LUNA IN BRAZIL, September 2001

Closed since September 11, the Brazilian Embassy finally opens for business
September 17, the day we are due to fly to São Paulo, and Lee is able to pick
up our visas. We arrive at JFK four hours before our flight, expecting long
lines, but check in without any hassle at all. My cigarette lighter is
confiscated, but I notice they are selling them at the duty free store. I buy
a copy of TALK magazine, wherein I learn that Halle Berry was paid an extra
$500,000 to appear topless in the awful movie Swordfish (I know it’s awful
because I paid good money to see it). This movie was written by the guy who
wrote and directed Thursday, a film that Luna scored.

September 18. São Paulo. High rise apartments stretch as far as the eye can
see. This city is much bigger than New York. 500 people come see us our first
night, and we do an interview for MTV Brasil, who are filming the show. Every
single interviewer has asked me “what do you expect of the Brazilian
audience?” I have no idea. We eat at a Churrascaria, where for about five
dollars you eat copious amounts of meat (all different cuts of beef, and
chicken hearts, and sausages, and pork), and we drink Caipirinhas.

September 19. São Paulo. I buy a new cigarette lighter and an alarm clock for
$1 each. We go to a CD shop, where I pay too much money for the first record
by Jorge Ben, "Samba Esquema Novo", as it is a Japanese import. That
afternoon I watch CNN, and listen to some CD’s. I have the new Bjork album,
which is quite beautiful, and the new Bob Dylan, which is also really good,
and The Moldy Peaches, who have a song on their album called “NYC’s Like A
Graveyard”. Yikes. I am reading American Pastoral by Philip Roth. It’s about
a businessman in Newark whose daughter blows up the local convenience store
to protest the Vietnam war.

Before tonight’s show we re-visit the Churrascaria. 800 beautiful people come
to the show.

September 20. Belo Horizonte. A relatively small city (a couple of million
people). We have the night off and eat at a barbecue restaurant, before going
to some kind of circus festival, dancing to some bad music, and watching some
boring jugglers. The next day I buy myself a pair of sunglasses, which have
sort of a Marcello Mastroianni look, or so I tell myself. Before the show we
have time to take in some of the American telethon. Watching Will Smith and
Mariah Carey and Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks makes me embarrassed to be an
American.

The Brazilian journalists keep asking me what I make of the situation back in
New York City, and the pending war against Afghanistan. Of course I am only a
singer, but I do have some opinions, which I will add to the end of the tour
diary...

September 22. Goiania. We flew through the airport in Brasilia, but
unfortunately don't get a chance to visit this city, which was created in the
1960s. The airport itself is beautiful, something right out of Wallpaper
magazine. The club in Goiania is a multi-level restaurant and disco. The
amplifiers hum and I am getting an electric shock from my microphone. Before
the show a DJ is playing awful music, and the crowd is pointing at him and
booing vociferously. They say that Goiania is where all the beautiful golden
people live, and they are not lying. But one drunken idiot keeps annoying us.
He likes Luna but he likes Limp Bizkit also.

The next day we get up at noon and hit another all-you-can-eat buffet, before
flying back to São Paulo. That night I go to the movies. Memento, starring
Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano. It's a confusing film. I don't know who really
killed Guy Pearce’s wife.

September 24. More CD shopping. I buy a bunch of records by Jorge Ben and
Caetano Veloso, and visit the Museum of Modern Art, which is small but has a
great show of contemporary Brazilian painting.

September 25. An in-store appearance at the FNAC, the best attended in-store
we've ever played. And then a late night radio session on Brazil 2000, where
we play about 8 songs live, and chat about Echo and the Bunnymen and other
such things. They have a new record out. I remember seeing them at Bond's in
NYC back in the early 80s. Alan Vega was opening for them and people were
booing him. I also saw the Clash at Bond's, on the Sandinista tour.
Grandmaster Flash opened the show, but were booed off the stage with chants
of "Nigger" and "Disco sucks!" This made me embarrassed to be a Clash fan.

September 26. Sao Carlos. We travel by bus with the opening band Pelvs
(pronounced pelvis). The bus gets a flat tire an hour out of São Paulo, but
luckily we're at a truck stop. We see numerous truck drivers carrying
handguns. I drink some corn juice, which is pretty good.

September 27. Curitiba. This is one of the smallest rooms we have ever played
in. They do have a second room, where those who can’t get in to the show can
watch it on a video screen. As I am setting up my guitar pedals I get in an
angry exchange with a journalist who wants to do an interview after the show.
"No." I say. "I don't do interviews after the show." It's a little rule I
have. I know I have to do telephone interviews in the daytime, and interviews
at soundcheck, but I figure that when the show is over I am free to relax and
have a couple of drinks. He insists that he has travelled four hours to be
there. "I don't give a shit!" I say. He threatens to write this in his
newspaper. The horror! Despite this annoying exchange the show is a lot of
fun. After the show he apologizes. Sort of.

September 28. Londrina. We go onstage at 2 a.m., get out of the club at 4:15
a.m., and quickly take showers at the hotel, before heading to the airport
for a 6:30 a.m. flight to Montevideo, Uruguay. Nobody is feeling so good this
morning. I manage to grab three hours sleep on the flight.

September 29. Montevideo is lovely, and we are playing in an old theatre.
Another delicious steak meal is topped by crepes with ice cream and “dulce de
leche”, sort of a butterscotch topping that is very popular in Uruguay and
Argentina.

The opening band tonight is a surf band called the Supersonicos, who wear
matching shirts and are very funny. The moment I get onstage my tiredness
disappears and I deliver my usual high octane performance.

September 28. Buenos Aires. It is raining and cold. When we arrive at the
hotel that morning Sean and I get in a little altercation. I admit that I was
laughing at him because he accidentally left some stuff at the airport. And
then he kicked my suitcase, and I shoved him. But luckily things didn’t go
any further. These things just happen on tour, especially when you’re tired
and cranky.

There’s a good crowd at the show (for a rainy Sunday), and afterwards we have
the best barbecue of the whole trip, and don’t finish eating till 2 in the
morning.

September 29. We arrive at the airport to find that our flight to New York
City has been cancelled, and we have to fly to Miami instead. We have hours
to kill and nothing to do but shop at the Duty Free, which is not exactly
cheap. We all buy more sunglasses, except Sean who buys some dulce de leche
and a bottle of wine. I think about buying some Cuban cigars, but I remember
that I have some at home that have been sitting in a plastic bag for about
three years. Instead I buy some “Havana” cookies, made with dulce de leche.

And now, from these frivolous matters, to the September 11 attack:

I was having breakfast downtown the morning of September 11, and heard alot
of sirens, and saw people standing on rooftops, pointing south and taking
photos. On my way to the subway station I looked up and noticed that the
World Trade Center was on fire. By the time I reached my destination I had
heard the news, and watched the horror unfold on TV. Of course these events
were stunning and unprecedented...

We all learned in the days to come that the attackers seem to be linked to Al
Qaeda, whose leader Osama Bin Laden makes his home in Afghanistan, where he
fought in the civil war against the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980’s.

I remember those days, when Ronald Reagan and George Bush were giving money
and stinger missiles to the brave Afghani “freedom fighters”, and Dan
Rather was appearing on TV with them. American bars even stopped serving
Stoli. (Note: they also won’t sell Russian vodka at “WARSAW”, the club we
recently played at in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but they have their own reasons
for hating the Russians). I remember reading about how the freedom fighters
believed that women should be covered from head to toe (even in the summer
heat), and may not learn to read. My anthropology professor at college had
written a book about tribal life in Afghanistan, and he explained to me that
the women there actually wield quite a bit of “power”, even though they
aren’t allowed to feel the sun on their faces. I was not convinced. Is it
okay to oppress women if it’s just “part of your culture”? This is the kind
of moral problem that Captain Kirk faced occasionally.

The following excerpt is from a recent article in the Guardian by Arundhati
Roy:

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence)
launched the largest covert operation in the history
of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of
Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a
holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim
countries within the Soviet Union against the
communist regime and eventually destabilise it...
Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and
recruited almost 100,000 radical mujahedeen from 40
Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war.
The rank and file of the mujahedeen were unaware that
their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of
Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally
unaware that it was financing a future war against
itself.)

So I guess my feelings are:

(1) the people who perpetrated this attack are despicable reactionary idiots,
who would like to imprison their own people in some kind of medieval
theocracy. The growth of their brand of religious fundamentalism is truly
disturbing to anyone who believes in the separation of church and state, or
that women have the right to read books, or that homosexuality should not be
punishable by death.

(2) There is no justification for the murder of innocent civilians that took
place on September 11. Admittedly some of those who work at the Pentagon are
not civilians, and it would be considered a military target if you were at
war with the United States, but the passengers on the plane that crashed into
the Pentagon certainly did not deserve to be used as a human bomb.

(3) The sad truth is that our own government had a hand in building the very
enemy that now confronts us. There is a word for this: “Blowback”.