Comments on: West Philly Rooftop Squatter Murder Provides New Endless Source Of Crustpunk/Media LOLZ

By: zned

zned — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:24:01 +0000

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.

By: C. The Impaler

C. The Impaler — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:48:56 +0000

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?

By: zned

zned — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:22:11 +0000

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.

By: drtheopolis

drtheopolis — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:56:15 +0000

Thank you, Wikipedia.

By: C. The Impaler

C. The Impaler — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:49:52 +0000

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.

By: ashy

ashy — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:13:31 +0000

Crusties also have been known to ride the Chinatown Bus. They some how manage to make it smell even worse than usual.

By: Blackmail

Blackmail — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:06:56 +0000

This totally made the cut at John Hodgman’s blog, Areas of My Expertise. He’s a hobo afficionado.

By: Phidget

Phidget — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:44:16 +0000

Okies!!!!!!! Geez. Anniversary on “On the Road” and no one can even use the correct term made famous in the book.

By: Sugar Town

Sugar Town — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:26:01 +0000

Cue up the Quincy punks episode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpYd7bOn52M

By: C. The Impaler

C. The Impaler — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:14:20 +0000

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.