Mexico City /
I remember that December 31, almost immediately after the arrival of the new millennium, when I welcomed the new year with doses of ecstasy and the Sex Pistols on the dance floor of a gay bar that was located a few steps from Insurgentes Sur. On the heels of a building that must have been futuristic in the eighties and that reminded me of the episodes of “Papá Soltero”. Of course I was with my best friend, Francisco Cullen, some of his neighbors and friends of the neighbors. Among them was a performance student wearing a T-shirt with the logo of god save the queen and the same haircut that Audrey Tatou wore in the “Amelie” movie. Unintentionally a large group was formed and everyone followed me the madness of my unbearable foolishness of making out with unknown men. The DJ’s turntable was near the front hallway. It turned out that the DJ was a childhood friend of Francisco’s and as soon as he recognized him, he jumped out of the booth to give him an effusive hug: “ask me for the song you want.” Francisco wanted to lower the panties of the girl with Amelie-style hair, who was the one who gave in to the wish of the DJ in the bottle. What do you want to listen? he told her. I don’t deny that I was jealous that he hadn’t asked me. In addition to being his best friend, the idea of going to a jotos disco after eating a piece of turkey for dinner arose from my mind and foreskin. But that’s how we batos are, of treacherous biology. Of course she asked for the Pistols. So it was. After a sequence of songs by Kabah and Safri Duo, Francisco’s friend released “Anarchy in the UK”, “Holiday in the sun” on the thread. We started throwing ourselves doing a minimoshpit that horrified the gays. One of them, with a really big ass, asked to be taken out, but the coward was left with his lips tighter than his ass when his demand was denied. When “God save the queen” ended, we stayed on the track. The stain was beginning to explode and Pink’s songs seemed to dampen the effect for good.
what the hell is he Never Mind the Bollocks considering that in the end, the Sex Pistols were a boy band with more attitude than talent.
After paying all her attention, the girl with the Amelie haircut so precise that it bordered on psychopathic threw all the rum and Coca-Cola on my face. Francisco had just brought him a drink, so the mess was grotesque and viscous. The only thing that asshole Francisco did was pee laughing and I was all sticky for the rest of the night.
He was only telling the truth. The Sex Pistols were a product of Malcolm McLaren dressed for the Vivienne Westwood assault. The woman who somehow invented punk fashion as it is understood today. It was she who put the studs and Scottish patterns on the Pistols’ nihilistic identity. John Lydon would confess years later in his biography anger is energy, that Westwood’s clothes were the most uncomfortable thing to wear in hell. After the Pistols’ demise they became nuclear enemies. The truth is that Westwood had a bit of punk coherence when he received the Order of the British Empire in a tight outfit that made the absence of underwear transparent in the middle of Buckingham Palace. But in the end he came to meet him, just as Lydon began to shriek with the death of the queen, whom fifty years before he had wished filth. The British are incurable in their codependency with the monarchy.
She went from founding the Sex boutique, where practically all the founders of British punk met, to becoming a prestigious fashion designer who sells skinny jeans for 500 pounds, about 11,000 Mexican pesos. One-button tartan jackets like the trousers the girl with the Amelie cut wore that first of January are now around a thousand pounds sterling. She is an anti-nuclear activist, a radical environmentalist with orange or white hair who never gave up punk. That is to say, nothing more punk than lending himself to designing the bad luck dress that would ruin Carrie Bradshaw’s wedding to Mr. Big in the first “Sex and the city” movie. In her there were always grams of discomfort that worked in the glamorous circuits of bourgeois elites in which she moved after leaving the underground. Her designs inspired so much the clothing of cocaine addicts from Wall Street to drag culture that they do not end up paying homage to her in the reality shows of “Drag Race”.
The fascinating thing about Westwood will continue to be the way in which his sewing defined the cheesy contradictions of a theoretically nihilistic movement like punk, until it led to that infinite joke as conceived by David Foster Wallace. His innocence and irremediable hope for him despite the no future. That’s why I identify more with the hardcore generated in California through Black Flag, really loud, minimalist and destructive like an AK-47 with saliva bullets. Westwood is the most lucid example of the basic philosophy of the Pistols. There’s no future. Just ambition and keep hating idiots while he racks up millions of sterling and dollars even after his passing and another new year.
Wenceslao Bruciaga