Part IV: Différance
If you have seen Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” episode on “Palestine and Israel” you will see the unifying gesture on the walls of the West Bank. Bourdain is clearly punk and is as sweet and soft on the inside as my anarcho-punk friend Nick Evans—a former record exec, filled with cancer and cocaine, and now a renowned and healed Ashtanga Yoga teacher. He is a pussy, yes. But Punk is also pussy.
Nicholas once told me a story about how he had been accosted after school (he was a young boy living in Wales). As he tells it, after receiving a slogging, Nick gets up, his hair pink, his clothes already in the “classic” punk tatter, his nose bloody, soaked, and broken, and like the imitation of Christ, holds out his hand and asks, “Friends?” …
His nemesis just punched him in the face again and walked away.
This is punk.
A guy walks up to me and asks 'What's Punk?'.
So I kick over a garbage can and say 'That's punk!'.
So he kicks over the garbage can and says 'That's Punk?',
and I say
'No, that's trendy.'
Billie Jo Armstrong of Green Day
Of course the evolute of the anti-punk is Trumpism.
Trumpists believe themselves to be the ‘ultimate disrupters’ of our decrepit systems, when in fact they are just trendy.
Aging Hippies ultimately find in their self-interest and self-indulgence and punk attitude that the needs of the individual outweigh the responsibilities of the individual to the State, the Social Contract, or the surrounding Community. However, as much we obviously need roads, emergency responders, affordable healthcare and good public education: “Death to Taxes” screams the aging American Baby-Boomer-Hippie Trumpist.
In societies like France and England and Canada with a stronger educational foundation focused more on social equity and class injustice, there is less interest in advancing this archaic ‘cowboy mentality,’ and thus, the State takes better care of the individuals on a whole.
In the most bizarre of ironies Post-Structuralist thought predicts the corruption of the Hippie.
Derrida suggests that a Structuralist review and order of human behavior is ultimately a failure in light of the subjective experience of the individual.
Acknowledging the subjective experience allows for the multi-culturist movement to thrive, but it also allows for the reactive white power movement to rebel self-righteously, (and we must be careful to say insidiously); the mob wants their fair share.
Its like the ancient Parisian law forbidding ALL members of society from sleeping under the bridge. Its fair, of course. It’s also bullshit.
Self-discovery must come with an understanding of the unification to the whole or else Balkanism of the society is the result. (Yet of course, not always or absolutely, says Foucault in our ear).
What is a hippie? What is a hepkat? A hip cat?
The most marvelous study on the word comes courtesy of the Jakarta post in Indonesia: Ms. Tiffany Munuera states from her research that the word “hip” stems from the Senegalese language Wolof.
Xipi in the Wolof language meant “to have your eyes open, to be aware. Xipi became the term hip. Adding the English suffix “-ster” we create the word “hipster. Or one who has their eyes open.
In today’s language: “A Hipster is Woke.”
I mentioned this wikinugget to Michelle Kelsey Mitchell the other day. She is an African American Georgetown professor of stress management and founder of the National Kids Yoga Conference. She explained to me that the irony here is that hipsters on the whole tend to have their heads so far up their own asses as to be the last people on Earth to be thought of as woke.
Well… they are the progeny of hippies after-all.
Still, language is an evolving thing.
“Kat” in Wolof is “someone who does something.”
So a “Hepcat” or “xipikat” or a “Hipster” is thought of in the post-war Jazz Era as someone who is ahead of the curve (perhaps avant garde). A Hipster became Beat after the second war. And a Beat is someone who is a non-comformist, rejecting prepackaged life, and also just strung out on the daily grind of it all.
Even canned music -- music reproduced electronically was snarkily belittled. Can you imagine such a thing? You who are reading this on an iphone.
Phillip K. Dick’s “Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch” is an excellent example of a satire that actualizes a dystopian future where we are all beholden to brand names and all-knowing computers walk us through our day-to-day activities; So much so that we are as awkward in our personal interactions as 4th graders. This, the most frightening vision to a cool Beat…
A future filled with hipsters.
A last thought on Basquiat. I have a punk friend in South Korea. Orel Hershiser’s niece the adopted Korean, Kate Hers Lee. She got so tired of responding to the remonstrations of Korean taxi drivers berating her for her poor Korean Language skills that she created an explanation card to hand out to them. She sent it to Adrian Piper.
Ms. Piper is an African American Conceptual Artist and easily passes for white. She created a video where she sits behind a desk: its legs facing outwards.
She is protecting herself.
She says in the film and from behind the table that she is black. And she asks if that makes us uncomfortable. This is a cool work.
Very sober and minimal. And yet, extremely punk.
Performance Art is a medium that is extremely transgressive by nature and here Adrian transposes the violence of her action onto us as viewers with our bias towards race transgressors.
She knows our reaction.
She has seen it before.
And she has now protected herself from us.
Adrian Piper Cornered 1988
Ms. Piper wrote Kate a postcard back:
“It’s not the big differences, but the small ones that society abhors.”
Adrian Piper The Mythic Being 1973