July 2011
2 posts
THIS IS MINE AND THAT IS HERS | KAT ASHARYA
Because every girl had a Rayanne Graf in their life. This is: half-true, half-made-up, in the way that many stories are.
1. In Ms. Finley’s trigonometry class she was telling everyone about sex with Eric Danzinger, using her hoop earring as a visual aid. We could see Ms. Finley turning redder and redder as E. waved the earring in the air, saying He was this big! and how they did it for...
THE WISDOM IN BEING A LOUD BROAD | CAROLINE...
I wasn’t allowed to watch My So-Called Life when it first aired due to the fact that it had a gay character (Way to go, parents! That one sort of backfired, didn’t it?). Once a week I would pick up a VHS tape of the current episode from the twins who lived down the cul-de-sac. I’d take the coveted tape to my friend Courtney’s house where we’d watch it in her...
June 2011
9 posts
ODE ON A 90S TEEN CATALOGUE: RAYANNE AND THE "COOL...
I recently turned twenty, so I’ve been spending a lot of time (some may say too much) ruminating on adolescence. As a child, I was fascinated by representations of the cool adolescent girl. The day I picked up a copy of the Just Nikki catalogue at Claire’s Accessories in the Willow Grove mall with my mother and grandmother will be forever seared in my consciousness. Each page was filled with...
FROM RAYANNE TO SUBURBAN MOM | SHELLI CORNELISON
I probably came to MSCL later in my own life than most of the people who will weigh in here. I sought out the series because I kept seeing references to this Rayanne Graff character and she sounded somewhat like a character I’d written. After watching a few episodes, I realized my character does resemble Rayanne, but not so closely that it should ever be a problem. But what I found more...
2 tags
GIRLS FOR LIFE | MELISSA PHRUKSACHART
Rayanne Graff is a spastic blur of barrettes and braids in my childhood memory. What got me interested in her again, though, was Tavi Gevinson’s wonderfully comprehensive post on Rayanne’s clothing throughout the MSCL series. Fifteen-year old Tavi considered Rayanne not a peer, but a historical object. It was somehow profoundly mindblowing to me that the stuff I did growing up, the...
seemorebanannafish asked: The writing and content on these posts are mind-blowingly amazing. I enjoy reading them so much. Please, please, please keep it up!
sniclefritz asked: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
2 tags
THINK WHAT YOU WANT, YOU WILL ANYWAY | SARAH JAFFE
Roseanne Barr, in a recent piece in New York Magazine, pointed out that there’s next to no television these days about working-class people, much less working-class women. It’s certainly true now and was true then, in the 80s, when she got started. And in the 90s, when teen television took off, the flagship show was Beverly Hills, 90210—not exactly a blue-collar zip code.
Yet there...
2 tags
BAD DECISIONS | CHERIE L'ECRIVAIN
I love to make bad decisions. They come to me so easily, and at the heart of every one is the same fundamental thesis: that more is always better. There is this thing in me, this thing that means that one of anything will never be enough, that once I’ve started it will be impossible to stop, that deciding something is not a good idea and doing it anyway is infinitely more satisfying than...
3 tags
MY SO-CALLED ADULTHOOD: MEG
When Sarah and I decided we wanted to talk about teenage girls, especially using a quirky sidekick character from a short-lived television show of the mid-nineties as the conduit to the discussion, I have to admit, I hesitated. Who in their right mind would ever take us seriously?
Two things (aside from a vague mutual predilection for those not entirely in their right minds anyhow) worked in...
2 tags
MY SO-CALLED ADULTHOOOD: SARAH
The thing people always miss about Rayanne is her joy. We’re so busy obsessing over her clothes, worrying about her drug habits, tsking about her wantonness, being shocked by her drinking, that we overlook the reason Rayanne is such a compelling character: she’s having a really, really good time, on her own terms, by her own rules. And yeah, it’s not always pretty—because...
May 2011
3 posts
THE RAYANNE PROJECT: WELCOME!
Holy crap you guys, thank you so much for your interest in the Rayanne Project! We were blown away by the enormous and enthusiastic response — so blown away, in fact, that we realized this project needed (at the very least!) its own corner of the internet in which to flourish, which is, well, what you’re looking at right now.
The site here will officially launch June 1st, when...
good morning midnight: THE RAYANNE PROJECT: WE... →
findesiecle:
So a few weeks ago The Rejectionist and I were having one of our weird long gmail conversations about, like, this thing pissed us off and should we buy these pants and have you seen this cool thing on the internet and OMG the 90s, which naturally progressed into lengthy discussions about…
