If you doubt the Chelsea's status as the Haunted Indian Burial Ground of Baby Boomer hipster culture, consider that no significant counterculture has been produced by Western white middle class youth since Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend on this very spot and died of a heroin overdose in Rikers prison in the middle of the East River shortly afterward.Did you catch the error? Sid Vicious did not die in prison at all. He died in a Greenwich Village apartment after being sprung from Rikers. Did Duncan not know this? Was she just posing a a punk fan or did she carelessly copy this blurb from another source?
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Punk diva: Was Theresa Duncan plagiarizing or posing?
A recent story about Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake in the Independent relies heavily on an interview with Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols, who knew the couple. Theresa liked to tout her rock bona fides on her blog, but check out this Wit post (hat tip to Poussin) on the Chelsea Hotel:
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7 comments:
You know this bothers me, Poulet. No, I don't expect that everyone would know where Vicious died. But if a person were to model her attitudes and postures around a certain sociocultural movement, the facts should be straight. Saying Vicious OD'd and died on Riker's is kind of like a historian telling a class of fifth graders that Kennedy was killed in Portland.
Not only, if she were so hip to Vicious, had she not read anything that contradicted her belief that he overdosed in jail? It seems to me that Vicious may have been just a random aside for TD, selected because he fit in with the post in question and fit the Wit suit just the way he fit the Pistols suit thirty years ago.
I dunno Poussin, maybe she copied this carelessly from another source while she was bakin'? I wonder if anybody caught this when she first posted it. Not everyone would have, of course. Some of us bypassed punk and skipped straight to Def Leppard and Poison.
Some of us are probably younger than others of us, or else some of us were hustling to KC while others of us were rustling up dime bags outside Max's.
I think it's the former.
BTW, I don't know that anyone caught the original error on Wit. This was a thirty-year-old event in what was a musical subculture involving one of its tragic, unfortunate semi-heroes. But it shows that McLaren did not read her blog, doesn't it.
This is the point I've been making all along: Nobody really read the damn blog!
They read it when it was convenient or it looked hip to mention/link or it talked about some queer little overpriced perfume no one had ever heard of or it posted another picture of TD for les fangirls to admire.
Hey ho Poussin - don't go overboard now. I understand and share many a critique of TD, but that doesn't mean that every single thing she did, liked or touched, was rejectable. So don't start randomly dissing the fumes already! Take it from me: TD had a nice, distinct taste in perfume. She also occasionally posted interesting links. Crying 'hip' as some sort of indictment won't change that.
Further, I wouldn't think many a blog is perused entry for entry, by anyone. Blogs are not meant to be, in my opinion. There's too much going on, and much of it won't be of your interest. Blogs and blogrolls are the subway over the internet. Once in a while you debark and read an entry carefully.
Yo, Poulet. Maybe nobody called her on Vicious' death place because nobody gives a rat's. I could not care less when and where. It doesn't mean I didn't read her blog. But I did read it mostly for the perfume reviews. She had good taste in perfume and I enjoyed her reviews.
"fit the Wit suit" -- That's good! And that was the whole point of interest, for me, was how was she going to display the Wit suit today (and was she going to write about perfume).
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