In Progress

Friends: I am going to tell you what I am doing right now because I am that excited about it. After being on a library waitlist for four weeks, I was finally able to pick up Dean Wareham's autobiography Black Postcards today. And, although I have a lot of other, much more important things that I need to be doing (since I leave for Portland in just 2 weeks!), I have decided that I cannot do anything for the next hour and a half while I read this book.

I've begun it. I think I'm about 3 chapters in. And now Dean is talking about his deep and abiding interest in Trotsky. This is what I imagined it would be--Dean is pretentious and obnoxious and smart, but not a tremendous writer. But I don't care. He is the most beautiful man in rock. Ever. Beautiful. And he makes music that makes me want to cry and sway and kiss people all at the same time. And so, strangely, I find myself caring about everything that he has to say. This includes utterances like absolute nonsense statements (calling David Thomas from Pere Ubu "the greatest Jehovah's Witness in punk rock") and horrific navel-gazing moments ("Graham said that Satan is happy when you put yourself first, that Satanism is essentially selfishness. If that's true, then I am an occasional Satanist, because there certainly are times in my life when I have put me first.").*

But I am still driven to distraction by having this book, unread, in my possession.

If you do not know who Dean Wareham is, well, that is just sad.

More on this once the reading is complete.

*This is also an example of some of the bad foreshadowing Dean does in the first few chapters of the book. As if we don't know already that he left his wife for Britta Phillips and he has a history of doing too many drugs.