Gonna be on the radio again - this time on Connecticut Public Radio’s WNPR on Wednesday morning the first of August at 10.00, talkin’ the future of advertising. Should be fun.
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Useful information
From the Speedbird monthly archives
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Oooh, this should be good: the Hitotoki crew turns their attentions toward New York. Y’all should totally contribute reminiscences and such.
I’ve been on the road so much these past couple of years that the precession of seasons has begun to slip in significance - emotionally, practically.
On the one hand, constant travel dices up the calendar pretty viciously. The year just whips by when it’s divided into fourteen or fifteen two-week intervals of between-trip time, so seasonal conditions never seem to have much in the way of dwell time, or purchase on the emotions. It’s also the case that whatever resonances ideas like “spring” or “November” may have banked up in my childhood, they’re largely irrelevant to this itinerant life, in which the climate seems to have come permanently decoupled from the calendar. (Monsoons and white nights, I confess, were not big features of a Philadelphia upbringing.)
But seasons are, y’know, kind of important. They register at the social level, at the animal, even at the molecular level. So I kind of feel like I’ve sacrificed something really crucial to the project regime - the ineluctable logic of Empire that’s enfolded me for going on half a decade now, and seems likely to keep me pinging between nodes of the network for the foreseeable future.
Maybe that’s why I’m so frankly luxuriating in what has been a few solid weeks of honest, low-exertion summer. Afternoons I’ll make a tumbler of gin and tonic and lie all dozy and stuporous in the garden, my plastic chair tilted back against one of the glorious London planes at a thoroughly alarming angle. In the evenings Nurri and I have been strolling - again, gloriously, almost voluptuously, through the streets and gentle breezes: down to catch a midnight movie on Houston, across the long stretch of 23rd to the Chelsea galleries. Yesterday I pedalled more-or-less lazily over to Williamsburg and spent a good long stretch at Oslo, nursing a coffee and working my way through the collected J.G. Ballard short stories: not earth-shaking, I know, but that’s kind of the point.
Dag, this is what summer feels like. I had almost forgotten.
Do you know, I don’t actually know whether or not NPR’s Morning Edition is a live show. If it is, dag, I guess I’m gonna be on tomorrow morning during the 10.00 hour Eastern time. Otherwise, it’s taped, and I’ll have to let you know when the segment will air.
I figured I’d give you a heads-up either way. : . )
UPDATE: The segment will air on Morning Edition Monday the 23rd. Check your local NPR station for more information on just when Morning Edition appears in your neck of the woods.
SECOND UPDATE: Or you could just listen to this. They’ve made one or two odd edits, but overall I’m not displeased with the way this came out.
[F]or the young, everything else (fashion, slang, sexual styles) flowed from rock and roll, or was organized by it, or was validated by it - and that therefore rock and roll was not just the necessary first principle of any youth revolt, but that revolt’s necessary first target.
- Greil Marcus, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1980
As a coming-home present, Nurri flabbergasted me by somehow tracking down and placing in my hands a book we had paged through in the San Francisco Kinokuniya three or four years ago, but never caught the name of: We’re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 1978-1980.
I insist that you order this book. If you have any love for the vital creative upwelling that was the first wave of American punk rock - and especially if you lived through that moment, or its immediate offspring - you really do need to have these images close at hand. Everything in them is fresh, handmade, dangerous, naïve, tender, as yet uncoopted and unrecuperated. Jocoy was something mighty damn close to an August Sander of the early Scene, and it’s enough to make you want to cry, when you consider everything that came after.
You’ll recognize a few faces - Exene, Iggy, and Jello are all here, as well as lesser-known lights like Dianne Chai and Randy Stodola of the Alleycats - but really it’s the anonymous kids that make We’re Desperate what it is. As I described them in a 2004 Metafilter thread: “There were maybe a hundred of ‘em, and no two looked the same. You had your Hefty bag dresses and your tempera-on-Kraft-paper ’suits,’ your fetish trappings worn over SCUBA gear, your goldplate ultra-Elvis, your hand-me-down biker jackets and your Valley Cong - none of it yet ‘commoditized’ in any way, except as collages of decontextualized consumer detritus. Fat girls in mohair, diffidently queer Chinatown hoods with bad skin and dorks on loan from the marine-biology department looked you dead in the eye, daring you to call their bluff - they knew they were beautiful.” Actually looking at these pictures again, I got the details wrong, but the gestalt dead on. Dead on. They were beautiful.
Nostalgia for the gutter? Not really. More a sense - however illusory, however self-congratulatory - that once upon a time, this stuff mattered. That the notch of a collar, the color of a bootlace or the depth of a cuff, to say nothing about certain ritualized postures of the body, could encode a precise statement about one’s relation to the world and communicate this instantaneously to anyone properly equipped to decode it. (Of course, I would think this: it was Marcus, after all, that first pointed me at Dick Hebdige’s utterly essential Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which in turn gave me semiotics, the Situationists, Jean Genet and the Mods…and neatly made Marcus’s point for him.)
Anyway, consider this the strongest kind of recommendation. We’re Desperate is more than an important document. It’s a reminder, a goad, and a call to greatness.
Back in NYC and just about fully operational. Give me a day and I might even start to post here again. Local peeps should definitely ping me - G&Ts, long rides and backyard go games are in the offing, at least for the next several weeks.
Just a quick reminder that Everyware is now also available en français. (Gratifyingly, it seems to be doing quite well at the moment: merci bien de votre aide!)
