Underground culture isn’t dead – it’s just better hidden than it used to be

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/05/underground-culture-isnt-dead-geoff-dyer

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Looking back – and I’ll explain later how I came to be looking back – I realise how much of my social life in the 1980s was spent at “underground” events of one kind or another. I mean underground in a sense lodged somewhere between the radical American organisations of the 70s – the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army whose stories are told in Bryan Burrough’s just-published history Days of Rage – and the London tube system.

In my teens, I’d been a devotee of magazines such as Frendz and Oz with their illegibly swirling psychedelic designs and still blurrier editorial agenda. These publications represented an (open) marriage between insurrectionary politics, prog rock, fashion (loons) and porno graphics. I was interested, mainly, in photographs of Hawkwind.

That may have been the golden age of the underground, but its spikier manifestations or descendants were part of the social landscape of London in the 1980s: the squatted cafe in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall, the Anarchist Centre at 121 Railton Road, Brixton, and, of course, the ubiquitous underground parties that later morphed into raves.

Maybe new variations of such things still exist in London and I’m too old and square to know about them but, broadly speaking, the counterculture has given way to an over-the-counter culture of cool cafes and pop-ups that lend a subversive slant to one’s retail experience. Even independent cinemas show the same films as chains, the symbolic example being the once-loved Electric on Portobello Road, now a one-screen multiplex – a monoplex – where for 18 quid you can enjoy the latest blockbuster from the comfort of a business-class lounger. The triumph of branded leisure has gone hand in hand with the filling in of unoccupied spaces that made London and Berlin centres of variously subversive happenings.

One side-effect of the internet is that it has brought to an end the golden age of bargain-hunting

Although long-time residents complain of the steady influx of people and cars, space is not an issue in Austin, Texas, where I’ve spent the past three months. The dilemma is that Austin is so anxious to retain its indie vibe that it’s constantly at risk of branding itself as the official alternative to an unspecified mainstream on which its economy nevertheless depends.

A fantastic book store, Book People, so bestrides the book-buying scene as to tacitly assume the monolithic aspect of a Barnes & Noble. The alternative to this dominant alternative is represented by a scatter of book stores whose stock is so carefully curated that they are often characterised by a striking lack of books. Malvern Books, for example, keeps only titles published by independent presses. It’s a laudable ideal but since many celebrated authors are published by Penguin/Random House, a black hole is punched in the middle of the Malvern anti-canon, as represented by the store’s largely empty floor space.

Long resigned to not finding my books in shops, I am persuaded that their absence, in this context, is proof that I have at last achieved the success enjoyed by Toni Morrison or Paulo Coelho. Still, there are some gorgeous volumes by small publishers I’d never have encountered were it not for the store’s policy of indie-militancy. It’s one of the lovely ironies of our times that the rise of e-readers and Kindles has led not to the predicted demise of the printed book but to a golden age of book design. The fact that you can get the content electronically has encouraged publishers to produce more imaginative and beautiful objects.

It is also a golden age of what was long regarded as a thoroughly unviable form of book, the essay collection – though as author Meghan Daum remarked at the conference Stalking the Essay in New York last weekend, it is always dangerous to talk about a golden age while in its throes. (Dinosaurs were probably basking in the golden age of the brontosaurus moments before their extinction.) Also speaking at the conference was essayist and novelist Jonathan Lethem who, for the five days I was in New York, kept insisting I went to a bookstore on East 84th Street, inconveniently located (for me) right next to the apartment where he was staying.

We finally turned up at 10 on Saturday night, after the conference and the post-conference dinner. Brazenhead Books does not look like a bookstore in any conventional sense. It’s a small apartment stuffed with books – and its days are numbered. The owner, Michael Seidenberg (for whom Lethem worked as a teenager), has lost his lease, which means I’m free to write about this semi-clandestine place.

And what a place it is, this book-crammed lair: the only place I have ever seen a copy of Amazons (1980) by Cleo Birdwell. “An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League”, Amazons is essentially a record of her highly imaginative sexual encounters with other members of the team. The author photo – a stunning blonde in hockey gear – plays up Cleo’s erotic allure but on the evidence of this, her only book, she must be ranked among the great comic geniuses of American letters.

The bookstore is also a speakeasy and salon. Even by Michael’s standards the previous night’s session had ended rather late (7am Saturday morning), and this evening looked like turning into an another epic of biblio-bacchanalia. It was like a book launch where no particular book was being launched. What was being celebrated instead was the survival of all books and of places like this even if this particular preserve had entered the terminal phase of its existence.

Many interesting items came into my hands, including an iPhone showing pornography featuring a tapir – the hi-tech equivalent of the stuff offered in graphic form in the underground comics of my youth. Drinks were drunk and books bought but I returned to my hotel without the seductive Cleo. Not because I couldn’t bear to part with $75, but because my life needs the thwarted purpose of hoping to find this much-sought-after item in a charity shop for a dollar even if one of the side-effects of the internet is to have brought to an end the golden age of bargain-hunting.

It was my visit to Brazenhead that got me thinking about the long and nourishing role the underground has played in my life. It also made me realise how easy it is to fall into elegiac mode and how important it is to resist doing so. In different forms, in spite of everything, places like this will keep popping up, unbeknown to the middle-aged likes of Lethem and me. So, as a way of combining the urge to lament and the need to affirm, we’ll close with the final words from Larkin’s Show Saturday in High Windows (Brazenhead, needless to say, had a first edition): “Let it always be there.”

Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush is out in paperback on 7 April (Canongate)