Sean Avery, we thank you, really

Yes we agree that the above title requires a lot of explanation, but it's true. If Sean Avery of the Dallas Stars had not spoken so poorly last week while the team was in Calgary we never would have had the chance to talk about what he reportedly said, something that ended up catching us offguard. According to Avery, he was simply trying to stoke a little hype and emotion about the game since Calgary defenseman Dion Phaneuf is dating Avery's ex-girlfriend Elisha Cuthbert and referred to Cuthbert as "my sloppy seconds". This created an immmediate sensation, especially among the NHL's older guard. What became evident though, is that while everyone seems to agree that the term is innappropiate and extremely disrepectful to Cuthbert, there is some argument as to how disrespectful it actually is because, as it turns out, the meaning of the term has slowly changed over the last few decades.

That langauge changes and slowly evolves is nothing new, but that we can hear this happening as a generational argument is rare. For example, Avery's use of "my" implies that "sloppy seconds" is a noun, objectifing Cuthbert and putting her on a level with last night's dinner leftovers. A lot of our younger friends are in agreement with this kind of usuage for the term - not that he was right to use it, but rather that he used it in the correct manner. However, for many of older friends, say 50+, the term is much more explict, describing an action. Thus, it would be wrong to say "he can have my sloppy seconds" just as it would be wrong to say "he can have my ménage a trois", and in fact this term is a little closer to the idea held by older speakers, although ménage a trois implies a sort of consensual character that is absent from sloppy seconds, though to call it gang rape might take it too far, but not necessarily.

Our conversation quickly turned from Avery to another derisive turn who's definition has dramatically changed over the last forty years ago: punk. Prior to the establishment of Legs McNeil's magazine Punk, the term described, as Williams S. Burroughs poetically put it, "the boys who gave their asses to the wolves". It was always something of a msytery to us how the term went from describing gay prostitutes to rowdy musicians, but Sean Avery's comments led us to reconsider the impact that the infamous 1969 Stonewall Riots had on the emerging punk scene. The raids on gay bath houses and subsequent marches are typically seen as the jumping off point of Gay Rights, and it would be hard to imagine that as Greenwich Village was the locus for much of this activity, as well as for what would become punk, that the two crowds did not mix, nor that media-savy types like Legs McNeil would not notice the press the gay crowds were garnering.

We think, and largely because of Sean Avery, that the time is ripe for a critical re-evaluation of gay culture on early punk. 

American Hardcore

Yesterday we took time out of our oh-so-busy schedules to watch the documentary on early American punk, American Hardcore. For perhaps the first time, the historical focus has finally started to shift form the early CBGB days, London, and late 1970s Los Angeles, to the development of hardcore punk in Washington, Southern California and New York. It was odd to watch the documentary with local counterculture historian Sean Marchetto present, as the film seemed to vindicate several points he made in his University of Calgary Masters' Thesis, Tune In, Turn On, Go Punk.

"The conversations I was having with people in 1999 was very different from what people are talking about now. Books like Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me and Clinton Heylin's From The Velvets to the Voidoids were really all that were out there. Hardcore was still to recent, people were still trying to remember the beginnings."

One of the things that Marchetto seemed particularly pleased about were the brief discussions about hardcore punks and their broken homes, "You'd read these early oral histories about people coming to New York or L.A. and there'd be suggestions that they came from broken homes. Rarely would they come out and talk about their family life, though Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch have been rather upfront, but instead they'd talk about showing up at the bus stop in a particular year. If you took that year and worked backwards from their birthday, or their approximate age in 1999, it turned out a lot of these people were fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen when they started getting involved in what turned out to later to be hardcore.  Groups like Bad Brains and Black Flag were older though, and you could tell that they belonged to that earlier generation of punks because they were the originators."

"There has to be some kind of connection between punk, and the counterculture in general really, and family life. Ideally sociologists and psychologists would find this a fertile area of study."