These Kids Today

I went to a poetry open mic night at my little sister’s college on Thursday. Being public about my personal writing is a new thing for me, here in this blog, and in reading aloud. To veterans of these events, it is a cliché that a different audience changes the meaning of piece. I don’t know enough not to be amazed by that fact.

The readings were quite good. Fascinating to me were the ones that were artifacts of the author's age and generation; not the same, yet not entirely different from my own. Several kids made fun of punk rock in a voice that made it obvious they were killing their idols. I don’t begrudge them this process, it is a necessary one. When a poem about a mohawked first love mocked the amount of money the author and his object spent on concerts and clothing, I pitied him for being born too late to know how much more it had been.

I loved punk rock once, too.  Oh, how my angsty heart broke when the scene ceased to be a utopia for angry freaks and geeks and became just another pretty thing stripped of meaning by commoditization. It is indeed lame to buy bondage pants at the mall and pay upwards of twenty dollars to see a band.  I happen to know what came before, though these kids are too young to remember.

At the beginning of my adolescence, when my sister and the abovementioned poet were not yet out of elementary school, I went to shows with the same hundred and fifty kids twice a week: in warehouses, in fire halls, sometimes in somebody’s parent’s basement or a county park. The bands were local high school students, the organizers the same. We gave voice to our age appropriate alienation with violent dancing, flailing, bouncing. Those rare times we held an all ages show at the local club, always weeknights so as not to interfere with the real music, you could jump off the stage and be caught by everyone there, could float above a crowd of bodies, anonymous hands pushing you in no direction, in every direction, until several somebodies helped you down. To be one of those anonymous hands was to find that a human being becomes weightless when held up by dozens of others. The magazines called it slam dancing, and I suppose it did look angry, but I was there. I know we kept our fists down or above our heads, never at person punching height. I know when somebody fell, the crowd backed up and made space and offered hands. I know what honest intimacy was born jumping and yelling in those cramped dark spots, staticy volume overwhelming our ears, pulsing directly into our bodies through the floor. Our souls broke open. We were not alone.

Among my five dear riot grrls, it was a given that each of us would have died for any of the others. We shoplifted makeup together: blue green black eyeliner lipstick nailpolish. That whole circle learned to smoke and drink on the bridge behind Alice’s house, seduced guys at the mall who we imagined believed the lies we told them about out ages. Lovely bright colors were slathered on each other’s faces, nails and, most importantly, our hair, in well planned ritual fashion. Safety pins pushed into our flesh in lieu of the sterile piercing we were not allowed. The secrecy of it all only enhanced the magic. It was such glorious trouble to turn our heads the color of grass or of the sky, to have metal bits in our skin. Long notes and poems full of love and rage and fear passed urgently between us. We determined to conquer the pain with art. I haven't known a tribe like that since. Threats came from every direction; boys and adults might hurt us anytime, but the five of us were each other’s spines.

Later, in college, I would stumble across the phrase Dionysian ecstasy while reading Nietsche and be taken back, would have a brainy way to talk about it, but by that time it had been long gone for several years.

Maybe some good came out of my harbor in a storm becoming so popular it turned into a place I could no longer love. Maybe spreading the subculture’s values was worth diluting the opportunity to experience them. Lost, though, was the emphasis on process over product, how craftsmanship was once totally out of the equation. DIY was an acronym not about home repair for us, but about creating a community where the act of making raw clumsy art was recognized to be more nourishing than consuming something perfectly polished. When we poured unlikely colors through our tresses, we belonged to ourselves; we redefined beauty on our own terms. Fundamentally, it never was about the piercings or the hair or the clothes, nor the sex and drugs; it wasn’t even about the music. We could have been writing code or planting gardens instead of playing songs; later, some of us were. The important thing was to find our voices, to do it together, to build something all our own.

Everybody supposes the era of their adolescence was the best one in which to be a teenager, but I look at kids only a few years younger than me, and I am grateful to have known what they can only imagine.

Comments

['mouse]

Thanks for writing that. Not only was it beautiful, but it also did a good job describing part of the essence of my teenagehood. Different but similar in many ways. I've been looking for time to put some of it in words, but my construction projects are currently more urgent.

[e]

mine too. and mine was two generations ago, in San Francisco in the 60s. you'd never know it wasn't exactly the one you describe, but instead after school in golden gate park, dancing along with the krishnas and the angels on a thursday afternoon.

[Keith]

"..but the five of us were each other’s spines."

I like that.

I'd love to jump on the reminiscent bandwagon with the rest of you, just to hang out, but my own youth was much different somehow. But the way you describe it, the time, yourself, makes me think I would have followed you around like a puppy. You would have lied to me and, dammit, I would have believed you.

[dena]

I loved reading your thoughts today. I was in my late teens when punk hit in the late 70s. I can remember the stares the punk rock kids got, the fear that you could see in some people's eyes. I was on the edge of the movement and mainly into the music, but many of my friends were much more into the entire lifestyle. I loved the entire movement, and especially the energy of those early shows. It was nothing less than phenomenal.

[grudknows]

Dammit! I think I'm becoming somewhat of a fan. :)

[julia]

so are you saying you're a beatnik?
I don't think poetry is as valued today as it once was...unless it is the form of song lyrics.

Your post makes me think of Mike Myers doing his standup poetry routines in 'so I married an ax murderer.'

Harriet
Harr-i-et
Hard hearted harbinger of hagus
beautiful, bemused, belicose butcher
un-trust-ing
un-knowing-ing
un-love-ed?

He wants her back he screamed into the night air like a fireman going to a window that HAS no fire...except the passion of his heart.

[yellojkt]

I was way more of a preppie slacker than a punk but I loved (and still love) the Clash. Now my kid listens to them much to the chagrin of my wife that could barely tolerate them the first time around.

I'd like to think that my adolescence (late 70s and early 80s) was one of the worst times to be a teenager. The music sucked, fashions were awful, and the Reagan years made the 50s look like Woodstock.

[Lindsay]

Hi. Triscuits and Joetella up in this apartment. (The jury's still out on that, btw)

"We shoplifted makeup....urgently between us."

That was my adolescence, too, only I haven't been able to salvage any theory or worthwile motivation behind it all.

For us [me], I think it was more about self-destruction for its own sake than any kind of expression or survival instinct.

And though I assume we looked the same, I never got into the punk thing. I always perceived the majority of any group of people as morons that I didn't want to be affiliated with. But I was growing up on Long Island, you know. They mostly were.

And I am really, really glad it's over.