Kosovar Punk
Right after we arrived in London last September, my MacBook Pro decided to give up the ghost. When it died, so went a number of files I thought I’d lost for good, including scans of an enormous collection of articles I’d written for print periodicals that had never made it to the web, or if they did, had long since been taken down. Most had been written for Punk Planet during the 1990s, and held a particularly sentimental value for me. I was devastated by their loss.
Last week, I successfully resuscitated the drive this material was on, recovering the PDFs I’d made of these articles. Today, I posted some of the better examples to the Clips section of this site. Of particular note is Ready for War, the cover story for the July/August ’99 edition of PP. Written following a roadtrip through northern Italy at the height of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, the sounds of fully loaded US F16s flying overhead were still fresh in my ears.
There’s more to it than that. Needless to say, a decade later, it is fascinating to go back and read these pieces, for both personal and political reasons. Written when I was working on my PhD, I was particularly consumed by the wars in the former Yugoslavia. They were especially rich for persons with my set of academic interests. I was convinced that the anti-Islamic rhetoric of Serbian nationalists would eventually be assimilated by western conservatives.
