***
Communities disintegrate often not from ideological disagreements, but from a slow seepage outward of participants. The leak starts with a tiny rip in the fabric and spreads into a gaping fissure, social atomization. In the early Pietistic woodland communes of 17th century America charismatic millenarian leaders would often predict dates for the end of the world. When the end didn’t come, it was only a matter of time before their communes became abandoned ghost towns. There comes a time when people ultimately weigh the advantages of ‘community’ up against its shortcomings and frustrations, and either divest themselves completely or renew their faith in the endeavor. Punk communities have such a poor retention rate for people aging into their late 20s and 30s because of a diminishing rate of returns—to be a part of it, one must continue to participate actively within the framework of a narrowly-defined lifestyle and continually show up to the persistent cultural and social activities, which begin to feel more and more obligatory. In the end, punk scenes disintegrate like any other social clique—people are let down by their peers, develop other interests, and begin to see the world through a wider-lens. They shift away from social milieus to more stable affairs like careers, marriages, or law school that make them feel alienated from the critical vanguard that make up what is considered ‘the scene.’ In a small incestuous subculture that defines itself by a moral interpretation of its predecessors, there is a constant back-and-forth tug of war between the mores of ‘the world’ and the mores of the community, which are often the inverse of the status quo. In this battle of lifestyle and ideas, ‘the world’, insidious as it is, often wins out—as they get older, many people prefer reading The New Yorker to some 18-year-old’s rants about eating food out of a garbage can in a photocopied zine. In this rhythmic, undulating digestion, the smaller thing is usually poached out and subsumed by the larger thing. Even the most well-hidden and reclusive cultures are eventually sought out by anthropologists and journalists, documented, publicized, and made consumable as image. To unravel a moral community all it takes is the transgression of one member of the sect—whether their sin is eating meat, signing a major label contract, or working within an established organization. This serves to legitimize and open that vista of possibility for the others. In his story “Worms”, Cometbus provided a parable for this: “For fifteen years the birds had hunted us down. They had done everything they could to kill our culture, including appropriate and water down every aspect of it that they could. Now they saw the exposure we had been getting and suddenly they came around and said they were very interested in us. What they meant was that they had stolen everything they could from us and now there was nothing left to steal from us but us.”
The author’s convictions bring to mind questions of revolutionary purity—after some perfect punk virtue is established, what next? It would seem that, like all revolutionary groups, the community could only turn inward on itself in a continual kind of self-cleansing and weeding out of ‘the normal’ within its ranks.
***
In one of the more recent novella-length issues of his zine, Cometbus #52: The Spirit of St. Louis, the longtime Cometbus reader notices that something has changed. For one thing, the narrative is noticeably fictional, whereas in the past it has been ambigous. There is no longer much of a literary character of the author, nor a hopeless romantic spin on the stories that make the world seem beautiful and filled with wonder. In The Spirit of St. Louis, Cometbus charts the decline of a fictional St. Louis punk scene—from the hope of its inception to the avalanche of bitterness that follows. Cometbus’s doomed lumpen punks are worn down by daily poverty, and the impinging forces of gentrification. Sheila is hit by a bike on her car, Spike wakes up with his apartment on fire. The only two good bars in St. Louis burn down and then are redeveloped. Pets die and one by one people get married and move away or disappear. This progression should be familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to stick it out in a second or third tier American city or a college town with an ephemeral and transient student population. The characters, one by one, shelve their idealistic hopes for community in favor of more realistic options. Gone are the excitable Greyhound trips, the love stories in a dumpster and bottomless cups of coffee in lonely nowhere diners, replaced by a multi-character narrative set in one geographic place. In The Spirit of St. Louis, there is the feeling of exhale, an unclenching of the synaptic stress muscles, as the author explores the kind of seeping bitterness of a life devoted to youth culture. In Cometbus #52, he steps back and assumes a more distant, shadowy author-reporter narrative voice. This has led to more journalistic/anthropological issues of Cometbus, such as Cometbus #51: The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah, where the history of Berkeley’s independent bookstore scene is dug from the archives, or Cometbus #46: The Dead End, a collection of interviews with the workers of a collectively run café in Minneapolis. These issues have a noticeable allure and interest, but are certainly less enthused than the younger, more caffeinated first-person approach—what originally captured the Cometbus readership was the image of Cometbus himself tromping around alone—his manic cross country trips, his long walks, his lonely Cape Cod squats. Blissfully lonely diaries like: “This is my new office, the bowling alley with twenty-five cent coffee only two blocks from my house. Before I moved here, my old office was the ice skating rink with seventy-five cent coffee. There was something really rad about spending a nice sunny day writing and swilling shitty coffee inside an ice skating rink.”
