Kate Schellenbach is cool. Cool not because, after starting the fanzine Cheap Garbage for Snotty Kids in the early '80s, she was the first to take a seat behind the drum set for the Beastie Boys. Not because nearly 10 years later Luscious Jackson, the band she formed with friends from New York clubs like Hurrah and Tier 3, was the first band signed to the Beasties' Grand Royal label. Not even because since putting Luscious together the band has shared stages with the likes of Bettie Serveert, Urge Overkill, and R.E.M. Kate Schellenbach is cool in that intangible way that the person you chat casually with in the bookstore is cool—she’s smart, funny, and unassuming. On the verge of Luscious Jackson's national tour with labelmate Ben Lee, supporting their new record Electric Honey, the band played a radio show broadcast from Foxboro Stadium outside Boston alongside the Pretenders, Natalie Merchant, Sugar Ray, Melissa Etheridge, and Blondie. In between playing her set and jetting back to the stage to rock out to the Pretenders, she found time to have lunch with me.
“I never intended this book to be published,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in the introduction to her new collection, A Child’s Lifeand Other Stories. Perusing these finely drawn, mostly autobiographical comic works, which span twenty years, it’s not difficult to see why its creator might be wary of foisting her stories on a public whose idea of an enjoyable narrative is Titanic. Gloeckner’s unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner’s alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men.
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