DIY & Travis Nichols…

I haven’t read the book Punk Rock Etiquette: The Ultimate How-To Guide for DIY, Punk, Indie and Underground Bands, I just stumbled across it while searching “DIY” on amazon.com (research purposes). It caught my eye with it’s (oxy)moronic title and badly-faux spray paint & stencil cover. Found in the youth section, it is a DIY guide for kids on how to start bands, tour, make stickers, etc.

It would appear that Travis Nichols is just trying to help kids out.  With sections like “Posse Up,” on the different types of people one may find in one’s band, he separates persona’s into stereotypes such as “the rich kid,” and “the poor kid.” Stating that the latter tend to “give a band cred, and they’re REALLY into music.” (8, emphasis his). And perhaps this is all to anger the kids at the way they have been boxed into two sentences delineated with a set of pros and cons for their assigned character and in the end they will just do what they want, which is the point of DIY. But that sounds like a lot of credit to give a book that seems unnecessarily appropriated and obnoxious.

Jameson Passage…

“But I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here. The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings. I think this writing is a way of doing that or at least of trying to. Its science-fictionality derives from the secret method of this genre: which in the absence of a future focuses on a single baleful tendency, one that it expands and expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which we are trapped into innumerable shards and atoms. The dystopian appearance is thus only the sharp edge inserted into the seamless Meobius strip of late capitalism, the punctum or preceptual obsession that sees one thread, any thread, through to its predictable end.” (76)

“Future City”, New Left Review. 21 May/June 2003. Oxford: Alden Press. 66-79.

Not Related: Cory Arcangel

pretty sweet project of recent past:

 http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2003/mario_clouds_2005.html

 

perhaps peripherally related to DIY culture. totally. 

Faith Wilding on my graduate career….

She said she was really glad I was doing what I was doing!!!