For a history of salvagepunk

Three moments.

One.

The scattered corpsescape of WWI. The night of the world is Europe looking at the death's face looking back at it, the progeny of nationalist pride and a gleaming weaponry forged from the guts of the Industrial Revolution. Only the Bolsheviks say no and carve a trench into history. And Kurt Schwitters draws forth Merz from Commerz.


Two.

The 60's go kaputt. Then the long 70's, in all their gritty urgency and Satanic deformations of hippie non-thought, Moro's body in the trunk of the Renault, Bretton Woods undoes the filaments of currency as certainty and shape. In England, 1969, The Bed-Sitting Room and Monty Python think the end of it all as little more than the relentless repurposing of the same. Ten years later, Mad Max heads toward the Outback.


Three.

Neoliberalism's febrile tremors and hysterical overcompensations. Small cracks and shimmers, old reptilian brain stirring of something that smells like a revolutionary past. Cyberpunk already came and went: how could it not, given that it coldly sang along with what it felt like on the ground? Steampunk, the wet dream of Obama-time, acts old fashioned as it sails smug over the oceans of dead labor that got us here, tidying up. Salvagepunk, not yet here except as the unbidden tightening of hands learning new tricks. Of the trash heap, only its romance of frozen decay should be discarded. The new building was other architectures in the pre-built wasteland of this life.