The foreword by Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks sets the tone for everything that follows in No Wave Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976 - 1980. Written by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Byron Coley, variously the editor of NY Rocker and underground editor at Spin, the book features photographs by Julia Gorton, Godlis, Laura Levine and others. The book also includes ephemera and diaristic captions, which taken together bring to life the ideosynchratic post-punk scene that howled along the Bowery for a brief period that was, in the annals of rock, an era.

Left: James Chance, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein at the Mudd Club. Copyright Laura Levine, courtesy of the artist. Right: Lydia Lunch. Copyright Julia Gorton, courtesy Harry N. Abrams Books.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn Branca, James Chance, Rhys Chatham, Robert Christgau, Brian Eno, Barbara Ess, Lenny Kay, Arto Lindsay, Lance Loud, Lydia Lunch, Debbie Harry, Glenn O'Brien, Robert Sietsema, Patti Smith, Alan Vega - these are just some of the figures that inhabit these pages. And the book's index provides an entry point for any student of popular culture considering a master's thesis on the subject. Herewith an excerpt from the foreword to inspire native DART readers to head for the opening tomorrow night of an exhibition of photographs from the book at KS Gallery, in Tribeca:

"New York City during the 1970s was a beautiful, ravaged slag - impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore.

"Shit was already percolating by the time I hit Manhattan as a teen terror in 1976. Inspired by the manic rantings of Lester Bangs in Creem magazine, the Velvet Underground's sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Doll's first album, and the poetic scat of Horses, by Patti Smith, I snuck out of my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound, and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped from. But with two hundred bucks in my pocket tucked inside a notebook full of misanthropic screed, a baby face that belied a hustler's instinct, and a killer urge to create in order to destroy everything that had originally inspired me....I wasn't expecting the toilets at CBGB's to be the bookends to Duchamp's urinal, but then again, maybe 1977 had more in common with 1917 than anyone at the time could have imagined.

"The anti-art invasion of Dada in Switzerland and the surrealist pranksters who shadowed them had a blast pissing all over everybody's expectations. The anti-everything of No Wave was a collective caterwaul that defied categorization, defiled the audience, despised convention, shit in the face of history, and then split. It's only a movement in retrospect. Post-Suicide, pre-Sonic Youth New York was the devil's dirty litterbox. No Wave was the waste product of Taxi Driver, Times Square, the Son of Sam, the blackout of '77...the hell of the Vietnam War, and a desperate need to violently rebel against the complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms and disco..."

No Wave Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976 - 1980 (Abrams 2008), the exhibition, opens Friday June 13, 6:00 - 8:00 pm at KS Art, 73 Leonard Street. A live reunion performance by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks is on at the Knitting Factory afterwards. Please check websites for information.