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Ira, you ask some great questions. Not sure I can satisfy, but'll whirl a while. what were the plans of these politics? >I can see the disaffection and so on connecting with punk >but what part of punk was political other than its >anti-fascist rallies. I pick up a lot of skepticism, >or perhaps bracing anti-nostalgia, in these considered >words. But are you suggesting an intellectual wing of >punk, or an intellectual/anti-bourgeois movement >vitalised by the punk movement (which has about its >primal, majority feel more of adolescent rebellion, >a great no saying with very little yes saying, as >if any yes saying was too intellectual/bourgeois- >are they the same thing). Did these scenes have any >plans, I AM wary of glamourising, of reifying my own youthful nexus. I AM sceptical of generalisation. There was no 'punk' but there were 'punks'. There was the 'here's three chords now form a band' punk, turning against the pomp virtuosity of overblown rock stars such as Yes and ELP et al, of the 'Love Lies Limp' tendency from Mark Perry: 'I never care who I go to bed with male or female, there's never any incentive' to counter Richard Hell's: 'Love comes in spurts, oh no, it hurts!' There were the rizomic streams of Situationism however manipulated they became under McLaren. There were important feminist interventions in the Performing and the Visual Arts. There was some carnival of class priveledges and of gender ideologies in relation to 'ugliness' and 'beauty'. The worlds turned topsy-turvy briefly. There was a celebration of DIY using available tec. There was a regional networking that has born fruit again in the Roads movement. I didn't then, and still don't, read these as either apolitical nihilist gestures, or NO NO throes with negation the sole residue. I read them as positive assertions of values other than those of the dominant hegemonies. A realignment of friends and allies that Isaac Julien struggled (awkwardly) to register in 'Young Soul Rebels'. It was a widespread disaffection with party politics and the sham face mask of western democracy that persists. The video of Sid Vicious singing 'My Way' holds the doubleness of priveledge in the application of irony. There were inevitably the sell-outs of 'official' punk. But for every Pistols there was a Swell Maps, or a Crass (as John Kinsella mentioned only a few weeks back) or the delicacy of The Raincoats, the brittle improv-flavored dub of The Slits and the dark loops from This Heat. brings me to Kathy Acker, who in 1978 struck me as very much out of that New York art house scene alongside Suicide and Patty Smith - and who could write me into the ground. Sorely missed love and love cris %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%