Earlier this year, in March, Pleasant and I spent a week talking about our adventures as inadvertent teenage entrepreneurs in the 70s...
With the (Teenage) Lobotomy show at Lethal Amounts as our anchor, we also were guest lecturers at my alma mater, UCLA, together with our punk rock comrades, Alice Bag and Iris Berry. Professor Jessica Schwartz, herself a latter day DIY punk rocker, invited us to speak to her class about the birth of the movement in Los Angeles and our roles in it as women and entrepreneurs in the fields of music, publishing, photography and general doing-it-yourself stuff. We fielded questions from a diverse class of millennials, and I finally understand what my parents' generation meant when they embraced the term "generation gap." Prior to the Lethal Amounts show, we stayed up late with Stella at KXLU and played records with her on her long-running and beloved Stray Pop show.
Throughout the week's activities, we were captured (in a good way) by Ohana Films, who are producing a documentary about Pleasant and Iris' punk rock crash pad, Disgraceland. Between talking with teens and 20-somethings at UCLA and meeting the folks from Ohana, it made me realize what kind of impact our little punk rock scene had on people.
Neither of us means to minimize anything, but take careful note of Pleasant's Brief History of Lobotomy. In the piece, you will hopefully come to understand how different things were in 1978, and how it kind of really WAS the Wild West. We didn't do it for the money; we were oblivious to "fame" but accepted notoriety. We did it, actually, because we had no money, nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Recent phenomena (I really don't know what else to call them) have sharpened my re-focus on this glorious piece of history and my long-standing conviction to memorialize it in all forms, analogue, digital, popular, academic and more.
Hoping you'll follow, join and/or support us along the way. We have our own book(s), films, multi media projects, live appearances/tours, readings and individual things happening, all towards the greater goal of keeping punk at the forefront and documenting this living history.
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