another night cutting up photographs and creating new ones.
What a fucking night that was.
Coin de la création...
Blood, toujours.
3.47am, webcam.
Kurt, Frances and a K Records shield.
“For D. Boon and the band to be in people’s mind still, especially young people who didn’t see us play, is pretty flattering,” Mike Watt says. “It just shows you how open-minded people are. In the early Seventies, when I was a teenager, there was no way you would be talking about the middle Fifties. I remember we were watching the Woodstock movie and Sha Na Na comes on. It was like, ‘What’s this shit?!?’” Watt prefers to think of punk as a state of mind rather than a genre of music. It lasts longer that way. Says he: “All of us are individuals and somehow feel confined by some herd mentality, so how can that ever go away? Yeah, you can’t dress up in that Johnny Rotten uniform and make that sound. That would be kind of bogus, like Sha-Na-Na…You can get too complacent even if your whole tradition is trying to buck systems. And young people can help you out there. Maybe there’s another word for it. I remember when I first heard the word ‘punk.’ In my town it meant a guy who got fucked in jail for cigarettes. But when I went to the gigs, I went, whoa, they’re just trying to make their own little world. They don’t fit in with the rest. Will that ever disappear? No. It’s just a word… I don’t want to get caught up in sentimentalism and nostalgia shit, to be the Sha Na Na of Minutemen stuff. I want it to make sense today. But punk is like a utopia in my brain, something in my head from a long time ago. Sometimes, when I play I just don’t want people to forget D. Boon.”
Karina and Godard. But if you didn’t know that, you suck.
My friends’ instruments were stolen before the show at Al’s bar last night. Here’s a general list of what was taken. Any information: 0273913197.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned?
“I always clam up when that question is asked. Maybe I’ll just fumble and stutter and end up saying, “Don’t believe everything you read.” I always knew to question things. All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I’ve found I don’t have the right to make a judgement on someone based on something I’ve read. I don’t have the right to judge anything. That’s the lesson I’ve learned.”
