Lilian Caruana’s Fascinating, Bittersweet New Photo Book Offers a Rare Glimpse of the Mid-80s New York Punk Rock Scene

In one of the initial CBGB crowd shots in photographer Lilian Caruana’s new book, Rebels: Punks and Skinheads of New York’s East Village 1984-1987, an audience member appears to be wearing a swastika patch. A closer look reveals a famous Dead Kennedys quote: “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF.” In many ways, that capsulizes the unexpected complexities of Caruana’s collection of black-and-white photos and brief interview quotes. It’s more bittersweet, strikingly insightful historical document than it is nostalgia.

In her introduction, Caruana puts the era in perspective. By the 1990s, punk fashion had been completely co-opted by corporate interests. Violent evictions by the police put an end to the Lower East Side squatter movement, paving the way for the destruction and suburbanization of a long-thriving artistic neighborhood. With a finely honed sense of irony – in the true sense of the word – and a wry sense of humor, Caruana portrays a long-lost subculture in their irrepressible DIY milieu.

In what might be the most surreal shot of all, a blonde girl who looks all of about fourteen sits on a mattress, her legs wrapped in a repurposed American flag. Her blank stare fixes on a black-and-white tv propped up on a milk crate. A Ronald Reagan movie plays on the screen. The pillow to her left is from the Bellevue mental ward. Decorations on the wall are sparse: a grimy handprint and a label peeled off a torpedo of Budweiser. The year is 1986.

As Caruana explains, the individuals in her portraits come from a wide swath of social strata. Collectively, they feel disenfranchised. Bobby sees himself as exploited at his minimum-wage job and isn’t beyond taking a little extra from the till to make ends meet. Dave, an Army deserter, longs for the American dream but not the mortgage and suburban drudgery. Matt comes from a more affluent background but is similarly alienated by outer-borough conformity.

As grim as their worldview may be, these people seem anything but unhappy. They lounge with their pets – a colorful menagerie including rats, kittens and an iguana – practice their instruments and strike sardonically defiant poses. Recycling may be all the rage in yuppie circles now, but punks were doing it forty years ago, if only because it was a practical survival strategy.

Unsurprisingly, the Cro-Mags, the Exploited, Agnostic Front and Battalion of Saints are the bands most often visually referenced here. But what these photos remind over and over is the vast difference between the Lower East Side hardcore contingent and their bridge-and-tunnel counterparts. Hardcore may have been more relentlessly aggressive, monotonous, and implicitly violent, compared to punk. But the LES crowd was far more likely to be politically aware, multi-racial, tolerant and open to women. In other words, they remained closer to punk’s populist roots than the high school boys whose moms would drop them at CB’s for the Sunday afternoon hardcore matinee and then drive them home to Long Island in the family Chevy Suburban. Other photographers have made big bucks shooting the famous and the semi-famous in that same part of town at the height of the CB’s scene a few years previously; Caruana’s work both dignifies and illuminates a time and place too infrequently chronicled.

9/11 and Its Aftermath Through Uncommonly Perceptive Eyes

What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change, by Jocelyn Lieu

Nation Books, $13.95, trade paper, ISBN-13 978-1-56858-346-4

Lieu, author of the short story collection Potential Weapons, kept a journal from September 11, 2002 through the following July 3. Based on that journal, this book chronicles the events of those fateful months through the eyes of an ordinary New York City resident (in her case, a New School professor and mother of a toddler living on East Seventh Street in the Village). Lieu has taken what seems to have begun as a purely personal attempt to make sense of what was happening, and turned it into first-class, first-person history. She could have written a polemic, and this can certainly be taken as one, but her genius in crafting this was to keep her anger (and her eventual wrath) close in check, to let the story speak for itself. Lieu writes in a tersely crystalline, imagistic style, as befits a fiction author. If only this were fiction.

With an eerily calm, matter-of-fact delivery, Lieu begins with the all-too-familiar images: the acrid smoke blowing uptown, the desperate posters put up by family members searching for loved ones, the city Balkanized with police barricades, its residents terrorized. These were wartime conditions: Lieu’s church ran out of food for the homeless, her neighborhood pizza place ran out of everything except onions and since it was a hot week, she and her neighbors had to sweat it out, as putting on the air conditioning might well have proven lethal. Lieu reminds us how just about everyone here knew someone who knew someone who died in the towers, and how utterly ridiculous it became to try to escape the order of the day by concentrating on one’s mundane, workaday activities.

But she really hits her stride in the weeks and months afterward. Friends, relatives and colleagues voice their rage against the invasion of Afghanistan, the authorities’ contemptuous disregard for the rights of antiwar activists and the lack of a coherent investigation into the demolition of the twin towers, while Lieu focuses on her teaching and her family. Her precocious infant daughter Gracie does double duty as Greek chorus and to keep her mother rooted in the immediate, present reality; her husband Chuck Wachtel (author of the novel Joe the Engineer) makes the occasional appearance as a taciturnly reliable bullshit detector. Daily dramas – a suicide, a family illness and a crime (Lieu’s purse was stolen but recovered from an inept, most likely mentally ill thief) – play out against a backdrop of disbelief and post-traumatic stress disorder. Armed with a new sense of priorities, Lieu doesn’t let the theft phase her: on the contrary, she takes pity on the culprit, knowing that he will probably be locked up for a long time.

Lieu’s only humorous indulgence is to mete out silly pseudonyms (Breyten, Dublin et al.) on the BoBo parents and children on the Tompkins Square Park playground where she takes Gracie. And she only editorializes when the Bush regime’s incessant fearmongering, running orange and red and yellow alerts up and down the flagpole, becomes completely intolerable. By then, she and her family have already bought the requisite duct tape and masks. And then it’s over. Overwhelmed, stupefied and disheartened, Lieu stopped writing. The police state had perhaps inadvertently done its work, putting an end to the most understatedly revealing of the many good post-9/11 New York City narratives. The Plague Year had Daniel Defoe; the Holocaust had Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. New Yorkers should be grateful to have Jocelyn Lieu. One of the essential historical works of our time, What Isn’t There should be required reading for all college students.

Sadly, interested readers searching for this title in stores need to look very closely. Even if the book’s displayed face-out, only the subtitle is visible from a distance against its white cover: marketability has taken a back seat here to some art director’s idea of negative space.