Michele On the Flipside
Seems like I can't turn around these days without finding another website dedicated to Flipside Magazine or LA punk in general. Here's the best one I've seen so far, the "official" Flipside memorial maintained by Michele, a former staff writer, who obviously created this site as a labor of love (along with some serious sweat!).
There's an awful lot of cool eye candy here: a database of the first 44 issues, an excellent gallery of fliers, and an extremely cool database of early live shows in the LA area.
The section that's most interesting for me is the photo retrospective because there are pictures here of people I haven't seen for almost 30 years: Al, X-8, and Pooch, to name but a few.
Speaking of Pooch, I stumbled across his band's website last night, and listened to a couple of their songs. Fun stuff. Al also dropped me a nice e-mail a few days ago.
Lest anyone should think I'm an old punk fart wallowing in nostalgia, let me point you to Alice Bag's blog where her most recent entry addresses her reasons for documenting the early days of LA's punk scene, which mirror mine to a great degree.
Comments
Hey, that's a good one, MBH. Good to see Michelle is still around the innerweb. She was on the Eggz-o-tica list, back in its salad days, before it went however it went... maybe you remember?
Posted by: M.Ace | March 17, 2005 5:38 PM
No, I didn't recognize her from the list, but I noticed from her photos that she was hanging around with Beachbum Barry and other Exotica types.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | March 17, 2005 5:42 PM
Mr. Bali Hai,
I recently saw Michele's website and sent her an email thanking her for what was obviously a tremendous labor of punk-love.
Thank you also for acknowledging my blog entry. I was worried that I might be perceived as slipping into "Happy Days" mentality instead of moving forward and I'd much rather be dead than stuck forever in the past.
Posted by: Alice | March 18, 2005 1:24 PM
Hey Alice. I thought your post did a nice job of laying out the rationale behind your decision to document the early scene.
I don't have a problem with nostalgia per se, unless it turns into obsession, and I think it's normal for people to want to put their lives into some sort of historical perspective when they hit their 40s, which is probably why so many similar sites seem to be popping up right now.
I also think it's important to set the historical record straight. LA punk got kind of a bum rap due to the club trashing, violence, and clashes with the police. We also got tagged as "poseurs" a lot, which I've never quite understood. I guess that some people just couldn't square their preconceived image of brainless, mellow SoCal with the pale, rowdy, corndog anarchists pogoing at Madame Wongs and the Masque.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | March 18, 2005 1:56 PM