These Are The Days-the coffee-table book is here!

These Are The Days coffee-table catalogue or program booklet is finally out. I was happy to receive a postal package a week ago of this Punk Good Book. I am barely beginning to probe or explore the pages of these wonderful graphics and writings that are contained between its covers. It`s obvious that tender loving care was put into the making of this book.

These Are The Days was an art show put on by Matt Stokes last February at Arthouse here in Austin. Matt took a close look at the Punk Rock scene that was happening here in Austin in the late `70s and early `80s. Matt contacted many of the people who played active roles in this ‘music subculture.’ This forced the issue. These artists/musicians got out of storage their old pics, 8 millimeter home movies, homegrown records, fanzines, gig posters and/or mangled T-shirts archived in moldy plastic evidence bags, then filed in a Funk & Wagnell in Grandma`s attic (for around three decades).

I`m listening to Television`s Marquee Moon this morning and trying to re-remember this whole thing once again. Memories are flickering in and out, but the most focused ones are of Nick West, who left us last summer. Nick did the fanzine Sluggo, a cultural awareness wake-up call publication, that seemed to trace the subconscious revolution that transpired here in (America & Austin). This credo was projected by way of humor, cartoons and coded words along the lines of Levi Strauss.

This is a direct quote from Nick Modern (Nick West) that is in the coffee table book. “Fucking Lester wussed out before the good stuff happened anyway. We already knew his punch line: THE OLD WORLD HAD EXPLODED, and we could mix and match the shrapnel any damn way we pleased. The creepy Cosmic Cowboy had slunk into oblivion, the punk clone buzz saw bands were still a few years away, and in between was the play space, the Anti-Houston, the land of a thousand dances and a few hundred sweat-hot nights in the bowels of Raul`s, screaming and laughing in stupefied disbelief that we were actually getting away with it! Then we…JESUS CHRIST, WHERE`D THOSE MIGs COME FROM?!?”

Nick has summarized the whole scene, somehow, in a coded message from his subconscious. More study is required of the SHEIK OF ARABY *(could be anyone-Matt, Tom,  Johnnie or Bert)…A KITTENCABUDLE OF COSMIC ENERGY!!!….

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