#119 - Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste
Matthew Buzzell's documentary, Tell Me Do You Miss Me, which follows the band Luna on its farewell tour, is not so much about the particularities of this one rock group as it is about the passage from adolescence to middle age.
We watch lead singer and protagonist Dean Wareham, guitarist and resident character Sean Eden, bassist Britta Phillips, and drummer Lee Wall as they cross the Rubicon from guitars, vans, and graffitied green rooms to kids, volunteer jobs, and acting careers.
The film is about the strange things that happen with time and identity on the cusp of conscious change. You fall asleep in one guise -- touring band -- and wake up in another -- former rock stars. Overnight, history collapses. You take your place among the (Velvet) underground ghosts whose once-present cries of the Now have instantly become whispers from a past that seems more magical in retrospect.
I want to be forgotten, these whispers say. But remember me, their echoes bounce back in the hushed absence of things ended. I cannot be recovered, but I must be.
Eventually, I will haunt your dreams with a mythical, quiet howl, an exploding plastic inevitable.
9 November 2006