The house was about to be sold, and its distinctive flourishes — the casket outside, the skate ramp out back — dismantled.
“I wanted to document it before it went away,” said Ms. Banks, explaining that despite their hoary history, many punk houses are ephemeral. “I just think they’re really important and beautiful. For some people it will be their lifestyle forever, but for others it’s just a phase.”
She called upon an old band mate, Timothy Findlen, and they embarked in Ms. Banks’s maroon Ford Ranger on a three-and-a-half month road trip.
The Ranger is an art project in itself, layered with stenciled images of figures impish, historical and arcane, like Herman Munster,
Anne Frank, and one Mr. Findlen made of Harry Smith, the music ethnographer, mystic and Bohemian who died of natural causes at the Chelsea Hotel. As they toured cross-country, Mr. Findlen would play shows, and Ms. Banks would take pictures. They brought house presents — a case of wine, Two-Buck Chuck, from Trader Joe’s, and a box of silk-screen T-shirts with the slogan “I’d Rather Be Dumpster-Diving,” made by a friend of Ms. Banks.
When those offerings ran out, Ms. Banks said, “all we had was to be nice” — and the offer of Mr. Findlen’s dish-washing services.
The ephemeral quality of punk houses became clear a year after the photographs were taken, when Ms. Banks returned to her subjects with photographic release permission forms from her publisher. Many of the houses were gone, she said, resulting in a scramble to find the former residents.
Last week, Andee Grrr, a 28-year-old zine writer now living in Brattleboro, Vt., described her three years at one of the oldest punk houses in Ms. Banks’s book, the 309 House in Pensacola, Fla. (It was so old, Ms. Banks said, “there were fliers on the wall for shows the year I was born,” 1978.) The house was a clapboard five-bedroom bungalow with a fluctuating number of residents and one “filthy, filthy bathroom.” The rent for each member was $25.
Ms. Grrr, like most of 309ers, volunteered at the End of the Line vegan-punk cafe across the street, living on her tips. Food was mostly free: bread from a bakery Dumpster and vegetables from the supermarket’s Dumpster. “The good part was there was always someone to talk to if you were feeling bad,” she said. “I developed some really strong friendships. And the rent was so low we didn’t have to work much. I could write a lot. The bad part was no clear boundaries.” And the aged scurf of the house, which she said was dirty to the core. “It was kind of a hopeless situation.” Generations of punks, she said, had lived in that house.
“I thought of calling the book, ‘No Lease,’” said Ms. Banks, who herself lives without a lease in Brattleboro, part of an art collective called the Tinderbox that’s nestled into a cavernous old dance studio. The difference between an art collective and a punk house, she explained, is that in the former you’re pretending you don’t live there, and in the latter you’re pretending you don’t make music there. The rent is $1,000, which Ms. Banks collects from her studio mates (there are about 20, living and working in rooms called Shantytown and Vegetable Street). When the rent collection comes up short, they have a show, Ms. Banks said, or sell T-shirts.
“When rent is cheap or free,” she said, “it leaves time to make art or travel.” Ms. Banks, who has a wide-open face and a keen eye for the life-force inherent in the making of art, takes inspiration from the photographs of a train-hopping friend, Mike Brodie, who goes by the name the Polaroid Kidd and is a kind of Nan Goldin to his train-hopping, punk house set. Ms. Banks’s eye is intimate, to be sure, but her pictures are sly and funny. And despite the profound grunge of the punk-house milieu, her photos are never tragic: they reveal a focused, almost manic energy, like a straight-edge song.
That the idea of the punk house endured for so many years is heart-warming to one 40-year-old former punk house resident. Joel Olson is now an assistant professor of political science at
Arizona State University. Back in the day, as he put it recently — which is to say from the late 1980s to the mid-90s — he was a zine editor and the author, with Jack Kahn, of the “Soy, Not ‘Oi!’” cookbook, copies of which Ms. Banks spotted in every house she visited. His Hippycore Krew House in Tempe, Ariz., had Green Day perform in its living room, as well as a “lot of malnourished vegan punks,” he said.
Being a vegan, as he pointed out, was nearly a punk given, a political act against industrialized agriculture and pro-animal rights, “but it was hard work.” In those pre-Internet days, he collected recipes from punk pen pals. They printed 2,000 copies, and sold them all. (A few years ago, AK Press, a radical publishing house, approached Mr. Olson for the rights to reprint his book, and it is now available at Amazon.) “I’m glad the punk house is still thriving,” he said. “It makes perfect sense for young people who don’t have much money and want to make music. The downside is that it seems to me punk culture hasn’t really evolved or developed.”
Certain icons, however, have endured, like the punk bathroom. Perhaps the greatest, said Mr. Moore, was the be-stickered, be-fliered and graffiti-emblazoned black hole in the basement of CBGB, the legendary (and now defunct) punk rock club in the Bowery.
“That’s the one thing that sears itself into your memory,” said Mr. Moore, breaking his reverie. “It’s that toilet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/ga...ewanted=2&_r=1