Punktuation ¡@#$%!
When I was an aspiring punk, still wet behind the ears, I wrote a fanzine to distribute at shows and leave at the local record shops and bookstores and coffeehouses.
The idea was simple. To apply the transgressive spirit of punk to language itself, to upend linguistic assumptions, to disorganize the textual conventions, to break with inherited traditions and start anew, with a blank sheet of paper, as it were.
I found a part-time job at the local photocopy shop, a Kinkos, and got to work with my paper-cutters and hole-punchers and colored cardstock. I walked around town with little pieces of paper in my hair and a Kinkos keycard in my back pocket.
When I wasn’t on the clock, nametag pinned to the front of my apron, you could find me at the local coffeehouse, the Leavenworth Café, at the seat by the window, where I put their policy of twenty-five refills under maximum pressure. A fixture, everyone knew me. And, like the dusty houseplants on the windowsill, they tended to overlook me, obsessed as I was with the task at hand, filling the pages of my notebook with punk poetry. Somewhere around the third cup, my handwriting would start to get jittery. Exalted, my flights of fancy would grow progressively higher until, floating in the upper atmosphere, they lost sight of the ground altogether.
The easy part was knowing what not to do. I didn’t want to follow the usual format of the fanzine. No album reviews, no columns, no interviews, no photos of shows, no shirtless lead singers and sweaty guitarists and fist-waving front row fans. No, the punk part of the zine wasn’t to be found in the content but rather in the form.
The first thing to go, then, was punctuation. No capital letters, all lowercase, especially the first person singular subject pronoun, no longer more important than the rest. No periods: simple spaces and line breaks would have to do. And, why fret over the correct usages of the semi-colon or its evil twin, the hyphen, when you can dispense with them altogether?
The only punctuation mark left standing was the comma. For obvious reasons. It was the most democratic, the most playful, the most punk. It did not discriminate between parts of speech and phrases but gave them all equal importance, brought them all together in one big messy mosh pit of fragments.
The hard part, with so many prohibitions, with so little left standing, was knowing what to write. I knew I wanted a poetry section, not the usual roses and thorns, the swans and moons, but something true to the aesthetics and politics of punk. I had been writing compulsively, making a mess of language, keeping notebooks of something resembling poetry, barely legible, for some time, back before The Great Debacle even, before I cut ties with my past life, escaped under the cover of darkness in a hooded sweatshirt, and washed up on the shores of the Branson punk scene.
I had been working on a method that rejected all confessionalism and insisted instead on a constructivist approach that built a poem around a single image composed of the right details. Whatever story there was to tell, whatever message there was to communicate, whatever tensions and their respective resolutions would necessarily have to be relegated to the background, like bones showing beneath the skin, accessible only through the details, if at all.
I had written a poem, for example, about the experience of going on tour with Lana Rebel’s band. The central image was a lug nut, nestled in the gravel on the side of the highway, camouflaged among the weeds and shards of grass, difficult to locate. The currents of air from the big rigs caused the leaves of the weeds to quiver frenetically.
Early in the tour, late for a show, we had a blowout on an isolated stretch of highway. As the roadie and the person driving at the time, it was understood that it was my responsibility to change the tire. Fair enough, I supposed. The car jack and lug wrench were easy to locate. Once sufficiently elevated, the flat tire came off effortlessly. When I was putting on the spare, though, I couldn’t find the last nut. I scanned the shoulder on the road around me, but there was no lug nut in sight.
Everything had gone smoothly, and it seemed like we were going to make it to the show, until this whole business of the missing lug nut. Naturally, my thoughts went straight to the worst-case scenario. We would have to cancel the show! Perhaps the rest of the tour! The blood sped up in my veins. My breathing quickened. My movements became jerky, panicked. I retraced my steps to the back of the van. Still no luck. I could feel the tension mounting, my heart pounding, rattling its cage, as I ventured off the shoulder of the road into the gravel. There was broken glass and Bermuda grass. There was burro-weed and puncturevine. I rooted and rummaged. I hemmed and hawed and huffed. I walked in circles and then got on my hands and knees and crawled around. Just when I was about to give up and drive away with only four of the five lug nuts, putting all of us in danger, band and roadie alike, I found it, hiding in plain sight. Evidently, it had fallen and rolled down the sloped shoulder into the thicket and nestled into the gravel among so much other random debris. As I motioned to recover the lug nut, not without some residual desperation, a crow took flight from the branches of a nearby Spanish Alamo. It rained cuss words down on me as it flew overhead. I had the distinct feeling that, having witnessed the whole scene, the crow wasn’t merely cawing but scoffing at my lack of composure. It had been secretly rooting for the lug nut all along, rooting for its valiant attempt to escape from its narrow utilitarian function, as determined by the humans, in all their irritating nervousness, perpetual motion, and lack of composure.
For the poem, the image of the stray lug nut would have to be enough. How was the reader to arrive, from there, to the experience of almost missing a show on tour? For better or worse, the question didn’t interest me much. The reader could infer the flat tire and a road trip but would have to fill in the rest of the gaps with her own associations and interpretations. It would have to be enough.
The poem, however, wasn’t the whole story. The poetry section was to have a specific format, tailored to the founding principles of the zine. The text of the poem would be written around the edges of the page, in the shape of a picture frame. The rectangle at the center of the page was to remain blank. This form was intended to make the very countercultural point that punk zines, as a discursive genre, were a form of writing from the margins, those of literature, of the culture industry, of society at large. As such, the poetry section was to be named ‘marginalia.’
The nonfiction section, for its part, was designed to figure less prominently. Going by the title, “the view from the merch table,” it would be based on the experience of working the merch table for Lana Rebel’s band. I also had a small book distribution which I set up at the back of the venue at local shows. Sunk in the shadows, relegated to the sideline, I grew accustomed to observing the scene from this point of view, inside and out at the same time. The centerstage point of view was common currency in the punk scene at large. Zine editors interviewed band members, who recounted time and again their experiences. Audiences, it seemed, never tired of hearing the same story, of seeing things from the same point of view, so I figured it was time to mix things up, to introduce a different perspective.
As far of the content of the section, it was intended as commentary on the scene and a contribution to the debates that raged in its ranks. What did it mean to sell out? What practices fell under the umbrella term of ‘punk’? We all agreed that punk was more than music, but there was little consensus on the political and aesthetic ideologies that underpinned it. Part musical genre, part protest, part social movement, part lifestyle, part mode of cultural production, defining punk was an impossible endeavor, which is precisely what make it such fertile ground for a nonfiction section.
By approaching some of these issues from the point of view of the merch table, I hoped to provide a skewed perspective that could defamiliarize the dogmas of punk. Unfortunately, the founding formal constraints of the zine, that is, its prohibition of conventional orthography and punctuation made the resulting mass of text all but unintelligible. With no logical connections between the clauses, just one long stream of phrases coordinated by the almighty comma, the arguments bled together into one undigestible syntactic and semantic knot of language. The cognitive demand required to untangle such a knot was a lot to ask my readers, too much apparently, as I was soon to discover.
Naturally, the zine would not be complete without a grandiose political gesture. At the photocopy shop, I printed out quotes from the speeches of politicians, starting with the easiest targets, Reagan and Thatcher. Unsheathing my X-acto knives and gluesticks, I got to dissecting the texts, rearranging the words, rehabilitating them, assembling them into political and aesthetic artifacts that betrayed their original intent. “the ten most terrifying words in the English language are: the ten most terrifying words in the human language are: the ten most terrifying words in the English language are…” I looped Reagan’s quip until it covered the entirety of a page. It was no longer the object of his ire that was terrifying but the act, committed in bad faith, of designating it as an object of contempt. The statements of Thatcher proved just as easy to profane. TINA could be rearranged as There Is No Acronym or Thatcherism Is No Answer. The slogan, “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families,” became commentary on her foreign policy: “there is no such thing as The Falkland Islands, only imperialism and multinational corporations.” The possibilities were endless. A few hours of distraction at work could produce more than enough material for an issue.
The rest was filler, a few pages of photos interspersed among the other sections. I took the photos myself at the shows at the local punk venue, the Downtown Performance Center, a warehouse down by the tracks that, during the day, served as the studio of its founder, Steve Eye, a local sculptor. Shortly after washing up on the shores of Branson and moving into the Peterbilt House, the local squat named after Guy Picciotto’s label, I found a Nikon F3 at the Value Village. Lisa Rebel, Lana’s sister, showed me how to use it. She didn’t live at the Peterbilt House but spent a lot of time there, on the back porch with the rest of us. She knew about all types of things, not least of which was photography. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, she explained it all to me in a few sessions at the trainyard. In no time, I was ready to start documenting shows.
Before setting to the task, though, I decided to lay down some guidelines. Band members were only to figure in the photos obliquely. As much as possible, singers and guitar players would be off limits. They already had enough exposure. Drummers and bass players were fair game, as long as they appeared out of focus or off to the side somewhere. The focus would be elsewhere, on different aspects of the experience of attending a show. The foreground would be reserved for mic stands, duct tape, patch cord, stacked amps, the sound board, drum hardware, milkcrates, the merch table, roadies, random people in the audience, the person working the front door that night, the person behind the pushbroom, all the things that make a show a possible and normally don’t appear in the pictures. I swore that, if I ever did an interview, it would be with someone like Steve Eye or Nadia, the sound engineer. Without their efforts, there would be no Branson punk scene. Yet, somehow, they went almost entirely unnoticed.
Once the formal questions were resolved and the plan was in place, the rest was easy. I had enough material in my notebooks for several issues. Lisa Rebel had access to the dark room at the community college and was developing the prints as soon as I finished shooting the rolls. I took care of all the formatting and printing at my day job. The first issue was finished in a matter of weeks.
Hot off the press, I left copies all around town, in all the punk hot spots. There was a stack on the merch tables at the shows with a little sign that read “free of charge,” and “read at your own risk.” I left a copy on the amp in the practice room of the Peterbilt House and another one in the kitchen, which was by far the most heavily trafficked common space of the squat. I even went so far as to sneak one onto Lana Rebel’s nightstand. The approval of someone of her standing in the scene would ensure a positive reception. I did everything to get the word out, everything except confess to having written it. I was far too shameful, far too insecure for that, not even Lisa Rebel knew what was afoot. I preferred that the zine remain anonymous, so that I could disavow it if need be.
Convinced that I had lit a fuse, all that left was to run for cover and wait for the explosion. It never came. A week passed. Two. A month. Nothing. Not a blip on the radar. One night, after the Christie Front Drive show, we were all in the kitchen when one of the Kelly brothers, the bearded one, turned to me and said, “hey, pass me that zine.” Finally, I thought to myself. “What? This one?” I held up my zine in the air for everyone to see. When I passed the zine his way, the Kelly brother folded it in half and slipped it under his beer bottle to use as a coaster.
I put out several more issues, always with the same hope that the zine would make a big splash and ruffle some feathers and spark intense debates throughout the scene. I had braced myself for rejection but hadn’t foreseen that there was something worse, indifference.
All of that changed when I got what I sensed was going to be my Big Break.
Nina, one of my roommates at the Peterbilt House, had a sister, Madeleine, who was dating Aaron Cometbus, considered by myself and so many other punks to be the best prose writer the scene had produced. Madeleine worked as an editor for City Lights books in San Francisco, which is how she met Aaron Cometbus. City Lights had been looking to convince Aaron Cometbus to do a book version of his zine with them, from issue #24 onward, ditching his coverage of bands and focusing instead on his novellas and essays on counterculture. Madeleine had a degree in literature and had heard of Aaron Cometbus from Nina, but she had never read any of his work herself, until she was assigned to the project. They met in the Mission District that first time and soon discovered that they shared much more than a love for literature. They had been dating for a few months when Madeleine announced that she was going to visit her sister, Nina, in Branson. A fan of the Desert Southwest and never one to turn down a road trip, Aaron Cometbus offered to accompany her, which is how they both ended up at the Peterbilt House.
Nina was nonchalant about the whole thing. Over hashbrowns and coffee in the kitchen, she made an offhand comment about her sister and Aaron Cometbus coming to stay for the weekend. It certainly wasn’t unusual to have punk fellow travelers stay at the Peterbilt House, but I had trouble wrapping my head around the concept. “Stay?” I was stuttering. Nina gave me a sideways glance. “Yeah, stay, why?” “No, no, nothing, yes, sure, of course, stay.”
I had an impulse to confess my admiration for Cometbus, a punk version of hero worship, but I thought better of it. I couldn’t expose myself like that. So, I opted for the safer option. I changed the subject. “So, read any good zines lately?”
I cancelled my shifts at the copy shop that weekend. Unofficially a part of the welcoming committee, I hovered from one common space to another of the Peterbilt House until that moment when the front door swung out and Madeleine stormed in, regal, more stage presence than Billy Joel, with Aaron Cometbus draped on her arm. I almost fainted.
Nina and Madeleine, I was sure, had catching up to do. Meticulous about keeping his travelogue up to date, Aaron Cometbus was whispering secrets into his notebook on the front porch. No one objected when I offered to make the meal, a vegan recipe that I kept up my sleeve for special occasions. Bought in advance, all the ingredients were waiting patiently in the refrigerator.
Cooking was my comfort zone. Before the copy shop, I had worked as prep cook in a few local kitchens, most notably the one of Terra Cota, one of Branson’s more avant-garde restaurants. There, I learned a thing or two about sauces and acquired decent knife skills, which came in handy for cooking for get-togethers at the Peterbilt House.
Lured by the smell, the visitors wandered into the kitchen just as the tofu was coming out of the oven. Nina set the table while I plated the dish. The conversation, over dinner, went from Branson to the Bay Area and back again, covering all the juiciest gossip. By the time the food was cold, I knew who had sold out, when, and in what way; I knew which bands had broken up and why; in short, I knew all the had been going on at 924 Gilman St, the epicenter, so close to Branson, geographically speaking, and yet so far, in terms of countercultural prestige. The conversation had covered all the bases, except one: new zines. I had been squirming in my seat, trying to figure out how to broach the topic. Petrified, incapable of self-promotion, I watched as the opportunity came and went. Plates empty, the guests complimented the dish. Nina went over to the window to smoke. Madeline cleared the table. Aaron Cometbus washed the dishes. Not sure what else to do, I swept the floor, though it didn’t really need sweeping.
I was still leaning on the broom when the Nina and her guests filed of the Peterbilt House. They had a busy schedule, a long list of people to see, scenesters and family members alike. I still had a copy of my zine in the side pocket of my cargo pants. I took it out and unfolded it but didn’t recognize it as my own. It stared back at me as an alien force, a menace. It was almost as if, flipping through the pages, I was seeing it for the first time.
The poetry was not so much challenging as it was unintelligible. It was not poised on the edge, which was the effect that I had been aiming for, but had fallen into the abyss. The prose was not light-footed and vibrant and playful but dry and strained and stiff. I tried to imagine what I would say if I had to write a review of the same exact zine, as if I were encountering it for the first time, as a reader, not the writer. I would be forced to say things like, “an oddity” or “not for everyone” or “perhaps not worth the effort.” Or, if I were in a more generous mood, I might say something like, “perhaps there is something here, but I’m not quite sure what it is.”
I leaned the broom against the wall. Looking around the kitchen, it was hard to believe that it was my kitchen, the place where I cooked, in the squat where I lived. I was hard to believe that it was me who was living my life and not someone else, some intruder, an infiltrator, a double. The skin of my face got hot. I ran my hand through my hair, what was left of it. Then, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and ripped the zine in two.
Good thing I hadn’t given a copy to Aaron Cometbus! Good thing he didn’t review it for his zine or his column in Maximum Rock and Roll, the gold standard, the mothership of all punk zines! The fact that it had been overlooked by Branson punks were a blessing in disguise. I could now safely go back to how it was before, back in the days when I kept my writing to myself.
A plan started to come into focus. I would retreat into the pages of my notebook. Back to the proverbial drawing board, I would return to my seat by the window of the Leavenworth café and the bottomless cups of Joe, where I had my work cut out for me. Having pushed language to the point where it dissolves and it is no longer possible to say anything, I would have to inch back from the abyss, if I planned to survive. I would start with the concrete, the communicable, little scenes from The Scene, fragments of dialogue between punks, images from our movement, our lifestyle, our impossible project. I would get it right this time, put it all into words, everything that we were living, everything that we were trying to accomplish, whatever it was.
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