With their first new music since 2004’s Rendezvous, the master Lou Reed disciples in Luna return to one of their strengths: covers. A Sentimental Education finds the quartet—Dean Wareham, Britta Phillips, Sean Eden and Lee Wall—tackling mostly obscurities by the likes of Yes, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Mercury Rev and Fleetwood Mac. Simultaneously released companion piece A Place Of Greater Safety EP is all-original, however, though the six songs are instrumentals. Luna will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Wareham: Jarett Kobek’s I Hate The Internet was my favorite read of 2016, and he has followed it with an even more entertaining novel called The Future Won’t Be Long, set largely in downtown Manhattan during the the ’80s and ’90s, the era of Save The Robots, Pyramid, Limelight, parties at Bret Easton Ellis’ apartment and riots in Tompkins Square Park. The dialogue is mean and funny, and the plot follows two characters, a girl named Adeline and a boy named Baby, a soon-to-be writer of sci-fi and noir, “queer as a wooden nickel,” who moves from Podunk, Wisc., to New York City and falls in love with it:
“Oh people, oh the people, oh New York, oh your glorious people. Your Puerto Ricans, your Hebrews, your Muslims, your Chinese, your Eurotrash, that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, your uptown rich socialites, your downtown scum, your Black Americans, your Koreans, your Haitians, your Jamaicans, your Italians, your kitchen Irish, Julian Schnabel, your Far Rockaway and Staten Island white trash. Oh New York, I loved your people. They were all so beautiful! Many of them were hideous, really ugly with terrible teeth, but even the ugly ones were beautiful too! Oh I was in heaven.”
