Blog of the Month? Old Punk Flyers
There’s nothing quite like cut-and-paste art with a heavy scrawl or questionably-laid-out text xeroxed to shit and stapled to a telephone pole.
In the web 2.0 era, it’s easy to forget how comparatively limited the number of “promotional” channels were just ten years ago. I mean, I remember stuffing 50 manila envelopes with flyers destined for clubs across the US as late as 2004 (my band finally got a MySpace a few months later, after much ideological hand-wringing). These days I’m still copping the cut-and-paste style from early DIY flyers, but hours spent at the local copy shop have largely been replaced by an outmoded home scanner and a pirated version of Photoshop. I’m still covered in ink and glue, surrounded by a pile of pen tips, Sharpies, and paper scraps in the end, but I’m re-tweeting and re-blogging the result instead of packing a bag with staples, tape, spray adhesive, or a jug of wheatpaste to head out into the night like some of my forebears.
Old Punk Flyers could be seen as an archival labor of love, or a tribute to the “good old days” described above. It’s a trip to scroll through these painstakingly crafted handbills and posters, recognizing band and venue names, or head-scratching over the ones whose notoriety never extended beyond their city or state’s borders long enough to be recorded in the most widely-distributed of the zines, glossies, or books that have cataloged the development of punk in the last few decades.
In any case, it’s a good way to waste the time you saved by lazing on yr couch and clicking the mouse a few times instead of riskin’ a friskin’ running around town pasting up yr shit. Some favorites are posted below, but make sure to follow the blog itself and scope the backlog while you’re at it.
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