Subculture

“With my straight razor, I unmask the lie,” Rainald Goetz read at a literary prize competition in 1983. Then, Goetz picked up a blade and sliced open his forehead, nonchalant.

What began as an art project with the overt purpose of confronting and confounding “straight” society ended up as something resembling a pro football game for people on psychedelics, and nearly as profitable.

In homage to ’80s cult band Felt, artists Christian Flamm and Mike Sperlinger crafted an encompassing, investigative fanzine of a book.

What does it mean to paint your name someplace you’ve been—a heavily trafficked location or a highly visible object, like a train, that perpetually traverses an entire city? 

“Even if you’re a punk you can have feelings of love and friendship.” Julien Temple

I sometimes wonder whether Zia Jaffrey has a sixth sense, a sort of x-ray vision that gives her deep brown eyes the ability to penetrate the hearts of others. 

Irvine Welsh has been coined as the acid house badboy of Scotland. He also happens to write like a sonovabitch, a term he’d appreciate. Writer Jenifer Berman and Welsh discuss class allegiance, class betrayal, and “trainspotting” among the muckers.

“I never give them archetypes. I’m totally anti-Jungian, symbols are intellectual. Emotions are universal, not symbolic. So that’s where I try and keep it, with the emotions.”

“I know the ball walkers aren’t “feminists” in the politically correct sense of the term, but what they are doing is innately feminist. A boy becomes a girl—gender is a learned thing, and these people chose to be women despite the American social convention that to be a man would be the preferable choice.”