Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP. 

In celebration of K Records' recent and forthcoming reissues of classic Mecca Normal albums (1988's Calico Kills the Cat, which K rereleased in November—and 1991's Water Cuts My Hands, which will be repressed on vinyl and released digitally for the very first time in June), Martin Douglas spoke to the band's singer Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester. In separate interviews, Smith and Lester offered in-depth accounts of the Vancouver punk scene, being a direct influence on the riot grrrl movement, and how the social climate they wrote songs about well over three decades ago isn't really that different today. 

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There have been a few major cultural exports shipped out of Washington State’s capital city, Olympia. Beat Happening and K Records—both founded by the iconoclast Calvin Johnson—spearheaded the American indie-pop movement, for instance. Or a little band called Nirvana, whose frontman, Kurt Cobain, wrote many of the songs that would take him to generational stardom and acclaim in Olympia. (Of course, we have spent the past 15 months unpacking Kurt lore on The Cobain 50.) The seeds for one of the most respected (or infamous, depending on who you ask) social movements of the past thirty or so years, riot grrrl, were planted in Olympia as well.

A lot has been said about the era-defining bands that were key influences for the musicians who heavily participated in the riot grrrl movement: The Slits, the Raincoats, and Kleenex/LiLiPUT among them. But there is one key band—one that had a direct influence on groups like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy—that can draw a straight line between themselves and the riot grrrl generation. This band was never given the benefit of historical reevaluations in splashy books or major label reissues, yet they are the closest link to the bands immortalized in the punk feminist tome Girls to the Front. For the past 40-ish years, the band has been located about three and a half hours north of Olympia, in the Canadian metropolis that is Vancouver, British Columbia. 

That band’s name is Mecca Normal. 

Formed by Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester in 1984, the Vancouver duo was radical even by punk standards: staunchly feminist, anarchist-leaning, no rhythm section (it would be well into the ‘90s before they even recorded one song with drums), completely uninterested in stardom. Their notoriety was fully grassroots; a big part of their status as the direct predecessors of riot grrrl came from their association with K Records—which rereleased their 1988 album Calico Kills the Cat last November and will reissue their 1991 opus Water Cuts My Hands in June. 

“It came about in such an organic way because we were in Olympia so much,” says Jean Smith over the phone, speaking about Mecca Normal’s influence on that specific wave of feminist musicians. “And the co-founders of riot grrrl were at our shows. I would talk quite a bit in between songs, directly to the women in the audience, to start a band with their women friends. And write songs about things that are important to [them]. About [their] scene, about [their lives] in general. And those people did that. So in that way, it was extremely gratifying and wonderful that they reached back—like [Bikini Kill founding members] Kathleen [Hanna] and Tobi [Vail], or whoever, have frequently mentioned that we were significant and important to their evolution.” 

In my interview with David Lester—about half an hour after I spoke with Smith over a video call, he echoed how meaningful it was to be cited as a forthright influence among the first wave of riot grrrl bands. He described the experience of seeing bands from Bikini Kill, the Julie Ruin, and Corin Tucker Band as exciting, “because they were all doing fantastic work, and if we were a part of that at all, that is absolutely astounding, to have something that you just created out of nothing and then have it have a life after that, that is meaningful to others.” 

In their own way, both Smith and Lester highlighted the importance of a person doing their part to change the world; no matter how incremental, no matter how “small.” 

Lester says, “In many ways, that’s what we set out to do, which was change the world. Many people say, ‘You can’t do that with songs or culture,’ but I know I have been changed by music, and my whole life has been profoundly moved by music and the type of work [I’ve done] and the life I’ve led.”

David Lester’s artistic life began in Vancouver, where, in his working-class family, he had an older brother with a great record collection and a great turntable to play those LPs on. “You might call him a ‘70s radical,’” says Lester. “He was good about letting me take any record I wanted to and play it. And it was from that [experience] that I discovered a lot of music I didn’t hear on the radio.” 

Lester says listening to the records his brother shaped his worldview and led him to the life he currently leads as an artist. It’s not like he was completely cut off from Top 40 radio and major label-subsidized music—which, you know, still included visionaries like David Bowie—but it’s safe to say you know exactly where the Mecca Normal guitarist came from when he speaks about Phil Ochs and the MC5. “I realized you don’t need a hit song to make great music or have great lyrics,” he says. 

At the tender age of nine or thereabouts, Lester knew he wanted to play guitar. And sometime after that, took lessons for the instrument. By high school, he started a band. Even though he had an interest in experimental music, he also liked Jimi Hendrix, so it was natural for him to play noisy leads and fiddle with feedback.

Many years ago, Jean Smith pursued a professional life as a commercial artist; she never considered being in a band pretty much until she started one. She says the commercial route was “more sensible” than becoming a painter. Both of her parents were painters. “That seemed to be something to aim for,” Smith says, “to have some kind of profession.” 

Even still, when Smith was old enough to consider a career path, a woman having a career was less likely than a certain other option. “Back in those days, let’s say the mid-’70s, I don’t recall too much being suggested to young women,” she says. “Because it was still of the time where it was sort of assumed that women would get married.” 

Smith’s mother was forty years old when she was born; Smith the younger notes that her mother lived through the Great Depression and WWII. “It was interesting,” she says, “having an artistic household in a more conventional, almost suburban setting—where the neighbors had regular jobs. The guy across the street was a traveling salesman.” 

Her parents were painters while the other parents in the neighborhood had standard 9-5 jobs. Her house was designed in the mid-century modern style while the other houses were ranch-style homes. “So I realized we were different in these sorts of ways,” Smith says. “And I liked it.”

As Smith and Lester were separately coming of age, a new sound—equipped with a new aesthetic, worldview, and sense of community—was brewing in various outposts throughout the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world, and would soon bring them all together. Punk rock, specifically the sort being imported from London, hit Vancouver like a comet. And by 1978, bands like Subhumans and D.O.A. were playing Vancouver and boarding ferries to play nearby Victoria. Says Lester, “Vancouver was particularly noted because of its strong left-wing political community here, and the whole rise of punk rock coalesced around that.” 

There were plenty of Vancouver punk bands that were purely into the sound of the genre, according to Lester, but London bands like Crass appealed to the sensibilities of D.O.A. and Subhumans. “The main bands [here] were quite political, and they would do benefits around town, [so] they were embraced by the political community at the time,” Lester says.

D.O.A.—who hired Lester’s older brother Ken as their manager in 1979—would go on to release Hardcore ‘81, largely cited for popularizing the name of the punk subgenre. Perhaps even more famously than his tenure with Subhumans was “Useless” Gerry Hannah’s membership in the radical social justice group called Direct Action (known more widely as the Vancouver Five or the Squamish Five). Direct Action lived in infamy for bombing an Ontario facility which produced guidance components for cruise missiles owned by the U.S. Government. They were also part of a larger group that firebombed an adult video store chain rumored to be selling snuff films and child pornography.

Hannah himself was arrested in 1983 as part of a crew who were allegedly training to rob an armored truck to finance further activity. He was charged with conspiracy and possession of a stolen firearm, and served five years of a ten-year prison sentence. 

Around those days, Lester worked for a leftist newspaper called Open Road as a graphic designer. He later found work at another paper, where he met Jean Smith, and their lives were forever changed. 

“I’d been in art school for a couple of years and didn’t really find that I was getting much out of it,” Smith says about what led her to working in the newspaper office where she and Lester first met. “I felt like I was being overinstructed in things I didn’t need.” She estimates she had worked for four local papers by the time she began working with Lester. “We were putting together the physical components of the newspaper back when you used an X-Acto knife to cut what were called the galleys, and a waxer to put them in place,” says Smith.

Lester says he and Smith were coworkers who became friends “through that process of working together and realizing we could work together. You can’t always work well with your coworkers, but we did quite well together.”

The two work buddies bonded over music, even though they liked different things at first. Smith says she was into artists such as Elvis Costello, Nina Hagen, and Nick Lowe, while Lester listened to the Jam, the Clash, and Sex Pistols. It was the first time Smith had heard the new style of rock called punk. Every week, after they finished the paper, they would go to local hangouts—”One of which had had bands eventually come on if you stayed late enough, which we did,” says Smith. 

After going to shows and making mixtapes for each other—as Lester says,”a sharing of the excitement for the indie music scene”—he and Smith started casually talking about starting a band. “He had mentioned at some point that he’d been in a couple bands and maybe wanted to put something together,” Smith says. “And I said, ‘Don’t do that. I’ll solve all the problems. I’ll join the band.” 

With that, Mecca Normal was born.

“In a world where it’s all based around four guys onstage with the bass, drums, guitar, voice, I wanted to do something that challenged that [standard],” Lester says about Mecca Normal’s configuration. He first mentions the limitations of the sole musical accompaniment of a band simply being a “really distorted and really noisy” electric guitar. He counters that idea by mentioning the limitations in your garden variety four-piece band, noting the various personalities, tastes, and different skill levels therein. 

“I have nothing against [the concept of the rock quartet], but I just wanted to try something different and I wanted it to be radical,” he says. “The form was radical. Not just the content, but the form of presentation was radical. And challenging. And scary to do as well because nobody’s covering up when you make a mistake or filling out the sound.”

Mecca Normal’s first show was an opening slot for a band Lester knew well through his brother, D.O.A. Lester described it as an ice-breaking moment in terms of both performing the songs they had worked on for a year and easing the anxiety of playing those songs to a live audience. In a 1991 interview with The New Puritan ReView, Smith said that people disliked Mecca Normal enough to inspire them to continue making music.

“I wonder what that says about me,” Smith says after a hearty round of laughter. (To say the least, I can understand where she was coming from at the time. Part and parcel to being a punk is embracing—or at least finding a sense of acceptance in—being disliked.) Lester acknowledges that Mecca Normal didn’t appeal to a lot of people because he and Smith were approaching punk music with a different sound, and people (especially back then) were used to hearing music a certain way. He continues: “And there’s a rigidity and conformity to it, which is not very inviting to have other people mess with the scene in that sense. And I always thought of punk as wide open; that you could do anything you want.

“Maybe conflict is not necessarily a bad thing for us. I think it fueled us.”

In 1986, Mecca Normal released their self-titled debut album on Smarten Up! Records, their own imprint. Perhaps the most impressionistic of their 14 official full-lengths, Mecca Normal was a document of the band prior to employing Smith’s stirring, spoken-word-driven epics and Lester experimenting with acoustic guitars and liminal space. Even “I Walk Alone,” essentially the band’s calling card to many of its fans, is less word-drunk than Mecca Normal’s work even a couple years later. Instead, the song gets a lot of mileage out of the encroaching danger that never jumps out in front of Smith. (That danger being what lurks behind the male gaze.) 

The subject matter of Mecca Normal—as well as pretty much every album that came after—significantly explores power dynamics (often how it pertains to gender specifically). Even before she was explicitly considered one of the inspirations for a feminist musical movement, Jean Smith had a lot to say. She tells me, “I was always a very strong person. It was probably helpful that growing up, as I mentioned, my mom was a painter. She’s an art school graduate and in our home, she had a studio. She had good boundaries on her workspace. And it was good that my dad was extremely supportive of her work and really liked what she did. So in a certain way, I saw that as a great example [being set for me] but I didn’t realize it was [at the time].” 

Smith credits her bandmate Lester with introducing her to a style of feminism she gravitated toward, particularly from the music he introduced her to. She cites bands like the Au Pairs, X-Ray Spex, and Crass as early examples. (“You know,” she says, “more than just the ‘four guys on stage’ thing.”) Music led to an interest in feminist literature, which further helped open her eyes to, in her words, “issues that were being defined through culture and the many examples of the injustices that [I] would see in the news or in the workplace; sexism in general.” 

A key factor in Smith wanting to be in a band was that the Vancouver punk scene at the time almost exclusively consisted of men. “The Four Guys on Stage syndrome was pretty heavy,” she says to a round of laughter from both of us. “And Dave and I wanted to present something different.” 

Mecca Normal being self-released through Smarten Up! was natural for the band. Lester says he and Smith recorded the album in a borrowed practice space, where they wrote songs and laid down tracks until they felt they had enough for an LP. Putting out the album through their own imprint was a product of seeing what was going on around them. “The main thing is, you didn’t ask for permission,” he says. “You didn’t play the capitalist game of auditioning for major labels. We didn’t pay attention to that.” 

Lester emphasizes the fact that Mecca Normal didn’t know exactly what they were doing when they self-released their self-titled album, but they figured it out. The process of learning how to do the thing, in addition to having full autonomy over the thing, meant a great deal to Lester personally. 

Armed with a collectivist mindset, a lot of talent, and a school bus borrowed from D.O.A., the Black Wedge—an artists’ cooperative comprised of musicians and poets, radical leftists all—toured down the West Coast in the year of their formation, 1986. The underground music network on the American West Coast was still being built, taking shape from a loose constellation of small, weirdo outposts. One of those outposts was Olympia. 

One of the stops on the first Black Wedge tour was GESSCO, the music venue which served as a student project for Bret Lunsford (most notably a founding member of Beat Happening) and Denise Crowe. (In 2025, all-ages arts spaces are harder to come by than ever and the building that once housed GESSCO is now a CrossFit gym. C’est la vie.) After the show, Olympia impresario Calvin Johnson wanted to trade records: Mecca Normal’s self-titled LP for Beat Happening’s self-titled LP. “We had never heard of K Records,” says Lester.

Smith vividly recalls the initial encounter with Calvin. “So I remember Calvin coming onto the bus and he had the Beat Happening album, which was a 12-inch, [had a] magnificent, bright yellow [sleeve] with the weird, childish scribble of a cat riding a rocket; that kind of goofy style of complete childishness. And I’m looking at this album and thinking, ‘I probably don’t want this.’”

She took the copy of Beat Happening anyway, even after considering her concerns about the vinyl record melting on the school bus by the time Mecca Normal made it back to Vancouver. And it did. Smith put it on her turntable upon returning and the LP was warped. “Calvin seemed like a guy who would be trying to give a person a yellow album with a cat riding a rocket,” Smith says. “He seemed completely out of context at any kind of show that had us playing, for sure. Because we came from a big city of pretty tough people.”

So, how did Mecca Normal not only end up putting out an album on K Records (and then four more in the following five years), but also end up one of the marquee bands of the label’s first decade? 

“It was basically a combination of a friendship, discovering what was going on in Olympia, and discovering what K Records was doing,” Lester says. 

Smith tells me that Calvin came up to Vancouver to buy tickets for an Everything But the Girl concert and asked her if Mecca Normal was interested in contributing to the K cassette compilation Let’s Sea, which became a pretty legendary document in K lore. The band’s “Smile Baby” was the opening track on Let’s Sea and also made its way to Mecca Normal’s K Records debut, Calico Kills the Cat. 

The starkest difference between Mecca Normal’s debut and their second set of recorded material is how the latter forefronts Smith’s lyrics. The aforementioned “Smile Baby” is a strong rebuke of the expectations put on women. “I’m a Bit Confused” casts its critical eye on people who put blinders on in order to ignore the world’s myriad injustices. (There’s a cultural observation that fits perfectly with the theme of this song: “The privilege of the unbothered.”) Many of the album’s tunes—especially my personal highlight, “Don’t Shoot”—find Smith reciting her evocative, literary-caliber lyrics in a spoken word tone and cadence.

About Calico Kills the Cat, Smith says, “Basically we felt we had an opportunity and the means to address issues that seem to be creating injustice on all sorts of levels—whether it was capitalism, poverty, prisons, or housing. I mean, my life was okay. I had an apartment and a Toyota Corolla; not a new one, but you know, we were fine.” 

Over the phone, Smith reiterates to me that she and Lester didn’t form Mecca Normal for the money—their musical output is blazingly indicative of that point—and that they managed to have comfortable lives as artists through the pragmatic virtues of side jobs, hard work, and low overhead. She mentions Billy Bragg while speaking on her lyrical approach to Mecca Normal songs, from the general (capitalism, almost as if it’s a universal epidemic!) to the specific (coal mining and labor unions in the north of England). Woody Guthrie is a frequent reference when people talk about Mecca Normal, and the spiritual comparison is apt: A voice with a lot to speak up about, coupled with a beat-up guitar that kills fascists (metaphorically, of course).

Smith views Mecca Normal in that lineage of “people who were using music, as it has historically been used, to convey information and opinions and inspire people to do something themselves to change the world for the better. Better for more people, not better for a bunch of billionaires.” 

When singling out particular songs on Calico Kills the Cat, three songs come to mind for Lester: “One Woman” for the fact that he plays the hell out of the two chords the song consists of, along with Smith’s lyrics about the idea of one woman making a change and how that encourages others to follow their beliefs. Then, there’s “Joelle,” which Lester describes as “a sexual politics kind of song.”

The last song he names is “Richard.” He says, “It’s about a dreadful person, a narcissist, and I think it’s very apropos to the world we live in today.” 

Smith also named “Richard” as a standout from Mecca Normal’s second album. “I was asked to pick three [songs] to come out as a little single type thing [for digital streaming]. This one is about a particular guy who just doesn’t care about anybody but himself and he’s just completely devoid of empathy and is just a grasping, greedy, horrible guy. That song was in our set for a long time and when [the digital single] came out, I said, ‘We should’ve called it ‘Donald’.”

Water Cuts My Hands, Mecca Normal’s sensational third album, expands the sonic palate of the band by employing negative space on some tracks and giving room for Lester to go buck wild on others. Lester himself notes there was more of a punk-pop sensibility to Calico Kills the Cat (that’s punk-pop, not pop-punk; there’s a difference), and a harder, abstract edge exists on Water Cuts My Hands. He was listening to a lot of classical music at the time, which played a role in the album’s sound. 

As for Smith, her narratives are more fractured and poetic than the electric prose on Calico. And her singing is (as ever) filled with emotion, as evidenced by songs like “Lois Wrote About the Farm” and “20 Years/No Escape.” “Water in a Bucket” is a minimalist ideal of what Mecca Normal can do. Smith conjures the image of someone carrying a bucket of water down “a North American street” while Lester makes such good use of empty space as an instrument that he lays out completely for a goodly section of the song. 

“You could think of Flint, Michigan or just [any] place where there’s poverty. And it just has not been addressed,” says Smith. “Here in Canada, the Indigenous people have water issues, and it’s shocking that they haven’t been addressed. And those kinds of issues I think people forget about. And I’m not having it.”

Songs like “Not Standing Still” and “Dead Bird’s Feet” feature perfect rock riffs that sound like something Mudhoney’s Steve Turner could bottle up and put on his mantle. “I love the way Jean sings [‘Not Standing Still’], I love the lyrics,” Lester says. “It’s a profound lyric of, Why do I fight? What’s the point? But you have to, and the declaration that we’re not standing still [means] we are fighting, we are resisting.” 

While mentioning that the themes of poverty, social change, sexism, the sexual politics between genders, and the narcissism of powerful men are as relevant and contemporary as ever, Lester notes that speaking up and fighting back are still crucial to our survival. 

Of course, the 1991 release of Water Cuts My Hands was far from the end of Mecca Normal. The duo released three more albums on K, including the great singles and rarities compilation Jarred Up (featuring another signature Mecca Normal tune, “Strong White Male”) and the (occasionally) folksier Dovetail. They’ve put out records on other storied labels like Matador and Kill Rock Stars. They’ve pursued projects outside of the band as well. Lester works as a graphic designer and illustrator who has published several graphic novels solo and as a collaborator. Like Lester, Smith has worked as an artist in several different mediums, with several novels and a short film to her credit, as well as an ongoing portraiture project where she sells acrylic paintings for $100 each. 

But the supportive friendship Lester and Smith share is truly genuine and nowhere close to a mere professional affect. Even in separate interviews, they speak glowingly of each other’s talent and character. And even when they don’t work on music together, they still collaborate: They’ve maintained an ongoing project for Magnet Magazine for over 15 years now. Not only do they work together, they make it a point to just talk as friends.

“Every week, we get on the phone, we have a little catch-up of whatever’s going on, but what it evolves into is art we find online,” Smith tells me. “And we discuss these paintings. And we’ve just found it to be quite incredible. So we’re both on our landlines, perched in front of our desktop computers, scrutinizing the history of art and all the painters you can think of. Every Thursday night.”

Lester says, “Meeting Jean was a remarkable moment in my life. And she’s a remarkable person, and I’m lucky to work with her. Her level of friendship and creativity and her incredible sense of aesthetics—whether it’s visual arts or lyrics or music or guitar playing or novel writing—I’ve learned so much from her. If you can meet a person like this in your life, you’ve succeeded in achieving something many people may never do. There’s no one quite like Jean.”

The important people who come into your life, whether they’re in it for four years or forty, are meant to leave a lasting impression on you. They are placed into your life—by the universe or a higher power or just dumb fucking luck, whatever you believe in the most—to help you learn more about the world, about yourself. They can’t help but change you in some significant way.

For their talk about changing the world, this place would have looked a lot different had Mecca Normal not come together as a band over 40 years ago. All of the individuals they have influenced and inspired (present company steadfastly included) may have found their way through different sources, but I don’t really want to imagine what that experience would have been like. Because this band with no rhythm section that still inevitably made a huge racket, who stood up for feminism and social justice, may be better than the world deserves—but, especially looking backward from the downturn in empathy and humanity we are seeing in the Year of Our Lord 2025, they’re the band this world surely needs. 

Throwaway Style’s Pacific Northwest Albums Roundup

Kylie V - Crash Test Plane

It goes without saying for most people who have experienced it, but growing up is fucking scary. The Vancouver-based Kylie Van Skye was only 17 years old when I reviewed their debut album Big Blue for Throwaway Style, and their latest release—Crash Test Plane, which dropped back in November—finds them in a place many of us have found ourselves on the cusp of adulthood. Which is to say equal parts moony-eyed, terrified, and immersed in uncertainty. The passage of time has brought Kylie V an even more refined sound along with the delicate exploration of interiors found in their songwriting, along with an array of multi-instrumentalists equipped to help fill out the album’s expansive sound. Crash Test Plane is also steeped in the feeling of young heartbreak, which of course feels like the worst thing in the world when you’re in it, but like Kylie V here, once you have the space to process, a lot of growth and understanding can come from it. And if you have the talent, you can turn it into one very good second LP.

Haley Heynderickx - Seed of a Seed

One of the very first artists whose work I became instantly enamored with after taking over Throwaway Style was Portland singer/songwriter Haley Heynderickx. And what’s there not to be enamored with? She’s a virtuoso on guitar; she could sing a rattlesnake to sleep; her songs are written with perspective, verve, and humor. Heynderickx’s long-awaited second full-length, Seed of a Seed, stays on course with the horticultural emphasis of 2018’s I Need to Start a Garden while adding some new wrinkles to her repertoire: Opener “Gemini” is what you might call “Dylanesque,” “Spit in the Sink” is a masterclass in dynamic songwriting, “Jerry’s Song” contains the sort of sweeping grandeur that made Fleet Foxes a household name in the post-millennium folk movement. Heynderickx might be our generation’s equivalent to Joni Mitchell, and that’s not a comparison I use lightly. 

Miranda Spatula & Nowhere Flower - Around and About You

Just when you think you’re cool and in-the-know about the goings on of the scene you’re a part of, something (that a few of your friends were already well-versed in) comes out of nowhere and takes over your consciousness. The Spatulas’ 2024 album, Beehive Mind, was a surprise hit for me and ended up being one of my favorite albums of the year. And as a follow-up I was completely prepared for because of that, the Cambridge, MA-based Miranda Soileau-Pratt collaborated with the Portland-based Lila Jarzombek, who records and plays shows under the name Nowhere Flower. The result is a loose, substantially improvised set of recordings; its first side recorded by traded recordings long-distance, the second side recorded in-person. Around and About You is experimental and meditative, weird but still very alluring, the perfect album for exploring its contours or queueing up with a pair of headphones and playing while you’re out in the world exploring. 

LATE PASS: Mope Grooves - Box of Dark Roses

It took me a while to listen to Box of Dark Roses, the final Mope Grooves album, simply by virtue of the heartbreaking passing of the project’s songwriter, sonic architect, and all-around genius, stevie. If I’m being honest, this 90-minute double LP should be listened to and fully absorbed rather than just taking in a short blurb written by me and putting it on in the background or something. It is a supremely immersive masterwork, and besides, stevie described it better than I ever could in her extensive liner notes for the album. 

Instead, I’ll repost the statement stevie left behind: "all artist profits and digital proceeds will be redistributed in perpetuity to incarcerated or formerly incarcerated survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, especially the many women and other gender marginalized ppl incarcerated for defending themselves against their attackers. funds will be allocated to the Survived and Punished NY Mutual Aid Fund, a comparable organization, or directly into commissary funds or fundraisers of incarcerated survivors.

"box of dark roses is a 27 song LP where the same images repeat and repeat until you might have some idea of what roses have to do with armed struggle, trans autonomy, losing your house (again), angels, women political prisoners, violence returned to sender, suicided poets, refusing to recant, insisting on life, & how the revenge of twenty billion screaming ghost women could unmake the worst of all possible worlds"