The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page A

Asian-American rights movements of the decade, which paralleled the indigenous rights movement launched at Alcatraz in 1969; the Chicano movement tied to Cesar Chavez’s organization of farmworkers from the early 1960s onward; and, of course, the African-American insurgency that was the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966. Financial district expansion had already devoured the rest of Manilatown, and urban renewal had gutted the neighborhoods of two other low-income communities just before—the African-American Western Addition/Fillmore in the 1960s and the South of Market area, full of retired waterfront workers during the 1970s. The space in which to be decently poor was drying up, and a few years hence, in the age of Reagan, the armies of the homeless would begin to march through the city streets.
    Maybe 1978 was when the 1960s ended and the 1980s began. Maybe there were no 1970s. Even punk rock, arguably the decade’s most original offering, died a little when the Sex Pistols broke up in January of 1978, after the Winterland hatefest that was their final concert. Winterland was around the corner from the Peoples Temple, the site of Jim Jones’s cult before he led his devotees on a paranoid flight to Guyana that culminated, ten months later, in drinking all that cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. One of San Francisco’s leading punk venues, the Mabuhay Gardens, was just around the corner from the International Hotel. It was all pretty tied together, like some kind of macramé of conspiracy, paranoia, and decline. Mostly it was a bleak landscape in which the dying experiments were easier to spot than the embryonic new forms that would matter immensely during the 1980s and after.
    AVENGERS
    Working all night as an extra, I carried a big green gherkin-like papier-mâché pod in the City Hall scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , though if I made it into the movie, it was only for a flickering second. Around the same time, I started hanging out at the Mabuhay Gardens—or Mab, asit was sometimes called—though I didn’t find out what the Tagalog word mabuhay meant until much later. I went to shows at the Peoples Temple when it turned into a punk venue after all its former parishioners were dead or scattered. I didn’t get it about the International Hotel until long afterward, though I remember the hotel, the protests, and then the hole in the ground where it had been. I saw the Sex Pistols’s last show on a rainy night when country music fans had been whipped up into a fury against punks and came to spit and hurl projectiles, back in that divisive, intolerant era when punks hated disco and country right back—but I didn’t know what a historic and final moment it would be.
    Punk wasn’t defined yet. Or rather it was defined in opposition. It was anti-rock, for starters. It was exceedingly anti-hippie and anti-disco too. It wasn’t yet cool. In 1977 no one knew what it meant to be a punk yet, though the short dyed hair, chains, safety pins, and shredded clothing were catching on. It was a moment that belonged to outsiders; but by the early 1980s when California punk had become hardcore, and hardcore was dominated by macho L.A. bands like Agent Orange and Black Flag, it was all about insiders, mostly male insiders. What began as the slam dancing of geeks and girls turned into the mosh pit that only the most rugged could safely venture into. “Different like everybody else,” was my epithet for a lot of it, and I moved on. But there was a glorious moment when no one knew what was going on, and what was happening seemed utterly new. A revolution opens up possibilities and dismantles existing authority and is usually followed up by the assembling of new authority. Punk rock followed this mode. Maybe the 1960s did too, with the wave of authoritarian cults that followed.
    Punk was in some ways a retro movement. We wore clothes from the 1950s—tight clothes, narrow-legged jeans, motorcycle jackets, slicked-back