Bad faith right and left-wing pundit types have made a lot of hay out of cancel culture. At least that’s my impression on Twitter; it might not be the case IRL. The gist of it is somebody, usually a straight white guy, makes a privilege booboo, and then no one wants to hear from them. Donald Trump, Jr. would have you believe that this is Orwellian.
And it would be if the booboos weren’t sex crimes or hatespeech, but they seem to be more often than not. It would also be Orwellian if the Government was responsible for any of this. The big flaw in all of these arguments is that the Free Market has intervened. In an era when personal consumption is the only political action most people are capable of/inclined to do, the Market decides which speech is profitable.
So if, for instance, Simon & Schuster, a cuthroat operation if ever there was one, decides publishing, for instance, Josh Hawley’s book is bad PR and a bad business desicion, they don’t put his book out. No Ministry of Truth necessary.
But there are real victims to corporate speech policing, and senators are not among them. I am, though!
But let’s zoom out for a second.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a basketball fan. I’m also a shameful laundry-rooting homer. This unfortunatly means I have been stuck rooting for the NBA’s most cursed franchise, the Minnesota Timberwolves. The first jersey I owned was that of backup power forward Tom Gugliotta.
The Timberwolves are owned by Minnesota’s richest man, Glen Taylor. Glen, as Kevin Garnett can tell you, doesn’t know shit about basketball. It’s a vanity investment on Glen’s part. He gets courtside seats etc. Although I must concede that the Minnesota Lynx, the WNBA franchise he also owns, is the greatest in the WNBA’s history, probably due to his hands-off approach.
Glen made his billions in the printing industry. He’s self-made to the extent billionaire can be. But like Charles Foster Kane before him, Taylor bought a newspaper. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which he intended to make more conservative, unlike Kane. Two years after he acquired the Star Tribune, the Star Tribune acquired the Twin Cities’ stalwart alt-weekly, City Pages.
Five years later, in a classic Taylor frenzy of austerity, City Pages was shuttered for being unprofitable at the height of the pandemic. I suspect, however, CP’s return to its confrontational left-wing roots under Em Cassel’s editorship was more to blame. I have what Conan Doyle called an emergency-type mind. But what can I say? 30 years of rooting for a Taylor team, with his Machivellian mindgames with players and coaches, has made me this way.
As much as I hate to give the irritating little Fenian his props, Bill Simmons has done much more work on Taylor’s malfeasance than I’m capable of going into here. See the forward of his Big Book of Basketball for a prime, if outdated example.
In the years of the Taylor ownership/Cassel editorship, I became enchanted with the films of Sarah Jacobson. Sarah and I have a lot in common. We were forged in crucibles of affluent suburban Minnesota high schools, finding inspiration in movies and punk rock. We both hated George Bush.
Sarah made John Waters-influenced riot grrl films and toured them around the country herself. She’s truly an inspiration, and she died young to cancer.
Her films are available on blu-ray from the American Genre Film Archive.
I pitched City Pages a cover story about Jacobson and her legacy. They accepted, and I worked on it for about seven months. I made $1000. It’s really the most pride I’ve ever had in any professional acheivement, and remains my biggest byline.
Here’s a broken link: http://www.citypages.com/arts/gt-from/1577693100
That’s right, Taylor shut even the archives down. Fortunately, the Hennepin County Library will have them available sometime this year.
I was exaggerating earlier when I said I was a victim, but I think Sarah’s memory is. If I may say so, my piece is the definitive one. No one talked more or longer to her friends and colleagues.
And now, it exists only in the memory hole and disparate physical copies, because it was unprofitable. In an effort to remedy that, I’m attaching the text of the article in full at the bottom here. People should be able to find it.
Remembering Sarah Jacobson
By Alex Kies
The year is 1997. There’s a new teen sex comedy in theaters. It’s titled Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, and it doesn’t give a shit what you think about it.
Mary Jane is a feminist piss-take on the teen comedies of John Hughes and other filmmakers from the ‘80s, replacing the oeuvre’s notorious racism and sexism with punk-rock vibes and sex-positivity. The story follows one woman’s last summer before heading off to college. She spends her final months working at a movie theater with a gaggle of twentysomething misfits and burnouts who quickly become her family.
The film received a rapturous response at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and its Sundance screening quickly sold out. Admirers included Roger Ebert, who praised its “offhand, unaffected freshness.” Feminist filmmaker Allison Anders called it “the most independent of all the indies I know,” and Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris said that writer/director/editor/co-producer Sarah Jacobson “has the kind of energy you just [think] would never stop. Her films have that same quality.”
At a mere 25 years of age, Jacobson was kicking ass and taking names. She would go on to create a network connecting arthouse theaters to indie filmmakers; no easy task in a era before internet chatrooms and online communities had really taken off. Tragically, Mary Jane would be her sole feature film, as she would pass away seven years later from uterine cancer.
In our current era of films like Ladybird, Juno, and Booksmart, it’s easy to see how Mary Jane was a trailblazer, laying the groundwork for future female-driven coming-of-age stories. Now, about 15 years later, Jacobson’s films are finding new fans at special screenings across the nation and through her first DVD release.
“Everyone talks about… living in the post #MeToo era,” writer, showrunner, and friend of Sarah’s Jake Fogelnest told me. “That was a powder keg that needed to explode, but okay, now what? Here was a woman who made films in the 90's, who was screaming about that stuff in her work and in her life before it became a fashion accessory button at a Hollywood awards ceremony.
Jacobson was born in New Jersey 1971, but soon her family move[1] d to Edina, which she would later refer to as “the snottiest suburb in the Twin Cities area.”
“I was never really pretty; I was never into makeup or fashion; I always felt really alienated,” she once told she told Punk Planet in 1997.
As a Jewish girl from New Jersey, she discovered she didn’t look or act like her new contemporaries. “These were these girls who were really blonde. They were jocks and they got good grades, and I was like, ‘I wanna be friends with these girls. These are the perfect girls.’”
When they did include her, it was “only as a way of trying to get me to convert to Christianity… which freaked me out.” An invitation to Bible camp was her breaking point. “After that I was like, ‘You know, fuck this. I’m not going to sit around and wait for these people to accept me.’”
So she sought out Edina’s undesirables. “To meet a punk rocker and have them tell you about socialism… After going to a little Molly Ringwald high school meeting people like that was really exciting.”
It didn’t hurt that Jacobson was coming of age at the zenith of Twin Cities’ punk/rock scene, with bands like Babes in Toyland and the Replacements being two of her favorites. Much like Mary Jane’s Jane, her crew of friendly burnouts, music heads, and punks were like family to her.
Soon, Jacobson was making zines. A regular at shows, she joined a band and recorded an album. But movies, not music, were her true medium of choice.
She loved slashers and films about punk rock, but she also had a secret love for uncool high school sex comedies like Sixteen Candles and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. These were some of the most prominent representations of teenage sexuality available to her.
Except that Molly Ringwald and the other stars of these flicks rarely had sex.
“[Ringwald’s characters] wanted a boyfriend, and she wanted romance, and it was implied that they would be having sex afterwards,” Jacobson opined in Bitch magazine. “But I wanted to see girls having sex from their point of view. You got to see Tom Cruise running around having sex. There’s so much time spent with the geek, and he gets laid. Why doesn’t Molly?...I could give a shit that the geek got laid. I don’t get off on that.”
Then she realized something many young women do.
“Everything you see on TV or in the movies or in media representation, it’s all… women are sexual objects,” she told Bitch Magazine in 1997.
Then she came across another source of inspiration: Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise.
“I’m going to do this,” she remembered thinking. “This is what I’m going to do.”The confluence of punk’s DIY aesthetic and Stranger Than Paradise’s low-budget cool galvanized Jacobson, who despite her partying and drug use managed to graduate with straight A’s (and five suspensions). That was good enough to get her into Bard College’s film program, so she headed east in the fall of 1989.
There, she was faced with elitism and stuffy intellectualism in the theoretically focused film department. It was against that : Road Movie, or: What I Learned in a Buick Station Wagon. Road Movie was about a female film student who takes a road trip after debuting a short film to her snooty, intellectual classmates. It’s a rush of images and sounds with light cultural commentary and slapstick humor.
Like her protagonist, Jacobson “just had to get away” from Bard. She made a fateful transfer to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under experimental film icon George Kuchar.
Kuchar and his twin brother Mike shot and distributed their surreal genre comedies independently since the late 1960s. Their films’ frank homosexuality and violent, off-beat humor made them a mainstay in independent film circles ever since.
They rubbed elbows with John Waters and Kenneth Anger. They gained acclaim in the Village Voice from the taste making Mekas brothers, one of whom taught Sarah at Bard and appeared in Road Movie.
Kuchar taught his students to shoot like he did. Move fast, travel light, have fun, and use what you have. It was music to Sarah’s ears.Next was her first “actual” film, I was a Teenage Serial Killer, a movie Jacobson would put together with no budget.
Serial Killer tells the story of a young woman who, after her mother’s death, starts punishing toxic masculinity by death. She pushes a catcaller in front of a bus. She beats a guy to death with a dustbuster, all played for laughs.
Serial Killer ends with a tonal shift from searing to earnestness, a move that would typify her later work. In the final scene, the teenage killer breaks down, telling a drug dealer on the street about being sexually abused as a child. Instead of reacting to that information, he hits on her.
“No one wants to listen to my story!” she yells, almost slitting his throat with a broken bottle before smashing it to the ground. Then, she turns directly to the camera: “My story exists whether anyone listens to me or not. I’m gonna tell them anyway.” She turns and walks away as credits roll over the raw power chords of “My Secret,” a song about killing an abuser from childhood by Heavens to Betsy, Corinne Tucker’s pre-Sleater-Kinney project.
Jacobson’s classmates and subsequent audiences loved it, groaning at gory close-ups and chuckling at the audacious one-liners. Serial Killer went on to be named one of Film Comment’s Top 25 Short Films of All Time.
Off the back of this success, Jacobson and her mother started Station Wagon Productions and, in 1994, production began on Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore.
The plot was based on an autobiographical novel she wrote in high school about working at the Uptown Theatre with a group of twentysomething burnouts who formed powerful friendships. To the story she added bits about losing her virginity and learning how to masturbate.
Over the next three years, she would work on the script, film, rig lighting, and edit Mary Jane with what she described as the “bare minimum of what you need to make a movie.” That bare minimum: one 16mm camera, one tape recorder, one microphone, four lights, $6,000, and one bra. When the bra gave out halfway through production, she made a short documentary about buying her first fitted bra during a break from filming.
Although Mary Jane is set in Minneapolis, it was shot in San Francisco. Station Wagon Production’s office was in Skid Row, where she recalled being spit on by “street people” on her walks home. The production ran out of money twice, but Sarah’s aggressive networking and touring paid off. The production was saved by cash infusions from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Tamra Davis, the indie-turned-mainstream director of Billy Madison. Eventually, her mother, Ruth Ellen Jacobson, moved to San Francisco to help her complete the film.
Jacobson understood that she only had one shot at a debut movie, and she wanted to make it count. “Film is so hard that it’s not really worth it unless you’re showing something that hasn’t really been said before,” she said in Bitch “Every girl wishes that they had an older girl who would tell them what’s up with sex…I wanted to make a movie where the girl learns to have control over her own sex life.”
Mary Jane starts like something you’ve seen before: a gauzy lens, sub-Cinemax sex, the participants not really touching, swaddled in sheets. Soon, it cuts to something else: an uncomfortable, brief, socks-on session featuring missionary on a picnic blanket in a graveyard.
In the male-centric films that Mary Jane comments on, deflowering is the narrative engine, the plot’s resolution. In Mary Jane, the heroine’s first time is a call to action.
Jane drives in from the suburbs to work at the Victoria Theater, a stand-in for the Uptown. She’s the youngest employee, and by far the least cynical. She soon forms a family with her coworkers, which include bisexual punk rocker Ericka and her gay manager, Ray, who takes her to her valedictorian dinner as her father.
Over the summer, she develops romantic relationships with a dreamy guy named Tom and a sensitive, affable weirdo Ryan. Both are depicted as good guys who respect Jane’s boundaries, emotions, and agency.
Then there’s Matt, the staff’s mercurial druggie, who antagonizes Jane, physically bullying her and denigrating her class status and Jewish heritage. Over the course of the film, Jane ceases to allow herself to be Matt’s victim.
After losing her virginity, she asks her coworkers about their first times. They share horror stories, including a running joke about a guy who says “olive juice” instead of “I love you.”
What surprises Jane is her male coworkers’ experiences are just as mortifying, just in a different way. They felt an expectation to be nonchalant and brusque and are embarrassed in hindsight.
“I wanted guys to be able to see it from a girl’s point of view and kind of understand women and not have to be all embarrassed about it,” she told *the Austin Chronicle in 1998 about her hopes for male audiences.
But boiling Mary Jane down to a raunchy coming of age story would sell it short. It also documents the height of the Riot Grrl movement, the decline of West Coast hardcore, and the beginnings of Emo. The soundtrack features Mudhoney, Superchunk, Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Babes in Toyland. Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra cameos as a concerned moviegoer, and AFI’s Davey Havok plays one of Ericka’s groupies. (AFI also lent three songs to the soundtrack.)The Twin Cities loom large in the film. Jane sleeps beneath one of Daniel Corrigan’s iconic Replacements photos. One character wears a T-shirt from a Jim Dine exhibition at the Walker. The coworkers see Mudhoney at Nye’s. Characters race motorcycles down Lyndale Avenue and road trip to Madison.
After a grueling three-and-a-half-year production, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore debuted at the 1997 Chicago Underground Film Festival. Jacobson was just shy of her 26th birthday.
The film received positive blurbs from Ed Halter and Roger Ebert, and Jacobson went on to a sold-out screening at Sundance.
But unlike other Sundance success stories, Mary Jane didn’t land a distribution deal. In later interviews, Jacobson speculated “girl films” flummoxed Hollywood.
Undeterred, she hopped in her trusty Buick Station Wagon, and went on tour, screening a 16mm print of Serial Killer and Mary Jane three weeks out of each month all over the world from 1997 to 2000. She arranged her own press and screenings, while Ruth Ellen kept her tour schedule back in San Francisco.
During this time, she gave effusive interviews in local papers, where she insisted that they include her address so readers could send away for a VHS of her movies (just $2!).
On the road, folks who might have never seen her films otherwise were showing up to screenings. “The biggest thing people say to me is, ‘I wish I had seen this when I was 16,’” she told Bitch Magazine.
Through her travels and screenings, Jacobson created a network for independent cinemas and video stores all over America. “The independent distribution system used to be a safety net for small filmmakers. Now the corporations — like Disney’s Miramax — are taking over the safety net. So we need to build another one,” she said in a 1998 Star Tribune interview.
All the while, Jacobson wrote for Indiewire.com, where she coined the term “Indiewood” to describe Harvey Weinstein’s high-production, high budget “indie” films, like Pulp Fiction or Mallrats. She also wrote a travelogue/criticism column, called “Underground,” for Punk Planet.
Eventually, touring became lonely and unprofitable. After three years, Jacobson moved to New York City, where she worked in television for Oprah’s burgeoning Oxygen Network and VH1 and taught filmmaking courses at community colleges.
She continued to work in film, producing music videos for Man or Astro-Man? and Fluffy, and produced a documentary on Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, a girl rock dramedy directed by Lou Adler of Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, written by Slapshot’s Nancy Dowd. Her documentary, as well as an oral history she wrote on the film for the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royale magazine, got the ball rolling on Rhino reissuing Stains on DVD in 2008.
“Sarah Jacobson is the reason you can see The Fabulous Stains at the push of a button today,” Stains superfan Jake Fogelnest told me.
During this time, Jacobson, often unlucky in love, settled down. She continued writing draft after draft of her follow-up feature, a tale about a punk-rock girl group inspired by Fabulous Stains. Her career was again on the upswing.
But Jacobson was also dealing with a nagging, mystery ailment. She was losing weight and needed to walk with a cane.
To generate buzz for her second film, she and her partner Aaron organized a retrospective of her work in New York. But as that event was coming together, she received a cancer diagnosis. Things took a rapid turn, and the February 2004 screening became a posthumous one. Jacobson had passed away in New York City at 32 years old.
But the energy Sarah Jacobson put into the world, through her work and through her promotion of others, wasn’t so easily stopped. After her death, her friends and family founded the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant, which has awarded funds annually to a female-identifying independent filmmaker for the last 15 years.
In 2012, Turner Classic Movies played Mary Jane as part of its Underground series -- just as Jacobson had seen Fabulous Stains decades earlier. In 2016, the American Genre Film Archive, the curatorial branch of the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, restored her films for a new theatrical release. A blu-ray featuring Serial Killer, Mary Jane, and loaded with her shorts, was released this past September.The tragedy of Sarah Jacobson is she was taken from us before her ideas and concerns were mainstreamed, before the internet fully became a useful distribution tool for independent filmmakers. We can only imagine where she would be in 2019 with the undoing of institutionalized Hollywood sexism and abuse.
The work we have, however, remains timeless, and now it’s as available as it’s ever been, to entertain and show a new way forward to a new generation of teenagers.
In an interview with me, Bleeding Skull and AGFA’s Joe Ziemba described Sarah Jacobson as “an inspiration for anyone who ever felt that their dreams were out of reach.” Her films, he said, “function as a call to arms for being a good human. Everyone can learn something from watching Sarah Jacobson’s movies.”