Month: March 2019

Louisiana Swamp Thing and Crawfish Festival

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MAR. 26, 2007

Cajuns will eat damn near anything. If it runs, crawls, flies, hops, swims, or slithers, there’s probably a Cajun recipe for it. Cajuns are highly omnivorous – either that or they’re starving. As Charles Dickens once said, “Hunger is the finest sauce in the world,” and even though it’s safe to say Dickens never enjoyed a decent roux, he was mostly right. Then again, Dickens came from a world where the sauce choices are Worcestershire, an unpronounceable dark brew ostensibly comprised of salt, vinegar, mold, dead fish, rat droppings, and poor people’s sweat; and something called “brown sauce,” which contains similar ingredients plus the pureed remains of red-headed Irish orphans. It’s hardly a surprise then that Dickens would award the gold medal to hunger. Cajuns however, through a long, meandering route that involves a swamp, several murky rivers, and a transatlantic voyage, trace their origins to the French, for whom sauces are an integral part of most meals. Like Cajuns, the French will eat damn near anything … as long as it’s slathered in a delicious, mouthwatering sauce: Horses, frogs, snails, geese, bunnies – you name it, and keep in mind French cuisine is considered to be some of the finest in the world. So the Cajuns took that culinary tradition and ran with it … at least until they reached a steamy swamp in the funky taint of America where they settled down for some real gastronomical depravity. In South Louisiana, if it can’t be deep fried, boiled, or blackened, it probably belongs in outer space, at a circus, or on an endangered species list. Cajuns themselves qualify for all three as well. Nowhere else in the world will you find such a bizarre clusterfuck of cultures, a steamy dreamscape of sleeveless camo T-shirts, wrap-around Wal-Mart sunglasses, spectacular mullets, and belligerently indecipherable patois that so brilliantly refutes the notion of intelligent design. And yet, despite ravenous alligators, relentless humidity, and hellish swarms of mosquitoes, Cajuns have managed to survive and thrive in a place where most people won’t even stop to take a piss. Their key to survival has always been adaptation: The ability to make the best of what’s available. What’s available in South Louisiana in April is crawfish, millions and millions of mudbugs, freakish little creatures palatable mainly to ’coons and cormorants. Of course, since their southward migration, you can add another “C” word to that list. Crawfish are a peculiarly Cajun delicacy, an earthy blend of swamp-water and spices. If done right, they’re surprisingly addictive. They’re a little messy too – sort of like eating lobster in a mud puddle – but always worth the effort. True Cajuns like to suck the head, but they won’t dis you for being a dilettante. They’re much too good-natured for that. Besides, it’s crawfish season, and everybody’s fat and happy. If you’d like to get fat and happy too, check out this Saturday’s Louisiana Swamp Thing and Crawfish Festival at the corner of Congress and MLK. Not only will there be authentic Cajun food done up by 20 different cooks, there will also be great music by folks like Cyril Neville, Big Chief Kevin, T Broussard, Dwayne Dopsie, and others, as well as Zydeco dance lessons, arts and crafts, carnival rides and a crawfish eating contest you’ll surely want to enter. Who knows? You may be a natural.

Joe Ely’s Bonfire of the Roadmaps

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MAR. 19, 2007

Now that SXSW is over, you’re probably feeling an overwhelming urge to do something meaningful with your life – some sort of wholesome activity that isn’t sponsored by an energy drink or an internet startup. It’s OK, that’s a natural recoil. Five straight days of shameless sycophancy, watery, free beer, and obligatory Texas barbecue would turn even Morgan Spurlock into a Jehovah’s Witness. You’d probably feel similar if you just got off the plane from a sex tour of Thailand’s boy brothels – even more similar if you ran into Pete Townshend at the luggage carousel. Here’s the thing: What happens in Austin never stays in Austin, and it’s probably just as well. That swarm of skinny jeaned, oily haired, pasty skinned trendies would eventually blight our sunny city like a plague of locusts. We did our part. We housed the homeless and the thankless. They ate our cows, fucked our roommates, and split without replacing the toilet paper roll or cleaning their pubes out of the shower drain. It was good while it lasted but it’s good they’re gone, and apparently Jehovah mercifully stayed his hand with the fire and brimstone – or maybe he was bribed with a pass to next year’s Spin party which, rumor has it, will be a live reenactment of the water buffalo decapitation scene from Apocalypse Now with Martin Sheen in attendance. Now that’s barbecue the way Jehovah intended it. Chopper in a few Hueys full of Playboy bunnies and you’ve got yourself a shindig that even Bono himself might attend. Still, just because a large, bloody chunk of your inner ear fell into the dirt at Stubb’s during the Stooges showcase Saturday night doesn’t mean you should abandon your quest for the holy grail of rock & roll. You might, however, want to catch your breath long enough to cough out the SXSW resin. Fortunately for you there isn’t a lot going on in town this weekend that warrants a full mosh pit so you should have plenty of time to let the cilia in your cochlea straighten up again. If you want some quiet time but still want some rock-&-roll cred, schedule a trip to the Ransom Center this weekend for “Joe Ely’s Bonfire of the Roadmaps.” Billed as “an installation of Ely’s verse, sketches, and paintings drawn from his road journals,” the show celebrates the release of Ely’s book of the same title. If you’ve never heard of Joe Ely, the rock you’re living under doesn’t roll. He’s a bona fide Texas music legend who has been on the road since the age of 16, probably not long after he met the devil at the crossroads and was offered an energy drink sponsorship.

Saturday Dew Music Festival at Town Lake with Riverboat Gamblers, Against Me! and Mastodon

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MAR. 9, 2007

One thousand five hundred bands are in town this week. You should make an effort to fuck the drummer in every one of them. You may have to do a little switch hitting, but this is the third millennium, and in these modern times you shouldn’t let something as trivial as gender get between you and your goals. If you thought you might try to play it a little less crass and just “sleep with” all those drummers, forget it. Sleep is time consuming. You have to spoon and fidget and fluff … your pillow, and inevitably one of you (probably the one with the deviated septum who just knocked back the better part of the case of Miller Lite that was provided gratis to the band) will snore. Reality check. If you’re going to bang 1500 drummers, you’re going to have to get busy. Consider the logistics: Even at a generous 3.5 minutes per drummer, you’re looking at more than 87 hours of coitus. That’s an ambitious goal even for a pro like Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy, or Paris Hilton, and even then they would probably require the services of a well-trained NASCAR lube crew between shaggings. You’re also going to need to factor in at least a limited (they’re drummers after all) amount of foreplay. Maybe a few minutes of slap and tickle before you latch the door to the toilet stall or slide the van door closed. What? You thought you had time to take the elevator up to the hotel room? The one with the single bed that the band has been sharing with a scruffy retinue of groupies, drug dealers, and shirtless frat boys from Wisconsin? Think again. Do the math. Foreplay plus drive to the hotel plus elevator fluff session (different type of pillow) plus a few minutes of rug-burned ecstasy (lead singer gets the bed) equals 25 minutes, minimum. At that leisurely pace, 1500 drummers would take you more than 26 days, maybe 30 if the bass player smoked a joint before the gig. That’s a whole month. For some of these bands, 30 days might be their entire career arc. You’ve got to get ‘em while they’re hot, otherwise you might as well wait a week and work your way through 1500 Thundercloud employees. Same tattoos and piercings but at least they have jobs. Or, maybe instead of opening your legs you could just open your ears, relax, and get blown away by some of the best new music the world has to offer. If you don’t have a badge or a wristband, don’t sweat it, just cruise over to Auditorium Shores for SXSW’s Dew Music Festival. Saturday’s Dewings go on all day starting at 11am with the sweet sounds of the Palm School Choir and ending with metal monsters Mastodon. Scattered in between are other great bands like the Jellydots, Priestess, Riverboat Gamblers, and Against Me! That’s still plenty of drummers, and you may not even need a lube crew.

Robert Rodriguez Presents “Torso” and “Zombie”

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MAR. 5, 2007

If you’re waiting around for a Robert Rodriguez “think piece,” it already happened. It was written by a 7-year-old and it was called The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. Smoke a bowl and watch it sometime. SB&LG is like pressing a naked eyeball against a glory hole of unrestrained parental indulgence. It’s an unwitting 3-D morality play that explores the question of whether one should, even if one can. For Rodriguez, the answer to that question has always been an enthusiastic “Yes!” – and the fact that SB&LG grossed a morally compromising $69 million sort of makes the question moot anyway, doesn’t it? What Rodriguez can do is a huge part of his creative genius. He’s the Horatio Alger of DIY budget filmmaking. Give him $7000 he’ll crank out a respectable south-of-the-border shoot-em-up. Toss in an extra $18,993,000 and he’ll give you a south-of-the-border shoot-em-up with gratuitous gore, exploding vampires, and Salma Hayek (or Juliette Lewis if you like a little dirt on your eye candy). The bottom line is that Rodriguez has the creativity and ability to get the job done for a lower bottom line, and that makes him both a hot commodity in Hollywood and a hero among independent filmmakers. So what if he hasn’t buckled down and shot some terse, brooding drama in the Style of Dogme 95? He’s kept millions of theatregoers and studio execs fat and happy on a colorful, cheesy diet of green screen special effects, fast action, simple plots, and even simpler dialog. Most importantly, he’s funneled mountains of money into the Austin film community and helped establish Austin as a viable alternative for independent filmmakers. He’s also friends with Quentin Tarantino, who like Willie Nelson and Matthew McConaughey seems to have partied with everyone in Austin except you. Recently Rodriguez and Tarantino collaborated on Grindhouse, a slasher/zombie movie double feature joined by a series of fake horror movie trailers – just the sort of stuff at which Rodriguez excels. Grindhouse won’t be opening until April, but this Saturday during SXSW Rodriguez will make an appearance at Republic Park for a special Rolling Roadshow screening of two classic horror films: Torso, by Sergio Martino, and Lucio Fulcie’s Zombie. Before the double feature there will be a collection of classic grindhouse trailers followed by an introduction by Rodriguez. In the intermission between the films, Rodriguez will announce and screen the winners of SXSW’s Grindhouse Trailer Competition. Admission is free with a SXSW wristband, but on this night anyone can jump into the SXSW Film melee for only $10. Rodriguez could probably shoot a grindhouse trailer for less than that.

79th Zilker Park Kite Festival

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FEB. 27, 2007

Inconvenient statistical extrapolation (aka “truth”) has it that the remaining ice caps will calve and melt into the sea sometime soon. Bummer for penguins and polar bears, but does our blue Earth cocktail really need an ice floater? Not necessarily. In fact, if the entire population of mainland China started driving Hummers, hairspraying their black moptops into rock hard beehives, and farting copious amounts of cabbagey methane into the atmosphere, the world would still keep on spinning. It might be hotter, wetter, and arguably smellier, but life would go on – or at the very least some fairly complex amino acids. It’s even possible humans might survive the ensuing cataclysm, but they would probably need to mutate up some gills and fins chop chop – or maybe a nice set of flippers and a blow-hole. Of course, you would think that once a few hundred square miles of polar ice shelf slides into the drink, governments would get serious about putting the kibosh on carbon dioxide emissions. So much for the Chinese and their Hummers and hairspray. They would have to be satisfied with the old-school hummer, the resultant emissions of which, ironically, can be used to create something of an up do, though maybe not a full on beehive. More old-school hummers might also curb China’s population growth. Talk about a win-win scenario for environmentalists. With enticements like that, it’s a safe assumption that the Chinese would be back on their bicycles in no time. Americans however, are a little more pigheaded – our legislators tend not to trust any science that doesn’t come straight from the Bible, which means the global warming issue is queued up somewhere between Federally Funded Universal Health Care and Transportation Strategies for the Rapture on the congressional agenda. Still, once Baytown and Pasadena are a couple of fathoms below sea level and millions of chain-smoking Houstonian refugees are roaming the heartland looking for cheap modular housing, DayGlo beach wear, and tittie bars, there is bound to be some activity in the chambers, if only to shit the proverbial brick. So, where’s the bright side? Here’s one: It’s possible that your roach-trap rent house on Montopolis might someday be oceanfront real estate. If that doesn’t make you want to put beans in your chili and a dual exhaust package on your Suburban, nothing will. In the short term however, there’s a good chance the winds will be picking up considerably, which should make for some nice kite flying – just in time for this Sunday’s 79th Zilker Park Kite Festival. If you’re too obsessed with the impending apocalypse to engage in some thing as frivolous as kite flying, consider it a possible transportation strategy for the rapture.

Lonestar Rollergirls Putas Del Fuego vs. The Cherry Bombs

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FEB. 19, 2007

Hmmmm … wouldn’t it be great if someone invented a sport that combined sex and violence and speed … and maybe the fakeness of reality TV? How American would that be? More American than pro wrestling? Way. Pro wrestling has its pageantry, no doubt, and it’s practically oozing homoeroticism, but the Greeks beat us to it by a few thousand years – along with Democracy, bathing, pedophilia, and catapults (those things fake German Volkswagen engineers use to pimp rides). Ancient Greeks didn’t just work out at the gym, they invented it. Damn those Greeks. They also make a nice salad dressing. In fact, they probably invented salads – or at the very least tossing salads. Like Americans, the Greeks were very fond of oil. They even coated their wrestlers with it, which must have created epidermal sheen not unlike that of modern American pro wrestlers, who glisten with the patina of some unwholesome artificial lubricant. No doubt about it, oil is hot, especially when slathered over nubile young women in bikinis. American oil wrestling is sexy, but not particularly violent, and the wrestlers seem to be more interested in prolonging the match interminably, which probably brings home more gold than actually bringing home the gold. Plus, as much as we’d like to call it our own, the fact is that the Turks have been oil wrestling for centuries, and just because watching a couple of muscled greasy Turks snake their hands up each other’s leather shorts doesn’t put the lead in your pencil doesn’t mean it isn’t a legitimate sport. Legitimate? Yes. American? Maybe not-so-yes. So what does that leave us? Apparently Roller Derby, especially since not even a svelte James Caan could kickstart the sport of Rollerball, no matter how intelligent a sport it was. Roller Derby, on the other hand, has it all. You have your sex (aided and abetted by overtly theatrical costuming), your violence (people moving that fast are bound to get hurt at some point, especially when they have to run the gauntlet of “spankers alley”), your fakeness (if they were really going at it, you’d have to sweep up the teeth with a push broom, and toothless chicks are only sexy in the abstract or a very dark room), and lastly, your speed, without which no sport can truly be called American (think about it, what is more American than NASCAR – a sport watched primarily by the prime demographic for methamphetamines?). So, while you may recoil at the thought of watching a bunch of trampy, tattooed, curvy chicks skating around in circles pulling one anothers’ hair, kicking, punching, and clawing their way to victory, remember, it’s the American way – at least until someone figures out how to slather them in oil. This Saturday, you can see an unoiled Lonestar Rollergirls match between the Putas Del Fuego (whores of fire?) and the Cherry Bombs in the classy confines of the Austin Convention Center. Or maybe you just want to continue riding around on your high horse.

Cornell Hurd

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FEB. 12, 2007

People are strange, but love makes them even stranger. If love makes the world go round it’s only because it’s spinning beneath the heels of people running away from lovesick crazies. News reports generally refer to them as “stalkers” or “spurned lovers.” They run the gamut from prank-calling preteens to wild-eyed, middle-aged astronauts who drive 900 miles in a pair of diapers to pepper spray and possibly kill and dismember a rival lover. Other than the diapers, wig, pepper spray, knife, hammer, and BB gun, not much about Lisa Marie Nowak’s wild ride makes much sense. It’s safe to say she was bat-shit crazy, but it’s also possible she was just in love. Sometimes the difference between the two is indecipherable. Love, like any respectable intoxicant, tends to addle the senses. People in love may act normal, but beneath the surface they’re drunk on a frothy brew of emotions and pheromones. Add a little insanity to that mix and you get Nancy Kerrigan in a knee brace, Mary Jo Buttafuoco in ICU, and Nicole Brown Simpson in the morgue. Those are, of course, extreme cases, but they all involved some sort of twisted logic. Lisa Marie surely had her reasons too. She also had a plan that included along with the items mentioned above, latex gloves, rubber tubing, and trash bags. In other words, she was crazy in love, but not so crazy she couldn’t provision herself with an array of weird items that made her seem even more crazy. Rubber tubing? A BB gun? Damn, this chick is good. It’s like premeditated insanity. Any normal person with an MS in aeronautical engineering would have at least brought a shotgun and a wood chipper. A BB gun however, is pretty much the key that unlocks the dressing room door at The Montel Williams Show – a little nest egg in case the whole kidnapping/murder/dismemberment thing didn’t work out. What a memorable Valentine’s gift that would have been. Certainly beats boiling the Easter Bunny. Rest assured however this isn’t the last you’ll hear of Lisa Marie. Her ratty-ass mug will be back clogging up your daytime TV quicker than you can whistle the tune to “Crazy.” So just remember while you’re out there birddogging your next true romance that being too serious can be a serious problem. If, in light of recent events, you want to keep it on the light side, this Saturday you can check out Cornell Hurd on the deck at Central Market North. Cornell may be dressed in black, but he’s all sweetness and light when he’s onstage and his band features some of the best country musicians in town. They’re sure to keep the world spinning beneath your feet even if the lovesick crazies don’t.

Couple Skate Valentine’s Day Benefit

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FEB. 5, 2007

Valentine’s Day is coming up. Question is: How can you parlay this once-a-year, bullshit greeting card event into something more meaningful like hot monkey sex (monkey sex in this case being a metaphor for energetic, acrobatic coitus with another human being and not sex with an actual monkey, even with that monkey’s implicit consent through a liberal interpretation of grunts, gestures, and facial expressions)? Seems like it ought to be a slam-dunk, doesn’t it? Unfortunately people are complicated – maybe even more complicated than monkeys … at least ideally. People are always wanting you to jump through hoops. You can’t just go up to people, sniff their crotch, and mount them with vigor and enthusiasm. Doesn’t work that way. At the very least they’re going to want you to learn their name and astrological sign. More likely they’ll want you to show a couple of major forms of ID, a credit card, and a college diploma. Getting some can sometimes be a big hassle. It’s no wonder so many people choose to just stay at home on the couch swathed in cat-haired polyester fleece, watching Lost and polishing off a sleeve or two of Thin Mints before lapsing into a blissful slumber. And really, who’s to say that’s not every bit as valid a sensory experience as wrestling the naked cast of One Tree Hill in an inflatable kiddie pool greased with Astroglide? Life is so full of exciting possibilities that don’t involve the exchange of bodily fluids and yet, for some reason, people are willing to do just about anything for the squish and squirt. Think about it. What else could explain Jovan Musk, camel toes, bluetooths (teeth?), and Camaros? OK, maybe there is some sort of cosmic procreation imperative or maybe it’s simply God, and she’s still all hot and bothered from the big bang – doesn’t matter. The only way to get on it is to get on it, so if you have to go Billyjack once a year with some blunt scissors, Elmer’s Glue and red construction paper in order to get in spittin’ distance of the godhead, that’s a pretty fair trade. Sure, there are other methods, but they’re equally unreliable. First and foremost you need to sidle up to the object of your affection, be it man, woman, or monkey, and start the ball rolling. One way to do that is to go on a date. This Saturday, KVRX is hosting a Couple Skate Valentine’s Day Benefit at Skateworld, Austin, a place that might as well be on Pluto in its geographical relation to KVRX, but they’ve never been known for their lucrative fundraisers and sometimes … well … you just have to work for it, right? Seven dollars gets you skating plus three bands and two DJs. The rest is up to you, Tiger, but there’s a decent chance you’ll run out of gas on the way home.