Touching on some heavy issues with a light hand, it is essential reading for those who want to keep up with the darker and more biting edge of alternative culture. Spiced with adverts for body modification and fetishistic art, and combining 'Underground' culture with political incorrectness, it's calculated to induce disapproval across the conventional political spectrum. Theoretical essays discuss the biology of human attraction and the psychology of envy. Devoted to a culture of transgression, Panik is today's face of the Underground, a concept that has changed considerably since I first encountered it in the late 1960s. Underground are now wearing suits and, indeed, nearing retirement.
Attitudes once considered revolutionary are now the reigning orthodoxy.
This process of generational inheritance of power has been both triumph and compromise. A sort of 'social Marxism' reigns supreme but at the expense of abandoning economic revolution. And if the revolutionaries have become the new Establishment exercising a new form of authoritarianism in the authoritarian form of political correctness, it is no wonder that the 'Underground' has shifted its political centre of gravity. But that does not mean to say that it has signed up to stuffy political reductivism. It's arty and bohemian, individualist and libertarian, and I presume that its poses and pronouncements are at least half in jest.