Punk's not dead. It's not cheap, either.

Pioneer Square is a gathering place for the local punk kids. It's a perfect stage for them. People of all sorts gather there to watch other people, to meet up with friends, to just sit and enjoy the weather (when the weather is good). It's a wide open space where sound travels and people are easy to see. So any activity is public, hard to ignore.

I sat down to do what everyone else does - watch people - and ended up surrounded by the punk kids. In front of me were 15 teenagers, dressed to the nines in their best punk clothing. Of course, their idea of what punk clothing is, is nothing like what the true punks in the 70's wore:

http://www.phillipkerman.com/concerts/ (click on the links at the bottom of the page)

I mean, the most wild bit of clothing in these pictures is a pair of skinny suspenders. There are no bondage pants, no piercings, no multi-colored hair, not even a pair of torn fishnet stockings.

But the kids in front of me wore all of that and more. Tattoos, piercings, hairdos, torn clothing, patches hand sewn onto clothing depicting their favorite bands. I was impressed. None of them really looked like they were posers - the kind who buy their punk clothing at the local mall. None of them really looked like they had been into drugs too heavily. Their clothes were too clean, too varied. A real drug habit would have competed with their fashion habit. They weren't the homeless street punk kids, but they weren't fresh out of the suburbs either. Then again, those tattoos don't come cheap. The money had to come from somewhere and none of them looked like they were even old enough to hold a job, nor did they look or act like they were selling anything on the streets to keep themselves well clothed and tattooed.

But they had the attitude. They yelled at each other, calling each other out, gave each other shit, trying to one-up each other, to prove how cool they were, how little they cared if other people in the area stared at them or thought they were weird. Or rather, they did these things so that people would stare at them.

Later I saw some of the homeless punks. They were strung out or high, scruffy and dirty. Maybe they had started hanging out in Pioneer Square, slowly making their way to the streets. Maybe they had started out on the streets and adopted the punk clothing of those around them. Although I had a lot of disdain for the high school punks, at least they were still clean.