Chris Duncan, editor: My First Time

The uniformity of the anecdotes in My First Time is simultaneously tedious and reassuring. No matter where these writers came of age, they almost all had the same parents who were skeptical of punk, the same local all-ages clubs with lousy management, and the same personal paranoia that had them worrying about what to wear and how to act. Too many of these three-to-four-page stories fall back on basic descriptions of how old the writers were, where the show took place, what took place, and how it changed their lives in some general way. Punk wasn't just a phase for many of these folks; they saw the light and never looked back.

But the better essays—like Jillian Lauren's "Jackie Was A Punk" and Joseph Gervasi's "Clenched Fists, Open Eyes"—consider the contradictions of embracing punk, from sweating out the perverse conformity of non-conformists to deciding whether they were devoted to the music or the scene. (High-school punks only obsessed with the former usually move on eventually.) Still, nearly all these writers understand the hardwired connection between punk and disaffected teenagerhood, and how nostalgia for cruddy performance spaces and thuggish slamdancers is really nostalgia for the people they used to be: obstinate souls stubbornly unwilling to compromise their ideals, no matter how impractical.