Scam: The First Four Issues!

by Erica Dawn Lyle

Scam was equal parts an introductory guide on how to get things for free and punk memoir. Youths experienced trainhopping, house shows, and cross country tours that sought out swimming holes. Community was sought and celebrated through generator punk shows on Mission Street, hunting for cans of beer on Easter, and Food Not Bombs. Angst was manifested while stealing electricity from lampposts, squatting in Miami, selling plasma, tagging freight trains, wheatpasting, spraying salt water into vending machines, returning stolen merchandise, and dumpstering as seen through the lens of a young punk. Scam has gone on to inspire a generation of imitators, the highest form of flattery.

Genres: Memoir

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, experimental musician, curator, and cultural instigator who lives in New York and Florida. Formerly the touring guitar player for Riot Grrl punk legends, Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, she has released musical collaborations with Bernadette Mayer, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purnell, and many more. The author of several books, she has been a frequent contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and other publications. Her artist books are in the permanent collection at MOMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Yale's Beinecke Library, the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, and other institutions, and her writings, papers, and correspondence are permanently held and viewable at the Erica Dawn Lyle archive at University of Miami. In collaboration with her partner, Midnight Piper Forman, she is currently at work on Our Place In The Sun, a speculative fiction film about climate collapse and gender transition in Florida that has screened as a work in progress at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and California School of The Arts in Valencia, CA. Her most recent book is The Knight of Cups (Belladonna Press, 2023).

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy fuck, Scam is so fucking awesome.

Contains a singularly authoritative essay on hiding in libraries to spend the night. Lots of good stuff on train hopping, squatting, and keeping it real. Imagine the feeling you get when you're super pumped up. Then condense that feeling into a white-hot ball, sort of like how scientists theorize the universe to have been moments after the Big Bang. Scam is an entire white-hot proto-universe of full-on, unbending awesomeness.

A lot of sci-fi exploits the idea of "worlds within worlds" -- this unseen world that exists just below the surface of the world that most people perceive and exist in. Scam is sort of like that. Alongside the rat race world, there's a Scam Punk world whose periphery is only barely visible from where you stand. And what's cool about Scam World is that its periphery brushes up against other unseen worlds: hip-hop pirate radio stations, urban fishermen, concrete sidewalk etchings, boxcar graffiti, and, uh, a bunch of weird shit in Miami.

I totally loved this anthology. A++++++, would read again.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed my life. Made an index for scam 2 in library school.