Each month, Reference Librarian Aurora gives a glimpse of a few new titles she is most looking forward to. Read on for July’s picks and don’t forget to place a hold on your favorites!
We’re Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond edited by Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney
A young friend of mine is jealous that I was a teenager in 2006, when it would have been possible for me to travel to New Jersey to see a certain band play live before the frontman of said band was charged with abusing a teenage girl and promptly decamped from the scald of the limelight. It is troubling to find myself in an age in which teenagers yearn for mid-aughts New Jersey as some sort of cultural Atlantis, lost to the unrelenting waters of time. I feel the same sickly jolt, considering this, as when I happen upon low-rise flare jeans crawling with butterfly appliques on proud display in a consignment shop. It is not out of any poorly repressed horror of aging that I resent these things; I accept that 2006 and low-rise flare jeans and, indeed, my own person are now old enough to rate as vintage. Rather, it seems to me there are things best pried loose of the grasping, greedy little hands of our retrospective tendencies.
What was ugly once, the passing of years alone does not make beautiful: would it be so terrible just to put it behind us and move on? Still, I can sympathize with my friend’s sense of having missed out on a more vibrant moment in culture, because when I was her age, I would have given anything to have been in New York City in the 1980s, to taste punk uncorrupted by the aspartame of mass-market popification. Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnany’s scrapbook of flyers, zines, photographs, and miscellaneous ephemera from the Cornell University archives – apparently, Cornell is home to one of the world’s largest caches of punk relics – accompanied by interviews and essays from the stars of the scene, confirms that my adolescent grief was justified. We’re Having Much More Fun maps the shifting landscape of punk in the United States, as it erupted in NYC and then spread from coast to coast, kicking up hot spots of creative and political rebellion. Through Peraino and McEnany’s curation, we see the punk scene as raucously oppositional and yet, in its own often clumsy, imperfect way, utopian: a welcoming shore for society’s rejects and rejecters. Here, pioneering women of color, feminist lesbian punks and Afropunk, as well as straightedge’s challenge to recreational anesthesia are summoned back from the margins to the main stage where they belong. Punk’s power, after all, was never with the hardcore bros in the mosh pit, but in the tireless defiance of the outsiders it gave free rein. We’re Having Much More Fun is an invigorating reminder that what made punk revolutionary is not lost to us today. We can’t get 2006 New Jersey back – may it rest in peace – but as long as we keep our politics sharp, our refusals loud, and our doors flung open, punk need never die.
For fans of music history and memorabilia, subculture scenes, and sifting through the archives.
Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage by Matthew Wolfe
Feeling dulled down by the 9-to-5 hustle? Contemplating infusing a dose of fresh excitement into your days by embarking on a life of crime? You could do worse than giving environmental direct action a try. It’s easier than ever to get yourself arrested for defending the earth and its creatures, what with the international throttling of activism, so chances are good you’ll barely have to break a sweat to land yourself on someone’s most-wanted list or in a prison cell. Tempted? Read up on the path ahead with Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night, a riveting account of the original “eco-terrorists,” the Earth Liberation Front. A decentralized, anarchistic activist collective, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) originated in the U.K. before landing stateside in the Pacific Northwest. Its trademark strategy was sabotage: damaging corporate property in the hope of making ecological devastation less profitable. At their most extreme, those operating under the ELF banner started fires, choosing for targets businesses symbolic of the ecocide they indicted. The arsonists struck SUV dealerships, a meatpacking plant, a luxury ski resort, logging companies. Although attacks were planned methodically to avoid harming any living beings, and no one was ever killed in an ELF action, the U.S. federal government named the group – which, like Antifa today, hardly constituted a group at all – the “foremost domestic terrorism threat.” This label gave the state righteous cause to descend upon monkeywrenchers, and radical environmentalism in general, with all the fury of the post-9/11 War on Terror. Cowed, the environmental movement retreated from direct action and commenced its glum slump into corporate co-optation. No longer was the mission to undo industrialism, or global capitalism, or consumer culture, but to “green” and thereby redeem them. In Fires in the Night, Wolfe concedes that this approach has proven a bust. His question, then, is what, in our present state of ecological emergency, counts as an “extreme” response, and what is simply commensurate. Let’s be clear. I am in no way endorsing any acts the FBI would call eco-terrorism – how irresponsible of me that would be! – but I am thinking of a line from Edward Abbey: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
For fans of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Andreas Malm, environmental true crime, and civil disobedience from Thoreau to Extinction Rebellion.
