Sellout, Part One: Punk University

1.

Carrie, Fred, and I arrive early, before the other punks. There is a lot of work to do.

The bowling alley clearly doesn’t have a janitor. The place is a mess.

The floor is peppered with ash, crumpled cigarettes, bend butts, smeared here and there with traces of lip gloss.

The white plastic tables are covered in flyers, folded, crumpled, or uncreased, hot off the press, straight of the oven, which is to say the photocopier. They announce assemblies, protests, community actions, debate circles, reading groups, political and artistic interventions and happenings of all sorts.

There is also evidence of broken thermoses, not the expensive kind, made of stainless steel, but the more precarious variety, thin plastic on the outside with a reflexive glass insert. Along with the shards of glass, congregated in clusters at the foot of the white plastic tables and chairs, there are little blasts of yerba mate, like dozens of miniature green gunshot wounds on the burgundy-tinted cement floor.

Carrie rolls up her sleeves, which Fred and I interpret as a signal, a call to action. We do the same. It’s time.

We break off into your respective roles, three one-person task units.  

Fred wheels the monitors and speakers out from the storage closet and sets them up in the corner of the room, the space that corresponds to the last ten lanes of the bowling alley, darkened for the remainder of the evening, as previously arranged with the owners. He has brought his large olive-green duffle bag with him. It is full of gear: mics, mic stands, TRS cables, XLR cables, power cables, patch cords, and adapters.

Carrie drags one of the white plastic tables to the back wall, behind the space demarcated by Fred as the stage, though, physically speaking, there is no stage, no material object that constitutes a stage, just an empty space on the floor, big enough for the bands and their equipment. She will set up the soundboard on the top of the table. This will be her spot for the rest of the night, both the corner of the room and its center of irradiation, from the sound check through to the last chord, the last squeal of feedback, the last crackle of a loose cable. At the helm, she will steer us clear of the rocks, out past the surf, into the white-tipped waves, the massive and unpredictable swells. As always, we are in her hands.

My contribution is more menial but, hey, someone has to do it, right? I clean. First, I clear the space, the venue, or what will shortly become the venue, by the time we’re finished with our tasks. I do this by removing all the white plastic tables and chairs, by stacking them on top of one another and pushing them against the wall. Then there are the floors, all the little mounds of yerba, the shards of shattered thermos inserts, legions of discarded flyers, and the usual congregations of squished cigarette butts. Swept clear, I top it off with a round of mopping, a few capfuls of Pine-Sol in the mop mucket, broad strokes in figure eight with the mop head, just to spruce the place up.

I will repeat the ritual, naturally, after the show. First to arrive in the evening, last to leave at night. These are the exigences of the trade. Sometimes, when I really pick up momentum, I am unable to stop myself and do the rest of the bowling alley as well, the other half, where the bowling balls spin on waxed lanes and the pins crash into each thunderously. I put in a few finishing touches, a few flourishes, for the sake of artistry.  

Perhaps this is our secret, the basis of our pact with the bowlers, the secret to our symbiosis. We get our venue, our meeting space; they get clean floors and urinals that smell like a bed of pine needles, or whatever the chemists of the cleaning supply companies decide the pine needles smell like.

While the bands are doing the sound check, there is usually a moment to contemplate my work. The floors are the same floors, the lanes are the same lanes, but something is different, and it doesn’t have to do with cleaning. There is something there that wasn’t there before, something more than the sum of parts, something that didn’t exist until we willed it into existence. We carved out a space for it, summoned it up, and suddenly it was there in our midst, an A minor chord resonating through the speaker, filling the room with its nuances, the voice of a generation. It is no longer just a bowling alley, no longer just a dive bar, no longer a monument to better days, long gone. In fact, what we are doing has more to do with the future than the past. It is all of that plus something new, something unforeseen, struggling to be born.

2.

The floor is cold. It stings my thighs through the worn fabric of my Ombu work pants.

I have an idea. Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier? Fumbling with the zipper, I open my backpack and remove a stack of photocopies. One by one, I insert them between my pants and the concrete floor. That should do the trick. For the time being at least. Before dispensing with the distraction, I make a mental note: remember to bring an extra scarf, a shawl, or even a throw blanket to next class, in case I don’t get seat.

I go back to taking notes. Possessed, frantic, never have I written so quickly. Little by little, I am inventing a new language, shorthand, an idiolectic, unintelligible to anyone else and probably not even to myself, later today when I read over my notes at night, back home in the shoebox apartment above the motorcycle repair shop on 64^th street.

The fact that I am wearing gloves, of course, doesn’t help any. It makes it even harder to keep up with José Amicola. He stands at the front of the hall, surrounded by tight rows of desks and students sitting on the floor in the spaces between the uneven rows of desks, which creates the impression that he is faraway and close at the same time.

Traffic roars on the other side of the window. The shutters, closed halfway, tremble with it, the steady stream of buses and motos and cars on 7^th street. Somehow, though, his voice manages to fill the entirety of the hall, the entirety of the available space, with no remainder, pushing outward against the walls and ceiling, like something living, a heaving chest. This is less on account of a secret technique for public speaking or projecting his voice than on account of the content of his words, on account of what is happening, a Happening, an encounter, of which he is only a part.

I can still see my breath as it issues from my mouth, but I no longer feel the cold. Amicola is speaking about Shklovski, Tinianov, Voloshinov, Medvedev, and Bakhtin. We hang on every word, as if they were not merely constative but also performative, as if they summon into existence something that hadn’t existed before we decided, collectively, to summon it.

It’s a rare feeling, collectively willing something into existence, unleashing its potential,

sending it off into the world, now so much bigger than yourself, to do as it may, topple buildings, fell trees, as it were, found new cities, plant new trees, the buildings and forests and dales of the future, maybe.

This isn’t the first time it happened. I’ve had it once before, the feeling, years earlier, before passing through The Hole in the Fence in the middle of the night, without having told anyone of my departure, arriving unannounced on The Other Side. There was something there at the punk shows, something more than the sum of the parts. There were the amps and the half-stacks; there were the guitars and patch cords and drum cases, all the hardware; there were the band members and audience, often changing places, interchanging roles, playing at shows, putting them on, standing on one side of the stage, then the other. There was all that but, taken together, there was something else, something that came into being, right there in our midst.

Sitting on the floor, listening to Amicola, it returned, descended upon me once again and seized hold of me, that feeling, the rare one, of being a part of something, not fully able to articulate what it was, of being at the place I need to be at the time I needed to be there doing the thing I needed to be doing, historically, socially, culturally, aesthetically, and personal speaking.

3.

There are stacks of burning truck tires on either side of the street, cutting off access to the downtown campus, Old Main and the Humanities building. Traffic on 7^th street is paralyzed, piling up, clogging the drain, except for the motos, a steading stream of them, weaving in and out of the other vehicles, immobile, cars and trucks and buses.

Once extinguished, the stacks of burning truck tires will leave scars on the pavement and a trail of stainless-steel cords, tightly wound, charred on the outside. For now, they emit plumes of thick black smoke, the thickest, a velvet cloak that intercepts the sunlight on its way to the pavement. Noses turned up, the neighboring buildings, high-rises, look down with their characteristic indifference.

Several years have passed, and I am now a graduate student who teaches the coursework section of a first-year undergraduate class. Somehow it makes sense, the way punk grew into this, this new life on The Other Side of The Hole in the Fence, an extension, a continuation, a better fit even, one step closer, more coherent as a project, and more effective as a response to the onslaught of neoliberalism, its tenaciousness and the way it spreads and takes hold and wraps its tentacles around our ankles and pulls us beneath the surface towards the deep dark depths, so murky, a unsustainable life, an intolerable social reality.

I am wielding a megaphone. My students are huddled close, seated on the pavement. Between the barricades, within the enclosure, there are other groups of students and teachers, participating in The Intervention, having class, which, given the context, have become an act of resistance unto itself.

The university is under siege.  The New Administration is exacting revenge on the old one, exacting revenge on her, for the unpardonable sin of investing in public universities and hospitals. With privatization and deregulation as their battle cries, they worked themselves into a frenzy. Faces smudged with warpaint, on a rampage, a wrecking spree, they want submission, they want blood, they want austerity measures.

With their characteristic resolve, their verve, the students aren’t about to just sit back and watch as the ground gets pulled out from under their feet. As it turns out, neither are the professors nor the teaching staff nor the non-teaching staff. We all showed up to defend the university from strangulation, from austerity, from the push to privatize. With truck tires and megaphones, we took to the streets.

The wind changes directions. The velvety black cloak of smoke, truck tire smoke, wraps itself around my shoulders. It is soft to my skin, soft like the skin of a new world, struggling to come into existence, and it tastes sweet, sweet like victory. I have the unmistakable impression that it is going to lift me off my feet, this gust. For a brief instant, between the words spoken into the megaphone, I experience weightlessness.

Over my shoulder, between the ribbons of smoke, the Humanities building, a Brutalist behemoth, makes its presence felt, its prescience.

It was built with precisely this type of situation in mind, a standoff, asymmetrical in nature, a confrontation between unequal forces. They call it Brutalism, the style, which in this case is not just an aesthetic category but a political and social one as well. The generals of the Second-to-Last Military Dictatorship bulldozed The Garden of Peace to make room for it, their building that, more than just a building, was also threat. If the style was intended to privilege function, to subordinate all formal considerations to it, then that function that was foregrounded was unambiguous: the building was designed for the purpose of control and repression.

Eight stories above ground and three below, there is nonetheless only one way to enter and exit the building. This was no mistake. It designed this way for the purpose of isolating and containing the student body at times of unrest. The dimensions of the central staircase were calculated to facilitate access of horse-mounted troops to the main pavilion. The classrooms are situated along open corridors that overlook the pavilion, each one of them within its purview. The doors to the classrooms were fitted with a circular window of shatterproof glass, so that guards, patrolling the corridors, could both look inside and report their findings quickly to The Central Command, down on the pavilion below. If necessary, any one of the classrooms, as well as any one of the corridors, could be closed off from the rest, the threat thereby contained, neutralized. Taken together, these features, born of a profound fear of universities, constitute a desperate attempt to limit critical thinking as well as an unequivocal threat of violence against students and faculty prone to dangerous flights of fancy.

The building, however, outlived the political project that brought it into being, as building tends to do. Once the military dictatorship (and its sequel) unraveled, as they tend to do, the main pavilion became the preferred meeting place of student groups, at the forefront of emerging political struggles and nascent social movements. Posters were draped from the railings of the corridors of each of the floors above the pavilion, convoking students to participate in assemblies, boycotts, marches, protests. Surrounded by posters, circles of students could be found sitting, day and night, on the floors of the main hall, the staircase, and the former Command Center, converted into a Student Union. Little by little and perhaps without being fully aware of what was happening, the students changed the building’s meaning, inverted its sign. Conceived of as a center of repression, it became the stronghold of the student movement, a wellspring of resistance, a hotbed for political thought and activism.

The class is ending, and my voice is hoarse, as if I were the singer of a punk band at the end of a show. The megaphone feels heavier than it did when we started. I am fielding questions, addressing the concerns of my students. Symbiotically, we go back and forth, back and forth, equal parts tired and tireless. Somewhere in all the comings and goings, somewhere in the encounter, knowledge emerges. An achievement, a victory, so very improbable in today’s world, it emerges right there in the middle of everything, right there in the middle of the street.

I look into the faces of my students and recognize what I see there. Above their heads and through a veil of truck tire smoke, I can also see the barricade and, beyond it, the traffic downtown, still paralyzed.

As far as I can see, though, there is no ivory tower in sight. No, this is not the technocratic university of postwar Europe and North America, anxious, as it was, to prove its utility to business and industry. Nor is it the neoliberal university of our times, which, not satisfied with merely benefiting business, insisted on becoming one itself, adding the motive of profitability to that of utility.

No, this is something quite different, an anomaly, an anachronism, an antidote, in short, a punk university, the only one I am interested in attending.

(to be continued... )