Against Punk

Here's my brilliant idea: the atavistic walkman.

Ingredients
1 handcranked eggbeater
1 stethoscope
1 wind-up phonograph head with functioning timpanum and needle
1 small gauge carriage bolt 4"-6" long
4 nuts
1 washer
1 free-spinning baring (to fit between cone and carriage bolt)
1 metal cone 2"-4" long and less than 1" at it's widest diameter
2 rubber wheels such as mouse balls or skateboard or heely wheels

remove beater basket/paddles from egg beater leaving support posts
run carriage bolt through center of eggbeater yoke (not yolk) and secure with nuts
use remaining nuts and...

AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS
the trouble is that the phonograph head needs a support. support it from the center post with a cap that simultaneously secures the record?
support it from below?

...in the end you'll be running around with sethoscope ear buds, cranking your favorite 78--might be good to have a full plate under it instead of just the spike. I don't know that the shellac could take the pressure...

One drunken summer night in a lower east side bar I shared this plan with my hipster-librarian-superhero friend. She said, "I hate to use this term, but that is so steam-punk"--a familiar phrase my students sometimes used but one I'd let pass by without asking for definition. So I went home and looked it up.

Steam = archaic
Punk = ...
And here's my problem. Given three chords, quick songs and the barest minimum of musical talent punk music would seem to be about simplicity, rock and roll haiku, but that asceticism is combined with all kinds of excess--excessive volume and speed (or lack thereof with bands like Codeine) and in the audience a phalanx of carefully disheveled, rebellious clothes set with cheap jewels of metal, leather and grease--it already seems atavistic, and that's just punk. Steam-punk is excessively atavistic as it fakes late 19th/early 20th century aesthetics and technology. What could be more old-fashioned than leather, metal and grease? Evidently it's steam, wood and brass.
Punk is kind of a perfect response to end-of-hippy days. As with all institutions the hippy movement gave up the ghost in a wash of excess. It's all fine and good to go back to the earth, learn to play indigenous, anti-establishment music and make war on war with flowers and songs but the long hair, flowery and flowing clothes do not lend themselves to working the land you've gone back to and they demand a lot of care and funding to create and maintain.

Punk rebelled against this by cutting off the hair, tossing out the crazy colors and patterns and the musical cognates in endless tripped-out solos. Our late 90s and early aughts got closer to our back-to-suburbia-land ideals, buying all our clothes second hand and letting the songs get a little longer. Of course the music was still excessive, maybe more so--to say nothing of the devolution of metal into pop-schlock with screamed vocals. And then came steam-punk--came and went.

Now I don't mean to suggest that the atavistic walkman is remotely simple. It's entirely excessive and unneccessary, but where steam-punk just puts a faux-brass jacket and fog machine over our 21st century goings-on at least the atavistic walkman has only atavistic parts and all of them functioning. It takes the old forms and updates them for our current, disconnected, transient lives. Of course it's inconvenient, but that's a cultural statement in itself. We must demand more discomfort because the world and our lives are utterly horrifying and made all the more so by our wallowing in willful blind comfort.

So pull some clothes off the rack--let the clothes do the work they need to do and no more. Try not to pay for the priviledge of advertising, even in irony. Pick up a guitar or harmonica or ukulele and teach yourself to play some quick, efficient songs. Don't Plug In. Play old songs fast. Conflate lyrics. Apply the hard edge of punk to the hard world lyricism of bluegrass and zydeco. Play reggae too slow. Check out Langhorne Slim and The War Eagles. They've got a shot at making this.

Don't contribute to the petroleum economy. Leave the vinyl and the polyester alone. Wear fabrics that make sense. Wool to contain heat, silk and tightly woven cotton to block wind. Leather to prevent abrasion. Buy clothes from the thrift shop.

Let us leave punk behind. Get on our bicycles and ride.