Monday 4 January 2010

PUNK

General Idea's empty-shell metaphor, while primarily referring to the media, applied also to Toronto's circa-1975 art scene, which lacked venues (A Space Gallery, Carmen Carmenthrows over lover for another. [Fr. Lit.: Carmen; Fr. Opera: Bizet, Carmen, Westerman, 189–190]See : Faithlessness
Carmenthe cards repeatedly spell her death. [Fr. Lamanna Gallery and Isaacs Gallery were the main ones), lacked hangouts (artists had a choice of rundown taverns; Grossman's on Spadina Avenue Spadina Avenue is one of the most prominent streets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Running through the western section of downtown, the road has a very different character in different neighbourhoods. and the Pilot Tavern in Yorkville were the most popular) and lacked a progressive art college (the Ontario College Of Art and Design--then the Ontario College of Art or OCA--at the time trained a glut of commercial artists and still-life painters but ghettoized the few "radicals" in a diminutive Experimental Arts department). Add to this the post-hippie cryogenic freezing of art-school discourse (minimalismminimalism, schools of contemporary art and music, with their origins in the 1960s, that have emphasized simplicity and objectivity. Minimalism in the Visual Arts..... Click the link for more information. and conceptualismconceptualism, in philosophy, position taken on the problem of universals, initially by Peter Abelard in the 12th cent. Like nominalism it denied that universals exist independently of the mind, but it held that universals have an existence in the mind as concept. ..... Click the link for more information. dominated) and cultural suspended animationsus·pend·ed animationn.A temporary interruption of the vital functions resembling death. ..... Click the link for more information. was in place. Disaffected OCA OCA oculocutaneous albinism. students, hearing the reverberations of new wave arising from Brian Eno's 1975 sojourn (which included a recording session in Hamilton and a performance at York UniversityYork University, at North York, Ont., Canada; nondenominational; coeducational; founded 1959 as an affiliate of the Univ. of Toronto, became independent 1965. ..... Click the link for more information. in Toronto) and from proto-punk musicians such as Patti Smith and the Ramones, began to form bands. The Dishes (Murray BallMurray Hone Ball (born 1937) is a New Zealand cartoonist. He was born in Feilding in the Manawatu, and is best known for his Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, Bruce the Barbarian and the long-running Footrot Flats comic series. ..... Click the link for more information., Scott Davey, Steven Davey, Ken Farr, Michael Lacroix and Glenn Schellenberg) were the catalysts. The band, whose members were friends of General Idea (GI), first played live in February 1976 at the Beverley Tavern on Queen Street West, a country tavern showcasing obscure bands to nearby OCA students unfamiliar with half-ton trucks and Rockin' Ronnie Hawkins
Not to be confused with Canadian indie rock singer-songwriter Ron Hawkins.Ronald "Ronnie" Hawkins (born 10 January 1935, Huntsville, Arkansas, United States) is a pioneering rock and roll musician and cousin to fellow rockabilly pioneer Dale . However, its owners, the Kolin family, offered the Dishes the venue they desperately needed, given that Yonge Street clubs such as the Gasworks gas·works pl.n. (used with a sing. verb)A factory where gas for heating and lighting is produced. Also called gashouse.
gasworksNouna factory in which coal gas is made or the Generator were only booking conventional prog v. i. 1. To wander about and beg; to seek food or other supplies by low arts; to seek for advantage by mean shift or tricks.[imp. & p. p. os> Progged( ) r>.p. pr. & vb. n. os> Progging. rock and metal bands--think Rush and Triumph. A few months past the groundbreaking 1975 Ramones tour of England and Malcolm McLaren's invention of the Sex Pistols, the Dishes' first gig, played to an enthusiastic audience of 30, marked the public debut of Toronto new wave. The Dishes, more Roxy Music Roxy Music is an English art rock group founded in the early 1970s by art school graduate Bryan Ferry (vocals and keyboards). The other members are Phil Manzanera (guitars), Andy Mackay (saxophone and oboe) and Paul Thompson (drums and percussion). and David Bowie-influenced than punk-emulating, performed a weekly "residency" at the Bev for a year. A growing audience inspired new bands out of OCA, like the Diodes (David Clarkson
For the professional ice hockey player, see David Clarkson (ice hockey).David Clarkson (born September 10, 1985 in Bellshill, Scotland) is a professional footballer currently playing for Scottish Premier League club Motherwell. , John Hamilton John Hamilton may refer to:
John Hamilton, 1st Lord Bargany
John Hamilton, 2nd Lord Bargany (c. 1640–1693), Northumbrian accused traitor
John Hamilton, 1st Lord Belhaven and Stenton
, Ian MacKay, Paul Robinson and John Catto) and Martha and the Muffins Martha and the Muffins were a Canadian new wave synth pop band in the 1970s and 1980s. Although they only had one major international hit single under that name, the core members of the band had several more hits as M + M. . Other groups included the Cardboard Brains, the Everglades (formed by Dishes member Steve Davey after the Dishes' break up) and the premier punk band of Toronto, the Viletones, whose lead singer, Steve Leckie, gained notoriety by slashing himself with broken beer bottles while on stage. Like the art students, artists tiring of the hippie era started to hang out at the Beverley. Among them was GI, who would regularly sit with Carole Pope, lead singer of the quintessential Toronto new wave band Rough Trade. Along with the Dishes, Pope and musical partner Kevan Staples were part of a growing nightlife-addicted entourage that surrounded GI: the performance artist and photographer David Buchan; the Dishes Fan Club "president," Anya Varda; and vint age-clothing-dealer-cure-restaurateur Sandy Stagg. A scene around Queen Street West, an empty shell that had begun with glamour, was burgeoning, a scene with either a decidedly queer or sexually ambiguous sensibility. In 1977, GI moved to Simcoe Street, just south of Queen Street, near the office of The Body Politic BODY POLITIC, government, corporations. When applied to the government this phrase signifies the state. 2. As to the persons who compose the body politic, they take collectively the name, of people, or nation; and individually they are citizens, when considered (a more political precursor to Toronto's gay weekly, Xtra) and the Beverley. Stagg opened the artist/musician-employing Peter Pan restaurant on Queen Street the same year, which was followed a few months later by A Space Gallery. Meanwhile, GI published their magazine, FILE, allowing them to both chronicle and promote this scene, the first such publication to do so. FILE, since its 1972 inception, when it participated in marl Marl, city, GermanyMarl (märl), city (1994 pop. 92,590), North Rhine–Westphalia, W Germany. It is an industrial and mining (coal, lead, and zinc) center, and also supports a number of chemical factories. art and ensuing networks "to create a cross-Canada link-up between artists," distinguished itself from other art magazines in Canada and elsewhere by avoiding analysis and reportage. (2) FILE dispensed with the academic seriousness characteristic of most art publications, especially in the language and theory-based conceptual era, preferring a biting satirical tone critiquing mainstream culture: for instance, GI's mock-beauty pageant (Miss General Idea). FILE functioned as an ongoing work of art with reproductions of GI's and other artist's pieces, plus GI's performance documentation and manifestos. Interspersed was a social element: pictures showing GI's circle, including, for example, Dr. and Lady Brute (a.k.a. Eric Metcalfe and Kate Craig) from Vancouver, who were, like many artists in early FILE, pictured wearing leopard-skin outfits predating the new wave obsession with that material. Vincent Trasov graced the first cover, wearing his de rigueur Mr. Peanut costume, which was typical public attire for him. From its first issue on, FILE was a progenitor pro·gen·i·torn.1. A direct ancestor.2. An originator of a line of descent.
progenitorancestor, including parent.
progenitor cellstem cells. of the cultural changes--artistic, political, sexual and musical--that the postmodern movement embodied. Reversing Life magazine's name and using its logo and oversized o·ver·size n.1. A size that is larger than usual.2. An oversize article or object.adj. o·ver·size also o·ver·sizedLarger in size than usual or necessary. format (TimeLife unsuccessfully sued) predated the strategy of appropriation of popular culture prevalent in the art world in the early 80s and anticipated, as Diedrich Diederichsen observes, "a strategy that today is an everyday youth cultural ploy; namely logo-busting." (3) And FILE put a queer sensibility into an art world that then didn't give queers visibility, featuring numerous bondage, leather and drag references and images: like those of the artist Michael Morris, a.k.a. Marcel Idea, who won the 1971 Miss General Idea beauty pageant, or the ongoing use of a fetish fetish (fĕt`ĭsh), inanimate object believed to possess some magical power. The fetish may be a natural thing, such as a stone, a feather, a shell, or the claw of an animal, or it may be artificial, such as carvings in wood. motif, the word appearing in various photo layouts and on GI's black Fetish T-shirts. Furthermore, a loose network of people later associated with the new wave music movement appeared in early issues of FILE. Monte Cazazza, a Bay-area artist and musician, and Cosey Fanni Tutti Cosey Fanni Tutti (born Christine Carole Newby on 4 November 1951, in Hull, England) is best known as a performance artist and for her time in Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey.Before both of these she was a performer with COUM Transmissions in 1969. , later a member of Throbbing Gristle, then a performance artist, appeared on the recto RECTO. Right. (q.v.) Brevederecto, writ of right. (q.v.) and verso ver·so n. pl. ver·sos1. A left-hand page of a book or the reverse side of a leaf, as opposed to the recto.2. The back of a coin or medal. covers of a "fake" issue, also called FILE, included within an actual issue, their sole publication in 1974, which also included the first Residents LP as a Flexidisc. In FILE's spring 1976 issue, they introduced the Interview magazine-reminiscent photo gossip column "BZZZ, BZZZ, BZZZ," which chronicled notables spotted during GI's party-hopping along Queen West and later in Manhattan. In 1977, GI, now con nected to the punk scene, produced its Punk "Til You Puke PukeSlang for selling off a losing position even if the loss is substantial.Notes:The point at which an investor decides to sell regardless of price has been dubbed "the puke point. issue, featuring a who's who of the punk movement: photo spreads of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and local bands including the Viletones and the Dishes. This issue was representative of a crossover between art and music; GI took band photos and designed album covers of the Dishes and Rough Trade and hired the Dishes to perform in the GI exhibition Hot Property: The 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant at Winnipeg Art Gallery The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) is a public art gallery that was founded in 1912. It is Western Canada's oldest civic gallery and the 6th largest in the country. The WAG is located in the heart of the city of Winnipeg, just two blocks from Manitoba's Provincial Legislature and (1977). However, while GI and FILE tapped into cultural changes, Toronto's established art scene of arts councils, museums and commercial galleries lagged behind. In one sentence, Eldon Garnet, former editor and publisher of Impulse magazine, effectively sums up Toronto's avant-garde of the late 1970s: it was "an art scene driven, not by new commercial galleries, but by the Canadian engine of communications, in this case, art magazines." (4) A Space Gallery, an artist-run centre AA Bronson was associated with, held concerts by the Dishes (1976) and Talking Heads (1977). Moreover, the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC CEAC Chemical Engineering and Applied ChemistryCEAC Conférence Européenne de l'Aviation Civile (French: European Civil Aviation Conference)CEAC Compensatory Education Advisory Committee ), a performance-art focused artist-run centre on Duncan Street (just off Queen Street West) offered its basement to Toronto's first punk club, Crash 'N' Burn, (making it, thanks to CEAC's arts council funding, likely the world's only government-supported one). Started by the Diodes and their manager, Ralph Alfonso, who had before used the basement as a practice space, Crash 'N' Burn lasted for the summer of 1977. The Diodes and other bands, including the Dishes, Teenage Head, the Viletones, the Curse, the B-Girls and New York's Dead Boys, played while patrons drank at a makeshift bar consisting of a door and two garbage cans and that only served Black Label-brand beer. Inevitably, the upstairs neighbours noticed the antics below, leading Amerigo Marras and Bruce Eves from CEAC to collaborate with the Diodes to produce a 45-rpm disc called Raw/War (1977), a strange pairing of CEAC's neo-Marxist manifesto--"how can ideology change social practice"--with standard punk lyrics--"fuck off" and "stick it up your ass." (5) The fashion world reached Crash 'N' Burn when Anya Varda, managing the club, held Fashion Burn, an anti-beauty pageant featuring Miss Curse, wearing a dress covered with fake blood, tampons and sanitary napkins, and performances by the Dishes and David Buchan. The event, documented in a spread in FILE's punk issue, brought the GI crowd to the centre of the Crash 'N' Burn scene, albeit briefly. After four months, Crash 'N' Burn was closed due to a liquor license violation, just after it had hit the papers that taxpayers were supporting a punk club. By 1978, Impulse had joined FILE in exploring punk and new wave. Despite differing editorial approaches (FILE was publisher-centric while Impulse was eclectic in its content, which included "music, architecture, fine art, photography, food, limbo dancing and poetry"), both magazines featured many of the same artists and musicians. (6) In 1978, helmed by Garnet, Impulse--in previous incarnations a literary magazine and then an image-dominant art magazine that changed its format every issue (one issue was a Super 8 film)--settled into a square-shaped format recalling an IP or Artforum magazine. Artist and designer Shelagh Alexander oversaw the new design, laying out the magazine in a "rough, purposely jagged" way to match "the energy of punk" and much of the content. (7) Included in the first issue with the new format was an interview with the Viletones and a spread on Patti Smith. Garnet recalls, "By the time the 1980s arrived, Impulse had already published four issues in what we considered the 1980s ... the hippies were gone and the punks were alive. Swiss design and modernism were replaced by the postmodern." (8) Memorable were Garnet's and fashion photographer George Whiteside's photographs of Toronto's avant-garde wearing bondage-influenced chic. Robert Stewart's fashion-mocking creations, photographed by Whiteside, were included in the spring/summer 1983 issue, the last real punk/new wave issue, featuring Garnet wearing a suit adorned with pasta and painter Rae Johnson wrapped in electrical cord. These images embodied how, as Bronson noted, Toronto publishers "reflect the art scene back to itself," a process of "representing themselves as an art scene." (9) In FILE, the punk/new wave presence continued for three more years, ending in 1986 with a co-publication with Art and Text magazine, guest-edited by the Australian critic Paul Taylor. Reproducing Andy Warhol's portrait of Sid Vicious on the cover, perhaps a gesture acknowledging not only the importance of punk but also FILE's indebtedness to Interview magazine and Warholian fame and glamour, the issue also included a controversial insert (especially in retrospect) by Malcolm McLaren: Chicken, a fictitious sex magazine for children. As the 80s progressed, Toronto's punk scene changed. A second generation of bands arrived, including Fifth Column, the Cowboy Junkies, the Rent Boys, the Government and the Dave Howard Singers, supported along Queen Street West primarily by two new art bars, the Cabana Room in the Spadina Hotel (an old tavern turned artists' hangout in 1979 by video artist Susan Britton) and the Cameron Public House The Cameron Public House is a small bar, hotel, and informal cultural centre located at 408 Queen Street West, just west of Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto, Canada. The Cameron (another former dive, located next to the Impulse loft, which Herb Tookey revamped in 1981). By the mid-80s, the Beverley had cancelled live music shows and these clubs filled the gap. With punk came zines. As in the underground press of the hippie movement (where FILE's roots are found), small publishing ventures initiated and maintained counter-cultural networks. Noteworthy in 80s Toronto for networking through publishing is J.D.s, significant as a precursor of the international queercore music network and an early example of the late-80s/early-90s zinc explosion. Bruce LaBruce--then a graduate student in film theory--and GB Jones--then a member of the all-female band Fifth Column and contributor to the fanzine fan·zine n.An amateur-produced magazine written for a subculture of enthusiasts devoted to a particular interest: a science fiction fanzine. Hide--published J.D.s for five years, starting in 1986, offering, in nine photocopied issues, a raunchy raun·chy adj. raun·chi·er, raun·chi·est Slang1. a. Obscene, lewd, or vulgar: "[He] look at their enviably decadent lives. J.D.s' raw style--cut and paste and black and white Xerox--rejected technical finesse to the point that even the photocopies were lousy. The New Lavender Panthers (NIP), the collective name of those working on J.D.s, aimed to put "the gay back in 'punk' and the punk back in 'gay.'" (10) Shaking up the 80s punk scene and the college punk era, they created "a symbiosis symbiosis (sĭmbēō`sĭs), the habitual living together of organisms of different species. The term is usually restricted to a dependent relationship that is beneficial to both participants (also called mutualism) but may be extended to between subcultures"--between punk, queer and art--in a context of urban decay. (11) J.D.s' form and content were similar to the many punk fanzines that had popped up everywhere since the late 70s, like the seminal Maximum Rock 'N' Roll rock 'n' roll: see rock music. from San Francisco, Sniffin' Glue from Britain or Dr. Smith from Toronto, by Candy Parker, a friend of the J.D.s crowd. There are, however, only a few gay fanzine precedents to J.D.s. Certainly, as Peter Gallo noted, FILE "anticipated many queercore and punk zincs of the later 70s and 80s." (12) Then there's Faggots and Faggotry, a New York New York, state, United StatesNew York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of zine Pronounced "zeen." See Webzine and e-zine. from the post-Stonewall early 70s by Ralph Hall, and almost a decade later, the allusionally titled Fags and Faggotry by Mike Niederman of London, Ontario. In 1980, another, Bill Elderado's The Toronto Rag, started publishing extensively but not exclusively gay content, plus reviews of Toronto bands such as the Diodes and Rough Trade. The NLP (Natural Language Processing) The capability of understanding human language. If the language is spoken, voice recognition plays an important role in converting the sounds to individual words. Then, natural language processing figures out what the words mean. described J.D.s' content as "softcore same-sex porn for hardcore kids." (13) Each issue featured a stark, minimalist cover and characteristically punk-style, ransom-note-cutout text collages inside. Memorable photos included members of celeb ce·leb n. InformalA celebrity. punk bands--the Red Hot Chili Peppers Red Hot Chili Peppers are an American alternative rock band formed in Los Angeles, California in 1983. For most of its career, the group has consisted of vocalist Anthony Kiedis, guitarist John Frusciante, bassist Michael "Flea" Balzary, and drummer Chad Smith. and the Dead Kennedys, for instance--exposing themselves onstage. Sex stories included LaBruce's (a.k.a. Blab) ongoing chronicles of the fictional hustler Butch, written in a half diaristic, half porn-mag narrative. Prominent visuals were Blab's photographs of boyish looking punks, typically with serious hard-ons, and Jones' Tom Girls, appropriations of Tom of Finland's classic porno narrative drawings, replacing his 70s clones with biker-jacketed punker girls often drawn in pencil on the backs of photocopies (following their appearance in J.D.s, Jones' Tom Girls have been exhibited at the Power Plant and Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto and Feature gallery in New York). Notwithstanding Jones' smartly subversive drawings and Blab's sexually charged documentary photos (similar, contentwise, to Nan Goldin's photographs), not to mention Blab's academic background, NIP claimed J.D.s "is not about art and it is not theory." (14) Unsurprisingly, the mainstream Canadian art community, deeply immersed in the opaque art theory of the 80s, was unresponsive. However, both LaBruce and Jones were making Super 8 films--Boy/Girl (1987) and The Troublemakers (1990), respectively--that reflected the DIY DIYabbr.do-it-yourself
DIY or d.i.y. Brit, Austral & NZ do-it-yourselfDIYabbr DIYdo it yourself a DIY shop/job. , diaristic approach of the zine and exhibiting them at Super 8 screenings, such as those programmed by Pleasure Dome in Toronto, where the punk, queer and art communities could interact. NLP did not find the gay community welcoming. Glad Day Bookshop, Toronto's pioneering exclusively gay and lesbian bookstore, would not sell it; besides, Jones says, "The J.D.s gang had been thrown out of every gay bar in Toronto." (15) They also had to contend with the 80s punk community of Toronto, fragmented into sub-groups ranging from Nazi skins to Trojan (non-racist) skins to frat-boy dabblers. LaBruce recalls, "We were the second wave of punk, reacting against the influence of hardcore, which was a lot more macho, much more a kind of boy-bonding mosh-pit thing." (16) Nevertheless, despite a failure--a deliberate failure-to fit into the already carved niches of the punk world, the mall networks of the punk scene allowed for the increased visibility of J.D.s. J.D.s was tremendously influential, and it was an early contributor to the zine zeitgeist of the late 80s and early 90s. Musically, J.D.s' influence must be considered in tandem with Jones' membership in Fifth Column (core members aside from Jones were Caroline Azar and Beverly Breckenridge; Kathleen Pirrie Adams was one of the original members), an all-female band with subcultural politics predating the Olympia, Washington riot grrrl movement by nearly a decade. Further, J.D.s first featured the word "homocore"--in "J.D.s Top 10 Homocore Hit List" and in the title of a mixed tape they distributed of mostly punk band songs with queer themes or references: from LaBruce's own Zuzu's Petals to Butthole butt·hole n. Vulgar SlangThe anus. Surfers to Bow Wow Wow Bow Wow Wow was a 1980s New Wave band organized by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in 1980 whose music is described as having an "African-derived drum sound".[1] History to Patti Smith. J.D.S" lexical contribution foreshadowed the homocore movement of the early 90s, still flourishing but long since renamed with a more inclusive term, queer-core. It is today a sizable international network of musicians, filmmakers and zine producers (there are now some 200 queer zines according to Holy Titclamps, one of the best known). (17) J.D.s' early contribution to the zine zeitgeist had a massive impact on art and cultural publishing in Toronto. In the 90s, facing recession, subsequent grant cuts and a growing number of artists seeking exhibitions in a non-growing number of artist-run centres, younger artists found themselves in a forced DIY culture comparable to that of the punk and zine world. Self-produced exhibitions by artists' collectives such as Free Parking, Mud, Nethermind and Jin's Banana House (Jinhan Koh's project prior to forming the Instant Coffee collective) began to flourish. Similarly, for publishers who were no longer able to afford glossy and who were competing with a group of established art and cultural magazines already publishing reviews and commentary (C Magazine, M/X M/X Mix Effects , Canadian Art and Fuse, for example), the zine format was a natural alternative. Two significant publications initiated in this context were Splinter and Zola. Barry Isenor and Kenneth Hayes, part of Toronto's Super 8 community and consequently well-aware of Jones and LaBruce, published Splinter between 1989 and 1993, an architecture zine "inspired by the zinc culture of the late 1980s, with an interest in producing an architecture and design publication within the zine community." (18) Produced virtually without a budget--thanks to ongoing trial loans of photocopiers by foolishly optimistic sales reps--Splinter articulately responded, for example, to the effect of 80s real estate developers' excesses on Toronto architecture and the representation of power in government buildings through a lively editorial approach blending architecture with art, film and design. Cited in Factsheet Five (the principal US review for fanzines) as the first architecture zine, Splinter had gained a small but solid international following (circulation reached 1,000), leading to coverage in the Utne Reader. Memorable were the summer 1991 "Glare" issue, featuring a silver Mylar cover referencing Warhol's Factory walls, and the zine's "Forgotten Modern" section, profiling obscure, small-scale modern buildings. Half a decade later, in 1997, artist Sally McKay, curator John Messier and writer, Catherine Osborne launched a jargon-free art magazine called Lola, by and for artists and, yes, the general public. McKay regularly exhibited artworks featuring Bert and Ernie Bert and Ernie are two Muppets on the long-running PBS children's television show Sesame Street. The two appear together in numerous skits, forming a comic duo that is one of the centerpieces of the program. of Sesame Street and co-produced the zinc CUNT (Chicks United for Non-Noxious Transportation), while both Osborne and Massier had written extensively on art. However, after the first issue they began selling advertising, paying feature writers (who later included established journalists such as John Bentley Mays and Gerald Hannon) and using a printer rather than a photocopierphotocopierDevice for producing copies of text or graphic material by the use of light, heat, chemicals, or electrostatic charge. Most modern copiers use a method called xerography. ..... Click the link for more information.. By the time they started winning national magazine awards, the editors had transformed Lola from zine into magazine. Yet in content the zine influence remained, best seen in the spontaneity of Lola's brief "shotgun reviews," written by artists and interested others who more often than not weren't art critics or journalists and who frequently wrote in the first person. Quick, fleeting impressions, the shotguns more closely resembled blog entries than evaluative essays. Overworked and underfunded un·der·fund tr.v. un·der·fund·ed, un·der·fund·ing, un·der·fundsTo provide insufficient funding for.underfunded adj → infradotado (económicamente) , Osborne and McKay folded Lola in 2003, following the publication of its first summer issue, yet its spirit lives on. With the revival by Broken Pencil--Canada's zine that reviews zines--of the shotgun reviews format, the art magazine has again merged with punk-rooted zinc culture. Nevertheless, with truly radical punk existing only in small, fragmented pockets away from the mainstream, the gross commercialization of the genre (if one is already disappointed by Green Day's current incarnation, a Canadian Idol contestant "going punk" will certainly finish the coffin nailing), blogs competing with zines and simply with the passage of time, the present influence of punk music on art publishing is impossible to quantify. But the punk era, with the anger of punk acting like a rallying cry to wake up from the deep-freeze of late modernism to postmodern consciousness, is worth looking back at--be it in publishing or other media and venues--to see how its iconoclasm iconoclasm (īkŏn`ōklăzəm) [Gr.,=image breaking], opposition to the religious use of images. Veneration of pictures and statues symbolizing sacred figures, Christian doctrine, and biblical events was an early feature of Christian led to or predicted what's happening today in music and art.

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