Shock and Awe
On March 11th my friend Maya and I went to Brontez Purnell’s “No New Art/No New Dance” fest, put on by The Lab in San Francisco. Groups of hipsters sat cross legged on the floor and tried to look contemplative; a few of the really high ones laid down. My friend and I both quickly realized we were underdressed, or at least underperforming with our clothes. I wore a flannel and some skinny jeans, my go-to “please don’t notice me” look, and still I felt as though I stuck out in the crowd of sheer-tank-top-and-bralette-clad art students. After we had done a lap and looked at the artworks hung on the walls, Brontez announced that the show was about to start and we took our place at the back of the crowd.
Admittedly, my only other experience with performance art was another of Brontez’ pieces that he performed for my class. In comparison, his piece at The Lab was much more focused, as opposed to the somewhat informal affair we witnessed the Wednesday prior which Brontez claims to have come up with while absolutely hammered. Brontez himself was a spectacle all night and seemed to be performing all the time, not just during his 15–20 minute segment. I waved hello on the off chance that he might recognize me, and he responded by giving me a long hug and a kiss on the neck as he flounced around the room. He seemed to know everyone. In fact, everyone seemed to know everyone. We stayed inside for another thirty or so minutes and listened to a combination poem/film (“And now we’re eating out. Eating each other out”) before stepping outside for a cigarette. As we walked back in to see “Ugly,” an all women of color punk band from Oakland, we noticed the crowd had dwindled and silently congratulated ourselves on being among the last there.
Ugly’s set ended, and Maya and I decided it was time to leave shortly after Brontez got completely naked in front of a video camera (which had been running all night) and did a handstand, flashing his self-described chafed asshole to 15 or so onlookers who couldn’t quite decide if it was funny or not. Exiting The Lab felt like returning from another planet. Suddenly everyone was fully clothed, people weren’t licking each other’s tongues and the majority of the floor space wasn’t taken up by an abstract piece of art painted by a mop. Things returned to comfortable normalcy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it as soon as I stepped out the doors.
This world’s definition of comfortable normalcy, however, is unequivocally different from the comfortable normalcy that the countercultural predecessors of The Lab experienced. The left is thoroughly embedded in the Bay Area. At a certain point you’d think “Berkeley Students Protest” would stop being news, but it’s been made clear in the wake of Milo Yiannopoulos’s non-speech that we aren’t at that point yet. So why, in Berkeley of all places, is it so frowned upon to protest an openly anti-LGBTQ speaker? In keeping with time honored tradition at this university, I’ve come to the only logical conclusion; we need a 19 year old kid to make sense of all this. A kid whose entire life has been lived in either Eugene, Olympia, Santa Cruz or Berkeley. A kid who has only viewed the world through the thin films of soap that make up his liberal bubble, but though the rainbows and distortions make everything a little blurry he’s pretty sure he can see a swastika on the walls of the White House.
From the right’s perspective, Milo acts as every modern republican’s gay friend. He doesn’t mind if you call people faggots. He doesn’t mind if you make a few jokes about his sexuality here and there. He’ll get the ball rolling by talking about how he can’t be racist because he loves sucking black dick. And unfortunately for Milo, being seen as the gay Uncle Tom is infinitely preferable to the way the left sees him, because white people hate being called Nazis.
The fact that it is so common to hear people call Milo a Nazi means that the counterculture can no longer be associated with the left, at least locally. Even Antifa, the edgiest far-left protesters in the business, dress up exactly the way culture wants them to. With the generation of disenfranchised teens raised by the punks on MTV finally reaching maturity, the anarchist look has never been so in. The left’s countercultural heroes aren’t playing dress up at protests; they’re getting naked in spaces like The Lab.
“Is this resistance or a costume party? Either way I think black with bandanas is a boring theme.”
— Pat the Bunny, Anarchist Folk-Punk artist
So what does this mean for our heroes? Well, unfortunately, the counterculture is not as clearly defined as it was in the 60s. While the parents had their backs turned, punk became the norm. The kids won, the way they always do. This is what a (relatively) progressive society looks like and if we live in a progressive society the potential future Nazis become the counterculture. The first time Green Day’s “Longview” played on national television, any chance of another Jack Kerouac was erased, and it feels like nobody has realized that yet. Try as they might (and they do try), this mainstream left simply cannot muster the energy to be shocking anymore. So now both sides have good reason to think they are the underdog on the brink of success. Everybody’s the hero in their own story. No one is concerned with the other side because the good guys always win.
I keep hearing people say that if only the right and the left could understand each other and talk about their issues, then the conflict would finally be over. But I think the time for that passed. It’s time to batten down the hatches, pick a side and fight it to the bitter end. So if Milo returns I’ll be in the crowd with the rest of you, holding a clever sign and telling that Nazi fuck to stay off our campus.
