I used to do that all the time in the 1980s and never experienced any hostility. Are you speaking from experience? Maybe punks today have become more self-conscious?Originally Posted by Desolation
I used to do that all the time in the 1980s and never experienced any hostility. Are you speaking from experience? Maybe punks today have become more self-conscious?
Give it a little longer, and post modernism will die. Thepeople who originally pushed are dead or dying, and it isn't as popular in academia as it was. Even some of its early proponents (Umberto Eco for one) have stepped aside. It is old and dying, and the longer people look at it, the less they see in it.
I can confirm that many modern punks are ironically quite nazi-like about it. I once went to a punk show in a yellow sundress, I was a DK fan ("punk ain't no religious cult, punk means thinking for yourself, you ain't hardcore cos you spike your hair," ect.) so I figured it would be more in keeping with the spirit of "punk" to wear something normal than the typical uniform, and some guy dumped a plastic cup of beer over my head for it. It's like they adopted the clothes, and the anger, and all of the violence and gross sh*t (the spitting), but abandoned the original essence of punk which was the struggle against uniformity.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 09-12-2012 at 12:44 AM.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
I thought that post-post modernism was basically the same as post-modernism apart from the fact that it's happening now rather than in the seventies.
A yellow sun dress is asking for it, unless you are male
Did you not expect that something like that might happen? How did you react? I'd have enjoyed it, rubbed it in, "beer shampoo, nice", and laughed as it stained my pretty fabric.
A yellow sun dress is symbolic of normality (or hippie!) and some violence, short of physical harm, should be expected, if not desired! You're hardcore if you can laugh at your pretty dress being stained beyond recovery, and you certainly shouldn't complain about it.
And your "nazi-like" comment is way over the top - ironic or otherwise - if you get beaten up and transported to a death camp you can start using that comparison. ( I've just read Ian Thomson's excellent biography of Primo Levi and I'm now hyper-sensitive to misuse of "nazi-like".)
I used to just wear my day clothes at punk gigs - as a computer hacker they were as tattered & nasty as most punk dress. Any beer spilled on them would have been amusing, but no punks felt the need to do it, even in the mosh pit...
mal, everything you wrote above is complete bull****. Maybe you're being sarcastic, but you don't have a reputation for humorous wit around here, so I assume you're not.
Getting a beer dumped on your head, or "expecting violence" because one wears any sort of clothing to a punk show--or any genre of music--is just idiotic. That's something to complain about. That would never happen at a metal show, though metal fans are pretty congenial for the most part, unlike idiotic punk fans (on a side note, punk music sucks--repetitive, simplistic crap).
And the nazi-metaphor works, because there's a large pink scene that's associated with white supremacy--seeing swastikas wouldn't be uncommon. It is funny seeing someone get all offended by someone using the phrase "nazi-like" after telling someone they shouldn't have been offended from getting a beer poured on them.
That's surprising, you don't normally think of white supremacists as being huge fans of pastels.
__________________
"If it is honorable for you to disturb the dead, I shall consider it an honor and will make it my ambition to disturb your living." - Captain Miles Hazzard
In truth, the amount of actual white supremacist Nazis within the punk scene is very, very small. When they do pop up, they're far more likely to be forcibly removed than someone wearing a suit or a yellow sundress. Even in the skinhead scene, which also tries to uphold an anti-racism platform, those types are seen as pariahs and not welcome. They do exist, though...And they're often a lot bigger, angrier, and meaner than everyone else.
Still, there is a very dictatorial rejection of outsiders (or, anyone who doesn't wear the uniform) among the hardcore punk extremists. And it is a big problem among the generally peaceful punks who don't think that civil disobedience equates to starting fires and beating up nerds. The Descendents even wrote a song about the phenomenon:
http://youtu.be/T9F4k8dZf00
To a certain extent, I blame it on Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, who for all their talk about free-thinking and being yourself began the "You're either with us or against us" trend in punk. Fact is, no one deserves to be treated to violence or scorn for trying to enjoy a certain type of music without fitting into a narrow identity of what fans are supposed to be or look like. It's a shame to me that the scene has become so rigid, because I love and grew up with punk rock. It was supposed to be a refuge for misfits, not another set of arbitrary lifestyle rules.
They're called Nazi punks, it's a thing. Anti-Flag wrote about them a few times too, like Davey Destroyed the Punk Scene and Punk by the Book. Everyone in the subculture knows at least a few of them. So I wasn't insulted or surprised, I knew what I was doing and of course I expected to be messed with.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
The nazi punk fits. In the 80's, at least in the N.E. US that yellow sun dress would have been fine, and maybe a beehive hair do, since your hair is long- I think.
I knew punks in the 70s and 80s, and they were always self conscious. In fact it made their day if anyone looked at them. They used to gather in certain pubs to avoid the real hard nuts becaus they didn't really want to cause bother, but merely acted tough with the spitting and the boots and the spiky hair. (I had a mohican for one day. I just couldn't be bothered to do it).
They were as much poseurs as the arty punks that followed them and any of the other groups that hung around. The whole thing about individuality has always been a bit false. They would try ever so hard to be different from everyone else, but would cluster in groups like herds of animals gathered together for protection - all there looking similarly different. But then maybe we all do that.
Much as I love David Foster Wallace, this seems like wishful thinking from a stranded ironist. He knew more than anyone else how impossible it was to revert to a credulous, escapist artistic mindset. When writers (or composers) make a conscious effort to be old-fashioned and sentimental, the result is usually so bracketed and patronizing that it embodies the very cynicism it claims it's trying to get past."The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. "
Post-postmodernism is going to have to encompass all the things we've learned in literature since the original Modernists started shaking things up, not just pretend that nothing happened in the 20th century.
I may be wrong but in the distant future most novels will look like Infinite Jest. It is worth noting that most of the readers of the book are still 20 somethings even thought the book was published 15 years ago.
The people who will really like and get the book are not born yet.
I doubt that. I don't think we have any reason to think meganovels like Infinite Jest will be any more common in the future (let alone comprise "most novels") than they are today.
Yeah, it's a hipster artifact, and twentysomethings are the ones who read them. Do you know a lot of grandmothers who read On The Road or Catcher in the Rye? Is it a big surprise that young students and the underemployed are the only readers with time to pore over this thousand-page novel?It is worth noting that most of the readers of the book are still 20 somethings even thought the book was published 15 years ago.
No, the novel was really a product of its time: pre-Internet saturation, pre-social media, when terrorism was still sort of a vague prospect. Are readers in the future going to relate to a vision of America where the biggest international threat is from Canada?The people who will really like and get the book are not born yet.
Last edited by Anton Hermes; 09-17-2012 at 08:40 PM.
I meant style, the topic could be anything. The length could be short, long, or medium.
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