Month: March 2019

Extravagasm VI ‘Return to Eden’

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OCT. 22, 2007

As much as we hate to admit it, there is a certain truth in the phrase, “Turn ’em over and they all look alike.” While there are countless variations in the size, shape, color, and coiffure of the human anatomy, the basic plumbing is pretty much all the same – has been for several thousand years, minimum. Same ‘ol, same ‘ol. It’s amazing we get worked up about one another in the first place. Imagine if you lived for hundreds of years … like Noah, who apparently clocked in somewhere between 500 and 1,000. After a couple hundred years of connubial bliss, it’s very likely that Noah’s wife just held up her hand and muttered, “seen it” every time he whipped out his baby-maker. Makes you wonder if Noah collected all those animals because of a sign from God or just because after all those years he wanted to try something new. Really, Noah’s ark probably makes a lot of sense to the average 500-year-old – sort of a freaky interspecies Carnival Cruise ship with Noah walking the Lido deck wearing a Hawaiian shirt and carrying a tranquilizer gun and a jar of bacon grease. The “male and female of each species” thing should come as no surprise either. It’s a safe bet that after five or six centuries, you’d be exploring bisexuality too. Maybe the idea of bestiality on such a huge scale seems a little over the top. Some might even call it an abomination, but you have to admit that engaging in a ménage à trois with a pair of full-grown grizzlies is one sure way of “keeping it fresh,” plus it gives the hamsters a chance to stretch their legs and unwind. Maybe Noah was onto something other than dry land. Most experts say that the key to having a fulfilling sex life is to try new things – keep it interesting. Problem is, not everybody is easily amused. In fact, in a world of ever increasing sensory overload, getting a rise out of the average person is getting harder and harder. It’s not enough to just buy some colored underwear or shave your nethers into a landing strip. These days you need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kama Sutra, the body of a gymnast, and a briefcase full of silicone power tools if you want to compete with the freakshow of the internet. Currently, meat-space holds the edge, but only tenuously. Soon enough computers will cough up something warm and squishy and the human population will decline like the Barton Springs Salamander. Until then you need to keep on your toes – or someone else’s – and keep it interesting. If you’re running out of ideas, check out the sixth annual Extravagasm ball this Friday. The theme of this year’s ball is “Return to Eden” and features the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang Burlesque troupe, pole performer and arialist Ms. Mercy Killings, belly dancers, fetish sideshows, a costume contest, and the usual assortment of kink and perversion presided over by Mistress of Ceremonies Lady Lynn. Unlike previous Extravagasms, this year’s ball is off Sixth Street – as in far North Austin – but the venue is a roomy, 9000-square-foot swingers club called Allure. Maybe if you go to the ball you’ll get some, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

Austin Haunted Forest

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OCT. 16, 2007

Haunted Houses are like assholes. Everybody has one and most of them are pretty scary. If you’ve ever been in one, you know it involves a lot of moaning and screaming and blood, and very likely you’ll want to get out just as soon as you go in. You might even wonder why you wanted to go in at all. If you haven’t been in one, you’re probably at least a little bit intrigued by the idea, but why? Life is scary enough, why would you want to subject yourself to additional terror? And pay for it? Just a quick scan of evening news stories reveals some of the most depraved shit imaginable: A man sexually assaults and hangs a 6-year-old girl in her garage; a college girl is killed and dismembered by her boyfriend; a mother puts her three daughters in a bathtub and sets them on fire – and those are just here in Texas. There’s plenty of grisly shit that goes on every day in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Darfur. When it comes to pain and suffering, the human race seems to take an if-we-can-conceive-it-we-can-achieve-it approach. Sure, getting mauled by a bear or eaten by a shark sounds really horrifying, but those are mercy killings compared to the average torture session during the Spanish Inquisition. We may like to think we’ve evolved somewhat in the last 500 years, but there’s no conclusive proof. Having flesh torn from your body with hot pincers may indeed be more painful and terrifying than being waterboarded or having electrodes attached to your testicles, but we’ll never know for certain. For most people such scenarios remain completely hypothetical, and maybe that’s the point. If the only true terror in your life comes from some schmaltzy holiday tradition like a haunted house, you’ve got it pretty good – maybe too good. Maybe your body occasionally needs that hair-raising, heart-pounding adrenaline rush of terror, if only to counterbalance the increasing torpor of modern existence. If your greatest fear in life is something like public speaking, leaving your fly open, or getting a pimple on your forehead, you’re probably underterrorized. Fortunately, here in America you can remedy this problem without having to drive around with a cougar in your back seat or volunteer with Oxfam in Mogadishu. How about the sheer terror of being in a dark room and having your hand plunged into a bowl of peeled grapes or spaghetti? Or maybe having something pop out at you unexpectedly even though you were pretty much expecting something to pop out at you unexpectedly? With enough planning and financing, opportunities for terror abound – opportunities like the Austin Haunted Forest, a quarter mile of “twisted performance art, wicked art installations, and totally freak the bejesus out of your soul.” In addition to their homemade haunts, this year the AHF features the Life Size Mousetrap, a “16 piece, 50,000 pound interactive kinetic sculpture set atop a 6,500 square foot game board complete with a Vaudevillian carnival show, musical score, and can-can-dancers” imported all the way from San Francisco, one of the scariest places in the world. What kind of sick freak would build such a monstrosity? It’s too frightening to even consider.

Texas Burlesque Festival

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OCT. 8, 2007

If you really want to look at naked people, they’re all over the place. No more so than on the Internet. If you don’t believe it, try typing the word “bazookas” into Google’s image search. The result is a cross between a carnival freak show and a chiropractor’s wet dream. Nobody in your office probably remembers it, but there was a time when looking at naked people at work involved drilling a peephole into a restroom wall. You can still make that kind of thing happen, but unless you’re willing to wait quietly in the janitor’s closet for an inadvertent money shot, you’ll probably want to take advantage of digital technology – if only to install a web cam in the peephole. But really, why go to all the trouble? You don’t have to work nearly that hard. There are literally millions of pictures of spectacularly endowed, relentlessly turgid, beautifully air-brushed naked people on the Internet and you barely need to lift a finger to get at them. It’s every schoolkid’s fantasy come true – like finding a whole Dumpster full of nudie mags. Of course the down side of the whole deal is the inevitable real-world letdown of finding out that most real people don’t have rock hard, toned physiques, glistening, hairless nether regions, double D breasts, or 10-inch peckers. In fact, most naked bodies fall well short of the Internet standard, even on the Internet. You don’t have to drive out to Hippie Hollow to see cellulite, saddlebags, leathery skin, faded tattoos, or wild, unkempt tangles of pubes. There are plenty of sites devoted solely to amateur exhibitionists who apparently don’t have access to a soft-focus lens or acne medicine. Gone are the days of crouching in the bushes beneath the neighborhood MILF’s bedroom window every night hoping she’ll lotion the razor burns on her privates. Thanks to the internet you can tell her how to shave and where to apply the lotion, as long as you have a working credit card and a box of tissues within reach. Not surprisingly, with the increase in readily available porn on the Internet has come a corresponding interest in and acceptance of porn in real life. More people than ever are taking control of their sexuality and trying to actually live out the crazy donkey/goat/monkey/gerbil/midget/Vaseline/rope swing/jackhammer/gimp mask/gorilla suit fantasies they see online. It could be society is paving a landing strip for the four horsemen of the apocalypse or it could be that it’s merely pulling a big bug of Victorian repression out of its ass. Either way the end result is more skin for everyone – at least until it’s burned off in the lake of fire. Until then, expect things to get a whole lot freakier – sort of like this weekend when local burlesque troupes Kitty Kitty Bang Bang and Burlesque for Peace present the Texas Burlesque Festival. Over 50 performers and nine troupes from Texas and beyond will be baring their wares on Friday and Saturday night at the Parish and Antone’s respectively. If you like to unwind with a little bump and grind, this is definitely your festival. In between performances will be seminars on how to burlesque for success: makeup, hair, choreography, costuming, and chutzpah. Who knew showing off your bazookas involves so much smoke … and mirrors? Don’t worry, somewhere underneath it all is some live, naked flesh worth your money.

TFN’s 12th Anniversary Celebration

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OCT. 2, 2007

Texas is a really big state, especially in the minds of its citizens, whose heads, for the most part, are large enough to comfortably accommodate its immense geography. Nowhere else in America will you find a citizenry so convinced of their home state’s superiority, even and especially in the absence of any substantiation. Outside of Texas there are those who find this hubris entertaining (pride inevitably precedes the type of ass-crack-revealing fall that makes the finals on America’s Funniest Home Videos), but more commonly, unTexans just find it obnoxious. Sure, it might seem like Texans’ heads are big enough to enjoy a certain amount of open-mindedness, but that doesn’t necessarily follow. You cannot have an open mind if it’s packed full of bullshit, and to fill up a space as big as Texas, you have to start packing at a young age. Fortunately, the Texas legislature is up to the task. Back in May they voted 124-5 to put the words “one state under God” into the Texas pledge, presumably to let the ’tards in the other 49 know whose side God is really on. Apparently the “one nation under God” in the national pledge (the one that immediately precedes the Texas Pledge) doesn’t provide the amount of God coverage Texas needs. Only three other states have even adopted an additional pledge: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. That puts Texas in very select company – what some might even refer to as America’s brain belt – although to give ‘Bama credit, their pledge doesn’t double dip on the deity. Think about it. Texas is currently holding down a spot usually reserved for Arkansas or Oklahoma. Now there’s something to brag about. Admittedly, bashing the Texas lege for idiotic behavior is cruel sport – sort of like making fun of a first grader with a rat tail haircut: You know he wasn’t born with it, but it wasn’t entirely his choice either. Somewhere along the line someone gave him the idea that a rat tail was a perfectly acceptable hairstyle. What’s done is done. We can’t jump into a time machine and fly back to the Eighties or for that matter the Alamo. We have to fix things here in the present. Rat tails can be remedied by a sharp pair of scissors, but backward-assed legislation can only be remedied by sharp minds. One way to ensure Texas minds don’t get any duller is to support organizations like the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization formed to counter radical fundamentalist legislation sponsored by the religious right. This Saturday they are having their annual fundraiser at La Zona Rosa. This year’s celebration features a live auction, food from local caterers, and music by folk favorite Ruthie Foster and Austin celebrity cover band, Skyrocket. Tickets aren’t cheap, but ignorance is even more expensive.

WFTDA Championship

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SEPT. 22, 2007

If you’re into helmet sports, this weekend is shaping up to be a humdinger. Not only are the wacky Longhorns testing their mettle against an actual conference opponent, there are big doings down at the Austin Convention Center, as well. You probably didn’t know it, but here in Merkuh we have something known as the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, and they’re having their championships at the Convention Center this weekend. That’s “Derby” as in “Roller,” which, in the modern/vintage version at least, is a sort of WWF tag-team match on roller skates. The WFTDA (pronounced, one would assume, “woof-duh”) is composed of 38 Roller Derby leagues representing nearly every state in the nation. Damn. That’s a lot of pissed off Sonic carhops. You’d be mad, too, if you had to wait on an endless stream of Suburban-driving soccer moms, vodka-toting teenagers, ass-slapping rednecks, and outright pervs for a couple of bucks an hour and a pocketful of pennies. Roller-skating around a drive-in might look like fun on American Graffiti or Happy Days, but after you’ve rolled through a few patches of chili-dog/cherry-limeade upchuck and bussed a parking lot’s worth of ketchup-smeared window trays, getting clotheslined by an Amazon in fetish wear in front of a few thousand drunk crackers seems like a dream come true. Sure, you could channel your rage into other activities like garnishing cheeseburgers with lung nuggets and pubic hairs, but that’s so McDonald’s. Besides, if the Lord blesses you with a talent, you sort of have an obligation to use it. Where would we be if people like William Hung, Kevin Federline, and Paris Hilton chose to ignore their god-given abilities? Exactly, so if a girl takes the time to learn how to do amazing things on roller skates, she should have the opportunity to utilize those skills in something other than a porno movie starring Dirk Diggler. Thanks to the resurgence of trailer-trash camp, Roller Derby and the WFTDA are alive and well, and this weekend Austin is ground zero. Teams from far-flung locales like Seattle; Chicago; Kansas City, Mo.; Detroit; Tucson, Ariz.; Raleigh, N.C.; and New York City (do they even have Sonics in New York City?) will be going at it on the Convention Center’s flat track to decide this year’s champion. You should probably check it out, but before you go, you might want to put on some temporary tats and a pair of Dickies. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get some steel-toed work boots and maybe one of those wallets with a big-ass chain. After all, dressing up like you’re working class is a lot more fun than actually being working class, and Roller Derby fans in Austin like to kick it blue collar. Even though Roller Derby is technically a sport, Roller Derby fans aren’t especially sportive. You’re more likely to see beer guts and plumbers cracks than ripped abs and rock-hard calves. They also prefer punk rock over jock jams and tend to take a lot of cigarette breaks. You get the sense that ultimately they’re just there to watch chicks in fishnet and helmets duke it out on roller skates. Rest assured the Derby girls will give them what they paid for.

Ink Fest Tattoo & Piercing Convention

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SEPT. 18, 2007

After three full days of slogging through the dirt, sweat, noise, and smell of Austin City Limits, you’re probably experiencing a touch of “acute anxiety” just like Meg White. You might feel extremely anxious about going outside again. In fact, you might just want to stay in the shower all day scrubbing yourself vigorously with a loofah sponge – not just because you spent last weekend lathered in other people’s sweat, but because you need to remove the remaining dead sunburned skin so it doesn’t look like you’re wearing a bikini even when you’re not. When you take your top off you should get credit for it, and not just from the people who are close enough to tuck dollars into your G-string. Besides, if you wanted a permanent design you would have gotten a tattoo, right? Maybe one of those cool armband tats that look like the headgear Jesus sported on his power walk up to Calvary. Or, you could go with the sure-to-please “tramp stamp,” which is like a St. Louis arch over your ass crack, a visually alluring gateway to the dirty South. You don’t want to cheap it on the tramp stamp. It should be something ornate and elaborate – something that shows potential lovers that you’re not opposed to spending a considerable amount of time on your stomach enduring pain. Hawt. Most of all, a tattoo should say something about you. Well, actually all tattoos do that in a sort of general, stereotypical way, but a good tattoo says something specific … personal. For instance, if you’re a sailor, you might want to get a tattoo of a boat anchor or maybe a Polynesian girl in a grass skirt – a totally unique design that sets you apart from all the nonsailors. If you’re into Lord of the Rings, you could tattoo something in Elvish on your alabaster chest. Try something playful like “T.C.B” or “Mama, fry me up a banana sammich.” If you insist on getting a name tattoo, try to stick with blood relatives. That way your painful divorce won’t include the agony of removing “Alexandra” or “Bartholomew” from the heart on your chest. Of course, those are just general guidelines that you’ll probably be too drunk to remember when you get your first tattoo. That’s OK, the key to getting any tattoo is not to overthink it. Like our president, you don’t want your steadfast resolve clouded by indecision. After the deed is done, you’ll have a lifetime to come up with a brilliant rationalization of your decision. If you’re one of those people who are still on the fence regarding tattoos, you can do some further investigation this weekend at the Austin Convention Center. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday illustrators and the illustrated will converge for Inkfest, a whole convention dedicated to body art. Check out live tattooing and piercing plus contests for “Best Ink of the Day,” “Best Ink of the Weekend,” “Best Body Art,” and Ms. Inkfest 2007. Oh yeah, and there’s live music too. Best of all, it’s indoors and air-conditioned, so even if there are many scary-looking people like there were at ACL, at least they won’t sweat on you.

Austin City Limits Music Festival

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SEPT. 11, 2007

Bill Clinton is doing a booksigning at 11am on Friday at BookPeople. Coincidence? Maybe, but it’s safe to say that “Butter Smooth” Bill is only a phone call or two away from a VIP plus 20 to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Chances are he’ll be phoning it in Friday morning, limiting his Q&A responses to a thrifty 20 minutes each and hurriedly scribbling autographs so he can get over to Zilker and get his geezer groove on. Imagine our greatest living president doing the white man’s overbite backstage during the Dynamites’ set, pumping his fist (albeit vertically with the thumb turned unthreateningly upward) and playing air saxophone. Yeah, that’s some messed up shit, but you know you would skip your project planning session or at the very least sixth-period biology to witness such an historic moment. You’re probably still kicking yourself for having missed Ben Kweller’s famous nosebleed tampon incident of ACL 2006. Could you really blame Blow Job Bill for wanting to get in on that action? It’s like Tony Montana is in charge of the backstage buffet. If you’re one of the less fortunate 100,000 dirt magnets on the other side of the barricades, you’re probably not going to get a chance to deviate your septum – unless maybe you’re willing to mule a couple of balloon pellets past the security gate – in which case you’re going to need a tampon for more than just your nose. Otherwise, there is plenty of unreasonably priced beer and the occasional communal spliff inexplicably produced by some string cheese trustafarian whose dreads look and smell like skunkweed. If you could find the wherewithal to rock that look, you too could be playing tonsil hockey with a tramp stamped, toe-ringed, hairy-ankled hottie. Of course, not everyone at ACL looks like they just got back from Burning Man. There will be plenty of middle-aged white guys in Hawaiian shirts, Birkenstocked NPR listeners, yuppie condopolitans, college kids, high schoolers, grade schoolers and even sweaty babies in strollers. Yeah, babies like to rock too. Simple math should tell you that your chances of rubbing up against your soulmate at ACL are infinitely better than sitting at home on your couch playing Halo, though maybe not quite as hygienic. One of the things that makes ACL unique is its undeniably multigenerational appeal. Like its namesake public TV show, ACL is all over the demographic map. Unless you’re into frog-throated death rock, you will probably find something you like that you didn’t expect to like. Failing that, you can always count on the big closers like Björk, Dylan, and the White Str– uh … Arcade Fire.

Beer 101

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SEPT. 4, 2007

Why beer? Seriously. There are plenty of different ways to get D to the rerunk that don’t involve farting, peeing a river, or wiping “head” off your lips. Highest on the alcohol pyramid would be ether. Ether’s some good shit if you can put your hands on it. Like most people, your only experience with ether was probably in Curious George Goes to the Hospital. Props to H.A. Rey for dealing with drug abuse in such an honest and forthright manner. You don’t see George running around in terror flailing at frightening hallucinations or riding his bike with no hands (the latter, in fact, is covered in Curious George Rides a Bike, but George isn’t drunk on anything except maybe pride); no, after George hits the ether he is one blissed out, messed up monkey. It was like H.A. was saying, “Kids, you got to get yourself some of this shit!” Sadly, preschoolers don’t have the mental capacity to bookmark quality intoxicants like ether and therefore its stock among adult buzz seekers is fairly low. That’s probably a good thing. One of the big drawbacks to ether is that it’s highly flammable, so if you’re a drinker who likes to smoke, it’s definitely not for you. Just ask Richard Pryor. Next highest alcohol content is Everclear. If you have ever found yourself arched over a toilet at 3 in the morning firehosing purple vomit so hard it feels like it’s trickling out of your eye sockets, you probably have experience with Everclear. The big “E” can be found in a variety of concoctions: Trashcan Punch, Purple Passion, Hairy Buffalo, Cowboy Kool-Aid, Thunderfuck, and perhaps the most appropriately titled, Stupid Juice. All employ basically the same formula: Everclear and something sugary that makes it easier to choke down. In essence, this same simple formula can describe just about any mixed drink, but for whatever reason, Everclear seems to evoke a particularly lowbrow mixology favored by high schoolers and B-list sororities. With a modicum of intelligence and restraint, Everclear can be an effective and relatively pain-free buzz management solution. Unfortunately, people with intelligence and restraint never buy Everclear. Sliding further down the pyramid you’ll pass a dizzying array of rums, whiskeys, vodkas, gins, tequilas, and other liqueurs that run the range from flammable to unconscionable. Most will do the trick nicely as long as you don’t pair them with something like Red Bull or Jell-o cubes, in which case you’re better off cracking yourself on the head with the bottle they came in. Wines? Are you fucking kidding? Bad hangover plus purple zombie teeth? They’re nice in extreme moderation – maybe with some foie gras or a tenderloin or some French people, but if you’re looking to get your buzz on you might as well snort meth. Beer on the other hand is more forgiving. Beer is the solid foundation of the alcoholic pyramid because it has the least amount of alcohol. This is not to say you can’t get crunk on beer, you just have to work a little harder: Maybe stand on your head with the tap in your mouth or drink it through a huge funnel. Otherwise beer is an effective buzz management strategy: You always know what you’re getting … as long as you know your beer. Some beers stick to your ribs like oatmeal, and others run through you quicker than you can open your zipper. All give you something to do with at least one hand at a party. Who knows? Your beer hand might be groping strangers or giving unsolicited shoulder massages if it weren’t otherwise occupied. If you want to get to know beer, you could do a lot worse than this Sunday’s Beer 101 class at Whole Foods on Sixth and Lamar. Sure, there’s a good chance the Wholies will get all epicurean and fail to address the important medicinal properties of America’s intoxicant of choice, but knocking back brew samples at noon on a Sunday might be good pregame for cruising the produce aisles.

Rock and Roll Karaoke with Nathan Black

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AUGUST 28, 2007

This week, Sunday night is Saturday night, so you’ll need to shift your normal Monday hangover to Tuesday. Don’t try to check the math with your Gilbert Grape finger abacus, just tap it into your BlackBerry and call it a day: Monday 8am-5pm – wicked-ass hangover. If you popped for an iPhone, don’t bother entering it into your calendar at all because you’re going to be surfing miniporn on Monday whether you’re hungover or not. Hallelujah, it’s a three-day weekend, a weekend specifically designated to celebrate your contribution to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. Unless you’re one of those scruffy persons of perpetual leisure who always hang out in front of Quack’s at 10am on a weekday shooting the shit, petting your mangy dog, and holding a slightly beat up acoustic guitar for no particular reason. For you, Labor Day is just a tiny ripple in the cosmic continuum, marked only by the annoyance of having industrious, kempt, and contributing members of society walk through your bum circle wearing the shit-eating grins of prisoners on early parole. Don’t be a hater. Come Tuesday the serenity of the eight-hour workday will return, and you and your shiftless companions can return uninterrupted to the important cerebral pursuit of creating a cogent unified field theory. If however, you’re one of those folks in the fat part of the bell curve whose employment is less cerebral but better compensated, this weekend is a rare opportunity to blow the carbon off your mental fuel injectors with some high-octane entertainment. And what, you may ask, might that be? Karaoke of course! Hell, anyone can BASE jump, street luge, or run with the bulls, but it takes some serious sack to get up on a stage in front of a roomful of (or more likely … several) auditory masochists and belt out a heinously off-key rendition of “Tiny Dancer.” For that matter it takes a certain amount of courage (liquid or otherwise) to even show up at a karaoke night. Sadly, most bars don’t have discreet parking in the rear like massage parlors and escort agencies, so if you park your racing-striped magenta Mini Cooper out front of a bar on karaoke night, you stand a good chance of being outed as a hopelessly depraved exhibitionist. That’s the kind of crazy risk your average bungee jumper will never know, and bungee jumping costs a lot more than a couple of shots of tequila and your dignity. This Labor Day you can experience the thrill of depraved exhibitionism right on Red River at Beerland, where Rock & Roll Karaoke host Nathan Black works the mic every Monday night. Close your holiday strong, and don’t worry, you can’t park anywhere close to Beerland anyway.

Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival

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August 21, 2007

You’re probably thinking, “Why even go to the Hot Sauce Festival if I can’t bring my dog or my cooler? Touché. Point taken. Nothing completes your festival experience like the companionship of a furry friend or the crisp, clean taste of your own choice of brew. What’s the use of attending a festival where you can’t play Frisbee fetch with your dog – especially in the midst of a crowd, and especially when your dog is sporting a bandana jauntily fastened about its neck? Kee-ute. So what if he occasionally hikes his leg and “marks” a baby stroller or tries to ferret out a red rat from beneath some stranger’s sundress? He’s not trying to hurt anyone; he’s just being a dog. And if (God forbid) he freaks out and mauls some innocent toddler while you’re fist-pump rocking to the band, you can reassure the parents that he’s never done that before and that it must have been because their toddler made some menacing movement. After all, there are no bad dogs, just bad people. Dogs aren’t moralists. If they were, they would probably judge it immoral to take a dog to a crowded festival. Then again, that’s just hypothetical extrapolation – something else dogs suck at. They are however, very good at eating, pooping, peeing, sniffing, and catching Frisbees, which is more than can be said of many dog owners, especially when they’ve knocked back a cooler’s worth of beer. No, it doesn’t take an especially sharp intellect or an excessive amount of skill and agility to safely shepherd the average canine through a press of festival-goers, but the mere act of doing so reveals a certain lack of judgment – the type of stupidity that is only further amplified by the consumption of alcohol. Drunk people are stupid enough, so how humiliating must it be to have to share a leash with one – in public? OK, so maybe you can leave the dog at home, but the cooler? Damn, that’s harsh. A dogless person should be able to enjoy a chilled beverage without getting hassled by the man. Right? Well … yeah … sorta, except that 10,000-plus people with their own coolers in Waterloo Park isn’t a hot sauce festival, it’s a clusterfuck. Besides, if you’re going to bring beer, you should bring enough for everybody. Otherwise you’ll look like a beer-hoarding asshole. So, unless your cooler has room for 20,000 beers, leave it at home. You can buy beer at the Hot Sauce Festival and the proceeds benefit the Capital Area Food Bank. Without the dog and the cooler, you’ll have two hands free to sample hundreds of salsas and more importantly, to carry the three nonperishable food items that the food bank is requesting for admission to the festival.

Austin Ice Cream Festival

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AUGUST 13, 2007

Somewhere back in the hairy-assed Stone Age one of our thirsty, unibrowed ancestors had the audacity to get his milk from an entirely different species. Who knows? Could have been a precocious 2 year old or simply some prehistoric Benny Hill, the point is that regardless of the motivation, it must have been a hard sell to the rest of the clan, not to mention the respective cow/goat/camel/yak/water buffalo. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to grab the tits of a lactating mother of your own species, but it takes big brass ones to crawl up under the belly of a 1,000 pound hairy beast and start tugging on her mams. One would expect to see more hieroglyphics detailing the hilarious Neolithic bloopers that must have ensued, but apparently history is not written by people with hoof marks in their foreheads or dung in their hair. Suffice it to say that domestication of dairy animals must have been a long and winding road, albeit a necessary one on the journey to modern civilization. Hunting is a decent enough leisure activity (unless maybe you’re bird hunting with Deadeye Dick), but chasing around critters for your daily sustenance can be a frustrating and demoralizing experience, especially if you’re a Buddhist. The Plains Indians (aka indigenous occupants of middle America) made a pretty decent go of it, but they racked up a lot of frequent follower miles in the process. Props to them however for figuring out how to live “off the tit,” as it were for hundreds of years. Sure, you can criticize them for not inventing gunpowder, the wheel, or movable type, but if you’ve ever sidled up beside a full-grown American bison, you’ll never disparage them for not having whipped up a respectable smoked Havarti. Unlike their light-loafered European counterparts, the American buffalo’s ass-kicking switch is always engaged, so milking one is pretty much out of the question, not to mention adult American buffalo bull can weigh more than 2,000 pounds, which can either be seen as a lot of fresh meat or a good reason not to fondle the cows’ teats. Someone might have tried at some point, but the size of his balls surely hindered his escape from the charging bull. Lesson learned. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, our European ancestors were growing fat and happy enjoying the advantages of dairy animal domestication: Fresh churned butter, curds and whey, quiches, cheeses, cow tipping. Sitting on a bucket and yanking teats may be hard work, but it’s not like chasing around a thundering herd of bison all day. Eventually, if you make enough cheese, you can turn your attentions to other pursuits like arts, sciences, and oppressing indigenous peoples. The Europeans excelled at all three, so it was only a matter of time before they invented ice cream. Used to be only folks in chillier climes could enjoy this delicacy, but since the advent of mechanical refrigeration, it’s been a special favorite of people in hot places like Texas. Ironically, ice cream doesn’t cool much down except your throat and generally just makes you fatter and correspondingly hotter than you would be had you not eaten it in the first place. Ah, but it sure feels good going down. This Saturday at Waterloo Park, you can cool down, fatten up, and celebrate the domestication of dairy animals at the first ever Austin Ice Cream Festival. Sample ice creams from a variety of local vendors, listen to live music by Nakia & His Southern Cousins, Boxcar Preachers, and Idgy Vaughn, and help raise money for local charities. The festival starts at 10am and ends at 7pm. By that time you should be wanting to get off the tit anyway.

2007 National Poetry Slam Individual Finals

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AUGUST 6, 2007

So how did slam poetry begin and where do we have to travel back in time to kill the evil bastard who started it? Questions like these invariably pop into your head when watching slam poetry. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself the victim of some unconscionably self-absorbed free verse soliloquy being performed forte voce by some wildly gesticulating, overly emotional word nerd, and your mind will wander to the hypothetical. Couldn’t all that mental detritus have been attractively assembled on a crisp piece of stationary? Or maybe a creepy looking website with flashing candy-colored fonts, sparkly unicorns, fluffy kittens, and a MIDI file of Ludwig van’s “Ode to Joy” playing in the background? Shouldn’t there be some message inherent in the actual text, some universal truth that needs no further embellishment, or is 90% of all poetic communication nonverbal? Why slam poetry anyway? Isn’t poetry enough? Can one just be a poet who reads his or her work in an overly animated fashion? Admittedly, “slam poetry” does sound cooler than simple, unadorned “poetry.” Maybe slam poets simply refuse to own up to the inherent dorkiness of poetry. There’s no shame in your game (poetry?) if you want to read what you’ve written (versed or un) to an audience, but it’s dorky. Dorky like playing the tuba, scrapbooking, or putting money down on a condo in Second Life. Own it. Just because you bust a sag, furrow your brow, flail around and read with the Tourette’s-like rhythm of William Shatner on PCP doesn’t make you any cooler than say, Robert Frost reading “Birches” in his deadpan New England drone. Adding “slam” to the word “poetry” is the type of spin-marketing mentality that gives us phrases like “extreme sports,” “green living,” and “power yoga.” which are basically flashy antecedents for simple-minded chumps – sort of like when a cop comes in to do an anti-drug rap performance for middle school students: Only the knuckle-draggers and nose-pickers get on board. Everybody else just wonders why the cop thinks they’re stupid. So it’s hard to decide which is dorkier: The Scrapbooker or the Extreme Scrapbooker, but the point is, who cares? If you want to play tuba, play tuba. You don’t need to play extreme tuba or power tuba or slam tuba. If you wanted to be cool you would have learned guitar, and all of the really great guitarists are dorks anyway. In fact, anyone who does anything even remotely interesting is probably a dork of some kind – someone who has committed to a pursuit without regard for what other people think. That kind of courage and focus is something to be celebrated. It doesn’t need to be spun. So, should you go see the 2007 National Poetry Slam Individual Finals this Friday at the Paramount? Hells fucking yes. It’s the National Finals, and these are some of the best poets in the country. You can assume they’ve perfected their craft both on paper and in performance. After all, in the words of the Bard (that’s old-timey talk for “slam poet”), “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Flaming Lips Hoot Night

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JULY 30, 2007

If you don’t own a Hummer, get one. You deserve it. Plus, it’s really one of the few joys left that poor people still have … other than maybe crystal meth and evangelical Protestantism. All these bourgeoisie tree huggers whizzing around in their godnearlydamned, whisper quiet, 50-mile-per-gallon hybrids are slowing down the apocalypse, which everyone knows is a necessary precedent to the rapture. Once again poor people are getting screwed. They’re the ones who would benefit most from the rapture. Rich people, of course, would be left behind (Matt 19:24 – read it and weep, Robert Rodriguez) to dodge the fire and brimstone … ideally in their tricked-out Hummers, and the middle class would be somewhere in purgatory, which is probably a lot like tooling around in a Prius. Question hybrid drivers: Do you really need a practice lap for eternity? Probably not, which is why you should get the Hummer, either way you go you’ll be bringing down the wrath of something, be it Mother Nature or Our Father. With the big H, you’ll be on the cutting edge of capricious conspicuous consumption, especially if you throw on some spinny rims and a personalized plate that says, “Hum Me,” which either means you like to have your cake and have it eaten too or you simply didn’t have room for the last “R,” which in this case might stand for “Resurrection” – something you don’t need to worry about anyway since you’re getting personalized plates. If you’re going Economy (i.e., the little “h”) you’ll be committing a mortal sin – that of oral sodomy, which, if you’re going to go mortal (or delve into sodomy for that matter), isn’t a bad way to go. Keep in mind however that unless you’re Baptist and can whip out the “Get Out of Hell Free” card of a last-minute confession, come the Apocalypse, you’re going to be earthbound with all the Hummer drivers trying to outrun the Four Horsemen. So, what if the scriptures are wrong (like, really, when has that ever happened?) and Al Gore is right? Don’t worry, Hummers are still the way to go. By sucking all that gas you’ll be forcing the issue of our dependence on fossil fuels (necessity breeds invention, right?) and by being sucked you’ll help control population growth so that fewer people are forced to face the purgatory of owning a hybrid. After all, hybrids are just another way for the man to keep us on the fossil fuel tit for another 20 years or so until the ice caps melt and Dick Cheney’s Jackson Hole ranch becomes beachfront property. Besides, everybody knows that solar powered air cars are the wave of the future and have been for nearly a century. So, how do you get a Hummer? If you want the big “H” you’re going to need to make a lot of money, and generally a lot of money means a lot of work. Yuck. For the little “h” your best bet is to start hanging out with musicians. Yes, it’s dirty work, but somehow the sick clash of ego and sycophancy creates a perfect environment for the little “h” – and not just herpes. Down on Red River this Friday (as ever) there should be a mess of musicians milling around for the Flaming Lips hoot at Stubb’s and the Wilco hoot at Emo’s. Both bands are rock icons so you can’t really go wrong on either end of the street unless you think a Hummer will get you a hummer. If that’s the case you’re better off in a Prius.

Music Under the Star

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JULY 24, 2007

There are so many things to bitch about in Austin, but in the ought seven, the weather isn’t one of them. It’s nearly freakin’ August and we still haven’t cracked the century mark, much less the high 90s. Sure, it’s been a little wet … OK, crazy wet … Girls Gone Wild wet, but if it weren’t for those pterodactyl-sized mosquitoes and the stifling humidity, it would almost be pleasant … and that’s about as much as you’re allowed to hope for at the end of July in Austin: almost pleasantness. So how did we score this sweet meteorological mojo? Did Stephen F. Austin beat Jesus H. Christ in a game of Texas hold ’em? “Read ’em and weep Chuy … royal flush. What? You’re out of chips? OK, how about this: You make it rain at least once a week in Austin for the rest of the summer. Oh yeah, and the temperature can’t go above 95. Either that or you have to take off your loincloth and run around your father’s throne three times.” Highly improbable to say the least, especially considering Jesus holds all the cards – at least in a theological sense, but this weather is highly improbable too. Besides, even if Stephen F. was a bit of a peace creep, he didn’t become “Father of Texas” by showing mercy to losers and deadbeats … well, actually he did, but that’s not why he became “Father of Texas.” He became FoT by sucking up to Mexico until it was no longer in his financial interest to do so. Yes, Austin’s path to glory was a twisted one at best, and highly circumstantial to say the least, but you have to give him props for thinking big. After all, Texas is a big state – a state that takes a certain amount of hubris to govern. No one knew that better than the late Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock. Bullock was involved in Texas politics for nearly 40 years – just a few shy of Austin’s entire lifespan – and though it’s unlikely his name will be repeated in the same revered tone as Austin’s, it will be repeated nonetheless. In his final term of office, Bullock was instrumental in the establishment of the Texas State History Museum, an $80 million boondoggle/monument to Texas history that bears his name. It also bears a 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Bullock and a video of his career in politics. If only Stephen F. got that kind of play. Regardless, if you’re into Texas History or Harry Potter (the BBTSHM has an IMAX theatre) it’s a fascinating place. If you haven’t checked it out, you might want to drop by this Friday for the finale of Music Under the Star – that being the music series that takes place under the 35-foot bronze star that graces the museum’s entrance. From 6-9pm, you can get lit at the cash bar and groove to the popular Latin dance band Ghandaia. You can also wander around three floors of museum exhibits for free. That’s about as much as you can hope for from an $80 million museum.

Concert to Save Town Lake

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JULY 17, 2007

Really, the question is, who wouldn’t want to live in $500,000 condo in a 44-story high rise on the breathtaking shores of Shoal Creek? Imagine leaning over your balcony railing on the 42nd floor and squinting downward at that tiny fissure of green space below and knowing that, just a few miles upstream under a bridge in Pease Park, a homeless man just dropped trow and is squeezing out a three-coiler on the dry creekbed – a pungent pâté of digested pizza rinds and cinnamon sticks from the Mr. Gattis Dumpster. Don’t worry, there’s not enough line in your Pocket Fisherman to get your lure below the 20th floor anyway, much less hit top water, so you don’t have to worry about reeling in a big batch of E. coli. Besides, it’s not like you really want to fish, it’s the idea that you could fish if you wanted to. You like to be close to the water, even if that water is a fetid drainage ditch for Downtown developers. Sign here … and here … and here. After all, you didn’t just spend half a mil on a condo, you bought a lifestyle. You wanted to be able to roll out of bed at 10am, take a quick four minute elevator ride to the ground floor and hire a pedicab to pump you up to Starbuck’s for a Vende Latteccino and a copy of The New York Times. Maybe afterward you could strap on your heavy hands and take your (circle one) Shih Tzu/Pomeranian/Chihuahua/Pekingese for a brisk power walk around Town Lake … but wait … some asshole put a 26-story condo right in the middle of the hike and bike trail. Worse yet, the City Council signed off on the deal. Now, just like the rest of Austin, you’re getting the runaround. Enraged, you shake your fist at the cranes and construction workers and without a trace of irony yell, “Damn you, developers! Damn you!” What kind of livable city is it when you can only enjoy Town Lake from behind the plate glass of an expensive condo? Well sure, it’s livable all right. So is the riverwalk in San Antonio. C’mon, they turned their drainage ditch into a tourism gold mine. With some knee-jerk urban planning and lack of foresight, Austin can turn Town Lake into a similar cement moat – maybe even with flatboats full of fat Midwestern conventioneers. Dare we dream? Maybe. If you want to have a voice in whether Austin will go from River City to Moat Metropolis, show up down at Stubb’s (nestled on the beautiful shores of Waller Creek) for the Concert to Save Town Lake, a fundraiser for Austinites for the Responsible Development of the Town Lake Corridor, an organization with a tough job and even tougher name from which to draw an anagram. Local musicians Bob Schneider, Dale Watson, Stephen Bruton, Jimmy Lafave, and Kinky Friedman will join forces to rock block the potential riverwalk.

Roky Erickson’s 60th Birthday Party

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JULY 10, 2007

People are like puppies: Eventually they stop being young and cute and get old and cranky. At some point you just want to drive them out to a nice place in the country, open the door, and yell, “Look, a rabbit!” Of course, with old people you might have better luck saying something like, “Look, a Luby’s!” or “Hey, is that Wilford Brimley and Angela Lansbury making out behind that tree?” Still, they might fall for the rabbit thing, too, depending on the potency of their meds. If a trip to the country seems a little costly, you might try dropping them off at Whole Foods or Central Market, where old people seem to be able to occupy themselves for days at a time, clogging the aisles with nearly empty shopping carts while loitering around the sample tables. Apparently in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, each new schmear of herbed goat cheese on a cracker tastes deliciously different, even after repeated samplings. Or, it could be that Whole Foods and Central Market are gastronomical gauntlets to the afterlife. Perhaps plowing through a smorgasbord of sample-sized snob cuisine is a one-way ticket to Heaven, or maybe it just tastes like it. Here’s the thing: Old people aren’t going anywhere soon. Yes, they make jokes about not buying green bananas or spending money on their teeth, but with advances in nutrition and medical science, it’s very likely that most old people will be around until you’re old, too. With enough Viagra and Retin A, 80 might be the new 40. There are surely benefits to that, but if you’re planning on surfing DIY porn sites in the future, you’re going to want to invest in some therapy. So, tossing aside “final solution” fantasies like Logan’s Run and Soylent Green, what are we going to do with all those extra old people? Put them back to work? Maybe, but how many Wal-Mart greeters can the world take? Imagine a spindly wall of glad-handing, blue-vested cotton tops blocking your way to the $1.99 Faded Glory sleeveless T-shirts? Time to do a little Billy Jack-style euthanasia. No, the true value of the aged is their wisdom and experience. Old people know a lot and have had a lot of practice. These traits, which are particularly annoying in young people, are what make old people tolerable, even likable. It’s unlikely that an old person is going to take your job or shag your significant other – they’re too tired – and even if they do, you have to admit they have serious, Clint Eastwood caliber game. The old can, however, be highly entertaining and informative, often at the same time, sometimes on purpose. If you need an example of this phenomenon, buy some tickets to Roky Erickson’s 60th Birthday Party at the Paramount Theatre this Friday. Erickson is crazy with wisdom and experience. The leader of the Sixties psych-rock band 13th Floor Elevators, Erickson took the whole ride: fame, drugs, insanity, and redemption. Recently, he’s been rocking harder than ever. Who knows? Maybe 60 is the new 20. Regardless, $36 gets to admission and a copy of the soundtrack to You’re Gonna Miss Me, the 2005 film documenting Erickson’s rise and fall.

Freestyle Jump Contest for Barton Springs

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JULY 2, 2007

Barton Springs is without a doubt one of Austin’s most beloved and memorable landmarks; Beloved because for centuries it has been the coolest place in Austin (in recent years just barely edging out places like Emo’s and Kenichi); and memorable for anyone who has ever been in the public, open-air showers at Barton Springs and seen the shriveled twigs and berries of some dangerously over-tanned, assless nonagenarian. Before you get too cocky about your own package you may want to take a flying leap into the Springs yourself and see if you don’t come up screaming like a schoolgirl and rocking an equivalent amount of Johnson. Barton Springs doesn’t just cause shrinkage, it causes your boys to flee deep into some warm cranny of your ribcage where they’ll secretly devise an exit strategy that involves Bikram Yoga and a blowtorch. Similarly, if you’re one of those women who have been blessed with large, sensuous nipples, you would do well to lash them down with some Kevlar patches and 100 mph tape before entering BS for the first time. Otherwise, you might end up with bullet holes in your bikini. Barton Springs is only cool on the outside – say on a towel on the hillside in the shade. The pool itself however, is MF’n cold. It’s the kind of water where the people who’ve already made the plunge say (through chattering teeth and blue lips), “It’s fine once you get used to it,” which is the same thing the people in hell would say were you to cautiously peer in and ask if it’s as hot as it looks down there. Misery loves company. Never trust the miserable. People who stay in the water at Barton Springs for more than a few minutes are either A) dead, B) training for a swim across the British Channel, or C) wearing the wrong swimwear and too embarrassed to get out. Remember the bullet holes? You might also want to think twice about that bright yellow Speedo slingshot that fits like a sausage casing at the tanning salon. Something dark and baggy should do just fine. Whatever you wear, you will want to enter the water quickly – almost as fast as the speed at which you exit it. That slow, inch-at-a-time acclimation process doesn’t really get it at Barton Springs unless you’re willing to spend an equal amount of time belting out Mozart’s Popoli di Tessaglia. The best way to get into Barton Springs is off the diving board – ideally with the kind of high, graceful acrobatic maneuver you would like to precede a sudden heart attack. If you want some good examples of how to do that, set your alarm clock early for this Saturday when Independence Brewing Co. hosts the second annual Freestyle Jump Contest for Barton Springs. Jumpers from Austin and beyond will compete for the right to have a photograph of their best jump featured on the label of Independence’s Freestyle Wheat Beer. Registration is $25 and runs from 7-8:15am. The contest begins at 8:30am. Jumps will be judged on “showmanship and freestyle-inspired creativity.” If you plan on competing, try not to shriek until you’re under the water, and don’t worry about keeping your swimsuit clean. Nothing’s coming out of that pucker.

Karaoke Apocalypse

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JUNE 26, 2007

Singers get all the strange. It’s the truth. Look it up. Wikipedia that shit. Yes, there are some exceptions: Eddie van Halen; Tommy Lee; Peter Criss; pretty much any nonsinging member of Blues Traveler, Metallica, or Motörhead, but for the most part, if you rock the mic, chances are you’ll be rocking someone’s world after the show. As a matter of fact, it’s a safe bet that even John Popper, James Hetfield, and Lemmy Kilmister score a disproportionate amount of wool, which is no small miracle considering Popper looks like he sells used cars on Hee Haw, Hetfield’s face has apparently been worked over with a meat tenderizer mallet, and Lemmy is the spawn of some unholy clusterfuck involving the Crypt Keeper, Al Swearengen from Deadwood, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Blaine Cartwright from Nashville Pussy – and that’s being generous. Lemmy by his own account has shagged more than 2000 women, so it’s very likely he doesn’t just look diseased, he actually is. But even if he’s only bagged half that number looking the way he does, it’s a remarkable feat – equivalent to say, Stephen Hawking bringing home Olympic gold in the high jump. The singer mojo isn’t just a man thing either. Think of all the chick singers who have become famous simply because of their T&A – that’s right, talent and ability. Janis Joplin? Chrissie Hynde? Joan Jett? Björk? Courtney Love? OK, so maybe Courtney’s T&A is her T&A, but you have to admit she wouldn’t be seeing nearly as much timber if it weren’t for her Hole performance. Just imagine what Courtney’s love life would be like if she were working the mic at the Jack in the Box drive through. Very likely it would involve hamburger grease and a mop handle. Of course, sex appeal isn’t the exclusive property of singers, they just have a big piece the market. You can certainly work your financial-analyst mack or your systems-integration-engineer seduction techniques (you might also want to familiarize yourself with how to inflate a blow-up doll), but if you really want a technique that makes the underwear hit the floor, singing – even bad singing – is a better bet than most. If you’re not convinced, head down to the Hole in the Wall this Friday for Karaoke Apocalypse. Yes, it’s karaoke, which is pretty much the demolition derby of singing, but the difference with Karaoke Apocalypse is that you get to sing with a live band. In this case, the Dead Motley Sex Maidens, a crack crew of veteran Austin musicians with an extensive repertoire of pre-Nineties hard rock, punk, metal, and new wave and an obviously masochistic bent. Think about it: All the glamour and glory of rock stardom without the long rehearsals, heavy lifting, ego-tripping, and band-van beer farts. Time to drag out those tiger striped spandex leggings, visit the cucumber stand at the farmers market, and practice your Gene Simmons devil horns tongue flick. It’s time to rock. Hard.

FanFare Friday

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JUNE 18, 2007

Skip work Friday. You deserve it. Really. And besides, what if a giant asteroid slams into the Earth during rush hour on Friday and obliterates everything? On the plus side, the war on terror would effectively be won, but on the minus side you just pissed away the last few hours of your existence in a soul-sucking “team strategy” meeting fantasizing about calling 911 and telling the operator you think you may be dead because time is moving really, really, really slowly. Here’s a tip: Next time you’re in an office meeting suggest to everyone that they should tape it and put it up on YouTube. Follow that statement up by holding your hand in the air like you’re about to get a round of high fives. Don’t worry; recognition of true genius is often preceded by long periods of awkward silence. Don’t think it through too much. The inevitable outcome of too much thought is inaction – usually well-justified inaction. For instance, if you put the team strategy meeting up on YouTube you’ll be Karmically fucking yourself because you will inadvertently be putting undue stress on the suicide-hotline people. Their jobs are tough enough as it is, right? Similarly, you don’t want to overthink ditching work. Sure, there is probably some byzantine logarithmic formula by which the wheels of commerce will grind to a halt because of your absence, but the law of averages dictates that the real consequence of your ditch will be that someone gets an extra stale doughnut – and you will have made their day. Now there’s an inspirational poster to hang in the conference room: “Capricious Irresponsibility: Pass it on.” Own that shit. You only have what? 40? 60? 80 good years left? Maybe a buck fifty if scientists get off their asses and figure out how to rig you up a new chassis out of stem cells. Point is, carpe the friggin’ diem. See what it’s like to be one of the nonworking stiffs they’re building all those Downtown high-rise condos for. Roll out of bed late, put on some crocs, jammies, and a wife beater; and head on over to Threadgill’s for KGSR’s FanFare Friday. Starting at the uncharitably early hour of 8am, KGSR will be hosting a full day of high caliber musical entertainment that will benefit Family Eldercare’s annual Summer Fan Drive. The talent train is long and goes something like this: Bobby Whitlock & CoCo Carmel, Seth Walker, Billy Harvey, Guy Forsyth, Ruthie Foster, South Austin Jug Band, Dale Watson, Ray Wylie Hubbard, a special surprise guest, Charlie Sexton, and Elana James & Hot Club of Cowtown. Plus, each $12 donation buys a new fan for a low-income elderly or disabled person and (as if doing good isn’t good enough) enters you in a drawing for a $6,000 high efficiency air and heat system. Seeing that you’ve skipped work, if you win you may want to throw that into the Eldercare kitty too, just to yin your yang.

Keep Austin Weird Festival

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JUNE 12, 2007

Remember how jacked you were when you could finally buy authentic Seattle grungewear in the Dillards casuals section? You ran over to the mall and picked up a “distressed” flannel vest with t-shirt sleeves sewn into it so it looked like you were layering to fend off the dank, cold, cloudy Austin weather. Good choice. Perfect for watching the salmon fight their way up the icy Colorado to spawn. Now you probably feel just a little bit guilty that you might have been part of the reason St. Kurt chose to martyr himself with a scattergun. Then again, maybe the whole grunge thing missed you entirely. You might have been into old-school punk like the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Misfits – bands whose t-shirts can most easily be found at Hot Topic, the best place to pick up band merch for bands who never had band merch. You have to give them credit, at least Hot Topic figured out how to identify and merchandise a punk “look.” Unlike the unbranded punks of yesteryear, Hot Topic execs aren’t hamstrung by some half-cocked, anti-consumerist, nihilist ideology. They understand that when it comes to rebellion and belligerent individualism, most people like a well-defined road map – ideally one that leads to prime retail space at the local shopping mall. Hot Topic isn’t sweating whether or not they’re perceived as authentic. With $13.6 million in net profits last year, they don’t have to prove their authenticity to anyone (least of all their shareholders). Hot Topic has clearly tapped that punk ass. Not surprisingly, the benefits of appropriation marketing haven’t been lost on the Austin business community. Awhile back local businesses caught on to the fact that Austinites were loosely opposed to the corporate homogenization that turns unique communities into generic, big-box developments. Someone (quite ingeniously) coughed up the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” as an opposition rallying cry. Yes, Austin is weird, but it’s more of a case of contrast. Weirder that what? Plano? Regardless of how you feel about the phrase, “Keep Austin Weird” has already moved a lot of beefy tees, and if businesses decide to use a catchy slogan to vitalize the local economy and celebrate Austin’s unique character, where’s the harm in that? Why not get on the bandwagon this weekend at Republic Square Park, when AT&T and HEB along with a variety of local businesses bring you the Keep Austin Weird Festival, a 5K fun run, costume contest, and concert that benefits the RunTex Foundation. Here’s your chance to do the grunt work of weirdness: Run around dressed up like a weirdo, eat, drink, and watch a great lineup of bands: The Steps, Patricia Vonne, South Austin Jug Band, Alejandro Escovedo, Soulhat, and Bob Schneider.

The Miracle Bash

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JUNE 4, 2007

It’s probably safe to say that since you’re trolling these pages you’ve given up on the idea of becoming a priest or a nun. You don’t need a personal ad to marry Jesus. Even still, there could be occasions when you wake up on the floor of your hotel room with coke crust on your nostrils, your underwear around your ankles, and a goat bleating in the bathroom and wonder if maybe your life lacks purpose and meaning. Heaven knows goodness isn’t for everyone, but it would be nice to think that every once in a while the roulette ball of your life bounces into the charity slot, if only to pile up some karmic chits to balance out any future hedonistic pursuits (of course, in that mindset, Mother Teresa must have been planning some sort of superorgy). Like most people, you probably want to do good, you just don’t want to do what it takes to do good – sort of in the same way you’d like to be an astronaut but don’t really want to have to take all those math courses. Plus, what if you’re not good enough? What if you take all that math and still end up as an earthbound NASA desk jockey with a ranch house in Clear Lake? F that S. Makes you not even want to try. Still, you have to allow for the possibility that there are some people for whom goodness is its own reward, a special, mutant breed of masochist who gets off on helping others, people who are actually good for goodness’ sake. If these people exist at all, they are exceedingly rare. They are the Michael Jordans and Peyton Mannings of altruism, perhaps born with some genetic glitch that allows them to subvert their id on a molecular level. Unlike Michael and Peyton however, they’re doing it when no one is looking. Thank goodness. They sure do take the heat off the rest of us. They also set the bar unimaginably high. You don’t need that kind of pressure. Chances are you’ll never be a Mother Teresa. You might have occasional moments of selflessness. You might buy the bar a round or toss a couple of quails in the collection plate, but when it comes time to change bedpans for ebola victims, you suddenly have to wash your hair. Besides, won’t it be funny if you get into heaven anyway? If so, feel free to tell Mother Teresa what a chump she was. Wait’ll you see the look on her face when she finds out all you did to get in the pearly gates was to buy a massage wand at a charity auction. Burn! Mind you, there’s no shame in getting some while you’re giving some. By definition charity is never quid pro quo, but very often there is an intangible return on your investment. Ask Caroline Boudreaux. She was blowing a media merger windfall on a trip around the world when she ran smack dab into her life’s calling: helping orphans in India. In less than seven years the organization she started, The Miracle Foundation, has built three orphanages in India and helped hundreds of Indian children receive decent food, health care, and education. That’s a lot of hard work when she could have been washing her hair, but Caroline’s the first to admit she gets a lot of payback. This weekend Sky Lounge on Congress is hosting “The Miracle Bash,” a dance party and Miracle Foundation benefit featuring DJ Archit and DJ Sharma’s Karma. Get your groove on to some Bollywood, hip-hop, bhangra, and dance music and build up some karmic chits for your next hedonistic endeavor.

Republic of Texas Rally

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MAY 29, 2007

There are so many ways to kill yourself: Warm bath, razor blade; big baggie of barbiturates; exhaust rerouted through the car window; DIY hanging; high rise swan dive; shotgun blowjob (a celebrity favorite: Hemingway, Cobain). Yes, there are plenty of stylish and inventive ways to do yourself in, but if you want to go with something daring and spectacular, albeit with a slightly less predictable outcome, buy a motorcycle. Motorcycles are and ever have been … cool – sort of like smoking cigarettes. Combine the two and your coolness goes into warp drive. Feel free to throw in a few tattoos and maybe some leather pants and a leather jacket. Life is short and yours, statistically, will be even shorter. Might as well leave a beautiful corpse. (By the way, if you can afford it, go with Kevlar. Leather staves off some of the road rash, but your undertaker and next of kin will really appreciate the fact that you popped for the Kevlar.) You might want to spend a little extra on your bike as well. While it’s true that pretty much any motorized two-wheeler is cool, generally the bigger the better. Harleys are among the most massive. They’re also known as “hogs,” not because their parts are made of pig iron or as an allusion to the girth of their riders, but rather because during the 1920s a very successful motorcycle racing team in the South named the “Hog Boys” used to take a pig for a victory lap on the back of their winning Harley. Of course, that was back in the days when Harleys actually won races. These days, Harleys are the Clydesdales of the motorcycle world. Just about any lightweight Japanese crotch rocket can outrun a Harley in the quarter, but if you’re looking for a big, obnoxiously loud, anachronism of engineering that will wake up the neighbors and impress tube-top wearing high-school dropouts, you’re safer on a hog. Honda also makes some pretty big bikes. There’s the Goldwing, a favorite of retirees and pragmatists that is the two-wheeled equivalent of a Winnebago. You can fit two people comfortably on a Goldwing, but neither will probably be comfortable with the term, “Biker Bitch.” There’s also the Honda Valkyrie, which is a Harley knockoff of sorts. It’s also the most honestly named motorcycle on the market, borrowing its title from the Norse goddesses who carry souls into the afterlife – proof positive that the Japanese are not without a sense of irony. What next? Maybe the Honda Sumo? Of course big bikes come with big price tags, but you don’t necessarily need a big bike to speed your way to Valhalla. Plenty of people have met their maker on mopeds and electric scooters … and their maker wasn’t surprised at all. If you’re going to be price-conscious, leave the helmet at home and invest in a nice, colorful silk scarf. It will flap around like crazy even at low speeds and serve as an ineffective tourniquet when your leg gets lopped off by a drunk in a pickup. Really, the safest way to enjoy motorcycles is vicariously, and this weekend is the perfect opportunity to do just that when the Republic of Texas Motorcycle Rally rumbles into Austin. Friday night sometime after 7:30pm, a parade of some 60,000 bikes will sputter and fart their way from the Travis County Expo Center and to Congress Avenue. Following the parade will be two stages with live music and scantily clad women. Scheduled acts include Podunk, Butcherwhite, Patricia Vonne, the Meat Puppets, and Patrice Pike as well as performances by Big Star and Sideshow Burlesque and the girls from Coyote Ugly. After taking it all in you may still want to draw a warm bath, but for different reasons.

Emissions From the Monolith 9

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MAY 21, 2007

The weather has been suspiciously nice so far this year. Makes you wonder if part of the arctic ice shelf calved off and is bobbing around somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. Austin is many things in the month of May, but very rarely is it ever pleasant. Regardless of the size of your rent check, this isn’t Maui or even San Diego. Then again, maybe real estate prices have gotten so high the weather just decided to follow suit. Maybe all of those unfinished $500,000 condos Downtown are creating a “urban cool island” effect, dragging temperatures down in relation to the rise in trendy real estate offerings. It’s an unlikely and unscientific scenario to say the least, but with this kind of anomaly all bets are off. Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually pin it down? If we knew for a fact that this recent run of beautiful weather was the direct cause of, say, global warming? Would we all run out and buy Hummers? Spray our hair into huge pompadours and beehives? Leave the lights on all night? Fart incessantly? It might be worth it. So what if a few polar bears (fewer every year) and Emperor Penguins have to spend some extra pool time so we can enjoy some extra porch time? Seems like a fair enough trade. Both species look like they could lose a little weight anyway, and with the glaciers melting and the water getting warmer, they’re going to need to be in fighting trim – sort of like Al Gore in the 2000 election before he got cheated and decided to become an emissary of doom, which apparently demands queuing up at the same buffet line as the Emperor Penguins. Still, regardless of how ominous Al-mageddon’s pie charts and bar graphs look, things around here are considerably improved. Are we better off now than we were eight years ago? Climatologically, hells yes! The Lord surely works in mysterious ways, otherwise we would know what the fuck happened to all the bees. Maybe we should just roll with it and see where it goes. Of course, you might be one of those people who can’t take too much pleasantness and this shit is about to drive you crazy. Don’t worry, Emo’s has your back. This Thursday through Sunday they’re hosting Emissions From the Monolith 9, a music festival that just moved to town from Youngstown, Ohio (maybe it was cooler here?). EFTM9 should pack Emo’s dark hole with deafening, frog-throated heavy music from bands like Super Heavy Goat Ass, Alabama Thunderpussy, Dixie Witch, and Throttlerod as well as sweaty, fist-pumping tattooed fans. If you can survive four days with the volume knobs pegged on 11, this is your scene. If not, it’s really nice outside.

Benefit for Peter Stopschinski

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MAY 15, 2007

Yes, the world is a beautiful place, but the next time you’re standing dumbstruck, misting up over the pulchritude of that polyethylene shopping bag that’s dancing around in the whirlwind in the corner of the parking lot, give at least a little credence to the idea that someone in the bar might have slipped you a roofie and is about to donkey punch you and steal your wallet. Yeah, that’s the world you’re living in too: a cruel, heartless, dog-eat-dog death match where the ruthless and evil prey on the compassionate and good. Sometimes it’s easy to confuse the two. Sometimes you can be lulled into thinking that being good is good enough, that your evident virtues will protect you from evil and you’ll live out your days in peace and happiness. Wrong. If it didn’t even work for Jesus, why would it work for you? Jesus had God on his side (at least if you buy into the Christian side of the story) and what did it get him? A horrifying, tortuous gauntlet of pain and suffering followed by a slow, agonizing death. Sweet payoff. Is it any wonder the early Christians felt the need to sell resurrection as the sizzle on their burned Jesus steak? Talk about a tough close. There’s a story that needed a Hollywood ending. Can you blame them? Imagine if they’d only offered a couple of months at a timeshare on the Sea of Galilee? Jesus who? Seriously, if you’re going to lean over the plate and take a pitch like for the team, you’d at least like to come home with a win. Sure, it’s a noble endeavor to walk in the path of righteousness, but there is a fine line between “nice guy” and “chump,” and eventually, like Jesus, you’re going to make friends with someone’s enemy and they’re going to nail you to a cross and leave you to die. Yes, people are basically good, but they’re also pretty fucking evil too. They’re murderers and rapists and pedophiles and burglars and swindlers and well-meaning frat boys from Yale who believe they’re doing the right thing. How do they get there? How does someone end up in the right frame of mind to cheat, lie, steal, rape, or kill? Is it because they weren’t held enough as a baby? Not enough lithium in their diet? Lack of intelligence? A chemical imbalance? Video games? Too much coffee? There are no easy answers. The best you can hope for is to try to live a full life without cowering from the unexpected donkey punch – much like Austin musician and composer Peter Stopschinski, who is currently recovering from severe facial injuries suffered while walking to his car from Sixth Street on March 17. Stopschinski had stopped to assist a woman who was having trouble standing up and was jumped from behind and beaten repeatedly in the face. Although Stopschinski was insured, his treatment was not completely covered. This Saturday the Scoot Inn is hosting a benefit to help defray his medical expenses. The show starts at 5pm and features D.J. Lyman, Teddy and Marge, Captain Smoothe, the Invincible Czars, Grimey Styles, Duke, Pong, Delicious Food, Lick Lick, and Cat Scientist. Five dollars lets you walk in the path of righteousness – even if you’re packed in like a sardine.

Grace Foundation Benefit

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MAY 8, 2007

You know, you would be so cute if you just did something with your hair. Have you put on some weight? You look heavier. Are you pregnant? You look tired. Are you getting enough sleep? You look like you just got out of bed. That would explain why your clothes are wrinkled. It doesn’t help that you’re slouching. Stand up straight. Your posture is horrible. You’re going to develop a dowager’s hump. Are you getting enough calcium? Iron? Vitamin B12? How often do you exercise? When did you start smoking? Do you want to die early? Smoking turns your teeth yellow. When was the last time you went to the dentist? Do you floss regularly? You don’t want to get gum disease. Gum disease causes heart disease. Have you had that mole checked? It looks like it’s getting bigger. When was the last time you went to church? Have you met someone new or are you still dating that loser? The one with the tattoos and ear pegs who works at the sandwich shop? The one who smells like foot odor, bongwater, and moldy bread? How can you live in this dump? You should clean up. You can’t leave the dishes out overnight. You’re going to have rats and roaches and God knows what else. Have you considered moving to a nicer neighborhood? There was a homeless man on the corner wearing high heels and a leopard thong holding a cardboard sign that read, “Beer me.” Why don’t they arrest people like that? I hope you’re not drinking too much. Drinking is bad for your skin. You don’t want to become a shriveled up old alcoholic like the man in the leopard thong on the corner. How much do you pay for this place? I hope you carry pepper spray. I don’t think it’s safe around here. You take the bus to work? The bus smells like pee and poor people. You can’t walk alone at night. Are you trying to kill your mother? Poor timing to say the least, it’s Mother’s Day weekend. You need to pull yourself together long enough to make it through Sunday brunch – long enough to convince your mother she was better off not driving to Mexico for a cheap abortion. And would it kill you to pop for some flowers and a card? Probably not. It’s small payback for the woman who ravaged her taint trying to squeeze your hefty noggin out of her birth canal, but it’s better than doing nothing. Face it, there’s no way you’re ever going to repay that debt, but if you’re intent on squaring the deal, if only in a karmic sense, free up your calendar Saturday night for the second annual Grace Foundation benefit at La Zona Rosa. The Grace Foundation helps homeless children get back on the right track and become functioning members of society by providing basic health care, job placement, career training, and college funding – all the stuff you might have taken for granted – for young adults looking to get off the streets. Don’t worry, you won’t have to check homeless waifs for scurvy, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy a concert by Rock Star: Supernova finalist Patrice Pike, a live, onstage painting by Rolando Diaz, food, drinks, and a live auction. Now you really do have a reason to do something with your hair.

Cinco de Mayo Celebration

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APRIL 30, 2007

Saturday is Cinco de Mayo – the day that Mexicans, Americans, Mexican-Americans, and most importantly beer companies celebrate the huge ass whuppin’ Mexican Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza and his ragtag army laid on the French Foreign Legion nearly 200 years ago at the Battle of Puebla. Viva Zaragoza! The French were getting all up in our business anyway, trying to un-unite our states by supplying the Confederacy with guns and delicious, smooth, creamy French butter. Glorious as it sounds, the Battle of Puebla didn’t do much other than piss off Napoleon III, who followed up a year later with a surge of 29,000 more troops. They quickly marched into Mexico City and installed an Austrian prince named Maximilian as emperor. Max basically sat on his throne and dangled spit in Mexico’s face for four more years. Point is, sometimes when you lose you really win. Then again, sometimes when you win you really lose. Four years later Maximilian was executed by firing squad at the orders of exiled Mexican president Benito Juárez. Strike up the mariachis. Still, why do Americans celebrate a holiday that isn’t even a federal holiday in Mexico? Here’s why: The French don’t drink beer. Why? Beer is for winners. Sure, victories are sometimes celebrated with champagne (1998 World Cup), but the champagne isn’t for drinking, it’s for pouring over your teammates’ heads. First you spray down your locker room with champagne and Gatorade, then you go out with your buddies and “have a beer,” which is the Americanese term for binge drinking. The French might drink a little beer, maybe with something light like fish, or poultry, or frog legs in a nice cream sauce, but they hitched their chariots to wine a long, long time ago. They might live longer and thinner, but you’ll never see French people experiencing the joy of a keg stand, beer bong, or a lime wedge forced into the neck of a beer bottle. Sad really. They could probably figure it out (Aggies have), but like the Foreign Legion, their hearts aren’t in it. The bottom line on Cinco de Mayo is that Mexican-Americans needed their own beer holiday, and since beer drinkers don’t tend toward historical research, the beer companies chose Cinco de Mayo as a decent enough excuse to pimp cerveza. Not to mention it has nice assonance. The Irish-Americans have St. Paddy’s Day (snake charming?), the German-Americans have Octoberfest (nice weather?), the Italian-Americans have Columbus Day (apparently the New World fell off the back of a truck), and the French-Americans have Mardi Gras (which is half beer holiday and half fluorescent rum drink holiday, really, but the French are quirky like that). Why shouldn’t Mexican-Americans enjoy their own beer holiday? And if, after stacking their empty Tecate cans into impressive scale replicas of Teotihuacán and Quetzalcoatl, Mexican-Americans feel a blurry sense of ethnic pride, shouldn’t we thank the beer companies that reminded us about the holiday? One way to do just that is to spend Saturday in a bar drinking beer. To that end, Emo’s has an all-day lineup of Tex and Mex bands including Vatos Locos, Roger’s Porn Collection, Ese, Suicidal Failure, Hell’s Engine, 13th Victim, Spitting Bullets, Dickins, Panther Zora, Undertone, Los Hispanos UK, Sober Daze, Los de Verdad ,and King’s of Crime. They’re also having $2.50 margaritas all night long, but you don’t want to rob Peter (Coors) to pay Paul, do you?

Dale Watson Record Release

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APRIL 24, 2007

Nobody could argue that Dale Watson hasn’t lived up to his end of the bargain when it comes to keeping Austin weird. He may not parade around in a chartreuse banana hammock, twirl flowers on Sixth Street, or spout paranoid vitriol on late night access TV, but Dale still has enough quirks to peak most people’s freak meter. Unlike many of his country contemporaries, Dale brings it old skool 24/7. He rocks a Jethro (that’d be Beverley Hillbillies and not Tull) style pompadour, the upkeep of which probably requires vintage hair products found only on eBay or maybe a dusty bottom shelf in the back of some bordertown farmacia. He tools around on a big, fat Indian motorcycle, an anachronistic steel Clydesdale that looks like it was hand-crafted out of pig iron and buffed to a pearly shine by a small town blacksmith from the 1950s. He wears vintage clothes (or maybe they just look vintage when he’s wearing them) even when it’s blistering hot or freezing cold and every song he sings sounds like classic country regardless of what style music he’s singing. Most importantly, he never breaks character because he is the character. Unlike his idols, Watson wasn’t born in a sharecropper’s shack and he didn’t spend time in San Quentin. He’s a city boy born in Alabama and raised in the smoky stank of Pasadena, Texas, but, in the words of country legend David Allan Coe, “If that ain’t country, it’s a damn good joke.” Watson may be a living caricature of a classic country singer, but he’s definitely not a joke. Sure, he’s gone a little batshit crazy in recent years – and with good reason – but no one has ever doubted his sincerity. In fact, one of the things people love most about Dale Watson is that he can’t be anything other than Dale Watson. That’s a rare commodity in a time when most peoples’ intellectual and moral compasses are spinning off the post. Dale’s compass is always true north, and that makes him something of a freak, but maybe a freak isn’t such a bad thing to be – especially not in Austin. As weird as he is, fundamentally Dale is a really nice guy who went through some really hard times and came out reasonably intact. He’s the kind of stuff country music legends are made of, and if country music ever comes back in style, Dale will be carrying the standard. This Friday he’ll be at the Continental Club celebrating the release of his latest CD, From the Cradle to the Grave, which features 10 songs written by Dale in three days at Johnny Cash’s cabin in the Mountains of Tennessee – a cabin owned by Johnny Knoxville. Weird? Yes, but weird is often how legends are made.

Austin Reggae Fest

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APRIL 16, 2007

It’s spring. You should be outdoors. Don’t be a wuss about it, make an Allegra cocktail, grease up with some SPF 45, and find yourself a place in the sun while there’s still enough ozone to keep it from baking you into a corporeal crouton. Soon enough the ice caps are going to melt, and you’ll spend your days on the roof in your sandbag redoubt with an AK-47, picking off Houstonian refugees who appear to be intent on raiding your food supply. After all, everybody knows Houstonians are big feeders. Houston is the only city to threepeat as “Fattest City in America.” That would be all fine and dandy if Houston had spectacular indigenous cuisine like New Orleans or Chicago, but the finest cuisine in Houston can usually be found on an interstate frontage road (not necessarily roadkill) or ordered through a squawk box at a drive-through, so that reasoning doesn’t hold water. What does hold water in Houston is the air, which is why home-cooked meals thereabouts tend to be something marinated – usually in sweat. To be fair, there’s not much worth leaving the air-conditioning for in Houston anyway – food or otherwise. Sure, you can swim in the tepid brown waters of the Gulf or take a careful, meandering stroll along the beach through the dead jellyfish, oil-slick tar, and rusty syringes, but that’s technically only in the resort community of Galveston. In Houston, your best bet for exercise is the mechanical bull at Gilley’s or maybe the stripper pole at Rick’s Cabaret. Outdoor activities are most anaerobic, like smoking. Smoking allows Houstonians to burn up the remaining trace elements of oxygen that the refineries miss. Breathing in a couple packs of Virginia Slims a day is preferable to freebasing refinery emissions. Plus, Virginia Slims have filters. So, if you’re not feeling the urgency to get outside and enjoy what could be the final halcyon days before the apocalypse, sketch up a little mental scenario of hordes of starving, wheezing, sunburned, nicotine-deprived Houstonians thundering toward Austin like buffalo across the prairie, only slower … much, much slower. You may find yourself wanting to stockpile several million rounds of ammo just thinking about it, but you’re probably better off gathering your rosebuds while ye may – sort of like a Hummer owner. Get out there and enjoy Mother Nature while you drive a big rusty metal stake through her heart. One way to that this weekend is to fire up your SUV (the one with the Sierra Club bumper sticker) and four-wheel it down to Auditorium Shores for the Austin Reggae Fest, a two-day event featuring reggae and world music acts from across the US and beyond. Saturday’s lineup features seven bands including Austin’s Grimy Styles and is headlined by the Easy Star All-Stars, a collective of New York musicians responsible for releasing reggae versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Radiohead’s OK Computer. Sunday features seven more bands including Austin’s Mau Mau Chaplains and is headlined by Jamaican artists Morgan Heritage. Entrance is $10 plus two donations to the Capital Area Food Bank, which, if nothing else, may buy you a little more time to fortify your redoubt when the ice caps melt.

Chaparral’s 25th Anniversary Party

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APRIL 9, 2007

Last Saturday it sleeted. In April. In Austin. That can’t be a good sign. This Saturday you may want to pack a Kevlar umbrella for the plague of amphibians that will surely rain down – probably frogs or toads, but you don’t want to rule out Barton Springs salamanders. The Almighty is not without a sense of irony. Who invented irony in the first place, right? It wasn’t George W. Bush, although he would certainly be on the multiple-choice test. So anyway, what next? Will the Colorado River run red? Blood red? Something has to be causing that horrible stench. We’re already up to our ear holes in gnats and flies, which inevitably seems to beget a plague of ineffectual Ziploc baggies filled with water and pennies. Unhealable boils? They’re called herpes. Most estimates show that more than 60% of the population has either simplex 1 or 2. That’s a plague by even the most conservative standards, but don’t go painting your doorpost with lamb’s blood just yet. We still have fire, locusts, and darkness to cross off our lists. Fire is actually the tastiest of the three Taco Bell sauces although hardly spicy enough to justify its name. It is a plague nonetheless (though maybe not as calamitous as their Chihuahua ads) because of the insipid quotes printed on the back of the packet, presumably so TB could print the ingredients in an even smaller, more illegible font. Could be potassium sorbate, could be sodium benzoate, could be pureed locust extract. Taco Bell would certainly need a plague of locusts to fill all those packets, wouldn’t they? If last Saturday is any indication, the Lord will provide. As for the Darkness, they’ve pretty much become passé since their second album tanked, Justin Hawkins went to rehab, and Dan Hawkins’ guitar tech became the frontman. That doesn’t mean they won’t rise like a phoenix from the ashes and unleash a whole new plague of arena rock on us, but it does make it less likely. If you want to hear a truly interesting take on some arena rock, head down to the Continental Club this Saturday night when Jeff Hughes and Chaparral celebrate their 25th Anniversary. No one does a better countrified cover of “Sweet Child of Mine,” or “You Shook Me All Night Long,” but Chaparral has been earning its keep since 1987 by keeping the dance floor packed by playing an interesting blend of traditional country, interesting covers, and well written originals. Any band that lasts more than a year or two in Austin deserves a medal, and by that standard Chaparral deserves a plague of medals – or at least a plague of silver dollars in the tip jar.

Urban Music Festival

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APRIL 2, 2007

If you’re too young to remember the O’Jays, outstanding. You’re right in the Chronicle’s target demographic – or at least on the very fringes of it. If you’re old enough to remember actually dancing to the O’Jays, you’re probably wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet and living in Sun City. Congratulations on scoring a copy of the Chronicle. Kudos as well for actually flipping back to the personals – even if it is just an amusing stopover on your way back to the escort agency ads. Hey, just because your skin has more grooves than an old 45 of “Love Train” doesn’t mean you still can’t get on it every now and then. Right? Doesn’t mean you can’t pop a few Viagra, slip on a Hawaiian shirt (don’t break a hip trying to be hip) and ride the golf cart down to the activity center to troll for some senior strange. At your age, every girl used to be somebody’s girl – maybe even your girl depending on whether you’re keeping up with your Alzheimer’s meds. Even still, you can bet that girl’s got plenty good lovin’, and while no one would argue that the smooth skin, flexibility, and enthusiasm of youth hold their allure, there’s plenty to be said for someone who will fuck you like there’s no tomorrow … literally. That’s probably why you’re always getting cock-blocked by that surprisingly nimble nonagenarian with the dowager’s hump and the tennis-ball walker. He knows: Experience is priceless. He also probably has an original copy of “Brandy” queued up back at his condo. If the preceding sentence confuses you, “Brandy” is sort of an aural roofie for anyone who peaked sexually in the disco era. That’s a huge list, one that probably includes your parents and maybe even their parents. Yes, their musical minds may have wandered into unhealthy realms like arena rock, new folk, jazz, or any of Sting’s post-Police releases, but their asses still belong to groups like the O’Jays, and sweet, soulful songs like “Brandy.” If you want to find out why, beat it over to Auditorium Shores Saturday for the Urban Music Festival. Starting at 11am you get to hear some of the best local jazz, R&B, and hip-hop followed by Atlanta neo-soul singer Anthony David, Minnesota R&B artists Mint Condition, 80s funk band Cameo (word up!), and the aforementioned authors of “Love Train,” “Used to Be My Girl” and “Brandy.” You may still be too young to be experienced, but you can at least show the requisite enthusiasm.

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.