Word has now gotten around that Lux Interior, legendary frontman for The Cramps, died yesterday in Glendale at age 62…or 60, or 64, depending on who wrote the stories. I’m sure Lux would love the lack of accurate info about his age; it just adds to the mystique that has made the band so fascinating for over 30 years. Lux has now gone to be with Rudolph Valentino, Marilyn Monroe, Lon Chaney, Roy Orbison, Mary Pickford, Bela Lugosi, Rita Hayworth, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Ethel Waters, Humphrey Bogart, Peggy Lee, and all the other luminous stars he and Ivy used to visit on their tours of Southern California cemeteries.

The Cramps were timeless, because they never grew up. They didn’t change their music, their image or their lifestyle as the years passed—only bassists, guitarists and drummers. Thankfully, Lux and Ivy didn’t have a passel of kids and start wearing sweatpants to the mall. They just kept on keepin’ on, and in doing so became sparkling and ageless, like the stars in the night sky that Norma Desmond gazed upon after she shot Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard.

So, I mourn with much sadness the loss of one of my musical heroes, adding another notch in my heart next to those left by the recent deaths of three Ramones, Joe Strummer, Buck Owens, Yma Sumac and Eartha Kitt.

Goodbye Lux, I’ll miss you. Wherever you went, that place just got waaay more interesting.

The Germs/Darby Crash movie What We Do is Secret, done in annoying fake-documentary style, was a disappointment on many levels, but on the strictly visual aspect, it was ridiculous. The wigs (and Darby's glued-on white hair wisp hanging over his forehead) were so outrageously bad, it makes me wonder if the costume budget was around $130. But it was worth the $8 matinee admission price to see the shiny plastic sculpture perched on Rodney Bingenheimer's (played by J.P. Manoux) head. The hair was wrong, the make-up was wrong, the clothes were wrong…the early years of punk in Los Angeles have been well-documented by many excellent photographers (and several books of these photos have been published), yet no one in the costume department seems to have done much research.

Then there were the drug scenes, which also reeked of ignorant sensationalism. Rodger Grossman, here's a tip for your next movie: PEOPLE DO NOT SHOOT UP IN PUBLIC. Intravenous drug users hide while getting high for two reasons: it's a private and disgusting habit, and they don't want all the other junkies around to hit them up for free smack. No one pulls out their rig, ties off their arm and shoots up in the middle of a party, a hallway, etc. You couldn't get anyone in Hollywood to help you make these scenes more realistic?

Screaming inaccuracies aside, the script swung between boring and bold, prophetic statements, with not a single realistic conversation in between. In one scene, Darby's writings (which weren't that great but he's hailed as a poetic genius) supposedly grabbed a record store owner by the balls and made him declare Crash the "Jim Morrison for our generation". Uh, yeah. Although I consider Jim Morrison a drunken egomaniac who took way too many shrooms, I think his writing was better than Darby's, and probably would have improved had not the French Bathtub Incident happened first. Also, having worked at a record distributor for seven years and a college radio station for five, I know the volume (and quality) of demos that come in the daily mail. Not once did someone pop a tape in the cassette deck, hit Play, and suddenly time stood still, the heavens opened, and we all said "This band is THE ONE." It just doesn't happen that way. Bands have to evolve—they rarely set the world on fire with their first shitty home-made demo. The only time I ever made a bold, prophetic statement about music was around 1989-90, when Green Day played in Jesse Michaels' basement at his house in West Oakland and I turned to Pete and said, "This band is really good, they're going to be big someday"…and by "big", I meant playing the Fillmore, not filling stadiums all over the world. At the end, Pat Smear (played by Rick Gonzalez) says, in all seriousness, "Darby said we were going to be bigger than the Beatles". EVERY BAND SAYS THAT. It's almost a requirement. It's the one cliché that was left out of Spinal Tap.

There are generally three kinds of movies about punk:

1. Documentaries with an agenda to make punks friendlier than the media has shown them, yet amusing because they are idiotic drunk kids and sad because their parents don't understand them. But the punks will eventually get their comeuppance, because in 10 years they'll be quiet and defeated—or dead (The Decline of Western Civilization).

2. Portrayals of punk as an important youth culture in the sense that it's temporary, to be seen as a passing fad; the music, costumes, and scene characters are realistic and familiar, but the 'moral' at the end of the story is that punk is not something you can be forever. Eventually we are all supposed to grow up, put on a business suit, and take our place marching off to work as another faceless drone in society (S.L.C. Punk).

3. Punks as cartoon characters who make loud music, pontificate on various topics, have lots of sex, yell and argue often, and inhale/inject piles of drugs which in turn causes their early demise (Sid & Nancy, What We Do is Secret). Thankfully, we have The Unheard Music, Westway to the World, and End of the Century: the Story of the Ramones, which atone for the many sins of the movies above. But they are also documentaries, so I suppose a true and realistic drama about punk has not yet been made.

The biggest sin committed by What We Do is Secret is undermining the importance of the Germs and the early punk scene to the people who lived it, and not in an Our Generation's Jim Morrison/Bigger Than The Beatles way. Punk rock took lives through condoning reckless behavior, but it also saved the lives of those who did not fit in with the rest of the world, the hopeless, sad, angry, creative, and odd ones. People forget, or are too young to know, that there was a time when punk was not mainstream: when there was no Hot Topic store in your local mall, when shows were picketed by religious groups, when kids threw rocks, when many a lone punk was beaten up by rednecks and frat boys, and the only time you saw punk rockers on television was when they were rioting and/or getting arrested. There was no general acceptance by society like there is now (I remember going in to a Taco Bell in La Jolla with my friends around 1986 and the girl at the counter refused to take our order). The Germs were a crucial part of a larger whole, which did change music, fashion, art, media, and more; punk had a greater impact than any silly statements in the film's script could ever convey.

My beautiful little dog is gone. Her photo memorial is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/therealdevildoll/2465716511/in/set-72157605418912653/

...Elvis Presley, born on this day in 1935.

Had he lived, he would have been the same age as my parents, who were never his fans. My mother told me about the day in the mid-1950's when he was going to be on television, and all of the girls in her college sorority house crowded into the house mother's bedroom (hers was the only TV in the place) to watch and swoon. Mom defiantly refused to participate, as she considered him "a pill". She has never been much of a music person, with the exception of Gershwin and Ella Fitzgerald. I must have been a changeling.

I got the following message from a "Tex Kamakawiwo'ole" here on MySpace:

"Very Eccentric,

Makes me wonder how many can keep up with your rinduce a sense of disbelief or alienation in someone???"

Can anyone tell me what the hell this means? I tried to send Mr. Kamakawiwo'ole a reply, to ask him what the hell it means, but he has non-friends blocked from sending messages (which makes being on MySpace somewhat pointless), so I am unable to ask him to translate his oddly-phrased question. And why would you send someone an e-mail in the form of a question when you know they will not be able to respond?

What a chode.

And there is no such word as "rinduce".

The lovely and talented Jen posted a blog about getting fired; it's an interesting subject, so I'm stealing her idea to pass it along. Feel free to contribute your own tales of employment woes.

It was in-between semesters at San Francisco State; every spring I had the stressful chore of finding a summer job that paid enough to cover my expenses at school for the next year. It was June or July, I was living with my grandmother and the job-clock was ticking, subtracting the dollars that I had not yet earned. In desperation, I signed up with some low-budget temp agency (my sister knew the owner), and got a job doing paper shuffling for Sears in San Leandro. The location was a giant, drab warehouse in a drab industrial area, and the office upstairs was painted a drab 1960's pinkish-beige and inhabited by drab women who were 'lifers'. Some were youngish, most were old, and they hated me instantly--probably because I was too colorful, with my bleached-blonde hair, red lipstick, lots of make-up...and I think I wore red pants on my first day. The work itself was some kind of order processing, which involved an illogical chain of events that I never mastered because, A. I wasn't there long enough to do so, and B. the Drab Lifers were barely accomodating when it came to training me. On the first day, the unsmiling supervisor woman got slightly frustrated with me, because I wasn't getting the hang of it--like trying to tackle a ghost or remember a rapidly-fading dream, it was all so vague and made no sense and there was nothing solid to grab onto. And did I mention that I had to report for work at 6:00am? Oh, yes, 6:00 in the fuckin' A.M. Maybe the Drabs were so colorless because they hardly ever saw the sun. Anyway, I was about 10 minutes late the second day, as I was adjusting to getting up at the torturous hour of 4:00am to go to Drab-Land. I got in big trouble for my 10 minutes of tardiness: there was a stern lecture from a polyester-clad man with greasy comb-over hair, and a threatening phone call from the temp agency. While at work, I listened to the women talk about their unremarkable lives--one of the younger ones (who was probably in her late 20's) was pregnant. How that happened, I will never understand, because she was one of the ugliest women who has ever walked the Earth. And NO, her physical shortcomings were not balanced out by "inner beauty". She was hideous inside and out. We all sat around a large table, stapling and folding, and doing whatever-the-fuck-it-was with the mysterious invoices/orders/papers, while the Drabs all discussed Ugly's impending baby. How was she going to decorate the nursery this time (wait, "this time"?? She's on her SECOND BABY?? Someone had sex with her TWICE??)--bears or bunnies? I wanted to slit my wrists and bleed all over their precious papers. I wanted to splatter my blood on the drab walls and their drab faces and scream "I WILL NOT END UP LIKE THIS! I AM NOT ONE OF YOU!" Instead, I quietly stapled and folded and listened while they talked over and around me, purposely ignoring my presence. That day, on my break, I made friends with a pretty Latina girl who was close to my age and very sweet. She told me about how my tardiness was a big deal, all the Drabs were talking about it before I showed up. But she considered it "a good job", and didn't understand my disgust; I saw her future, and it made me sad for her. The next day I overslept, and awoke at 7:00am to the telephone ringing. It was my mother, screaming at me for losing my job. For unknown reasons, the temp agency called her house instead of my grandmother's when I failed to appear at work. I guess Comb-over told them I was fired. I was thrilled. I blissfully went back to sleep, knowing I had dodged a bullet.

Viking Press published Jack Kerouac's novel On The Road, giving angst-filled youths their first guidebook.

Happy Birthday to Werner Herzog (65).