New Year's with Hazel Rowe

It’s December 31st, 1999 — the clocks are about to roll over, the systems might collapse, and you’re stepping into the new millennium hand in hand… what could possibly go wrong?

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1976, Hazel Rowe is the type of goth girl you met once at a late-night coffeehouse and never forgot. She was sitting cross-legged in the back of Obsidian Grounds with a clunky portable VHS player on the table and a stack of thrift-store documentaries about cold war espionage, crop circles, and 1970s women's communes. Her hair—dyed somewhere between burnt auburn and rusted copper—was piled into a lazy bun, she had on an oversized "Buffalo '66" hoodie that swallowed her frame and black Doc Martens worn down to the soles.

Hazel was American, sure, but not in the flag-waving, backyard-barbecue sense. She was Northwest American. Raised on a steady diet of rainy sidewalks, indie radio, and distrust of anything corporate. Her mom was a once-famous protest photographer who’d gotten blacklisted after testifying against the city council. Her dad? Gone before she could form words. Probably still out there somewhere, she once said, “living in a shack, writing manifestos, or dead. Either way, he was never here.”

In high school, Hazel was the girl who didn’t fit in with anyone—but not because she wasn’t cool. She just moved different. Obsessed with editing, she used to splice camcorder footage together in her garage with razor blades and tape long before digital editing became a thing. She’d stay up all night scoring her mini-documentaries with Radiohead cassettes and ambient noise recorded on her dad’s old reel-to-reel.

By 1999, she had her own small business. She was the founder and editor of GLITCH//GIRL, a black-and-white zine that got passed around record stores, skate parks, and hackerspaces from Seattle to Austin. Half sci-fi poems, half punk manifestos, full of photocopied art and hand-written margins, it was her love letter to the misfits. She worked freelance editing commercials and music videos on analog equipment in a basement studio near Burnside. She refused to switch to digital. She said it was “soulless” and “too clean.” Her clients put up with it because she w