John Cameron Mitchell is "an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, producer and director. He is known, among other things, as the writer, director and star of the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch," All I know about Mitchell has just been provided to you, with my thanks to Wikipedia for the quotation above. As you will immediately suspect from my disclaimer, I have never seen the film.
On Sunday, May 18, 2025, The New York Times ran a "Guest Essay" by Mitchell, headlined as follows: "Today’s Young People Need to Learn How To Be Punk." The image above headed up the essay, at least in the online version. I gather that stamping out cellphones may be part of the "punk" program. That idea has at least some attraction to me, though I do need to be honest, and report that I have a cellphone, myself, which I carry with me and use from time to time. I am, in other words, not an anti-cellphone purist, though I have made a number of negative comments about the impact of cellphones on our society and politics, right here in this very blog.
I have no personal knowledge of what it takes to be "punk," having missed that moment, but when I looked it up, online, I found that "OG Punk," which is what I gather is being talked about, has some or all of the following characteristics (emphasis added):
OG Punk speaks to the legacy of punk as an anarchistic, youth counterculture rebelling against mainstream society. An attitude more than a movement, in the 1970s punk swept across the globe and was often motivated by urgent political concerns. Early on, the West Coast had an especially vibrant hardcore punk music scene. Over the past year Dina Goldstein has photographed key figures from the legendary punk rock scene of the 1980s and 1990s in Vancouver and Victoria. The portraits in OG Punk from this ongoing series were shot with a neutral studio backdrop, establishing a mood of staged and theatrical artifice. The subjects self-consciously perform for the camera, showing off their punk regalia, spiked hairdos, and tattoos. Some pose with playful bravado, others are more introverted, even melancholic. Seen as they are today, these original punks have matured as distinct personalities while still retaining their subculture personas, as their nicknames imply. Distinctions between costume and everyday adornment are hard to decipher, drawing attention to the limits of self-fashioning. Each portrait carries tensions between the public display of social identity and individual expression. For Goldstein’s subjects, punk culture persists as a rebellious attitude, and as Lisa Jak of the Dayglo Abortions band claims: “as long as there is ignorance, oppression, and intolerance we’ll be here to fight back.”
As has already been revealed, "Punk" has never been my style, but Michell's "Guest Essay" in The Times does let me see some things that I think are vitally important for everyone - even those not feeling super-comfortable with spiked hairdos, tattoos, and other punk "regalia."
For instance, in his "Guest Essay," Mitchell says the following, and provides this mini-tutorial on how to "access the punk":
So, how can all of us access the punk? Get in the room with other people (more D.I.Y. and I.R.L.). Embrace the analog [as opposed to the "digital"] which can’t be surveilled by artificial intelligence. Reach out to unexpected, even problematic (I prefer “problemagic”), allies, with different but compatible definitions of justice. Luckily, kindness looks the same to most of us. And as you start making that useful thing, you might lock eyes with the person working at your side, and maybe this time you won’t flinch. The walls of identity crumble in the face of our greatest human strength: empathy (emphasis added).
Check out those highlights. That quote from John Cameron Mitchell's "Guest Essay" is making me think that we all might want to "access the punk" (even me), if what that means is more "analog" and less "digital," more interactions "in real life," and more "Do It Yourself," combined with a commitment to kindness and empathy.
Count me in!
Foundation of Freedom
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!