Month: April 2022

Beard Prom

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 26, 2011

American Legion Hall

Your beard may look ridiculous, but here’s some good news: You can shave it off. You can’t say that about your My Chemical Romance armband tattoo. Sure, you might have been a cutter, but you probably don’t have the sack (or unexpressed emotional pain) for a bloodbath like that. Maybe it’s best that you stick with grungy long-sleeve shirts, ratty jorts, and the type of beard Moses brought back with the Ten Commandments. After all, God has a beard, and He made us in His image, right? Of course by that reasoning, God must have an uncircumcised penis, an appendix, and possibly a disturbing amount of back hair. Jesus, on the other hand, was circumcised, but only because circumcision is prescribed in the Bible, which, it turns out, is the word of God. How perfect is that? Jesus also rocked a beard, but unlike God, his was more of a high school guidance counselor beard – the kind you wear to show you have feelings. As for back hair – apparently that went out with the Old Testament. If current trends are any indication, however, back hair is poised to make a comeback. No one could have imagined that so many seemingly intelligent young men would willingly abandon thousands of years of personal grooming evolution just so they could hide their ironic smirks. That would be crazy … especially now that the Gillette Fusion ProGlide is available. Five blades, motherfucker, five blades! Not even Axe’s ball scrubber can outshine that type of brilliance. One blade lifts. One blade cuts. The other three define the term “redundancy.” Oh those scruffy-faced, dirty-sacked old-timers with their twin blades and shower puffs! Such crude and ineffective implements are enough to make men abandon grooming altogether. Maybe that explains why so many young men these days look like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Then again, maybe it doesn’t. There is a certain hipster cachet in sporting a look that says, “I’m just too lazy to give a fuck,” even when you aren’t. And really, the harder you work that angle, the more it seems like you’re trying. You think Billy Gibbons just woke up one morning and said, “What is all this shit?” Well actually, considering the copious amounts of drugs ZZ Top probably has access to, that’s a real possibility, but if you’re walking around sporting Ambrose Burnside-style mutton chops or a Rollie Fingers handlebar mustache, you’ve fully crossed the Rubicon of mindless sloth and into the territory of consciously cultivated narcissism. No shame in that game, just own up to it. Better yet, flaunt it. This Confederate generals facial-hair craze isn’t going to last forever. Soon enough Gillette will invent a pre-lubed razor with seven blades, and we’ll all be as smooth and hairless as a baby’s ass. If you’re running short on places to flaunt your chin varmint, you’re in luck this Friday, because that’s when the Austin Facial Hair Club is throwing its first-ever Beard Prom, a full evening dedicated to the celebration of that which makes you look more heterosexual than you really are. You know … facial hair. Check it: Appetizers, raffle tickets, prom photo booth, DJs from Second Sunday Sock Hop, and, most importantly, an open bar. That alone is worth growing a quick George Michael.

Austin Gorilla Run

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 19, 2011

City Hall

Jogging is uncomfortable, time consuming, hot, sweaty, boring, and, most of all, exhausting, but jogging in a gorilla suit is just fucking silly. Really. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Not even a gorilla would jog in a gorilla suit … and not just because it would be creepy, but because gorillas, being primates, are smarter than that. Unlike those of us higher up the primate order, gorillas know what it’s like to actually wear a gorilla suit, and there are just certain things you don’t do in a gorilla suit. One of those is jog. Beat your chest? Check. Jump up and down with your arms curled at your sides? Yep. Swing through the trees on vines? Of course. Delouse your buddies? Definitely. Jog? Nuh-uh. Why go to all that effort when you could be lollygagging around in the grass munching on foliage? Gorillas can run, yes … on their hind legs even. They max out at about 20 feet – which is plenty enough distance for even the most ambitious primate. Why should humans in gorilla suits be any different? Besides, you don’t need to run in a gorilla suit to realize it’s a bad idea. Just put one on and wait a few minutes. There’s nothing like polyester fur and black rubber for working up a prolific schvitz. As long as you’re at it, you might as well pop some peyote and make it a real sweat lodge experience. You may not cross the finish line, but once the mescaline kicks in, you won’t even remember you were racing to begin with. Look at it this way: Anytime you wear a gorilla suit, it’s a vision quest, so you might as well make it official. Those eyeholes don’t offer a lot of peripheral – just enough of a window to let in a little fresh air, a margarita straw, or the wet tongue of a mischievous friend. After all, if you’re wearing a gorilla suit, you pretty much have to expect to get pranked. It’s part of the territory. You can’t go sashaying around town in a gorilla suit without consequences. What self-respecting gang of disaffected adolescents would allow you to pass within a stone’s throw and not chuck a few at you? You should expect a fair ration of slaps on the ass, “kick me” signs, and occasional mountings by Great Danes … or even just plain Danes. Danes are fetishy like that. Oh well, if you’re going to draw attention to yourself, you have to expect some of it to be negative, right? One thing is for certain, a big (or even small) group of gorillas, whether fake or real, is going to attract attention, and that’s the point, really. The plight of the mountain gorillas in Central Africa doesn’t get a lot of play here in Central Texas. We’ve got our own species to endanger and enough genuinely good causes to keep us impoverished until kingdom come. A city can only do so much, right? Austin may be nearly tapped out philanthropically, but when it comes to a sense of irony and a love of dorkiness, our wealth is limitless. This is exactly what makes Saturday’s first-ever Austin Gorilla Run so ingenious. It might be difficult to get a few hundred people to fork over money for endangered mountain gorillas that are half a world away, but getting people in Austin to run around in gorilla suits? Slam dunk! That’s exactly the type of ridonkulous nerdfest that whips the locals into a lather. This Saturday you can join those locals as they run, walk, skate, and bike their way through the streets of Austin in support of the mountain gorillas. Plus, after it’s all over, you get to keep the gorilla suit … and maybe even all the new silly friends you made.

FronteraFest Short Fringe

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 12, 2011

Hyde Park Theatre

Not all silence is awkward. Some silence is golden. Some silence is blissful. Some silence is deadly – especially the silence that happens in the Car2Go after a gluttonous, hog-trough-feeding binge at Mr. Natural. Raise the little white flag and roll down the window. Some people are silent – sometimes, we are told, a majority of them. Others are singularly silent, often for reasons unknown to anyone else. Some people just like to keep people guessing. Confucius once said, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” It’s a good bet that some wiseass at the back of the room followed that platitude with: “Hey Confucius! Shut the fuck up!” Ironically, the Confucian silence quote is also attributed to Abraham Lincoln, who could have used a little less silence at Ford’s Theatre. If only someone would have shouted: “Duck Abe! He’s got a gun!” It probably seemed like a foolish thing to shout at the time, what with the play going on and all. Some silent people are thoughtful and intelligent; others are just plain stupid. It’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. Some silent people are scary, which is an excellent argument for not encouraging silence. With silent types, you really never know what’s bouncing around up there. It might be the cure for cancer or an elegantly proven grand unified field theory, but it might be a screenplay for The Human Centipede. The scary truth is that there are some things in life you may not want to know but probably should before it’s too late. Terrorists aren’t particularly chatty – neither are Mafia hit men. Why would they be? Dead people don’t talk. If they did, the first thing they would probably say is, “I wish someone would have said something.” After all, isn’t the hallmark of evolutionary advancement the ability to communicate? Isn’t that what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? Who knows? Oysters might be some wicked-smart motherfuckers, but until they learn to use their words or, to set the bar slightly lower, develop a brain stem, their lot in life is to be served on the halfshell. Being able to build your own home and make your own jewelry isn’t proof of intelligence – no matter what Martha Stewart would have you believe. Where does that leave the starfish? Let it speak for itself. The important thing is that everyone should speak up so we know who the stupid, crazy, and scary people are. That, in essence, is the genius of the First Amendment: Calling out the crazies so we can keep an eye on those bastards. Censorship only drives the nut jobs underground – where they’re more dangerous. So the next time you hear something spoken that is completely, abominably outrageous, make sure to send up a hearty hurrah! Help keep all the crazies in the open so they don’t sneak up and stab us in the back. Support free speech in all its glorious and disturbing forms. Speaking of, you can get a bit of both at FronteraFest, Austin’s own fringe theatre festival. The Short Fringe runs through Feb. 12 at Hyde Park Theatre, and the Long Fringe runs through Jan. 30 at the Salvage Vanguard Theater and the Blue Theatre. This Thursday you can catch a full night of Short Fringe performances at the Hyde Park Theatre. Check out Elevator Action, a comedic journey on an improvised elevator; The Priceless Slave, the true story of an antebellum slave architect; Dirty, Nerdy and Unemployed, poetry by Jacob Dodson; Route 307, an autobiographical sketch about the life of a mailman; and a sketch comedy performance called 4 Hole Punch. Rest assured, if there is silence on this night, it will probably be awkward.

First Friday Frolic

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January 5, 2011

Club de Ville CLOSED

It’s scary out there. Birds are dropping from the sky. Fish are washing up dead. Crazy shit is happening. The good news is that it’s mostly in Arkansas, and Arkansas is always scary and crazy. Then again, God may just be pissed about the new Walmart logo, which is surely by now universally acknowledged as a line-art replica of a puckered anus. Hey Waltons, times are bad, but do we need to be reminded of it by the old red-eye (well, technically it’s yellow, which may be a nod – wink? – at Walmart’s largest trading partner)? More likely it’s symbolic of how the average Walmart customer feels when shopping there. It’s like a little, yellow warning sign that says if you want low, low prices, you’re going to have to bend over. As for the birds and fish, it seems unlikely that God would take his Wal-wrath out on them, but God always seems to throw curveballs when it comes to moral logic. For instance: The Haitian earthquake. Dude, WTF? Sure, the Haitians are big pot smokers and dabble in voodoo – hell, some of them probably even occasionally engage in acts of sodomy – but that shit seems a little much, especially when there are so many other more deserving assholes. Maybe God hasn’t yet invented smart-wrath technology. Maybe that earthquake in Haiti was supposed to smite Osama bin Laden and God missed by a few thousand miles. Hey, it’s a big universe, so it’s probably a miracle He was within a few light years, right? By that measure the floods in Pakistan were nearly a bull’s-eye. Who knows? It’s possible God actually did smite Osama with the Pakistani floods. Osama can’t be much of a swimmer with that bum kidney and hipster beard. Glub glub. If he’s still alive, well, he’s going to catch hell when he gets to hell, that’s for sure. Then again, maybe Satan will go easy on him for being such a massive dickhead. If hell has a VIP section, you have to think Osama has earned a spot in it. Walmart, on the other hand, may be evil, but it hasn’t yet busted its homicidal cherry. If there was money in it, maybe, but Walmart would prefer to keep you around to enjoy its shitty, plastic-tasting food and cheaply made, ill-fitting clothing until you die from cadmium poisoning. Hey, if you want to live longer, don’t suck on your Chinese-made plastic jewelry. In fact, you should probably ask yourself why you’re buying Chinese-made plastic jewelry in the first place. Maybe God actually does have smart-wrath technology, but it only works on stupid people. That doesn’t help explain the dead birds in Arkansas however. Yes, birds are stupid, but they’re intelligently designed to be stupid. You can’t fault them for that. They are, by nature, bird-brained. They are also blessed with the undeniable innocence of the simpleminded. So really, the best explanation must be that those birds in Arkansas were the beginning of the Rapture. Yep, it’s the end of times, and apparently those nitwitted critters scored first-class seats on the flight to eternal bliss. Either that or they made first contact with some really hostile aliens. Either scenario doesn’t bode well, so it’s time to seriously ramp up the partying. Good thing it’s Free Week down on Red River. No cover charge means you can spend more money on booze – booze that kills brain cells, ideally the ones that are stressing about the dead birds. Get your party started at Club de Ville, a laid-back bar with reasonably priced drinks and skilled bartenders. This Friday, the free weekend kicks off with First Friday Frolic, a gratis lineup of local acts including BK & Mr. E, Eagle Eye Williamson, Erin Ivey, Monarchs, Stereo Is a Lie, One Hundred Flowers, DJ I Wanna Be Her, and DJ uLOVEi. Rest assured the beats will carry you away before the Rapture does.

ew Year’s Eve With the Diamond Smugglers and Pong

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December 29, 2010

Continental Club

Good to finally put a fork in 2010. The prepubescence of the 21st century has been hell so far, but maybe things will turn around in 2011. After all, it’s a brand-new year, right? Anything can happen, and that’s sort of the problem. We’re currently overwhelmed by ominous signs of an impending apocalypse, and God may not be merciful enough to smite us with a huge asteroid or crush us with a black hole. It might be much uglier than that. The world financial system might collapse. The ice caps might melt. Justin Bieber might get married. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to get the sneaking suspicion that God is just one more dumbass mortal fuckup away from shaking the creationary Etch A Sketch. In fact, at this point the Mayan calendar would seem like a pretty good bet if it weren’t for the fact that the Mayans were into human sacrifice and worshiped a corn god (they call it maize). The end of days may indeed be upon us, but before you start burying gold in your backyard or learning how to tread water indefinitely, consider that there may still be a way out of this mess: Learning from our mistakes. Yes, we can keep fighting the same stupid wars, filling our engines with dinosaur juice, and buying mountains of useless plastic crap, but it doesn’t mean we have to. As the saying goes, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Thus, in the spirit of evolutionary progression, here is a short laundry list of the mistakes of 2010 that we should avoid repeating: 1) Hipster beards. Just fucking quit it. You look ridiculous. An overabundance of facial hair is perfectly fine for lumberjacks, Hasidic Jews, hermits, and fat old Mexican ladies, but on a 23-year-old bartender wearing a Hot Topic Misfits T-shirt and skinny jeans, it just looks stupid. That shit is over – just like full-sleeve tattoos and cock-ring-sized ear gauges. Hint: If you think you look like David Cross or Iron & Wine (fuck you, we know his name is Sam Beam), you probably actually look like the Lucky Charms leprechaun or Al from Home Improvement – and no, that doesn’t make you ironic; it makes you a douche. Shave that shit off, and let your girlfriend use it as a merkin. 2) Clothing with tattoo designs. Call it Ed Hardy or Christian Audigier or Rue 21 – just call it over. Anytime your shirt looks like the one being worn by the chubby singer from Rascal Flatts, it’s time for a wardrobe rethink. Plus, if you’re too much of a pussy to actually get a crucifix tattooed on your skin, having a BeDazzled one on your clothing doesn’t make up for it. 3) Fedoras. No. If you want to look like your grandfather, start drinking Old Crow and chain-smoking Pall Malls. A fedora just makes you look like a Josh Groban wannabe … or worse yet, Kid Rock. 4) Scarves/kaffiyeh/whatever. If it has tassels and looks like you stole it from a dead Taliban, it doesn’t belong on you, much less your Labrador. Scarves are never appropriate in Austin. Ever. Not even if you have a neck wattle like Andy Griffith. 5) Vibram Five Fingers. This is an evolutionary shoe design in that it attempts to prove you descended from monkeys by making you look like one. Either that, or it’s proof that the Italians hate us. Either way, the only appropriate time for wearing these shoes is if you’re getting shrimped by a South African prostitute. 6) Snarky comments about meaningless fashion trends. There are bigger, more important fish to fry, aren’t there? Yes, of course there are, but no one wants to read about BP oil spills, global warming, or dying whale otters (Seriously? Did you just try to iPhone that?), much less do something about them. It’s a brand-new year. Time to party! If you’re one of those people who like making fun of what other people take seriously, then you are going to love New Year’s Eve at the Continental Club, where cherished Neil Diamond tribute band The Diamond Smugglers will be holding forth along with local space groovers Pong. No one skewers the Diamond like the Smugglers, and Pong is the perfect antidote for the smirking arm folders who will surely attend. At least if 2011 swirls further into the shitter, you’ll be able to say you finished 2010 on a high note.

Armadillo Christmas Bazaar

The Luv Doc Recommends

December 22, 2010

Palmer Events Center

There are probably a few money shots left to be fired in your annual orgy of excess. Sure, the economy is deep in the shitter and the red Chinese have us by the shorthairs, but that isn’t conclusive evidence that you need to rein in your consumerism. Who knows? America may only be a few hundred million maxed-out credit cards away from economic salvation. One thing is for certain: You’re not going to kick-start an economic recovery by sitting home singing Christmas carols, drinking eggnog, and stringing together popcorn garlands. That’s exactly the kind of tedious sweatshop work we used to pawn off on Third World orphans. Think about it: If stringing popcorn garlands is so fun, why isn’t there a Nintendo Wii game based on it? Even golf has a Wii game, and golf is just slightly more exciting than an afternoon nap … or maybe death itself – which may explain why so many old people play it. All golf requires is that you move slightly faster than the grass growing beneath your feet. If you can’t do that, just rent a golf cart – or buy a Wii. Wiis might be made by the Japanese, but they’re as American as apple pie. After all, this country was founded on the idea that if you work hard enough, eventually you can afford something or someone that will do the work for you. Remember when Tom Sawyer had to paint his Aunt Polly’s fence? He conned the neighborhood kids into doing it for him. Tom Sawyer is an American hero – just like the young men and women in our armed forces who pilot attack drones. Drone piloting surely lacks the glamour of humping it through the Helmand River Valley with 100-plus pounds of assorted gear and weaponry, but it definitely gets the job done, proving yet again that with enough money nearly anything is possible. Stringing popcorn garlands and singing Christmas carols doesn’t pay for attack drones or swarms of poison-injecting assassin nanobots. Buying a Nintendo Wii does, however. It also provides good training for the war of the future. Sharpened sticks are out; joysticks are in. Someday, if Americans can just cough up the cash, the roughly 1.4 million active U.S. military personnel in the world will all be equipped with their own predator drone and pocketful of poison-injecting assassin nanobots. That way they can sit safely in some underground bunker and unleash unmitigated hell on whichever unfortunate meat puppet has the audacity to challenge truth, justice, and the American way. As always, the tricky part to making this happen is coming up with the money. We can’t just ask the red Chinese to fork over trillions of dollars for us to build an unstoppable remote-controlled robot army. The red Chinese are not chumps. We have to backdoor this deal by mindlessly running up our credit-card debt. That will put the economy on hyperdrive and allow for some really lavish defense spending. Yes, at some point the red Chinese will try to collect their money, but all our military might rest assured that the knock on America’s door will be a very polite, timid tap. Of course, if you’re going to spend money to preserve America’s military world dominance, there’s no better place to do it than at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, which runs daily from 11am to 11pm through Christmas Eve at the Palmer Events Center. The Armadillo Christmas Bazaar is an Austin institution and a great place to purchase unique and interesting gifts made by Austin-area artists. You’ll also get to hear live music performed by some of Austin’s most beloved bands. Who knows? Something this fun might eventually end up on a Nintendo Wii … or maybe some things are just too much fun for a joystick.

Randy Willis 15th Annual Pickin’ on Christmas and Birthday Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

December 13, 2010

Dallas Nightclub

Dec. 25 is just around the corner, and the war on Christmas is really heating up. Not only is Christmas under heavy assault from the politically correct left, who for years have been insidiously leaving the “Christ” out of Christmas or nixing the entire name in favor of the more generic and inclusive “holidays,” it is also taking a huge hammering from corporate greedmongers with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets who quite wisely have appropriated the symbols of Christmas if maybe not the actual name. Big business is all over Christmas like a wet Santa suit, and why wouldn’t it be? After all, appropriating other peoples’ holidays is a tradition that dates all the way back to Adam – yeah, that Adam. Christmas itself has been a big holiday ever since it was Saturnalia. That Roman gift-giving holiday was a stroke of genius, and the early Christians knew it. Of course, they had to gloss over the fact that Jesus wasn’t much of a shopper. Far from it. Jesus was actually a bit of a hippie (or maybe his beard was just ironic, and he rocked a pair of jorts under that tunic). He was also a peace creep and an unrepentant (imagine that) inclusionist. He was down with the lepers, the hos, the paralytics, the blind (which probably translates as “visually impaired” in Nazarean), the mentally ill, the sick, the dead, and, most importantly, the poor. Back in the first century, the poor people smelled nearly as bad as the dead ones, so caring for the poor was really taking one for Team Yahweh, so to speak. Really, the only thing that really got under Jesus’ skin (besides a crown of thorns, some 9-inch nails, and a centurion’s lance) was when he saw that moneychangers had set up shop in the temple of Jerusalem. Jesus went Billy Jack and started turning over tables, setting doves and livestock free … all that shit. It’s fairly safe to say that Jesus wasn’t much of a materialist. If anything, he was hostile to materialism. Jesus didn’t ride into Jerusalem on a chariot with spinny rims; he rode in on an ass. That’s a statement. That’s like Obama rolling up to the White House on a shitty moped. Jesus didn’t wear bling or nice clothes. He didn’t dine at fancy restaurants or go clubbing with his posse. Instead, he walked around with a growling stomach and dropped mindbombs on his disciples – stuff like, “Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor.” Boooom! Given that sentiment, it seems rather obvious that these days Christmas itself is a war on Christianity. Best Buy isn’t having a “Give to the Poor” sale. That Mercedes with a bow tied around it isn’t waiting outside a homeless camp. Those Zales holiday charm bracelets won’t end up on the arms of war orphans. If Jesus were alive today (at least in a materialistic sense), he’d be waging his own war on Christmas. He’d probably be lobbying to have his name taken out of Christmas entirely. What would Christmas be without the Christ? Just “mas,” which means “more” in Spanish and pretty much nails the spirit of the season. At least then no one would have to fret over the war on Christmas and everyone could continue buying mas shit they don’t need without the nagging guilt of Christian morality. Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it? Until then we’ll just have to settle for rampant materialism slowed by occasional attempts at Christian charity. One of those is happening this Saturday at Dallas Nightclub, where local music impresario Randy Willis is hosting his 15th annual Pickin’ on Christmas and Birthday Party, a live music concert benefiting the Travis County Brown Santa Toy Drive. For the price of one toy, you can see a lineup that includes Johnny Rodriguez, Vallejo, LC Rocks, Jeff Gallagher, the Cheyenne Band, Steven Franks, and Lucas Cook. That’s a lot of music for only one toy. Maybe you can bring mas.

SIMS Benefit Bash

The Luv Doc Recommends

December 8, 2010

Austin Music Hall

Mental health is a bit of a sticky wicket – especially where musicians are concerned. It’s no wonder. The constant vacillation between unbridled egomania and soul-crushing self-doubt is bound to leave a few frayed ends. It’s difficult enough for the average person to cobble together a sense of identity and self-worth. Musicians tend to compound the difficulty by pressuring themselves to be much more interesting than they really are – to be larger than life. The type of wacky, harebrained behavior that would land the average person in the loony bin (if such bins still existed) is actually tolerated and even encouraged in musicians. After all, normal isn’t very entertaining is it? The result is a whole slew of aberrant dress and bizarre behavior. Consider the questionably pedophiliac, body-mutilating, androgynous insanity of Michael Jackson (arguably one of the greatest entertainers of all time), or the karate chopping, UFO-sighting, rhinestone jumpsuit-wearing (also questionably pedophiliac) Elvis, who may or may not have been involved with the FBI, CIA, and extraterrestrials. Throw in a goat, a monkey, and a 50-gallon drum of Vaseline, and you have one seriously bizarre clusterfuck. Unfortunately, in the music world that’s the kind of thing it takes to get noticed. Liberace was probably at one time a fairly unremarkable Polish kid from Wisconsin; Madonna was just a high school cheerleader from Pontiac, Mich.; the members of Kiss were just hardworking metal musicians from the boroughs; and GG Allin was just a boy from Vermont who was born with the name Jesus Christ Allin, cross-dressed for the last three years of high school, did a stint at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and made a career(?) out of urinating, defecating, flinging feces, bleeding, and vomiting onstage. OK, so maybe Jesus was crazier than a shit-house rat from start to finish, but he still managed to get gigs, and that’s the point really. In the music business, there is always someone willing to encourage and reward insanity. Lady Gaga is a pretty good singer and all, but could she make it without the meat dress? Or the bubble dress? Or the Kermit the Frog dress? At some point her career will slow down and she’ll end up paying Franc Fernandez to design her a dress out of dalmatian puppy hides, human placentas, or maybe circumcised foreskins. At some point you either decide to wear the hamster carcass earrings or end up doing matinee shows in Branson, Mo. In music, you’re either on your way up or on your way down. In one night you can go from windmilling power chords in front of a club full of screaming fans to washing your underwear in a gas station restroom on the interstate. One month your album is at the top of the charts; the next month it’s not even on the charts. One night you’re on Leno, the next night you’re on Leno. It’s no surprise that many musicians try to even out the peaks and valleys with drugs and alcohol, which are always easily available. Often as not, they only amp up the insanity, and bartenders and drug dealers aren’t necessarily predisposed or trained to deal with complex emotional and psychological issues – especially if they’re not getting paid. Thankfully Austin has an organization that offers musicians opportunities to seek help from people who are trained to deal with psychological and substance abuse issues. It’s called the SIMS Foundation, and this Saturday it’s hosting the SIMS Benefit Bash at the Austin Music Hall, a fundraising concert featuring a who’s who of Austin Musicians: Eliza Gilkyson, Ian McLagan, Will Sexton, David Garza, Graham Reynolds, Kat Edmonson, Don Harvey, Brownout, Lauren Larson, Ruby Jane Smith, Amy Cook, Mark Andes, and Scrappy Jud Newcomb, among others. For less than the price of a round of Jäger shots, you can show some musicians how much you appreciate them in a way that actually does them some good.

Holiday Hat Party 2010

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December 1, 2010

Speakeasy

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote: “A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” When you have a fat Irish head the size of P.J. O’Rourke’s, those are definitely words to live by. There is also a strong case against hats being made by the resurgence of straw fedoras – especially those worn in conjunction with clothing featuring tattoo designs. Wearing a straw hat with a Christian Audigier knockoff shirt doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a douche; it just means you probably shop where they shop. Is that so wrong? Not everyone can rock a chapeau like Justin Timberlake, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. It seems to be working for Jason Mraz and Kid Rock (and really, as long as you’re going to rip off other people’s music …). There’s nothing inherently wrong with wearing an interesting old hat that you found in a thrift store or your grandfather’s attic. However, if you’re wearing a hat you found in the accessories aisle at Walmart, you just might be a douche. Don’t worry though; the mere fact that you found it at Walmart means that there are thousands, if not millions, of other people who did exactly the same thing, so you’re not alone. Plus you probably saved the job of some 8-year-old Chinese orphan. Here’s the thing: Straw fedoras aren’t inherently douchey, they just end up on the heads of a lot of douches. Straw fedoras don’t make douches in the same sense that guns don’t kill people. It’s a symbiotic relationship at best. The crazy thing is that hats are every bit as utilitarian as any other piece of haberdashery. Baseball caps keep the sun out of your eyes, stocking caps keep your head warm, hard hats prevent head injuries, and cowboy hats attract drunk blond chicks. Not surprisingly, hat types are myriad and vary in relation to functionality. There are some hats, however, that seem to serve no purpose other than to just look fucking ridiculous. You might be tempted to lump Kid Rock’s fedora into this group, but that might be a mistake. Think about the big, foam cowboy hats you see at football games (really, any hat made of foam is ridiculous – be it a leprechaun, pimp, cheese, or pirate). Top hats and bowlers are pretty F’d up too (well, except for the one Lena Olin wore in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), so are beer caps, fezzes, yarmulkes, huge sombreros, and pretty much anything worn at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Keep in mind: There is no shame in wearing a truly ridiculous hat. The mere fact you’re wearing it means you’re comfortable with sacrificing your dignity and ego, and nothing is cooler than a willingness to be a complete dork. If you want to get in on some serious dork action this weekend, you need look no further than Speakeasy. Friday night it’s hosting Holiday Hat Party 2010, a fundraiser for Florence’s Comfort House featuring music by Dysfunkshun Junkshun, Aquadrums, and Tyler Guthrie. There will also be drink specials and a tequila tasting – as if holiday hats aren’t fun enough.

Marmalakes, the Frontier Brothers, Mother Falcon

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 23, 2010

Parish – Closed

Simmer down, Aggies, simmer down. Yes, the rotting corpse smell of the Longhorn football season has you deranged and howling like a pack of starved coyotes, but remember: Like Jesus, the Longhorns will rise again. Texas may be 5-6, but they’re still sick with talent. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Dixie Chicken, the Bush Library, and the Animal Husbandry Barn aren’t the highlights of the Longhorns’ recruiting trip. Down on the Forty Acres, recruiting is a bit more of a slam dunk. All Texas has to do to land a Top 10 recruit is to take him to 50-cent wings night at Sugar’s. College Station doesn’t even have a Sugar’s … or even a Yellow Rose or a Landing Strip … unless maybe you count the Animal Husbandry Barn, which is sort of like the Chain Drive only much bigger, smellier, and freakier. Needless to say, College Station’s quaint charms don’t appeal to everyone, so when the Ags have a respectable season, you have to give them props. It’s not easy to Shanghai decent athletes to College Station – certainly not intelligent ones, so big ups to Mike Sherman and crew for cobbling together a winning Aggie team this year. Other than former A&M legend Jackie Sherrill – a true innovator with the insane brilliance to use livestock castration as a motivational tool – few heirs to the Aggie coaching throne have shown as much promise as Sherman, whose competence and sacrifice is rewarded with a paltry $1.8 million a year contract (the kind of chump change that Mack Brown keeps next to his toilet). For such a meager sum, it’s amazing Sherman even crawls out of bed in the morning, but somehow this year he and the Aggies have put together an 8-3 record. That’s a complete turnaround from the Aggies 4-8 season in 2008 when he began his sentence. Fortunately Sherman’s stint as head coach at Green Bay was good training for his return to Aggieland. He now knows that the bitchiness and petulance of a highly recruited college athlete are nothing compared to that of an NFL player making 10 times the coaches’ salary. At least you can bully a college kid with curfews, extra laps, and harsh, withering looks. If it gets really ugly, you can even tell the boosters to stop leaving envelopes full of cash in his locker (remember, this is A&M) or, worst-case scenario, cut off his supply of steroids. Whatever Sherman is doing, even if he’s hacking the nuts off a bull before every game, it seems to be having a positive effect. Mack Brown, on the other hand, seems to have spent the last nine months tooling around town in his bling’d out Mercedes, snorting rails of coke off the bare asses of coeds, and breaking mirrors with his maniacal, high-pitched Appalachian cackle. While it’s true that kind of playa lifestyle never hurts recruiting, it can cut into the actual coaching. After a humiliating six-loss season, it’s safe to assume that Brown is now back on task. He may have grown a little soft in the middle – possibly even the prefrontal, but Brown is smart enough to understand that last Saturday’s smackdown of Division I-A powerhouse Florida Atlantic won’t satisfy even the most soft-headed of Longhorn fans. He also knows that if he loses to A&M, DeLoss Dodds will be after his balls with a rusty pair of pruning shears. Even still, there will be joy in Mudville. Why? Because we’re the goddamned live music capital of the known universe. An average Saturday night in Austin rocks the shit out of College Station on New Year’s Eve. This weekend is no different. Saturday you can (and should) catch an awesome bill at the Parish featuring a homegrown trifecta of musical badasses: folk-pop funsters Marmalakes, party punkers the Frontier Brothers, and orchestral tour de force Mother Falcon. A set by any one of these acts will put a smile on your face that not even a gloating Aggie can wipe off.

Extravagasm Fantasy Ball IX: East of Hedon

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November 15, 2010

ND Austin

How about one last chance to party like a porn star before the wet blanket of holiday wholesomeness spoils all the fun? Sure, nothing makes you want to flick your tongue between your devil horns like the thought of a crisp, rosy-cheeked night of wassailing bundled up in cozy, androgynous winter layering, but somewhere in the deep, depraved recesses of your mind you’d rather be nearly naked, slathered in baby oil, and writhing around on a crowded, pulsating dance floor – or at least you would rather be watching something like that, perhaps through the unzipped mouth hole of a leather gimp suit. Remember, you’re only about a week away from the maddening boredom of Thanksgiving Day, your yearly ritual of binge-eating bland pilgrim food then slumping catatonically on the living room sofa and listening to your catnapping grandpa’s stale beer farts ricochet off his vinyl recliner. There’s a reason they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Ibiza – and it’s not because they can’t get the A&M game on satellite. Hot on the heels of Puritanfest is Christmas, which tops off the Turkey Day wholesomeness with a huge layer of cheese: shamelessly crass commercialism, frog-in-a-blender color scheme, Lawrence Welk soundtrack, garish, Vegas-style lighting displays. Of course, the cherry on top of Christmas is the children: snot-nosed, greedy little chumps who believe a fat man from the North Pole with an unironic hipster beard is going to drop down their chimneys and deposit Call of Duty: Black Ops in their stockings. Why? Because they’ve spent the last few months scrawling deranged, incomprehensible shopping lists for Santa, fucking up the lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” and leaving half-finished candy canes in either the crack in the sofa or their little sister’s hair. Yes, children have their place during the holidays, and that place is called “Grandma and Grandpa’s house.” That way, instead of spoiling your holiday party mojo with their incessant whining about being hungry, wanting to go to sleep, and needing to have their soiled pull-ups changed, they can instead while away prime time with the blue-hairs drinking eggnog, making popcorn garlands, and watching Jimmy Stewart stammer his way through It’s a Wonderful Life. After all, Christmas is for kids, isn’t it? For adults, it’s more about finding excuses to binge-drink in order to forget about all the credit card debt they’re piling up. So, before the boring pall of the holiday season descends, blow it out one last time this Friday, Nov. 19, at Extravagasm Fantasy Ball IX: East of Hedon. Friday’s ball is an exotic, erotic dance party featuring the Brass Ovaries Pole Dancers, Miss Sophie, the Jigglewatts, Sky Candy aerialist Miss Winnie, the Golden Go-Go Squad, Starlite with Shi Feticcio, and music by DJ Cauzeone and DJ Orion. Along with the erotic dancing there will be fantasy photos by Flash, chocolate body-painting, and spanking stations. If that’s not freaky enough for you, keep this in mind: If they’re willing to let a name like “East of Hedon” slide, it’s a pretty sure bet anything goes, so bring an open mind and maybe some wet naps.

Game On Austin

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November 10, 2010

Mohawk

If you’re looking to get laid, there’s probably an app for that, it just won’t be as good as the real thing. Building a program that simulates a pan flute isn’t exactly the same as building one that stimulates your skin flute. This may come as a shock, but there are already several masturbation apps for the iPhone – one allows you to shake an onscreen image of a fish until a milky liquid oozes out of its mouth. Another is a geolocation app that allows users to place penis icons on a map to show the most recent place they had sex or masturbated. Nice. Seems like a great way to avoid getting nailed by an errant money shot while innocently walking your dog through Pease Park. Speaking of, maybe someone will whip(?) up a map app for people who don’t scoop their dog’s poop … or how about one for people who vomit frequently? There is also iVibe, an app that turns your iPhone into a vibrator. You might want to get a waterproof case for that one … or maybe not. It is, after all, just an iPhone. If you’re one of those skeptical types who aren’t totally on Apple’s cock, you might be happier with the Android. The Android has an app store called MiKandi that carries actual porn apps: things like 3D Mobile Porn (you’re probably safer wearing some sort of eye protection anyway), a YouPorn app (because YouPorn is so hard to find on your Web browser), and Sincasso, a nasty photo-sharing app which, like YouPorn, has a shamefully derivative name and boasts a “super clean user interface” as one of its features. Hmmm … sounds hygienic. You might think that MiKandi’s cesspool of smut apps might give Apple the moral high ground over the Android filth mongers, but you’d sort of be wrong. iPhone users can still surf the same freaky porn that pervs, sexual deviants, and mimes leer at all day long in their mothers’ moldy basements. The difference with iPhone is that they don’t allow porn apps – well, except for soft porn apps like the Cosmo Sex Position of the Day app, which features flesh-colored silhouettes going at it in a variety of unrealistic, uncomfortable, and unstable ways. It’s surely a lot of fun to look at – especially if you have a Mattel-ish hostility toward nipples, but put into actual practice by real people, it has all the titillating allure of a farty Bikram yoga class. Successful as its app may be, Cosmo is unlikely to follow it up with a Oral Sex Tips app, and even if it did, it’s unlikely Apple would approve it. They’re not porn merchants … or even pimps for porn merchants. Apple has your back like that. You won’t fall into the pits of perdition on Apple’s watch – well, at least not yet. There may be a game-changing app just around the corner that’s so awesomely filthy/hilarious/shocking that Apple just won’t be able to refuse it – especially if everyone is buying Droids just to get it. Who knows what the future holds? Well, if you want an idea, show up at Mohawk Tuesday, Nov. 16, from 6 to 9pm for the Chronicle and South by Southwest ScreenBurn’s Game On Austin, a free event where local game developers will be on hand to show off their latest wares, some of which may actually be designed for the iPhone … or perhaps those filthy, filthy Droids.

2010 Lone Star Vegetarian Chili Cook-Off

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November 3, 2010

Old Settlers Park

The world is teeming with all kinds of animals you can kill and cook and eat. A good number of them taste like chicken – at least that’s what the man at the fried-rat stand in Taipei is going to tell you. Of course, pretty near anything is going to taste like chicken if it’s battered and fried – even Homo sapiens. It’s doubtful that you would take a bite of deep-fried human flesh in a blind taste test and declare, “Hmmmmm … that tastes suspiciously like Homo.” You might, however, say it tastes like chicken, only gamier. Over the centuries, humans have whittled down the number of edible fauna to just a handful of species – generally the fat, slow, quiescent ones. These days – at least on this side of the pond – we’ve broiled it down to three basic meat groups, any or all of which might end up in a hot dog: chicken, pork, and beef. Someday, through a miracle of genetic engineering, we might even be able to graft them all into one animal: a chiporcow. Ideally the chiporcow would weigh a few thousand pounds; give milk; lay eggs; eat anything, including ground-up parts of other chiporcows; and spend its entire life confined in a cage designed to completely restrict its movement and maximize the tenderness of its flesh. Really, why even eat meat unless you can cut it with a cheap plastic spork? Even still, don’t throw away your steak knife in a fit of ecstatic optimism just yet. It might take another 20 or 30 years of genetic engineering to grow a chiporcow that is completely devoid of bones, tendons, and cartilage. Until then, all that stuff can still be pureed into a steroid infused, protein-rich paste that is sure to find its way to a nugget or patty at a fast food restaurant near you. Yum … well, with the right amount of sodium, sugar, and artificial flavoring. It’s hard to believe that there are still people out there who insist on killing, butchering, and eating their own meat – not just the crazy ones who are responsible for cats disappearing in your neighborhood, but normal people who wake up in the wee hours, strap on some camo and a fluorescent orange vest, and heroically try to control the mushrooming deer population. Hey, somebody has to do the dirty work – especially when joggers are out there Swiss-cheesing natural predators with laser-sight pistols. Hopefully Gov. Goodhair had the decency to mount his kill (pause for a moment to consider the nastiness of that unfinished sentence) on a cedar fencepost as a warning to all the other coyotes to back off the shih tzus, kittens, and Pomeranians and go back to killing sick cows and lost sheep. Deer? Killing those are a lot of work, unless you’re golfing at Lakeway or driving down U.S. 290 in the middle of the night, and coyotes, like just about any other intelligent animal including Homo sapiens, are likely to choose the easy way every time. It’s no wonder so many people are vegetarians these days. Meat is a lot of goddamned work – not just with your pastor or psychotherapist exploring the moral implications of offing other living things just to crap them out a few days later, but in a real physical sense, like cold, chewy street fajitas. Getting off the meat tit is getting more popular because it keeps getting easier. People are making plants into just about everything. Why not food? Some people have even figured out how to make great tasting fake-meat dishes. Don’t believe it? Head over to Old Settlers Park this Sunday for the 22nd Lone Star Vegetarian Chili Cook-Off and see for yourself. Taste veggie chilis made by 20 different teams from all around Texas, and decide if you’re lazy enough to stop eating meat for good. Love it or hate it, one thing’s for sure: It won’t taste like chicken.

Butthole Surfers Halloween Shows

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October 26, 2010

The Scoot Inn

The best thing about Halloween isn’t the candy; it’s about making memories. Sure, it’s plenty of fun to get all jacked up on candy corn and Pixy Stix and run through the neighborhood wilding trick-or-treaters in your flammable Chinese-made Darth Vader costume, but when the sugar rush subsides, a night of whacking unsuspecting kids on the back of the head with an inflatable plastic red lightsaber is just going to seem a little childish no matter how fun it was. Plus … and this is an important thing to remember … if you’re looking to get laid on Halloween or any other night of the year, it’s best to avoid places with children altogether – even and especially if you’re a pedophile. This is not to say you can’t score some strange with children around, but they do make it immensely more dangerous and difficult. No doubt there are brave souls who managed to achieve coitus on a McDonald’s playscape at 3:30 in the afternoon, but they are probably few and far between and incarcerated with muscled-up cellmates who share an equal penchant for risky sexual behavior. Besides, everyone knows going to McDonald’s is a bad idea – especially if you’re wanting to eat a taco. So really, even though you’re certain that your assless altar boy robe will be the hit of the elementary school Halloween carnival, you may want to save it for someplace where subtle irony is better understood and appreciated … like the Chain Drive for instance. You’ll make memories there that will last a lifetime too, and you’re less likely to end up on a sex offender Google map. Of course, you don’t have to engage in outrageous behavior to make memories, but outrageous behavior definitely makes memories that last – especially if they’re outrageous enough to get you tagged in an action photo on Facebook. Don’t hate. Facebook is just extra incentive to come up with a well-designed costume, ideally something with a comfortable mask – a mask that won’t fall off should you decide to do a keg stand in that Cinderella dress that was so long you decided you might as well go commando. As long as your luchador mask is laced up tight, you can claim that lots of other girls probably have a crucifix pull target with an inscription that reads, “Everybody gets nailed sometime.” Normally only your proctologist gets to see that far beneath your panty line, so it’s unlikely your boss is going to have the balls to call you on it. Point is, the only obstacles to making the memory of a lifetime are things like self-consciousness, self-esteem, and a sense of dignity and propriety. With proper costuming, you can abandon all that and get down to the dirty business of making lasting memories – or at the very least, shockingly hilarious YouTube videos with millions of hits. Being outrageous isn’t all that difficult. It just means that you have to be willing to go where other people aren’t. If you want a good example of how to do that, you should study up on the Butthole Surfers, who have been bringing the punk rock equivalent of shock and awe for more than a quarter century: cross-dressing, nudity, flames, destruction, blood (fake and real), all accompanied by screeching, roaring, howling soundscapes and epilepsy-inducing light shows. This weekend at the Scoot Inn, the Butthole Surfers will be playing Friday and Sunday shows that are sure to pack the Scoot to the gills. Friday night’s performance will focus on material from the band’s 1987 Locust Abortion Technician, and Sunday night’s Halloween show pairs the Surfers with fellow punk legends the Meat Puppets, who are calling Austin home these days. You could wear a costume for the Halloween show, but first and foremost, wear some earplugs, the bands will surely take care of making memories.

Goblin Gayla

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October 20, 2010

Tiniest Bar in Texas

No, it’s not Halloween just yet, but it is the beginning of the Halloween season. That means there’s a crispness to the night air, but it’s not crispy enough to keep you from sweating like a Chilean miner (and going blind like one too) inside that homemade ape suit you got for a steal on Craigslist. Really, any costume involving rubber and fur is always a bad idea in Austin. You don’t want to have to sip your gin and juice through a straw jammed into a nose hole. You don’t want to have to pee into an astronaut diaper. Yes, Halloween is the second biggest Holiday after Christmas, but it’s not big enough to actually warrant true suffering. That’s what all those other holidays are about. Halloween, like spring break, is a time for binge drinking in skimpy outfits. You don’t want to wear anything that can’t be quickly yanked down to your ankles while you pop a quick squat behind a dumpster on Sixth Street. No, seriously. If you think you’re going to find a vacant public bathroom stall anywhere Downtown in the next 10 days, you may want to get back on your meds. Available bathrooms during Halloween are as rare as buying a winning lottery ticket or getting in the fast-moving lane at the bank drive-through. That kind of thing only happens to other, wholly undeserving people. Yes, there are those who would argue that skimpy costumes aren’t scary. Au contraire. Not even Borat can rock a Borat slingshot without making normal people throw up a little in their mouths, and he’s a movie star. Imagine how scary average people would be if they were wearing something similar: birthmarks, moles, body hair, muffin tops, saddle bags, beer guts, goiters, cysts, varicose veins – really, there’s nothing more profoundly disturbing than the average human body on display. Even still, if you’re one of those lucky few who is blessed with supermodel looks and an awesome body, you still don’t have to suffer to be scary. Just pick up something sexy – say a European male swimsuit or a string bikini from a thrift store, then hose yourself down with fake blood. That way, if you get really drunk and fall down and crack your head open trying to jump over a vomit patch in your 4-inch stiletto heels, no one will even notice. Don’t worry, guys fall down wearing stiletto heels on Halloween all the time – especially in Austin. It’s no big deal. They just get up, dust off their bikinis, and get back to being the best slutty, blood-and-vomit stained zombie booze weasel they can be. After all, if you’re going to do Halloween, do it all the way. It’s one of the few two-week periods of the year that you can try out being someone more drunk, outrageous, and slutty than you normally are and still get a pass when it’s all over. Awesome, right? Well, you can start this weekend at the Austin Gay and Lesbian Pride Foundation’s Goblin Gayla. No, that isn’t misspelled. Saturday night at the Tiniest Bar in Texas, AGLPF will be hosting a mad bash complete with apple-bobbing, a photo booth, tarot card readings, a wig auction, two DJs, dancing, and, of course, cocktails. Note to the Debbie Downers and Killjoys: Costumes are optional.

Austin Yam Jam

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October 16, 2010

Threadgill’s World HQ

Every time you’re tempted to moan about another benefit for some musician who wrecked his car, had his equipment trailer jacked, or broke his wanking arm in a spectacular dive into an apathetic mosh pit, remember that in Austin, benefit money usually flows the other way – and by a large margin. It’s amazing that a city with such abundant wealth habitually relies on the inhabitants of Hand-to-Mouthville to fill its charity coffers. In other cities, fundraising is done with walkathons, bake sales, golf tournaments, or car washes featuring bikini-clad high school girls with soapy sponges, but here in the River City, fundraising involves calling your musician friend and seeing if he can rustle up a few bands that will play for free … for a good cause, of course. Fortunately in the “live music capital of the known universe,” bands outnumber good causes by a hefty ratio, so there is almost always a stellar lineup willing to step up to the plate. Sure, some of the savvier bands might request an ice chest full of Lone Star tallboys or first dibs on the VIP buffet table, but that in no way undermines their altruism. In fact, most bands playing fundraisers don’t even make gas money. If it weren’t for their girlfriends’ day jobs, they would have to walk to the gig. You’ve probably seen some scruffy-looking guy walking down the street with a guitar and thought, “Wow, someone should have a fundraiser for him,” never realizing that he was just between girlfriends and on his way to play a fundraiser. That’s so Austin, isn’t it? Of course, not all fundraisers in Austin are benefit concerts. It just seems like it. There are plenty of golf tournaments, road races, garage sales, and cook-offs that don’t necessarily feature live music but include it nonetheless. Why? Because live music gives it that Austin twist. What runner wouldn’t want to hear 15 seconds or so of original Austin music played by live bands scattered intermittently along the 26 miles of a marathon course? And what band wouldn’t want that gig? Well, as long they are allowed to sell merch and put out a sign up sheet for their mailing list. You really can’t beat that kind of exposure. As common as they are, benefit concerts can be a bit of an ego boost for musicians. People are much more willing to pay a hefty cover for a benefit than they are for a regular show. Maybe it’s because they feel much better about dropping a 10 spot on cancer victims than having it all go to some terminally broke slacker who gets to do what he loves and still manages to score talent that is way above his pay grade. Regardless, as far as benefits go, musicians have been the golden-egg-laying geese in Austin for decades, so forgive them if they sometimes complain about the pain in the ass. Don’t hate; appreciate. It’s a successful, long-standing symbiosis, and ultimately, no matter what the motivation on either side of the relationship, it does good for Austin. If you want an example, check out Sunday’s Yam Jam at Threadgill’s World Headquarters benefiting Operation Turkey, which provides food and clothing for the Austin-area homeless during the Thanksgiving holiday. From 3pm until close A-string artists like Malford Milligan, Jake Andrews, Guy Forsyth, Lance Keltner, David Holt, and Driver will take the stage to help someone other than themselves. That’s truly something to applaud.

Texas Freedom Network’s 15th Anniversary Celebration

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October 6, 2010

Bullock Texas State History Museum

In the world of politics, activism beats apathy every time. A small, well-organized group of complete nut jobs has a much better chance of forwarding its insane agenda than an unorganized multitude of like-minded, reasonable, uninvolved intellectuals. Don’t believe it? Consider Hitler. People are every bit as likely to vote with their guts as they are with their minds – even smart people. More importantly, intellectuals are much less inclined to do the dirty work of politics: the canvassing, the mailing, the sign posting, the cold calling, and the fundraising (which involves more knee pad work than most intellectuals are willing to endure). To be fair, intellectuals are also disgusted with the political process itself, which inherently undermines the integrity of its participants. Anyone who has campaigned for anything – be it PTA second vice chair or assistant county clerk – knows that politics involves a humbling amount of compromise, and very often the first thing that gets compromised is ethics. Politicians who start out on a march toward truth and light sometimes lose their way in the dark forest of financial necessity, public opinion, and political cronyism. What begins as a “means to an end” becomes all about the means with no end in sight. Politics can be very rewarding – especially for those seeking rewards. Thus the ongoing American fascination with “political outsiders.” The problem with political outsiders is that in politics, there aren’t any. Even if you want to somehow subvert the de facto plutocracy of the American political system, you’re still going to have to get on the cock of a whorish number of needy special interest groups in order to get elected. As the Bob Dylan song goes, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Ideally it’s your constituency. Sometimes your constituency is a corporation that funnels millions of dollars to your campaign through a fictitiously named bank account in the Caymans, and sometimes it’s a group of senile, xenophobic old timers with nothing better to do with their time than show up at the polls on voting day. Feeling jaded? You should be, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon politics entirely. Far from it. As mired in bullshit as American politics may be, things are not going to get any better with you sitting up there on your high horse. You’re not going to get rid of Sarah Palin, tea baggers, or even Rick Perry’s spectacular head of exquisitely styled hair by simply bitching about it or wishing it away. You’re going to have to drop some coin … or if you’re financially strapped like most big thinkers, you might even have to do some shit work. Either way, you have to get involved, otherwise you’re going to wake up someday and find the lunatics are running the asylum – just like they were two years ago. Rest assured those crazy bastards always try to get the keys. Thankfully there are sensible, hardworking people like the folks at Texas Freedom Network who make it their daily mission to keep the crazies out. This Thursday TFN is celebrating 15 years of being Texas’ watchdog against the political far right with its Let’s Shake It Up! fundraiser at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Enjoy dancing, drinking, and silent and live auctions that include, among other things, VIP passes to The Daily Show With Jon Stewart as well as platinum badges to South by Southwest 2011.

Band Together for Hope

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September 29, 2010

Spider House Ballroom

If you’re like most people in Austin, you probably walk around with some extra pocket change. It might be just a few coins that jingle in your jorts and tip off the Hooters waitress you’ve been stalking, or it could be something bigger – maybe some fives and tens that you keep in your wallet for stoned, late-night food-trailer binges – or perhaps you like to roll like a playa and keep a couple of hundies wrapped around a spool of lesser bills, the kind of pocket chum that gold diggers instinctively swarm. Regardless, any way you fold it, you have more than you need. If you weren’t compelled by your love of humanity to deny the tin-can-rattling con artists at traffic lights, the cardboard-sign-carrying fauxmless dudes who work the interstate intersections, and the Drag-worms with their cute, hungry-looking stray dogs in dirty red bandanas, you might go broke – well, except for your Platinum MasterCard. To be fair, you’re probably not one of those people who thinks charity is just a really unimaginative stripper name. You may not be Bill Gates or Eunice Kennedy Shriver, but you’ve hit your share of theatre-group fundraisers, celebrity silent auctions, and high school cheerleader bikini car washes. Really, what more can you do? You can’t save everybody because … as the saying goes … not everybody wants to be saved. In fact, if you were to lean in close enough to that Somali orphan on the TV who appears to be dying of starvation, he just might whisper, “It’s all good,” in your ear. Then again, he might not – and how can you be sure you heard him correctly over the buzz of the fly swarm? That’s what really freezes you into inaction. How can you know for sure? Where do you draw the line? You pony up for a couple of bags of famine rice, and next thing you know, you’re dodging Uzi fire on an aid flotilla headed for Gaza. Truth is, there is a mind-boggling number of worthwhile charities in the world to which you can devote your leisure time and money. How do you decide? Which is most important? Is it better to feed a starving child, keep a kitten from being euthanized, or teach an adult how to read? Who reads anymore anyway? Other than Twitter? Reading just leads to a guilty conscience. Why spend money on something that makes people feel guilty? Don’t we have churches for that? Besides, where would Jesus or Muhammad or Stevie Ray Vaughan want you to bestow your largesse? Save the Children or Ducks Unlimited? Everybody loves ducks – even the people who shoot them. You can’t say that about children. Probably the best thing to do is lean in a little closer to the starving Somali orphan. Maybe he really is saying, “It’s all good,” but maybe what he means is, “Anything you can do will be appreciated.” You’ll need to brush up on your Somali to know for sure. Even still, any time you can step out of your own little drama and help improve the world for others, you’re doing good. No need to get stuck up about it. There’s plenty of selfishness in altruism, but it’s a selfishness that requires wisdom and patience. Yuck. Of course, if you practice doing good regularly, chances are it won’t seem so strange and churchy. You might even learn to have fun with it. Here’s some good news: You can start practicing Saturday, Oct. 2, at the United States Art Authority when the Mother Truckers and Dertybird perform in the third annual Band Together for Hope, a fundraiser for the DiscoverHope Fund, which provides an opportunity for women in poverty to create their own prosperity through microcredit, entrepreneurship, and training. Sound good? It is.

Fantastic Fest

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September 22, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

How could you go wrong with something named Fantastic Fest? Well, OK, if you really loved The English Patient or Lost in Translation, you might not appreciate the jackhammer nuance of Fantastic Fest fare. If The Remains of the Day is your idea of two hours well-spent, then it’s unlikely your taste is going to dovetail with the festival that brought you The Human Centipede – a movie that, if nothing else, shockingly proves the saying, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.” It also makes a fairly strong case for 1) remembering to renew your OnStar subscription and 2) the decline of Western civilization. (It’s probably used as an al Qaeda recruitment film too.) As disturbing as The Human Centipede is (the disturbing part not being so much the movie itself but the fact that it actually got funded, filmed, and distributed), it’s not a particularly inventive film. It is, however, an incredibly ballsy one – and perhaps a sobering look at what’s coming down the pike in the horror genre. Expect to see titles like The Human Toilet, Donkey Show Snuff Gallery, and Babies in a Blender, all filmed in 3-D with spectacular computer-generated graphics. Think Grand Theft Auto quality with lots of chain saws, wood chippers, and other dangerous power implements ripping through human flesh in an impressive cascade of urine, feces, and blood. Who wouldn’t want to see that? If you let your imagination run wild, it may just run wild enough to make it into your local cineplex. If you’re really lucky, your imagination might even end up being a video game … or vice versa. Think that’s crazy? Well crazy has already happened plenty of times: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, BloodRayne, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, Super Mario Bros. The list goes on and on, and, interestingly, no film based on a video game has ever scored higher than 43% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. Critics can be so critical. In comparison, The English Patient rocks an 83%, and The Remains of the Day nearly pegs it at 97%. Somehow James Ivory managed to pull that off without stitching Emma Thompson’s lips to Anthony Hopkins’ keister … well, maybe in a metaphorical sense. The Remains of the Day is its own kind of genre film – that being tedious British films about repressed Victorian values – but fortunately Fantastic Fest doesn’t dabble in that kind of fare. If there is a staid English butler in a Fantastic Fest film, he probably has a full crawl space and is a secret sorcerer, a robot from the future, or a badass martial artist who can plunge his hand into your chest cavity and pull out your still-beating heart. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? It gets even cooler than that – albeit in a slightly nerdy way. Fantastic Fest has more than 170 official screenings, parties, and events: everything from film debates finished off by actual boxing matches to live karaoke, dance parties, video-game competitions, and even an off-site, cow-on-a-spit barbecue complete with knife-throwing and bullwhip demonstrations. This year, during the first four days, Fantastic Fest has transformed the HighBall ballroom into a makeshift arcade that features 29 different games by cutting-edge game developers. Everyone knows that video games are like flypaper for nerds, so if you’re on the prowl for some nerd loving, you’ll definitely want to work that room.

Austin Pagan Pride Day

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September 15, 2010

Zilker Park

Ancient religious texts are hard to burn, aren’t they? It’s not like they’re something useless like science textbooks or old Mad magazines. People really get touchy when you start torching the word of their Lord. You might as well be pitchforking puppies into a wood chipper. With the right publicity campaign, pitchforking puppies might stir up as much outrage as the Americans who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero … well, in the neighborhood … the same neighborhood that has a strip club, an off-the-track betting establishment, and a Starbucks – which, by the way, is a good place to start sniffing around if you’re looking for an organized assault on American values. Three dollars for a cup of bean squeezins? Sweet Jesus, a couple of months of that shit and you could start your own meth lab and dental clinic. What could be more American than that? Christianity you say? Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, modern American values have very little to do with the teachings of Christ. Jesus espoused nonviolence, poverty, humility, and charity. America is all about Bumfights, Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire?, and The Apprentice. If anything, Christianity is an assault on American values. Jesus specifically said: “Sell what you possess and give to the poor.” That doesn’t sound like Joel Osteen, Toby Keith, or even Barack Obama. That isn’t America. Here in God’s country, we won’t even cough up enough loose change to make sure everyone has access to health care and housing. Why? Because that would be communism. Most American Christians hate communism as much as the devil himself. They would rather let poor people die in the streets than pay higher taxes to fund a government-run health care system. Nonviolence? Ask the 100,000 or so Iraqis who, it turns out, weren’t hiding weapons of mass destruction. Humility? Well, there is one word that starts with the letter “H” that describes Americans’ attitude toward the rest of the world: Hubris. Who knows? Maybe at some point Jesus will come back to Earth … scratch that … to America preaching a gospel of aggression, greed, arrogance, and stupidity. Until then, Americans might want to explore some other religions. Hinduism is intriguing, but there are a lot of Gods to keep track of – maybe there’s an iPhone app. Judaism is basically Christianity old skool – without the Christ. Buddhism is intriguing, but you have to meditate a lot. Bor-ing. Islam? F that S. Americans like to get their drink on and really aren’t terribly hung up on virginity. Ditto for Mormonism. Scientology sounds good until you actually read up on it or (God forbid) watch Battlefield Earth. Rastafarianism? Dope-smoking is already a religion for a lot of Americans, but we like to cannonball it with booze. Really, there are a lot of religions to choose from, each with its own goofy idiosyncrasies. Before you drink the punch, you probably should sample a wide variety to find the one that’s best for you. This Sunday you can check out paganism at Pagan Pride Day at Zilker Park, a chance to expose yourself to a variety of pagan and pagan-friendly artisans and entertainers from the Austin area. Yes, you probably thought you were pagan already, but there’s so much more to it: Wiccans, witches, druids, Asatru, mages – shit you didn’t even know about, and all presumably better than not knowing at all.

AGLIFF

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September 8, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Don’t let this freak you out, but there are gays all over Austin. Whoa, right? What’s even crazier is that a lot of them don’t even act gay. So, you could be at some totally straight place (like a cigar shop, a Harley dealership, or a Hooters) and bend over to tie your shoes and have a whole bunch of them just run up and start humping you … and there you go … you’re headed straight to hell, and you were just innocently practicing pedestrian safety. Is it your fault if you have an ass that is just irresistible to gays? Hell no! Are you supposed to wear baggy jeans from Old Navy your whole life to avoid eternal damnation? Maybe. It’s hard to say, and Leviticus is a bit of a literary slog anyway. Really it’s best to be on guard at all times … everywhere. Yes, that sounds paranoid – phobic even – with an ass like that you can’t be too cautious. There are gays everywhere – not just the easily identifiable grab bag of Village People stereotypes (Native American? Really?) but cleverly straight-looking doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, landscapers, interior design consultants, and even the prep nurse for your vasectomy. As frightening as that sounds, who else would you trust to be so close to your junk with a straight razor and a handful of shaving cream? Even still, just the idea of not necessarily knowing which people are gay is enough to keep you up at nights. How can you sleep knowing your UPS guy is suspiciously buff and his uniform fits almost perfectly? He seems to use the word “package” a lot, too. What’s up with that? Is that some sort of gay come on? The skinny guy at the sandwich shop seems a little questionable, too. He always asks if you want extra mayonnaise and a pickle – even when you’re ordering a meatball sub. And what about your pottery instructor? Does he really need to encircle you in his arms when you’re at the pottery wheel? Isn’t there some other way he could demonstrate proper technique? And why does “Unchained Melody” always seem to be playing on his jam box? That can’t just be coincidence. You probably wonder sometimes if you’re just imagining that the good-looking guy behind you at the ATM is staring at your glutes. Why wouldn’t he be? They’re irresistible. In fact, that’s your big problem. You’re irresistible to gays, and you’re not even trying. You’ll probably never know for sure though, because you’re ceaselessly vigilant about keeping an eye out for them. It’s nerve-racking. Probably the best thing for you to do is just assume that everyone is gay. That way you won’t have to worry about whether someone who looks straight is actually gay. Of course, if you assume everyone is gay, then you have to assume you’re gay too. What a relief! Now you don’t have to act all butch to prove you aren’t gay. Go ahead and cross your legs, TiVo Glee, and rock that Justin Bieber haircut you’ve always wanted. The world’s your oyster. Time to start digging for pearls. A good place to do some pearl-diving this weekend is at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Through Sunday, Sept. 12, the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival will be offering a full slate of some of the best LGBTQI (for you straights, that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed) films being made. There are also some bumping parties planned, like Sunday night’s closing BearCity aGLIFF Afterparty at Cheer Up Charlie’s. Should be a fun time, but if you’re at all worried about exposing your irresistible ass, just keep it planted firmly in a seat at the Alamo Drafthouse.

‘Hammy and the Kids’

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September 1, 2010

La Zona Rosa CLOSED

Listen to the Audio Version of this artcle.

Just think: If you were in Canada right now, you would be chill. Give it some thought. Canada is only one border crossing away, and, unlike Americans, Canadians are much more respectful to their southern neighbors. In fact, in a lot of places along the U.S.-Canadian border, there’s not much of a border at all – maybe a ditch, a swath of clear-cut forest, or, like in Derby Line, Vt., a simple line painted across the street. How awesome would it be to do the Hokey-Pokey in two countries at the same time? Really … not much more awesome than actually doing the Hokey-Pokey. Regardless, no need to pay a coyote for a run across that border. In fact, the biggest threats in crossing the Canadian border are gray wolves and grizzlies. They’re particularly fond of people who smell like bacon – Canadian or otherwise – so if you decide to scarf down a few Egg McMuffins before your hike into the promised land, you might want to consider packing a loaded .45 and a couple of spare clips. Back before 9/11, crossing into Canada was even easier. You didn’t have to declare anything except maybe your intent to get pissed on Molson’s and bang anything that didn’t look like a moose or a Mountie. In those days, Canadians were willing to tolerate unconscionable levels of obnoxiousness. Not only that, they let almost anybody into their country: draft dodgers, the Grateful Dead, boat people, the French. The result is one huge frozen cultural clusterfuck that has contributed more to American society than the entire state of Wyoming – and that includes Jackson Pollock and Dick Cheney (who, by the way, are no strangers to clusterfucks themselves). Strangely, as diverse a place as Canada is, Canadians are largely a peace-loving people – unless you happen to be a moose with a huge rack or the opposing hockey team. Canadians also have a likable humility and a great sense of humor – traits conditioned by years of being America’s ruthlessly hazed sidekick. Think of it this way: Canada is the Paul Shaffer to America’s Letterman. Would it surprise you to know that Paul Shaffer is Canadian? Of course not. He’s incredibly talented, has a great sense of humor, is amazingly humble, and is loved by everyone. Letterman, on the other hand, was apparently loving anything that wasn’t a moose or a Mountie. When it comes to tapping the office talent, nice guys always finish last, eh? Or at least a close second. Canadians (other than Tommy Lee trainee Pamela Anderson) really don’t put off the sexual freak vibe anyway. Maybe it’s their layered clothing, their chirpy disposition, or their inability to put on a game face for anything other than a hockey brawl. In truth, Canadians may actually be freaks, but they keep in on the DL … at least until their boyfriends videotape it and post it on the Internet. There are some, however, who couldn’t keep it on the DL even if they tried: Howie Mandel, Jim Carrey, Kiefer Sutherland, and, of course, Kids in the Hall‘s least popular member and most successful freak Kevin McDonald, who will be in town this weekend for the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival. Sunday evening at La Zona Rosa, McDonald will be performing Hammy and the Kids, billed as “A one-man exploration of working with the Kids in the Hall and coping with an alcoholic father.” Joining McDonald on musical numbers will be Canadian guitarist/alt-folker Alun Piggins, who would be playing Paul Shaffer to McDonald’s Letterman if McDonald weren’t Canadian.

‘Austin Chronicle’ Hot Sauce Festival

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August 25, 2010

Waterloo Park

You might ask yourself: “Why here? Why now?” Waterloo Park in late August will be hotter than Satan’s taint – sweatier too. Of course, the same could be said of Austin in general, so apparently there are quite a few people here in Weirdsville who don’t mind a hot, sweaty taint. Hot, sweaty taints were all the rage back when Waterloo was the name of a village on the banks of Shoal Creek instead of a municipal park sandwiched between a hospital and a parking garage, but ever since the advent of air conditioning, Fudgsicles, and more recently, South by Southwest, Austin is a much cooler place. People all over the world (who can actually point it out on a map) are always saying it, so how can it not be true? Austin actually is cool – as long as you stay inside for about eight months of the year. Easy enough, right? You may have to quit smoking and work the bleached-out vampire look, but it’s doable. You might also want to check in to getting one of those remote start devices for your car. That way, as long as the soles of your goth shoes don’t melt during your mad dash through the parking lot, you will only have to endure a few seconds of roasting. Remember: Dogs die in hot cars. So could you. If you don’t have a car with air conditioning … or for that matter if you don’t have a car at all, you are, to paraphrase, up Shoal Creek without a paddle. Like the original settlers of Waterloo, you are condemned to chase the shade like cows and, when things get really desperate, shrink your scroat in the frigid water of Barton Springs. Really, Barton Springs is the only sure bet. Shade is nice and all, but it can easily reach 100 even in the shade, and if the humidity’s anywhere in the normal range, your clothes will always feel like a hot swimsuit that hasn’t quite dried out yet. Sure, you can wear light, cool clothing. Couldn’t hurt. A thong is light and cool – at least for the parts of your body that aren’t in contact with it – but rest assured your taint will be a raging red furnace. Regardless of what you wear or don’t, you’re going to sweat like a whore in church, so even if you’re dressed like one, you still need to drink lots of water. Back in the old days, hydration was much more of a sticky wicket. It contained things like cholera, intestinal parasites, Comanche poop from up river, and water moccasins (not Weejun preppy loafers, but real, poisonous snakes). Nowadays, however, there is always some benevolent corporation willing to slap its logo on a plastic bottle, fill it with water, and sell it to you for a few dollars. That way you can avoid the embarrassment of violent bouts of bloody diarrhea, stomach cramps, and projectile vomiting. There is also a small chance you might develop breast buds from synthetic estrogen released from the plastic bottle the water comes in, but hey, everybody likes boobies, right? Oh yeah, and also there are apparently enough plastic water bottles to encircle the globe 190 times. Apparently somebody is staying hydrated. That’s the key to a healthy life isn’t it? It’s certainly the key to a healthy Hot Sauce Festival. Beer will only get you so far when it comes to withering heat – if you don’t down a little water along with it, it eventually will get you to the first aid tent. That’s an important thing to remember if you’re attending this Sunday’s 20th annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival. Your body is definitely going to burn through some water – either from the heat of the sun or the heat of the sauces in the tasting tent. Usually the samples run into the hundreds, and for a couple of cans of food from your pantry, you can taste them all if you have the fortitude. It’s an epicurean extravaganza that is about as uniquely Austin as they come. Certainly it’s worth a little sweat on your taint.

Aye Eye Ball

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August 18, 2010

The Off Center

Piracy is in, so it only follows that pirates should be as well. Problem is, there are a lot of pirates to choose from and not all of them are equally cool. For instance, intellectual pirates, the most common pirates by far these days, are a thoroughly uninspiring lot consisting of a large swath of humanity: shut-ins, eggheads, techno-geeks, cocooners – pretty much anyone with a high-speed Internet connection and flexible morals. As far as fashion sense, pretty much anything goes as long as it’s comfortable enough to allow for long spells in front of a computer monitor. In an office environment this would mean business casual – maybe some Dockers, a polo shirt, and some Vibram-soled shoes. At home, however, where most intellectual pirates do their plundering, the dress code is a bit more lax – anything from a food-stained terrycloth bathrobe down to just a simple pair of tighty-whiteys with worn-out elastic will suffice. Probably a significant number of intellectual pirates pirate porn, which doesn’t really require much in the way of accessories other than a bottle of lotion, a box of tissues, or some sort of silicone prosthesis with a cute nickname like “Wankenstein,” “The Dildozer,” or “King Dong.” Really, if you can’t pirate porn in your birthday suit, why even bother? Somali pirates are getting quite a bit of ink these days too – not skull-and-crossbones tattoos but media attention. They deserve it, if only for their ability to dream big. Sure, they probably swashbuckled their way through plenty of expensive private yachts, but those are just toy boats compared to something like a Saudi supertanker. It’s amazing what a few enterprising young men can do on the high seas with a motorboat, some AK-47s and a couple of RPGs. Costumewise, however, Somali pirates are only a small step up from their pasty-skinned, computer-savvy counterparts – which is truly heartbreaking considering most have runway model physiques. To maintain a similar look, Heidi Klum would have to snort an ounce of meth a day, eat a bucket of tapeworms, and stick her finger down her throat after every meal. Even still, as model-thin as Somali pirates are, they still have a way to go with costume design. Their outfits may be functional, but basketball shorts, bandanas, and bandoliers are simply too avant-garde a look for anyone not perched menacingly on the bow of a longboat. Of course, the biggest fashion faux pas of Somali pirates is that they want it too badly. Desperation isn’t attractive to anyone except maybe sex tourists in Thailand. The key to a really successful pirate look is a devil-may-care attitude – something that is essential when you’re wearing a puffy shirt and buckle shoes. The nice thing about traditional pirate wear is that it’s a fairly easy look to nail: captain’s hat or bandana, eye patch, beard, puffy shirt, sash (remember that devil-may-care thing?), billowy pants, parrot (fake is best unless you want a smack-talking wingman who occasionally flies up to the mainmast and shits on your head), and, if you really want to take one for the team, a peg leg. Easy enough, right? You probably have a hacksaw and a tourniquet laying around somewhere. Of course, the most fun thing about being a pirate is talking like one. No, it never gets annoying, and anyone can do it. Tiger Woods can probably do a serviceable pirate. Martha Stewart can too. It’s almost as easy as doing an English accent, and like an English accent it’s hilarious to nearly everybody, except maybe the English. All you really need to channel your inner pirate is a few anachronistic nautical terms and a complete willingness to abandon your dignity. If you’ve got that, you’re ready for Saturday’s Aye Eye Ball, this year’s iteration of the Rude Mechanicals’ annual Eye Ball fundraiser. The Aye Aye Ball, though maybe not exactly a pirate shindig, is at least nautically themed, featuring a silent and live auctions; music by Eye Ball DJ for life, Graham “Poseidon” Reynolds; and an appearance by high-society hostess Rebecca Havemeyer. You could certainly rock your vintage cruise wear to this fete, but pirates get more booty.

Top Drawer’s 17th Birthday Party

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August 10, 2010

Top Drawer Thrift

Need some new clothes? If you’re going to drop coin on that David Bowie “Let’s Dance” button-down shirt at Target, you might as well strap on a pair of golf cleats and do a river dance on a litter of baby seal pups. Oh yeah, and if you truly are that heartless, at least make sure you buy your golf cleats at a thrift store, otherwise you might as well stomp on yet another litter of baby seal pups. Fashion is a bloody business … even when PETA isn’t involved. On the other hand, every time you buy some type of hot new designer togs, you’re giving some 9-year-old Asian kid a valuable 14-hour-a-day job. Sleep well, clothes pony. You might have saved that child from a life of prostitution and homelessness. Of course, buying new clothes and cleating baby seal pups aren’t the only ways of raping the environment. There are literally tons and tons of brand-new useless things you can buy that will not only clutter and complicate your own life but will also waste environmental resources and litter up the earth. Here’s a good rule when shopping: If you see something made out of plastic that also comes packaged in plastic, buy it. When you pay for it, ask them to put it in a plastic bag. Congratulations! You just gave one or more multinational petrochemical corporations something known as a “happy ending.” Remember, even as you read this, American patriots are giving their lives to keep you flush with plastic. Don’t dishonor their service by easing off the throttle of your mindless consumerism. Keep buying shit. Don’t worry about paying for it – you can use plastic. That way, not only are you giving a multinational petrochemical corporation a happy ending, you’re giving a multinational financial institution one as well. You also might want to buy a pair of plastic safety goggles and a plastic rain poncho, because at this point, the corporate jizz will be flowing pretty thick. Sounds like a Japanese porn site, but what else can you do? It’s not like you’re going to start raising chinchillas or Angora goats or, worse yet, hemp, which unlike the first two is not only batshit crazy but illegal. Cotton farming is also problematic in that it involves farming cotton, which is a bigger pain in the ass than trying to shave a goat in the middle of August in Texas. Nothing feels better than a face full of wool on a hot, sweaty summer day … and no, that’s not a euphemism. Even if you did somehow miraculously raise enough chinchillas to slaughter, you would still have to figure out something attractive to do with their pelts … something that doesn’t look like it was designed by Leatherface from Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Sewing is tedious work anyway – the sort of thankless toil Asian preteens are best suited for, apparently. Instead of spending sleepless nights wracked with guilt over the child labor syndicate you’re running by proxy from a self-service checkout stand at Walmart, maybe you should seriously consider buying your clothes secondhand. At least when you buy used clothing, you know what they’re going to look like after a few washings. Not only that, you get the good feeling of knowing you didn’t throw an extra dead baby seal on humanity’s trash heap … or at least the plastic equivalent. Sometimes too, if you’re really lucky, the place you go thrift shopping will exist for the sole benefit of raising money for a charitable organization, just like Top Drawer Thrift does for Project Transitions. This Saturday, Aug. 14, from 10am to 7pm, Top Drawer is celebrating its 17th anniversary with an all-day party featuring special deals, music, food, drink, and a raffle. You really should drop by and see what Top Drawer have in your size. You might be amazed. Even if you’re not, you can still get fed, watered, and rocked without paying a dime. Should be funner than a baby seal golf cleat river dance.

Micro Championship Wrestling

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August 3, 2010

AFS Cinema

Whatever you do, don’t call it midget wrestling. Why? Good question. Pro wrestling has not traditionally been the model of political correctness. Rather than play down the differences of its competitors, pro wrestling has always built them up to comic extremes. Who can forget (remember?) ring legends like Ivan Putski “The Polish Power,” Norman “Black Magic” Smiley, Sheamus O’Shaunessy “The Irish Curse,” Umaga “The Samoan Bulldozer,” or “The Spaniard” Crusher Verdu? If none of the preceding sound familiar to you, you’re probably not a pro wrestling fan. Congratulations! You also probably didn’t grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in a trailer that smelled like moldy carpet and burnt toast. Feel free then to enjoy a little smug condescension for the unsoaped riffraff who find it entertaining. Regardless of what John Irving and sundry Greek philosophers would have you believe, wrestling has never been a big sport for thinkers. Sure, there’s a certain amount of strategy and cunning involved (well-concealed brass knuckles or maybe a surprise metal folding chair to the back of the head, for instance), but most of the time simple brute force prevails, just like in the real world. Wrestling is an age-old reality series that dates back thousands of years, probably to the dawn of man. The Chinese did it … as did the Egyptians and eventually the ancient Greeks, who passed it on to the Romans, who in turn passed it on like herpes (also Greek) to most of the world. The Greeks, however, get special credit for really refining the sport. They actually made up rules … and perhaps more importantly, had the means to write them down. Genius. Back in Greek times dudes wrestled dudes in the buff … while coated in oil. These days that sort of thing only happens at financially distressed gay bars on off-nights. The spectacle is much the same, except that in ancient Greece, it was against the rules to grab your opponent’s nut sack, even if just for a sensual caress. No, the ancient Greeks were much more into the violent aspects of wrestling. Other than hitting, kicking … or the previously mentioned scrotum grab, pretty much anything was fair game: choking, bending (breaking) fingers, gouging eyes … all of which still exist in modern pro wrestling, it’s just that they are illegal and usually the shameless, desperate behavior of the bad-guy wrestlers, known in the business as “heels.” Heels are the comic book villains of the pro wrestling world whose job it is to inspire hatred from fans through various forms of dastardly behavior directed toward “faces,” the good-guy heroes of wrestling. As with any good soap opera or reality series, the plot is thickened by switching things up every now and then. The bad guys become the good guys, the good guys the bad, and so on … sort of like an average episode of Jersey Shore or America’s Next Top Model. Yes, both are filled with buffoonish characters that everyone loves to hate, but the difference with wrestling is that it lacks even the scarce subtlety of reality TV. Therefore, if you are going to see wrestling, leave your thinking cap at home. You don’t want to ruin the experience by overanalyzing. This is especially true of midget wrestling. It’s best that you start by completely suspending both your disbelief and your moral superiority. This Friday offers a chance to do just that when Micro Championship Wrestling mixes it up at the Marchesa Hall on I-35. To whet your appetite for small-scale destruction, here’s a quote from the MCW website: “MCW Superstars have performed with Rock Stars: Kid Rock, DMX, Iron Maiden, Slipknot and others. They have also been featured on tons of TV Shows: Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, MTV, WWE, TNA, and Major Roles in The Bleeding and 100 Tears to name a couple.” That’s doesn’t sound unbelievable at all, does it? Question is, does it sound exciting?

Knife Party! With the Jungle Rockers, Salesman, Flatcar Rattlers

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July 28, 2010

Hole in the Wall

What a huge comfort it is to know that we live in a country where just about anyone can legally own and carry weapons. The saying, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” works equally well for broadswords and bazookas. Really, who wants to live in a nation where a toddler can’t grab a hair-triggered revolver from his grandparents’ nightstand and accidentally blow his brains out? Unthinkable, isn’t it? Are we going to punish millions of senile paranoiacs just because some 3-year-old’s parents didn’t teach him proper gun safety? That’s just another step toward outright totalitarianism. Should outlaws and their children to be the only ones who have the luxury of committing suicide with a merciful bullet to the temple? Seems unfair to the law-abiding clinically depressed. Other methods of suicide take so much more effort and planning. You can’t just go off half-cocked. Sure, gunshot suicides can be a little messy, but life itself is messy, and in these tough economic times, there are plenty of able-bodied citizens willing to do the cleanup for next to nothing – especially if our freedom is at stake. Perhaps most importantly, the right to “keep and bear arms” is essential to forming “well-regulated militias,” which the Second Amendment says are “necessary to the security of a free state.” As anyone in Northern Idaho will tell you, the only way to truly secure the blessings of liberty is to let the government know that you won’t succumb to totalitarianism without a firefight. When the government’s Apache gunships come swooping down from the heavens with their 625-rounds-per-minute 30 mm cannons, Hydra rockets, and Hellfire missiles, militia members will valiantly defend freedom with small caliber arms fire and improvised explosive devices … for a few seconds … until the Apaches reduce them to a fine, pink mist … freedom mist. Anyone who has seen the WikiLeaks video of the Iraqi journalists getting ventilated by an Apache gunship in 2007 has an idea of how useful small arms will be in securing a modern free state. Trying to fend off one of those nightmarish bastards with anything less than a Stinger missile is outright lunacy. You might as well be packing a camera and a tripod. Anyone seriously wanting to defend liberty should consider pushing the button in a voting booth before they flip the safety on an automatic weapon. Just like cities blow money on fireworks displays on the Fourth of July, America spends billions and billions of dollars on badass weapons so you don’t have to. That said, shooting guns can be a lot of fun, but you probably don’t want emotionally unstable people like the double rainbow guy walking around with an AK-47. It’s just not good public policy. There has to be some middle ground where people can shoot animals, tin cans, and themselves, but maybe not their fellow high school students or postal employees. It’s a balancing act to be sure, but who really needs a machine gun or even a semiautomatic pistol to go hunting? Polar bear hunters, maybe. The rest of us just need to nut up and take better aim. This is not to say that you couldn’t murder a lot of people with a bolt-action rifle; it only makes it harder – just like it’s harder for someone to “accidentally” knife someone to death. Knifing someone to death takes dedication and follow-through, even with a fairly good-sized blade. Knives aren’t handguns, but they’re still pretty dangerous, which is a good reason you should probably leave your knife at home when you go out drinking … except this Saturday, because the Hole in the Wall is hosting Knife Party! Bring your legal pocket knives (everybody has more than one, right?) to the Hole between 6 and 9pm and get it sharpened for free! You can also enjoy old timey music by Flatcar Rattlers; lyrical, acoustic indie rock by Salesman; and the wallet chain surf twang of the Jungle Rockers. Hey, with all those sharp knives around, do you even need to be told to drink responsibly? That’s the genius of the Second Amendment. Let’s see how well it works.

Benefit for Gulf Coast Disaster Relief

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July 21, 2010

Jo’s Coffee

Here’s a bit of a paradox: Most easily bored people believe they are easily bored because they are so interesting. Fucking wow, right? Unfortunately, the foundation of knowledge is rarely self-knowledge. For most people it’s an inverted pyramid. Generally, the more you learn about the world, the more you learn about yourself. Acquiring knowledge takes time, energy, and perhaps, most importantly, enthusiasm. The latter is where many people drop the ball. In order to be interesting, you must first be interested. The preceding sounds like an empty platitude, but it’s not. You have to really care about something enough to want to try to fully comprehend it, to master it. This is one of the things that make nerds so scary. Is Star Wars really something to which you can devote an entire lifetime? Apparently so. Ditto for pigeon racing, chess, needlepoint, LARPing, and Japanime. Really there are endless variations of things to occupy your mind, body, and spirit, and that’s the point. If you’re bored, you are either too ignorant to conceive an alternative to your boredom or you simply lack the motivation and inspiration to change your state of mind. Either way, you’re not much fun to hang out with. Bored people are boring. Even still, it takes a certain amount of motivation to move on to something more interesting. Boredom can often be the catalyst. In fact, you may be bored right now and ready to move on to something more interesting. Bully for you. At least you found inspiration. Of course, using boredom to inspire you to do something truly interesting is the key to becoming an interesting person. Ideally, your interest will be something that consumes you – not only for a moment or an hour or a day, but for an entire lifetime. It’s important to keep in mind that the depth of your knowledge is every bit as important as the breadth. Being interested and interesting isn’t just about knowing a bunch of shit. You can get that from an iPhone, and we all know how exciting people with iPhones can be. No, interesting people have context, a sense of the larger picture, an ability to filter and synthesize the shitstorm of external stimuli and information into something coherent and useful … or at the very least entertaining. Unfortunately, context demands a long attention span – the type that is nurtured through a passion for understanding and mastery. These days, the world is full of people who are short on both intelligence and attention span. They are constantly distracted by a literally mind-boggling array of external stimuli, and in the absence of that stimuli, they are often at a loss of what to do with themselves. It’s no surprise that their fun boxes are short a few tools. They have never been bored enough to learn how to overcome boredom. Maybe that’s a good thing, but if you have ever spent time with an adrenaline junkie at a cocktail party, you might wonder. Whether motivated by boredom or not, there is no shortcut to becoming an interesting, well-rounded person. If you want to live an interesting, exciting life, no one is going to do it for you. Well, maybe if you join the marines …. Otherwise, you’re going to have to collect the tools it takes to make your own fun. For now, however, you can just piggyback on someone else’s. This Friday from 6 to 10pm in Jo’s parking lot on South Congress, Jo’s and Hotel San José are hosting the Gulf Coast Disaster Relief Benefit. The event is free with a $10 suggested donation and features music by Papa Mali and the Grammy-nominated Lost Bayou Ramblers as well as speakers from the Environmental Defense Fund. There will also be a $10 per plate shrimp boil by Perla’s, the proceeds of which will go to the Greater New Orleans Foundation Oil Spill Fund and the Gulf Restoration Network.

Red Hot 2010

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July 14, 2010

Oilcan’s

The oil business has been getting an especially bad rap recently, especially since the Deepwater Horizon blowout. As with all preventable catastrophes, there has been plenty of finger-pointing but no truly satisfying scapegoat. In fact, saddling an actual goat with the symbolic transgressions of the various parties involved might ultimately prove easier to watch than B-roll of tarred pelicans, sludged sea turtles, and, perhaps most disturbing of all, beach cleanup workers in orange reflective vests, rubber dishwashing gloves, and frumpy lesbian-style cargo shorts. So it is. Oil spills are ugly business. People want blood, even if they have to burn through a few million barrels of oil to get it. They want answers too – not complicated, technically dense, ethically vague, lawyer-assisted depositions to congressional subcommittees, but flashy, shameless, simplistic confessions (ideally pointing toward a Machiavellian conspiracy by Big Oil), followed by public disembowelments by corporate executives. That would maybe do the trick. The Joe Six Packs don’t want to hear that average workers like themselves might have ignored safety precautions – perhaps in response to upper-management pressure to get the job done, or maybe they were just high as a bat’s ass, staring at their fingers. It’s hard to imagine that a couple of bad decisions by reckless individuals possibly could have caused one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes, isn’t it? There must be larger forces at work here … some sort of systemic, conspiratorial evil. As much as the foil hat people would like that to be, it just isn’t so. The ugly bottom line is that Big Oil might have fucked us, but Americans helped them by buying the lube. While we were riding to work in our SUVs we were also riding on the back of the crocodile. We still are. BP, like any other business, is driven by profit, not safety – occupational, environmental, or otherwise. It was only a matter of time before a big spill happened again. Yes, again. Back in 1979 the Pemex Ixtoc I oil spill infused the Gulf of Mexico with more than 3 million barrels of crude. For years afterward, Texas beaches were speckled with tar. Beach lovers sported not only tan lines but tar-ball splotches. Pemex, Mexico’s government-owned oil company, didn’t take nearly the heat BP has drawn. In fact, it wrapped up the whole cleanup operation for around $100 million, claiming sovereign immunity against liability claims. Not surprisingly, Pemex is still in business, still pumping oil out of the Gulf. During the first Gulf War, Iraqis tried to preempt a U.S. invasion by dumping as much as 6 million barrels into the Persian Gulf. Didn’t work. Here’s something that might surprise you: The worst oil spill ever happened on land … in California no less. The 1909 Lakeview Gusher Number One in Kern County spewed 9 million barrels of oil into a desert valley near Bakersfield. That’s nearly three times the amount of oil floating around in the Gulf. Yes, it sucks big, stinky tar balls that the latest spill happened on America’s watch … in American waters, but just because BP had the largest stake in the profits doesn’t necessarily mean BP should entirely shoulder the blame. Hell, the rig itself was actually owned by a Swiss company (Transocean) flying a Marshallese flag (looking to start a corporation? Try the Marshall Islands!) and employed workers from several different subcontractors (including the nefarious-by-association Halliburton). If you’re mad enough to shoot somebody, you’re going to need a lot of bullets, including one for yourself. Perhaps the most productive thing to do might be to start weaning yourself from the oil tit – not just by buying a brand-new Prius but by turning off the goddamn lights every now and then, caulking your windows, or maybe walking or taking the bus or voting for un-American public transit. Maybe oil won’t be such an ugly word if we can reduce all those oil barrels to something smaller … like oil cans. Speaking of, this Friday, Project Transitions 19th annual Red Hot fundraiser is happening at Oilcan Harry’s. This year’s party includes performers from Cabernet Cabaret, cast members from City Theatre’s Into the Woods and Zach Theatre’s The Drowsy Chaperone, the Austin Babtist Women, Larissa Ness, the Austin City Showgirls, and the cast of Las Vegas’ La Cage. This blowout won’t be nearly as epic as the Deepwater Horizon, but it should be more fun!

Jon Blondell CD Release

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July 7, 2010

Elephant Room

Yes, you can dance to jazz, sort of in the same sense you can milk anything with nipples. At some point, however, perhaps when you have a double-fisted death grip on the teats of a stampeding mother rhinoceros, you’re going to find yourself asking, “Was it worth it?” Yes, jazz dancing has its pluses. The biggest of course is that you get carte blanche to do the Bob Fosse “jazz hands.” Nowhere else outside the realm of street mime performance can you get away with such overt hamminess without inspiring a gangland style beatdown. If you’re going to swing for that fence, you might want to put on a pair of white gloves first – really makes it pop. Then there’s the footwear issue. Jazz dance traditionally requires jazz shoes, but those are for formal jazz dance – the kind you learn in a real dance school. Dancing to jazz music only requires the shoes of a questionably crazy person, and here the styles of footwear are as diverse as the variations of insanity itself. To be sure, actual jazz dance shoes are pretty nutty looking outside of an actual dance studio, but don’t discount Crocs and socks, woven huaraches, or Vibram FiveFingers, those creepy looking glove shoes. Wearing FiveFingers is pretty much an outright admission that you never want to get laid again for the rest of your life. If the Vatican ever finds out about FiveFingers, they will become standard issue footwear in monasteries across the globe. Not even an altar boy would allow himself to be molested by someone wearing FiveFingers. “Forgive me Father, but you and Vibram have committed a mortal sin.” Really, the only place FiveFingers are apropro are Leftover Salmon/String Cheese Incident mosh pits and … well … jazz clubs, where ruthlessly innovative footwear has an actual chance of gaining a toehold, especially among people for whom nerdiness is a badge of honor. Make no mistake, jazz is cool. There is even an actual genre called “cool jazz,” but jazz is the absolute nerdiest of music forms, edging out even classical and polka. If music were math (and essentially, it is), jazz would be calculus, and jazz musicians would be mathletes. When someone has the chops to reach the level of a music mathlete, they usually turn to jazz. It is at this point that their nerdiness reaches such a density that it actually folds in on itself like a collapsing star and creates an alternate universe of cool. Aside from some obvious anomalies like axe murdering and scrapbooking, nothing is cooler than being exceptionally accomplished. Great jazz musicians are exactly that. They may be broke, alcoholic, homeless, marginally or even fully insane, but at the very least, they are exceptionally accomplished, and that is cool. Knowing that you can do/have done something that few people in the world ever will is surely liberating in many ways. If, for instance, you forget to bathe or shave or pull on some clean clothes in the morning, it’s probably no big deal. At least you can still do some amazing improvisational runs that might get you some free drinks and maybe even a roll in the hay with some moon-eyed jazz lover. Life is good in 5/4 time. This Friday at the Elephant Room you can find out how good when the Jon Blondell Quintet celebrates the release of its new CD, Bone-Nanza. The band features David Bowen and JJ Johnson on drums, John Fremgen on bass, Carter Arrington III on guitar, Jeff Helmer on piano, and Jon Blondell himself on trombone. Even if you don’t know Blondell, you’ve surely heard him. If not on his signature trombone solo on Sublime’s “The Wrong Way,” then surely as a bassist or trombonist on cuts by Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, B.B. King, Pat Green, Doug Sahm, James McMurtry, Dale Watson, or Ray Benson, just to name a few. Point of fact: Jon Blondell is huge, not only in stature but also in talent, and even if you aren’t brave enough to dance to his music, you will appreciate and enjoy it nonetheless.

Austin Symphony July 4th Concert & Fireworks

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June 30 2010

Auditorium Shores

In America, we celebrate freedom by making a lot of noise … as opposed to say, meditating quietly on the blessings of liberty. No slam against meditating, mind you, but sitting calmly with your thoughts lacks the ostentatiousness (no, dudebro, it isn’t spelled “Austintatiousness”) of colorful, ear-shattering explosions that make dogs spontaneously urinate on expensive carpets and whine nervously into the wee hours – no pun intended. Here in God’s country (that being the USA and not the 180-plus other God’s countries) we get fired up about freedom. Our freedom is an awesome freedom, much better than the sucky freedom in countries like Somalia, Haiti, or Afghanistan. In America, a group of drunken teenagers can throw a string of lit Black Cats out the window of their parents’ Ford Explorer at 3am in a quiet subdivision and the most that will happen is a few bedroom lights will turn on. If they were to try the same thing in Somalia (and perhaps certain parts of Idaho), they could expect their Explorer to be riddled with small arms fire or blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade. As any Somalian will tell you, sometimes it’s a fine line between freedom and anarchy. Freedom seems to work best when guided by a system of laws that ideally keeps the dickheads from spoiling the fun. Of course, different places have different definitions for being a dickhead, so a certain amount of tweaking is involved. For instance, here in Texas there aren’t many places you can’t spit legally. You can pretty much cut loose with a huge roping arc of Copenhagen juice anywhere you please, as long as you don’t hit a cop in the face. In Singapore, if the tiniest bit of drool drips out of your mouth and hits a sidewalk, you get burned at the stake, waterboarded, and thrown in a tank of piranha – or at least heavily fined. You can’t chew gum either. No, seriously. You can’t chew gum. It’s illegal. Compare that to California where you can do just about anything except drive a car that burns gasoline. In California you can do naked bong hits while no-handing a unicycle along the beach in broad daylight. In fact, you can probably legally kill someone in California as long as you dispose of the corpse in an environmentally responsible way. The same is true of Louisiana, except that in Louisiana you can burn the corpse in a trash can in your backyard. What law there is in Louisiana derives from the Napoleonic Code, which is statutory, meaning that if some transgression isn’t actually prohibited in writing, it’s fair game – which just about everything is in Louisiana. If it moves, you can kill it, sauté it in butter, and eat it. That includes manatees, government bears, Bigfoot, and the lost Dauphin. Menacing oil slick notwithstanding, Louisiana isn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact, Bigfoot and the lost Dauphin are probably alive and well and living in Alaska, where the only written laws have to do with milking Exxon for every last red cent. Other than that, Alaska = freedom. It’s a magical place where a 46-year-old ex-cheerleader can hunt Bull Moose with an AK-47 in her red, white, and blue bikini; where polar bears can drive snowmobiles; and where the drinking age is 9 – whiskey included. Alaska makes California look like a gulag. The only place freer than Alaska is death itself … or maybe West Texas … it’s hard to tell the difference. Regardless, they’re both in America, the Land of the Free. Make no mistake, American freedom is something worth celebrating loudly, even if it means dogs pissing on expensive carpets. Why? Because American freedom was dreamed up by wicked-smart rich dudes and paid for by the blood of patriots. It’s precious and delicate and frickin’ awesome all at the same time – easily in the Top 10 freedoms worldwide, and that’s reason enough to get out there and make some noise … or you could just relax, lay back on a picnic blanket, and have someone else do it for you. This Sunday at Auditorium Shores, the Austin Symphony and the city of Austin will be putting on their annual Fourth of July concert and fireworks display. Mission accomplished. The hardest thing you’ll have to do to celebrate freedom is to load up your cooler and find a way down there. Easy enough, right?

Fan Fare Friday

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June 21, 2010

Threadgill’s World HQ

Depending on your association with the beautiful sport of soccer, you may or may not have been in a bit of a huff last Friday. You might have been hunting up Mali on Google Earth trying to figure out the best place to lob a couple of cruise missiles, or you might have been chuckling to yourself thinking, “That’s soccer!” At this point it’s pretty much universally agreed that Malian referee Koman Coulibaly’s foul call in the 86th minute of the U.S. vs. Slovenia soccer game was horribly botched. Hindsight is 20/20 – especially when you have the luxury of half a minute of high-def video showing the “controversial” penalty kick where several Slovenian players decided to take piggyback rides on their U.S. opponents (and really, how could they resist draping themselves around those broad, muscular, world-cradling shoulders?) while American midfielder Maurice Edu slides through nearly untouched for an easy goal. That, of course, isn’t the way Coulibaly saw it. Forced by FIFA rules to make a split-second decision in what must have appeared on the field to be a roiling clusterfuck of rules violations, Coulibaly called a foul on Edu and waved off the goal. Fortunately, this egregious injustice occurred in a soccer game, so most Americans just went about their Friday afternoons blissfully ignorant instead of rioting, looting, turning over foreign-made cars, and flashing gang signs in the background of video news reports. Had such a call been made in game seven of the Lakers vs. Celtics series, whole swaths of Los Angeles or Boston would have been ablaze, the National Guard would have been called out, and a congressional committee would have been formed to decide if NBA Commissioner David Stern’s severed head should be mounted on a pike. This was just a soccer game, however, so the few viewers who weren’t secretly delighted foreign expatriates had to suppress their outrage and incredulity with things like serenity prayers, hair tearing, and pissy, jingoistic Web page comments. In the world soccer community, American outrage is a muffled cry in the wilderness, and probably with good reason. When a soccer player blatantly flops, feigns excruciating pain, and then pops up as if nothing happened, Americans are incredulous. They see flopping as an shameful, cowardly act of cheating, worthy of the harshest of penalties. The rest of the world simply sees it as part of the game. Similarly, bad officiating is seen in much the same light – as something that, like the weather, cannot be changed. This fundamental philosophical difference may be part of the reason soccer hasn’t reached the same popularity in America as it has in the rest of the world, even though millions of American kids actually play soccer. Americans are always trying to improve things, weather included. We’re not satisfied with a wistful sigh, a shoulder shrug, and an apologetic look of defeated resignation. Americans do not accept defeat and more importantly are not content with a tie. Americans want resolution – ideally a happy ending and not some morally confusing random moment of existence, beautiful though it may be. Maybe someday Americans will have enough influence to fix soccer. Ideally the fix won’t come from Vegas mobsters, but from a sincere urge to do what is right. If you’re one of those Americans who feel an urge to do what is right, think about skipping work this Friday and going down to Threadgill’s World Headquarters at 8am for KGSR’s Fan Fare Friday, a musical benefit for Family Eldercare. For the donation of a fan (not a soccer fan – something that generates breeze not noise) you can see sets by some truly amazing musicians: Quiet Company, Rocco DeLuca, BettySoo, Shinyribs, the Gourds, Kelly Willis, Mingo Fishtrap, Malford Milligan, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jon Dee Graham, and an unannounced “special guest.” You may not be able to afford to buy a referee, but you can probably afford to buy a fan, right?

Eric Does Hendrix

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June 16, 2010

Antone’s CLOSED

Having fun can be a real bitch. There is almost always a certain amount of effort involved. Sure, you can attempt to minimize it to a certain extent. You can position your recliner within arm’s reach of your Red Bull and Snickers stocked minifridge, get your joystick optimally situated so that you barely have to move your wrist, strap on a urinary condom and a collection bag so that you rarely have to even go to the bathroom, but what kind of life is that? Sitting around all day basting in the funk of your own nervous sweat worrying that you might get ganked by a hostile World of Warcraft mob? Fuh-hun! A few years of that and your Jabba the Hut-looking ass will have exactly zero chance of getting laid by anything other mail-order sex toys. Scary as it sounds, there is something to be said for getting out and about – not just making vampirish runs to the grocery store at 3:30 in the morning to pick up more Red Bull and Snickers, but actually going out and engaging in activities that bring you into contact with real people, not just the automated checkout machine. Such risky activity does require a modicum of social skills and a wardrobe with slightly more depth than a cat-fur-coated bathrobe, sagging tube socks, and torn house slippers. For instance, let’s say you start slow. Maybe you rent a kayak on Lake Ladybird. Since it’s June, you clearly haven’t done your homework, but hey, credit for taking a stab, right? Nothing like kayaking in June to bring home the valuable epiphany that being on the water is not the same as being in the water. Anyway, you will at least have to interact with the cashier at the boat rental stand: a few unintelligible mumbles, a quickly scrawled signature on the credit card slip, and you’re off. That wasn’t too painful, and is this fun or what? Slowly floating down the Bird in a plastic log, body bent into an excruciating right angle, blanketed in sweat from the 100% humidity. Enjoy yourself. Soon enough you’re going to have to paddle back up river to claim your deposit. OK, so maybe that hypothetical was a bust, but surely there is some sort of fun activity that doesn’t involve a slave galley ship re-enactment. How about Frisbee golf? Bam! There you go! Frisbee golf is just like real golf, only no one cares if you’re actually good at it. Genius! You could scream “I am the number one rated Frisbee golfer in America!” at a crowded cocktail party, and conversational din would go on uninterrupted. Similar results could be achieved with the phrase “I am really good at masturbating!” Yawn. Everybody thinks they’re the Tiger Woods of masturbation, and, ultimately, that’s true. It’s just nothing to write home about. Of course, masturbation, like Frisbee golf, is fun that can be had with a relatively low risk of injury and limited arm/wrist movement. It’s probably best not to do it in public parks though. Having fun isn’t always easy. Managing to endure the hellish drudgery of day-to-day existence requires a Herculean amount of imagination, creativity, and courage. Blessed are the entertained, for they shall inherit the stuff suicidal people leave behind. Staying entertained can be exhausting. It’s no wonder why so many people try to spice things up by turning to drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately, some end up believing that drugs and alcohol are the fun itself. That’s often the point at which the fun ends, when an exciting choice turns into the grim necessity of chemical dependency. Being chemically dependent is ugly at any age, but especially so for teenagers, who haven’t yet been exposed to the wide array of possibilities life has to offer without drugs and alcohol. Fortunately there are programs like the Palmer Drug Abuse Program that help teenagers deal with chemical abuse issues and life in general through peer counseling and support. As the song goes, it’s easier “to get by with a little help from [your] friends.” And PDAP is doing just that this Thursday night at Antone’s when Eric Johnson, Chris Layton, and Scott Nelson perform a fundraiser called “Eric Does Hendrix” – a night of Jimi Hendrix music performed by Grammy-winning Austin guitar god Johnson, along with ex-Stevie Ray Vaughan drummer Layton and bassist Nelson. If you’re into Hendrix, Eric Johnson, or just helping kids make it safe through troubled times, this show should be big, easy fun.

ROT Rally Parade

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June9, 2010

Congress Avenue

If you’re into beef jerky, this weekend your meat market is going to get a whole lot bigger. The incessant rumble of Harleys should have told you something is up, and that something is the Republic of Texas Biker Rally, aka the ROT Rally, the annual gathering of 50,000 or so motorcycle enthusiasts that takes place in Austin each June – mainly out at the Travis County Expo Center but also at swank places like Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill, Twin Peaks, Hooters, and Coyote Ugly. For most Austinites, the locus is a little harder to pin down. If you’re anywhere inside the loop, the incessant cacophony of blurts and pops rattling every sash in your home might lead you to believe there’s a hawg rally right in your backyard. If you’re feeling a little smug about living in the suburbs or exurbs, don’t gloat. There’s nothing like having your REM sleep shattered at three in the morning by the farting exhaust of some bewildered biker tooling through your quiet subdivision to remind you that the ROT Rally isn’t just that thing they have at that place out past the dump. No, ROT is all up in our chili, parading down Congress, tearing around the Hill Country, clogging up Sixth Street, and scaring away nearly as many hipsters as the Texas Relays. The difference with ROT is that nobody is going to be closing down clubs for this crowd. Sure, there are still some scary biker gangs – leathery old dudes with meth-rotted grills and biker bitches who look like the granny from the Playboy cartoons (especially topless) – but a huge swath of the ROT demo are suburban professionals: lawyers, accountants, and middle-management types who had a deferred midlife crisis and dropped 20 large on a steel show pony thinking they could recapture the wild youth they never had. In a way, they have … as long as their wild youth fantasies involved hanging out with a bunch of trussed up, rheumatoid old dudes in mechanic-themed bars listening to Van Halen and hitting on saddle-bagged, butter-faced 35-year-old women in leather halter tops. Careful, even though you might feel compelled to pop off audibly to your skinny-jeaned buddies about some potbellied, do-ragged sexagenarian who is wearing a T-shirt that says, “Yeah, I’m hitting that!,” don’t discount the possibility that the shirt’s meaning is literal. With bikers, you just never know. You should also consider the possibility that anyone willing to spend their recreational hours straddling a 600 pound suicycle/legchopper/murdercycle probably has a bit of a death wish – and really, wouldn’t you if you were tapping that? The best policy for most people is to just lay low until the whole thing blows over – ideally with a bottle of Demerol and some really expensive noise-canceling headphones. On the other hand, if you’re one of those hellions like Sandy Bullock who gets turned on by a guy who gets turned on by a huge vibrator with wheels, you’ll want to make sure to get down to Congress Avenue this Friday night for the “Longest Parade of Motorcycles Known to Mankind.” At around 8pm, nearly all the cyclists from the Expo Center will rumble through a waiting throng of willing voyeurs. Yes, you can bring dogs and children, but it’s about as smart as taking them to Mardi Gras. It’s pretty safe bet that both animal and child will surely be debauched at some point during the evening. Yes, there is beauty – some of the finest, most lovingly cared for machines you will every see – but there is also plenty of ugliness as well, both figurative and literal. Regardless, it’s all riveting entertainment … and afterward you get your fun tank topped off with a concert by Vallejo, Grady featuring Dee Snider, and the L.A. Guns. If you’ve never been to the ROT Rally, Friday night will give you a good taste: tough and salty, but ultimately satisfying – sort of like beef jerky.

QueerBomb

Uncategorized

June 2, 2010

ND Austin

Austin is, after all, the state capital and arguably the third gayest city in Texas … at least in terms of numbers.
Why wouldn’t Austin devote a four-day weekend to the life and music of Charley Pride? Anyone who has sold more than 70 million records is worthy of a heapin’ helpin’ of A-Town adoration, but CP did it as a black country singer. That’s like a big slab of improbable sandwiched between a couple of slices of impossible, slathered in unthinkable and garnished with unbelievable. In other words, a lot of “ble” to wrap your head around. Pride knows what it’s like to be a victim of discrimination. Pride knows what it’s like to overcome obstacles. Pride understands the plight of the downtrodden, but he also knows the thrill of victory and the triumph of accomplishment. Did you know that Charley Pride is the only black person ever inducted into the Grand Ole Opry? Ever. Not even EP can say that … especially since … no matter what you read in the tabloids … Elvis is dead. CP, on the other hand, is alive and kickin’ – just attended spring training camp with the Texas Rangers … as he has for the past 30-plus years. Pride knows perseverance. He tried to become a major league baseball player until his fastball lost its mustard due to an arm injury. He ended up playing semipro in Helena, Mo.; working in a zinc smelter; and playing club gigs a couple of nights a week. With the help of a local DJ, he landed on a package show with Red Foley and Red Sovine, who later hooked him up with legendary guitarist and record executive Chet Atkins. The rest is history – a history well worth four days of colorful revelry, remembrance, pomp, and circumstance, and at the very least just one. Hey, if Buck Owens gets a birthday bash, Charley Pride deserves one, too. Sadly however, Charley Pride’s birthday falls on March 18, which is usually smack-dab in the middle of South by Southwest. Of all the damned luck, eh? Sorry, Charley. This weekend is a pretty good weekend for a Pride fest too. In fact, there is a Pride fest this weekend, only this Pride isn’t black, it’s rainbow-colored. Confusing yes, but not for Pride participants. They’re all rock-solid sure of their sexual orientation – so much so they’re proud of it, thus the name. This Pride might not knock out a stirring rendition of “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” (unless it’s a gender-nonspecific remix with a throbbing disco beat), but they will turn out festively and in impressive numbers. Austin is, after all, the state capital and arguably the third gayest city in Texas … at least in terms of numbers. Most importantly, Pride is about reminding the breeders that gay, lesbian, bi, and transgender people are people too … equally deserving of the same rights as their het counterparts, some of which they still do not enjoy. As with any large, diverse group of disenfranchised people, there are varying methods and opinions on how equal rights should be achieved. Some see Pride as a way to show the straight world that GLBT people are the same in just about every way, only freakier in the sack. Others, however, see Pride as a way to celebrate their differences. If you’re into shock and awe, you’ll probably want to hang out with the latter. At least their parties are a lot more fun. This Friday, you can get in on the action at the QueerBomb Rally and Procession, which starts at the ND at 501 Studios and parades through Downtown. After the rally, there will be a “stank throwdown” featuring two DJ’s, as well as performances by Little Stolen Moments, Kings N Things, and Christeene, the world’s most terrifying drag queen and the “lady” most likely to inspire Charley Pride to sing, “Anyplace is all right as long as I can forget I’ve ever known her.”

Austin Wine & Music Festival

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May 26, 2010

The Domain

Unlike modern epicureans – who all seem to look like Paul Prudhomme (aka Dom DeLuise) - Epicurus himself was all about moderation, temperance, and the avoidance of suffering. In essence: Don't overdo it. Odds are he was smitten with that philosophical epiphany after a hard night of Dionysian excess. It's the exact same epiphany that countless millions of drunks experience while driving the porcelain Buick, but Epicurus actually stuck with the program. Imagine if he had access to a crack pipe or some Extra Strength Excedrin. Would it have somehow saved humanity from having to use the term "foodie"? You might want to put that on your time machine wish list.
What better place in Texas to hold a wine festival than Austin … at the Domain no less? Classy. You can spend Saturday morning saving money at high-end retail outlets and then blow it all that afternoon buying samples of vino. Double devil fingers up, yo! No better way to strap on your woozy helmet than to go on an eight-hour wine binge with your besties. Why not? Wine tastes good. It also comes in a bunch of different flavors, but mainly grape. Sure there are subtle nuances that people literally spend their lifetime learning to discern, but no matter how thoroughly you try to scrub your palate with cheeses and crackers, after about 15 sample glasses of wine they’re all going to taste like Thunderbird – at which point you might as well go ahead an buy a bottle … either Advil or Excedrin will do, it really doesn’t matter. The next morning your head is still going to be clanging like a church bell. Maybe it’s just the Lord getting some payback for all that time you spent with the devil. Regardless, a really bad wine hangover can be ugly enough to make you want to start smoking crack. In fact, it’s very likely that wine hangovers created a whole system of philosophy: Epicureanism. Unlike modern epicureans – who all seem to look like Paul Prudhomme (aka Dom DeLuise) – Epicurus himself was all about moderation, temperance, and the avoidance of suffering. In essence: Don’t overdo it. Odds are he was smitten with that philosophical epiphany after a hard night of Dionysian excess. It’s the exact same epiphany that countless millions of drunks experience while driving the porcelain Buick, but Epicurus actually stuck with the program. Imagine if he had access to a crack pipe or some Extra Strength Excedrin. Would it have somehow saved humanity from having to use the term “foodie”? You might want to put that on your time machine wish list. These days however, Epicureanism seems to be more about the pleasure-seeking than the moderation. That’s easy to understand. Pleasure-seeking is as American as baseball, apple pie, and a fruity, robust Chardonnay. In fact, among our unalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness, which is pretty much a synonym for pleasure-seeking, isn’t it? Exactly. There is no mention of a right of moderation in the Declaration of Independence. Who would want it? Americans were born to live fast, love hard, and die young, which is why KFC invented the Double Down – either that or they were creating a low-calorie alternative to the Big Mac, neither of which will be available at the 2010 Austin Wine & Music Festival. Don’t worry though; there will be plenty opportunities for excess, bacchanalian and otherwise. Start with samples from more than 20 Hill Country wineries, food from local vendors such as Freebirds and Kerbey Lane Cafe, and a “Manctuary” with seven varieties of locally produced brews – apparently targeted at dudes whose masculinity is threatened by anything fruity. The Manctuary also includes a “Man Cave.” No, that’s not fruity in the least. Still, if your estrus starts to blossom, you can butch back up with a two-day lineup of nearly chick-free Texas country music. Acts scheduled to play include Autumn (the girl) and lots of dudes: Texas Renegade, Micky & the Motorcars, Mike Mancy, Walt Wilkins & the Mystiqueros, Josh Grider, and Radney Foster among others. Like the variety of wines, there is something for just about everyone at this festival, which should make it a fun time. Just remember to occasionally knock back some water and, if you have it, wear something purple … you know, to match the stains on your teeth.

Pachanga Latino Music Festival

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May 19, 2010

Fiesta Gardens

There is no equivalent of Ellis Island anywhere along the Mexican border, no outstretched torch of Lady Liberty lighting the way for clandestine nighttime border crossings, no bronze plaque beckoning tired, poor, huddled masses and wretched refuse through the golden door. Really, would it have killed Panama to pop for a big copper statue as payback for helping them win independence from Columbia? (Yes, we gave them the military reach-around mainly so we could dig a huge ditch through the middle of their country, but hey, a favor’s a favor, right?) Just think of the warm feeling all those illegals would get (as if riding sardined in the back of a sweltering, windowless semi trailer through the desert wouldn’t do the trick) if they were welcomed by a reasonably svelte, feminine beacon of liberty, even (especially?) if she was wearing a poncho and a huge, touristy sombrero. Well, no such luck for our southern neighbors. Their entry into the land of the free is much too hasty to allow for standing around gazing at statues and waxing philosophical about the blessings of liberty. In Mexico, making a run for the border isn’t just a lighthearted euphemism for the late-night munchies; it’s an adrenaline-fueled gauntlet reminiscent of a jailbreak scene from Cool Hand Luke, except the bloodhounds are replaced by paranoia-crazed minutemen with night-vision goggles, assault rifles, and spine crushing 4-by-4s. Down on America’s tan line, immigration isn’t for the timid. It takes some cojones grandes to cross into the home of the brave. Those few who actually make it are awarded the prize of a shit job that pays below minimum wage, a breathtaking stay in a cheap motel room that’s packed tighter than the cargo hold of La Amistad, and, if things go exceptionally well, a shot at dying in a cloud of cocaine and gunfire like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface. For most immigrants, however, freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose – especially since they probably just spent their life savings paying off a coyote. Yet, as brave, hardworking, and committed as illegal immigrants are to the American dream, as much as they love our country, they still have to leave it. They are, after all, illegal. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to be dicks about it like Arizona. If Americans start pulling over and checking the papers of everyone who looks like they descended from immigrants just to make sure they’re legal, they won’t have any time left to run their casinos. F that S. Persecution is hardly un-American, but it doesn’t make it right or reasonable. This country was founded on the principle that all men were created equal. It has since spent more than 230 years falling short of that mark, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Hopefully, the rest of America is smarter or at least more optimistic than Arizona. Hopefully America understands that its strength is in its diversity, which means we have better food, better music, better parties, and we don’t bleed to death when we nick ourselves shaving. If you want to enjoy a great example of our awesome diversity with relatively little chance of being jacked up by immigration Nazis, check out this Saturday’s Pachanga Latino Music Festival at Fiesta Gardens. From noon to 11pm, four stages will host more than 20 Latino acts including such favorites as Grupo Fantasma, David Garza, Haydn Vitera, Vallejo, Amplified Heat, Roberto Pulido y los Clasicos, Hacienda, and Bomba Estéreo. Enjoy the music … and remember how much uglier it would be in Arizona.

35th Annual Deutschen Pfest

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May 11, 2010

Pfluger Park

Nothing brings people together like a shared enemy – except maybe a shared enema. It’s one thing to share hatred with other people – even complete strangers. It’s quite another to share an enema tube – even with your bestie. It should come as no surprise then that statistically, at least, hatred tops enemas by a large margin. Regardless of President Clinton’s exhortation for Americans to expand the definition of “us” and shrink the definition of “them,” we’re still very comfortable with the hatred. We seem to like getting our panties in a wad. We especially like to hate on our neighbors to the north. Not Canadians. Hating Canadians is like hating Jesus or Santa Claus. Sure, they’re so sweet you get sick of them every now and then, but if you start posting Photoshopped pictures of them having sexual congress with assorted farm animals on your Facebook page – however hilarious they might be – you would, in the end, only be screwing yourself. Besides, people hate a mean drunk. That’s why Billy Joe Shaver could shoot one in the face and still get acquitted. Of course, if you decide to try that in the parking lot of your local shithole honky-tonk, make sure you have plenty of celebrity friends and Dick DeGuerin heading up your all-star, pro bono legal defense team. Canadians may have dangerous socialist tendencies, but it’s universally accepted fact that they’re happy drunks. Plus, you don’t have to travel that far north to hate, just cross the Red River. Okies are as easy to hate as Tim Tebow on a Vegas bachelor weekend. Why? Simple. Oklahoma’s football team has won more national championships than ours. Admit it. In terms of offensive behavior, they could just as well have gang-banged Bevo and broadcast it on the Godzillatron at the Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Being better than Texas at football is nearly unforgivable, but Okies somehow manage to up the ante by being equally loud and obnoxious drunks – superseded only by Alabamans, who are even louder, more obnoxious, and completely incomprehensible after a few Budweisers. Is it any wonder they have the most national football championships of all? Still, no matter how ugly a drubbing they gave us in the Rose Bowl, it seems a lot of trouble to cross two states to piss on the Crimson Tide when we have crimson and cream right upstairs. Fortunately, you don’t even have to go that far north to find someone to hate and ridicule – especially when you have Pflugerville just 10 minutes up the interstate. Yes, desirable, affordable Pflugerville. What’s not to hate? First, there’s the galling effrontery of sticking a “silent” P in front of a perfectly good F. F alone isn’t good enough for you Pflugerville? Well, F you with a P on top. Pflugerville also has good schools, huge sports fields, a lake, roomy houses, and the celebrity cachet of having been the filming location for Pfriday Night Lights. Hate you, Pflugerville. Adding insult to injury is its annual Deutschen Pfest, a three-day pfestival pfeaturing pfood, arts & crafts, music (yes, they scored Dale Watson and Bruce Robison), and even a 5K Pfun Run/Walk. You’re probably tasting vomit in the back of your mouth right now, but if you can somehow get over your Central Austin hipster haughtiness, you might find that you have a lot in common with your northern neighbors – if not genetically (really, who in America hasn’t been pfucked by a German?), then perhaps spiritually. After all, you probably come from the ‘burbs just like they do. “Them” really are “us.”

Studio 54klift: A Fundraiser for Forklift Danceworks

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May 5, 2010

Spider House Ballroom

Dance will never die. As long as there are dudes willing to showcase their mooseknuckles in sheer spandex tights, as long as the tutu remains a staple of little girls’ dress-up boxes, as long as Gene Kelly and Fred & Ginger movies run on AMC, as long as Michael Jackson songs are played, as long as there is rhythm and people shamelessly willing to express themselves through movement, there will be dance. Get used to it. Want to know how pervasive dance is? Even people who can’t dance do … often on YouTube with a several pages of ruthless commentary. Here’s the thing about dance: Like poetry, there’s no wrong way to do it, just more or less hilarious ways. Serious dance is every bit as funny – maybe funnier – than goofy dance. Of course, that doesn’t mean that all dance is funny, just that most of it is … at least a little bit – certainly the stuff that happens in the fat part of the dance bell curve. On the other end, it can be awe inspiring and impressive. Regardless of your familiarity with the discipline, seeing a really good ballerina knock out a succession of flawless fouettés inspires the same kind of awe and respect as seeing Vince Carter throw down a 360-degree tomahawk dunk. If only the ballerina could put the exclamation point on it by saying, “In your face, bitch!” Sadly, most of the dancing the average person sees is of a much lower caliber. Nearly everyone has at least a few bad dance memories seared permanently into their consciousness. You may not be the one doing a drunken rendition of the broken-armed robot in your cousin’s wedding video, but chances are you have moonwalked, checked your watch, churned some butter, and thrown some dice in a similarly arrhythmic fashion. It’s all good, yo. You were probably having the time of your life – making memories for both yourself and all those snarky asshole wallflowers who posted it on their Facebook pages. In the words of the prophet McConaughey, “Just keep livin’.” Sure, the cops may show up at your door at 3am some morning to find you stoned to the bejesus belt, banging on bongos in your birthday suit, but that’s no reason to start acting like you’re too cool for drool. Trying to go through life without looking stupid is a most pernicious form of stupidity. Often times acting cool is only a shitty cover for being boring. Remember: Shame is for the morning after, not the night of. Yes, you may have all the fly dance moves of a 4H Club treasurer from suburban Wichita, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait around all night for the DJ to play “Y.M.C.A.” or the “Macarena” just so you can dance. Sometimes you have to freestyle it. All you have to do is feel the rhythm; you don’t necessarily have to stay on it. Sometimes, when you’re really working your stuff, you might feel the dance floor open up for you. It could be that people are forming a circle so that you can school everyone with your fly moves. Or, they might be laughing at you. Doesn’t matter. You’re doing the right thing: bringing joy into the world. That’s ultimately what dance is about, isn’t it? e.e. cummings said it best: “He sang his didn’t and danced his did.” This weekend you can dance your did at Studio 54klift, a disco dance party based on New York’s Studio 54 disco. No, you won’t get to relive the smell of cigarette smoke, sweat-cured polyester, and cocaine snorted off a men’s room toilet seat, but there will be lots of dancing to throbbing disco beats, plus performances, a cash bar, and a silent auction, ideally with enough time in between for you to work your stuff.

Lights Out! at Seaholm Power Plant

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April 21, 2010

Seaholm Power Plant

Occasionally, even right here in River City, you will meet people so stupid they make you want to tear your hair out. Why? Because you’re at least smart enough to know that if you choked them to death, you would probably end up in prison … a place with more people in need of Darwinistic mercy killing than you could possibly handle. As desperate as mankind may seem for a well-reasoned, efficient thinning of the herd, it’s insane to actually take on the task yourself. On a human scale, natural selection is a glacial process – much like dealing with the U.S. Postal Service. You can’t just expect all the stupid people to become instantly extinct like the dodo bird. Sure, you could maybe accelerate the process by luring them all into a stadium for a tea party rally and then clubbing them to death like baby seals, but inevitably a few would escape, breed like rabbits, and spawn a whole new duh generation. Besides, genocide is always messier than it seems, no matter how well planned or intentioned. More importantly, brute force is always outright admission of the failure of intelligence. You’re better off going hairless if that’s what it takes to stay Zen. Maybe that’s why Buddhist monks are bald … they’ve already torn their hair out. Dealing with people of obvious intellectual inferiority can be so exasperating, can’t it? How can you even have an intelligent conversation with someone who doesn’t regularly read The New York Times, listen to the Decemberists, and watch The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert? Someone who forsakes the theory of evolution for the dogma of creationism? Someone who drives a four-wheel drive King Ranch F-250 instead of a Prius? Someone who owns more guns than books? Someone too stupid to realize that meat is murder and milk is tit torture juice? You can barely even look at them without your face contorting into a grotesque mask of derision. Fortunately seven years of liberal arts college education not only gave you the patience of Job but the empathy and compassion of Jesus himself. Instead of snarkily pointing out the intellectual shortcomings of knuckle dragging red staters, Christian fundamentalists, and crotchety, senile, blue-haired conservatives, you take the time and make the effort to understand their position and engage with them in meaningful dialogue. After all, true change always comes from within and is rarely affected by scorn, derision, and ridicule, hilarious though they may be. You’re not the kind of person who dismissively labels someone as a right-wing nut job or a crazy-eyed Christian fundy. No, you always carefully examine people and issues in the stark, unforgiving light of well-informed objectivity. In short, you’re part of the answer, not part of the problem. For that you will be richly rewarded, if not a terrestrial sphere, then surely a spiritual one … if you actually believed in that bunk. Don’t sweat it, Austin offers plenty of earthly rewards for folks just like yourself. For instance, this Friday, April 30, at the spooky shell of the old Seaholm Power Plant, the Texas Travesty, KVRX, and Canvas for a Cause are hosting Lights Out!, a six-hour extravaganza featuring “some of the best bands, comedians, and artwork that the city has to offer.” For only $10 you can see comedians Mike MacRae, John Ramsey, and Bryan Gutmann and be treated to a music showcase featuring local shoegazers Ringo Deathstarr as well as other “exciting surprise guests.” There is also an art auction with all proceeds benefiting Heart House Austin, an afterschool program dedicated to providing a safe haven and academic support to low-income children so that someday you won’t feel the urge to choke them too.

Texas Burlesque Festival 2010

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April 21, 2010

ND Austin

OK, here’s the deal: Burlesque involves stripping … but not that skanky, donkey show, picking-up-pingpong-balls-with-your-vajajay kind of stripping. No, modern burlesque is more about the dress than the undress. Sure, you can show up in your trucker cap and sleeveless camo T-shirt, flicking your tongue between your peace fingers and yelling, “Show us yer ta-tas, baby!” But mostly what you’ll get is the judgmental, raised eyebrows of your fellow audience – the same sort of look you get at a little league soccer game when you scream, “Either you nut up and take that goalie out or you’re hitchhiking home!” to your 6-year-old from the sideline. Unfortunately, the fact that he recoils into a defensive fetal position every time the ball comes near him doesn’t excuse your boorish, anachronistic behavior. Crazy as it sounds, burlesque fans can be a little stuck up too. Why? Because burlesque, much like parenting and society itself, has evolved. It’s now an art form. Stripping, on the other hand, involves the coarseness of overt monetary exchange. Merely by walking in the door of a tittie bar, a strip club, or a Hooters, you are opening yourself up to being called a chauvinist pig. Fair or not, this does have its advantages. For one thing, your standard of acceptable behavior drops to somewhere between that of Rush Limbaugh and a homeless man who just crapped his trousers. Essentially, all bets are off … at least until the bouncer pile drives you into the asphalt in the parking lot for dry-humping your cocktail waitress. For the exorbitantly high price of a rubbery surf and turf combo, you buy the right to unleash all manner of misogynistic, foul-mouthed commentary; obscene gestures; and lascivious leers. If you have the foresight to bring a roll of one-dollar bills, you can actually break the fourth wall and let your fingers brush against the skin beneath the G-string when tipping. Whoa! Cleanup on Aisle 9. Burlesque, on the other hand, while hardly the model for genteel sensibility, nonetheless has a certain level of decorum and, more importantly, an overtly post-feminist mindset. If you just took off your trucker hat to scratch your head, think of it this way: chicks on top. The progressive political orientation of the neo-burlesque movement leans strongly toward female empowerment and celebration of the female form – lofty phrases that have no doubt been appropriated by every low-rent, skeevy porn director on the planet when recruiting for lipstick lesbian scenes. Nonetheless, if a woman says she is celebrating empowerment by performing a bump-and-grind routine to Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers” in 6-inch heels and a dangerously tight corset, you have to take her for her word – at least until she invites you into the men’s room for a quick $5 HJ. The preceding scenario however, is extremely unlikely at modern burlesque gatherings, where adjectives like “artistic,” “inventive,” and “classy” abound. There is still plenty of skin, but fewer black eyes, pimp bruises, and cheap, lopsided Mexican breast implants. More importantly, the stigma of being labeled a creepy, lecherous voyeur is almost nonexistent. As a fan of burlesque, your lechery is repackaged as a healthy appreciation of camp, fashion, and artistry – sort of like going to the Roller Derby, only the chicks are hotter and don’t wear knee pads. Don’t let that slow you down however, because burlesque will certainly add to the richness of your fantasies, even if it doesn’t necessarily fulfill them. This weekend you can fill out the cast of your fantasies by attending the Texas Burlesque Festival, which is being held Thursday-Saturday at the Independent. The Texas Burlesque Fest showcases more than 60 of the best burlesque performers from across the country and is hosting workshops to help performers hone their craft and polish their art. And really, wouldn’t you rather spend that roll of ones empowering women?

Austin Reggae Fest

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April 14, 2010

Auditorium Shores

Living in Austin can be crazy stressful: All the noise, traffic, congestion, and smug hipsterism can really take a toll on your zen. Add to that several hundred milligrams of caffeine, general angst about the tanking economy, and the imminent onset of swimsuit season, and you’re marginally postal about 90% of the time. Sure you could start a citrus cleanse or begin a vigorous colonic irrigation regimen, but you will still not have plumbed the root of it all: You care too much. Remember Austin? This is not the city you come to in order to feed your voracious ambition. This is the city you come to in order to polish your Frisbee golf skills. This is the city that motivated you to test how long you could sleep on your college friend’s couch before he kicked you out (two and a half weeks) in a screaming fit of rage for eating the remainder of his quart of Blue Bell Caramel Turtle Fudge (you were wicked baked) and then putting it back in the freezer empty. Yes, he was just looking for a reason ever since he found that merkin of pubic hair you left in the shower drain, but you took the high road, persevered and lived off Central Market samples and art opening crudités until you finally had to break down and get a job. Now that you’re all respectable with a day gig, a Smart Car, and an East Austin rent house with a five-way split, you’re feeling like maybe Austin has lost a bit of its luster. Wrong! The problem is that you’ve just given up on giving up. Somewhere along the way you quit quitting. There is still a lot of time to be wasted in Austin, even if you’re not wasted all the time. Hey, when was the last time you called in sick and spent the whole day at Barton Springs working on that dark, luxurious tan that’s the envy of your cubicle farm? How many Monday afternoons have you devoted entirely to practicing the sport of beer pong? How often do you blow off work for a box-wine picnic at the top of Mount Bonnell? Don’t you have at least one friend who will let your borrow his ski boat on a Thursday? Coming up with inventive ways to waste time can be pretty taxing, but when you run out of ideas, there is always the old standby: sitting on the couch with a skull bong listening to reggae. The cool thing about getting stoned and listening to reggae is that it’s something you can do without even bathing or changing your boxers. How awesome is that? All you need is a ratty old couch with one leg replaced by a telephone book, a coffee table made of cinder blocks and plywood, and a window tray you “borrowed” from Sonic in order to cull your seeds and stems … oh, and ideally a big bag of Funyuns. If you start to smell a little gamey after a few days, you can just blame it on the skunkweed. You barely even need to move. Just put Bob Marley’s Legend on repeat and chillax. Don’t worry, when he starts saying “get up, stand up,” he’s just speaking metaphorically. Of course, if you want to take that literally, you might want to bus it down to this weekend’s Austin Reggae Festival, where Friday, Saturday, and Sunday you can groove and sway with acts such as the Easy Star All-Stars, the Mighty Diamonds, and the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. If you haven’t listened to a lot of reggae or smoked a lot of ganja, relax. It’s a proven fact that pretty much anyone can dance to reggae as long as they’re not too stoned to stand up.

The Austin Outhouse Reunion

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April 7, 2010

Giddy Ups

You’ve probably heard the old folk tales about the days when Austin was dirt cheap, scruffy, and unpretentious. They’re mostly lies. Yes, it’s true that back in the day you used to be able to buy a six-pack of Texas Pride for $1.25 at the H-E-B … and yes, the Whip In convenience store on Burton Drive used to sell packages of nitrous oxide … and it’s true that hookers – real, skanky, foul-mouthed hookers – used to troll SoCo nightly. However, unless you like beer that tastes like it’s been left out in the sun all week (Texas Pride should have been called “Texas Perseverance”), and unless you like waking up with a menagerie of inexplicable bruises (no, you can’t run through brick walls, even if you’ve been huffing), and unless you’ve been accosted by a female prostitute who looks like a dude who let a 4-year-old apply his/her lipstick, then even in the softest lens of retrospect, it would be hard to call the old days better times. Cheaper times, yes. If you go back far enough, you can probably find a time when you could buy a pound of skunk weed for fitty cent, a bottle of Coke for a penny, or maybe even a paint pony for an eagle feather, but there are down sides to everything. You would probably have had to get the skunk weed from an old hippie who smelled like patchouli and dried urine and had brown teeth and a case of toenail fungus that belonged in a science exhibit. The paint pony would probably come complete with a smallpox laden saddle blanket, and the Coke, while refreshing, would be spiked with actual cocaine, which everyone knows is a gateway drug to being a huge asshole. Old Austin however (that being the Austin you weren’t around for) had its pluses. For instance, back in the day there were no douches. This is not to say there weren’t self-important, nugget jewelry wearing, beauty salon mullet rocking, T-top Camaro driving douche bags. Yes, there were. But mostly they were called pricks, dickheads, and assholes, and they mostly hung out at places like Confettis or the Roxy on East Riverside. Really, every town needs a disco – if only to act as flypaper for all the fronters trying to work their game. Otherwise, their impact would be more immediately felt. It’s bad enough to have a couple of Hummers (the modern-day equivalent of the T-top Firebird) parked across two spaces at the H-E-B, but imagine a whole parking lot full of them. How about a few tables of obnoxious cigar smokers at your local coffeehouse? You get the picture. Fortunately, back in the old days there were plenty of places holding down the other end of the scale – places where pretense got checked at the door. Perhaps the least pretentious of all was the Austin Outhouse. As you can imagine, a bar named after a shitter probably isn’t too concerned with the social status of its clientele. That’s what made the Austin Outhouse such a special place. It took all comers, not only regarding its clientele but its booking policy as well. On any given night you could see anything from youthful avant punk to leather-skinned Texas songwriters, and through it all, the scenery never changed: wood paneling festooned with old license plates, band stickers and assorted memorabilia, a few neon beer signs, wooden tables, a motley assortment of questionably homeless looking people permanently installed at the bar, a few dogs, and a genuinely wonderful guy named Ed running the place who would occasionally get up on stage and play a mean harmonica. Was it better than anything we have these days? Maybe not, but it was pretty damned good back then – reason enough for a celebration too. This weekend at a similarly unpretentious bar out on Manchaca Road called Giddy Ups, they’re hosting a star-studded Austin Outhouse Reunion with a whole bunch of old-timers and a few new ones thrown in as well. People like: Calvin Russell, the Rhythm Rats, Lost John Casner, Gurf Morlix, Lloyd Maines, Ted Roddy, Shelley King, Terri Hendrix, Herman the German, Leti de la Vega, and many others. Proceeds benefit the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians and Save the Cactus Cafe. Think about it this way: You may never have a better reason to go to Manchaca Road.

Open Screen Night

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March 31, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz

Hey everybody, it’s Easter! Put your hands together for the Easter Bunny! Well, not you Jesus. You get a pass. Let’s just say you’re in the VIP section. Tell you what, why don’t you hang out with Dismas and Gestas while the rest of us collect colored eggs filled with chocolate candy and chump change? Super. Hey, what’s this? A boiled egg? Blasphemy! That’s a shitty prank to play on someone celebrating the horrifying torture and crucifixion of the son of God. Is this some sort of yolk? Is this some sort of subtle attempt at promoting a pro-choice agenda? No, God will not show mercy, even if this egg was boiled in the first trimester. Boiled eggs are murder, plain and simple. God does not condone baby-killing! Yes, He may occasionally turn a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents … and He definitely seems to be fairly zen about death and suffering in general, but just because He is the omnipotent creator of the universe doesn’t mean you can pin the rap on Him as an accessory to murder. Besides, if God believed in killing babies, don’t you think He would have just crucified Jesus right there in the manger? He could have left the Jews completely out of it. He could have done the trick with a couple of oriental kings and a box of trim nails, but no, baby-killing is wrong. You can’t just go around hammering messianic newborns to 1-by-4s. God don’t make no junk babies. You have to wait until the baby grows up, learns a trade – maybe becomes a carpenter (how ironic is that?) – and then starts a whole peace movement. Now you’ve got someone you can kill: a peace-preaching, sandal-wearing, long-haired do-gooder who won’t even fight back. Plus, not only is he of killing age, he’s an insolent blasphemer who refuses to get with the program. As the old saying goes: “Opinions are like assholes. They all stink, and people should keep them to themselves.” But ol’ Jesus comes trotting into Jerusalem on an ass (which in all likelihood was the AD33 equivalent of an Escalade with spinning rims), running his mouth about love and forgiveness and not necessarily saying he’s the son of God, but you know he’s just oozing attitude: “Go on and crucify me, bitch. I’ll still be seated at the right hand of the Father, and I will return to judge the living and the dead … aka you motherfuckers.” Really, Jesus is lucky the Jews (and God, their accessory) didn’t crucify his whole posse. In fact, entire genocides have been carried out with less justification, presumably while God was washing His hair. Clearly the message here is to keep your nose to the ground and your big ideas to yourself. You might not change the world, but you might find a few more Easter eggs. If you feel like you absolutely have to witness the lurid depravity of original thought, there’s no better place to do so than at Open Screen Night at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz on Easter night. A $100 prize is awarded to the best short film/home movie/video clip brought in by an audience member. Really bad videos get the gong after two minutes – which is about how long it takes for the boos to reach a crescendo. Hey, it’s planet Earth. Mob rules.

Peer Pressure: Indie Presses Unite!

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March 24, 2010

Club de Ville CLOSED

After last weekend’s molasses-lubed traffic clusterfuck, it’s a good bet that any Austinite within a three-mile radius of Downtown was sufficiently motivated to grab a shovel and help dig an entire subway system. Smart growth accomplished. There is, however, one little hitch in our get-along: traffic. Regardless of how it probably looked on the scale model 3-D renderings, all those tiny dog-walking condopolitans haven’t decided to ditch their Lexus SUVs for Segways and Mellow Johnny’s fixies (Sorry Lance, regardless of the tiny carbon footprint, you definitely have to LiveStrong to have the confidence to walk around in biking shorts – especially the padded kind that make it look like you’ve just dropped a whopping load). It turns out that just because someone owns a half-million-dollar Downtown Austin condo doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally like to take their Yukon Denali down to the dove lease for a little Dick Cheney-style Russian roulette. Who would have thought rich people (and, for that matter, tiny dogs) were so hard to train? Downtown planners really stepped in it – both figuratively and literally it would seem. Well, the good news this week is that even if you can’t train rich folks and tiny, genetically dwarfed dogs, you can train middle-class suburban commuters – all the way Downtown. The fat part of the economic bell curve that occupies Austin’s outer reaches may not have the intelligence, inspiration, or motivation to carve themselves out anything more than a modest slice of the American dream, but they are at least smart enough to know (if only by years of Pavlovian conditioning) that those precious hours spent logjammed on the upper deck are gone forever – like the dodo bird and basic grammar. In fact, they are probably ecstatic to be able to sit down, surf the interwebs, listen to their iPods, and take a few hits off the whiskey flask on their air-conditioned ride back to Cedar Park. After such an embarrassingly long wait, it feels like a true miracle that Austin finally has a commuter train. Yes, it may primarily benefit a tax base that hasn’t chipped in its fair share of the ante, but at least it is an earnest step forward in solving Austin’s transportation issues. It will reduce emissions, reduce stress, and keep cars off the roads (ideally, particularly the Ford Flex). There are also intriguing cultural exchange possibilities. Sixth Street will surely attract some of the more adventurous, gullible suburban teens, and on the other end, all those pristine privacy fences out in the burbs are just begging for some artful graffiti. It’s a situation people too lazy or simple to use the phrase “mutually beneficial” refer to as “win-win.” In the end, however, with mass transit everybody really does win, even the tiny-dog people (as long as they don’t let go of the leash when the trains go by) and the culturally benighted suburbanites. If you’re one of those, here’s a quick cure: Hop on the train in Leander Saturday afternoon and head into town to the Convention Center station. From there, it’s just a short walk down to Club de Ville to the Peer Pressure event, sponsored by Effing Press, Dalton Publishing, Monofonus Press, and American Short Fiction in celebration of Small Press Month. Hear readings from all four presses, see live bands, and spend the night in a nice hotel because the trains don’t run after 7:42pm. What? You expected the Downtown hotels not to win?

Austin Chronicle Music Awards

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March 16, 2010

Austin Music Hall

Walk outside. Inhale deeply. Smell that? That’s the smell of fresh meat: thousands upon thousands of fame whores, sycophants, big shots, losers, and a few real, honest to goodness normal people who somehow got sucked into the roiling clusterfuck that is South by Southwest. The air Downtown is thick with the scent of desperation and disappointment – not just because of the maddeningly intermittent cab service and ubiquitous sub-par catered barbecue, but because of the collective realization that the city of hope is built on a mountain of crushed dreams. Somewhere between the last windmill armed power chord of their 8pm showcase and the hungover, stale-farted van ride back to Nowheresville, legions of starry-eyed hopefuls will experience the painful epiphany that they just don’t have what it takes. The hardest lesson to learn is that a dream is not enough. It’s not enough to want it really badly. You have to want it really badly and be really, really good – exceptionally good … or at the very least exceptionally good-looking. Even more sobering than the overwhelming number of truly great bands showcasing at SXSW is the thought that each year fewer and fewer of them will become superstars in the classic sense. They might occasionally experience a few golden God moments – a bed full of naked groupies, a TV defenestration, their names spelled out in coke on the hotel coffee table – but most of the humping they will be doing will involve carrying their equipment on and off stages in a never-ending succession of forgettable towns. Of course, touring musicians are the lucky ones. The music business is a pyramid with a very fat bottom. As a percentage, anyone sharing a smelly van ride back from SXSW is probably at the top of his or her game, careerwise. Even still, it’s no real consolation that the fall from such a low pinnacle is much less painful than some loftier achievement. The artistic ego is fragile. The hurt is real. At least SXSW sweetens the pot by offering an ocean of free booze so the sad sacks can drown in something other than their own self-pity. Moments of weakness and self-doubt were made for refreshing American pilsners. Don’t think for a minute that if the Medellín cartel had a chance to sponsor SXSW it wouldn’t. You can’t really make a drug abuser until you make a drug user. Drink up all you Johnny B. Goodes, the dream is gone. The music, however, remains. So maybe it can’t feed your children or pay your mortgage, but it can feed your soul and maybe buy you a little happiness and mental health. In a city as crazy as Austin, that shit is priceless. Success in music comes in many forms, and not all of them pay for the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons. This Saturday at the Austin Music Hall, Austin celebrates some of this year’s musical successes at the 28th annual Austin Music Awards. See some of Austin’s brightest stars get their due and watch performances by outstanding musicians like the Texas Sheiks, the Explosives, Peter Lewis of Moby Grape, Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sarah Jarosz, and Mother Falcon. Not a bad way to finish the largest music festival in the world.

SXSW Film Festival Screening of ‘Tucker and Dale vs. Evil’

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March 9, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz

This weekend thousands of edgy, creative, cosmopolitan types from all over the globe will descend on Austin for the South by Southwest Film and Interactive festivals. By the time they leave, most of them will gush openly about their love of Austin’s laid-back, eclectic lifestyle (Oops! Where’d that go?); awesome barbecue and Mexican food; and skanky dive bars. Some will even declare outright their intention to relocate here permanently. Awesome. Austin is always in need of a few thousand more pasty-skinned Urban Outfitter hipsters willing to pay $5 for a Lone Star and half a mil for a Lilliputian Downtown condo. Why wouldn’t they be? Living in Austin is like being on spring break year round. It’s always a balmy 75 degrees. The trees and lawns are perpetually verdant with the first fresh growth of spring. There are always lots of cool parking lot/backyard day parties with bands and free beer. At night there are hundreds of more live music clubs to go to – both real and improvised. Austin is creative like that, yo. Living here, knowing better, you might feel the urge to scream, “The emperor has no clothes!” Resist it. Why crush the fantasy? If they move here, Austin will crush it soon enough – just about the time they walk outside in August wearing an authentic poly-blend black Misfits T-shirt from Hot Topic and vampire eye makeup. The result invariably looks like the Wicked Witch of the West death scene from The Wizard of Oz: “I’m melting! I’m melting!” The thing that will really take the shine off Austin’s penny is when they figure out Austin’s dirty little secret: You can make all the art/film/music you want here; you just can’t get paid for it. Creativity might be a precious and rare commodity in other burgs, but here in River City we’re up to our necks in it, which means, in three words, art is cheapo. You just finished a new film/painting/song/literary opus? Y-A-W-N. So did your waitress, your landscaper, the guy who changes your oil at Jiffy Lube, and the really stoned dude who makes your sandwiches at ThunderCloud. It might be less depressing too if they sucked, but they don’t. They’re creative badasses willing to endure what would be a shameful amount of poverty anywhere else in order to perfect their craft – plus at least one of them can make a fucking majestic corned beef on rye. Yes, in that respect, Austin is like SXSW all year round, but why let the cat out of the bag? You’ll only sound like a crazy, bitter, homeless person (no use trying to convince out-of-towners that what you’re wearing is actually Austin fashion and not a symbol of your destitution). Your best strategy with these starry-eyed interlopers is to give them what they’re expecting. Sprinkle your Austin hipster patois with and extra dash of hillbilly: y’alls and ma’ams and fixin’s and whatnots. And really, would it kill you to wear a cowboy hat and some cutoff overalls? That way they’ll feel like they’re really getting over on the locals, and you’ll have your sweet revenge in August. If you want to see what this will look like on film, check out SXSW Film’s Friday night screening of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a wicked, hilarious send-up of slasher-in-the-woods movies that explores what happens when a group of college kids on spring break encounter what they believe to be a couple of deranged backwoods killers. Could there be a better metaphor for Austin during SXSW?

82nd Zilker Park Kite Festival

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March 2, 2010

Zilker Park

Sometimes a really cool kite can be almost as effective as a Labrador puppy in a bandana for attracting members of the opposite sex. It really depends on how you work it. Either one can set up the shot, but it’s up to you to actually score. If you don’t watch your puppy, there isn’t much danger involved. It might gnaw on a toddler’s leg, crap on a picnic blanket, or possibly be snatched up and carried away by a mastiff, but your liability index is still fairly low. Kites, however, can nosedive unexpectedly out of the clear blue and put out someone’s eye. In a park full of children staring up at the heavens in wide-eyed wonderment, you don’t want to be the asshole who was too busy trolling for strange to play out some kite string. Kids just ruin everything, don’t they? You could almost forgive them if they could just hold their liquor and stop cock-blocking the MILFs, but they always seem to be underfoot, staring up at you with pleading eyes, dirty cheeks, and green-tinged rivulets of snot running out of their noses. Yes, puppies may have wicked bad sour-milk breath, razor sharp canines, and a penchant for ralphing in your car right after you get it detailed, but at least they don’t dirt their drawers and then follow you around in an unholy cloud of funk screaming at the top of their lungs expecting you to clean it up. Talk about a mood killer. A pair of pendulous pampers will shrivel the average dude’s johnson in no time – perhaps even send him into the priesthood, but a screaming child is every bit as much of a libido extinguisher. Regardless of what you see on the interwebs, most MILFs become completely uninterested in sex once a screaming child sends their mams into milk mode. (Bad news for all you lactophiliacs out there cruising the Craigslist for milking moms. That’s a dry well … metaphorically speaking). To a single man on the make, a crying child is more of an annoying setback – especially since he’s never completely sure how to alleviate his suffering other than put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones or maybe give the child a shiny object to play with … say a pocketknife or a cigarette lighter. The latter is a great way to find out who the child’s mother is (if only to separate her from potential mates), but it can also make you a bit of a pariah. You might as well nosedive your kite into a toddler’s eyeball. Puppies, on the other hand, attract the opposite sex better than really cool kites, but goddamnit if they don’t attract children as well, which makes puppies a bit of a double-bladed sword. Unlike kites, puppies will also follow you home … sometimes even if you let go of their leash. If you let go of a kite, it will find its own home … often in the branches of a tree or wrapped around a power line, but at least it won’t bleed you dry financially (dog chow, chew toys, linoleum, carpet, vet bills) and emotionally (screen-door whining, table-scrap eyes, Old Yeller reruns). Like a long-term relationship, a puppy is a lot of work. You don’t need that kind of hassle – especially on a Sunday at the park. Maybe you should just build a really cool kite (still cheaper than a puppy) and head over to Zilker Park this weekend for the 82nd Zilker Park Kite Festival. You might not win a booby prize, but you could win categories like Steadiest Kite, Strongest Pulling Kite, Smallest Kite, Most Unusual Kite, or Largest Kite. Just remember, if you decide to go for Largest Kite, make sure your insurance policy covers collateral damage.

Dodgeball on Ice

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February 23, 2010

Chaparral Ice (in Northcross Mall)

Being a grateful beneficiary of the finest health care system in the world, you probably have no fear when it comes to sports-related injuries. If you should sprain an ankle, dislocate a collarbone, or suffer serious head trauma, you can rest assured that the insurance company of your employer’s choosing will be right there to provide you with premium health care services … as long as the emergency room or doctor’s office you visit is “in network” (sometimes mistaken as a synonym for “incompetent” or “inexperienced”) and your injury isn’t the result of some pre-existing congenital condition excluded in the fine print of your policy. If you’re not sure, don’t worry; your doctor will run you through a barrage of expensive diagnostic tests – not because they were necessarily warranted by your condition but because your insurance covers them and they are probably required by the doctor’s malpractice insurance to protect against any potential lawsuits. As long as everyone has insurance, no harm, no foul, eh? It’s not like it’s real money. It’s just insurance. Of course, in the end you will have to pony up some real cash, but that $35 co-pay and $1,500 deductible is a small price to pay for the finest health care in the world. Plus, as a door prize, you’ll probably get several unnecessary prescriptions for addictive pain medications – or at the very least a baggie of sample meds provided to you gratis by your doctor. Consider it a gift from your friends in the American pharmaceutical industry, an industry so thoughtful it is willing to buy drugs for people who can’t afford brand-name prescriptions. Yes, that might seem like a transparent ploy to keep the outraged uninsured from rioting in the streets and Congress from enacting meaningful health care reform, but at least it’s something. Besides, even a broke junkie is worth more to an insurance company than a healthy straight edge. High cholesterol? Why give up fondue, bacon-wrapped shrimp, and chili-cheese fries when you can just pop a pill for it? Diabetes? There are pills for that too – as many as there are pharmaceutical companies – so don’t feel like you need to use common sense and willpower to manage your condition. You can also get drugs for depression, hypertension, insomnia, listlessness – you name it. If you can communicate it, you can medicate it. If you have good insurance but don’t have a living will, you might not even need to communicate it. Clearly, the keys to maintaining the finest health care system in the world are expensive insurance and a huge variety of brand-name drugs. That means Americans need to have the resolve to put the interests of huge corporations ahead of individual citizens, otherwise we might as well live in a communist state like France, Britain, or the red menace to the north, Canada. Health care? They can’t even make decent snow. If history has proven anything, it’s that governments are completely ineffectual – the less the better. We certainly can’t afford to let government run our health care system. After the colossal failure of Medicare (a completely ineffectual health care program Congress hasn’t found the courage to mercy kill over the past 45 years), who could trust Uncle Sam to step up his game? Certainly not Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, or Abbott Labs. You probably won’t get Aetna, Humana, or UnitedHealth to sign off on that either. Good thing, because government run health care would be like a death sentence … mainly for the aforementioned, but corporations are people too. The Supreme Court just said so. Really, insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies are just people taking care of people. Don’t worry, they’ve got your back … even if it breaks trying to pay them. Feel free to go out and live a healthy, active life, and if that doesn’t work out, there will surely be a drug (or a cocktail thereof) to help you feel better. If you’re looking for a fun activity, how about dodgeball? On ice? Yes, it’s an awesome idea … especially for spectators. You’ve been looking for a way to burn up that deductible anyway, right? Here’s an exciting opportunity to decimate in one fell swoop … or one swooping fall. This Saturday at 9pm at Chaparral Ice on Anderson Lane, the folks from Hill Country Outdoors are hosting a dodgeball game on ice. Two sides pelt each other with balls until one person is left standing. That person’s name? Winner.

‘Misprint’ Magazine’s Fourth Annual Beard & Moustache Competition

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February 17, 2010

Mohawk

When you have failed at everything else in life, take heart. You may be succeeding in something you didn’t even know you were good at. Somewhere along the way you may have forgotten that you too are one of God’s infinite number of different yet perfect snowflakes, special in your own way even if you’re completely unremarkable in all others. Sadly, after kindergarten, being special has increasingly pejorative connotations. By the time you reach middle school, the only reward you get for being special is a ride on the short bus. From there the beatdown only increases in duration and ferocity. More than likely if you had a third nipple or an extra pinkie toe, by high school you had it discreetly removed. After all, it’s much safer to run with the herd than be trampled by it. Still, running with the herd has its costs: You might have to wax off your Wookie pelt; buy expensive contacts, huge silicone knockers; or get your teeth wired, capped, and bleached into flawless, sparkling symmetry. Beauty may be skin deep, but it ain’t cheap. You might have to go for the public option: being different. Not everyone has the financial wherewithal to mold themselves into aesthetic homogeneity. Even if you can afford the price of admission, you may not want to pay it. You might decide to go nonconformist, to nurture your lost specialness. Brave move, Sparky, but first you’re going to have to find it. Some people choose to devote a lifetime of intense meditation and introspection in this search. Others try to show their specialness in a variety of ingenious, yet ultimately superficial ways. That’s understandable. It is maddeningly difficult to get others to recognize your innate specialness, especially when it isn’t readily apparent … even to yourself. Not surprisingly, many people opt for some outward manifestation of their specialness: a flashy pull-target tattoo (that peeks seductively out of their muffin top), a ridonkulously large ear gauge that would make even an Ethiopian cringe, or maybe a cubic zirconium crusted grill from the jewelry store in the Fiesta Mart. Put on your mirror shades, bitches! Sparkles in the house! Here in Austin there are some really special people. That tribal armband tat that made you the rebel of your high school show choir doesn’t even raise an eyebrow around here. If you really want to stand out, you’re going to have to sport more ink than a Where’s Waldo? book and maybe tack on a few body mods like a bifurcated tongue, elf ears, genital beads, or maybe some subdermal devil-horn implants. Let your imagination run wild, but just remember that at some point your specialness may cross back into the short bus kind. If you get to obsessed with how you look, you may need to, in the words of Bomani Armah, “Read a muh’ fuckin’ book!” After all, specialness is mostly in your mind anyway. Fuck, it’s not even a word. Besides, as Joni Mitchell sings, “We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon.” It’s true. We’re all pretty much the same, more or less, and sameness isn’t all that special. Really it’s what you love that makes you special. You might love big, epic tattoos or weiner dogs or raw food or the person you’ve been stalking for the last few years … doesn’t matter. It’s what makes you special. Everything else is just window dressing, a front. Take facial hair for instance. It takes either a lot of love or extreme apathy to grow the type of beards you’ll see in Misprint‘s fourth annual Beard & Moustache Competition this Friday at Mohawk. Either way, it’s fascinating – sort of like demolition derby or hot-oil wrestling, only vicariously a lot more itchy. This year’s competition is hosted by Matt Bearden and features music by DJ Andy and DJ Huge Cock, with live music (really Misprint?) by Diagonals. Do you have what it takes to win Best Groomed, Sweetest ‘Stache, Fiercest Chops, Gnarliest Beard, or Ladies? Who knows? Maybe you’re succeeding in something you didn’t even know you’re good at.