RE/Search's V. Vale on maker culture and punk rock
BB pal and inspiration V. Vale is the publisher of RE/Search, chronicles of underground and fringe culture since 1977. The RE/Search books, from Industrial Culture Handbook and Pranks! to Modern Primitives and Incredibly Strange Music, are essential encyclopedias of alternative thought, art, music, literature, and methods to circumvent "control" in all its manifestations. (Pranks!, Industrial Culture Handbook, and RE/SEARCH #4/5: Burroughs, Gysin, Throbbing Gristle are now available in limited edition hardcover!) Vale attended the recent Maker Faire Bay Area and was blown away by the connections he saw between the hacker/maker/crafter culture and what he suggests are the original, unspoken "principles" of punk rock: DIY, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Black Humor. Vale saw all those characteristics embodied at the Maker Faire and, inspired, wrote a wonderful piece about what the Faire meant to him. Here's an excerpt from Vale's RE/Search blog post, "Maker Faire and Punk Rock":
The first, quintessential principle of “Punk Rock” was (obviously) “DO-IT-YOURSELF”… meaning Create All Your Own Culture: music, recordings, record labels, distribution, “Punk Rock” stores, art, graphic art, collages, drawings, interior decor, your clothing, hairstyles, sculpture/installations, social gatherings, community centers, squats or shared housing, art studios, shows — everything that makes your life “meaningful” and “fun.” And this “principle” made EVERYONE at least a naive or “outsider” artist, if not more...Link
Well, for more than thirty years Punk’s “Do-It-Yourself” signified (to me, at least) Doing It Yourself — but pretty much restricted to the “Arts.” But for the first time we attended last weekend’s Maker Faire and realized that: Why shouldn’t D-I-Y also apply to Science and Technology? (Now, we had ALMOST thought that, years ago, when Survival Research Laboratories began, but — we’re dense.)...
In other words, for thirty years the underlying message of all my publications has remained: “Everyone Is An Artist.” But, now I want to add an additional message: “Everyone Is A Scientist” — or, “Everyone is an Artist/Scientist.” Because, who doesn’t want to figure out how things work? ”
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Now hold on a moment... Are they proposing some sort of "cyber" punk? That just sounds wacky!
Oh my god, RE/Search books saved my teenage life, I swear to GAWD. Modern Primitives burned itself into my eighteen year old retinas.
Latter-day V/Search stuff is also aces!
@Glossolalia Black (#2), You and me both, sister!
Vale is a legend, and an unbelievably nice human being. He still runs RE/Search pretty much singlehandedly out of his living room. RE/Search was one of dozens of teeny publishers that lost a chunk of money last year when their distributor's parent company went bankrupt. He's been doing a TON of table-ing lately (tabling? how do you even spell that?) at punk shows and places like maker faire to pick up the slack.
So show the love and buy some shit direct from his website! At the very least, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to the email newsletter which is always full of excellent, slightly insane rambling from Vale and friends.
Oh yeah, it's totally true. There's been a solid underpinning of DIY well beyond "the arts" in punk for a long time, depending on whose 'punk' you consider. 70's NY, UK? I dunno. 80's San Francisco & Bay area, LA? Absolutely.
I was involved in or took part in lots of it: we built living space into cheap warehouse (Shred of Dignity Skaters' Union), put on "hit'n'run" punk shows (generator, band, coffee can for donations, pick a venue ('Beale and Brannon at the Base of the Bay Bridge' a favorite) (its gone now) and play til the cops came (before Pat Cadigan's parallel fictional invention :-), bikes made from junk; Gilman St. Warehouse, The Farm, skateboard ramps from crap and scrap; dumpster diving for furniture, materials and everything; ... that's just off the top of my head. It was quite explicitly DIY and tech and anarchist and mutual aid and... (I did a 'convert your car to propane power' at this time -- I still drive the car today)...
FidoNet was totally and explicitly queer-anarcho-punk. I said so at the time. No one wanted to hear it, so that thread got disappeared, Soviet (Fox News) style. Feh.
The "arts only" punk thing, at least in the SF Bay Area, is a post-fabrication, or more likely, the physical side was not understood fully, and in a well intentioned but misguided attempt to legitimize punk, lost. Legitimacy (and all its attendant limiting baggage, such as hip and cool) was exactly what punk was rebelling against, remember?!!
Survival Research Laboratory is fucken punk, no?
There's many branches and offshoots of punk tech. For example we just ran the 24 Hours of LeMons $500 endurance car race (partly sponsored by MAKE!) which is very, very punk -- talk about mutual aid -- most teams selflessly ran to help neighboring teams without a thought of the fact that they were 'competition'. see www.24hrsoflemons.com, and our site www.makewayracing.com. Check out www.jalopnik.com, search 'lemons 2008'.
Tall bikes... bike messengers... Burning Man... illegal soap box derby... making clothes with crap, paint, pin
That sort of "DIY" requires more physicality, physical culture, as in dirt, force, heavy stuff, danger, in varying degrees. Physical culture is getting lost. Too bad for us.
Embodied skills often require more intellectual rigor and practice than mere intellectual pursuit.
I agree with Bookyloo. I just finished JG BALLARD CONVERSATIONS and have purchased almost everything Re/Search publishes in the past. Any RE/Search book is worth the loot.