That Dude From Luna

As promised, I have read, and carefully chosen bits to share with you from, Dean Wareham's autobiography Black Postcards: A Rock and Roll Romance. I loved this book. I loved Luna before I read the book, and now I love Luna even more. I loved Dean Wareham before I read the book, but now I love Dean Wareham even more.

But it isn't because I think I would like the guy. I'm pretty sure I would not. He's kind of a dick. And he does a lot of drugs--very casually--which makes me nervous. And he's smart, but he sort of spends a lot of time and energy trying to pretend like he's just a rock guy. Which I find sort of disingenuous. But he is also funny, and confessional in a way that is sort of endearing.

Most of the book is a history of Galaxie/Luna--time on the road and in the studio. There is precious little about his personal life and marriage to first wife Claudia, until he begins to detail his affair with bandmate Britta Phillips. At that point, the book becomes much more about his personal life. A chapter called "The Worst Moment of my Life" details, brutally, and somewhat self-indulgently, the day that he left his wife and toddler son. It's an odd departure from the rest of the material of the book, given how little he lets the reader know about his married life.

Still, it's a good read for the live-on-the-road sections. (I'm always a sucker for that, which explains how I can read so much Rollins.)

Here are some of the high points, so that you can get a feel for the book, but not have to read it yourself. Not surprisingly, I've had a hard time not commenting on the selections, so most of them are accompanied by a little analysis by yours truly. Enjoy, and listen to a little Luna if you have not recently, or (horror of horrors!) have not at all.


***I learned a lot of new things from reading this book, like about all the cars that Dean Wareham has ever driven (he's got a thing about cars), and about how there are Galaxie songs that are based on Star Trek episodes (this theme will return later). But I also learned about the existence of this:

[Talking about a friend in Germany] Armin invited me to eat with him and his girlfriend. We drank beer from large brown bottles, and he showed me his collection of Donald Duck toys (he owned three hundred). He was not only a drummer and a postman but also a Donaldist. He belonged to an organization called DONALD--and acronym for Deutsche Organisation Nichtkomerzieller Anhanger des Lauteren Donaldismus (the German Organization of Non-commercial Devotees of True Donaldism). (189)

***Here's an example of Dean's willingness to tell a pretty embarrassing story about himself, if it is a good story. This comes at the end of a long story about picking up and having a one night stand with a super beautiful woman named Marina in Majorca. This is a pretty awful way for something like that to end . . .

Then we talked about music. Mariana offered to sing her favorite song for me.
"Do you know it?" she asked, and sang softly into my ear.
Oh, no. I did know that song. "More than Words," the ballad by those dudes with the really long hair--Extreme. I hated that song. I remember the video that went with it--I hated that too. Yet there I lay with a stupid smile on my face while she sang it for me. This was my punishment. Or at least the beginning of it. (212)

The story wouldn't work as well if it were any other song.

***Not only did Dean write a Galaxie song about ST, but it is clearly a cultural reference that comes often and easily to him. After an inexplicable digression about Afghanistan (?!?) he writes:

It is okay to stone adulterous women if that is just part of your culture? Shouldn't everyone be allowed to learn how to read? These were the kinds of moral problems that Captain James T. Kirk faced in his travels around the galaxy. (245)

Really?

***Dean has some weird opinions. Here are a couple of examples:

[In Bordeaux, with Luna. Note the understatement, which he doesn't seem to mean ironically.]
Our hotel was a little odd. It had a nautical theme going, and the little rooms were decked out like a ship's cabins with round portholes instead of windows. I had my own room that night, and watched an excellent pornographic film on the free TV. Everyone was wearing masks and white wigs, and they were dancing and singing madly and having anal sex, and it was really very funny. It's fun hanging out in the hotel room, drinking a cold Kronenbourg and quietly watching French porn. (207)

[In France (again)] I spent a little time in the cell where Robespierre was held before his execution. I wasn't there long--unlike Marie Antoinette, who practically lived there. Marie Antoinette's cell had been re-created too, but I've never really been a fan of hers. Her head needed chopping off. (281)

I suppose that I shouldn't throw stones, since I believe that everyone should have a favorite economist (my is Malthus, who is yours?), but Dean has some issues with Marie Antoinette.

***I can't often disagree with Dean's opinions and observations about rock and roll though. Here are some highlights:

[At the Lorelei Festival in Germany] All the bands hung out in the amazing backstage area, enjoying the barbecue and the sun and scenery. All except the Ramones, who stayed in their trailer and had pizza sent up from town. This was very punk rock of them. The mountain, the cliff, the sunshine, the barbecue--they were against it. Since punk is a celebration of all things ugly, how can punk rockers enjoy the beautiful Rhine Valley? (88)

[A gig in Cincinnati] Sudsy Malone's was a bar, a rock club, and a laundry. You got a discount on the ticket to see the band if you brought your laundry as well. We were able to wash our clothes, and the club was packed. But it was a bit depressing to play at a laundry, no matter how punk rock it was. You could smell the fabric softener from the stage, and it didn't smell like rock and roll. (147)

[About hating SxSW] In March the band flew down to Texas to play shows at South by Southwest in Austin and at the Ridglea Theater in Forth Worth. It was our first time at SXSW and we didn't much like it. First of all, they don't pay you for performing there. We could earn $5,000 doing a show in Austin at any other time, so why were we playing there for free? Second, we were treated rudely by the staff at Emo's. They refused to give us any beer, and they rushed us off the stage just as we were hitting our stride. (254)

[This is funny, but maybe only to be and my youngest sib. B-this one is for you--I know that you will appreciate it.] Our final stop was the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. They had a terrific lineup, spread out over five different stages. I saw the Cramps and the Cure and Nick Cave and Bob Dylan. The first half of Dylan's show was awful. He had that dolt G. E. Smth on lead guitar. G. E. Smith was the bandleader on Saturday Night Live, and he was best known for making too many rock faces. Maybe his playing would be tolerable if he put a paper bag over his head.
I am opposed to rock-guitar faces. I am not turned on by guitarists who shake and stick out their tongue and drool during guitar solos. I prefer to let the guitar speak for itself. No need to sell the guitar solo with overly expressive facial expressions. (89)

***This is what I mean when I say that he's smart, but tries to act like he's just a rock guy. I mean, he knows Adorno and Althusser, and it isn't like he chose totally mainstream pop icons. And he went to Harvard, which he reminds us in another section of the book where he starts in on something about a class he took his sophomore year about Kant. See, disingenuous.

But I don't know culture from counterculture. Questions like that confuse me, and they don't help when writing songs. Let the rock critics read Adorno and Althusser. I will study Pops Staples and the Chocolate Watchband. (108)

***And this is what I mean by funny. These two sentences have made me laugh out loud like four times now. It's part of a story Dean tells about Neil Hagerty, a guitarist for the D.C. band Pussy Galore.

His eyes were pinned and he stood by the side of the stage, scratching his legs and telling me about the suede pants he had picked up on the street for $5. Admittedly, that is a very good price for suede pants. (58)

***I don't really have much to say about this one. It's just funny. And it is sort of poseur-y too.

[From Galaxie 500's first European tour in '89] Every French interviewer asked us about the Pixes. They figured that since we were from Boston, we must love the Pixies. Nonsense. We had no love for the Pixies. (71)

***Finally, a observation that makes a lot of sense. Again, a little self-deprecating, which is nice, considering a few of the more snarky comments above.

[On costume choice for the final Luna show in LA] I wore a striped purple Paul Smith shirt for the final Luna show, which I regretted when I saw it in the Luna documentary--because it's purple. (322)

Gross

It is so humid outside that you can see the air.

Is it any wonder that I'm counting down the days until I get to go to PDX?

Thursday Night

Thai food. "Cute and skirty." Warm and healing Jesus hands. Driving through North Austin neighborhoods. "Bohemian Like You." Rock star parking. Juicy limes and a bartender who knows how to squeeze them. Rooftop lounge. Boy energy and green shirts. "Won't it be sad when?" Pinning a dress. Perfect temperature. Not seeing the band we were seeing. Toes out the window. Phish food and half baked. "Are your toes waving at me?" Big Daddy. Sleepy, home, future, now, future.

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.

Postscript to Uncle Moo

I just read the blogs. I'd give you all the prizes just for not being a giant effing windbag like the rest of those guys. God, I hate hunters (Cecil excepted, but just because, as my niece has pointed out, he is a "cute man.").

And that poem did make me cry. Because it was hilarious.

But you are disturbed. You do know that, right?

Reply to Uncle Moo

Ok Marcus. I could swear that I told you to shut your trap about If Lucy Fell. I'm not SJP's greatest fan or anything, but I love that film. Get over the fact that you watched it on my recommendation and hated it. That Eric Shaeffer guy is interesting. I like the stuff he does. And I do think that Bwick Elias is a good Ben Stiller character.

Now that I am done being pissy with you--one thing that is interesting about your comments on my blog is this: you often challenge my own sense of what the editorial policy of The Make-Ready is and should be. #1: you asked me to write on a specific topic (that piece of crap movie Legends of the Fall). Do I take requests? I have decided that I do. This has proven to be a hard post to write, because I have come around to your way of thinking on the matter. I am going to have to watch the film again in order to do the topic justice. And that is NOT something that I look forward to. Additionally, Qwanty has registered some mild objections to this topic, because she knows that I can't talk about the film without talking about her. The writing that I have already started on this subject does indeed discuss the circumstances under which I saw it, which does implicate Qwanty. I'm still working through this. But rest assured that I have not forgotten the request, and I will fill it at some point in the future.

Challenge #2: This has been brought up by your last post. Do I allow comment-ers to plug their own sites or posts? I've decided that, yes, I do. But I will also state here, for the record, that I have not yet read Marcus's contest blogs, and thus cannot recommend them. So, while I will allow you to drum up interest, I will not authorize or legitimize the product. I think that this is a reasonable policy going forward. (Of course, I will indeed read these gems. We are family, after all.)

In closing, Secretary as Christian allegory? Hmm. I may not think about that too hard. It sort of ruins the effect for me. Is that what you were trying to do? Is this some kind of perverse psychology trick? If so, you are a bad, bad preacher man. I invoke the voice of Beavis here (and I do think it is both apt and appropriate) when I ask, "Butthead, why do you have to ruin everything that is good in my life?"

(By the way--I'm TOTALLY in "training" and I hope that by the end of the summer I'm up to actually taking a run with you. I finally finished Bowerman and the Men of Oregon and it totally inspired me. Have you read it yet? If not, borrow my dad's copy and read it. It will make you proud to be a freaking Oregonian!)

In the interest

of full disclosure, I feel like I should admit that I went to see Baby Mama with Nikki last weekend. She had good reasons for wanting to see it--particularly in terms of wanting to see how the film dealt with race. I had no such critical curiosity. I just went because she suggested it, and it looked sort of funny.

Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time really "reviewing" this film, but I thought that I would share with you some of the impressions/experiences that accompanied seeing the film.

1. What is truly great is about this film is seeing 2 women who have serious on-screen chemistry and are funny. This is a very, very rare thing. I read a review that suggested that this was a "chick flick" which actually surprised me. I didn't think of it as such when I saw the trailer, although I can understand that categorization now that I've seen the film. That said, I think that it does Fey/Poehler a disservice as a comedy team because I'm pretty sure that they can make dudes laugh. And everyone (guys and lesbians alike) seems to understand that Tina Fey has that smart/sexy thing going on. (Like someone I know who occasionally reads this blog, so I will not call her out, but I think that most of us know who I am talking about. OR like a certain short, brunette, bespectacled and nervous PSU prof--)

2. I found too much of the humor in the beginning of the film uncomfortable because I realized I was laughing because it felt true. In one scene, Tina Fey, who now knows that her t-shaped uterus is not conducive to conceiving and bearing a child, coos and waves to a baby looking at her over its mother's shoulder. Then she leans in and actually makes contact with the baby. I have done this. I have, for my own gratification, talked to, made eyes at, and even touched, some stranger's baby. It's disturbing, I know, but it's like I can't help it. (And apparently I am not the only woman to have done so.) Anyway, I can assure you that this is not a comfortable thing to see reflected back to you in a film.

3. The film makes fun of Whole Foods. And that is funny. Steve Martin is integral to the humor surrounding this storyline, and that makes it even funnier.

4. This was much more of a romantic comedy than either of us expected. I don't know if that is good or bad. Since I generally hate romantic comedies (except Secretary--which I know some of you don't consider a romantic comedy, and If Lucy Fell--shut your damn trap, Marcus), I suppose that is mostly bad.

5. (And this is actually the thing that I most want to say about the experience of this film.) The worst part of Baby Mama, for me, was having to buy my ticket to it. Because I had to say the name of the film. Out loud. And that turned out to be a problem. There are two issues here: first, I think that I was a little embarrassed to be seeing the film in the first place. And I am somewhat concerned about my "cool" in that I DO, on occasion, worry that the book or music that I am buying, or the film that I am renting or seeing somehow makes me not look at all cool. I am guilty of trying to pass some of this consumption off as "ironic". It is because I do actually care what people who work around these particular cultural products think about me. It's lame. I know it is lame. I know that people who work at bookstores aren't all that cool (given the fact that I have worked at bookstores myself, and know lots of other people who have too), but I'm still weirdly worried about it.

This, of course, all goes back to the horrible over-identification I (and many others--c'mon, a lot of you do this too) have with my "things." I know in my head that I am not my CD collection, my library, my DVDs (oh god, I wonder what 8 seasons worth of Charmed really says about me--), my jewelry and barrettes, but part of me does believe that these things are who I am. And, frankly, there are some possessions that do, in fact, seem to stand in for me to the world outside. (I am thinking specifically about my hello kitty traveler's mug, which I am starting to develop a bit of a complex about.) What all of this means is that I am quite susceptible to the judgment of others about these things, particularly to the judgment of those who pedal the crap with which I surround myself.

But maybe that is a bit of a digression. The second reason that buying the ticket pained me was that I had to utter the phrase "baby mama" aloud, to a stranger. I am not linguistically daring. This is part of the reason why I suck at foreign languages. I don't like to sound stupid. And saying a phrase like "baby mama", which has no business coming out of my mouth, ever, for any reason, makes me feel stupid. And, frankly, I can't say it without sounding really uptight and awkward and, well, white. The phrase sticks in my mouth, I feel and sound self-conscious using it, and it ends up sounding that much more ridiculous. It is very much like when I try to say something in French, which also comes out sounding really uptight, awkward, and, well, American.

Ultimately it is probably good for me to have to use language that I am not comfortable with and that I don't own. But I couldn't help thinking that someone was out there laughing at me for doing it--and paying to do it--in this case--