Punk'd by Miami

Once again I really enjoyed the special collections section of the Richter library. They had a new selection and I think that this time it was so much more specific to the topic of Miami and that was really cool to me because we saw things from the everyday person, like at the are museum, and it represented the true Miami Local. Something that really made me happy was the University of Miami Section and seeing all those new 106 kids look at it for the first time in awe. Looking at the old yearbooks becomes like looking back into your family history and seeing how they lived over the same land over half a century ago. It will always give me this kind of mixed feelings of seeing all these young kids but I’ve yet to see any black students who attended, but that’s just because they had too old of yearbooks out but also history didn’t not allow that integration at the time. I was happiest to see my own part of history in the UM collections which in the future, students will see my work while going here and compare that to the futures present and the past before mine. The one with the zines and the punk kids who wrote the little zines created my punctum, but it also makes me think of how fast technology has advanced because today’s zine would be called a blog. I really thought that the Mocazine was this intrusion on imagination (which is probably perfect from what I hear about Moca) and really one of the craziest things I have ever seen, there was a purple man alien with horns coming out of his forehead playing the guitar with no shirt. Then there were little cartoon people hidden throughout the clutter of the chords and amps in the drawing. I consider this to be another unrepresented part of Miami that the rest of the world was not able to learn about due to the flashiness of south beach and the mobile/ Miami vice perspective. With the punk crowd responding to Moca which is one of the largest and coolest Art exhibits in the country, It shows this whole other creative and intellectual side to Miami and in reality it shows a kind of invisible curtain that Miami has pulled over the locals in order to pimp Miami out to international as well as domestic foreigners. I think of how important little pieces of paper became to these people because they had to make these little zines to express their opinions. I think of how punk has evolved into today’s modern style of Miami Punk. You still do not see it too much but it’s around in places. But I loved seeing the punk Miami culture of late end of the last millennium till now.