Steampunk

While aimlessly wandering around the internet during my lunch hour today I was absolutely delighted to run across this tiny tiny steampunk keyboard made by Lizabeta!

Have a look here for more information.

On Saturday morning the inestimable Molly Friedrich dropped me a note with a link to an MP3.  I was entirely unprepared for the awesomeness that lay behind that link, Professor Auerbach's Attack of the Steampunks Rap:

Meeting the opposition like a hammer on an anvil
Conquering the culture like a visionary vandal

Buckle up your boots and adjust your brass goggles
Check the meter, pull the level
Activate the power toggles
Hold your head up high
Let your flag unfurl
The steam pressure power punks are taking over the world

The Professor asked me to note that the beats used are Creative Commons samples from Freesound.org and just in case here's an alternate source for Attack.

Long before the age of the internet, and well before the cold efficiency of the assembly line, existed fantastic and terrible machines, run on hope, sweat, and steam. It was a time in which form and function lived in sin, and everyman was a revolutionary.

We are 13 American artists united by broad geography and narrow aesthetic.

Marrying narrative and nostalgia to design and technology, we imagine the triumphs of the past overriding the failures of the present to create from the ruins and detritus a dazzling future-perfect.

September 12 - October 3, 2008 Opening Reception: September 12 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM

2222 2nd Ave Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98121 (206) 956.3900

suite100gallery.com/show/2008/09/12/anachrotechnofetishism

James writes from Hirakata, Japan:

Hey!  Big fan of the site and of anything and everything steampunk...Funny thing is, there are so many people who are straight-up steampunk without even knowing that such a cult underground exists.  For example, when i was a teenager, I modified a 13inch TV i had from the 80's to fit inside of a 1930's TV box that I found in an abandoned, half burned down factory near where I lived. [I did the same thing! -JvS]

Well, the same thing occurs throughout the world, I've found.  I live in a small town in Japan in a very rural area.  Upon exiting the supermarket the other day, I came across this steampunk masterpiece!  I waited for an hour for the presumed Japanese steampunker to come out with his goth gear on and his mohawk, but low and behold, an 85 year old man comes out, grabs his lighter from his scooter, and lights up.  I went over to him to complement him on his work, and with barely audible Japanese since he had no teeth at all and had very badly fitting dentures, started to explain how he put it together in the heaviest Japanese countryside accent I have ever heard.  Classic!

James is spot on, Steampunk is not a new thing but an expression of something that has been with us all along.  What's different is that people's dissatisfaction with what they are offered in the marketplace has more and more of them turning to DIY to make their own wonderful things and the advent of the 'net gives them immediate access to how to information and each other.

Thanks James!

In a brilliant cap to his series "A History of Steampunk" Cory Gross over at Voyages Extraordinaires has posted this cogent analysis of the coming course of Steampunk sub-culture.  Boy that guy can write!

I am immensely flattered that he's credited me with initiating the controversy on the Brass Goggles Forum (I always thought it had been Johnny Payphone myself.) that set Steampunk on it's present course.  He quotes a portion of a 2007 Wired interview I did where I said that DIY wasn't originally a quality of Steampunk and he responds:

This admitted co-option led to a debate between older and newer fans over the extent to which a DIY and Punk ethos was necessary, required or even wanted of Steampunk. The view that they were, championed by "makers" such as Jake von Slatt and Datamancer and media such as Steampunk Magazine, won out in short order and the dynamics of Steampunk as a subcultural movement were regimented.

Cory goes on to quote the eloquent manifesto written by the Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective in the premier issue of Steampunk Magazine as further sealing Steampunk sub-culture's fate.

Steampunk may indeed progress exactly as Cory predicts.  However, the important thing (and this is clearly true with respect to music and subculture) is not so much the style but the underlying ideas and ideals that people who are attracted to the style are ultimately exposed to.  Steampunk will introduce a whole new generation to DIY and Punk political thought.  I know for a fact that it has me re-visiting the music and philosophies of my youth.

I fear Cory will not be pleased at all with some of the conclusions I've come to with respect to the direction the sub-culture should take as I've recently become quite enamored of the books I acquired from the the folks at CrimethInc.

Regardless, those of us who love Steampunk so will still be wearing our top hats long after the trend is dead.