Tag Archives: punk

Night Clubbing

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Events, Fail, Living History, personal

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Mountebanks at night. watercolor by Paul Sandby, 1758 Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

Mountebanks and miscreants: how we love them. I have found myself in a situation of late that feels altogether too much like high school, and as a means of understanding it, I have a story to tell. It will, sadly, confirm what my parents thought was happening, but hoped was not.

Let’s step back to the time when I was known as the Rat, when I spoke truth to adolescents and paid the price of ostracism and harassment. I was already largely outside whatever cliques there were in high school, for I’m not certain you can call an assemblage of despised literary hopefuls in a hallway window seat a clique, so the harassment hurt more than the exclusion. Harassment these days comes not in the form of people chanting at you in person, but rather in online trolling, which can be deleted, unless people take the energy to rise to doxing or swatting, and few in the living history world seem to– and that’s not a challenge, kids.

So, operating within a loose-knit band of misfits more Donnie Darko than Ferris Bueller, I began breaking the rules, taking films back to the public library for my teachers and spending the rest of the day at the art museum or bookstore, or combing thrift shops for my nearly-all-vintage wardrobe. I could not find a place to be, so I stepped out.

Naked Raygun at the Metro (not the club in question)

Along the way, I met some very interesting people: punk musicians, artists, dancers, and students who introduced me to a very different world than the one my classmates lived in. It was a kind of mid-western Desperately Seeking Susan, or perhaps Something Wild, only I suppose I was Susan seeking myself. I saw great bands and terrible bands, and continued my forays even after I’d left the city for college, which leads me to a moment that resonates fiercely with me in light of the past few days of highly localized re-enactor drama.

portrait of a wanna-be-artist

I had a sometime-boyfriend who was ahead of me in college, at a different university, who worked as a DJ in northside night clubs. On one summer trip to the city, I found myself walking out of a nightclub where I’d been dancing, eager for some fresh air. At the door were two of my former classmates– too much acquaintances to be called frenemies– trying, and failing, to get in. I caught their eyes, agog, as I walked out.

“You come here?” one asked. “How’d you get in?“
“I know a guy,” I said. “I’ve been coming here all summer,” and walked up the street to catch the bus to the next party.

Rude Boys and Reenactors

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Frivolous Friday, History, Living History, personal

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This morning, the Twitterz provided me with a link I’d missed back in November, to a piece about the Clash’s Vanilla Tapes. I listened to the cut of London Calling, and heard the ways in which it was not the final cut, and thought of authenticity. What a fabled state of grace: authenticity.

You think, if I just get this one thing right, I’ll be done.

portrait as a process test

process test poser portrait

But you won’t. And that’s okay. You’re still not a poser. (That’s an old Chicago punk term that got thrown around the way farb gets thrown around now.)

I’m pretty familiar with the album version of London Calling, but the Vanilla Tape version really reminded me: it’s not a destination, it’s a process.

It can mean taking coats apart and making them over till our eyes bleed. It can mean thinking and rethinking a character.

What matters is the process. I know, how tiresome: it’s the journey not the snow leopard.  But it’s true: what makes history in any expression fun are the questions, the new things to learn.

Yes, I have always like to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.

Yes, I have always liked to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.

I realized, too, that the joy I felt seeing the Clash at the Aragon ballroom none-of-your-business years ago was not unlike the pleasure I get from living history– and that’s not just because of the funny clothes and loud noises, though both sub-cultures share a taste for natty dressing and unusual music.

I find joy in the physicality of living history*, for although a milliners’ shop is no mosh pit, when your  clothes, shoes, and accessories are as right as they can be, you will move and feel differently than you do in your office or workout clothes.

There’s joy for me in the difficulties, too: from Saratoga to cooking, I like a problem to solve, a process to learn.

I’ll never get everything just right: I’ll get closer to right, and the fun is in figuring out how.

 

Punk is Dead and Buried at the Met

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in Art Rant, Clothing, Museums

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So, I went to New York yesterday and spent the day at the Met. It was a good, if epically long, trip. I saw everything my feet could bear. One show I even went through twice, Punk: Chaos to Couture. I was trying to “get” it.

The [In]famous Bathroom

The [In]famous Bathroom

Punk got a lot of hype in the NYer and the NYT but it was the least imaginative installation in the Museum. Oh, so what about the CBGB bathroom! If we had to walk through it to get to the gallery, now that would be something. Instead, the bathroom and the “store” are offset, afterthoughts to the main drag, which is a drag.

Hall of Classics. Worship these Gods of Fashion.

Hall of Classics. Worship these Gods of Fashion.

The galleries main attractions are mannequins lined up as if on a catwalk, above us, so couture, so not punk. Rainbow colored spike wigs do not make Gianni Versace punk. Or, honestly, Vivienne Westwood at this late juncture, let alone Zandra Rhodes. I found the mannequins trite, and the clothing uninspired and only vaguely reminiscent of what I remember of punk.

Naked Raygun at the Metro

As for the store: I never shopped at Clothes for Heroes, or even Trash & Vaudeville (I had to send my Dad for my Johnson’s motorcycle boots) but I did buy Trash & Vaudeville label and band t shirts at Wax Trax, in the back. I wore the zip minis and fishnet stockings (real stockings) and vintage from the AmVets. I made my own tshirts, with spray paint, markers, and my dad’s castoffs. And even in 1980 Chicago, even at The Exit or Lucky Number or the Cubby Bear, I knew I was ersatz. I knew I was not really punk.

Graffiti & Agitpror

Graffiti & Agitpror

The Met show shines with the Alexander McQueen dresses. They are by far the most interesting and best made pieces. They’re clearly genius. Everything else, save for Rei Kawakubo, is merely derivative.

The sections of the show, Hardware, Graffiti & Agitprop, and Destroy, make sense. Yes, safety pins, chains, spikes and belts (hardware) were typical. Slogans and hand-made clothes, also typical, as well as shredded (purposeful or not, often not, but worn), are fitting descriptors or sub-genres of the punk aesthetic. But the clothes displayed disappointed and dismayed, a grand “So what?” And why?

Maybe it’s Andy Warhol, Mr. Anti-Punk in my mind. But I think it is the great postmodernist movement, where by at this point anything once ironic or referential is now merely self-referential. Punk could have a sense of humor. With few exceptions (Kawabuko, mostly) the clothes in this show lack the intelligence for humor, let alone politics.

Am I glad I went? Yes, absolutely. Because now I know there are bigger risks to take installing shows, and I’m ready to think about what they might be. I’d put a couple of those Kawabuko black-sleeve dresses, or McQueen’s black “bubble-wrap” gowns on display with over in Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity, and see what happens. That’s when chaos and couture would really meet.