lizbee | (Reply)

From:

I can't even fucking figure out what people mean by "-punk" anymore, except just as "-gate" came to stand for "scandal" and was taken up by people to manufacture bullshit media-grabbing stuff (Troopergate, Whitewatergate, Thisgate, need we go on) people seem to use "-punk" as a kind of shorthand for "DIY" with a dollop of futurism. Or worse, just a synonym for "gritty." So you get steampunk, mythpunk, hopepunk, ninjapunk, I don't even fucking know what. Like how "core" was connected to "hardcore," but now there's slowcore, sadcore, grindcore, whatever, it's just become an intensifier. (And "punk" is such a complex and historical topic -- the fashion! the horribly dodgy politics! the much better politics! the absurdist nihilist side and the grungy hopeful side! -- that using it as some kind of dumb intensifier bullshit is really distressing.)

In the moralising spaces is this seen as conservative? and therefore to maintain their sense of self identity as liberal/progressive they have to reframe their fiction choices and daily lives as also radical and progressive?

Someone seriously needs to throw that Emma Goldman quote at them, and the real one, not the T-shirt slogan:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]

Like, THIS IS NOT A BRAND-NEW PROBLEM, FOLKS! PEOPLE HAVE DISCUSSED THIS BEFORE. But one of the really maddening things about Tumblr is like this wilfull blindness to look at anything historical (because Old stuff = Conservative and = Bad?) and to try to reinvent the wheel with building blocks.