For a movement that famously proclaimed there was no future, punk rock has had a remarkably durable half-life. Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion Robert Christgau wrote a memoir about his downtown New York youth, Kim Gordon published her memoirs, Viv Albertine published hers, Richard Hell released the paperback edition of his, Patti Smith released the follow-up to her National Book Award–winning memoir, and HarperCollins signed Lenny Kaye, Smith’s guitarist, to write a memoir of his own.[*] Ramones fans can look forward to a forthcoming Martin Scorsese–helmed biopic and a documentary promising new footage of the seminal band, whose last founding member perished in 2014.
Punk has cracked the upper echelons of the tech sphere too. Earlier this fall, in a pictorial called “The Stylish Men of Tumblr,” the New York Times introduced the world to Pau Santesmasses, a thirty-nine-year-old product manager whose own Tumblr account is devoted to “modern architecture, skateboarding, and punk rock”—thus apostrophizing a movement of self-professed anarchic rebellion as if it were a tasteful accessory. Photographed atop the grand, dramatically lit staircase in his employer’s Manhattan offices in a pristine gingham button-down, skinny khakis, and shockingly clean sneakers, Santesmasses described his shirt as a “punk-slash-mod thing.”
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