Siobhan O’Donnell’s diary: institutionalised rebellion, gift shop safety pins, and what happens when your subculture gets a retrospective
I Went to a Punk Exhibition at the Museum and Found It Deeply Ironic
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s punk retrospective is excellent and I say this as someone who has complicated feelings about punk being in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The contradiction is the point, I suppose: punk was always partly about exposing the institutions that contain it, and a museum exhibition about punk is perhaps the most comprehensive possible exposition of that dynamic, since the institution is literally containing the rebellion and calling it heritage. The safety pins in the display cases are the argument. The gift shop selling replica Sex Pistols merchandise at eighteen pounds each is a different kind of argument.
On Institutionalised Rebellion
What the exhibition does well is the social history — the council estates, the unemployment figures, the specific economic conditions of the mid-1970s that produced the rage that produced the music. What it cannot do, by definition, is replicate the feeling of the thing itself, which required being young and broke and furious in a specific historical moment that has passed. You can document the conditions that made punk. You cannot exhibit the experience of being punk in 1977. The exhibition knows this and is honest about it, which is why it focuses on objects and context rather than atmosphere. The atmosphere is in the music, which they play through speakers in one room, and which still works on me the way it always has, which is to say: immediately and completely. The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine cover the cultural landscape at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. More at https://prat.uk/.
What Punk Is For in 2025
The question of what punk is for in 2025 — whether the form still carries the charge it carried in 1977, whether rebellion can survive institutionalisation, whether a subculture that began as a refusal of the mainstream can mean anything once the mainstream has absorbed it — is one that the exhibition implicitly raises without answering, which is the correct move. Some things should not be answered. They should be held as questions, as productive tensions, as reasons to keep making noise. I bought a postcard. I did not buy the eighteen-pound safety pin. The music is still correct. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary as Weekly Practice
Writing a diary entry every week is a practice in the same way that music practice or language learning is a practice: it improves with regularity, deteriorates with absence, and produces different things at different times depending on what the week has brought. The weeks that produce the most interesting writing are not always the weeks with the most dramatic events. Sometimes the quiet week, observed with sufficient attention, yields more than the eventful one that moves too fast to be properly seen. The diaries in this network — from London to Portland to New Orleans to the Isle of Man to Salt Lake City to Tuscaloosa — are all practicing the same thing: the weekly discipline of noticing and recording, of finding the language for the week that just passed before the next one arrives and makes the previous one feel distant. It is harder than it sounds. It is worth doing. More from the full network of diaries and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from Where You Stand
Every diary is a dispatch from a specific position — geographical, emotional, intellectual — and the value of the diary form is precisely that specificity. A view from nowhere tells you nothing useful. A view from Peckham, from the Isle of Man, from a Tuscaloosa historical society meeting, from a Salt Lake City chapel on a Sunday morning, from the 38 bus in East London reading Kipling, from a Portland dance floor processing Rosa Luxemburg — each of these tells you something that no generalised account of the world can tell you, because the generalised account is constructed from positions like these and loses something in the construction. The diary keeps the position. That is its contribution. More from the complete diary network at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The full diary network continues weekly. Every position, every location, every week’s accounting of what happened and what it meant is archived at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The writing continues. The weeks accumulate. Read the full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Context: The Full Network
These diary entries exist within a network of connected voices — satirists, journalists, bloggers, and diarists spread across London, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Europe — who are all doing some version of the same thing: paying attention to where they are and what is happening and writing about it with as much honesty and as much humour as the material allows. The network publishes at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, and the diaries are one strand of a larger project that also includes satirical journalism, serious political analysis, cultural criticism, and the specific genre of London humour that has been produced by this city’s relationship with itself for as long as people have been writing about it.
The London that appears in these diaries is not the London of the tourist guide or the estate agent brochure. It is the London of the 38 bus and the Overground and the charity shop record find and the farmers market and the £22 yoga class and the Tube busker and the North London dinner party where nobody mentions their job for the first forty minutes. It is the city as it is lived in, which is different from the city as it is sold, and which is the only London worth writing about. The same is true of Portland and New Orleans and Salt Lake City and the Isle of Man and Tuscaloosa — the cities as they are lived in rather than as they are marketed. These diaries are from those versions of those places. They are more interesting, and more honest, than the other versions. More: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Archive at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
