About InstaPunk.com
Twenty-five years ago, the counter-culture born in the late 1960s gave rise to a kind of counter-counter-culture called punk. Most famous for its raucous untutored music, punk represented a rebellion against the circumstance that the rock-and-roll baby boomers had become the establishment they used to rail against. Punk was an anarchic attitude desperately in search of a real cause for attacking the baby boomer culture, but since that culture had already overturned so many traditions and conventions, the punk movement quickly ran out of steam. One artifact of their existence is the strange book called The Boomer Bible, which postulated the emergence of a demi-monde of "punk writers" on South Street in Philadelphia. Aided by advanced computer technology, the punk writers acquired access to the knowledge they needed to mount a genuine attack on the baby boom generation. The South Street punks wrote in bands, using an assortment of high-tech input devices, and pioneered a new style of writing that was intensely oral and dedicated to breaking as many of the rules governing 'serious' fiction as they could. They also worked on a few projects that involved the effort of 2,000 or more punk writers at a time. The Boomer Bible was the first such joint effort. According to their own histories, the punk writers were also violently engaged in combating the various drug gangs which ruled the streets of Philadelphia and Camden in those days. It was their practice to ambush drug deals, destroy the drugs, and use the monies they captured to pay for their computer equipment. Theirs was a spartan life, and their dominion on South Street lasted for just six years. Legend has it they vanished all at once, on the same day that the Philadelphia Police Department bombed MOVE headquarters. It is still unclear where they went and why, although The Boomer Bible seems to predict their return in the year 2001. A few scattered reports from South Street suggest that this return may well be underway.
We at InstaPunk are not the original writer punks of South Street. Many of us are their contemporaries in age, and all of us share their view that the baby boom generation, now firmly ensconced in power, takes itself far too seriously and uncritically. We take our cues from the vast scope of subject matter in The Boomer Bible, and so our blog entries will address not just the political hot potato of the moment, but also history, the sciences, and the high and low arts. We think the writer punks would be pleased to see this blog approach and its built-in capacity for linking, because from the present perspective The Boomer Bible itself looks very much like a gigantic self-contained blogosphere in which book after book denotes its myriad connections to every other book. It is a grand sewing together of ideas, viewpoints, and events, as is the new 21st century realm called the Internet.
We're always glad to receive your emails (punk -at- instapunk.com) and will generally respond to them, but it's also wise to remember that we are punks, however grizzled and gnarled, and we don't hesitate to fight fire with fire if the occasion warrants.
So there.
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