It’s been true for a while now, but I’m making it official: Girldrive, as an ongoing presence in the blogosphere, is dead. I will no longer be posting updates, takes on the news, or Your 2 Cents. As much as I have loved maintaining this site for the last four years, I need to concentrate on my new-ish job as associate editor of GOOD (yay!) and other projects and pieces that I have in the wings.

But this doesn’t mean that Girldrive the project, or the concept or the spirit or the voice, is dead. The comforting (and scary) thing about the Internet is that it lasts forever. There are hundreds of women in these archives who embody the curiosity and motivation that drove Emma and me to go on Girldrive in the first place. There are important projects, declarations, and stories. These will always be here for all to search.

Thanks to every single person who spoke to us around the country and through the computer, who spread the word, who bought our book, and who decided to get off their asses and hit the road.

Enjoy the ride!

xo Nona

In other words: She not only kicked open the door for women in the field–she helped invent it.

I’m very excited to announce that the collection, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, will finally be out May 1. And to celebrate it, Daphne Carr, Evie Nagy and I have organized a conference at NYU celebrating her work.

Check out the full schedule after the jump. Everyone from Alex Ross to Ann Powers to Bob Christgau to Kathleen Hanna will be there. Hope to see you there!

Opening remarks and thanks: Conference organizers

**Robert Christgau, reading of one piece + remembrance**

Willis’s Work in Context: Culture, Politics, History (10 a.m. -11:30 a.m.)
A discussion of Willis’s writing in terms of social history, the culture wars, feminism, and the left.

Panelists:

Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Daphne Brooks (Princeton University)
Michael Bérubé (Penn State University)
Scott McLemee (National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors)

Moderated by Susie Linfield, New York University

** Karen Durbin, reading of one piece + remembrance**

**Donna Gaines, reading of one piece + remembrance**

Ellen Willis and the Cultural Conversation (12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.)
Ellen Willis’s work enabled and inspired a wide range of cultural responses, within as well as among the spheres of academia, journalism, music, and activism. This panel will hear from figures from these fields to explore Ellen as a catalyst for a new kind of cultural conversation, considering how—as a writer, teacher, and role model—she helped to make possible what it is that they do.

Panelists:

Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre)
Ann Powers (NPR Music)
Joe Levy (Maxim)
Joan Morgan (New York University)

Moderated by Devon Powers, Drexel University

Lunch 1:30-2:30

** Richard Goldstein, reading of one piece + remembrance **

** Georgia Christgau, reading of one piece + remembrance **

The legacy of Willis in the 21st century (2:30 p.m. -4:00 p.m.)
A discussion on music writing and the journalism industry, then and now.

Panelists:

Evie Nagy (Billboard Pro)
Nona Willis Aronowitz (NPR, author, Girldrive)
Rob Sheffield (Rolling Stone)
Alex Ross (New Yorker)
Irin Carmon (Jezebel.com)

Moderated by Daphne Carr, Columbia University

Reception (4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.)

It’s all very depressing, we agreed. But lately it seems the only way to fight back is to empty your wallet. Give $25 here, $12 there, go to this $40 fundraiser, get a bus to DC and take off a day of work to go to this event. Even if I did have that kind of money, it still feels so defeatist to be funding (or defending) a revolution piecemeal. And all those 60s activists didn’t need a penny to just get their asses to local rallies and organizations in their area.

Well, I wake up this morning and what do I see: there’s a real, life PROTEST in New York City planned to fight against all these measures on Saturday, February 26. As Vanessa from Feministing succintly said today: Enough of this anti-choice bullshit.

Both online activism and microdonations are important, but it can’t be the only way we fight. We need to be visible. We need to be angry in front of TV cameras, radio mics, and flip-phones. If Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, and all the rest taught us anything, it’s that the old cliche still holds water: The people (physically) united shall never be defeated.

Sadly, I will be flying to Chicago that day  to move my stuff back to New York, which will prove to be about the 800th time I move this year. (Hopefully this will be the last time for a while!) But for New Yorkers who will be there: please, please do me a favor and get your (literal) ass out there next Saturday. And for non-New Yorkers, which yes I realize there are many, kindly follow suit and plan something similar in your area.

UPDATE: There are also planned rallies in L.A., Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Alaska, D.C., the U.K., and Pakistan. So maybe I can go after all!

via.

On the neo-burlesque scene in New York City:

…and on burlesque’s patron saint, Gypsy Rose Lee:

On the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson:

On what makes a “gay-friendly” musician:

I didn’t produce this Soundcheck Smackdown on the White Stripes, and it doesn’t has much to do with feminism–except the fact that BUST editor Emily Rems drops knowledge:

First, a Nona update: I’m still at WNYC, doing some work for their music talk show, Soundcheck. And I don’t mind telling you I’ve already imbued a little feminism into the hour. I just produced a piece about Nicki Minaj, where I got Feministing blogger Lori Adelman in the studio to talk about whether she’s good for women in hip hop:

I’ll also be producing segments on neo-burlesque and bad-ass rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson in the next couple weeks, so look out for those, too. Finally, the anthology of my mom Ellen Willis’s rock criticism, called Out of the Vinyl Deeps, is coming out in May!

Now for a cryptic, Girldrive-related update: I’m planning another political road trip this year. It has a little bit to do with this, and it channels this and this. I promise to blog about it very soon. Promise!

I’d also like to announce that this site will take a broader focus in the coming months. To me, “Girldrive” means more than discovering feminism–it means getting out of your comfort zone, talking to people who haven’t grown up with the same values and expectations and circumstances as you. It means having heated conversations face-to-face rather than screaming at people over the internet. While doing Pop and Politics, we had extraordinarily intimate conversations with, among others, Black Tea Party candidate Allen West (who later won a seat in Congress), a Mexican-American minuteman, and someone from the Tohono O’odham nation whose homeland is split down the middle–people who are so much more complicated than their 5-word ID suggests. It’s convinced me more than ever that a good reporter treads on the turf of their subjects–sits down with them, shares a cup of coffee, and listens until they’re done.

So this year, “Girldrive” will be about discovery and the road in the broadest sense. About feminism, of course, but also about people who don’t often get to speak for themselves, or people who are going out of their way to pop the comfy bubble of their lives.

More soon!

The election results are in, and we’ve been following the process every step of the way. Here are the 3 hours we put together from our journey: a documentary from our road trip to Florida, another one from Arizona, and our live show at WNYC’s The Greene Space the day after the elections.

Florida: Race, Rage, and Reconciliation

Arizona: New Voters, New Challenges

The New Map: America, Redrawn and Reconceived

Cross-posted at Pop + Politics

Housing has been on this journalist’s mind lately. I just moved back to New York City after being gone for a while, and the reality of real estate here has hit me like a punch in the gut. Shiny condos that sit half empty have replaced warehouses and greasy spoons I used to know. Subsidized middle-class housing complexes have 20-year waiting lists. New Yorkers like me are priced out of their childhood neighborhoods.

Thoughts of my gentrified hometown reverberated through my head a few weeks ago when we visited Miami, a city still knee-deep in the housing crisis. This metropolitan area was one of the epicenters of the housing boom, where new constructions and sub-prime mortgages abounded a few years ago. Here we met Ruby, a Miami native whose house was at risk of foreclosure after going through a bankruptcy and several rounds of refinancing. To her, a house is everything–a place to make your mark on the world. It is a place to lay down roots and engage in a community, a place to make beautiful, to make yours.

“The American dream is now a nightmare,” she told us listlessly. A little later: “Capitalism should not mean greed, but that’s what we’ve had.” Ruby didn’t expect elected officials to do much about her situation. She waxed poetic about her house, but she was disappointed–not only by the government, but by the direction of our country. She felt alone and in limbo.

A few hours before we talked with Ruby, we met up with Max Rameau, founder of the national grassroots group Take Back the Land. Max doesn’t expect the government to do anything about the housing crisis either–so he takes matters into his own hands. Take Back the Land moves homeless people into government-owned, foreclosed homes that are standing empty.

Of course, what Max is doing is illegal. But in the vein of the sit-ins during the civil rights movement, Max believes he is challenging unjust laws. “Corporations don’t need housing to stay alive,” he told us. “They’re just pieces of paper. People need housing to stay alive.”

So is a home–a house, a place to call your own–still the American Dream? Is that even possible anymore? Max thinks that’s too narrow. “A safe, clean and stable place is more than the American dream, it’s the human dream,” he said. Not everyone can own a house, he explained, but one should at least be able to count on a roof over one’s head.

Buying a house is a classic act of American individualism. It’s saying, “I’ve made it. This plot of land is mine.” But there’s a lot of pain at stake if that dream is snatched away, or if my generation’s hope of buying a house falls by the wayside as foreclosures and unemployment rise. Should we be depending more on our communities for support rather than turning inward? Or should we learn to embrace the market rollercoaster and divorce emotion from home ownership, like Condo Vultures owner Peter Zalewski advises? Ruby, Max, and Peter all seem to agree on one thing: our culture is shifting, that we’ve reached a turning point in the way we think about homes and neighborhoods–and that something’s gotta give soon.

–Nona

Crossposted at Pop + Politics

When the media cover “the border,” they pit Mexico against America, Spanish against English, two increasingly melding cultures separated by a porous partition. But what happens when a border cuts straight through your own people’s land? What happens when you’re the forgotten voice in a three-way conversation–which hurts doubly, since you were there first?

The Tohono O’odham nation, one of the largest native reservations in the country, straddles the U.S.-Mexican border. Our team spent the day in Sells, Arizona, soaking in the landscape, eating short rib stew and prickly pear smoothies at the local cafe, and, before talking with Sells native Art Wilson, checking out the border. A far cry from the looming wall in Nogales, the border here is marked by some wire and posts barely taller than my chin.

Art explained that the border meant little to him as a child, that he inhabited both countries freely. “It was more like a a fence that kept the livestock from crossing over,” he said. “It was like crossing into somebody’s backyard.” He didn’t think of his world as a U.S.-Mexico duality, instead thinking of it in terms of “O’ohdam and white.”

After our conversation with Art, he generously shared a private moment with us–a ceremony in the middle of the desert memorializing the anniversary of his mother’s death. Here, we had a rare breath of calm amid our frenetic schedule, an hour enveloped in a prehistoric landscape that stood in stark relief against the cacophony of New York City.

These are the moments I’m glad I’m a journalist. These are the reasons to go on the road–to appreciate the vastness of our country, to force ourselves to see colliding identities, to get out of our comfort zones and glimpse into another person’s reality. Right before we got back in our cars, Farai mused, “You can never really walk in anyone’s shoes. But once in a while, you can stand where they’re standing.”

More soon…

-Nona

The job description is after the jump!

WNYC Pop+Politics Media and Outreach Intern

About 2010 Midterm Election Specials Pop + Politics hosted by Farai Chideya

Farai Chideya is well known to many public radio listeners as the former host of NPR’s Newsand Notes, and as guest host on WNYC and PRI’s The Takeaway and APM’s The Story. This fall, Farai Chideya will take listeners somewhere new. Her three Pop + Politics midterm election specials, from WNYC and American Public Media, will ask the big questions about how our nation is dealing with issues of race in an era of both President Obama and the Tea Party movement and in a country where many individuals are still struggling to recover financially. Farai takes listeners into battleground states to hear first hand from politicians andvoters what matters the most to them..

These three Pop +Politics with Farai Chideya news specials will ask questions about how America is changing, particularly in terms of race and identity, through the lens of politics andculture. This is NOT more of the midterm horserace.

Here’s an overview each one-hour Pop and Politics program:

* Race, Rage and Reconciliation: American Politics Viewed from the Road (October 21)

* New Voters, New Challenges (October 28)

* The New Map: America, Redrawn and Reconceived (November 4)

Media and Outreach Intern

Pop+Politics seeks a highly motivated Social Media and Outreach Intern to help support a broad range of social media and outreach strategies that will build community and drive online discussion around race and the midterm elections in2010. This position is ideal for applicants interested in gaining experience in social media, online organizing and communications.

Reporting to and working closely with Pop+Politics online communications staff, the Intern’s projects may include:

· Optimizing Pop+Politics Twitter, Facebook and other social media assets

· Monitoring and engaging with online conversations pertaining to the midterm elections

· Researching and maintaining a database of key online influencers, media makers and bloggers who we should engage around Pop+Politics

Required Skills and Experience

Strong social media skills; familiarity with Twitter and Facebook
Strong reading, writing and interpersonal skills
Familiarity & experience with Microsoft Excel and Word
Ability to communicate ideas and information effectively
Strong understanding of political process

This is a part-time (10-15 hours a week) opportunity available immediately and will continue through November. The intern will be paid a small stipend and should be based in New York City.

To apply, please send a resume and short intro email to Nona Willis Aronowitz, naronowitz@wnyc.org, and Kerry Donahue, kdonahue@wnyc.org, as soon as possible. Please include days and times you are available.