The Guest List | Special Interest
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The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. For this edition, we spoke with Ruth Mascelli and Maria Elena, two members of the disco punk outfit Special Interest. Late last year, the group released their third album, Endure, and we’ve been dancing to it nonstop ever since. So we were pumped when they agreed to answer a few questions about what they’ve been reading lately.
SwR: The band is based in New Orleans, a city with a fabled history. What are some of the best books about New Orleans?
Maria Elena: We’re both going to say [John Rechy’s] City of Night, right?
Ruth Mascelli: Oh, I was definitely going to bring up City of Night at some point! The scene toward the end where the narrator has a Mardi Gras day hookup is just so perfectly evocative of a certain kind of carnival energy. But I also really love the early sections in that book that take place in Texas and the character studies of queens living in L.A. It works perfectly as a novel and a time capsule of an era when anything queer was truly SUBcultural.
Michael E. Crutcher Jr.’s Tremé: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood is a really excellent deep dive into why the city is built the way it is. In particular, the story of how the elevated I-10 expressway was built in the 60s is very instructive about how things get done here. This federally funded highway was supposed to go along the river near the French Quarter. Instead, the city decided to build it over a historically significant Black business corridor. Countless oak trees were uprooted, over five hundred houses were demolished, businesses closed. It’s easy to think infrastructure is neutral or has just always been the way it is, but there are always corrupt human elements deciding how to construct the world around us.
ME: I haven’t read this yet but it’s on my urgent to-read list: “The Gilda Stories” by Jewelle Gomez, a Black lesbian vampire novel set in Louisiana. Jewelle has published a lot with the big dyke publishers (Firebrand/Naiad), and I think she’s often overlooked as one of the first Afrofuturists.
SwR: New Orleans is a famously queer city, and the band embraces this element in its songwriting and performance. What are some of your favorite books from the genre of queer literature?
ME: Pretty much anything I recommend is gonna be at least a little gay, haha. See above.
RM: One Arm, an early short story collection by Tennesse Williams, is really thrilling. There’s the one-armed hustler on death row, the bathhouse cannibal fetishists. It’s way more overtly gay and transgressive than his plays.
SwR: Much of the album was written in response to the political unrest of the last few years. Specifically, the protests against the police killings during the summer of 2020. Were there any particular books or authors that informed your thinking at the time?
ME: I had a pretty intense job during the whole pandemic, so I feel like my reading capacity nosedived then. But I can say [Special Interest frontperson] Alli [Logout] was reading Fred Moten during that time. You and Alli are the theory readers of the band, no?
RM: Eh, I read a little bit of theory if it’s really out there but—for the most part—it doesn’t do much for me. In the summer of 2020, I finally read The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. That is an incredible historical work whose ideas can easily translate to the present day. I kept thinking about how words like “decolonize” have been so divorced from their original meaning by the individualistic-Instagram-self-help-buzzword-machine. I kept wondering what happened in these places after they took up arms and decolonized. It sent me down a rabbit hole, learning about the CIA-backed campaigns to destabilize and control essentially anywhere that was trying to achieve sovereignty or any form of socialism. Alli was also on the Fanon wavelength. The track “Concerning Peace” directly references a chapter in The Wretched of the Earth.
SwR: And yet Endure balances deeply felt social consciousness with an irrepressible sense of fun, especially on a track like “Midnight Legend.” Who are some writers you read for pure pleasure and nothing else?
ME: I’ve always loved music memoirs. After dipping toes into the actual music industry with Rough Trade, I think I’ve officially been using those books as support groups, haha.
I just moved and got access to a new library, so I hit the music book section real hard. I recently read Liz Phair’s Horror Stories: A Memoir which is SO good. I also read the Beastie Boys Book, which I’m pretty sure influenced my recent clothing choices, now that I think of it. It was exciting to read about the tape loops that Adam Yauch was making—especially the detailed explanation of the creation of the “Paul Revere” beat. I really wish his voice was in that book, though. I also wish they said what they thought of the sample in “American Flag” by Cat Power. Because THAT SONG IS INCENDIARY. And I read Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, mostly so I could read about her and our pal Heather Gabel falling in l-u-v and having their wonder kiddo. OMG: I also finally read the Robyn Crawford memoir A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston—also good!
RM: Definitely memoirs also! Those are the only books I truly can’t put down. One of my favorites lately has been the reprint of Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black. She really was a national treasure. Her writing is vivid and empathetic but totally unhinged. I love how the most absurd details and harrowing experiences all get mentioned in one off-handed, seemingly effortless breath. She is an example of a life truly well-lived. Reading her words feels like talking to an old friend.
I also love reading about film history, particularly anything to do with low-budget, horror, or porno films. One of the best books I’ve ever read on the topic is Jimmy McDonough’s The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. Milligan was a classically tortured homosexual who put everything and nothing into his art. The book is an amazing character study and a great window into how the lowest of the low-budget sexploitation and drive-in films were actually made. A big chunk of his filmography is completely lost, but I’m patiently holding out hope for the day someone unearths the missing prints of Gutter Trash and The Degenerates.
SwR: What are your favorite books about music?
ME: I already mentioned the Robin Crawford memoir, but I also really loved Gerrick Kennedy’s book Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston. I read those two and the Nico bio You Are Beautiful, You Are Alone by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike all at the same time and basically had huge revelations about media and women musicians. As a punk, I really thought that I somehow wasn’t affected by media depictions. These books showed me how wrong I was about that. OMFnG! Media truly is deeply insidious and such a powerful tool for internalizing so many shitty things. When journalists surreptitiously talk shit, brush over, or invalidate artists, it has such an effect.
I’m not done (LOL) . . . the Ronnie Spector autobio Be My Baby has been a long-time favorite of mine—it’s definitely not ghostwritten! I love Viv Albertine’s books. I got The Fall book Excavate! at Rough Trade while we were on tour, and it’s such a great time capsule of a band. Alli showed me Mucus in My Pineal Gland by Juliana Huxtable, which is great.
I also love music histories like Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs and We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk. (Someone just told me there’s a death rock one!). But I do NOT like Please Kill Me. That book really, really annoyed me and soured my impression of the early punk scene in NYC. It’s just so macho, and most of the quotes are from blowhard dudes who throw in derisive comments about any woman. It made me realize how that depressing punk movie Smithereens is probably pretty spot-on. Plus, there’s very little reporting on lesser-known bands. I read Please Kill Me to try and find out about bands that maybe had a 7-inch or something new I could discover and freak out about, but the book just did not pay off in any way. No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 is a good example of a history book that IS trying to document all the bands of that era.
SwR: What’s a book you think more people should know about?
ME: A friend gave me a copy of They Call Me Mad Dog!: A Story for Bitter Lonely People by Erika Lopez probably twenty years ago. It’s so good! Really fun dykey-acerbic-comix-y book set in 90s San Francisco. I want to meet her sooo badly. Ruth recommended Hilton Als to me a few years ago, and his books have rocked my world. I also just found out about a Zora Neale Hurston book Barracoon from the documentary Descendant (watch ASAP—it’s on Netflix!). It’s a book about the last survivor of the Middle Passage, Cudjoe Lewis, that was published pretty recently. I had no idea how much Hurston did to preserve oral histories via film and writing. I can’t wait to deep-dive.
I also haven’t read this yet, but I’m really excited to read The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the 60s & 70s. It’s all reports from intentional communities, and my boo said there’s so much juice in it! As in: we’re all still making the same mistakes that people have been making for decades in radical communities. For instance, I think Adrienne Maree Brown has sooo many great points about exploring our imaginations when it comes to how we all approach the world. But I do wish that when people talk about new futures, the most concrete example of reimagination wasn’t just divestment from monogamy. I think challenging ourselves not to feel jealousy or to be open to polyamory is actually a big root of what goes wrong in DIY. And pretty much everywhere? I want reimaginings of the future to include stuff our ancestors would tell us, too, which includes a focus on whole community health and less on assumptions like we should all be able to work together or that every contribution is equal. (That’s not a dig on ability, but a dig on those who skirt the unfun responsibilities of community.) Free love isn’t free! And it honestly doesn’t need to be. Panoramic sexual viability seems to make a path reeaaallly muddy, and I’ve seen it create more hierarchies than it breaks down.
SwR: What’s the last really good book you read?
RM: A great recent read that is dense but quick is the memoir Down Below by Leonora Carrington. I’ve been obsessed ever since I first saw her paintings. The depths her mind must have contained! The book is a surreal account of her experience being institutionalized in Spain during WWII. It’s intense and beautifully written and takes everything, including her delusions and hallucinations, at face value in a way that is really powerful.
ME: I just read Pauline Oliveros’s Quantum Listening—it’s great. Definitely a short academic diddy, but the more intimate intro by Laurie Anderson really gave me what I wanted. I want to read everything she’s got next. After I read it, I flew home from a show we played in Chicago and ate a weed gummy that was too strong and had this incredible, psychedelic experience of quantum listening to the plane sounds. Highly recommended activity!
I’m currently reading Is This How You See Me? by Jaime Hernandez (I got it at Myopic Books in Chicago—such a great bookstore). It’s a newer Love & Rockets compendium, and I am literally SHRIEKING at all the throwbacks. (I’m a long-time L+R loverrrr—I have 2 L + R tattoos!) If you haven’t gone deep on Los Bros Hernandez, hurry up! Don’t just read Jaime—his brother Gilbert’s Palomar stories are probably my all-time favorite fiction writings about colonialism and diaspora. They’re as hilarious and perverse as they are profound. I would sincerely love to take those brothers out for a nice steak dinner.
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