Maybe this was why it surprised me that Sol could have done the big blow-up before us now. It wasn’t the most technically accomplished graffiti you’d see. If you paid attention, as I did in the darkroom, pulling the photos I’d taken from their chemical baths, you started to see there was actually a whole lovely graff esthetic, which this didn’t have, exactly. But what it lacked in style it made up for in size, and he had this grin on his face like a hunting dog who’d dropped a rabbit at my feet. “Posthumans,” I said. “Is that like ‘posthumous?’ ”
He said he’d got the word from a buddy of his. “It’s a thing he says about us punks. We’re post-Human.” It sounded so kind of atypically philosophical or something that I couldn’t not tease him. “The buddy SG keeps talking about, you mean. The mystery man who broke up Ex Post Facto and now can’t show his face at shows.”
But this is something I have to be careful about, this teasing reflex, because for a second Sol’s sour and safety-pinned visage kind of crumpled and I saw it meant something more or different to him than I’d been led to believe, and SG looked like she could have thrown me off the roof. Or one of us, anyway. It was the moment of maximum separation, like I was still stuck back in the suburbs of the heart with walls and windows and inhibitions and fears between me and the city. And I didn’t know what else to do so I backed up and crouched down and started snapping pictures. Already the piece was starting to look more impressive. It wasn’t meant, really, to be judged up close; from back near the fenced edge of the roof, I could see how you’d be able to see it from down below, where there was now traffic coming toward us, too, headlights crawling along the FDR toward Brooklyn. And here was Sol, this wage-slave punk kid, who had actually thought to do something. It was wicked cool, I said finally, realizing that was what he’d wanted all along.
After that we bought some 40s of malt liquor out of solidarity and sat on the benches out front for a while getting drunk and talking too loud, but people weren’t exactly understanding the gesture. DT had met up with us and brought ’ludes, so we ended up going to the handball court to get ’luded and watch Chinese kids play handball as it got dark. But just before it did - just before the lines between us dissolved and we melted into a puddle - I remember thinking how it was funny we still required chemicals to make this happen. In all those months since SG and I had discovered our NYU connection (her enrolled, me applying) and had started hanging out, I had never been quite sure whether I was trying to convince her and her friends I was tough enough to be one of them, or whether they were trying to prove to me they were worth the effort. Which just goes to show, I think, that the United States of Punk Rock is an ideal and not a birthright. We’re all still working to perfect it. Then the ’ludes hit, with the violent sky and the soft pock of handballs and the laughter bubbling in our blood and the city rising all around us, and that’s exactly what it felt like we were: perfect.
we dedicate this issue’s travel section to hangouts below 14th street, with gratitude for helping us survive senior year.
1. seor wax
is there an actual señor wax? if so i’ve never seen him. instead you’ve got the staff perpetually trying to hit on you. still, for the most up-to-the-minute in wrawk & roll, el señor is the establishment for you. + not just cuz it’s the only joint in town disreputable enough to stock this rag you’re now reading …
2. second ave salvation army
if you’re willing to brave fleas, you’d be amazed at the funky shit you can find for under a dollar. (caveat emptor: all pants appear to have been tailored for someone four feet tall + 325 lbs)
3. subway tunnels
mob up with yr droogs at one end of the platform. then have one or two of you slip past while the rest stay behind so the transit cops don’t notice. rats, third rail, layers of subway soot, + trains mean you have to be careful, but it’s like a museum of graff down there. thousands of years from now, future humans or posthumans will move in groups led by docents with little purple hats. here we have a genuine TAKI.
4. sex shops
by far the finest people-watching is to be done outside the sex shops west of 7th avenue, cuz you’d just be amazed who you see going in to buy dildos.
5. overlooked park at bleecker & sixth
one of my favorites. mostly junkies, old people, and so many pigeons (you’ll want to check the trees before you choose a bench), but cathedral-quiet, not counting the traffic, which just turns to a kind of oceany wash. It’s true that it can be fun to sit in a park banging on trashcans with sticks + do chants + just generally wig people out, but i never bring the droogs to this one. a great place to take a book you’ve just bought from …
6. mcaleery + adamson (one block north of st. mark’s place)
this basement bookshop is hard to find (there’s no sign) and smells like the bowl of an old pipe and the staff is so basically offended that you think yourself worthy to shop there they can make you cry. all of which i find weirdly comforting. this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real life starts to grate by comparison.
That this “luncheonette” stays open 24/7 is but one reason to love it. Consider also:
- bottomless cups of coffee
- a malieu melieu of grad students, shut-ins, dockworkers, drunk oldsters who like it when you make faces with them, etc.
- the waitstaff: would you like a side of ’tude with that egg cream?
- bialys sold here
and you get to meet the weirdest people! liike i’m in there with sg and we start talking to these folks in this picture and the guy says to us, “i’m about as stable as a bottle of nitro-glycerin” and i say, “why is that? does it tip over easy or something?” and he says, “naw, ya just get a drop of that shit and it goes [neat descending whistle noise] … POW!” yeah, man, on all night.
REVIEWS U CAN UZE - LIVE MUSICK
hunger artists / voidoids @ cbgb, 26 jan.
there’s been some rumblings in the so-called alternative press about what a revellation it is to have some female faces on the scene, but that’s pretty condescending if you think about it. fact is: hunger artists have one of the sickest sounds around + have been tearing up the local circuit ever since their “deface the music” 7 inch. a transcendent gig at american legion post 719 last fall showed that noli mettanger can go toe to toe not only w/ debbie harry but w/ almost any singer on the planet. tonight was comparatively just excellent. for me the big discovery was opener the voidoids led by bad boy richard hell (ex-television). rumor is there’s going to be an east-coast mini-tour, so if they’re in yr town, definately check them out
heartbreakers / some band i can’t remember @ the underground, 20 feb.
okay, can i say something? it is possible to take heroin chic too far. johnny thunders used to be so beautiful, but even with the fucked exposure on the picture i took of him at this show, he looks like fucking keith richard. ‘chinese rock’ is breathtaking, but don’t get high on your own supply, you know? as for the band i can’t remember … what can i say? students at RISD, i think someone mentioned, so possibly going somewhere, or nowhere. more memorable by far was dt + sol raising hell down on st. mark’s before the show + causing scenes in the narrow aisles of stupid boutiques. then outside one sol pulls from his pocket this dog-collar necklace i’d been eyeing. i expropriated it for you, he said. which was heavy lingo for boosted, dt said; sol had picked up the fancy word from their friend nc, tho i often wonder if this nc of theirs is like imaginary, as i have yet to meet him.
patti smith @ st. mark’s in-the-bowery, 2 april
showed up at this one expecting music + got poetry instead, but it’s patti, so who really gives? i mean i swear when that voice of hers got all hetted up + was bouncing all around filling the ceilings of this little church you could hear jet engines, you could hear guitars + whole drum corps + probably even atheists walked out feeling a little closer to god. a real scene, too, this one, with like a million billion
people + everyone loitering around outside afterward kvetching about how she was better two years ago reading on the rooftop of so + so’s apartment, back before warner brothers + lenny kaye, before anyone knew about her. this kvetching, by the way, is how you know patti is really the real deal, + i’ve taken it almost verbatim from these three dissertationist types i saw passing a j. among the graves. i went to take a picture of them - a perfect decisive moment with this lightpost leaning over them at a crazy angle - but they’re all hey hey hey hey + crowding around like, what am i, some kind of pig? paranoid as hell. + then sol, who i didn’t even know was in attendance, comes crashing through the crowd w/ sg + dt in tow + dt’s like, “is there a problem?” i smell violence + everybody else can, too. my man bullet, this hells angel who usually works the door at the vault, has been brought in by patti’s management or whatever as security + i can see him like moving through the crowd, skinny bodies flying out of the way like bowling pins + it’s sol he’s coming for, who looks like the instigator. hey, it’s cool, i tell sol + to prove i’m not a narc + defuse the tension + keep sol from getting stomped + say fuck you all at once, i grab the dissertationists’ joint + suck down the whole thing in a single go, a real lung-buster. sol doesn’t know how to behave around women, as evidenced by the fact that he doesn’t even like patti. then again, if he doesn’t like patti, what’s he doing here in the first place?
FIGHT IN A PARKING LOT
a boy spinning donuts
in the snow in his boss’s van
around and around till it’s slicked
a thick black oily slick
and two men coming out
of a lit box nearby,
saying hey and hey
and just hey what the fuck
do you think you’re doing
and the girl up on the slick top
of a dumpster, watching,
as the one stomps the shit
out of the two, doesn’t like
how the kicks keep on coming
when you’re down
doesn’t like this brakelight, hey,
this exhaust, hey, this hanging open
of this door in this snow,
but then again, she’s never been
on the winning side of anything,
and hey honestly, who’s to say
who doesn’t have it coming?
THE ESSAY PAGE
-mostly political-
Everybody seems to be talking about it these days, from “Anarchy in the U.K.” to “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers.” You go to the Vault on your average Friday night, you’ll see at least three kids in identically abused white tee-shirts with the circled capital-A inked on the front. Hell, I’ll probably be one of them. Because this whole punk thing in some sense is about liberation. But then when I looked up the definition above and really meditated on it, I started to see this tension I at first couldn’t think my way out of. On one hand: Complete freedom. Freedom to be who I want. Express myself as I want. Live where I want. Make what I want. Tune in the music I want on my radio. But also, if I want, to take your radio, deprive you of your own music. Your utopia. This looks at first like a junior-grade objection; you just insert into your anarchist constitution or whatever that the boundary line of freedom is wherever it starts to impinge on the freedom of others. But take a slightly more complicated case. Say I’m married to a person I don’t love. Or whatever is the anarchist equivalent of married. Say we have a kid. It is my right - right? - to free myself from that and just go. But if I do, I’m hurting my kid. Or if I take the kid, I’m hurting my husband. But if I choose not to hurt either of them, they’re in a sense hurting me. Impingement, in other words, is all around, and this freedom business is much messier than it looks at first blush.
One possible way of squaring the circle, it seems to me, has to do with that other part of the above definition, “made up of individuals.” I wonder what would happen if we started to think in units larger than that. As if the collective weren’t something that came after the individual, but the thing that comes before. That makes the individual possible. What if we could just define “enjoy complete freedom” in a more collective way? Is this even possible? I don’t know, but the current alternative does seem to suggest that the imperialism of the self has infected even this little scene of ours. I urge my fellow tee-shirt wearers to start thinking about this stuff, seriously, because the thing we’re building together will ultimately only survive - maybe we only will ourselves - if we can get beyond these screaming me-me’s. This I I I.
anarchy ann-ar-KEY [[ML anarchia, fr. Gk. fr. anarchos, having no ruler, fr. an + archos ruler] 1a. a utopian society made up of individuals who have no government and who enjoy complete freedom.] *
flower hill chronicles, vol. i
4.2.76
straight home after school. it’s eight o’clock now + the sorcerer is still in his workshop, so it’s looking like tv dinners again.
4.4.76
oatmeal for the fifteenth morning in a row today + dad forgot to put in sugar. when i turned my guitar up to 10 + tried to teach myself cretin hop he didn’t even complain. still depressed over losing the contracts.
4.10.76
saturday, but not going into the city. sit around + get fucked up + pretend not to be lonely: i can do that by myself + save train-fare.
5.6.76
weirdest thing happens today. i’m hanging out at señor wax, trying to get sol + dt to sit still for pictures, when skulking by the window is this kid i know from out in flower hill. weirder: this is the second time in a month; i’m not sure i would have spotted him otherwise. i decide the universe is trying to tell me something, + anyway, i need an out, so i ditch sol + dt + act like we’re dear old chums + take him to lenora’s for cawfee. also weird: it felt like we were dear old chums. a long island of the mind, maybe. i said we should hang out. he said, on the island? no, no, sez i, the island is a depression. let me show you the city. my city.
5.9.76
what did i remember about c from that day on the ballfield? carrot-top, that’s it. but he turns out to be maybe the funniest person i’ve ever known. i don’t think he even realizes it, but i can hardly look at him without cracking up. his long stringy goofiness. tonight we rap on the phone for 40 minutes about nothing, not philosophical “nothing,” but just … nothing much. maybe i was meant to have a little brother.
6.7.76
for a week they’d been rehearsing us, as if it were any great complication to walk up to the riser + take the diploma as it was handed to us. underneath the robe i wore jeans + my TV tee, + at the last minute, too late for the graduation adviser to notice, i left the nose-ring in. they were going to graduate the real me or no one. from the doorway to the gym, i’d scoped out where my dad was sitting, but now i lost him. i could see him, though, in my mind’s eye, with his arms crossed, nodding once, as if to say, well, you did what you had to do, but don’t get too pleased with yourself. the rest of the applause was polite. + then, from the top of the bleachers, just as the headmaster was shaking my hand: an indian war-whoop. my heart leapt up.
*definition of anarchy taken from … fuck it, i don’t have to tell you, cuz i’m an anarchist
reviewz u kin use: wreck-chordings
= terrible. avoid.
= you are allowed to buy this + i won’t make fun of you.
= pure genius. walk, don’t run.
the clash, seen on the green (u.k. bootleg)
rumor is, frontman joe strummer started out in a bar band + just went punk last year. but a) who was punk before last year? and b) with music this good, who cares? the long live set here is only the band’s second time out in public, but the hooks flying around could really bring our message to the masses: london’s burning! salute the new wave! even if the pop flourishes still feel a little put-on + there’s a weird reggae rhythm going on in the last third (+ even if the july 4 show at the black swan’s supposed to have been better) this is still, no bullshit, worth yo
ur hard-earned dough.
“howling fantods,” by get the fuck out, b/w “soylent blue,” by johnny panic & the bible of dreams
a collaboration by some east village neighbors, but as with most split singles, not everyone comes out looking good. “fantods” is uncomfortably close to caterwauling. there’s all this theoretical jabber on the sleeve - but punk rock isn’t some intellekshul thing; it was supposed to be about passion. the b-side, though, is worlds better. johnny panic has a kind of sinewy maximalist panmusical thing going on, with these moments of poetics that remind me of ex post facto in its heyday - or what i have to imagine ex post facto was like in its heyday. billy three-sticks, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you …
berlin, by lou reed
this is the most depressing song in the world: “they’re taking her children away because they said she was not a good mother.” lou! how could you!
1. Horses Brass Tactics
2. Brass Tactics Horses
3. Radio Birdman (import)
City on Fire Page 55