Word: punk
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...also a very good one-an account of a 17-year-old boy named Don, who, following normal teen-age tropisms ("I know you hate to see me playing rock 'n' roll,/ But Mom, I gotta break your heart to save my soul"), performs in a punk rock band whose acts feature the musicians biting the feathers off a live chicken. The group is successful, naturally. Hallelujah, except that Don, a nice, decent fellow, realizes queasily at the story's end that he faces an indeterminate future of biting the feathers off chickens. This is good comedy...
...youths asking the usual hesitant questions of the starstruck. Does he remember a mutual friend? (Yes.) Does he still have a following in Europe? (He seems to remember, and cite, his every public reading scheduled within the past two years.) What younger poets does he like? (He mentions Punk Novelist Jim Carroll, Rock Singer Patti Smith and "a guy named David Pope in Grand Rapids, who doesn't get published...
Elsewhere, Lurie detects a curious connection between the two most publicized American styles, preppie and punk. In their Brooks Bros, and L.L. Bean gear, preppies favor useless buckles on loafers, buttons on Oxford-cloth collars, straps on raincoats and safety pins on kilted skirts. These fastenings strike the author as powerful agents of emotional restraint. Punkers, on the other hand, leave zippers sagging, shirts unbuttoned and wear safety pins through their cheeks as though the flesh itself is literally exploding with rage. The styles may be disparate, Lurie concludes, but "both graphically convey the sense of a world...
...cookie play is about three vendors on the corner of 28th and Bank, and the latest arrival, a punk who dreams of opening a restaurant in an abandoned firehouse, wants to join forces on the project with the middle-aged cookie lady. "What a crust! What a crunch!" he cries, wooing her. The pipe dream is shattered by the pompous detergent vendor, and in a "cathartic" climax the cookie lady smushes pies into his and the punk's face. Throwing food really means something in the bourgeois theatre with all these half-eaten cookie characters...
...Clash!), etc. When Rolling Stone has grown more and more uncool, the Voice quietly retains its cool, thanks to Lester Bangs and Mr. Christgau. This book is hardly comprehensive, nore objective, but it doesn't and couldn't try to be. He loves enough types of music--Reggae, Soul, Punk, and Rock and Roll--and listens to enough music (14 hours a day, brag his zealous press releases) to at least be accepted on his face value. Okay, so he went overboard and gave all the Ramones albums A's, and both NY Dolls Albums A-plusses. So what...