Gawker
Punk houses have finally been classed up and commodified! Not only in a book of fancy photos by a SELL-OUT 29-year-old artist who documented life in 42 punk houses for purchase and prominent display on your fancy mahogany coffee table in your comfortable, single-family home or apartment full of professionals found on Craigslist, but also in a lengthy Times "Home & Garden" section plug of said book, which will help explain the entire concept to your grandmother. We were going to follow that with a representative, forehead-slapping line, but an entire paragraph jumped out at us as too hilarious to break up, so we'll just stick the whole thing after the jump (Ron Paul).
The punk house is a curious and sometimes beautiful habitat, the expression of a music scene and do-it-yourself culture that went underground decades ago, in an attempt to opt out of just about everything that smacked of the mainstream: cities, clubs, bars, alcohol, processed foods, agribusiness and the record companies, for example, not to mention all media larger than a photocopied zine. With its roots in old-fashioned counterculture communes (like Findhorn in Scotland, but really messy, and with a thrash-hardcore beat), the punk house is a multifunctional dwelling: typically a place for like-minded males in their 20's to live and to make and hear music. This is not to say that there aren't all-female punk houses (there are) or ones with girls living among the boys. As with punk itself, the punk house eludes a tidy definition. "Punk Is (Whatever We Made It To Be)" is the title of a song from the Minutemen, a punk band in the early '80s.
Also Thurston Moore was once sneered at in a Minneapolis punk house for wearing "a nice winter parka."
Comments
Harder core than thou for a year or two, then it's time to get a real job.
- J. Biafra
Fookin' hell. Who ate all my Easy-Off?
"Apartment full of professionals found on Craigslist" what?
So that's what they're calling "shitholes" these days. Crazy kids.
So, then, the bum-infested entrance to the abandoned porn theater near my house is a "punk campground"?
Oh, Gerald, look at the darling little man in the corner with the needle up his arm trying to tune his guitar in the buff! That's it--I am sold. We MUST buy this house.
do people who live the punk lifestyle still use the word 'punk'? it seems a little too mainstream.
I went on a Punk Safari once and it was just so great to see them running wild in their natural habitat.
norpunk
I am available later to explain the phrase "photocopied zine" to everyone born in the '80s.
Yet they haven't run a single word on Emily and Michelle.
Difference between this and Freegans?
Writing "burn" on the stove screams "hipster irony," not "punk." Nice try, though.
"As with punk itself, the punk house eludes a tidy definition."
What a clunker of a sentence. Dear God, I miss Johnny Apple.
Back in the day we used to just call it a 'band house' and they were usually totally depressing vortexes of shit and failure...although much like everything ungerground in the past 30 years, this aesthetic will soon be sterilized, packaged and sold at your local Urban Outfitters when they turn in to the Home Depot for the new breed of consumhipsters. Pre-graffiti'd vintage diswashers are on aisle 8 next to the pre-scruffed 70's style linoleum. Punk is whatever it is sold to be.
No punk house is complete without a bitchin' Camaro.
Saw a stop on her book tour. Pretty uncomfortable...
@mathnet: I think it's a Casual Encounters reference?
@Tammany_Fall: No, it screams a warning from the previous owner.
Scribbling "burn burn burn" on the stove reminds of Jeffrey McDonald's scribbling "acid is groovy. Kill the pigs" on the wall of the apartment where he just slaughtered his family, the idea being to blame hippies.
Hope we can rely on you not to use shower
you're not keeping tub caulked
caused both downstairs bath ceilings and
walls to be soggy -Take Five, D, Minutemen
@SarahHeartburn: It's just one word away from "Disco Inferno," and thus highly suspect.
If he printed and bound the books himself, that would be pretty punk.
Emily and Michelle are offended by this misogeny.
And we want to know what Douglas thinks as well.
Did the article mention anything about Ragtime? Has Ragtime sold out too? Because I live in a Ragtime house and I can't believe it would no longer be considered stylish.
It's encouraging to think that if I ever followed through on any of my seemingly useless project ideas, perhaps I too could make the pages of The Times. I can't decide whether to apply my energies to (1) a coffee table book documenting the paper's periodic use of the word "scurf" or (2) a lending institution inspired by the curious phrase "art-house alt-punk bank Sonic Youth."
@KimGordonsPanties: printed on human flesh. That's punk!
I, myself, live in an Oom-pah-pah house.
Punk rock died when the first kid said, "Punk's not dead. Punk's not dead."
@Itsjustcatnip: Learn how to type- twat.
So that's Fall Out Boy's native habitat. With a little wainscoting, it would be downright charming!
I just loved this: "The rent is $1,000, which Ms. Banks collects from her studio mates (there are about 20, living and working in rooms called Shantytown and Vegetable Street). When the rent collection comes up short, they have a show, Ms. Banks said, or sell T-shirts."
Uh, I don't have my 40 bucks this month either, but I've been working on my navel lint dream catcher and it's sorta ready so we could try to sell it or something...
@tammyfey: Ha. I'm sorry, but these "punks" are one Bennington degree away from "Performance Art House."
"You know what punkers don't do? Call themselves 'punkers.'"
@tammyfey: even more evidence... profitability stemming from artistry. these people aren't punk, they're whores. cheap whores, but whores nonetheless.
Looking more carefully at that picture, the "burn burn burn" looks PhotoShopped and there's an impressive, neatly arranged spice shelf in the background. Oh, and in the center there, is that a nice gift-wrapped bottle of wine or is that part of the window treatment?
I just bought a late-90s boy band house, and my pubic region has never been smoother!
@Michael Jahn: Yes, luckily we can always blame hippies. I'm sure some stinky fucker with polenta crumbs in his beard and Rusted Root vinyl in his homemade messenger bag is responsible in some way for any ill you can name.
Rent? Pfft. A true punk house is a squat.
@Michael Jahn: Wine is totally punk if you drink enough of it and then puke. But gift-wrapping I guess isn't all that punk.
Once again, David Foster Wallace's dog's loss is the world's gain.
@Michael Jahn: All I can say is that my squatter/punk friends have better taste than to approve of Two Buck Chuck as a hostess gift. Maybe they're part of some foodie-punk sub-subculture, or maybe. . . punk's dead.
@KimGordonsPanties: You have to puke ON the person interviewing you for the Home & Garden section.
@JesusKong:
or "punk rockers."
@Hez:
A true punk house really is a squat and even in my most fucked up years, you still couldn't pay me to sleep or bathroom in one of them.
Guess I sold out to the Tidy Bowl Man.
I gift wrapped a bottle of Boone's Farm Apple Wine once, but the recipient was a jazz singer who lived on fillet of iceberg lettuce and salt & pepper soup.
I liked this tortured metaphor: "And despite the profound grunge of the punk-house milieu, her photos are never tragic: they reveal a focused, almost manic energy, like a straight-edge song." straight edge is not a genre.
Thurston Moore is a nice and modest person; f*ck those brats and their pretentious dwellings. Although I will say punk houses do keep squatters out of your own house (at least I wish they had for the winter of 2005). Angry muttered cursing (I wonder where they bought that stove).
@Tammany_Fall: Apparently, the Common Ground, a collective restaurant in Brattleboro and pretty much the epicenter of Crunchy Purple Hippiedom, had a cockroach infestation a few years ago. A proposed solution was that there would be a talking circle, in which the worker-owners would gently and non-judgmentally urge the roaches to move elsewhere.
@hiredgoons: and to be fair, perhaps he needed the puffy jacket to protect him from the sting of all that deliberate irony inherent in a snotty vegan wearing a leather jacket with a Dead Kennedys logo.
@JesusKong: ExACTly: youtube
fucking brainless idiots
Looks like a wonderful place to throw a New Years Eve party.
punkz a funny word
When I lived in the same house as my bandmates (and assorted girlfriends and/or boyfriends), we had a strict policy of not allowing in anyone who used the following terms in description of their own houses:
-Cooperative
-Collective
-Non-profit
-Organic
But then again, we mostly just lived together so we'd be able to pool our money for beer, steak and drugs. Then, we'd beat the crap out of each other.
the word punk was used only 7 times in that pointless description.
that in itself is, in fact, not punk.
I remember when me and like-minded males would sit in the basement, burning things, listening to thrash-hardcore anti-agribusiness songs, and making photocopies of our zine... then we would take our zines and go and drop them off of interstate overpasses. Then we would go back home and vomit all night long. Listening to thrash-hardcore. Always always to thrash-hardcore.