly and saying “hello!” in bright, friendly voices, and then running away when I respond in kind. They mostly seem impressed that this is a communication device, and not some secret code made up to annoy them in school or on TV. Although this exchange, repeated multiple times, provides the primary entertainment for the moment, other kids watch as carnival stands and food vendors begin to set up shop along the entrance to the field. One extremely dirty kid in his underpants chases bikes through the dirt grooves. Many sit and gape at the roadies.

Soon, the kids pull out another trick: The strung-together syllables of “Jingle Bells,” which we sing together without comprehension (myself included, if we’re to get philosophical about it. Jingle all the way? What was that even supposed to mean when you weren’t celebrating the holidays in a hundred-plus-degree heat?).

Suddenly an even more exciting thing happens: roadies start hanging banners on the black stage in the center of the field. “People over Profit” one says. “We need Accessible, Quality Health Care,” proclaims the other. A third, for the curtain behind the stage, is missing and this is an emergency. It is too far to go back to Phnom Penh for it, although this is considered for a moment. The Khmer respect for formality will not let the absence of that banner stand, so the country’s brightest labor organizing and public health policy minds get together to repaint it while a group of trans people practice catwalking the stage.

DECEMBER 25, 5 PM

Watching an entire village gather in a field in a southern province of Cambodia to celebrate, feed, and entertain trans women and an all-girl pro-labor and human rights musical group is so far beyond anything I have ever experienced in the American punk underground that I spend some time alone recalibrating what I mean by the word “awesome.”

DECEMBER 25, 5:45 PM

The people that have been busying themselves under the metal awning are finally ready for us, and have decked out their standard-issue light blue plastic chairs with elaborate gold sateen covers and politely bagged all the table settings in plastic. They have also prepared no small amount of food. steamed fish in giant kettles; a dish made from local vegetables and tiny unshelled shrimp; chicken; a coconut dessert. Visitors are handed prim bottles of water, a gift just for coming! Already seated are police chiefs and local officials, several major authority figures.

A smartly dressed woman, long hair tied back, with a deep-colored silk kroma perfunctorily positioned around her neck, asks me in English lilted with a slight French accent to sit next to her. We are partway through the meal before I realize that the deference others grant her is due to the vast political power she holds—she is the Deputy District Governor—but by then we have already bonded over not having husbands. Being unmarried in Cambodia as a woman is OK under certain conditions—if you are exemplary, for example, or foreign.

Generally speaking, young women here are expected to have families. So expected, in fact, that women are assumed, without query, to be married already. To my left, for example, the villagers ask Saem about her husband, and what the husbands of the band members are expected to do when their wives travel so frequently.

Saem retorts sharply, but with humor: the women all laugh, and the village official next to me concurs. “What did you say?” I have to ask my friend, as my Khmer is mostly limited to words for baby animals.

“They ask where my husband. I say, if it good enough for your leader to have no husband it good enough for me,” Saem answers.

Still, I know Saem has a partner she misses when she travels. The Messenger Band performs regularly, but Cambodian bands don’t tour like US ones do. In fact, this performance is it for public gigs for the next month or so, and although it will be a late night by Cambodian standards—the concert will end around 9:30 and I’ll get home around 11:30—there’s no drinking, drug abuse, or carousing going on, and I can’t imagine that tours like this take that much of a toll on home life. In fact, some of the band members still hold down jobs in the garment factories.

Yet Cambodian families are also stronger than their US counterparts, and if they hadn’t moved to the big city to work in the factories, all the women in the band would still live at home. In fact, all unmarried women I know in the country still live at home, and return home before dinner, promptly, every night.

For her part, Saem is perfectly content to sit, chatting gaily before her concert. To the group, and on her cell phone. No signs of nervousness, no performance anxiety. I developed a theory when I lived in a dormitory of teenage girls 24-7 at the age of 37: that growing up Cambodian doesn’t give you a lot of space to develop performance anxiety. If you can’t eat, sleep, meditate, sing, and dance in front of other people, you’re sunk.

The table next to us, of trans people loudly flattering each other and laughing with locals, fares equally well. “Is it always so easy for trans people in Cambodia?” I ask Saem.

“Oh no,” she says. “Many times, people will say something negative. It is a very difficult life, also for gay and lesbian people.”

I have spent almost four years traveling to, researching, and writing on Cambodian women’s issues. This is the first time I have heard a Khmer woman use the word, “lesbian.” I look at the table next to us. “They don’t appear to be having a difficult time,” I say.

“Oh, that is because they have one of them here. It is important for trans people to be together, to feel happy and safe,” Saem explains. “Also, the community know already.” Meaning: trans people are already accepted here. I’m pretty sure my Northside neighborhood in Chicago could learn a lot from the Kandal province.

DECEMBER 25, 6:45 PM

The civic leader to my right, who I am at last introduced to as Tes Sopheap, politely invites me, as she says, “to toilet with her.” This is a delightful idea, and not only because I have to piss like a racehorse. I’m always up for a late-night stroll through a dark Cambodian town, and this one does not fail to amuse. There are more stars than I ever remember there being, ever, and the dark serpent-themed temple we pass by in the night peers out from a late-night fog, satisfying my desire to mix terror with my Christmas celebration. We stop at the first well-appointed neighbor’s house we pass, make perfunctory greetings, and use their pit toilet. When the lady of the house returns home a few minutes later, she is surprised to find a white girl sitting on her mahogany bench. She asks if I would like to take a quick shower. It is a respectful thing to ask, and not intended to be, in any way, improper. I’m certain I look like I need it, but decline the invitation.

DECEMBER 25, 7:15 PM

The band rushes off to change into their costumes, and the MCs take the stage and offer rambling greetings to the gathered crowd, slowly slowly pulling them away from the balloon-popping carnival games, a corn vendor, a sugarcane stand. Soon the whole town is crouched, mostly, or seated, in the dry, ridgey field in preparation for the concert. And yet the MCs ramble on.

When The Messenger Band takes the stage, they are decked in traditional Cambodian dress: red or orange sampot, gold-trimmed and elaborately folded; white silk top with lace, elaborate hair styles. Big movements in such outfits are not possible; these women will take small steps, make graceful gestures, never raising their arms above their heads triumphantly or bounding from one side of the stage to another. Gracefulness in Cambodian dance is about attentiveness to detail and extreme, if sometimes awkward and excrutiatingly slow, gestures.

Slowly, then, the band opens with an appropriately introductory song about the town they have traveled from, Phnom Penh. When it was evacuated under the Khmer Rouge, the town stood empty for nearly four years, during which property laws were abandoned. When people began resettling again in the capital city, they simply found a convenient, or nice, place to hang out. Who was going to deny them the right? There was no more paperwork to prove otherwise.

At some point, under the Vietnamese, the still-reforming government had to just acknowledge: wherever you live now, you own it. Establishing any other order would have undone the fragile peace process, and further instilled a mistrust of the foreign, occupying, government. And yet, today, land issues still arise, regularly. There is little order, less work. Construction and garment work form the only cohesive way of making a living for most.

This, I gather, is the gist of the song—although I must ask the young feminist organizer seated beside me for a translation. She is a rare find here, someone who advocates for the rights of women as a class. This is partially because women in Cambodia are still influenced by something called the Chbap Srei, a centuries-old document that translates, literally, into “rules for girls.” It dictates how proper young women dress, behave, and even sound—which is why Cambodian women appear to have higher-pitched voices in films than, say, women from Vietnam or Thailand. This is called “sweet voice.” And the physical counterpart to this rule is, “not rustling your skirt when you walk.” More extreme rules include: accepting the beating of your husband.

Wife-beating is thus deeply embedded in Cambodian notions of gender normativity and, indeed, a few players get up and perform a skit about domestic violence and alcohol abuse. It is a typically didactic Cambodian performance, but perhaps most frustrating is that it is also typically representative of far too many relationships. Some sources estimate that around one in five women here is a victim of spousal abuse.

But in this skit, played for laughs, the man of the family—his wide moustache a giveaway for province drunk—fights with his wife. She needs money for health care, so she goes to the town moneylender—usually a woman, who lends freely, but at very high interest rates. When a payment comes due, she asks her no-good husband for it, but, he says, this is not his problem. He threatens her, physically. Although comedic, this scene is common enough that it’s not necessarily taken as such. A small boy in the front row cries, real tears. Why does that woman have such a hard life, he asks?

The answer is the purpose of The Messenger Band’s skit, but also the thing they cannot say outright. The answer is that a deeply corrupt, generations-old system has allowed for no safety net for the majority of Cambodians, leaving them without options under duress, save burrowing deeper into financial insolvency and taking their frustrations out on each other.

DECEMBER 25, 8 PM

Really, though, Khmer concerts are weird, even those held indoors. Everyone sits, patiently. There is no crowding the stage, no stage diving, no mad dash to touch the performers. Occasional expressions of affection do occur: a fan will approach the stage, formally, to hand a bouquet to the singer, who will pose patiently with it and/or the giver while pictures are taken. A wide berth stands always between the edge of the stage and the audience.

Many celebrities have made the transition from the Western world to Cambodia: Britney Spears can be heard regularly in the streets, pictures of Angelina Jolie decorate makeup stores and bars alike. But the American notion of hounding celebrities and getting all up in their grill until they have to punch you? Hasn’t travelled this far yet.

DECEMBER 25, 8:30 PM

One of the labor organizers had asked me earlier what I was doing in Phnom Penh. Basically, I’m teaching, but they already know I am also a writer.

“What do you teach?” She asked.

“Well,” I said, “I teach in media and communications—but here in Cambodia it’s mostly about implementing critical thinking skills around advertising and marketing.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly preparing her next query, which was this loaded one: “And when you teach, do you have an agenda, or do you allow the students to share their own idea?”

Usually, what this means is: are you promoting an ideology, or creating a space for open, creative dialogue? But as I look at the stage, watch the performances, piece together what I can of what is being said, it’s clear that there is an agenda here: it’s just not the one you see in newspapers, on the TV, or hear on the radio. In Cambodia there is, officially, Leadership. And then there is, less visibly, the Opposition. And what an agenda means is: promoting the Leadership party line. It is not seen as promoting an agenda to counter Leadership.

This, in Cambodia, is the meaning of democracy. That you have the right to counter leadership: occasionally, ineffectively, and predictably. Which is not the way that I understand the term, at all.

It is not unlike the performance now on the stage: trans people, dressed to the hilt in makeup, heels, short skirts, prancing like women in the worst of the 1980s music videos. If the performers weren’t trans women, or situated in one of the most impoverished, corrupt, and cruel environments I’d ever been in, likely taking their lives in their hands by publicly outing themselves as srey sros—if, in other words, I was sitting in a field in the provinces of Cambodia watching tarts parade around on stage as tarts and not as a statement about who is and is not allowed to participate in tart culture and why, I would be furious to be here.

But the parading is having an effect, and to my far left a policeman is swinging his foot in time to the throbbing dance number. His government-official pal, seated on his right, makes an appreciative comment—I catch the word for “beautiful”. What is going on here, right here and right now, is a destabilization of attraction, and not a destabilization of gender roles. Which, given Cambodia’s love of beauty, may be far more powerful.

DECEMBER 25, 8:45 PM

Some local youth are called up on stage in sort of a quiz-show style game. It mimics the way lessons are taught in grade schools here, taught in grade schools everywhere: it’s the “fun” “interactive” “educational” part of the show, where we really get to test whether or not the lesson has sunk in. They answer questions about safe sex, about the number of women employed in the garment industry, about access to health care. A trans woman hands out the prizes—gift bags, school supplies. Another lesson: put local youth in direct physical contact with trans people.

To underscore the point, members of public health organizations pass through the audience handing out brightly printed flyers with further information.

DECEMBER 25, 9:00 PM

To be honest, I am growing annoyed by the endless preaching. I acknowledge that I understand very, very little of it, but the tone is clear, and others are fidgeting too. Also: the fog machine is set way too high. Sometimes I cannot see the stage.

I understand with every fiber of my being that polemics, here, are necessary: that promoting even the existence of opposition is a nearly impossible task. It must first be made clear that there exist more than one approach to daily life, social interactions, and politics-as-usual. Later, down the road, this can be softened. Various camps can stake claims over various skirmishes in various battles. Yet social change in Cambodia hinges on the necessity that everyone first become aware that change is possible—and might even be necessary.

But I am not Cambodian. I am becoming bored. The feeling is dangerous, I know; a condition of my privilege. Acting on it could well destroy the progress being made here. Getting up and walking away is not an act of solidarity. Neither proposing and implementing solutions borne of my experience as a white woman from the United States. It’s weird, but the most radical thing I can do at this moment is sit here and smile pleasantly.

I had earlier recorded an interview with Saem about The Messenger Band. “Why would garment factory workers start a band?” I’d asked her.

“I think it’s really important because first, myself, I can really speak out about the situation when I was working in the factory and I saw a lot of problems with the workers in the factory.” Saem had worked full time in the factories for five years. Since then, she’s been full time with the band. “I think that it’s good if we write a song that’s educate to the people. And also do advocacy through the song.”

“Advocacy toward what change?” I asked her.

“Oh, that’s a good question. First, I want to see the change, like the garment worker respect by the law and support by the government and the investors. It’s important for investment, they have to follow the law in Cambodia and they have to respect worker’s rights.”

“How is the law not being followed in Cambodia?”

“A lot of ways, like the forced overtime and the low wage. And have to ask permission for when they have to take leave or when they get sick. It’s really difficult to take leave. And sometimes, they were dismissed by the company because they cannot go to work, like when they got sick, they have to go to the hospital. But the factory owners, they don’t allow them to go. Some factories, they are warning that the workers have to make some print, I don’t know how to say, when they cannot work and they, I dunno—” she broke off to ask someone for an English translation “—Unconscious. When the workers fall unconscious in the factory, when they awake from unconsciousness, they tell the worker that, ‘you have to promise that you will not unconscious again, otherwise, you lose the job.’”

I was surprised by this. I spend a lot of time being surprised in Cambodia.

“So, if people faint,” I asked not hiding my incredulity, “they have to promise that they won’t faint again?”

“Yes,” Saem told me. “They have to promise. They cannot unconscious again. Otherwise you will lose the job. And the workers are so scared, so they just promise to the leaders.”

“Are you nervous being an activist in Cambodia?” I asked her. Workers here are scared to agitate for their rights, because they have jobs to lose. Activists in Cambodia put much more on the line. Many are threatened, some are harmed, occasionally someone goes into hiding. Murders also happen.

“Hmmm, a little bit. Because, you already know about here. Right? But if we don’t stand up, no one hear the story. And that’s why we have to stand up and share some information about the poor people in Cambodia. We have to stand up and speak out, otherwise we die. I don’t want to be a famous person, but I want my song, I want my information to become recognized by the big people, and be respected. And provide the rights to those people. For me, I don’t want to be famous, but I want our people here to get enough rice, enough food to eat, and they have the right to demand their rights.”

“Why the songs about HIV rates and karaoke bars?” I asked.

“When the factories close down, some girls will go to become entertainment workers, and HIV will spread out around.” She was frustrated, however, that NGOs only seemed to care about Cambodians when they became a statistic. “Why don’t they care about their living life? Why they don’t care about their family? Why they don’t care about the security of those people? Why they care only HIV?”

She started to cry, while I was taping her. “I don’t know, I don’t understand. We care about HIV,” she said. “But you have to think about the lives of the people, not only HIV. If the people don’t have enough food to eat, if they don’t have enough education, if they don’t have good health, how can they prevent themselves from the HIV? They don’t have time to think about HIV, they only have time to think, I need food, I need food. All the time.”

DECEMBER 25, 9:15 PM

Another presentation has the audience pondering various forms of violence: physical, emotional, economic, and reproductive. The Messenger Band does a final number about subcontracts, the primary means by which the normally well-monitored garment factories commit worker abuses under the radar. Then the concert closes with a fashion show of sorts—here, fashion is not on display, only the performers themselves, and the lessons we’re supposed to receive are clear: you can be desirable to men, physically, as well as any number of other things too: a biological male, politically vocal. The models—members of the band and trans people—all hold up signs I cannot read. When I later get my hands on a translation of the signs, they read exactly as I imagined they would: “Owner richest, worker poorest,” one says, and “Cambodia LGBT Pride.” “Real men don’t hit women” and “We are part of the solution” are equally self-explanatory. For sure, this isn’t the Subtlety Band.

DECEMBER 25, 9:30 PM

Things are wrapping up. Public thank-yous are given from the stage, and pictures with local officials snapped on a variety of cameras. The roadies strike the stage while the band, labor organizers, trans people, and hangers-on like me pile into two massive vans—one has been re-branded with Mercedes-Benz paraphernalia, the other has lost its shocks.  A foreigner, I am shuttled into the re-jiggered Mercedes van with a kind respect I feel is unnecessary. Members of The Messenger Band cannot possibly understand that in my mind, going on tour pretty much means you wake up with cat poop in your hair and a smelly man with stringy hair and a drug problem trying to talk you into premarital sex.

On the way home, the trans women twitter and flirt, the band calls husbands, loud cell phones ring—pop songs, all—food is shared. Lychee. Bananas. Bread. Lots of questions, lots of stories. We spend the next two hours redelivering everyone back home.

I’m in bed by midnight. My presents stay unwrapped until Boxing Day.

On what is locally called American New Years Eve, a few days later, I get a call from the band. They want to know if I enjoyed the show. But mostly, they want to wish me a Happy New Year.

Originally published at Souciant, in two parts: part one and part two.

The Adventure School for Ladies is an experimental graduate program that explores gender, cultural production, political engagement, and social divisions with the top ladylike scholars in the field of adventure studies. Our upcoming program will run from June 4 to June 15 2012, in advance of the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (Cake) on June 16th and 17th. This two-week collaborative comics intensive, held at Chicago’s Read/Write Library and Spudnik Press, will host top and emerging ladylike drawers as they create and publish a collaborative comics anthology based on research of gender, race, and economics in the comics industry. Previous experiments have adventured the notion of school by having students contribute equally to group learning experience as an exercise in intellectual trust. Absolutely nothing was supplied by the school except administrative support; scholars were required to bring all curricula, drinks, foods, study materials, and spa entrance fees—for our orientation session—necessary to attend and create an educational environment.

Brilliant Chicago-based comics creator Edie Fake recently called the project a “tripped-out grad school” in his scene report for my own former haunt, The Comics Journal.

In recent years, comics have grown into a legitimate—and big money—business. Yet some in the industry haven’t felt the impact of the popular success of the now ubiquitous form. More often than not, it’s the female-identified creators who aren’t being encouraged to submit work, aren’t being sought out for anthologies, and aren’t getting books turned into big movie deals. In comics and elsewhere, women creators of all sorts of media are starting to ask: Why? Ladydrawers, a new semimonthly comics collaboration on Truthout, looks at a few possible reasons and impacts—in, of course, comics form. Read the series here. Feel the love here. More love, Dutch-style, is here.

The column builds on volunteer and student work conducted in and around Chicago, where Moore teaches a course called Ladydrawers: Gender and Comics in the US. In 2010, we released a comics anthology about women’s comics anthologies. Last spring, we initiated a national conversation about gender and comics with a postcard project. This summer, we created a new anthology combining gender, sex, and representational theory called Unladylike. It is available for your online perusal or download here. A blog collecting research and digital output is occasionally updated here.

I. Free Candy

Several years ago, a friend and I held a series of pedagogical sessions called “free candy” workshops throughout the country as a way of addressing integrity within the punk and DIY underground. Actually they were more like interactive stand-up comedy routines, riffs on the Man, selling out, payola, and makin’ the deal, held at self-publishing conferences, anarchist bookstores, and zine libraries.[i] Yet because getting together to discuss abstract theories like the preservation of integrity sounds a little dry to those who would rather be tuning guitars, doodling in sketchbooks, or interviewing band members for pirate radio shows, and because no self-respecting punk kids believe they will give up the authenticity, sincerity, honor, and personal vision they refer to as integrity, we promised free candy. And people came. We knew our audience: zinesters are hungry folk. Hell, we were our audience.

We were kind of dirty, dressed funny, and swore without provocation. We associated with people who both ate out of garbage bins and fixed up bikes as political acts. We relentlessly documented our disgust with mainstream culture, our never-ending frustrations with governments both Republican and Democratic, and our desire to live life free of corporate influence. This amounts to very little of what most people would consider success, and thus our clothes, food, mode of transportation, and life style were often handmade or greatly modified versions of what polite society had already rejected.

For over a decade, I sold funny little booklets for a dollar through zine distros, independent bookstores and at self-publishing conferences, scrounging out work in writing as a legitimate career evolved. I am now a publisher at Independents’ Day Media, where my business partner Daniel Sinker and I edit and publish the 14-year-old Punk Planet magazine and Punk Planet Books (in partnership with Akashic Books in Brooklyn, founded by Johnny Temple when his punk band Girls Against Boys signed to Geffen Records in 1997). My wardrobe was acquired through friends and thrift stores and retooled to fit my needs. And my food, although not grown in my garden (at least not all of it), is usually prepared by my own hands. Unlike many of my peers, I do watch TV, although because I am surrounded by talented people, the vast majority of the CDs I listen to, books I read, art I hang, and zines I keep in the bathroom are created—conceived, executed, published, and distributed—by just a few individuals with vibrant, crushing passions they feel driven to share with the world.

Mark Hosler describes the art-making practice of his band Negativland as a “natural response to growing up in a mediated world,” and this was how I came to zine-making. My decision to write and publish my own work for an audience of whomever I ran into after I photocopied it was a reaction to the information I was fed daily about how to live my life. Without advertisers, sponsors, or funders, I was beholden neither to publishing dates nor content that would (or more likely would not) ultimately please them. Without an editorial staff, I re-created language to suit my message, and without a design team I explored my own creativity. I published whatever I agreed with or found interesting, and urged the creators of work I found objectionable, malformed, or boring to publish themselves. It wasn’t, to be sure, a financially rewarding decision. It was merely the only one I was interested in making.

But this is no memoir. My experience is merely one among many comprising the current punk and DIY underground. The series of decisions that go into living a life of intentionality, where one chooses goods and services based on some knowledge of the history of their production, are deeply political, yet rarely chosen for lofty ideological reasons. They are made out of necessity and can be traced back to factors including poverty, social class, and the race and gender biases of mainstream culture. When a certain kind of individual stumbles across such barriers to stability, which in our consumerist culture hold real economic consequences, a certain kind of logic emerges. DIY: Do It Yourself. “If you boil punk down to remove all the hair dye, power chords, typewriters, colored vinyl, leather jackets, glue sticks, show flyers, and combat boots,” Dan Sinker wrote in the introduction to Punk Planet’s collected interviews We Owe You Nothing, the culture “has always been about asking ‘why’ and then doing something about it.”[ii]

Musicians start labels when it becomes clear no one else will release their music; writers self-publish because the publishing world doesn’t feel their perspective is marketable; visual artists go unfunded and unrepresented and yet still feel compelled to make work. There are myriad reasons why the labels, the publishing companies, the galleries—and, in turn, the music fans, the book-clubbers, the art collectors—may outright reject or simply fail to embrace a particular artist’s point of view. Far too often, however, these can all can be reduced to a single essential problem that no cultural movement has yet been able to eradicate: that the artist’s point of view is considered unmarketable by the label manager, publisher, or gallery owner—whether, for example, due to her skin color, his low-class manner of dress, her feminist themes, his language of choice, her lack of access to proper social networking channels, his failure to come up with an entrance fee, or perhaps the artist’s transgender presentation. These are curatorial and editorial decisions made primarily out of fear that the keepers of culture will be unable to make back what they invest in supporting the work. For years sacrificing merit to the market has affected what we can see, experience, or purchase in the world; now the dwindling viability of independent media is beginning to influence what we believe to be possible.

***

This book is primarily concerned with integrity, a notion that lately has inspired confusion: it topped the list of most looked-up words in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary in 2005. Equally confusing may be the other words that form the subtitle of this book (although they may not yet appear in most dictionaries): brandalism, vandalism committed as an advertising campaign; graffadi, or graffiti that is advertising; copyfighting, activist projects that take on copyright and intellectual property issues; and mocketing, product placement that is integrated into parody-based entertainment media content.

There has been similar confusion over the word “organic,” particularly regarding foodstuffs. The definition of organic most of us are accustomed to describes living beings; refers to something that develops gradually and without force; and implies the use of agricultural practices reliant on naturally occurring pesticides, fertilizers, and other growing aids but without the use of synthetic chemicals. We think of “organic” as a synonym for natural, untrammeled, sustainable.

Yet the definition of “organic” used on food packaging is a technical and tautological one, describing a lack of synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides, or herbicides and an adherence to a set of standards put in place by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to regulate the commercial use of the word organic. While the definition has been pared down from its original, the word has also become popular in packaging, advertising, and the media; it’s a promotional tool. The word “organic” has therefore grown (inorganically, I would argue) to comprise such methods as those used by Earthbound Foods in farming arugula, as described by the New Yorker’s Steven Shapin in a review of Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “Earthbound’s compost is trucked in; the salad-green farms are models of West Coast monoculture, laser-leveled fields facilitating awesomely efficient mechanical harvesting; and the whole supply chain from California to Manhattan is only four percent less gluttonous a consumer of fossil fuel than that of a conventionally grown head of iceberg lettuce.”[iii] Thus, he argues, “the growing of the arugula is indeed organic, but almost everything else is late-capitalist business as usual. . . . ‘Organic’ isn’t necessarily ‘local,’ and neither ‘organic’ or ‘local’ is necessarily ‘sustainable.’”[iv]

So the schism between what we believe “organic” means (naturally occurring, created without using damaging substances or force, and eminently reproducible) and what it means in the commercial sphere (grown by aid only of other products also labeled “organic”) is vast. Marketers have done more than take full advantage of this schism. They have created it.

For those of you who may not pay attention to such things (in my world, you are much less likely to pay attention to what farmers in California may be doing than what’s coming out of your radio), remarkably similar sleights of hand have occurred with the terms “independent,” “alternative,” and “punk.”

Similar to markets such as Whole Foods, which has profited by marketing organic produce, back in the 1990s major record labels attempted to capitalize on independent, alternative, and punk music. This was a switch from earlier decades, notes Naomi Klein; the original punks of the 1970s “were only half-heartedly sought after as markets. In part this was because seventies punk was at its peak at the same times as the infinitely more mass marketable disco and heavy metal, and the gold-mine of high-end preppy style.”[v] When it came, the drive to capitalize on the punk and DIY underground seemed to happen fast, as if all A&R reps woke up the one morning, heard Nirvana for the first time, and suddenly realized that, throughout the country, small groups of kids were getting together and creating their own music. They had been doing so for decades, of course, inspired not only by the energy of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, but by bands like the Minutemen and the Ramones, each made up of a few scruffy losers who happened to know each other and have access to guitars.

But almost overnight, they had been decreed marketable.

The music of bands like Fugazi, Bratmobile, Screeching Weasel—and Girls Against Boys, Le Tigre, and Green Day, when they were on independent labels—was independent, meaning it was made without corporate support, remained free of conceptual or artistic meddling, and explored previously untested sounds. It was alternative: there was a musical mainstream you could hear on the radio, and these sounds did not fit into it. Such music also forged an alternative path for success, one that depended not on record sales or radio plays but on consistent touring schedules, a national fanbase, a devoted local following, and the admiration of peers. Most importantly, this music was punk; like those earlier angry white mostly male musicians, it was self-righteous, inappropriate, and dirty, and seemed safely immune to widespread popularity and thus served as a protected space from which to voice sociopolitical criticism. At the time, the official, on-the-books definition of “punk” included phrases like “unwashed,” “obscene,” and “violent.” (My dictionary’s definition still features those words.[vi])

But by fall of 1991, “there was a sudden and intense interest in underground and independent music . . . largely due to the phenomenal success of the Nirvana Nevermind album,” musician and founder of Dischord Records Ian MacKaye recalled. The major corporate record labels were right to take note of the vast audience interested in what they weren’t providing. By the time they noticed it, there was an entire network of people—fans, mostly, but also artists, businesspeople, and general supporters of subculture—who had devoted themselves to creating an existence outside of major media. We wrote our own literature from zines to comics and sold them for cheap. We made our own T-shirts and traded them for home-recorded tapes; we held concerts in our basements advertised with flyers we’d carefully designed using tape, scissors, and white-out, then copied at Kinko’s using any number of well-known free copy scams, and circulated among friends and friends of friends. This was a culture you couldn’t see on TV (the most ubiquitous mass media at the time), and when you eventually did hear it on the radio it was watered down and wrong.

Now the establishment wanted to cash in on this unestablished culture. MacKaye recalled, “Fugazi, the band that I started with Brendan [Canty] and Guy [Picciotto] (from Rites of Spring) and Joe Lally in 1988 was one of the largest in the underground, and soon attracted the interests of many major labels. The band’s decision to remain on Dischord led to offers from the majors to buy the entire label, but selling it was never even a consideration. We understood the value of self-determination.”[vii]

The majors were slightly more successful with bands on newer independent labels, however, and punked up their recording dockets in no time by luring struggling bands away with big-money promises. Warner Brother’s Reprise Records scored biggest with Green Day—like Nirvana, the band had developed a substantial following before the major-label jump—but other bands were duped into bad contracts, loss of creative control, and unbearable tour schedules that frequently cost more than their albums ever brought in.[viii] Yet selling out held tangible appeal to band members, who were eager to quit their day jobs, wanted the big advance checks, and deserved the increase in audience the promotional teams at major labels could offer. Given the sudden recognition of their products as widely marketable, smaller labels couldn’t give much enticement to stay; they couldn’t, in some cases, even meet increased demands for merchandise.

Major record labels, however, weren’t the only ones waiting to cash in on the underground. News and other entertainment media were closely following the riot grrrl movement, a brash combination of second-wave feminism and punk-rock music. Named for the 1991 zine Riot Grrrl, written by political organizer and musician Tobi Vail, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill (and later Le Tigre), Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile, and a few others, riot grrrl came out of young punk women’s simple desires to express their personal voices. “In a way,” Alison Wolfe recalled, “it was like announcing, ‘hey us girls are here, we’re doing something, we’re making our voices heard in this scene.’”[ix] Riot grrrl shows and zines were confrontational and loud but aimed to create safe spaces for female (and eventually less traditionally gendered) fans.

It was a straightforwardly sexual movement and therefore ripe for misrepresentation. By 1992, the press was already getting everything wrong. “A lot of riot grrls don’t shave and deliberately give each other bad haircuts,” declared Seventeen magazine.[x] “Also popular is a deliberately nerdy or dowdy appearance,” the New York Times stated, further explaining that antisocial fashion decisions were to be read as “a challenge to the cultural expectation that women should strive to be pretty.”[xi] Such stories ran in direct opposition to what riot grrrls were calling for: to not have their appearance up for evaluation by the New York Times or Seventeen at all.

So participants developed a sophisticated response: a media blackout. It didn’t entirely take, of course, but for the most part the mainstream media was left trying to describe the burgeoning scene from the edge of the mosh pit. A movement that embraced sexuality was too enticing to ignore, however, and even though participants refused to talk to the press, reporters continued to misconstrue the messages. “During a performance [Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill] might take off her top screaming, ‘Suck my left one,’” the Chicago Reader reported before postulating incorrectly what this might mean. “Such acts probably confuse and terrify the teenage boys in the audience who’ve been waiting for this moment.”[xii] In fact, riot grrrl deliberately deprioritized concern for boys’ feelings, occasionally going so far as to emasculate male fans: sometimes men were charged extra for not wearing dresses or bras to shows.[xiii] Still, the Washington Post rushed to preserve heteronormativity: “Make no mistake,” it reassured readers. “Most riot grrrls still find boys useful for the usual teenaged things.”[xiv]

Yet the barest trace of revolutionary ideas still filtered through such reporting—available in stronger doses through the zines and the shows whose audiences began to grow. Usually, though, to major media, this was a style, not a social, revolution. “The media usually served to water down our message and turn it into fashion statements,” Wolfe stated.[xv] To some, this proved the viability of the market, and although few were offered the same major-label opportunities their male counterparts were, the market found a way to appropriate the ideas into its sales pitch. A slogan from the cover of Bikini Kill #2 read “Girl Power,” which quickly became the rallying cry of the patently unradical Virgin Records creation the Spice Girls.

It was only the most egregious co-optation from the mid-1990s frenzy for underground culture. Zines, too, received major media attention, with zinesters appearing on the pages of glossy magazines like Details and Sassy and on talk shows—Dishwasher Pete, for example, who pledged to document his experiences washing dishes in every state in the union, was invited to appear on Late Night with David Letterman but sent a friend in his stead. (I was invited to the Jim J and Tammy Faye Show; the program was canceled before I could reply.) Graffiti and street art were all the decorative rage, and the messy DIY/punk fashion aesthetic was packaged and sold at Urban Outfitters.

Despite the underground’s apparent acceptance as an aesthetic, genuine and well-founded fears of major media misrepresentation remained, fueling the debates about “selling out” and “co-optation” that plagued the period (and to some degree, still rage). Something was perceived to have been lost beyond the meanings of the words “independent,” “alternative,” and “punk” as “without corporate support,” “created and experienced outside of the mainstream,” and “made out of passion and not for profit.” Each were eroded, and now only denoted a slightly different flavor of mass-produced entertainment. The loss of the original senses of these terms, which had once held serious political implications vital to our ability to describe life outside of corporate support, seemed only a short step way from the loss our ability to imagine what they describe.

The surge of interest in the punk and DIY underground didn’t last long, though, and within a few years, it was over. “There are no A&R people at major labels looking for punk bands anymore,” stated Ruth Schwartz in 1997. Schwartz ran Mordam Records, the independent distributor smack dab in the middle of the major-label boom. “It’s over. There have been layoffs because of it.”[xvi]

By then, of course, a major policy change in media ownership had taken place. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated caps on the number of outlets single media conglomerates could control. Formerly independent radio stations and newspapers were bought up or sold out. Resources for small media dried up; the vitality of teeny, almost one-on-one media—home-recorded music, street art, zines—were less visible. And debates formerly about selling out and co-optation—about integrity—were recast as necessary sacrifices in pursuit of an audience.

***

Punk music, at its most basic, was created in reaction to what could be purchased elsewhere and reclaimed the joy inherent in creating something by hand. The same was true for zines, graffiti, underground comics, and stencils. In a way, these provide exactly what we think we are buying when we buy organic produce: a locally produced, delectable commodity created not to be sold to you but to speak to you. This can be seen even more directly in cultural products and activities of activist communities. Punk culture and its more accessible (and feminine) variant, DIY culture, remain inherently political acts, responses to and critiques of rampant consumerism, social class differences, and access to media resources. They were created by people unwilling to live by the standards set for youth in society. We can’t claim a terribly large membership, nor can we define ourselves any more succinctly than “vaguely anarchic.” We just retained this sense of being removed, subterranean, buried and forgotten about. Underground.

Although this culture may not be readily apparent to everyone, it remains a rich potential space from which to voice dissent. “Up close, the DIY punk scene can seem an effective strategy for resisting branded culture,” Alissa Quart writes in her 2003 investigation of youth marketing, Branded. These youth “have developed a distinctly anticorporate edge that extends past their distaste for commercial music spaces. They stage ‘actions’ that combine these two elements, as on the occasion in summer 2001 when fifty kids took over a Kinko’s copy shop at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York, and put on an illegal concert.”[xvii]

Because sociopolitical ideals are so deeply woven into punk culture—and simply because the DIY methodology demanded it—integrity of message and of medium has always been a punk mainstay. In her memoir Weird Like Us, former New York Times rock critic Ann Powers asked her friend Jone Stebbins, the bassist in Imperial Teen and a former member of the 1980s all-girl punk band the Wrecks, to define the values of punk rock. She responded: “Integrity . . . taking an active part in your life, rather than just being a consumer. Being ready to blaze a different path or try something new.”[xviii]

Yet the marketability of punk in the mid-1990s and changes in media ownership policy had buffed over concerns about integrity, which by then had mostly been consigned to well-worn debates over “co-optation” and “selling out” anyway. “Talk of who has sold out or bought in has become impossibly anachronistic,”[xix] Klein wrote in 2000.

Of course, the watering down of these terms has been advanced by their use in advertising and corporate media, which, as with the word “organic,” has a vested interest in relaxing the original definitions. Unfortunately, the repositioning of these terms started to lead to increasingly weird cultural products. Friends in recovery ran alcohol ads in their zines; brilliant underground comics artists took jobs with major animation studios that had worked actively to squelch the work of their peers just a few years earlier; radical antiestablishment newsletters were sold in Borders and Tower Records, ; nonsmoking former straight-edgers signed contracts with conglomerates that also owned tobacco firms. Yet addressing issues of integrity has always been exceedingly difficult without bitching about whether or not your favorite band sold out by signing to a major label, reminiscing about the first time you noticed that chain stores had co-opted your fashion sense, or what, exactly, a barcode on the cover of a zine denoted.

This was because the terminology that had given us the ability to discuss integrity—co-optation and selling out—each relied on differing sets of assumptions about underground practices, human behavior, intellectual property, and corporate strategy. Co-optation, for example, assumes:

1. That there is a strict membership that makes up any to-be co-opted community.
2. That practices of this community are the intellectual property of this strict membership.
3. That big business is solely behind acts of co-optation, which it sees as a necessary prelude to future sales.
4. That co-optation is never inflicted upon a willing community; it is always unwelcome.

Similarly, notions of giving up one’s autonomy and integrity in exchange for money or other benefits—selling out—rely on the following assumptions:

1. That selling out is a purely black-and-white proposition; you can either sign on the dotted line or walk away from the deal, and either option is whole and complete and affects every future thing that you do.
2. That selling out is always fully acknowledged by all parties in advance: it is not done accidentally or without full consent.
3. That big business is solely behind acts of selling out, which it sees as a necessary prelude to future sales.
4. That selling out always negatively impacts the greater community and is done exclusively for personal gain.

Unfortunately, however popularly held these assumptions may be, not one of them is true. And yet they still seem to dictate how members of the underground assess the integrity of their own work. Which, increasingly, is being used to sell or improve big corporate products.

***

To skirt the self-protective instincts that arise when addressing the authenticity, sincerity, honor, and personal vision of the work of the punk community, my friend Tizzy Asher and I decided to give away free candy in 2003. Of course there was a catch. To get the big candy bar—the monster Kit Kat or the super-sized M&Ms bag—you had to agree to certain stipulations. Those stipulations involved artistic, and possibly ethical, compromises. Otherwise you just got the lame “fun” size bar.

At the time, Tizzy and I ran an ultimately short-lived online magazine called To Whom It May Concern that was primarily a joke, an excuse to insert links into words that contained the letters C-A-T—“catalog” or “scatological”—that, when clicked on, would display pictures of our household pets. To begin the workshops, we described in as straightforward a manner as possible our personal publishing agenda, known as the To Whom It May Concerns:

1. To forward the vitality and awareness of our pet cats via any means possible.
2. To encourage the support of cats throughout the world in general.
3. To encourage awareness of To Whom it May Concern, in support of all previously listed factors.
4. To support the work of Anne and Tizzy in particular, encouraging secondary awareness of To Whom it May Concern and all previously listed factors.

Big candy bars were given to those individuals who agreed to authentically adopt one or more of these concerns as their own, through their videos, zines, radio shows, independent films, or radical distribution networks. A verbal promise was not enough to win participants the king-sized Snickers, however. Workshop attendees had to fill out our handwritten, photocopied contracts. They were messy—maybe not what you’d expect from a legally binding contract, but that’s what they were. The transaction was transparent: all of us in that room were friends, and we honestly didn’t want to force anyone to do anything they weren’t comfortable with. So the documents left large blank spaces for attendees to list whichever concerns, as listed above, they agreed to forward as their own. Participants were then, in marketing terminology, “invited”—and by that I mean cajoled, teased, bribed, and otherwise tricked—into agreeing to add the To Whom It May Concerns to their independent media projects as if such concerns were their own.

For a piece of candy.

After each workshop, I walked away with signed and dated contracts that assured us influence over several DIY media outlets. One woman who had come to the underground publishing conference in an attempt to connect with her son, who, she complained, had recently developed an addiction to publishing his own poetry, promised us a minimum of five cat poems in his next volume. Several zinesters agreed to mention our names and our website within six months. (It is important to note that we weren’t looking for advertising; we already knew independent media producers mistrust the stuff, being ones ourselves.) A video game maker suggested an innovative plan to create greater cat awareness with a game in which players ran over cats, Grand Theft Auto III–style. We liked his spunk but not his message; we were eventually convinced to let him join our team when we grasped the potential media opportunities that would surely arise from the backlash against his game. A man who did not currently possess a media outlet agreed to start one in our honor based on our concerns. And a popular underground Northwest publisher signed away all ownership to his small but influential media empire.

Our one failure—the single individual who refused, outright, to put anything to paper—happened to be a lawyer. Because as fun as the atmosphere was, and as much as we laughed while discussing these ridiculous demands and stupid contracts, they remain, even now, legally binding documents. They still exist, and, since the candy promised in exchange has been delivered, we could hold the signers to the bargain at any time. (In theory, at least. Technically I lost the contracts in my last move.)

Ultimately, the free candy workshops were conducted, and experienced, as a joke. They involved a lot of candy for an educational session, and there was little ultimate point to them: the To Whom It May Concern website was abandoned before the workshops ended, so the marketing potential yielded little value. Plus, we were just goofy self-publishers (sometimes, just one goofy self-publisher) with nothing to offer in exchange for participants’ souls but candy.

Nonetheless, the free candy workshops were a success, if we measure success solely by the gains made by our enterprise To Whom It May Concern: in exchange for a few 75-cent candy bars, we seeded a vast, dedicated promotional team that our company’s target demographic—activists, anarchists, and independent media producers—could really trust. They had not agreed to any stipulations that they could not uphold with authenticity and sincerity and that did not jive with their sense of honor or personal vision. These independent cultural producers had simply agreed to adjust their own belief systems to comfortably accommodate what we wanted.

We had turned a tired debate over integrity into an experiment that answered a central question for participants about integrity: what will it take to give yours up?

***

Souls come sort of cheap in the underground. I had been giving mine out in the form of hand-colored, photocopied, limited-edition pieces of literature for around ten years at that point. I had most certainly never made enough money to cover my costs, not to mention my time, and when my income from my day job grew, so too did my production values, although never the price of my zines.

In fact, the spring before the free candy workshop series, I had finally gotten what seemed to be a dream job when two friends and I were asked by a local arts festival to organize a zine-making workshop. I could fly in any of my awesome zinester friends from all over the country and have them talk about whatever parts of zinemaking they knew best. Supplies—fancy art-making ones like glitter, colored papers, and collage materials, as well as the standard paper cutter, 8” x 10” white paper, and stapler—were all made available free of charge to all workshop attendees. And the coup de grâce: two free-standing, full-color, large-format photocopiers with on-call tech support at our complete disposal for the duration of the festival. For someone who has snuck photocopies from law firms, temp jobs, and office supply stores for a decade, the free photocopies alone were a great reason to take the job. That I was being paid, in no uncertain terms, to make zines during work hours and as a part of my job was simply too much. Turning the offer down never occurred to me, until it was too late to back out.

Because everything has a price, and in this case, mine was being paid by Starbucks.

So when I was asked later that summer to talk about issues of integrity at a independent self-publishing conference, I’m sure it was expected that I would give a straight-up play-by-play of how I sold out to Starbucks. But “selling out” didn’t accurately describe how my work for Starbucks unfolded; moreover, it presented no concrete lessons I could use to alert others to the insidious nature of dealing with big business. More disheartening was the fact that telling people never to sign anything that has Starbucks—or Toyota’s or Nike’s or Sony’s or Tylenol’s—name on it only works sometimes. In my case, Starbucks was not originally involved in the project I committed to. In other cases, corporations’ participation is deliberately obfuscated. Anyway, these corporations have endless amounts of money and can almost always find a way to buy you out; if you refuse, they can find someone else who is willing to be bought. These are the facts of late-stage capitalism.

A discussion, however, that focuses on the evil that certain corporations do, and how we get tricked into playing along, misses the point. Because what we fail to acknowledge in debates about selling out and co-optation is that we all do have a price.

For some, the price of integrity is about the same as a candy bar. The trick seems to be offering it up in the right context.

This worked in our favor as Tizzy and I set up our free candy workshops. Tizzy and I advertised them in advance as selling-out workshops that would highlight issues of integrity and personal voice in independent cultural production; in the moments before they began we would abandon the ruse of propriety and race through the halls yelling, “Free candy!” and passing out flyers with our room number on them. It is true that we stacked the deck: if you came to a workshop because you wanted candy, you would probably be willing to do almost anything for it. One almost-attendee came to the door and peeked in. “Free candy?” he asked, disappointed. “I thought this was the selling-out workshop,” he said and left. Which leads me to conclude: the only way you could really win the game we were playing was by somehow failing to play.

Yet because it was fun and social; because we exist a small and friendly community of independent cultural producers; because we had come up with a way to give out free candy to people we liked; and because what we were asking was not all that harmful, or crazy, or hard to get behind, no one (except one lawyer) refused our demands. Our project-within-a-project, the marketing of To Whom It May Concern, was done in a totally straightforward manner. Our concerns were listed on the board! Right there to accept, deny, or ignore as participants saw fit! They got to choose whatever campaign they agreed with! It was a marketing campaign, sure, but it was rooted a totally transparent one, designed to work in tandem with our community’s authentic concerns.

When opposition arose, we dealt with it the same way, I imagine, as the Brain Reservists may have during Tylenol’s Ouch! campaign, as the planners of the Lucasfilm underground ad blitz would, or as the leaders of any word-of-mouth marketing firm might: acknowledge the naysayers, underscore the transparency of the project, ask politely that further disruptions be kept to a minimum, and note that participation in all aspects of the project is voluntary.

What our campaign generated was phenomenal buzz—people asked us to repeat them throughout the country that summer—and what it cost—perhaps $20 per session in candy and $3 in photocopies—was minimal. If we can pretend for a moment that Tizzy and I had a valid project to market, we’d have what any boardroom in America would call a smashing success, especially when we compare these costs to a traditional ad campaign to reach out to this elusive demographic. Admittedly, ads in zines (if publishers take them) are cheap to begin with, although we could have purchased perhaps only one or two for the cost of each session we held. We would have had a more difficult time getting our message out through pirate radio broadcasts, blogs, or independent video games because these venues don’t offer advertising. But we sought wider and more entrenched support from our target demographic, knowing that ads don’t have much credibility with them. So we went a different way.

We aren’t the only ones to have done so. In recent years, corporate marketing tactics have gained access into independent media projects and have successfully targeted punk and even dedicated, issue-based activist communities. This was done seamlessly enough that radical leftists, anticorporate artists, and independent cultural producers alike—as well as marketers and advertisers—can all state with equal force that Adbusters magazine, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Reverend Billy, American Girl dolls, Negativland, Pepsi, Tony Trujillo, Sony, Ian MacKaye, Tylenol, pirate radio, and (speaking for myself now, in acknowledgment of the unseen corporate donor behind the free candy purchases) Starbucks have all contributed to their work dismantling the corporate machine.

That first free candy workshop was held with the hope that forcing independent media producers to consider their own integrity would prepare them for the unimaginable enchantments—notoriety, validation, money, and health insurance—that, it turns out, lay just around the corner, soon to be offered up by those same corporations listed above and more. Unfortunately, we didn’t hold enough workshops.

Or, perhaps, we did. And Brain Reservist Sophie Wong just happened to attend one.