streptos music

Fear of a Tad Planet
by Tad Kepley

A Tad Planet practices selective breeding via forced miscegenation.
Its businessmen mind their own business, its feminists are.  Anyone
who fucks with anyone else gets blown away on a Tad Planet, but only
kids are allowed to carry guns, and we expect the brats to obey that
order.  No porn on a T.P., everyone has easy access to the real deal.
Constant travel–no bullshit *stationary* “community” here, everyone
is a nomad; bad-assed traler-court Bedouins in methane-driven Broncos
thrumming and caroming from parallel to parallel across cracked and
bubbling asphalt.  Here is there here–movement a communal abuse of
speed for its own sake.  Anything that anyone ever paid for is
redeemed only through fire…non-liberatory commodities are trashed
in spontaneous bursts of arbitrary flame, not to assuage guilt but to
celebrate and commemorate the supercession of their usefulness.  Theft
has become the preferred mode of exchange–no property is held
comunally here for no property is *held*–when immediate use of an
object has ceased, it’s up for grabs.  You never know where you’ll be
tomorrow here, and you’re glad.  Everyone is socially responsible for
being *equally* socially *ir*responsible.  We specialize in
*de*specialization, we’re centrally *de*centralized…we take freshman
philosophical paradox as the maximal tenet of our lack of ideology.
“Art” (with a capital A) doesn’t exist because it implies the
stationary; sand paintings sprout on the overgrown roadsides as
grafitti’s exquisite corpses adorned the crumbling city walls…The
only way one communes with the land on a Tad Planet is by crossing it.
No one tells you what to do because *no one cares* what you do.  On a
Tad Planet you get high on life by doing drugs (ritual abuse replaced
ritual use), you imprison yourself with freedom.  Everyone is a
potential lover and always a potential enemy–both if you’re lucky.
Stapled by gravity to the side of a Tad Planet we disobey our own
orders, we contradict ourselves and tell you we didn’t, all rules are
made to be broken.  A Tad Planet has compassion without condescension,
“rebellion without guile.”  The slinking, snickering coyote is our
familiar.  Our global emblem is the horseshoe crab–like our species,
a resilient evolutionary anomaly.  Our colors, never worn, are rust
and the green of the aurora; the farewell flash of the sun.  The
nose-breaking, septum-searing stink of creosote and rose-pink diesel
our decorative stenches.  The tornado is our totem, convection’s
consumate creation; atmospheric thermodynamics our only exact science.
Our endless summers are spent trailing interesting meteorological
phenomena–we summer chasing thunderstorms from rockies to
mississippi, we ice drinks with our hail.  We worship only ourselves
and each other on a Tad Planet, we all have U.V.-sevsitive tattoos on
this ball–visible only under the black lites that illuminate our
shanties and teepees.  Brutality is beautiful here: the most direct
form of communication, it punctuates our appreciation of life…The
only contests here are won by concoction of the gel explosive with the
highest foot-per-second dispersal rate, marathon spinning on a tilt-a-
whirl, achieving orgasm the most times and with the most partners in
one swing of the sun.  Sex has nothing to do with “intimacy” and
everything to do with selfish pleasure, our genitals don’t have scabs,
they’ve got battle-scars.  We measure our body temperatures in degrees
Kelvin…we party in rooms sealed full of nitrous oxide and helium.  A
Tad Planet’s music is the warm warble of high tension wire in a stiff
wind, the infrasound throb stirred by harmonic tectonics, accompanied
by harmonica, mouth-harp and didjeridoo, with a snot-nosed percussion
section of several calibres (rapid fire .223 and .308 snare, 10 and 12
guage bass, .22 and .25 hi-hat at a distance–the lilting cracks and
booms best appreciated through a half-mile of thick air).  On this
tilting terra-infirma, the manipulative die of inertia.  We revel in
flauting the “laws” of nature–defying and decrying cruel gravity as
sizeist, converting energy from useless states into useful ones,
shucking fucking edenic entropy as silly, burning both ends of a
parafin ouroboros, daring ourselves to die as a celebration of life.
The surety (on this viral more of an orb) is that nothing is *ever*
easy, nothing is *ever* done for you–all is challenging and vibrant,
a corruscating lacy latticework of carnivorous chaos ponderously
pickle-eatinpregnant with prurient possibility.  Caveat emptor.

Originally published in the anarchist zine Black Eye (among others).
Please reproduce and distribute freely.

sp000120

source http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000120.txt

[The following is taken from a leaflet that was passed around Lawrence,
Kansas sometime around 1986 or 1987]

FUCK PUNK
[by Tad Kepley]

Dear friends….

Punk Sucks. As every day goes by, it becomes more pathetic, choking itself
on its’ own puke, and I’m through with it.

For several years, I’ve been involved in the “scene”, and I’m tired. I give
too much and get nothing in return. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen you all. Snotty
rich kids hollering Anarchy, hyper-intelligent are farts quoting Sartre,
“lower class” anally retentive nazis, just plain idiots, hipsters like
me…..

I’ve always claimed myself as a part of the “scene”…I’m sick of people
who claim that they aren’t part of the scene, yet still bleed off it to
bandage their insecurity. That is Punk. People who are hip, yet not quite
hip enough no not be hip…got that? If you don’t, I’m sure there would be
a million self-contradicting upper-middle-class hippies’ kids to tell you
what is up.

Why should class even come into this? Because I’m nauseated by rich kids
trying to act poor….it is almost as bad as poor kids trying to act
rich…social class is a big part of the scene. The kids who don’t have
jobs, yet somehow seem to make it to every show and have huge record
collections, and the whole while whining about social injustice and nuclear
holocaust. They are secure, they can afford to worry about these things,
not to mention their shitty little problems and their shitty little
cliques, and shitty little mind games.

Recently, some idiot told me how he wished “these people” would “stop
acting like they’re part of a subculture, punk’s not important, it is too
elitist. The hippies and beats were more…etc…etc…punk isn’t a
subculture, why don’t these people realize they are just the same?” Why?
Because there are people in the scene.

Like any “movement” punk has its’ rhetoric, some self-challenging, most
not. And most “movements” weren’t even that until someone was moved to make
a movement. You can “believe” anything you want…you are only limited by
your imagination. “The truth shall make you free,” say squeamishly correct
literary groupies, “and the more truthful you are, the freer you shall be.”
Bullshit. We are all liars, and we are all social critics, and you can
only do your best, there is no such thing as perfection.

I’m tired of people creating secure realities and then pretending they
aren’t a part of them, or becoming so much a part of them that they lose
sight of what their “original goals” were. Wait a minute…what if the
original goal was to lose track of goals?

Punk is hierarchical and inherently fascistic. People don’t form bands in
the scene to “express themselves”, politically or otherwise. They do it for
that nice warm feeling you get when someone kisses your ass. It’s who you
know that matters, and the scene kings who proclaim it the loudest and most
vociferously are that doctrines most addicted practitioners. Ass kissing is
a drug. How are you going to change the world so you don’t have to kiss ass
by spending all your time doing nothing butt?

Hey you punk “anarchists”…I call your bluff. Your anarchy isn’t anarchy.
It is deadpanarchy. A deadpan reactionism. Yes, I too can say “fuck you” in
ten different languages, and I didn’t pick it up from the little prince.
Some of you did, and will spout “Kropotkin this, Bakunin that.” So what.
Pretty unanarchical of you to make fun of the people who come to the shows.

I don’t need this shit. I have enough problems without letting all this
drag me down…this could go on forever…but it doesn’t need to.

The “scene” meant alot to me…and did a great deal for me. And I paid for
my pleasure with jail terms, thousands of hours and dollars…and it isn’t
fun, and I’m no freer.

Most of you who will be getting this are my friends. I haven’t seem many of
you in a long time, and many of you I’ve never seen. I’ll still go to
shows, and I’ll still listen to the music, but punk and I are divorced.

This doesn’t need to go on. You all know the “truth” anyway…time for me
to do the “hip” thing and move on.

Divisively yours,
Tad

sp000726

txt source http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000726.txt