While making my daily commute, Smells Like Teen Spirit came on the radio and I began thinking about those days when it first came out.

I hung out with skaters and punk fans, so I wasn’t unaware, by any means, of the music that lay beyond and beneath the songs playing on the radio – Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Circle Jerks, Black Flag – but none of us were too jaded to be struck by that song and by the Nirvana in general.

Maybe it was like the first time someone heard MC5, the Sex Pistols or the Clash. I don’t know. But certainly, Smells Like Teen Spirit was of that moment.

It was representative of the break from postmodernism and the rejection of a postmodern irony that evolved into kitsch. There is, yes, irony, in the title, but mostly the song seems to rage against disaffected irony.

Un cri de coeur. Whatever. We liked it. I affected us.

But what perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate as a 16 year old in suburban Florida was the quality of the songwriting.

I can’t sing, I can’t play, so I am just talking about the lyrics. But this is a rare song that, I would argue, actually works on the page, as well (only Leonard Cohen consistently writes songs that could also be good poems).

To me that is the real test of a poem, and perhaps at the root of my discomfort with the slam culture. When you take away the performance, what value (or is value the wrong word? should we assign something as capitalist and market oriented as ‘value’ to poetry and art?) remains in the words themselves?

Listening to the (granted, sometimes mostly unintelligible) lyrics, I could see them put down on the page and having value (that word again) as poem, stripped of the music and stripped of the connotations now associated with it and with singer/songwriter Kurt Kobain’s death/suicide/martyrdom (I use the word ‘martyrdom’ not to make any sort of judgement either way on his suicide nor on what ‘killed him’ but as a statement on its meaning for us – he was a sort of liberator and the early death of a liberator is always a sort of martyrdom).

While back in Florida, I visited Berlin One, a self-proclaimed art extravaganza taking place at my old haunt, the Ritz in Ybor (I saw more shows there than I can count back in my high school and college years).

A respected and beloved local poet, Brad Morewood, recommended the event to me while I was in town.

Before stopping at the Ritz, I went down the street a bit to the Ybor Arts Colony, a series of studios on the second floor of one the buildings on 7th Avenue, the main drag. I spoke for a bit with Moira Shriver, the wife of the Tampa artist, Jason Shriver, as well as city council candidate, Sara Romeo.

Berlin One itself was crowded with viewers, artists, and designers and enough hipsters to satisfy the most hard core San Francisco scenesters (I notice that ironic moustaches are very popular these days). It felt like my little hometown was growing up.

Ybor City’s artistic glory days were in the 70s, when local artists set up shop in old cigar factories. By the time I came around in 89-90, that scene was already disappearing – the galleries and quirky stores being forced out by clubs and bars catering to overage frat boys.

But maybe, having hit a certain saturation point, something interesting and dare I say – artsy – is coming back?

Moira asked me what I thought about the changes, about how people are trying to take back the area.

I like it. I like it very much.