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Vivienne Westwood, fall 1981 ready-to-wear Photo: David Corio / Redferns Forty years after Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren staged their first fashion show, full of pirate looks, swagger has returned to the runways. It’s present in Rick Owens’s elegantly tattered dresses (a wink at Schiap’s tear print perhaps) and in Matty Bovan’s high-seas fantasies. Both boast an imperfect glamour that resonates in a time when many are feeling shipwrecked by the pandemic. A little bit of swashbuckling bravado might be just what we need to keep up the fight. Westwood and McClaren show...

Blank Generation, Richard Hell and the Voidoids were at the forefront of the New York punk scene. Hell, who had done time with Television and Johnny Thunders' the Heartbreakers, elevated the punk art form on the first album, but then struggled to follow it up with Destiny Street five years later. This was at a time when punk/New Wave bands (see The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads) were cranking albums out at about one (sometimes two) a year. The expanded and remastered double disc reissue Destiny Street Complete (Omnivore) features three versions of the same album — 1982's original Dest...

Ending with Destiny Street Demos (1978-1980), filled with additional songs that didn’t make the final cut, every part of Destiny Street Complete functions as its own individual work. The songs were never a problem, and the original album worked as it was. But all these alternate universe versions are equally valid as well, whether listened to discretely or as a whole. The album is the focus of the conclusion of our chat. The occasion upon which we are having our first-ever conversation is a most interesting version of an album I love, but you apparently were not pleased with it.

Destiny Street Complete, a two-disc reimagining of Hell’s least favorite entry in his brief discography, consisting of four different versions of the album: 1. The original release; 2. Destiny Street Repaired, a 2009 reinterpretation featuring new vocals and new guitar parts from Marc Ribot, avant jazzer Bill Frisell and original Voidoid Ivan Julian; 3. Destiny Street Remixed, sonic surgery done to the original 24-track master tapes by Hell and Destiny Street Demos (1978-1980), which should be self-explanatory. We took the set’s release as an opportunity to discuss his role in punk his...

"Blank City" seems almost to argue that poverty is of great assistance to artists. Caeine Danhier's documentary revisits an era--actually, more of a moment--when the bankruptcy of New York City coincided with a no-budget flowering of film and music on the Lower East Side, which by then had already been giving birth or shelter to artists for most of a century. In "Alphabet City," below 14th Street, rents were low and sometimes optional. The streets were dangerous, but artists could live there on little income. They could buy cheap Super 8 cameras, some of them stolen. They could sometimes scro...