West Philly Rooftop Squatter Murder Provides New Endless Source Of Crustpunk/Media LOLZ
While it’s true that there’s nothing to laugh about regarding the city’s 186th murder victim this year, the strange tale regarding the death of Timothy Bradley at the hands of squatter/crustpunks has been enough to throw any mainstream reporting of it into a seizure of misguided sensationalism. The culprit for this crime has been nothing more than good old fashioned lazy-straight-media-not-understanding-the-punks. And oh, the bizarre turns of phrase it has invoked.
From Action News (the video with this has to be seen to be believed):
The three are described as modern day hobos. Anarchistic vagabonds who travel by train, jumping boxcars when it’s time to go.
And here’s the pulp fiction-y Daily News take:
They were a bunch of drifters from as far away as California.
They settled in an abandoned apartment building in West Philadelphia where, cops said, they had an all-night party Sunday night on the roof.
Working on that screenplay already, honey? Sheesh. And here’s NBC10 going for the hobo imagery once again:
Police said the attackers were believed to be vagrants who travel the country by freight train.
That’s only the beginning, of course, but something tells us the Law & Order episode on this is really gonna be the money shot.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
That was my most successful thread on Salt Board ever. The spice must flow!
June 19th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
So, it’s cool in the philebrity style manual to jump on the media bandwagon when the Philly MSM mistakes a mosh pit gone bad as a riot; but when they don’t properly namecheck crust punks as such, cry foul?
If you look at a bunch of anarcho-drifter vagabonds, and don’t notice the soundtrack, you call them anarcho-drifter vagabonds. I mean wouldn’t calling them “crust punks” just culturally fuck up the word much the way “goth” got sodomized by the media post Columbine?
I’m sure calling the police tip line with a scene-watcher’s correction that these individuals are more precisely called crust punks will help a lot in tracking down potential witnesses … oh wait, apparently just looking for train jumpers works too. Nevermind. GQ or Esquire will be all over this story before L&O gets a hold of it, Philebrity should pitch the story. “Murder, The Cool Kid Wrote.”
The one thing action news got right, the “rise” is crust punks is more a result of an influx of “trust punks”. I’m wondering what sort of legal representation waltzed in after the train hoppers were detained.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Cue up the Quincy punks episode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpYd7bOn52M
June 19th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Okies!!!!!!! Geez. Anniversary on “On the Road” and no one can even use the correct term made famous in the book.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:06 am
This totally made the cut at John Hodgman’s blog, Areas of My Expertise. He’s a hobo afficionado.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Crusties also have been known to ride the Chinatown Bus. They some how manage to make it smell even worse than usual.
June 20th, 2007 at 10:49 am
I would have figured crusties would stow away in the Chinatown Bus’s baggage bay … kinda like that VU song, but no love story.
Er “Okies” aren’t that sort of drifter and Kerouac didn’t popularize the term. When California wrote their “anti-Okies” laws during the Depression, they didn’t do so after being disturbed by some frightening book from the future. Continuing this loyalty to the space time continuum, Kerouac probably picked up the term from reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, not the other way around. Lastly, Okies evolved to be a term for displaced Midwestern farmers working as day laborers on the West Coast. To my knowledge, crust punks don’t exactly have the work ethic to work a field under a de facto overseer.
I like Kerouac too, but alas the hipster reading list once again proves to not be a tool for inculcating literacy. Unless you mean Kerouac perpetually “popularizes” a term that should be part of basic American historical understanding.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Thank you, Wikipedia.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
For more info — read Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
These crusties should read this, then they might believe that anarchy means more than just being provided for by they state or you and I. Their minds are as lazy as their bodies.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Beh, Dr. T., HBO’s Carnivale scene check to an Okie tent town probably does okies more justice than Wikipedia; but even that show basically lifted it’s first shot from the first pages of Grapes. I’m guessing the WP entry on On the Road probably started the Kerouac popularized Okies line. Someone update some “very special” episode of your favorite 80s sitcom where Punky Brewster or Arnold Coleman try to get by with just the cliff notes.
Do Crusties really associate themselves with the Okies? I figured they were more copped from a UK or Berlin scene. There’s also the fact that Okies weren’t a lifestyle choice … do crusties claim to be victims of society a la the Quincy Punks?
June 20th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
They are like jesus freaks. They are middle class kids with no moral conflict in their lives so they create one like abortion or homosexuality on which to take a stand. They believe they have separated themselves from a crooked society. Instead they are just leaches.