Punkademicse Basement Show in the Ivory Tower

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TPunkademicse Basement Show in the Ivory Tower Edited by Zack Furness Minor Compositions 2012 Punkademics Edited by Zack Furness ISBN 978-1-57027-229-5 http://punkademics.com Interior design by Margaret Killjoy Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Cover images by Rubén Ortiz-Torres & Haduhi Szukis Released by Minor Compositions Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] Contents Introduction: Attempted Education and Righteous Accusations ....................5 ‘Cause I Wanna Be… PhD? ................ 25 Turning Point ................................... 27 Punk Ethics and the Mega-University .............. 37 Milo Went to College............................49 On Becoming a Punk Rock Sociologist............. 57 Finding Balance in the Academy ...................65 Punk Rock Docs ................................. 67 Punk Theory Mix Tape, Side A ...........89 MAXIMUMSOCIALSCIENCE . 91 Building Recording Studios Whilst Bradford Burned:..................... 105 Growing Up Clichéd ............................. 125 Punk Pedagogy:.................................131 Her Life Was Saved By Rock and Roll: ............. 143 Punk Theory Mix Tape, Side B ...........155 L.A.’s ‘White Minority’: ........................... 157 The Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s ....................... 179 Mexipunx ...................................... 187 Punk Places: ...................................203 Afterword .....................................217 Author Bios ................................... 225 Zack Furness Attempted Education and Righteous Accusations: An Introduction to Punkademics The position being taken is not to be mistaken for attempted education or righteous accusation. -Operation Ivy, “Room Without a Window” I think the moment at which I realized I was actually turning into a college professor was not on the frst day I taught a class in 1999, but when I was listening to an old Operation Ivy tape about a year later and found myself wanting to sit the band’s singer, Jesse Michaels, down to have a frank discussion. Specifcally, I wanted to ask him why, in a song written to both illuminate the politics of ideology (“walls made of opinions through which we speak and never listen”) and express the need for open-mindedness and self-refexivity, would he choose to intentionally denounce the educational function of his lyrics from the outset? Not being a complete idiot nor un- familiar with the band, I obviously realized that the song “Room Without a Window” (quoted above) was penned by Michaels when he was in his late teens, which is around the time when years of schooling and top-down authority have unfortunately succeeded at the task of turning education – or at least the compulsory, state-sanctioned version – into something 6 punkademics from which young people want to run; I imagine all the more so for the sizeable number of kids in the late ‘80s East Bay (California) punk scene whose parents, like Michaels’s dad, were college professors. But whether the lyric intentionally gestures in this direction or is self-consciously ironic is hardly the issue. Indeed, even if the frst line just sounded cool when he wrote it, the point here is that I wasn’t singing along, tapping out the beat (as ex-drummers are annoyingly prone to do), or even just engaging in the kind of run-of-the-mill lyrical analysis that has been the bread and butter for both punk fanzine writers and music journalists for over three decades. Rather, it’s that I was busy concocting some bizarre scenario in my head that, if allowed to play out in real life, would have undoubtedly translated into the world’s most boring and pedantic conversation with one of my punk heroes. As if it didn’t feel weird enough to catch myself pursuing this rather strange line of hypothetical inquiry at the breakfast table one morning, the sensation was heightened when I also realized, perhaps for the frst time, that my own internal monologue was now being structured around concepts and jargon from my graduate seminars. Since when, I thought to myself, did I start to throw around – let alone think with – phrases like “illuminate the politics of ideology”? Was I becoming the kind of person who ends up nonchalantly remarking upon the “narrative tensions” in a Jawbreaker song? Or using the word oeuvre to describe Bad Brains’s dis- cography? Was I heading down a path where I would eventually not even be able to go for a bike ride without theorizing it?1 Just then, as if the uni- verse wanted to accent the point in as cartoonish a manner as possible, I narrowly avoided stumbling over my cat while rising from the table, and I managed to spill half a mug of cofee onto the stack of student papers I had been grading. Muttering to one’s self? Check. Cofee stained papers? Check. Analyzing one’s music collection through the lenses of critical pedagogy and rhetorical theory? Check. Shabby outft? Certainly. Di- sheveled hair and of kilter eyeglasses? Indeed. Exhibiting behaviors that one might objectively identify as ‘wacky’ or ‘nutty’? Check. It was ofcial. All I needed now, I thought to myself, was the kind of jacket where the patches are sewn nicely onto the elbows instead of silk screened and stitched across the back with dental foss. Elbow Patches and Back Patches Twelve years later I still don’t have one of those professorial tweed jackets, though I did manage to attain the job, the eccentricities, and the shock of salt-and-pepper hair that would compliment one quite nicely. Attempted Education and Righteous Accusations 7 And despite my initial anxieties over the prospects of compromising my then-entrenched punk ethics by turning into a stufy academic, I actually ended up spending more time playing in bands and participating in vari- ous aspects of DIY punk culture as a graduate student and eventual professor than I did when I was younger. While far from seamless, I’ve often seen the relationship between these two ‘worlds’ as dialectical, though at frst this mainly consisted of scrutinizing every new set of readings and concepts I learned in school through my own increasingly politicized worldview: a punk subjectivity that I fancied as something of a “bullshit detector.” But fairly quickly, though, my immersion in critical theory, cultural studies, feminism and political theory started to help me hold up a mirror to sub-/countercultural politics and to generally unpack some of the bullshit that is often embedded within our own bullshit detectors, as it were. Part of what facilitated this process, aside from personal experi- ence and the guidance of some older friends, was getting exposed to the broader gamut of political punk and hardcore and to the range of writers, teachers, artists and activists who, in publications like Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Maximumrocknroll (MRR), Clamor and Stay Free!, not only connected many of the issues and concerns I’d previously encountered within diferent spheres, they also complicated and problematized (in the good way) a lot of my taken for granted assumptions about punk and the proliferation of ideas in general. It was through these channels – DIY punk and DIY publishing – as opposed to the classroom, that the relationships between politics, popular culture, education, and everyday life frst started to make sense to me.

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