Saw a screening at Tribeca Film Festival of a documentary called Punk: Attitude directed by Don Letts, former Clash associate, video director, etc. It’s a history of Punk using a lot of archival footage intercut with interviews with survivors that draws a crooked line from the Stooges and garage bands of the 60s to Blink-182 and other slicker more manufactured versions of the sound that exist today.
The interviewees, many of them, featured stunning examples of British dentistry at its worst. Or maybe I’m being unfair, maybe it’s the British diet that fosters rampant tooth decay. I can talk, my teeth are far from straight and perfect — I didn’t have braces when I was younger the way lots of American kids do now. Not that I really desperately needed them — which was the accepted justification back then. Now the bar has been raised and mere functionality and suitability of chompers is not enough, they have to be “improved” and made as close to perfect as possible.
Anyway, New Yorkers will be pleased at Letts’ version of punk history — it corrects the often mistaken impression that it originated in London. Henry Rollins, who is one of the interviewees, is amazingly articulate, funny, good looking and incisive. Many of the others seem sadly aged or somewhat damaged, unsurprisingly.
