Monday , November 16, 2009
Dean Wareham's Black Postcards + Liz Phair As the New Michiko Kakutani
I'm always in the middle of a million and one books, but the book I really, really, really want to read lately is the memoir of Luna frontman Dean Wareham, Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance. I love a good rock bio; my favorites run the gamut from Grievous Angel, about Gram Parsons, to Dirt, which is of course the epic story of Motley Crue. But Dean's always been one of those guys I've had a half-crush on for years. First he swept me away with the celestial, seminal indie pop of Galaxie 500 and made "Tugboat" the anthem of my heart for years; then, he stole my heart again with a rougher, more jagged take on his trademark heavenly sound with Luna, whose record Penthouse made me feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated and melancholy when I was going to school in the jankiest town ever. He's got dreamy eyes and a wry, inscrutable way with his lyrics, which is always mystery-producing and therefore fetching. And once I saw his handwriting on a dusty old record at the radio station at Harvard, where he went to college, and I totally squealed, much to my best friend's disgust.
Black Postcards was excerpted awhile ago in Men's Vogue, and I was completely riveted and surprised with how Wareham was both detached and incredibly honest, particularly about his infidelity in his marriage and his subsequent rock romance. I made a mental note to check the book out, but the book recently came back on my radar thanks to an incredibly lucid, smart review in The New York Times by none other than Liz Phair -- herself a 90s indie wunderkind. It's funny; I've been listening to Phair's Exile in Guyville again lately, which I haven't rolled out in years, and am both horrified and amused by how relevant its super-brainy, super-horny point-of-view still is and how it persists in our culture -- it's like a slacker "Sex and the City" rendered in sound, before Carrie and company were even a glimmer in HBO's eyes. Since then Phair's made albums that have made a once-promising discography go down the shitter, but she almost redeems herself with her review of Black Postcards. Check it out here and revisit some 90s-era Phair and Luna below:
Luna playing one of their most beautiful songs in 1992 (and is that a Screaming Trees t-shirt he's wearing? I cannot think of two more temperamentally opposed bands):
I find Liz Phair really obnoxious in most of her videos but this video for "Stratford-on-Guy" kind of rules. You will also note the name-check of Wareham's band Galaxie 500 within the song, which brings things around quite nicely:
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Posted by Kat in Pop Culture |
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