Dealing with the English influence....

Over the last couple days I have watched some incredible movies. "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten" and "Green Street Hooligans". I have commented on the latter before but the Joe Strummer documentary was one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Alot of voice overs and the filmmaker was not worried about identifying every single person interviewed. It was your loss if you didn't know who they were. Pretty wild though - Joe was a Hippie before he was a Punk. WOW. Didn't see that one coming. It's amazing that all these Punk bands begin dirt poor, can't play, are anti-establishment and all that - then they fall victim to all the pitfalls of sellout bands: drugs, attitudes, power plays. It all turns to shit.
During the movie Bono commented about the Clash and stated that what pisses him off about the Clash is that they are not still around making music. Then, towards the end of the movie, one of the nameless interviewees (an old friend of Joe Strummer's) states, "It's selfish of us, the fans, to expect bands to stay together and keep making albums for "our" sakes instead of their own." I think that is one of the most profound statements I've ever heard. We should respect other's rights to do what they want to do instead of expecting them to do things for us. Hmmm.
Now on Green Steet Hooligans - I have taken a 3 month hiatus from this Blog because I have gotten bitten by the Facebook bug. All the old friends from High School have come out of the woodwork. Some I was friends with, some I wasn't. Some "adult" friendships are here too but it just bring back the thoughts of going out on Friday nights and looking for trouble, knowing all the while that my friends had my back. Then Elijah Wood says in this movie "...best feeling is not knowing your friends back, it's knowing that you have theirs." (the weird thing is other people are shocked to know that you have their back). In HS we got into quite a few scraps and the infamous night I got my nose broken and rescued by Wendell K I saw that me and my friends were out numbered but not out manned. I took the biggest guy and broke his hand with my face while the rest of the guys (3) took care of the rest, except for Scotty- they ganged up on him.