I have a bizarrely intimate and simultaneously distant relationship with Beck Levy's work. Hearing her D.C. band Turboslut for the first time was one of those unique instances where you hear something a stranger has made and it is powerful and confusing because you feel like you're hearing an unfamiliar part of yourself. Like a stranger is telling you about you? It is a very strange thing! What I mean to say is, sometimes you hear other people's stories and are so grateful to them, because now this is a story you will not have to try to tell.

I think I understood that Turboslut lived in the same city as me, but I didn't really get it that I could just go see them live or something. (I can't remember if they were still a band or had just split when I first heard their 12".) I didn't really get a lot of things. (Still don't). I still don't really know how to adequately thank Beck for the music she's been a part of making (her current band Hand Grenade Job's cassette will never get it out of my head), for the posters she's printed that now hang in so many show spaces and friends homes, for the

"pro-choice anti-christ" patches on a lot of jackets. There's a lot more. Beck Levy is responsible for a lot of underpinnings in the framework of modern-day DIY/underground culture happening in the USA right now. You could say I am a big fan. I was very psyched to have this conversation with her about scene reports, show-booking, punk as activism (or not), and creating culture in the mess of late stage capitalism

Katie: Who is Beck Levy? What does she do?

Becky: I'm 27, from DC. I miss it dearly but am living and working in Oakland, CA now. I'll be staying put here for a while. I'm a gorgon-identified artist constantly fighting against the restraints of space and time. I'm a printer, mostly letterpress. My partner and I have a Vandercook Universal One letterpress, which is about 2,000lbs, and about as much type. I do some linoleum carving and polymer plate designing (the modern way to create relief plates for printing) but mostly I use letterpress to communicate with text. I'm also a writer . . .

Punk has a complicated history — a history both celebrated and redacted, chronicled in shopping malls and personal zine and record collections alike, idealized in squats and suburban living rooms, retained as much in collective memory as in countless book anthologies. If one common denominator were to transcend all of punk's dislocated genealogies, it may well be found in the colloquial mantra so often recited in earnest by punks everywhere: fuck you!

But we don't hear this phrase much anymore. Why not? Let's look for an answer by examining a different, more contemporary maxim: I don't give a fuck! This phrase probably strikes a familiar chord for most, as it has proliferated extensively in mass culture, through political ambivalence, relationship trouble, art school critiques or the loss of a preferred sports team. What is curious is how much these two idiomatic expressions resemble one another. Fuck you! I don't give a

fuck! Enunciated similarity aside, the former seems overt and directional, whereas the latter appears to indicate a lack of care. One might signify transgression; the other insouciance.

In fact, the exclamation I don't give a fuck! can be dated back to a song by Tupac Shakur released on his debut album "2Pacalypse Now" in 1991, entitled "I Don't Give a Fuck." Yet, there is a certain incongruence between the song's lyrics and the current motto. After the first two verses spell out the blatant racism of the police in their grabbing people off the streets, the listener learns that neither Tupac nor the police give a fuck. We should read this shared feeling as differently held by each respective party; the police and Tupac have different sociopolitical positions and, in such a way, different levels of privilege granted by the state. The police don't give a fuck based on their lived privilege; Tupac doesn't give a fuck . . .