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Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

Book by Viv Albertine · 5 quotes · Punk, Punks, 1970s

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Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys Quotes

“One day Sid turns up in the peg trousers and they're in ribbons. He'd sliced them up with a razor blade because he hated them so much but he couldn't find his jeans so when he wanted to go out he had to stick them back together. He joined the rips with loads of safety pins, all the way down his legs, hundreds of them. That’s how the ‘loads of safety pins’ thing started amongst people in clubs: they copied it, but he only did it because he couldn’t be bothered to sew his trousers up.”

“Whenever I get a free period, I set off to the college library and work systematically through the Dewey system, taking each book off the shelf one by one and adding, in black biro, ‘/she’ and ‘/woman’ to every ‘he’ and ‘man’. I do this for the whole three years but I never finish (and luckily I never get caught). I do it with righteous indignation; there is hardly one book in the whole library that doesn’t use only the generic male pronoun. As if only men think and feel and discover and read. We’ve been taught on this course that every single mark and sound on film or the page is important and laden with meaning, and yet every book in this library talks only to men. Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy. If language isn’t powerful, why not call your teacher a cunt?”

“I have a choice: I can get all upset and self-pitying about his attitude, boo hoo, my dad doesn’t love me, isn’t proud of me, or accept that he is damaged. I decide to be calm and level-headed about it: This man is incapable of love. He is to be pitied. And I never mention my life in music again. From that moment on I only talk to him about neutral things – health, weather, history – because I understand that for some reason, that’s all he can cope with. It’s not me, it’s him who has a problem, and I really can’t use up any more time and energy on being a victim of my father’s inadequacies. I have got to get on with my life.”

“I’ve never regretted letting someone go who was taking the piss, although sometimes I miss them for a couple of months. I think you can get a bit addicted to people and often these piss-takers are good fun to hang around with. In the end, the ‘relationship’ isn’t worth the damage that’s done to your self-respect, though.”