new genre

[egypturnash]

I think I accidentally created a potential new genre in the mood of my last entry: flapperpunk. It's like cyberpunk, except with much more style. And dirty jazz instead of techno. Prohibition, bathtub gin, mirror eye implants, cybered up mobsters, noisecore jitterbugging... fast times, not-so-fast cars.

Anyone who wants to run with this, feel free. At most I'd probably just do a few doodles and move on to something else.

Also, my self-bobbed hair has enough bleach in it right now to treat a full head of scapula-length hair. Hopefully I managed to get it on all the nasty black!

Comments

[pyrobunny.livejournal.com]

so now there's cyberpunk, steampunk, and flapperpunk. excellent. i like the latter two better. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how quickly cyberpunk flared and died. Even the beautiful line that Gibson opened "Neuromancer" with, The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, is now made wholly obsolete by technical progress - back then, you saw static when you tried to watch a channel that didn't exist, but now, a TV set detects that, and substitutes a blank field of blue.

Cyberpunk was pretty damn cool when it was new, before everyone jumped on the bandwagon. It brought a lot of life back into science fiction, which was getting pretty ossified back then.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

My ratty's ears are burning!

Awww, they're so cute when they glow all orangey-metallic like that, but they're probably toxic.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I must've picked up his psychic grumblings or something!

Or else this is just the Day Cyberpunk Died, +- 5 days.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

o/~ And they were singin' bye-bye Mr. Street Samurai o/~

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

Cyberpunk is something that *almost* happened while I was in high school. Some kids started wearing crazy stuff like jewellery made from circuitboard slices, or slapping on all the gadgets they could find. I'm really glad that one died, though.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Don't forget 1940's/1950's tubepunk! And cyberpunk wasn't so bad until it got out of the hands of the people who hated the term...

OK, so basically, we have everything from around 1837 to 1959 covered. That leaves eighteen years until Never Mind the Bollocks and Ramones Leave Home and the advent of real punk. What are we gonna do to futurize those other eighteen years? :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hippiepunk?

No... it just diesn't work. Punk was a reaction to all the syrupy happy art-wankery of the hippie lovefests seeping through all of culture in the 70s.

glittering butthole rotating in hyperspace

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

I liked the plastic irony hippie/flower punk evoked in me.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Punk was a reaction to all the syrupy happy art-wankery of the hippie lovefests seeping through all of culture in the 70s.

*cackle* You must have seen a different 1970's than I did. Keep in mind, I was raised by a KSU survivor... ;) I also read way too much R. Crumb, Bob Wilson, Tom Wolfe, and Ray Mungo to have a sunny technicolor view of the 1960's and 70's!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mostly I remember lots of earth tones. And a lot of earthtone-flavored red, white, and blue around '76. What do you expect, I was learning to talk back then, popular culture went right past me... and I haven't felt any desire to wallow in nostalgia for time periods I already lived through once; I want to play around with ones that were dead and gone before I was born.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Hee, I don't think I was even learning to talk by '76, not till later in the year. I was born exactly a year and a day before the Bicentennial. :) I got most of what I know about the 70's second-hand but in very large volume from my mom, who's a pop-culture junkie like me, so I see current events relative to swine flu, Idi Amin, Watergate, and lots of other little historical blips that just aren't on most of my generation's radar.

In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hey, that means your birthday is two days before mine. July's a great birth-month because it's straight across the calendar from Christmas, so you pretty much maximize your gift-recieving potential when you're a kid. *grin*

I, however, try to stay as far away from pop culture as possible. I don't even think about doing this; it's just reflex.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

February 1976.
I was in Daytona Beach for Bike Week, with my parents. This was my first time in the US.
(I was born in France, see...)
I don't think I ever recovered.


By the way, Idi Amin is dead.
Of natural causes.
Unfortunately.
Grrrrrrrrrr...

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

Cybermod?

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

FlowerPunk!

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that a word from the title of a Zappa song? See, that's where I'd go with the 1959-1977 cyberpunk equivalent if I had to put it on the steam/tube/flapper/cyber spectrum. People forget too quickly (sorry, Peggy ;D ), yes, punk was in part a reaction to the hippies, that's entirely correct -- but the seeds of the punk movement were already well within the 1960's counterculture, which was frighteningly diverse and had plenty of dark elements which have been overlooked amid all the day-glo bodypaint. (And who can blame them? ;) )

I mean, for crying out loud, Lou Reed was wearing leather and singing about heroin and whores in 1968! ;) Frank Zappa was singing about the "Brain Police" and later about "the Central Scrutinizer." Steely Dan, love 'em or hate 'em, were also a nice bridge between drug-soaked hippie idealism and punk cynicism. They didn't sound very punk, sure, but they were apparently a big, big influence on William Gibson. And there was that wonderfully dark L.A. hippie culture, the one that spawned Arthur Lee's Love and Kenneth Anger and Bobby Beausoleil, and let's not forget Manson. The spirit of Gibsonesque paranoia and Sterlingesque techno-alienation was well alive in 1968. :)

Damn, postrodent could probably do this better justice than I could. I know I've seen all sorts of 1960's sci-fi that had elements of that seedy punk alienation long, long before it's time. But yeah, if we were to futurize the 1960's, I think that's the tack I'd want, to seize onto all that wonderful alienation and violence and antinomy and exaggerate it, in some alternate universe, to the point where punk didn't really need to happen because the hippies just became them...

(There was a WOD MUSH called "Purple Haze" or something that took this premise, emphasizes the icky parts of the Sixties, and I regret never having gotten to play there even though I hate White Wolf as a rule.)

[fourprint.livejournal.com]

Mainframe hackers, early VR, Huxley, Leary, Buckminster Fuller, high-tech dome-livin' back-to-the-landers...

Hmm. I think I'll have a flip through the original Whole Earth Catalogue now.

[adequatemagic.livejournal.com]

... I liiike it.

A long time ago, there was a group of folks on talk.bizarre who were trying to write 'The Golden Age of talk.bizarre'... a sort of jazz-age pulp hero version of ourselves.

It was working pretty well, then it, like so many things, went kerflop.

Hm.

Imagine this: a system of interconnected subterranian tunnels, with our protagonists speeding though them to unknown desitnations via motorcycles, line-steamed cars, or occasionally (in one case) on very patient foot.

Imagine a man with 144 personalities, each one with their own nature, their own meta ability. Imagine a polymath gadgeteer turned swashbuckling hero, accompanied by a black panther and the Wonderous Gizmo. Imagine the Radio Gun and the Brass Motorcycle.

I like it.

Hi.

[(Anonymous)]

You don't know me. However, I happened to see your post (via Ursula Vernon's friend's page; she doesn't know me, either) and thought you might be interested to learn of the mini-comic The Twelve Swingin' Princesses (http://warytales.verunne.net/) by Jen Wang (http://www.stringsoffate.com/art/) (who also does not know me). You have to pay fifty cents to see the actual comic but judging from the concept art it's rather flapperpunkish: 1 (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mao/97481.html) 2 (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mao/99271.html) 3 (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mao/99579.html) 4 (http://www.livejournal.com/community/pantsketch/544.html) 5 (http://www.livejournal.com/community/pantsketch/6714.html) 6 (http://www.livejournal.com/community/pantsketch/10885.html). (You may now return to your regularly scheduled livejournal.)

Re: Hi.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

...there are no new ideas, are there. It's just a matter of actually implementing them, and how well you do it.

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

Sorta like the beginning of A Clockwork Orange?

I want a fake eyelash.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Someday I really must see that movie.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

You must! You must!
Doesn't your roomy have it?
I would be really surprised if not.
BEST MOOG SOUNDTRAK EVAR!
(tee hee)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just because I've was raised by closet hippies... or maybe it's because I read way too much about the Democratic Convention... however, I always had this weird impression that Punk was connected to the hippy movement anyway, considering that it all was about revolution and getting rid of the goverment in it's own way... maybe different ways, but still the same.

Course, in Chicago, things kinda were extermly confusing anyway, considering...

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

What you describe sounds almost like Doc Savage brought kicking and screaming into the present day. Or possibly The Shadow.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hard drives of men..."

[zrath.livejournal.com]

Buckaroo Banzai did Doc Savage for the '80s, so I guess it's time for a new version of it.

You know, deep down, I don't wanna wear oversized t-shirts and pants and all that gangsta crap.
I wanna wear zoot suits and '20s gangster suits!
I wanna bump Cab Calloway on my boomin' system!
I wanna be a big band palooka!

And I want a Thompson submachinegun...

[taskmaster.livejournal.com]

Style is all but dead these days.

just to be pedantic...

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

Actually, one of the primary goals of dance music was to reconcile hippie ideals with the raw energy of punk. In the genre I spin, psytrance, most artists came from either the punk, goth or industrial scenes; check Aussie-punk turned flower child Spacetribe (http://www.spacetribe.com), or Youth's (ex-Killing Joke) various (http://www.dragonflyrecords.co.uk) projects (http://www.liquidsounddesign.com).

Of course, the yin-and-yang of antiestablishment consciousness expansion is well in line with Zappa and Beefheart, while almost completely sublimated in America's pleasure prisons PLUR raving...