The Boomer Bible

A couple of points. This is not the BoomerBible.com website, which is still languishing at The Wayback Machine. It’s also not something I can take credit for. It’s an astonishing act of faith. People came together, for no economic reason whatsoever, to make the Boomer Bible’s Intercolumn Reference a living, online thing. They succeeded. I can never repay them. Never. But here it is.

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The book is 33 years old in 2023. But it is not dead. It remains alive in multiple locations, with full text online versions at three sites, including the Internet’s Modern Archive. It’s also still available for secondhand purchase at a variety of online stores.

A couple things you should know about the book. It was written in Philadelphia by “punk writers” on South Street, which is a real place with a long history of its own. What it looked like in years soon after the time of the punk writers.

This theater was once the epicenter of punk writer performances of their writings. The photo series is called “Rumours of the Metalkort.”

The story of the warrior-writers of South Street is told in the book Punk City. Arguments still rage about whether they ever exited or not. Problem is, there’s evidence they did exist. Here’s a brief overview of their strange world:

This map of Punk City is reproduced in black and white in a file (Don’t Send Me Dead Flowers…”) excerpting a book called ‘Post-Mortem on Punk’ by a skeptical academic of the time. The file can be a useful intro to the South Street culture. 

My own last testament on the subject…

What time is it? Time, I believe, to republish The Boomer Bible.

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