Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

it was the stories underneath our society that gave rise to all of this, and then to see that we do indeed have the power to shape and change these stories.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be

The great German artist Joseph Beuys used to recite, as a maxim and manifesto, the phrase “Everyone an artist.” I used to think it meant that he thought everyone should make art, but now I wonder if he wasn’t speaking to a more basic possibility: that everyone could become a participant rather than a member of the audience, that everyone could beco

One could trace the equally strange trajectory that created rock and roll out of African and Scots-Irish musical traditions in the American South, then sent rock and roll around the world, so that a sound that had once been endemic to the South was intrinsic to dissent in Europe’s east. Or the ricocheting trajectory by which Thoreau, abolitionists,

“I think the political responsibility of the fan is to challenge that memory—challenge the desire for nostalgia and, in doing that, challenge the soundtracks that have latched onto this nostalgia.”