In Sacramento’s historic district there’s a fun store called Evangeline’s.
I first discovered the small shop around 1982, during the period we called “New Wave”. Blondie and Joe Jackson were on the radio, edgy synth tunes from England and Australia were reaching American ears, and the line between “weird”, “funny”, “ironic” and “cool” seemed to have been erased. Clothing, haircuts, music, art and behavior hinted at a thrilling vitality behind an increasingly mechanized society.
Evangeline’s felt like an active volcano of this stuff. Every T-shirt, house fixture, book or postcard they sold hinted at a vibrant, inventive new way to look at the world.
Several years later I went back and found that Evangeline’s was there, but the “New Wave” was not. The shop sold T-shirts and postcards, but all the jokes were about farts and boobs and poop. The humor was consistently, depressingly sophomoric, with none of the profound subtext I’d found so exciting before.
I concluded that creative work can take its inspiration from just about anything – but when there is no inspiration, the work defaults to the same dreary material. The magestic achievements rise and fall, but the lowest common denominator never goes away.
I spent yesterday listening to podcasts – enough to experience “podcast curation”, when each one responds to questions raised by the other.
In this case, they triangulated around those years, roughly 1977-1983, when “Punk Rock” / “New Wave” brought a tidal wave of excitement that introduced many fantastic ideas – and washed away many others. The confining rules which had distinguished good from bad were rejected, inevitably to be replaced by some new set of expectations for music, style and behavior.
Leonard Maltin is terrifically friendly – which means all the excitement comes from the guests. This talk with Craig Ferguson is a fantastic balance of funny and substantial, but I was particularly moved by Ferguson’s description, starting at 27:30, of how early punk rock was ultimately a creative scene in which DIY artists were encouraged to support one another, and everybody was encouraged to become a DIY artist.
Dana Gould’s latest guest is Greg Proops – a favorite comedian and podcaster from San Carlos, CA. At 55:00, Dana and Greg address the contradictions of Punk Rock, and the necessary tension between rejecting authority and accepting civic responsibilities.
Greg feels like a friend of the family (I interviewed him in 1992) but his focus on politics has been a heavy burden to carry for the last few years, so it’s wonderful to hear him visit more casually with his old friend Dana.
Evangeline’s is still there, btw: it now occupies three floors and sells costumes, books and toys – as if to suggest, perhaps, that our ever-evolving fashions have been costumes all along. Well worth a visit if you’re anywhere near Sacramento.