Update March 27, 2003 -- “U.S. Out of My Pants!”

Update March 27, 2003 -- “U.S. Out of My Pants!” I’ve received several emails asking for an update. What can I tell you, when we're not watching the war on TV, we’re writing songs so that we can make another Luna album this year. We might play on Long Island this summer, we might possibly visit Portugal, or at least Brooklyn, but our next confirmed date is at Brown University in Providence, RI on April 10th. We’re opening up for the Joan Jett and the Donnas.

The good news -- they released Christopher John Boyce from jail a couple of weeks ago. Boyce is mentioned in the Luna song “Moon Palace”, he was convicted of selling government secrets to the Russians in the 1970’s, and was portrayed by Timothy Hutton in the film “The Falcon and the Snowman”. He does not like to be called “the Falcon,” he says that was a Hollywood invention. He prefers to be called Christopher... subsequent to his capture, he escaped from jail and moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he found work as a bankrobber for several years, before he was finally captured again. This fascinating story is told in “The Flight of the Falcon,” a book that is the sequel to the movie.

We performed at the Knitting Factory last Thursday and Friday. I confess it was a little strange to go out and sing songs about lovedust and teenage lightning and fuzzy wuzzy, at the same time that our government was dropping bombs on Baghdad.

We opened our set Thursday with a song called “Kill For Peace,” which is by the 60’s NYC band the Fugs. The phrase “Kill For Peace” is an excellent example of what George Orwell called doublespeak, and we’ve been hearing an awful lot of doublespeak lately. Like Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that Saddam Hussein actually “chose” to go to war on the day we attacked. In fact it is Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush who have chosen war, a war that is opposed by people all over the world (inlcuding, as Michael Moore pointed out, the Dixie Chicks and the Pope).

A couple of weeks back I participated in an evening called “Songs of the Vietnam Songbook” -- performances of protest songs about the Vietnam war. It was an inspiring evening. Performers included Thurston Moore, Lenny Kaye, Barbara Dane, and Pete Seeger. I sang Lee Hazlewood’s “No Train To Stockholm.” My favorite performer was Watermelon Slim, who was a Vietnam vet himself. He advised the audience to make sure that we didn’t go quietly into this war... And the wonderful Tuli Kupferberg (of the the Fugs) had this to say: “The war against Iraq will be a short war, it will be over very quickly. But the war against the United States... that will go on for a long time.”

Dean Wareham

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