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doors at 8 · nobody on the list · nobody turned away

Club Chronic

Punk music · punk community · a vivifying overlap

Freaks to the front.

Bring your stims and glims. Bring your pain and suffering. Bring the agony and the ecstasy of existence. Bring your authentic self or selves. Shed your masks or wear them boldly.

The scene is the thing, not the sound

Punk documentaries are all secretly the same documentary, and it is not about music. Community comes together to build inclusive spaces. Community rebounds after losing spaces. Community fights off skinheads with bats and pipes to keep spaces safe. Community learns how to DIY together. Thirty years of the East Bay, and the thing everybody in it keeps saying is that they came looking for somewhere to be, and when there was nowhere they built one on Gilman Street and ran it themselves.

That is the whole method and it is why a disability organisation has a punk club in it. A scene that has to build its own door ends up thinking very clearly about who the door is for. The social model of disability says the same thing in duller words: the barrier is not in you, it is in the stairs, and the stairs were built by somebody who could have built a ramp. Punk worked that out on the ground, about venues, decades before most of us met the theory. Our own essay on this is where the playlist got its name.

Lorne, in This Is What Trans Punk Looks Like, puts it better than any of our paragraphs: “To be a queer person is inherently a very punk thing. I think to be a punk person is also inherently a queer thing. There’s a lot of really vivifying overlap there between those two things for me.” Vivifying overlap is the phrase this room is built on. It is the same shape as neuroqueer: not two identities that happen to be in the same person, but each one making the other more itself.

And it is not a fable. The Linda Lindas were eleven and thirteen in a public library when they played Racist, Sexist Boy, and the reason that song exists is that a boy said a thing to Mila and, in her words, “we were really angry, and we decided to write a song about it.” Their tagline is we rebuild what you destroy. Punk’s inclusiveness was never automatic and never finished — it has been fought for from the inside, repeatedly, by the people the scene kept leaving out. That is the part worth inheriting.

The door policy

On the stage

Our signature playlist, on both services. Neither of these says how long it runs, because it is a list we keep adding to and today’s total would be wrong next week — the same reason the nature cams two doors down carry no runtime. They run until you stop them.

On YouTube

Chronic Neurodivergent Depressed Queer Punk

Kept by Stimpunks Foundation · open it there →

The whole list, in order, with the video. Runs until you stop it.

On Spotify

Chronic Neurodivergent Depressed Queer Punk

Kept by Ryan Boren · open it there →

The most complete version. Spotify will want you signed in for full tracks; without that it plays previews.

Pinned by the door

Everywhere we keep the music that keeps us going. Layers of it, going back years, the way a wall by a venue door actually looks.

The rack along the back wall

This selection is not ours. The six racks, their order and their themes come from It Take a Joyful Sound on Star Stuff, our sibling site, which is an essay about punky reggae, Rock Against Racism and why a pure tone has almost no identity. Every note below was written for this room rather than lifted from that page, because two of our own sites reciting the same paragraphs makes an argument you can only follow by having read the other one. Go and read it; it is the better thing and this is the jukebox version.

Rack One

The party gets its name

Two outsider musics were told they were at the same party, and then behaved as though it were true. Every accepting scene starts with somebody naming it.

Rack Two

Everything brought to the front

The gesture itself. Whatever you were told to tuck away, moved to the outside where it can be seen — which is what a stim, a glim and a visible cane all are.

Rack Three

The door is the argument

DIY is not an aesthetic. It is a claim about who is allowed to make the thing, and it gets tested at the entrance.

Rack Four

The body in the room

The sensory reality, which nobody puts on the flyer. Loud rooms are not free, and these are written from inside the overload rather than about it.

Rack Five

Care is punk

The unglamorous half. Care, rest and holding the door open are not the soft version of this; they are the whole of it.

Rack Six

Keep on livin'

Survival, which is the floor and not the ceiling.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

MAX GLITTER buys you nothing in here, and that is on purpose rather than unfinished. See the door policy.

Job marker — a safety pin

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: Read the door policy

Before the code: This club names one thing it will never do, because it can put somebody on the floor. One word, and it is a kind of light.

Hint 1

It is on the door policy rather than in the music.

Hint 2

It is the one obvious effect a punk club has, and the one this club refuses.

Last hint

Nothing plays until you press play, and nothing in here does the other thing.

Give me the answer

The answer is Strobe. A room whose argument is come in as you are cannot have a light in it that causes seizures. The club has no ambient layer at any dial setting, and it says so on its own door policy so that nobody finishes the room later by adding one.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: SAFETYPIN

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →