Abstract.
This thesis presents a perspective of the Berkeley 924 Gilman Street sub-cultural
zeitgeist. I am an amateur ethnographer / sociologist and I was a participant at
Gilman in the late 1980s and 1990s. Gilman is a volunteer-run collective. For many,
punk sub-culture uses music to restore sanity in an insane post-industrialist
neo McCarthist and now also post Reaganomic era. Individuals involved in Gilman
are and have been involved in an on going grassroots phenomena. Gilman, like
punk, has an outreach that is global. Punks from around the world understand
that the message and standards for which this club was created helps keep ideas
regarding equality and non-conformity open and active. This bastion of creative
freedoms needs to be preserved. None of this is possible with out the efforts
of those who continue to help explore the punk virtues that helped create 924
Gilman. In punk there is a punk repertoire, an anti-status, an oral history,
and there is a survival element and ethos against The Man. The man that is so
odious that we must throw ourselves upon his machinery to stop him.[1]
Our mechanism, our slam dancing, our social networks, and our genre reverses
the torque of said machinery and creates a catalyst of change for future
generations. Whatever he destroys we will build it again.[2] I
try not to take these facts for granted and keeping this in mind I explore the
ethos, space, and some gender based analysis of Gilman including my own
empirical ethnographic data.
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