Little Dom's tent at Occupy Pittsburgh

Human and animal liberation is right, Dom! For those interested in following politically aware punk via the internet and punk aesthetics: The female punk run Thunderhorse Vintage. Peace.

If in doubt, a paper bag over the head is a sure fire winner

Assuming that you’ll be avoiding all those nasty heteronormative clichés (no punk would ever lump for sexy vampire / zombie / witch now, would they?!) like the plague, you could do a lot worse than look to the wildest ever dressed scene for some inspiration. Of course, we’re talking about LA Punk circa 1977-79. As you’ll be wanting to differentiate from this kind of heinous shittery, you’ll need to get specific.

Brendan Mullen’s book ‘Live at the Masque: Nightmares in Punk Alley’ documents the

Dress you and your girlfriends up as Castration Squad and rage in the streets?

bands, events and outfits of this scene, from anonymous lurkers to Darby himself, quite often in rare technicolour detail. In addition to this, a radical lady and obsessive archivist of this period is none other than Alice Bag, whose Flickr feed provides a motherlode of OG snapsnots of subterranean self-styled freaky legends.

If you ask me, these combos are way too good to keep to one day of the year, so draw on a Germs Burn, talc up your face a little, and get outlandish!

So is it really worth the effort? Regular faces at the gigs that I put on are routinely shocked at where all these ‘new’ people have come from, and I can only respond along the lines of ‘actual hold-in-your-hand flyers!’

Don’t be complacent — if you live in a big city, there is always someone who’s gonna be interested that you don’t personally know. It might seem hackneyed, but copying flyers and posters and getting them up around town, and beyond the eyeline of yer regular messageboard / Facebook cognoscenti is the key to busy and fun gigs!

The only limit is your imagination. If anyone asks you make a flyer, you should jump at the chance! The most fun job in punk, arguably, where you get to write mini-reviews of bands, pick images and take the theme of the gig wherever you want. What’s not to like? If you’re stuck, a good fail-safe is to use topical images with resonance to those who are gonna see it, so you could lampoon a shamed politician or make a visual link to local campaigns/concerns.

Otherwise, why not subvert the enormous graphical goldmine of the last 40 years of punk and hardcore to promote your night? The book Fucked up and Photocopied is one of the many chronicles of our rich outsider art history when it comes to punk rock flyers, and makes a great resource for scanning and fiddling with. Request it at your local library, do some scanning, and get cutting and pasting.

The ultimate harsh rhetorical ‘Would we force this mutant child to walk a mile to see…INSERT BAND HERE’ works a treat too! Or, If you’ve no computer and you’re handy with a ballpoint then do as they do in South Wales and light box that shit. Every town has a building which could, when squinting, be morphed into the Capitol Building for purposes of a lightning strike Bad Brains rip off!

When the internet eventually explodes, your Photoshop archive will be long gone, so make real life paper flyers and you never know, in thirty years your work might be hanging in some Auction house, too.

Adventures in Nonfiction

Mimi was in town. It had been three years. We went out for Indian food and then coffee. Her dashing girlfriend Fiona was there too, in a vintage vest and tie. I had forgotten that Mimi was left-handed and that she didn’t drink coffee. She still had asymmetrical hair but now she grew herbs, she said, with a shrug, and did bodywork to take care of her fucked-up shoulders. She and Fiona were working on their respective books. Mimi said she was tired of hers, she wanted to write a different book, a series of essays about NGO-sponsored beauty pageants in which landmine victims were awarded solid-gold prostheses, and the for-profit marketing of women’s-prison-made handicrafts to consumers, and other confusing and/or obscene intersections of fashion and oppression. I told her I wished she would hurry up and finish the first book so she could hurry up and write the second.

We talked about how to get these things done when there’s no one around to tell you to do them. No TV, no video games, we agreed. At one point Mimi said that if she were rich she would probably just stay home and play World of Warcraft. We talked about teaching: Fiona presents key points of feminist thought to her students by showing them slides of cute boys. Seeing Zach Braff or whoever floating on-screen beside important tenets of post-colonial theory made them feel less anxious about taking Women’s Studies classes, she said, especially from someone who looked so queer. We talked about binge drinking, grade inflation, and the Midwestern post-adolescent’s lack of affect.

I told Mimi and Fiona how lately I’ve been tiptoeing into a local grassroots literary circle, a place I might someday like to belong. It’s mutually supportive and DIY and otherwise similar to the punk scene in many ways, but I still feel like a kid at my first show, or writing overconsidered letters to zine editors, all awkward and fumbling around with my wings folded behind me and dragging a little on the floor in front of the stage. It’s a strange place to find myself, after having stuck around long enough in punk publishing to have my name scratched on the walls, and to be accepted by people like they accept the walls. We talked about writing zines and blogs and books. I laughed because I had left MRR to attend a top-tier journalism school and now here I was, back again. I said it felt right, I missed it, I needed a smaller feedback loop than the huge film and book projects provide. They take so long and can be so lonely. Mimi shrugged again and said she needed to keep writing too — why did I think she hung on at Punk Planet until Dan Sinker took her off the masthead without even an explanatory email? And that’s also why she does the wonderful threadbared fashion site that’s of course about so much more. I asked, but what is the compulsion to share about, anyway? Why so first-person all the time? Is it some kind of disease? One we share with everyone on Twitter? We’re not 25 years old anymore, clutching Xacto blades, but we haven’t changed. We still keep courting the dynamic terror of creative self-doubt.

Fiona and I finished our coffee. I bragged about touching the Rosetta Stone. Then we talked about what was hot in YA fiction. Mimi recommended a series called Monster Blood Tattoo.

Notes!

1. Check out San Francisco’s Doomed this week. Yes. All ages. Yes. Maximum plus Thrillhouse plus bands plus baseball. Yes.

2. Surrender is still on tour. Go see them when they come through. OK, they’re peace punk, but they’re also doing…theater. I don’t mean like high school thespians exchanging lines from “Les Miz” in the cafeteria. I mean that they don’t just play, they perform, and they don’t break character, allowing you to fall under their spell. The blindfold still bothers me, but in a good way.

3. I am interviewed by the rejectionist about my film on Ursula K. Le Guin.

Arwen Curry and Ursula K. Le Guin (photo by Andy Black)

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The Wipers (photographer unknown)

Black Flag (photographer unknown)

Tim Yo and Grant Hart (photo by Murray Bowles)

As promised, next week we’re gonna go back to the future, so if you’ve taken some killer photos this summer, send them!!!

If you shoot shows and have photos you want to submit for the MRR Blog, send to: photoblog {at} maximumrocknroll(.)com. Be sure to put “MRR Photo Blog” in the subject. Include your name, the band, where and when it was shot. Just send your best photos – edit tightly. Three to five photos is plenty. We will be exercising a little quality control here…not everything sent in will be posted. Please size your photos so they are 500 pixels (72 dpi) at the longest side.

There are a lot of awesome photographers out there shooting shows…and there are a lot of unseen archives of old shows. Show us what you’ve got!

Bikini Kill (photo by Justin Demetrick)

Born Against (photo by Justine Demetrick)

The Mummies, circa 1990 (photographer unknown)

Next week we’ll have one more installment from the archives, (with two very special treats!) then it’s back to the NOW scene.

Wanna submit a photo for the MRR Photo Blog?

If you shoot shows and have photos you want to submit for the MRR Blog, send to: photoblog {at} maximumrocknroll(.)com. Be sure to put “MRR Photo Blog” in the subject. Include your name, the band, where and when it was shot. Just send your best photos – edit tightly. Three to five photos is plenty. We will be exercising a little quality control here…not everything sent in will be posted. Please size your photos so they are 500 pixels (72 dpi) at the longest side.

There are a lot of awesome photographers out there shooting shows…and there are a lot of unseen archives of old shows. Show us what you’ve got!

Amebix @ Triple Rock Social Club, Minneapolis MN, 27 May 2009 (photo by Damien Inbred)

Positive Noise, Chicago, IL, 20 February 2010 (photo by Stephanie Kiewiet)

Sucio Poder, Melbourne, Australia, 28 February 2010 (photo by xCarlos El PasoX)

Pisschrist @ Gudang Noisy, Amang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 31 December 2009 (photo by Fae Rebel, submitted by Pat)

Wanna submit a photo for the MRR Photo Blog?

If you shoot shows and have photos you want to submit for the MRR Blog, send them to: photoblog {at} maximumrocknroll(.)com Be sure to put “MRR Photo Blog” in the subject. Include your name, the band, where and when it was shot. Just send your best photos – edit tightly. Three to five photos is plenty. We will be exercising a little quality control here…not everything sent in will be posted. Please size your photos so they are 500 pixels (72 dpi) at the longest side.

There are a lot of awesome photographers out there shooting shows…and there are a lot of unseen archives of old shows. Show us what you’ve got!

Possibly Mark Murrmann

Sorry things are lagging behind a little here on MRR.com this week. The absence of the Monday Photo Blog threw us off a bit. What happened to the photo blog, you ask? That’s what we wanted to know too, so we did some research and figured out that some dude name Mark Murrmann (alias “icki”) is supposed to be in charge of said weekly web feature. Further research showed that it’s quite possible that he’s currently traveling with the re-formed X of Australia, who are on tour of the western US, and playing a little-known DIY fest in Austin, TX, called Chaos in Tejas this week.

Our crack team of internet sleuths also discovered a handy website called Google, where we dug up even more dirt on the elusive “blogger.” Turns out he’s been known to take a few pictures himself, and he’s recently published some kind of book! One website, The Rumpus, even managed to talk to him…

We’ll keep investigating. Keep checking in, and hopefully by next week we’ll have gotten to the bottom of this.

Airfix Kits (photo by icki, used without permission)

Clorox Girls (photo by icki, used without permission)

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Lisa Hodapp

by Ivy Jeanne

Lisa Hodapp was a huge inspiration and a punk rock role model to so many people including myself. As a teenage punk girl growing up in South Florida in the late ’80s/early ’90s, I sometimes felt like the “scene” was a virtual wasteland for girls and women getting into punk rock. It felt exclusive and full of machismo, a real boys’ club.

Discovering Morbid Opera was a huge turning point for me during that time. I loved their record so much I’d listen to it on repeat much to the chagrin of some of my friends! In listening to that record, I heard a sound so raw, so strong and so female. I heard the possibilities.

Morbid Opera and other bands with ladies playing in them, made it feel possible for me to follow suit. I’ve been playing in bands ever since, 19 years and counting. In the mid-nineties, I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa and after much bonding, a friendship was formed.

She was always so supportive to the younger generations that came up after her. Unjaded and enthusiastic, Lisa was always ready to start a new musical project and to make new friends. She blew minds with her multifaceted life, a bad ass rocker, a whip-smart lawyer, and a mother to boot. In the mid ’90s there was a brief time that Morbid Opera reformed, and she asked me to join to sing backups. It was a real dream come true! Lisa was still rocking, her latest project was called Fraulein.

It’s always so hard to lose someone so vivacious to an illness as epidemic as cancer. There’s so many unspokens. Let’s start the conversations on how we can truly love and support each other when we get sick. It means everything.

As Lisa leaves us, she leaves us with a little bit of fire, sharpened wits, a real tenderness and a desire to push for something more, to create something more.

Download/listen to MORBID OPERA’s “Polyester Pig” MP3