Middle Age Punk's Love Letter to the Weird Older Neighborhood Kid

Scrolling through the endless social media barf feed, I stumbled on this image tucked in there with the rest of the same old boring dreck.

It was benign, at first, but it got me thinking about how people, particularly kids of impressionable ages, discover weird, transgressive, perverse, rebellious art in this modern day.

The image is obviously in reference to anime, but think there's a similar phenomenon to other forms of subcultural art: comic books, punk rock, heavy metal, horror movies, etc.

When I was a burgeoning preteen way back in the way back of the nineteen hundred and nineties, I too, was fascinated by anime, and for a suburban kid in Aurora, Colorado, there were but a few ways to come across it, which I'm not sure exist anymore. The main, and cheapest way was to wait, hoping some TV channel would play Akira late at night. Not optimal but I'd take what I could get.

Then there were the local comic book conventions. Before they were cosplaying battlegrounds of washed up pop culture celebrities, comic conventions were held in dimly lit, dingy hotel conference rooms, packed full of dubious vendors selling all sorts of bootleg, third, fourth, or fifth generation VHS copies of things you didn't believe existed: the secret Fantastic Four movie that was never released, the rumored Star Wars Holiday Special, and, of course, anime. You'd just take a chance, and hope you got something good. Sometimes you struck gold, meaning, giant monsters, violence and gore galore, and naked ladies.

There was also an Asian video import store in our burbs, run by a kind older man that barely spoke English. All the videos were in white boxes with Japanese writing on them, so again, it was a shot in the dark. Sometimes you'd pull a VHS of four or five episodes of Dragon Ball, sometimes a random Godzilla movie that hadn't yet made its way to America by normal means, or sometimes you get a whacko Japanese gameshow. Again, we worked with what we had.

Failing all that, there was, and where we come back to this "Oldtaku" idea, the weird, older kid who lived across the street from a friend of mine. If you're lucky, you know the kind: the kid who lives in the basement, collects knives, had a stash of playboy magazines, has a pet snake and or tarantula, the keeper of the goods. My wiser elder, among those hobbies, also collected anime, comic books, listened to death metal, and watched weirdo, violent horror movies... and smoked the pot. All of which he was more than willing to share with the neighborhood kids, under the condition we didn't "rat him out."

Many an hour was spent in his basement, watching all types of wildly inappropriate anime and horror movies, listening to the most insane music I'd ever heard at that time, eyes affixed to the gross and goopy album covers, and yes, smoking the devil's lettuce. It felt subversive. Rebellious. Even a little dangerous, and it makes me wonder if these sorts of characters still exist nowadays? They serve a vital role in the blossoming of fellow weirdos, and I hope that there's some form of this activity still happening in the local outsider's basement, freely sharing things with younger minds that would make their parents head's spin, and maybe even breaking a few laws. After all, if it isn't a little grimy, or dangerous, did you really discover anything worthwhile?

Abigor - "Nachthymnen (From The Twilight Kingdom)"

Been hitting the play button on some neglected metal albums, and Abigor, beginning with the letter "A," is always at the top of my collection, taunting me with its mystical black metal aura.

IDLES - "Joy as an Act of Resistance"

I've now witnessed two unrelated talks about IDLES challenging conventional, problematic aspects of masculinity and reforming them into modern, positive takes, mostly filtered through this album, so I figured it was a sign to give it a listen. Also, the music video for “Never Fight a Man With a Perm” is a fighting game, sooooooo…