The Punk Piece
This was commissioned for Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin, published by Routledge in 1999.

CONCRETE, so as to SELF-DESTRUCT:
the etiquette of punk, its habits, rules, values, dilemmas

“Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth; Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind. But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you.”
—Leviticus 11. v 21-23 (King James version)

“There are always two reasons for anything. There is always the good reason and there is always the real reason.”
—Michèle Bernstein (Marcus, 1989, p.373)

“I’ve got a little book/which tells me what to do…”
—Rob Hind, unrecorded song lyric

Imagine the ensuing centuries of Judaeo-Christian moral debate had Moses returned from the mountain carrying not two stone tablets inscribed with five commandments each, but the first Siouxsie and the Banshees LP. Imagine a community evolving to encompass such a debate, its unspoken shared assumptions, the taboos it defined itself against. Now imagine long wrangling churchly decades collapsing into distracted teenage days — what would the moves and looks and passions and refusals of this community be? Their Right, their Wrong, their boredoms?

So call it misplaced intellectual extrapolation, so call it plain arrested — but welcome to my daft life these 20 odd years: where the momentary sayings and doings of a few minor popstars long ago became Tablets of Stone, Testaments and Talmud to me. Calling this silly won’t make it not true. And if I’m a sorry specimen mired in lost time, this only shows the distance by which our project failed to root (its success, you could say).

By establishing ritual purities and purifications, the Book of Leviticus boundary-marks biblical Israel as a tribe, with taboo-breakers cast out and excluded. Now my kind — Witnesses to Landings across Britain and the world since 1970 or thereabouts — share likes and dislikes, tastes and tics — but are we in truth marked out, by values, taboos and exclusions, as a tribe? Leviticus 18.22: for a man to lie with a man as with a woman is abomination.[1] Those who live by and through such a rule have their everyday possibilities shaped by it. “My body’s an oasis to drink from as you please,” sang Siouxsie in ‘Mirage’ in 1978. What possibilities does this injunction shape? What sort of community is needed, that such questions can be central to its self-defining rituals?

Far more lucid and daring than me at her age, here’s Colette, 15-year-old editor/author of Cape Cod fanzine Looks Yellow, Tastes Red, writing in 1995 as Witness to a recent Landing: “If punk means truth and dedication to ideals and saying ‘fuck you’ to the backwards attitudes and customs that hold us back, if punk means kid power and energy and music and sense of community, I would sell my soul for it. If punk means wearing ‘punk’ clothes, having the most body piercings, the oddest hair or the best record collection, if it means competing to be the coolest and the most noticeable or doing the most illegal ‘fuck society’ things, I would rather not have anything to do with it.”

So now it’s 1977: The Banshees are still only rumour outside London, and I’m 17, watching TV with my Dad, as Eddie and The Hot Rods gurn their way through ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. Something Dad says, or just a look, tells me that he hates this noise, this message. At other times, I will naïvely defend Patti, Iggy, whoever: “Oh no, they only look as if they take drugs!” Now I’m silent. For I too disapprove of the Rods and their oafish pub-rock racket, embarrassed on behalf of things I can’t yet name.

As a message, DO WHAT THOU WILT[2] was no problem: indeed, it was already so basic a motto for me that to give the Rods any credit for it was blandly to approve all of rock. Within months, as The Rods began a resentful descent into obscurity, The Banshees would step into longterm chart success — while Subway Sect, that most self-occluding of the ur-punk London voices, put out their second (and final) single, titled ‘Ambition’, in ironic homage to the exit from history they were then engineering for themselves. “I won’t be tempted by vile evils, because vile evils are vile evils” is the couplet that ends the song — as my second motto, well, it plain contradicts the first. But contradiction was my thing. The Sect’s bleak suicidal glee appealed to me as pure paradox. And if the Rods couldn’t work at proper internal tensions of impossibility, I wasn’t going to work at being bothered with them.

DO WHAT THOU WILT: VILE EVILS ARE VILE EVILS. In all unspoken earnestness, I began to live my life as if this were tattooed on me where all could read it — and to hunt, no less desperately for not being aware of it, for similar unconscious routes towards the same tension, for formulations, contradictory and unwitting, marking out a tribal sibling (as in Colette’s “I would sell my soul for it”).

After ‘our’ Landings, we Witnesses listened and learned, and we did do anything we wanted to do, publicly, with clear effect in music, movies, art, politics, eating, adverts, writing, fashion, drugs, TV, and sometimes just the way we walked or talked or looked in the city street. And all the while the full-on punky libertarianism arrived wrapped in more arcane rules and restrictions than any youth cult before or since — an endless miasma of codes, guides and forbiddings. In the name of absolute moral and social freedom, don’t be such a fucking hippy…

For my secret double injunction was just one among a thousand ways to formulate the axioms of punk life. And since what you do tells who you are — since public rituals define the tribe — there had also emerged, over the years, a system of speedread surface pointers to deep identity. Visible-invisible shortcuts to recognition, same as any other band of outsiders flip into in tricky times: the keychain codes of the year-zero autonome.

Except that in this etiquette of punk, any ordinary way to distinguish surface from depth, the trivial from the serious, the anomaly from the essence, would also lack that all-important intractable layer of demonic paradox. If these fast-track systems of signs existed, they existed to ensure that the well-agreed dresscode (“Cut That Hair”) registered as tellingly as the minor and personal reaches of politics and lifechoice (“No More Babies”). If the founding axioms were way too primary directly to arbitrate on the everyday — on what you’re to wear, or when and how (and to who) you curse — that was also a proof that the contradictions of the everyday — the etiquette — trumped the consistencies, intentions, causes and legacies grounding them.

Walking the walk

“Let neither rank nor fortune, nor the finest order of intellect, nor yet the most winning manners, induce you to accept the addresses of an irreligious man.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p36: ‘Courtship’

“Against the Kingdome of the Beast/Wee witnesses do rise… ”
—Leveller Marching Song, 1640s

In his overlong, gloomy, histrionic essay ‘The Shadow of our Night’ [2] (Gillett and Frith, 1996, p.153), working-class 60s rock-kid Pete Fowler offers a single perfect anecdote of punk-think. By the 70s a teacher, eager that his art students think for themselves, Fowler had them discuss ‘fancying’: that is, what makes X attractive to Y, and so on. In class of ’79, the 18-year-old with the pink hair and the safety-pinned bondage gear hadn’t yet opened up. So Fowler asked him this: “You’re at a party, and three girls are on a sofa, all naked, all hot for you: one looks like Debbie Harry, one like Charlotte Rampling, one like the tall one in Hot Gossip. Which do you go for?”

“None of them,” answers Pink-Hair.

“None? Are you sure? Why?”

“Because in the morning I might find I went with the one that wears flares.”

As described, Pink-Hair strikes me as a sad and becalmed fake punk at this date (safety-pins? in 1979?), but I would sell my soul to have given so well-formed an answer, unprepared, to so lamely constructed a question: not only to have refused assent so easily, so artfully, to the pathetic selection of choices on offer, but to have overturned — so sweetly, so ruthlessly — the entire system of judgement that birthed it, the assumptions about order and possibility behind Fowler’s economy of desire.

To have overturned them, as here, by choosing at once precisely and absurdly: by respecting rules — your own rules — so flamboyantly, you could reveal how ridiculous rules were, and how compromised. You could crack open the carapace and glimpse power, denuded, wriggling within. With what? A stream of acts and moves, based on systems of value and etiquettes of behaviour so mad and yet so exacting in their concrete being, and effect, that etiquette at least (being a value-system’s collusions with its defining demons, and disguises thereto) would self-destruct.

Was the total fuck-off look — spiky hair, big boots, spitting — sometimes less a weapon than a crutch? (Is there a difference?) “They only wanted to be noticed. They only wanted to be loved,” says a friend, perhaps of herself at half her present age. But “only” is wrong, a too-broad hindsight hit: sure it was love they were after, but there were prices they would not pay.

For part of what they wanted was no longer to be noticed. Dressing-to-shock (zips, rips, binbags, tattoos, the pretty-slut tease, fetishwear taken casually public) is adopted against the instant society stops being shocked. Stops being shocked by surface gestures anyway: the moment when the occasion of reaction wasn’t silly kids capering in horror masks, but genuine evil, currently lurking unnamed or overlooked. They only wanted a world where what you wore was all just fashion: where how you look isn’t who you are. A world healed, a world purged. When right prevailed, these signs would pass unmarked — and until then, we lived in unreal time.

Hence Sid’s or Siouxsie’s Nazi chic; hence the wayward declarations of fondness for (for example) Myra Hindley. For Hitler and Hindley had lost their respective wagers against the future. To present oneself as blithely unmoved by the crimes of outcasts so complete — the defeats of losers so complete — is to deny oneself the reactionary comforts of community; and in the denying, to force those who decry such crimes towards better reasons for this than the need to remain comfortable in the bosom of a suspect ‘us’. Backing the known winner is an unearned shortcut to approval — which approval generally comes at a price: a faith in a certain gorgeous future, if only you brush your teeth in the politically correct direction. That future generations may be spared complacent and tainted options, you sacrifice your own reputation to their instant contempt… (Kind of neat, whispers a self-destructively punky part of me, still.)

Anyway, once you accept Sid and Sioux wore swastikas because they weren’t Nazis, the dresscode for the truly punk was clearly anything but pink hair, safetypins and bondage gear. The only acceptable function of fashion was the overthrow (for all time) of the very metaphysics of ‘fashion’. All choices — what you ate, how you walked, when you slept, who you liked — were to be rated primarily against their likely immediate effect; what reaction they provoked from who. No act was non-public, no decision non-political. A complex calculus: easier just to say, Who cares? Life’s too short and energy too limited for totality at all time. After all, “all choices” includes all spur-of-the-moment decisions about which bits of your total rule-system you can make a point (or a production) of overriding, just for tonight. Nothing so unpunky as absolute intransigence (because nothing more quickly becomes unquestioned routine).

This nonchalantly committed regime of mindfuck detail can be shorthanded: it’s topsyturvy-dom as unending strategy (as Malcolm McLaren had said, on the release of ‘Anarchy in the UK’: “Of course, the real fans aren’t buying it”). Which is why anyone who couldn’t see beyond the random naffness of my outward appearance in most of the 80s, who couldn’t see how crap clothes and haircut were totally punk, wasn’t worth trying to persuade. Those who mistook such non-gesture gestures for fence-sitting, timidity or laziness — well, let’s just say that the strong points they may have had were always outgunned by stronger ones they were missing. In my head.

Combining the hip dicta of a sub-branch of 70s teen pop culture with ordinary adolescent fear and shyness (and only slightly less ordinary adolescent strictness), I’d evolved a line as anti-teen as any grown-up could ever have hoped for — or feared. Caught in the contradictory cross-ply of my Two Commandments, I was as naysaying as any Puritan Iconoclast, as indirect in my pleasure-seeking as any mediaeval flagellant — except of course that all my forbiddings only ever applied to me. The better to enjoy the amplified specifics of teen-dom right up to the last possible moment — why pretend to be adult before we had to be? — I committed myself to cranky little-old-man-dom. No drink, no smoking, no drugs, no sex: bargaining fun’s deferral against being untrapped and untricked, the only controller of such futures as this self-isolated, self-punishing, self-denying, way-too-clever teen was prepared to permit himself. Or as Minor Threat sang in ‘Straight Edge’, their 1981 song of ranging abstinence, “Always gonna keep in touch/never want to use a crutch…” [4]

Never wanting to want

“In the street great quietness of manner should always be observed.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p17, ‘Deportment And Manner In Walking’

“No bondage is worse than the hope of happiness”
—Carlos Fuentes

All vanguards are cadres of the selfish, preening themselves in the future’s fond spotlight. The purest expression of punk community may be the refusal to reach out, to express the desire that the community continue, to set out obligations of duty towards its nurturing. If to give notice of wanting the other is to risk the immediate dissolution of all ties, the microcommunity must be taken to exist somehow by chance alone, never design. To want it, to build towards it, is to betray it.

The most detailed study of how-to-do and how-to-be, punk-wise, is the comic Love and Rockets, by Beto and Jaime Hernandez, published in 50 issues between 1982 and 1996: Jaime’s section, on two lovers, Hopey Glass and Maggie Chascarrillo, from California’s chaotic-bohemian community, exalts their battle to discover new ways to be adult without betraying their adolescent choices. Parted by circumstance, then reunited, they discover their readings of punk principle — Hopey’s hyper-anarchic (“Do What Thou Wilt”), Maggie’s ultra-romantic (“Vile Evils are Vile Evils”) — are no longer in sync. An etiquette has intervened: the generalisations and explanatory shortcuts of once-inseparable allies no longer mesh; blurred by mutual idealisation during separation, unspoken assumptions about identity — about belonging — suddenly fail. [5]

Hopey knows that what she does is not who she is: her capacity to fuck women she dislikes proves (at least to her) that the feeling she has toward Maggie by contrast transcends the merely physical. Wanting to be wanted for herself, Hopey knows such emotions aren’t hardly remarkable. So she’s mad that Maggie beats herself up as irredeemably conventional (and un-Hopeyish) for wanting only Hopey. This isn’t uncool and unpunky; this isn’t anti-lesbian. Solution? Only open declaration of what Maggie is to her, sounding forth all deep hopes about what she is to Maggie.

Yet to hint that your other half might sometimes feel vulnerable, might want and be wanted, would vastly betray the specifics of mutual punk loyalty, the private political purpose of this radical project of coupledom, the never-ending public demonstration of total individual autonomy.

And besides, to revive the indivisible tribe-of-two would be to diss the identity-gangs each hangs with in the absence of the other (Hopey’s East Coast art-fags, Maggie’s MexiCali proles). Totally self-centred in their unwillingness to be so ‘selfish’, the two let the duo fail again.

If the devil comes

“We have to attack the ‘enemy’ at his base, within ourselves.”
—Alexander Trocchi (Marcus, 1989, p.173)

“What’s beautiful is to change, tirelessly. Because every change is an advance, every permanence a grave. Contentment and resignation are a single despair, and anyone who stops and gives up becoming something else has already opted for death.”
—Emmanuelle Arsan (Arsan, 1975, p.173)

“Perhaps inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroised society," writes Leo Bersani in Homos: "This of course means sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive element of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself.” (Bersani, 1995, p.7).

If gay liberation is at the core of any revolutionary social transformation, as Bersani insists, he leaves little room for inclusionary redrafting or metaphorical (i.e. ‘de-gaying’) generalisation from the male-on-male: no vive-la-différence celebration of mutuality, no fuzzy-sappy yearning to be one with the Other. The book is a daring, exhilaratingly nihilistic attack on the affirmative etiquettes of identity politics, the repressive sentimentalities of the gay community, and from its unsettling focus on the central fact of gay desire, and the most commonly occluded: that it means men who want cock and women who don’t.

But — though he barely uses the word — what’s most punk about Homos is the contradictory extremism of its demands. That the word “punk’ derives from prison slang, for the “boys who give up their asses to the ‘wolves’” (Savage, 1991, pp123-140) [6] , is not news. In mid-70s New York, The Ramones and Richard Hell took their barely coded look from the boy hustlers on 53rd and 3rd, ripped jeans and t-shirts, adorably mussed-up hair. It was the refusal to recognise any community politics in this self-locating gesture, the emphasis on hostility and self-loathing and extremes of relational withdrawal, that gave this scene its pulling power. [7]

In 1978, in Those were Different Times, her memoir of the punk milieu of Cleveland, Ohio — of Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys — Charlotte Pressler wrote: “There was no reason why they should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet all of them turned their backs on this world, and that meant a number of very painful choices… I would like to know too the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged wire. It isn’t, precisely, class-hatred; it certainly wasn’t political; it went too deep to be accepting of the possibility of change... It should be remembered that we had all grown up with Civil Defence drills and air-raid shelters and dreams of the Bomb at night; we had been promised the End of the World as children. And we weren’t getting it.”

“Five years/that’s all we got...”

On UK television in the early 90s, a cheerful crustie-punk Convoy girl is interviewed. She explains, badly, why she’s chosen to be an unmarried mother, and how supportive and understanding her mother (married, and very straight rural middleclass) had been. On the wall is a poster: “Children are God’s way of telling the world it can go on.”

Distilled in this slogan can be found everything latently dangerous in an apparently radical lifestyle: the reactionary sediment precipitating out of so manifestly courageous a life-choice. Children as blank-slate projection of the world things we hope is coming, failsafe machinery for generating ‘love’ and pre-programming destiny. This is why (as Colette insists) punk has to mean kid-power, refusing both puppet-dom and God the ventriloquist. Listen again to the resignation and the glee in Johnny Rotten’s croak, as he slips from venomous particularity through self-assault to metaphysical nihilism, his attack on monarchist reverence a plea for his own removal as movement figurehead, and a declaration of war on the very concept of tomorrow: “No future, no future, no future for you/no future, no future, no future for me…”

Nothing is more unpunky than the belief in guarantees, than the ceding of moral autonomy. Punk’s freedoms are absolute, if only in this sense: no one else’s rules apply to you. You take full responsibility for the consequences your own rules, your own beliefs. You choose to obey or disobey for your own reasons. You do not complain when the consequences come down slantwise, or worse.

Faith in any better future — in class or race or GenderPref revolution; in history’s and philosophy’s end; in the Messiah’s return in glory — is a trapdoor back into the order opposed and abhorred. Except perhaps for little kids — my dad’s harder than yours; my mum loves me more than yours; my progress is more historically objective than yours — there is no unconditional love, and no guarantees.

To wish for a future is to dream a social context in which the endless contest for self-definition ceases, for a care and a calm in which one can ‘simply’ be oneself: projecting the Social around our own want, this faith desires the rest of the world reconfigured as balm for our hurt, filler for our lack. To tolerate ‘difference’ is to tolerate all the things that keep difference alive, hurting: yet to amplify antagonism between genders (races, classes), that a ‘we’ to be brought ‘together’ out of such founding trauma, is to be enjoined to wallow in our extended community of pain — and to excoriate those deemed untouched by it — that this same pain one day magically dissolve itself, somehow, maybe.

Certainly as a model for unselfish service and policed togetherness, Family Values is the wound not the balm, a repressive grief even after the Christian-Fascist definition of “family” is rejected. Tenderness dies when it’s made a duty. Better the profound anti-communitarian impulse in homo-ness (the desire of the same for the same) than the divisive exchanges and transactions that an ‘ordinary’ breeder couple affirms. Preferable to the control-freak ego-megalomania at work in ordinary relationality is the location and valorisation of the ego-shattering, suggests Bersani, that is entailed in becoming the passive partner in the male-on-male sex act, the fuckee, the ‘female’.

OK, so here the generalised jump to L&R’s take on gay life and love may seem tricky, given the centrality of the comic’s two (non-symbolically) female lovers. Cute softcore dykes getting it together easily and often: this is work sharing a primary market (adolescent het males) with Emmanuelle Arsan’s mid-70s Emmanuelle novels. Soft porn disguised as radical social philosophy, Arsan (though a better writer and thinker than Anaïs Nin, say, and funnier too) is De Sade Lite at best. Her readers get what they pay for, lovingly imagined and described fuck-scenes without too much plot or discourse between. Emmanuelle has increasingly extreme sex with various pretty girlfriends (and with countless faceless and interchangeable men) in a guilt-free, trouble-free, disease-free erotic utopia, an imaginary Thailand of the unburdened colonial mind. By contrast, L&R — radical punk philosophy disguised as bohemian Mills&Boon — puts its readers through the wringer, with onscreen sex rare.

As David Halperin, reviewing Homos with approval and exasperation, glosses Bersani: “Gay desire points the way to the possibility of defetishising difference without denying it. It thereby offers a superior ethical alternative to the repressive hypocrisies of multiculturalism” [8]. It’s precisely this “superior ethical alternative” that the Hernandez Brothers explore: how being punk means you get to be a new ‘kind’ of female (or lesbian, or Mexican); how being a girl — or gay, or not white — is always already a better way to be punk, if you’re insistently, selfishly subjective about it. So what if Hopey and Maggie first sprang from an adolescent breeder fantasy of softcore polysexual nirvana? Given that they’re both handsome, healthy California girls in relatively unfettered sectors of society, theirs is an erotic counter-utopia of some bleakness: the nightmare mechanics required to keep just one unspoiled punk relationship going for two nights in a row are more than apparent.

Should punks always tell the truth?

“No! Not just anytime! Only if it’s funny!”

—Roger Rabbit

“It is an unchristian action to tell us some hard things our acquaintances have said of us, because ‘we ought to know’. We ought NOT to know, and would be very much happier if we had never known.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p.10: ‘Candour and Cheerfulness’

For “funny” (and for “unchristian”), read instantly effective, or atmosphere-charging, or ludicrous, or self-denying, or generally wrong-footing of such of the world as obtains in one’s immediate vicinity. When you have no opinion on an issue, it cannot be ‘wrong’ to invent one, simply to explore what happens when you make it known.

Like your shoes: how about it?

“No young lady ever engages in a correspondence with a gentleman who is neither her relative nor her betrothed without eventually lessening herself in his eyes. Of this she may rest assured.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p.83, ‘Correspondence With Gentlemen’

Every etiquette ever laid down is actually a summary of the current codes within a given community on who you get to fuck, and how. Within a ‘straight’ community (any group a Fuck-the-Future face-tattoo excludes you from) such codes still feed straight into the political economy of babymaking, a profound subservience to the proprieties of property. Writes Bersani: “[I]f a community were ever to exist in which it would no longer seem natural to define all relations as property relations (not only my money or my land, but also my country, my wife, my lover), we would first have to imagine a new erotics.” (Bersani, 1995, p.128, my italics). But etiquettes flourish everywhere, as speed-read grounding in the communication of shared outsider identity, as security-guarantee of the foundations of such identity. Rules make things easier, not harder. You devise them to avoid things, thoughts, yourself sometimes. Etiquette is a device to ensure that the pleasures of identity aren’t always prefaced by such terrified, potentially fatal enquiries (“Am I in the place where it’s OK for boys to do boys?”) that the looked-for comfort never emerges. In French, ‘etiquette’ means (just as it sounds) ‘ticket’ — that is, ‘label’.

So who you are (who you can get yourself to be labelled as) still determines who you can get to love. Which is why etiquette is also always the vector by which the resisted power-system is re-introduced. Which is why the only acceptable punky pick-up line has ever been the intolerably unmannerly “Wanna fuck?”

Bersani: “.Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself”[9]. Thus any definition of homosex that requires public gestures of relationality is less key-chain code than dungeon door. A friend — at the time a member, like me, of the world-wide if atomised community of the celibate — noted how others defined her in terms of the absent sexual relationship, the coupledom she conspicuously lacked. Breeders assumed it was a boyfriend she missed, benders that she somehow hadn’t yet dared reach towards the solace of a girlfriend. “My identity,” she one day stated, in a climax of amused and illogical exasperation, “has nothing to do with who I am.”

“Punk,” wrote another friend, “is a mental machinery for manufacturing a series of NEW moral choices/stand-offs, to make life more interesting when those already in existence have lost their freshness. What these new moral alternatives actually are — and which ones you choose and reject — does not actually matter.”

But it does matter — because what’s at issue is new kinds of social relationships, newly imagined erotics (and economics). Bersani’s “homo-ness” strives for a conscious tension-in-paradox, its pridefully nihilist specificity veering occasionally towards exactly the punkier-than-thou-pretensions that Colette rejects in dismay[10]. If future community — community ‘after the revolution’ — is to derive from the particularities of homosex, complete with radical doubt about the definable nature of such community, all the more reason to treat flight into non-breeder desire as a foundational generalisation (and punk as a radical metaphor for this same generalisation). Because a commitment to a certain asociality is also the only route through to any mutual tenderness that isn’t merely scripted by outsiders: so that the degree of asociality achieved is an invaluable marker of the limits of the promises of this or that rival community-as-salvation. Communities are shaped to accommodate genres of argument: a community that can accommodate Bersani’s “homo-ness” (a ‘punk’ community, a community untouched by sentimentality towards itself as a community) demands a world rescued from need itself.

On a hot night after the landing

“The man or woman who is wilfully late at a dinner party must simply be conscienceless.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p.48, ‘Duties Of Guests’

Now the scorching breeze comes off the flats again, and my honey’s eye-fur begins rippling, in soft waves of blue and purple. Usually I like to spoon a little first, but of course it’s too late for that — her gill-slits are already flick hungrily open, her psychic palps whipping forward into me, at chest, cheekbones, temples…

We are strangers in a strange land: its laws are not ours. Obeying them is a courtesy (if we choose to respect courtesies). What does a guest gain by breaking a rule they don’t know is a rule? Which is the more subversive? Looking like a slut and then being one, or looking like a slut and then not being one?

‘No Future’ was never a threat; it was a promise. It was — it is — a moral fact, a fundamental conundrum: how to behave in the last days, when authority is ended. Life during wartime; how to live happily and decently when this is as good as things may ever get. Making babies is making excuses: an appeal to the future that simply defers the conflicts of the present. Welcome to unreal time.

It should be remembered that we had all grown up with dreams of the Bomb at night; we had been promised sex with Others — with aliens, mutants, the unimaginably brilliant and strange future — and we WEREN’T getting any.

Selling her soul for it

“If one person is becoming uppermost in your thoughts, if his society is more and more necessary to your happiness, if what he does and says seems more important than that of anyone else, it is time to be on your guard, time to deny yourself the dangerous pleasure of his company and indeed time to turn your thoughts resolutely to something else.”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p.37: ‘Disappointed Love’

“I don’t really know what punks do after punk”
—Jaime Hernandez [11]

How do we know right from wrong when community has no call on us? When Maggie leaves, Hopey can cherrypick the company she keeps — but since to choose at all is to choose all, when she does, she discovers what it is of herself she won’t, at last, sell to survive.

Effectively a rentgirl all her adult life, she’s gotten fed and a bed in trade for her company if not her body, so now cheerfully allows herself to be trophy-slut to a cabal — headed by an ageing Lucille Ball-type — who like to toilet-train and discipline the ‘infants’ they hire young hookers to play. To ultra-punky Hopey, such kinks are (necessarily) “supercool” — besides, there’s cross-cut here her memory of her aspirant Colombian mother pimping her (Hopey’s) infant cuteness to ad agencies. As justification, as projection, as denial, children are a damage in endless directions: the enactment of any adult desire on a child is an abuse of some kind.

Consensus S&M insists on the strictest possible rules, on escape-hatch etiquettes that ensure the fantasy can be ended[12]. But here, with mass-culture stars owning street-whore slaves, no such escapes exist. This fantasy, no more consensual than ‘real’ Family Values, is not supercool.

Incomplete control

“I identified with Ulrike Meinhof. The same blocked emotions that turn some people into junkies turn others into terrorists… ‘I won’t have it! I won’t stand for it! This is totally unacceptable!’... A form of idealism that leads down different paths.”
—Marianne Faithfull (Marcus, 1994)

“Tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are”
—Creole proverb, 1885

Is the expression of love and commitment, as opposed to momentary desire without obligations (“Wanna fuck?”), always simply to place others intolerably in your debt? Hopey’s libertarianism frees her from rules aplenty — a non-judgmental, sexually experimental viewer, she passes through the mirror of TV-flavoured authoritarian mom-ism into a fine pervy utopia, only to discover that there are rules here too, all the more unpleasant for being unspoken, and when you’re all alone in the world — a circumstance Hopey has actively fostered for years — those who enforce them are much harder to dodge. Identity — along with labels, tickets, etiquettes — is a terrain of secrets, exploitation and manipulation. And sometimes it’s punkier to cede control, to compromise over absolutes, to shut down on the totality and just chill.

Hopey discovers solo mindfuck spite won’t always function as a Force for Good, won’t generate the instant etiquette that concords with her unstated punk values. Yes, without Maggie she can get herself labelled however she chooses; but look who she has to get to do the labelling. And with physical assault on less agile friends comes the shattering of her belief that World Justice can always be called up merely by her self-absorbed dance of intuitive provocation, that atmosphere-charging badness alone will ever actually punish the rich and the powerful.

This dance, of directness and obliqueness, of posture and evasion, of obscure attack and sometimes startling tolerance, is the punk’s private argument with him/herself, only made public for specific and possibly irrelevant effects as it circles justification, legitimation and rationalisation: the sorting of the ‘good’ reason from the ‘true’. It has rules for the fun of feeling naughty when you later breaks them; it has rules (or anyway habits) whose entire purpose is to charge the atmosphere, which stick or change according to the effect they’ll have; it has rules so ludicrous they mock the whole notion of rules (punk close cousin to consensus S&M in this respect); it has rules to help one hurt or deny oneself; it has rules to smash through all limits of who one allows oneself (and who others allow one) to be. In this tangle — otherwise known as the rethinking of everything — Bad Faith is a constant companion. Bad Faith towards ourselves, that is — because who else is paying this much attention? [13]

Hopey’s ‘do the right thing’ is obliquely visible at best in the ordinary etiquette of Hopeyness. But even she knows from the outset that this particular adventure, this adventure in dodgy bonding, was always a cop-out, an easy option, a betrayal of self.

Hence her need for Maggie, absent centre of her self-satisfied self-absorption. For the dance only works its magic when Hopey’s comfortable with herself: and if Maggie isn’t comfortable with her, maybe she can’t be either.

Reluctant to impose a shape on the future, to be ruled by desire, hungry for new ways to relate, the couple had dissolved their world-of-two. To be two again would be to celebrate a success in the world’s eyes (their own, small, weird world); to cheer a small but significant win. And Punk is not, and cannot and must not be about winning, or even making shift to win.

In pursuit of ideals so constructed as to be unattainable — punk as the active embodiment of contradictions others disguise — your only friend is the knowledge of Bad Faith’s unavoidability. Knowledge that failure must always follow — that death is final, and planning futile — is what keeps us human. That success is always only ever a matter for the present; that there is no future; no life after death; no dashing prince or beautiful princess or funky proletariat come to shower happy-ever-after on us, no revolution to palm off responsibility for the consequences of my beliefs onto. To accept myself as a True Punk would be heaven indeed; to be a Punk Traitor is what makes me human, what keeps me sane. All punk codes were always intended to fail. Our failure is our essence. We only wanted not to need.

Shadow behind the heart

“The Sex Pistols sang ‘No Future’, but there is a future, and we’re trying to build one.”
—Pere Ubu’s Allen Ravenstein

“Know this, Emmanuelle: the future of the earth will be what your body’s power of invention makes it. If your dream should darken and your wings fold, if, by a strike of misfortune, your curiosity should falter, your insight and perseverance should fail, then that will be the end of Man’s hopes and changes: the future will be eternally like the past”
—Emmanuelle Arsan (Arsan, 1975, pp173-4)

“How often do we see a dress exquisite in all its parts, utterly ruined by the wearer, for instance, by the adoption of vulgar gloves!”
—The Etiquette of Modern Society, p.13: ‘Importance Of Adjuncts’

If the abomination of compromise that is ordinary coupledom is the only way to be an adult, then ye are to refuse adulthood.

Perhaps you assume I’m mad at the world for disrespecting my capabilities, my mind. That I veer constantly towards callous frivolity because I resent the neediness beneath the surface of respect. You can and will, wheedle the respectful, deliver. We look to you one day to save us.

And how’s this my job?

Passivity leans in here, and laziness, and narcissism — and fear, always fear, the bitter kindness of staying silent. Misplaced extrapolation? Ungrounded projection? Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. Vile Evils Are Vile Evils. No Future. No Future. No Future.

“None? are you sure? why?”

“Because in the morning I might find I went with the one who thinks identity is for life, not just for Christmas…” Concrete, To Self-Destruct.

This essay is dedicated to two that I lost: Rob Hind, whose code was far stricter and more self-effacing than mine (he took his life 12 years ago now, which hurts still and is not forgiven), and CJS, who more than anyone and despite all taught me enough about myself to inch out of unreal time at last. Most emerged from discussions in 1996/7 with AB, NB, CC, LF, KH, PH, NJ, NM, LN, COR, DQ, JR, BS, JS, JS, MS, RS, RS, BT, JT, BW and others, and with Colette of ‘Looks Yellow Tastes Red’ (who gave me permission to quote her and to reprint this Venn Diagram [scan to follow]). and Frank Kogan of ‘Why Music Sucks’. But it’s dedicated also to the girls of 14 Regent Street long ago — Steph, Cath, Zoe, Vicky — who I worshipped and envied and modelled myself on. Their absence — the living, the dead — made it harder to get this right, and far more important.

1: Not all translations/interpretations of Leviticus 18.22 are pretexts for extermination: otherwise rigorously Orthodox rabbis have argued that, since the "abomination" at issue is the unfruitful waste of semen, gay male seed-spillers can atone by adopting kids.
2: This phrase, with its bibilical root, was of course Aleister Crowley's notorious motto. In The Magic of My Youth, Arthur Calder Marshall's amiable memoir of Crowley's circle, Marshall wonders with amusement if any community defined by absolute freedom was ever so structured by petty taboos.
3: ‘The Shadow of Our Night’ is an afterword-update to Fowler’s much-anthologised 1972 howl of disillusionment, ‘Skins Rule’.
4: Straight Edge arose in reaction to LA Hardcore, which had been crazed, abandoned, suicidally self-indulgent. In December 1980, Darby Crash of The Germs injected a massive shot of pure heroin, to be found the following day, cruciform and dead, at just 22. With Minor Threat as flagbearer, non-coastal America cleaned up in the revolutionary name of punk—a higher, nobler path towards, well, what, exactly? (“Straight” itself meant drug-free rather than non-gay — to the celibate, GenderPref hardly signifies.)
5: The key issues are L&R #30-39, particularly the eight episodes of ‘Wig Wam Bam’.
6: Savage is quoting from New York’s Punk magazine, #3.
7: Named for a notorious t-shirt slogan Hell forced pretty-boy guitarist Richard Lloyd to wear round town, McNeil and McCann’s aural history of NY punk Please Kill Me rams the point home.
8: David Halperin, ‘More or Less Gay-Specific’, London Review of Books, 23.5.1996:
9: Homos, p59
10: Colette’s venn diagram is from Looks Yellow, Tastes Red #6
11: Interview in The Comics Journal #126, January 1989.
12: See for example Pat Califia’s Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex.
13: For a decade at least, Hopey functioned as my own projection of the asocial daring I still tend to punish myself for lacking. So I’m Maggie at heart — so fuck off.

©Mark Sinker 1999

Bibliography
Anon, (c.1900?), The Etiquette of Modern Society, Ward Lock & Co
Arsan E. (1995), Emmanuelle, Mayflower/Granada
Bersani, L. (1995), Homos, Harvard UP.
Califia, P. (1994), Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh, Cleis Press.
Colette, Looks Yellow Tastes Red #6, available, for $1 and a stamp, from PO Box 1275, Wellfleet MA 02667, US.
Eddie and the Hot Rods (1977), ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’, Island Records.
Fowler, P., ‘The Shadow of Our Night’, in Gillett C. and Frith S. (1996), The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader, London, Pluto Press
Fowler, P., ‘Skins Rule’, in Gillett C. and Frith S. (1996), The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader, London, Pluto Press
Hernandez G. and Hernandez J. (1982-96), Love and Rockets #1-50, Seattle, Fantagraphics Books.
Kogan, F., Why Music Sucks, available, for $7 or a written contribution, from [update address to be confirmed].
Marcus, G. (1989), Lipstick Traces, London, Secker & Warburg.
Marcus, G. (1994), ‘Marianne Faithfull: Fighting Hard & Losing’, Days Between Stations column, Addicted to Noise netzine, http://www.addict.com/issues/back.
McNeil, Legs, and McCann, Gillian (1996), Please Kill Me, London, Little, Brown.
Minor Threat (1981), ‘Straight Edge’, Minor Threat, Dischord Records.
Savage, J. (1991), England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London, Faber and Faber.
Siouxsie and the Banshees (1978), ‘Mirage’, The Scream, London, Polydor.
Subway Sect (1978), ‘Ambition’, Rough Trade Records.

On the Top Five Articles You Wrote Yourself page at rockcritics.com, I expanded a bit on the outro: “[Concrete was] written to convince myself of the uselessness of being in love with [xXx], and at the same time to persuade [xXx] — who was first to read it — to adore me. What’s wrong with it is also why it works, maybe: that I’m not always at all sure whose head I’m in. Not that it did ‘work’, at least in the hopeless, impossible sense of the first sentence.”