Give me convenience 17/07/2018
MemoriesStory
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Because I was too young,

Because I was too shy and too scared,

Because I was too young, (not) much too young,

Because fear was not my best friend,

Because I was (still not Neil) young and fading away already,

Because the spotlight frightened me (and still does decades later),

But mainly because I was too serious and too disciplined to be young and irresponsible.

Is it a quality? I missed Punk. Not the music, but the part where style, fashion and identity takes over, the part where it becomes larger than life itself. I should have travelled to London or Berlin. In the aftermath of the gloomy 70’s I experienced a little bit of freedom, a short window of opportunity closed already by 1985. A bit of chaos and uncertainty just before money became the new religion as symbolised by Gordon Gekko.

I stared at the Dead Kennedys logo on the power transformer behind school. Ran my fingers over it and imagined it in white paint on my leather jacket or scratched in my Dr.Martens. It was all fantasy. I didn’t have a leather jacket or Dr.Martens. I just watched the kids who did, with their spiky hair, my own blank generation in torn t-shirts and Billy idol peroxide. ‘Kill the poor‘, ‘Let’s lynch the landlord‘, ‘California รผber alles‘, ‘Riot‘, even the song titles were too dangerous for me. It didn’t scare me personally, it was refreshing and revolutionary for me. No, it scared me through the eyes of my audience. I ridiculed myself through their eyes, their eyes only, and moved deeper and deeper in my own fantasy and imagination.

Around the same time I saw a beautiful photograph taken just after a Dead Kennedys concert. It showed nothing more than a bass guitar lying on stage. I loved it, I still do, but the action was elsewhere, always elsewhere.