Author: The Luv Doc

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.

Dudley & Bob’s Pleasure Fest

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February 8, 2010

Aces Lounge

It’s still not too late to break up with your significant other in order to avoid dropping a lot of coin on a Valentine’s present. In these tough economic times, buying lavish gifts that symbolize your love seems a bit irresponsible when you could just write a haiku or maybe shave off your ironic Rip Van Winkle beard. Yes, your girlfriend may say you look like Devendra Banhart, but that’s just love putting lipstick on a pig. Deep in her heart she’d like to wrestle you to the ground and shear you like a cashmere goat. Think of it this way: Would you like it if her cooch looked like Moses? And no, it wouldn’t help if she paired it with skinny jeans, a dirty canvas messenger bag, and some really thin-soled shoes. If you absolutely insist on walking around with a ZZ Top soundtrack playing in your head, you might want to consider upping the ante on the Valentine’s gift. At the very least, you should ditch the haiku for something more epic: perhaps a love sonnet or a Damien Rice/Ray LaMontagne/Michael Buble/James Blunt mix CD. Even if she despises them as much as you do, she will at least give you props for suffering through the selection process, although in the end you might feel less emasculated by shaving the beard. If you’re really broke and need to hit a home run, you could go for the grand gesture. Of course the key to the grand gesture is to think big. Standing under the window holding a jam box blaring Peter Gabriel is a bit cliché, but if you’re a paint-by-numbers type, it’s not a bad way to go. Merely the fact that you’re willing to piss off all her neighbors with such an embarrassingly unoriginal stunt has to be worth something. Plus, she will surely be intrigued by whether or not you had to strangle a homeless person to score a jam box. If you’re an adrenaline junkie, nothing says love like spray paint on the side of a water tower. Ideally, you’ll want to save time by painting a heart symbol with an apostrophe “S” rather than spelling out the actual verb. The apostrophe will let her know that even though you’re an idiot, you’re not stupid. If you’re feeling a lot of anxiety about what to get your boyfriend/husband for Valentine’s Day, don’t. The greatest gift you can give him is an outright denial that Valentine’s Day is a valid holiday to begin with. If you can’t muster that kind of resolve, there is always plan B, which involves an act of selflessness and a five-minute time slot on your day planner. If you want to throw in some candy hearts, that’s sweet, but otherwise, Valentine’s Day accomplished. This isn’t rocket science. It’s easy enough to figure out how to handle the dude side of the Valentine’s equation, but it can be maddeningly frustrating to figure out what a girl wants. What you might see as thoughtfully sexy underwear, she might see as an implication that she is a low-rent whore. On the other hand, you would be foolish to assume you can buy her something practical for V-Day … like a vacuum cleaner or a 36-piece ratchet set. She’ll just point at you and say she already has a tool. If you’re going to be wrong (and there’s about a 50% chance you will be), you might as well be wrong in a way that might turn out right. To help you in this awkward endeavor, the KLBJ Dudley & Bob Morning Show is hosting Pleasure Fest, an evening of adult-themed activities and products that will surely offer a variety of ideas on how to either make or ruin your Valentine’s Day. Besides, if you’re dumb enough to buy her a tool, it might as well be something she can use.

Bob Marley Birthday Party

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February 3, 2010

Flamingo Cantina

Last Thursday Willie Nelson canceled his show in Kenansville, N.C., because of pain in his hand. Shortly before the announcement, six members of Nelson’s band and crew were charged with possession of moonshine and possession of marijuana by local law enforcement officers. The rest of the world understands implicitly that the pain in Willie’s hand was really in his ass, metaphorically speaking, much in the same way the rest of the world knows that if you search one of Willie’s buses, you’re going to find pot, maybe even some corn squeezins. The real question is why law enforcement officers were on the bus in the first place. As insane as it sounds, there are a few possible explanations: Rip Torn might have left his hat and boots outside Willie’s bus door. That would be a red flag for sure. Apparently Torn has been tooling around lately with a loaded .22 caliber revolver in his pocket. Doesn’t sound too lethal until you consider the fact that he once hit Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer for being a shitty director. A hammer. Yes, Mailer probably had it coming, if only for sheer hubris, but even still we don’t want to risk Torn getting ripped on white lightning and emptying his clip on Willie, who everyone knows is a pacifist, despite his duets with Toby Keith. You might also have to call out the Barney Fife Brigade if Osama bin Laden were rumored to be on Willie’s bus. Yes, he would have to be a complete moron to hide out on what has essentially become a rolling lightning rod for every frustrated ex hall monitor-turned-assistant deputy, but it still has the allure of being one of the last places a reasonable person might look. Besides, lose the turban and Osama pretty much looks like any other dude at Mohawk or Liberty … especially if he could fit into some skinny jeans and master the facial memes of middle-class irony. Then again, there could have actually been a fire on the bus. That might explain why North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement officers rushed to the scene. Maybe they were first responders. Maybe they saw a plume of smoke rising from Willie’s bus door and saw an opportunity for heroism. Could you blame them if their hopes were crushed when all they found were a bunch of stoned geezers drinking moonshine – a geriatric analog of Spicoli’s van? Nothing is more depressing than finding out that old people are having more fun than you are – especially when they’re making several times your salary doing it. Why do you think Tommy Chong ended up doing time? You can’t just walk around all the time with a shit-eating grin and not expect to get hassled by the Man. You can, however, ease your anxiety about getting hassled by staying constantly baked. That probably explains why when Bee and the crew were asked to turn over the drugs they did so immediately and without protest. Maybe they even invited the A.L.E. agents to burn one. You never know. Regardless, you can’t bust Willie and his acolytes for smoking pot. It’s un-American. Even Toby Keith would say so. Busting Willie’s people for pot is like sending undercover narcs to a Bob Marley festival: fish in a barrel. There’s no honor in that … barely even any sport. Speaking of, the Flamingo Cantina is celebrating Bob’s birthday this Saturday starting at 9pm with the Mau Mau Chaplains, Don Chani, Subrosa Union, and Winston’s Caribbean Kitchen. You should go down and celebrate with them, but maybe, just to be safe, leave your moonshine at home.

Hope for Haiti Benefit

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January 26, 2010

Antone’s CLOSED

That breathtaking pinkish sunrise is not a good sign. Yes, it’s pretty – the kind of daybreak that appears in all your better Southwestern tourist brochures – but it also can be the harbinger of an ugly day for allergy sufferers. Cedar pollen is a sure sign that Adam and Eve really screwed the pooch with the whole forbidden fruit incident. The realization that they were naked was only a very small portion of the package of affliction and misery the Old Testament God had in store. There is so much bewilderingly evil and nasty shit in nature it can only be explained by a malevolent and vengeful God. No doubt cedar pollen is solidly on the list, but there are plenty of other menacing phenomena that top it by far. For instance: porcupines. Jesus, what the fucking fuck? A varmint entirely covered in needles. It’s like an animal designed by prank-store employees. Really, God? Is that some sort of sick payback for the apple? Then of course you have skunks, which look exactly like something you might want to pet … right up to the point when they lift their cute bushy tails. Piranha? Piranhas would maybe make a little sense if Eve had been caught strangling puppies or gerbiling or something, but even still, piranhas seem like a gross over-reaction. At most, an apple is worth an earwig or some bot flies or maybe an ugly case of herpes. Yes, it could be argued that the Lord was acting on principal when he cast A&E out of the garden. In fact, the real punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge is knowing that your God thought it was OK to create a menagerie of other creatures that can eat you, maul you, sting you, strangle you, clobber you, maim you, and hurt you in ways too bizarre for any mentally healthy person to imagine. Crocodiles? Why? Imaginative, yes, but couldn’t all those fish, varmints, waterbucks, zebras, and the like just have died of old age? Must baby fawns be torn to pieces by packs of wolves? Is that really necessary? A world with so much violence and treachery makes a strong argument for either a maniacally sadistic micromanager or a scatterbrained absentee landlord – somebody who drunkenly jizzed in a tide pool then flew off to another galaxy in his silver spaceship. Neither of these models is entirely satisfying, but the latter is much more comforting. Knowing that God was actually pulling the levers when more than 150,000 Haitians were crushed in an earthquake two weeks ago doesn’t really bode well for the afterlife. Would you want to eat at the same Taco Bell where a bunch of people died from E. coli the week before? Even though it’s on a comically smaller scale, the whole cedar pollen problem raises similar questions. Isn’t there a less obnoxious way for trees to mate? Do we have to be covered in a monthlong toxic pink pollen money shot? Do we even need cedar (aka mountain cedar, Juniperus Mexicana)? All it’s ever brought us is nasty pollen, brush fires (proof of a benevolent God?), and shitty bases for glass-topped coffee tables. If you stay awake trying to answer these questions, you probably can’t sleep because your head is pounding with sinus pressure – either that or you’re going insane. Same difference. Trying to understand why cedar trees exist is a pointless exercise – sort of like trying to understand why Taco Bell chose the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito for its 89-cent special. You will never understand that type of insanity unless you’re insane yourself, and the juice probably isn’t worth the squeeze. All you can really do is react to it in a way that seems sane and responsible. That’s exactly what some generous musicians will be doing this Sunday at Antone’s when they perform for the Hope for Haiti Benefit, a fundraiser for victims of the Haitian earthquake. $15 gets you a night of music from Love at War, Johnny Goudie, Suzanna Choffel, Nina Singh, Kathy Valentine, and Savannah Welch, and it might at least help ease someone else’s misery.

An Evening With Chastity and Alan Jr.

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January 20, 2010

Salvage Vanguard Theater

If it hasn’t happened already, there will come a time in your life when you have to show your ass in public. If you’re lucky, you’ll be really wasted and your face will be blurred when the video shows up on YouTube. The more likely scenario is that you will show your ass in a more metaphorical sense: Expose yourself publicly to the withering criticism and derision of others. Some people like to call this type of vulnerability life. They tend to suck it up and get on with it. Others will try to forestall this eventuality by ducking below the radar. After all, as the saying goes, the tallest blade of grass gets cut first. So, to avoid embarrassment, they bury themselves in remote corner cubicles of sprawling government bureaucracies, spend their days filing mimeographed (that’s right, this is the government we’re talking about here) triplicate copies of mimeographed triplicate copies. Others go entirely off the grid, toiling away on some sustainable organic farm, spending their days plowing, weeding, watering, and milking things like goats, cows, and father time. Then there are those who go underground – hole themselves up for years in the windowless basements of their mothers’ houses, day trading, surfing porn, and playing World of Warcraft. These are all fairly low-risk strategies. Yes, it is risky … brave even … to offer yourself up as a meatshield for your fellow Blood Elves in your skirmish with Skullsplitter trolls in Stranglethorn Vale, but even if you do get gloriously ganked in WoW, you’ll still be alive (although nearly invisible) in the real world. You might even think you’re safe, but it’s just an illusion. Often an uglier fate awaits those who try to avoid fate altogether. As it says in the book of Matthew, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Sounds like a halfhearted pep talk for all the suckers getting left behind in the rapture. Awesome. You definitely get some nice real estate in that deal, but you also get places like Mogadishu, Peshawar, and Port Arthur. Thanks for nothing, J-Dawg. Or, maybe the “inheritance” thing is meant to be a confidence builder. People who own a lot of stuff seem to have a limitless supply of confidence and self-worth. Look at Jerry Jones … Mark Cuban … The Donald. Those guys don’t seem to be embarrassed about anything. Imagine the type of arrogant dickhead you would have to be if you owned the earth. You would probably end up walking around like a 2-year-old saying: “Mine! Mine! Mine!” In reality, whether you believe it or not, you do own the earth … at least as much as anyone else does. The big question is whether or not you choose to be a selfish dickhead or a generous caretaker. Ideally you’ll want to peacefully share yourself and the world with others, thereby enriching their experiences and yours. To do so you will have to show your ass on occasion, expose yourself to injury, take some risks. It’s really not so bad, and you may learn along the way that your ass isn’t all that special anyway. Throughout January, Fronterafest plays host to a whole bunch of people hell-bent on showing their asses as it hosts its 17th annual fringe festival, five weeks of fringe theatre from all types of performers from all over the country. At 7:15pm this Saturday, Jan. 23, at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, Chicago comedians Alan Metoskie (Texas expat) and Zoe Schwartz bring you An Evening With Chastity and Alan Jr., a country and western musical comedy revue. Chicagoans doing a country and western comedy revue in Texas is risky, but that’s what fringe theatre … and life … is about, isn’t it?

Stool Pigeon Featuring the Stories of Charlie Hodge and Becca Peterson

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January 13, 2010

ColdTowne Theater

Austin spends a lot of time staring lovingly at itself in the mirror, masturbating. Why not? It’s relatively young, good-looking, and well endowed. It’s full of parks, greenbelts, watering holes (both kinds), and lots of exciting live entertainment. Hey, not every city can be pretty and popular. There are also lots of shiny new buildings popping up everywhere. Austin just keeps getting prettier and prettier. For instance, you’d be hard-pressed to find an actual warehouse in the Warehouse District – especially the type of bombed-out, broken-window-paned, graffiti-scrawled anachronisms for which it was named. The only thing industrial going on in Downtown Austin these days is the occasional Ministry song on the Saturday night playlist at Elysium. It’s cool. This isn’t the rust belt; it’s idea city. Amazingly, out-of-town venture capitalists, rich retirees, and fun-loving rubes of all types have bought into the idea of Austin like few other cities in America. Maybe it has something to do with Austin’s incessant shitstorm of hype: Austin is creative. Austin is open-minded. Austin is fun. Austin is friendly. Austin is entertaining. Whether motivated by cunning self-interest or monumental hubris, we Austinites have been pimping our city with evangelical fervor for decades – so much so that people in other parts of the state and country are now doing it for us, gratis. Mission accomplished. Austin is truly one bangin’ burg. The big question now is whether or not the people buying into all those shiny new buildings will buy into the Austin aesthetic as well. Will they go out and get their nails dirty in the grungier side of Austin culture, or will they stick to the places that are cleaner, less cluttered, and culturally homogeneous? If anything, the Austin aesthetic is constantly being redefined, both in a physical sense by the type of businesses that are able to thrive in such a quickly changing cultural environment and by the people who contribute to that culture. Ultimately a lot of the funkiness (whether organic or contrived) of Downtown Austin has been squeezed out into less dense and less expensive areas not within an easy walk of high-rise residents. Those fun-loving condo buyers are slowly being hemmed in by the types of businesses and culture they were presumably trying to escape. Maybe it’s no big deal. Austin is still an excellent place for the rich to go slumming, if only for the fact that Central Austin has very few slums, just areas filled with middle-class suburban expatriates that look slummy. How’s that for a win-win? If you’re one of those fun-loving condo dwellers looking to do a little slumming this weekend, try ColdTowne Theater this Saturday for Stool Pigeon, a series of improv comedy sketches based on the stories of local guest celebs, in this case Geeks Who Drink quiz queen Becca Peterson and Charlie Hodge, the quick-witted quarterback of KLBJ’s Charlie Hodge Rock ‘n’ Roll Half-Time Show.

BCS National Championship at Alamo Ritz

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January 6, 2010

Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz

Austin is a pretty cool town. Thankfully, it’s not too cool for football. Austinites will dork out for a Longhorn game every bit as much as they will for a Buttnumbathon, a Makers Faire, or an Eeyore’s. Admittedly, Longhorn fans are by far a scarier brand of dork than you will find at most other Austin events. Not only are they usually amped up on adrenaline and testosterone, they’re often holding back some serious pent-up rage, mainly the residual effect of watching four hours of Greg Davis’ offensive coordinating. Dear, sweet, merciful Jesus, for once could you please tell Mr. Davis to just let the big dogs eat? This three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust shit may be taking its toll on the opposing defense, but it’s even more exhausting for the fans. Who knows how many aneurysms, broken TV screens, and cases of domestic violence were the result of the 2009 Big 12 Championship game? Sure, the final one second was exciting, but the rest of it was like spending an afternoon at the Department of Motor Vehicles. At least Nebraska fans got the vicarious thrill of watching Ndamukong Suh toss the Texas offensive line around like a bunch of rag dolls. The only thing missing was the eponymous Johnny Cash song as background music. Don’t worry, ABC will surely queue that up at some point in the BCS pregame show. Still, regardless of all the bitching (or perhaps in spite of it) big Greg’s offense put up just enough points to get the Longhorns to the dance once again. Years from now in the historically embellished retelling of the glorious 2009 season, it will be the golden toe of Hunter Lawrence that gets all the glory. And tiny Hunter slew the Goliath Ndamukong with the graceful sweep of his European-soccer-style kick, and the fans burst onto the field and did hoist him upon their shoulders and laud his name. The real story however, took place up in the lonely press box high above the field, where ol’ Greg Davis took off his headset, leaned back in his chair, and as is his custom, said a little prayer of thanks to the Lord for letting him feed off the entrails of Will Muschamp’s defense once again. So, what does all this have to do with you tapping some strange? Next to nothing. Regardless of how it’s portrayed on gay porn sites, football is mostly a sexless endeavor. Those well oiled, accidental, post-steam-bath, locker-room three-ways involving the tight end, punter, and fullback never really happen … unless they actually take place on a porn film set. This is not to say that you can’t get as lucky as Hunter Lawrence and the Longhorns at a football game. Au contraire. In Texas, football is as legitimate a foreplay technique as beaver slapping and tonsil hockey and, ultimately, equally successful. Plus, like sex, you don’t need to know much about football to enjoy it. You just need to be enthusiastic and get your game face on. If you’re one of those few remaining hermits or foreigners who hasn’t decided whether football is for you, a good way to test it out is at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz, where Thursday night it will be shoring the BCS National Championship on the big screen … for free! The theatre should be full of Longhorn fans, but you can reserve a seat by purchasing a $5 food and drink voucher online. With so many people wearing such an ugly shade of orange, you should be able to talk someone out of their clothes. Hey, the Longhorns got lucky. Maybe you can too.

The Gourds New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball

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December 29, 2009

When the big ball drops Thursday night, the Aughts will become the shoulda’s. You’re probably planning on spending the evening in quiet, contemplative thought, torturing over the mishaps and missed opportunities of the last decade. There are certainly lessons to be learned. For instance: Presidents of the United States should at least be able to maintain a B average … even at Yale … even if they’re cheerleaders. In retrospect that doesn’t seem to be too much to ask, but sometime in the last decade a lot of people went to the polls thinking that if below average was good enough to sell Amway, drive a semi, work a backhoe, or maintain a plumber’s crack, it should work fine for the Oval Office too. Turns out they were dead wrong. Sadly, a lot of their sons and daughters didn’t have the luxury of being wrong. They were just dead. George Bush and the extended Bush family didn’t contribute any of their bloodline to that corpse pile, nor did most of the rich people in America … nor will they ever. Happily, some rather major advances were made in robot technology in the last decade that are allowing more and more soldiers to pull joysticks instead of triggers. Increasingly, robots and robotic technology are being used on the front lines of the war on terror. The day may soon (perhaps already has?) come when the son of a drywall mudder from Round Rock will be able to fly a remote-control nanobot up Osama bin Laden’s nose which will burrow its way to his heart in a matter of minutes. So we have that to look forward to … as well as all of its terrifying potential abuses. We also learned that when it comes to being abusive, America is in the Top 10 with a bullet. We are, it would seem, some sadistic motherfuckers, given the right circumstances. Actually, we always have been. We just forgot. Vietnam was quite a while ago, and all the guys who beat the shit out of captured Nazis after World War II are mostly dead. We shouldn’t have been surprised about renditions or waterboarding or prisoner abuse though. It’s hard to find people who are willing to kill people, get shot at, and simultaneously maintain compassion, empathy, and understanding for their enemies. Maybe we can build a robot for that, or maybe we shouldn’t try. We also found out in the last decade that we can be blitheringly incompetent. We crashed a space shuttle, botched a hurricane relief effort, and most recently sent the world economy into a tailspin because we let the greedheads run amok in the world of finance. Now we’re 10% unemployed and in the hole for trillions of dollars – most likely to the Chinese. In 2000 we had a $230 billion surplus. Right now the deficit is $1.84 trillion. That’s a $2 trillion swing. Every man, woman, and child are roughly eight grand in the hole. Oh where are you now charming Billy? Leaving out those under the age of consent for rhetorical purposes, you’d be hard pressed to find many average Americans who wouldn’t Lewinski the prez for eight large … at least on the DL, and you have to figure by now Clinton has learned to keep his mouth shut. At least the Chinese are now making enough money to be the largest new-car market in the world. They also will be pumping out an unprecedented amount of greenhouse gases, so your Hyde Park bungalow might end up being beachfront property in the next 10 years. If only you could go in the sun for more than a few minutes without being riddled with basal cell carcinomas. Yes, all of this sounds pretty bleak, but there’s hope. It said so right there on the Obama campaign poster. In fact, the future’s so bright you might be blinded if you look directly into it. Starting on Jan. 1, America is going to begin building a new, green economy that will create millions of new jobs and lead to unprecedented prosperity. This new prosperity will foster social, physical, intellectual, and spiritual enlightenment that will end all war, conflict, and suffering throughout the world. That’s the thing about the future: You can’t say it won’t happen. One thing that will be happening (if it’s not already in the past when you read this) is the Gourds New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball at the Independent. If history tell us anything, it’s that people really get their freak on when they feel anonymous, and unless you’re one of those people who dresses up in real life, this should be a great opportunity to experiment with being something you’re not. You might even get to do someone you’re not, too. Plus, you’ll be benefiting the brave new world, because the proceeds benefit the YMCA Partner of Youth Campaign, which provides financial assistance for programs and services to deserving Austin families.

Dale Watson’s Annual Christmas Show & Dance

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December 22, 2009

Ideally by now the manic materialist melee of the Christmas shopping season is behind you. There may be a few last-minute convenience-store runs for retaliatory gifting, but hey, you can’t anticipate everything. It’s not realistic to expect gifts from your yoga teacher, your postal carrier, or the person who towels sweat off the equipment at your gym. What the fuck? This isn’t Japan. People should at least be on a bro hug basis before they start buying useless shit for one another. A good rule of gifting is that if a present can be procured at the dollar store, a nice card will probably suffice. Handmade will do, too. You might even get away with a Monk-e-mail. Popping for Uchi gift certificates or weekend stays at the Four Seasons is downright creepy unless you’re a real estate agent or a personal injury lawyer. Even a box of Godiva chocolates is a bit ostentatious for any relationship that doesn’t involve blood relatives, heavy petting, or perhaps some sort of disturbing combination of the two. Otherwise, disproportionate gifting just has one effect: awkwardness. Sadly, as much as you might try to duck and cover during the holiday season, somebody you would never expect will inevitably drop a gift bomb on you. That is why you should say a little prayer of thanks for all the unrepentant heathens who keep their 24-hour convenience stores open year round. You just never know if your reclusive next-door neighbor with foil on his windows is going to drop by with a fruit basket, a cheese ball, or a used pizza box full of pot brownies. Even though you know for an absolute certainty that his heartfelt offering of friendship will soon be clogging up your garbage disposal, you will still feel enough of a tinge of guilt to send you down to the corner store at 9 o’clock on Christmas Eve to buy him an ice scraper and a bottle of 10W-30 motor oil in retaliation. You could get him a sleeve of Donettes and a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice, but you won’t want him thinking you’re trying to get in his pants. Smarter, shrewder types will just leave the giver hanging … not even a thank you note. It’s a ballsy play, but the idea behind that strategy is solid: A giver is like a hungry kitten at your screen door. If you just ignore it, it will eventually go away. In the real world, not everyone has the cold chrome heart it takes to ignore a hungry, mewing kitten – not even a metaphorical one. Money can’t buy everything, but occasionally it can buy some last-minute peace of mind, and sometimes that peace of mind just happens to come through a metal sliding drawer beneath a bulletproof glass window at 3am on Christmas morning – or as the Sikh on the other side of the glass likes to call it, “December 25.” Regardless of what you call it, at least on Christmas Day the pressure is off. You might have done good or completely screwed the pooch with the gifting, but on C-Day there’s no use worrying about it. In the immortal words of Clayton Williams, you might as well relax and enjoy it. “It” ideally would be Dale Watson’s annual Christmas Show & Dance at the Continental Club. If you’re on the fence about country music, Dale will definitely make you a believer. Plus there’s no better way to meet the opposite gender in Austin than knowing how to country dance, so stop being stuck up and give it a whirl.

Master Pancake Christmas Show

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December 16, 2009

At some point this weekend you are going to be stuck on the highway behind some hayseed from that region of Egypt that doesn’t even appear on the map. He will be driving 20 miles per hour below the speed limit and hitting his brakes at random intervals trying to decide if he missed the exit for Sheplers. At this point, your misanthropy might crush your red giant heart into a tiny white dwarf, perhaps even a black hole. You might begin pounding on your horn and screaming expletives with such force and conviction that the inside of your windshield is covered with droplets of spittle. All of this will happen while “‘Tis the season to be jolly” chirps out of your radio. The only thing keeping you from going completely postal is that he doesn’t have a bumper sticker that says: “What’s the hurry? You’re already in Austin.” Here’s a little mantra to get you through the Jesus season: Zen. Yes, you do live in a city full of infuriating retards, but you’re one of them too. You’ve been the one blocking traffic at a green light because you’re sexting your boyfriend, futzing with the radio, or trying to retrieve the french fry that fell under your seat. You’re the oblivious son of a bitch who leaves your grocery cart at a 45-degree angle in the aisle at H-E-B while you painstakingly compare the fiber content of Cap’n Crunch vs. Golden Grahams. You also take 37 items to the 20-item express checkout and then ask the clerk to fetch you a case of Newport 100’s and a lighter from the locked display case across the store. Just remember that shit when you’re screaming, “Die! Die! Die!” at the line of preschoolers clutching one another’s shirts as they slowly shuffle through the crosswalk in front of you. That may be the Easter spirit, but it’s definitely not the Christmas spirit. Those little numskulls are just trying to get through their days same as you, only with a few more wet Pull-Ups and a few less temper tantrums. They aren’t personally trying to fuck over your mad dash to Starbucks. Remember: It’s the season of giving. Instead of giving yourself an aneurysm, give yourself the gift of inner peace. Unstress. Let it slide. The holidays are always fraught with unrealistic expectations: Your daughter wants a Twilight Bella Swan Barbie. Mom wants everyone to go to midnight mass. Dad wants to cut down the Christmas tree himself with a chain saw. It’s been the same for centuries. Mary expected little baby Josh to be the messiah. No pressure there. Somehow, without the benefit of medicinal marijuana, Josh managed to find inner peace (well, except for that one time with the moneychangers). His secret? Forgiveness. So, if you want to really get in the spirit of giving for the holidays, start by giving people the benefit of the doubt – even the assholes. Sometimes what seems to be most evil is really just comical … sort of like Rob Zombie … and laughter is pretty good stress relief. If you want to uncork this holiday season, you couldn’t ask for a better way to do it than Master Pancake’s Christmas Show, a Christmas-clip extravaganza featuring commentary and improv caroling by Pancake regulars John Erler and Joe Parsons, with Santa-holic Owen Egerton joining the cast for this special holiday show. You might want to wear some Huggies. This show is so funny you might actually crap trow. How Zen is that?

Blue Genie Art Bazaar

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December 8, 2009

Ideally by now your house is so completely covered in lights that your next-door neighbor has to wear welding goggles to find his car in the morning. His raccoon-face sunburn is an epidermal shroud of Turin, a moving testament to your profound faith in the One True God. No doubt the baby Jesus would smile upon your handiwork. Not only is he the Truth (although according to his Holiness, the Shaq, that title now belongs to Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics), he is also the Light. Check the paintings. His head glows like a lightbulb in nearly every one of them. Surely He wouldn’t mind you sucking a few hundred kilowatt hours out of the matrix to let the neighborhood know that you’re on the Jesus team. After all, Christians have been rolling strong since about AD400. It was a long, ugly road from the manger to Vatican City, for the persecuted to become the persecutors, for Christianity to go viral. They needed a flashy marketing campaign to keep that kind of buzz afloat: lots of ostentatious bling, fly vestments, and lots of lights. Everybody likes lights, right? Well, unless they’re being burned as a witch or branded with hot pokers. Yes, Christianity has had at least a few million low points over the last 2,000 years, but it’s also done quite a few good things too. There are just too many children in impoverished Third World countries running around in ironic American T-shirts to argue otherwise. Even still, not everyone is on board the Jesus Bus. For some, Christmas lights are just an external manifestation of the oppression of Western imperialism. That’s not too far of a stretch.You wouldn’t ask someone who was waterboarded at Gitmo to go water skiing, would you? Of course not. Fortunately, there aren’t many people left in our little corner of the world who have a psychotic aversion to ostentatious lighting displays. For the most part, they’re just a sparkly way to further accelerate global warming, but otherwise they’re mostly harmless. That’s because sometime around the turn of the last century the bulb replaced the candle as the primary means of Christmas tree illumination. One can assume it really put the kibosh on the holiday burn ward business … until the invention of flammable polyester pajamas. Really … who knew toddlers would get too close to open flames? So yes, there are probably a few people out there who are terrorized by Christmas lights through no fault of their own (note to acid droppers: You buy the ticket, you take the ride), but by and large people dig them – so the more, the better. We can always build more windmills. Plus, you wouldn’t want to deny all those 10-year-old boys in the neighborhood something to shoot at with their BB guns, would you? Hells no! That would upset the cosmic equilibrium, or at least the ongoing symbiosis between the creators and the consumers. This time of year it always seems like there is a surfeit of consumers, but in reality the creators kick it up a notch as well. For instance, through Christmas Eve, more than 100 local artists will be peddling their wares at the Blue Genie Art Bazaar at the Monarch Event Center. This isn’t just another holiday crafts show to ignore; it’s an especially good one. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by attending. If their stuff doesn’t get bought, they may very well be applying for your job next year, and the only other thing you probably know how to do well is shoot out Christmas lights with a BB gun.

Opal Divine’s Whisky Festival

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December 2, 2009

Truly one of the best things about the holidays is that they are an excellent and generally accepted excuse to enjoy a little recreational intoxication. Yes, you, Jesus, and Krissy Kringle can all make a solid case for the spirit of giving, but inevitably materialism is the road to ruin. It may look like a lot of fun when everybody gets a new car on Oprah or when Skeeter wins the lotto and buys an aboveground for his double-wide, but there is a darker, uglier side to materialism, and not just that chest-crushing moment when you find out the big box under the Christmas tree with your name on it contains a Texas Longhorns Snuggie. Ohhhhhh, you better not pout. Here’s a suggestion: If you actually do manage to nurture your white, hot rage all the way to the North Pole, make sure you’re packing a sidearm with enough caliber to drop a polar bear in less than six rounds. Rumor has it that when those bitches come up out of the water they are insane with hunger … and that Texas Longhorn Snuggie is going to stick out like a sore thumb. Santa Claus, on the other hand, should give you much less trouble … unless you’ve already emptied your clip on a polar bear. Needless to say, it would take a lot of hate to pistol-whip Santa in front of the elves, reindeer, and Mrs. Claus. To summon that kind of fury you would have to binge-drink Starbucks and listen to Gorgoroth all the way to the North Pole. A few days of that evil shit and you’d be ready to strangle the baby Jesus, so putting the beatdown on Santa would almost feel like a mercy killing. But really, if you’re going to binge-drink, why squander your money on the dark side? Why not imbibe something that warms your heart and makes you launch into I-love-you-man soliloquies for random people such as your postman, your boss, and that surly, liver-spotted old lady behind the counter at your dry cleaners? No, not ecstasy, that shit hasn’t been legal since the Eighties. What you need is Holiday cheer (aka booze!). Sure, there should be some lengthy, ponderous boilerplate here about responsible drinking, but deep in our hearts we all know that truly responsible drinking means not drinking at all. F that S. Humans have been using alcohol to get stupid at least since they could articulate the word “grog,” but very likely a few centuries before that. Even though chemically its effect lacks the subtlety and nuance of pricier and more potent drugs, alcohol is nonetheless the most epicurean because of its countless permutations and means of delivery: Jell-O shots, rum cakes, beer bongs, absinthe, ether. You could spend an entire lifetime pickling your liver with all manner of alcoholic inventions and still not exhaust the supply. Ask Michael Parker from Opal Divine’s. He’s been on an alcoholic vision quest for most of his adult life, and though his journey is far from over, Austin has benefited from his worldliness and willingness to share it. This Thursday, Opal Divine’s Penn Field location is hosting its seventh annual Whisky Festival. From 7 to 10pm you can sample more than 45 of the finest malt whiskies from all the regions of Scotland. You can also nosh on hors d’oeuvres like smoked salmon, smoked meats, and fruits and cheeses, all for the amazingly low price of $45. Even more amazing is that all of the proceeds from the event will benefit Meals on Wheels and More. What a great way to enjoy the spirit of giving and still get your spirit on.

ThunderCloud Subs 19th Annual Turkey Trot

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November 23, 2009

Thanksgiving is like communism: great in theory but often ugly in execution. Of course, the same could be said of Christianity, but that holiday is still a month away, so we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, should we? As far as Turkey Day, though, there’s plenty of room for improvement. For starters, the iconography could use a little dressing up. Pilgrims and turkeys. Really? Do we have to choose between religious zealots and birds with a built-in death wish? Both seem to be overly eager to meet their maker, so one can assume they don’t spend a lot of time counting blessings. On the other hand, walking around in high-heeled buckle shoes or with a snood and wattle hanging off your face surely brings some low points. Think about it. If you had to spend the rest of your life as a Pilgrim, you’d probably buy a box of razor blades and start drawing a warm bath. Similarly, if you had to walk around with grizzled, pulpy pieces of flesh hanging off your nose and chin, you might eventually find yourself standing on a folding chair with a noose around your neck. You get the feeling that when a turkey first saw a Pilgrim raising his blunderbuss, he leaned toward the muzzle, thinking, “Bless you kind sir, this goddamned snood was making me cross-eyed!” More than likely, the Pilgrim turned the blunderbuss on himself first, because when your one big feast of the year features turkey as its centerpiece, you’re probably eager to shuffle off your own mortal coil. Regardless of how reasonable that scenario sounds, we can only assume that turkeys are suicidal. We can’t be absolutely sure. After all, turkeys are rumored to be stupid, and ignorance is bliss. The Pilgrims might have been suicidal as well, but they were too busy fending off disease, pestilence, wild animals, and peace-loving American Indians to take reasonable stock of their situation. In fact, it is within the realm of possibility that any Pilgrim who survived more than six months of that brutish existence was pissing himself with glee … if only because he had the option of choosing a better exit than having his head used as a chew toy by a mountain lion. This, in essence, is the philosophical foundation of the Thanksgiving – the part that works. Every once in a while it’s good to take a quiet moment and reflect on how things could be much, much worse. It’s easy enough, just let your imagination run wild. If your life actually got as bad as you can imagine it could be, you’d be absolutely giddy at the thought of eating dried fish, turkey, and yams with Squanto. However, in the real world it’s hard to keep your eyes on the rhetorical punishment. Sometimes just sitting down with your relatives and hogging on some Butterball can seem like the seventh level of hell, when in reality it’s not nearly as bad as say, being torn to pieces by bloodthirsty hyenas or, a little closer to home, being waterboarded at Gitmo. It’s all a matter of contrast, really, and if you can bend your mind into a decent hypothetical perspective, you’ll probably find that you’re living fat and happy – though you might want to take care of that toenail fungus situation. Maybe you can drop by the drug store on your way back from the 19th annual ThunderCloud Subs Turkey Trot, which starts at Waterloo Park at 9:30am on Thanksgiving Day. Not only is the Turkey Trot a great way to feel better about the orgy of gluttony and sloth the modern Thanksgiving has become, it’s also a great way to meet a lot of ostensibly healthy people and see what they look like when they’re sweating. Most importantly, it’s a relatively easy and fun way give back to the community, because the race proceeds go to Caritas of Austin, an organization that fights hunger, homelessness, and poverty in the Austin area.

Sick

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 18, 2009

Hear that? That’s the sound of the holiday clock ticking toward C-Day. Another week and you’ll have to beat the dust out of your flashing Bobbie Brooks Rudolph sweater and plug in the string of Christmas lights that’s been permanently attached to your house for the last three years. Sure, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but what used to be a gentle road bump on the superhighway to material excess is now a big, white, one-way arrow. After all, if you don’t have any things, what are you going to be thankful for? Health? Happiness? Love? This is Austin, Texas, America, not an ashram. You might be able to somehow monetize your health – say, if you’re a day laborer or a sex worker, but love and happiness aren’t going to put spinny rims on your Hummer or crust your grill with ice. Really, what good are love and happiness if you can’t rub them in other peoples’ faces? After all, happiness in the absence of external validation is very often mistaken for insanity. You can’t just wander around in a state of bliss for no reason without checking someone else’s opinion. You’re not Kierkegaard. Life is much uglier and meaner than that. You have to occasionally check in with friends and neighbors and complete strangers to make sure they recognize your happiness as genuine happiness and not some freak chemical imbalance. When you proudly open the door of your crawl space to reveal the piles of corpses, it’s probably a bad sign if your friend recoils in horror. It’s an even worse sign if you don’t have any friends with whom you can share your crawl space. People need people … if only to make sure they haven’t gone off the deep end. This system of external checks and balances doesn’t always work. Sometimes abominations slip through. For instance: People still engage in hardcore, sloppy tongue-kissing sessions at shopping malls. They still take out second mortgages to lease PT Cruiser convertibles. They still wear nugget jewelry and Ed Hardy prints. They still launch into tedious long-form soliloquies about their fitness regime at cocktail parties. Actions such as these are basically cries for withering social criticism. It’s how society evolves. Sure, solitude has its perks. Everyone needs a little downtime – but not everyone is John the Baptist, Hank Dave Thoreau, or Jeremiah Johnson. Increasingly, people are forced to show their asses 24/7 whether they like it or not. These days you never really know if your innocent, back-alley beer piss is going to end up going viral on YouTube or whether you’ll be tagged in a Facebook photo with a wrinkled nutsack resting on your sleeping forehead. Welcome to the fishbowl. “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players” … with no green room. Will it force us into a morally homogenized lifestyle, or will it simply make the aberrations seem commonplace? Stay tuned, the plot thickens. If you want to catch a little old-skool theatre, you can find it at the Hyde Park Theatre this weekend as Capital T Theatre continues its run of Sick, Zayd Dohrn’s comedy about a family of germophobes trying their best to retreat from the dangers of the outside world. Spoiler alert: People mess it up.

East Austin Studio Tour

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 11, 2009

This Saturday East Austin will be teeming with art lovers, or at the very least people who want to believe they are. Expect to see clusters of trendy looking people wandering around trying to read the East Austin Studio Tour Google map on their iPhone. Statistically there should be a corresponding bump in hit-and-runs and muggings, but the Eastside has become so gentrified in recent years that the biggest crimes seem to have more to do with architectural design than they do with personal injury. The latter gets more press understandably. It’s very rare that an Austin Police Department officer riddles a tangerine-and-teal postmodern condominium quadplex with a hail of gunfire – regardless of how much it deserves it. He might upchuck a little bit of doughnut in the back of his mouth when he’s driving by, but as far as a voluntary corrective action, nada. It’s probably all for the best. You definitely don’t want to cross the Austin arts community – even if you’re strapped. There are nearly as many artists in Austin as there are musicians. You might be able to take out some of the first wave (and what makes the first wave so formidable is that all artists consider themselves to be in it), but eventually your clip will be empty and you’ll be overwhelmed with an relentless tide of bitterness and resentment. Hey, it could be worse. You could be a music critic. Now there’s a suicide mission. Devoting your life to making compelling arguments on why people should suppress their urge to create is a thankless job to say the least. Fortunately, most visual artists don’t mail in copies of their artworks for review. More often they’re likely to have a website with a memory-hogging flash intro followed by 7-point text at the bottom of the page that says, merely, “enter.” If you’re willing to squeeze your waning interest through the eye of that cyberneedle, you’re probably ready to experience the artist’s work in all its two-dimensional, pixilated, broken-linked glory. What did you expect? Internet art can’t be a fulfilling substitute for the real deal. If that were the case, you would be totally satisfied with Internet porn. You have to admit, as truly awesome as Internet porn is, to get the payoff you still have to do the dirty work yourself. It’s pretty much the same thing with art. Seeing a 360-by-420 JPEG of dogs playing poker is a horrible substitute for the real thing – even if the dogs are really just bad taxidermies with spotty fur and creepy poker faces. To see real art, sometimes you have to get up and leave the house rather than just buying on it on the Home Shopping Network. Of course, if you’re going to have to go traipsing all over the Eastside just to look at art, it had better be some good shit … or at the very least you should be able to get some nice snacks out of the deal. Well, there’s a good chance of getting a little of both this Saturday when the East Austin Studio Tour kicks off its sixth year. Print yourself a map and spend the next two weekends visiting the 154 studios, 20 exhibition spaces, 49 happenings, and 30 programs that make up EAST. If you somehow manage to tick off every box on that to-do list, you’re a true art lover … and you have way too much time on your hands. Perhaps you should be come an artist yourself?

Fun Fun Fun Fest

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 3, 2009

Halloween is over. Time to put the sparkly unicorn costume back in the closet … at least until Carnaval. Now begins the ugly slog to Thanksgiving, which offers very little in the way of entertainment unless you’re into football, distended bellies, and stale beer farts. Exhibitionism? Forget it. Your two choices are Pocahontas and Pilgrim, and nobody, not even Johnny Depp, can make buckle shoes look cool. Try it. Wear buckle shoes. See if the grade schoolers in your neighborhood don’t hang you on a doorknob by your underwear. If you’re going to roll Pilgrim style, back it up with a loaded blunderbuss. At the very least, you’ll be able to shoot your TV set if the Aggies manage to somehow pull off the upset. Until then, however, you’ve got three solid weeks of fall to grind through – perhaps the greenest fall ever. Poke your head out the window, and you’ll swear little Cinderella birds are going to start landing on your shoulders. This fall may be the best spring Austin has ever had. Time to slam some Allegra and start acting like the fun, outdoorsy person you described in your Facebook profile. You know, the one who likes hiking, biking, camping, running, skydiving … those sorts of things. Yes, it’s true there’s probably an iPhone app for all that shit. There’s also probably an iPhone app that will simulate a hot, ripped bod too, and maybe your iPhone avatar is totally getting laid tonight, but you on the other hand will only be getting fatter, paler, and dumber. The only person currently cashing in on that ugly triumvirate is Rush Limbaugh, and he’s pretty much cornered the market. If you’ve been a little too long jacked into the Matrix, don’t despair. You don’t have to look like an Abercrombie model to enjoy a beautiful day. You could just throw on some sweats and go lie in the grass somewhere. Your first thought might have been Zilker – if only a quick shudder of sense memory recalling the Austin City Limits Music Fest puddin’ people. But Zilker isn’t the only place in Austin where you can sit your ass in some grass. According to the Austin Parks and Recreation Department, there are 206 parks, 12 preserves, and 26 greenbelts in the Austin area. That’s a lot of dogs with bandanas, Frisbee golfers, power walkers, moms with toddlers, and creepy dudes looking for anonymous gay sex. You should be able to find some little patch of green where you can have peaceful commune with Mother Nature. If that fails, you can always join the trampling hordes of hipsters down at Waterloo Park this weekend for Fun Fun Fun Fest, a festival so cool that the headliner is the Jesus Lizard … or maybe Danzig … or Shonen Knife. Then again, a decent case could be made for Brian Posehn or the Whitest Kids U’Know … or maybe U don’t. If none of the preceding ring a bell, then the rest of the lineup will be completely unfamiliar to you unless you’re under the age of 21 or wear shoes that sort of look like athletic shoes but really aren’t athletic shoes because they have too much leather and are available in colors like wasabi, chocolate, and cantaloupe. You might also have an Amish beard and carry a messenger bag even though the only message you’re carrying is on your T-shirt. It says: “Under the Influence of Jesus.” You don’t mean it. You’re 43. You also have Crystal Antlers, Lucero, Hannibal Buress, Gorilla Biscuits, Rat King, and Fuck Buttons in heavy rotation on your iPhone 3G – not because you’re trying to impress people with your musical eclecticism but because you love music. Yeah, that’s it. If you’re someone else, think of it this way: Out of 90 acts you would think at least one has a chance of actually making a name for itself, so, money well spent.

Zombie Ball

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 27, 2009

Hopefully by now you already have your balloon boy costume put together. Good show. Your friends and random acquaintances will surely have a marvelous time secretly trying to burst your bubble. Don’t pout. When was the last time you had so many people trying to poke you? Besides, they appreciate the effort. It’s not like you just scrawled H1N1 in Magic Marker on an old undershirt. Here’s a hot tip for people trying to get laid on Halloween: Don’t dress up as a virus, even and especially if you’re an apathetic slacker who won’t look outside your dirty clothes pile for a Halloween costume. Sends the wrong message. If you’re not willing to wear something embarrassing and uncomfortable every once in a while, it’s a good bet you’re not sitting on a wallet full of unexpired condoms either. A shitty, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute costume isn’t especially scary, but barebacking is, just maybe not in a Halloween type of way. You might as well just scrawl “HERPES” on your T-shirt and be done with it. That way you can spend the rest of the night passing out candy to kids whose parents will slap it out of their hands the minute they get off your porch. Maybe you could offer them a hit off your beer bong instead? Regardless, Halloween is a night of endless possibilities. That’s what makes it so fun. It’s not like you have to bake a turkey; wear a hot, itchy sweater with blinking lights; or break up with your girlfriend so you don’t have to buy her a Valentine’s present. All you have to do on Halloween is pay the ante of at least a bag of cheap Mexican tamarind lollipops and, of course, try not to mow down any grade schoolers wearing poorly lit Harry Potter/Twilight costumes on the way back from your last-minute run to Fiesta Mart. As a general rule, operating a motor vehicle is extra tricky on Halloween – especially if you’re wearing clown shoes, big bird feet, or 4-inch, come-fuck-me pumps (that work perfectly with your crotch-high nurse outfit, fake lashes, and press-on nails). As you surely have already learned by now, drinking only complicates things. Not only is it difficult to fit a Natty can through the mouth of a rubber gorilla mask (smart monkeys drink longnecks), but alcohol also impairs your ability to interact sincerely with children – and really, why should you even make an effort when they’re all jacked up on sugar anyway? Some people would argue that Halloween is for children. Those people are wrong. You can’t expect people to stop believing in ghosts just because they attended four years of college … and maybe did a little post-grad work in paranormal psychic phenomena … that’s just crazy. No, grownups need to celebrate the dead too, ideally by dressing up in completely embarrassing/ridiculous costumes, drinking, and doing something worthy of at least a Facebook video post. Otherwise, why would the dead even pay attention? Aren’t they busy luring little blond girls into televisions? This Saturday and Sunday you can do something that will make the dead stand up and pay attention at the first ever Zombie Ball, a two-day Halloween throwdown sponsored by the folks at Sustainable Waves. The Zombie Ball features three solar-powered stages of live music and a haunted ballroom with Texas’ second largest disco ball … uh … vampire slayer. Make sure to ride your bike. Your rubber-chicken feet may be huge, but at least you’ll leave a smaller carbon footprint.

Extravagasm Fantasy Ball

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 21, 2009

Ever notice how there aren’t any Renaissance faires in Texas in August? Here’s why: Wearing a suit of armor in Texas in August is a surer and perhaps more painful death than anything the armor might repel. A couple of hours in the full sun and the occupant would have the skin tone of a Renaissance faire turkey leg. You might be Sir James the Tumescent putting on the armor, but you’d be taking it off as Slim Jim. Of course, the same could be said of just about all faire wear, be you saucy wench or roguish knave. A bodice (aka “boob bucket”) is a perfectly acceptable means of support in most climates, but around here it’s just a recipe for a big ol’ pail of mam chowder. Really the chillest Ren wear would have to be the monk’s robe, which offers the opportunity to freeball it but wears like a Navajo sweat lodge. Judging by the dress code, you would think that the Renaissance bypassed Central Texas altogether. Not so. As early as the 1500s, Spaniards were sharing the wonders of the Renaissance with the indigenous peoples of the desert southwest: smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and cholera to name a few. They also brought along their co-pilot, God, who navigated them toward gold and glory but instead got the consolation prize of murder and slavery, referred to in history books as “missionary works.” Not surprisingly, the Renaissance isn’t remembered fondly by the locals. Sure, they found Jesus, scored some used blankets, and learned to make the beast with two backs, but all in all they found the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. They were happier running around in animal skins and feathers, hitting it doggie style, and worshiping the earth. They even have their own Renaissance faires – they’re called powwows, and even though you can’t get a turkeye legge, you can get a turkey leg, in full confidence that it’s authentic, historically accurate, indigenous cuisine. Huzzah! Really you haven’t lived until you’ve spent a weekend camping out, wearing leather, smoking “the peace pipe,” and munching on fried bread. Regardless, American Indian fetish wear is still a niche market compared to real Ren faire wear. Not only did Western Europeans overrun the New World, they cornered the fetish market too, which seems a natural turn of events considering that depravity and debauchery were perfected in the 17th century – probably near ye olde towne of Versailles. “S’wounds I say! Thou shouldst bynde faste ye rodentes’ pawes ere ye shoveth hyme up thy arse!” To this day, for a certain segment of the population, nothing swells the organs lyke the sounde of olde Englyshe and the sight of the tightly corseted torso of a pasty pale wench or pudgy knave. However fetishy it may be, Ren wear, like the Ren faire itself, leaves a lot to the imagination. If only you could sexy it up some how … show a little more skin. Well, happye newes, bytches! This Friday night at 9pm the Extravagasm Fantasy Ball returns at Mixx on Sixth Street. This year’s theme is Erotic Renaissance, which means the ball features all kinds of exciting activities: fire spinners, Hula-hoopers, piercings by Pineapple, belly-dancing by Z-Helene, rope bondage by Bydarra, body-painting by Curvy Canvas, tarot readings by Cat Dancer, and the Siren of Song Ms. Cat Mon Dieu. If you want to be on the ball, make sure to strap on your fetish-influenced fashion and fantastical costumery! Just remember: No blatant nudity, and all genitalia must be covered. Start with your own. Nobody wants to see your turkeye legge poking out of your tyghtes.

Evil Dead: The Musical

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 13, 2009

Really, why shouldn’t Evil Dead be made into a musical? After all, death is quite a showstopper. It worked for Romeo and Juliet. Remember the closing scene where Leonardo DiCaprio eats it (well, drinks a vial of it) and then Claire Danes wakes up, gets all emo, and blows her brains out with Romeo’s custom-made nickel-plated .45? Balls out, Claire! Stunning visual. Queue the Wagner and … scene! Death sure does tidy up the unresolved plotlines, even though it messes up the set. It works for God though, so it must be the right way to go. Death also has a big closing scene in Hamlet … well, except for the Gilligan’s Island version. In the castaways’ production of Hamlet: The Musical, nobody dies at all, although the depressed Dane and his associates are pretty well butchered dramatically. The real Hamlet however, has an impressive body count. In fact, more people die in Hamlet than in Evil Dead. That might change at some point – especially if Rob Zombie decides to tackle the Bard – but those are solid statistics to date. Of course, in Hamlet, none of the dead people reanimate – unless you count Hamlet’s pops, who does stir the turd quite a bit with his whole revenge trip. It’s disturbing to think that in the afterlife old King Hamlet has nothing better to do than backseat drive his son into a murderous rage. Would it kill God to install some slot machines in the afterlife – at least maybe some Tetris? Similarly, the evil dead in The Evil Dead need to get a life too, which they do … apparently so they can pad the guest list of the afterlife. Here’s the basic plot: A group of Michigan State students go to a vacation cabin in Tennessee where they find an old tape recorder in the basement. When played, the tape unleashes evil spirits. First a girl gets raped by trees possessed by the evil dead (really evil dead, possessing vegetables is just beyond slumming), then she gets possessed herself and starts going all white-eyed and stabbing people with a pen. From there it’s all blood and guts, death and dismemberment: chainsaws, axes, daggers, shotguns, fireplace pokers – a veritable tool shed of prop-room implements slathered with gore. Imagine Hamlet, but with Gallagher doing the set direction. It’s easy to see why The Evil Dead would eventually find its way to the live stage. As far as being a musical, that was a natural too. You can’t expect thezbos to suppress all that voice and dance training indefinitely. Eventually somebody is going to have too many cosmos at happy hour and blurt out, “What if we make it a musical!?!?” If it happened to The Grapes of Wrath, then it can happen to anything … Schindler’s List … Requiem for a Dream … Brian’s Song … and you can only imagine the big tap-dancing production at the end of My Left Foot. In contrast, Evil Dead: The Musical doesn’t seem so evil at all. When you really study the evidence, you realize that the dead aren’t nearly as evil as the living – they just have really bad PR. Dead people didn’t try to exterminate the Jews, sew together a bodysuit made of human skin, or author The Bridges of Madison County. Dead people are harmless. That’s why evil living people are always trying to make more of them. And yet, just because life is infinitely tragic doesn’t mean it isn’t infinitely comic as well. In fact, the two are so hopelessly intertwined it’s pointless to try to separate them. Your glass is either half full or it’s half full of blood. Drink up! This Saturday you can belly up to the bloodbath at the Salvage Vanguard Theater: its very own production of Evil Dead: The Musical! Make sure to wear something white and pay the extra $5 for “splatter zone” seating. After Saturday night’s show there is also a special Dead Man’s Party, with live bands, munchies, and more visual gore. How’s that for a good closing scene?

Lebowski Fest

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 6, 2009

It’s been nearly a generation since Rick Linklater’s seminal film established Austin as the center of the slacker universe, a lazy little college town where people mostly just sat around talking about weird, esoteric shit and did little else (except wander off in a sort of ADD tangent to the next vignette). Apparently, a lot of people saw Slacker and said to themselves, “I can do that! I can do nothing!” and moved here in droves. Initially some were old-school hand-to-mouth slackers who came for the cheap booze, drugs, rent, and slutty women, all of which could easily be had by working a 20-hour shift at ThunderCloud. Then came the second tier: folks who identified with the slacker lifestyle and aesthetic but were also able to pony up the increasing rents for slacker havens like SoCo, SoLa, NoFo, and Crestview. These semislackers often held down real jobs and were closet competents, regardless of their full-sleeve arm tattoos and ear pegs. Instead of getting shit-canned on Natty Light, Lone Star, Pearl and PBR, they enjoyed the more moderate, epicurean buzz of boutique brews like Fat Tire, Bootlegger Brown Ale, Sierra Nevada, and Firemans 4. Instead of gut-bombing wicked hangovers at places like the Tamale House, Arandas, Taco Shack, and the occasional construction site roach wagon, they had sit-down breakfasts at places like Güero’s, Curra’s, Maria’s Taco Xpress, Pato’s, and Changos. No shame in those names, quality is quality, but quality isn’t a regular part of the slacker budget. Sometime around the turn of the millennium came the third tier of slackers: the dot-com cash-outs and trust fund babies; late-in-the-gamers who also bought into Austin’s weirdness fully, first with their pocketbooks and then their hearts, so much so that they even created marketing campaigns to keep weirdness from being gentrified … albeit a day late and a dollar short. Their “no worries,” casual Friday approach to slackerdom was genuine – why sweat the small stuff when you truly don’t have to sweat the small stuff? – as was their utter oblivion to the fact that they were pricing the old-school slackers into the hipster wilderness of far East Austin (they eventually priced them out of that as well). For the latecomers, slackerdom is more a destination vacation than a journey of personal discovery. They’ve opened cute, hyperspecialized boutiques; bought overpriced condos; and actually pay for extravagances like valet parking and bottle service. What was unthinkable back in the day is commonplace now. It’s still Austin, just an entirely different Austin. Yes, there are still plenty of unshaven, jort-wearing, tattooed grad school dropouts with part-time jobs who share a rent house with five other overeducated, undermotivated velvet rutters, but they’re feeling the pinch. That East Austin shotgun shack is four times what it was back in the day. You could try to work that early Nineties slacker budget nowadays, but that lifestyle is now called homelessness – and no, you’re not fooling anybody by parking your rusty old shit-beater van down the street from Epoch. Makes you long for the good old days when slackin’ was cheap and your landlord passed out fliers for his interpretive dance performance. Those days may be gone, but you can relive them this weekend when the Lebowski Fest rolls into town on its Speed of Sound tour. For an unslackerly $45, you can attend Friday night’s Big Lebowski screening at Stubb’s and Saturday night’s bowling party at Highland Lanes. This is your chance to feel what it’s like to actually dress up as an old-school slacker … or one of the many other zany characters from this Coen Brothers’ cult classic. So maybe Lebowski Fest is as close as you’ll ever come to actual slacking, but that’s probably a good thing.

Capital City Marching Band Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 29, 2009

This is a big weekend for music lovers – or at the very least for people who like to watch music being made. Unlike a football game, a bullfight, or a tittie-bar pole dance, watching live music demands rapt attention. You don’t want to miss a second. For instance … what if the bass player stops looking at his fretting hand and gives a slight nod to his drug dealer offstage? Twitter that shit, yo. He may not do anything that exciting for the rest of the set. Besides, the dude offstage might not be his drug dealer at all. It might be Matthew McConaughey … baked to his gills! Tuh to the motherfucking weet! “Thrz is zo mrch fn! RcknRpll!” If you find the bass player visually captivating, check out the drummer. He may not be Darren King from Mute Math, but he’s the most animated person onstage. He’s moving his arms and his legs! You could stand there in the dust and the heat for hours and watch him hit that snare drum again and again and again. Fascinating. How does he do it? If you stare at him long enough in gap-jawed wonderment, you’re sure to figure it out. Samesies for the guitar player. You would expect him to stand perfectly still so he can concentrate on his intricate fingering, but no! He’s thrashing around like a crazy person, making weird faces, and flinging his guitar picks out to all the hot ladies. If he were on a street corner doing the same thing minus the guitar, you would probably insist the police take him out with a tranquilizer dart, but instead he’s onstage and you’re throwing him your hotel room key. Why? Because he’s so damned sexy! The crazy thing is that the guitarist isn’t even half as exciting to watch as the lead singer. Now there’s a character! When he reaches out in front of him and grabs thin air and pulls it back into his chest with a clenched fist, you can actually feel your panties sliding down your legs. He must be some kind of magical sorcerer. You are completely under his spell. When he claps his hands above his head, you clap your hands above your head. When he holds out the microphone to the audience, you automatically sing – even if you don’t really know the words! “OMG thid is brdass!” you Tweet. Every morning in the shower, you belt out atonal, wrong-lyric versions of these songs, but that doesn’t hold a Bic lighter to squealing like a spooked sow in the middle of several thousand other sweaty live-music fans. Otherwise, why would you have dropped a couple hundred bucks on a wristband that doesn’t even help cure cancer? That just makes no sense. No sense at all. No, you ponied up the cash because live music is awesomely exciting to watch – sort of like demolition derby only with a much nicer VIP section, and, of course, demolition derby doesn’t last all day. Even still, there are so many bands and so little time. How will you see them all? Well, get to Toney Burger stadium early on Saturday and plant your ass on the 50-yard line. That way you’re sure to get the best possible view of all 25 bands in this year’s Capital City Marching Festival. They might not do a lot of microphone-stand crotch-rubbing, but rest assured: These bands know how to move. In fact, it’s part of their act! Plus, unlike other music festivals, this one actually has a winner. Now that’s American! Here’s the best part: It’s only $7 to get in … oh, and the restrooms have running water!

Fantastic Fest Michael Jackson Dance Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 23, 2009

Michael Jackson was one seriously messed up … uh … let’s just say “dude” until the full autopsy gets published … but he produced some badass dance jams. If someone cranks up “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” in your immediate vicinity and you don’t start full on moonwalking – or at least a reflexive mook head bob – check your pulse. You’re probably dead. Look around the room. If you see Nicole Kidman, a couple of pasty-faced kids, and a frost-breathing Bruce Willis, you may need to start dancing toward the light. That could be where the Michael Jackson music is coming from. Here in the terrestrial world there is a considerable amount of debate as to where MJ will take up residence in the afterlife. If Michael manages to pull off a “Neverland: Extended Edition,” in heaven it’s safe to say that he should be blissfully content. There seem to be a lot of naked baby angels fluttering around up there – especially if Italian Renaissance paintings are to be trusted, and why shouldn’t they be? Italy is the home of God’s personal PR firm. Yes, if Michael makes it past the pearly gates, he’ll be set: No more need for the petting zoo, amusement park rides, and protracted court cases, just a smorgasbord of pink-skinned cherubim. If, however, MJ spends eternity a little farther south, no problem there either. As Pat Benatar says, “Hell is for children,” and you have to figure that in hell, even pedophilia gets the green light. Of course, the “down” side would be having to listen to Creed 24/7. Looking at it karmically you have to wonder: Does giving humanity “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” earn MJ any credit toward a twisted lifetime of alleged pederasty and general weirdness? Tough call. Yes, MJ was fond of sleeping with children, but so was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was also criminally negligent with the Jheri Curl and the geisha makeup and the plastic elf nose, but did that make him a monster? No, fame made him a monster (with maybe an assist from Diana Ross), and it was fame well deserved. If only MJ’s sexual proclivities leaned toward chubby Jewish girls like Monica Lewinsky instead of prepubescent boys, he might have gotten a pass. In his premutant days, Michael could have shagged anything he wanted – sort of like Elvis or Louis the 14th. Somewhere around the ten thousandth groupie, ennui has to set in. There has to be an inclination to improvise like Thelonious Monk: Animal. Mineral. Vegetable. Chances are MJ was just working through his smooth-skin phase. Had he lived to be 100, he might have gotten into snow leopard cubs or baby seals or something … who knows? And really, unless you’ve been there, it’s tough to throw stones. In the wake of MJ’s death, all we’re really left with is compassion, wonderment, and, perhaps most importantly, an ass-shaking oeuvre. You can enjoy that oeuvre this Sunday night at the Alamo’s new bowling alley/karaoke bar/lounge, the Highball, where boy band sensation Henri Mazza will be holding a Michael Jackson Dance Party as a part of this year’s Fantastic Fest. This is a good chance to see the Highball in all its tuck-and-roll splendor, before it’s grand opening in October, and a nice opportunity to honor the King of Pop through expressive movement.

Mother Truckers

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 15, 2009

Health care. We got it. Then there are those unlucky wretches who happen to have pre-existing conditions: obesity, arthritis, diabetes, depression, pregnancy – really anything short of acute head trauma is grounds for disqualification from most American health insurance programs. The remaining few crazy enough to actually provide insurance coverage for people with pre-existing conditions charge rates just slightly less than the actual medical treatment itself costs. Generally, people with pre-existing conditions are the lepers of the insurance world (and, by the way, leprosy is a pre-existing condition). Why shouldn’t they be? No insurer wants some obese, diabetic, depressed, pregnant chick pissing all over its actuarial tables. That’s no way to make a fast buck. On the other hand, you can’t exactly march all the pre-existing condition cases out to a shallow grave in the woods and pop a cap in the back of their heads either. The bleeding hearts ruined that gambit for Hitler, so there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t ruin it for Humana too. If Hitler had succeeded, however, his master race would have dressed up German actuarial tables nicely. Imagine what a nation of ruddy-cheeked Aryan Übermenschen would do for health insurers’ profits – especially if they were somehow conned into believing that their health insurance premiums weren’t artificially inflated. Attractive an idea as it may seem, using genocide to fleece up the gene pool is not without its problems. There’s corpse disposal, grieving relatives, and all the lost revenue for the health care industry. More importantly, if you start offing the old and the sick and the feeble-minded, where do you draw the line? Genetic purification is a sticky moral wicket to say the least. Do you start with the coma patients? People on respirators? Dialysis machines? Asthma nebulizers? If you really think about it, old people in general put a huge strain on the health care system. Maybe if you instituted an age limit … sort of like Logan’s Run? You could start modestly at first – maybe say that anyone over the age of 65 gets sent to the woods for “renewal.” If you’re worried about the Rolling Stones, don’t sweat it; they’re English. England loves it some old people. Case in point: Benny Hill. Here in America we’re into youth. We like hairless genitals; smooth skin; svelte, glistening physiques; brash confidence; inexperience and ignorance. People over the age of 65 are sorely lacking in all these qualities (at least let’s pray the Sun City spa isn’t overbooked for Brazilian waxes), so why should we let them drag down the finest health care system in the world? Make no mistake, insurance companies and their greedy shareholders are not driving up the cost of health care; old people are. Old people and the chronically ill are driving this country toward bankruptcy, and the only two choices are Obama’s death panels or spending even more on health insurance and crippling our already fragile economy. There is no other way … well, except for the health care systems in Japan, Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Maybe some Congress members should put in a few long-distance phone calls. Maybe somehow we could come up with a health care plan that covers all Americans for two-thirds of the cost we pay right now – like France. Maybe America could spend some of that extra money on things like drug abuse – which, depending on your health plan, is probably a pre-existing condition. Until then, those with chemical dependencies have to get support and treatment where they can. Fortunately there are organizations like the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, which provides free support for teenagers dealing with chemical dependency. Tonight at Antone’s the Mother Truckers are playing a benefit concert for the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. $10 gets you into the show and gives you an opportunity to help out local youth and, in a broader sense, the overly expensive but ailing American health care system. Remember: It’s either your charity or Obama’s death panels. There is no other way.

Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 9, 2009

In Europe, it’s almost impossible to tell a straight man from a gay man. Everyone carries purses. Everyone walks around in hipster shoes. Everyone wears really tight swimsuits. They’re not even embarrassed about it either. They’ll just stand there casually holding a conversation with a bas-relief of their kibbles and bits bulging out of a colorful spandex slingshot. Europe is a whole continent full of Brunos … not that there’s anything wrong with that, but pretty much everywhere you go your gay compass is spinning like a roulette wheel. You can’t help thinking: “If this dude isn’t gay, why is he still hugging me? What is that intoxicating smell? Sandalwood? With a hint of pepper?” For the average American – gay or het – it’s a confusing continent. If a Frenchman leans in for a kiss, it’s probably just tradition. He may find it confusing if you drop into a sexy, lip-parted swoon like Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Oh, and uh … ixnay on the onsil hockey tay. What we call French kissing here in the States is not the way people greet each other on the continent – not even on pride weekend, which is the same as just about any other weekend, except that it involves more paint and feathers. You would think that paint and feathers would peg the needle on your gay-o-meter too, but not so. Just because French people love paint and feathers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gay. Au contraire. Actually, they have quite an American Indian fetish – sort of like the English love queens – so you can’t really judge a Frenchman by his plumage. The French also have a thing for Jerry Lewis, who, even though he was Dean Martin’s bitch, was about as gay as an episode of The Three Stooges. Yes, Europe is a place of perplexing gender-bending extremes. On the hard, butch end of the scale you have female German weightlifters, and on the soft femme side you have Prince Charles. Hard to say who scores more vag, but publicly Charlie gives the German muscle gals a good run for their money, even if he might actually prefer a little man ass on the down low. Damn it all, apparently in the Third Millennium, stereotypical gender traits are not an ironclad bet to determine sexual orientation. What to do? What to do? The healthiest thing to do is to not spend a lot of time worrying about it. People are basically people, but if you’re not occasionally taken out of your comfort zone by the interests, activities, and proclivities of others, you’re probably not living a very interesting life, and that’s a damned shame. That doesn’t mean you should take up skydiving, scrapbooking or gerbiling, but it does mean you should occasionally expose yourself to other ideas. This week you have an excellent opportunity to do just that at the 22nd Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival. If you are gay, aGLIFF is a good opportunity to explore a broad range of issues relating to your lifestyle. If you aren’t, aGLIFF offers you a chance to gain a better understanding of what it means to be gay/lesbian/transgendered, even if it makes you squirm in your seat on occasion.

Out of Bounds Comedy Festival Headliners

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 2, 2009

Sweet. Three-day weekend! Of course, that’s assuming you have a regular job with a set schedule, benefits, and all that. Otherwise, a three-day weekend just means you’re pulling extra shifts to accommodate all those state and corporate drones looking to get their swerve and grub on. You wouldn’t mind it much if they were big tippers who could hold their liquor, but the ugly truth is that your pockets will be sagging with chump change and you’ll be spending a lot of quality time mopping mangorita barf out of bathroom stalls. Happy Labor Day! Bet you’re rethinking that fine arts degree now, eh? All you wanted to do was dance, right? Well, how ’bout you dance your ass down to table 7 and Hoover up that high-chair debris field that Junior laid down while his parents superhumanly ignored his cracker crumb and macaroni temper tantrum? They probably think they can buy you off with a 15% tip and a huge smiley face on your comment card, but for this travesty you’re going to need some serious payback. Sadly, you’ll just have to estimate. You can’t know the real damage until they lift that chubby little fucker out of his high chair and shake him like a can of Parmesan cheese. It’s truly amazing the amount of culinary detritus that can get trapped in a pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls: a whole sleeve of saltines, a half basket of tortilla chips – soggy on one end, of course – some Jell-O kernels, and a few hundred Cheerios (brought in by the parents to keep him occupied). Even to the most compassionate of food-service employees, that’s worth at least a couple of lung nuggets and a butt-crack silverware swab, but by the time you’ve properly assessed the damage, they’re already buckling him into the backseat of the Prius. Breath deeply. Hold it in. Visualize the huge bowl of pee soup you’ll be serving them the next time they decide to save money on a babysitter. Your boss and your unemployed dope-dealing roommate like to tell you there’s no room for bitterness or resentment in the workplace. They’re right. There is no room … unless you make room. If America has learned anything from its disgruntled postal workers, it’s that people can endure almost any amount of monotony, abuse, and humiliation in their jobs as long as they can nurture a psychotic revenge fantasy … hopefully one they won’t actually act out … at least not in real life. Besides, that’s what improv classes are for, right? Where else can you mow down an entire office full of co-workers with an AK-47 and get away with it? Maybe even score a few nervous chuckles in the process? You may not think it’s funny, but comedy is an important part of sanity maintenance. Somehow you have to soak up all the injustice, pain, and misery in the world and still manage to turn that frown upside down. It’s not easy. Sometimes you need an assist. This weekend Austin provides one in the form of the Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival, a seven-day “live performance festival that showcases some of the best improv, sketch, stand-up, and filmed comedy from all over the country.” Sunday night, the Independent features Austin’s Get Up and Melbourne, Australia’s Impro Melbourne at 7:30pm, then Chicago’s SCRAM and Los Angeles’ Cackowski and Talarico at 9pm. You might as well make a whole night of it. You probably don’t have to work the next day. If you do, you could probably use some comic relief.

Austin Chronicle’ Hot Sauce Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 27, 2009

It’s going to be hot at The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival this Sunday. Crazy hot. Maybe like 1,900 degrees … in the shade. Don’t let Jim Spencer or Mark Murray or Troy Kimmel or that bouncy dude on Fox with the shopping-mall hairdo tell you any differently. They might appeal to your sense of idiotic optimism with the promise of a 10% chance of rain – dangle it in front of your nose like a bacon-flavored dog biscuit – but the only thing falling out of the sky on Sunday will be blistering rays of sunshine and dehydrated grackles. In other words, the weather on Sunday will be absolutely perfect for the festival: scorching – the kind of insanely intense heat that should scare away the curious, the delicate, and the apathetic. Besides, anyone who is really into hot sauce won’t let the possibility of 100-plus weather hold them back. They’re coming for the heat. They’re coming to sweat. After all, a good salsa will make you sweat no matter what the temperature. Like a whore in church. Like a pedophile at a preschool. Like the kid in the rat suit at Chuck E. Cheese’s. If the preceding sounds a bit masochistic, it is. The pepper is an acquired taste. Like coffee, it generally needs to be mixed with something to make it palatable: tomatoes, tomatillos, mangoes … anything to soften the blow. You may prefer your coffee black now, but back in the early days of your addiction, you liked it with lots of cream and sugar – the K-Y and Astroglide of coffee consumption. Capsaicin addicts tend to start slowly too. You can’t just shovel a bunch of habaneros into your mouth and expect a happy ending. Au contraire. In fact, you might want to prophylactically apply a topical ointment to your ending if you somehow managed to choke a habanero down your gullet. Perhaps some actual K-Y might do the trick. Regardless, like sex, with peppers your best bet is to work your way up slowly. A good road map is the Scoville scale: bell, pimento, poblano, jalapeño, serrano, habanero, and naga jolokia, which if eaten whole will kill you, your children, and your childrens’ children. Most people tend to put the brakes on capsaicin consumption somewhere around habanero. Really, beyond that you might as well just shoot yourself in the mouth with pepper spray. At a certain point, the pain from the capsaicin completely obliterates any other nuance of flavor. With habaneros, at least you get a few seconds of actual pepper taste before you start looking for a fire hose to spray out your mouth. Serranos are the peppers most often found in traditional red salsa. In the right quantity they can be exceptionally hot as well, but they’re also quite flavorful. The same is true of most peppers if they’re well prepared. That, of course, is the challenge, and the reason the Chronicle devotes one blistering hot Sunday a year to hot sauce and all its varied forms and flavors. It’s an epicurean adventure with a decidedly masochistic twist. It’s also an Austin institution, hell or hot weather. So … are you in?

Rude Mechanicals’ Sci-fEye Ball

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 19, 2009

Balls … seems like everybody has them. They’re the low hanging fruit of the charity business – maybe not quite as low as the benefit concert, but still easy pickin’. You would think it would be easier to scrape together two turntables and a microphone (the electronic retro-phallus of the DJ world) than it is to fill up a seven band bill, but here in Austin we pack in bands like slaves on the Amistad – and pay them even less. With all this musical talent laying around, how hard can it be to find someone who can match beats without sending the dance floor into arrhythmic epilepsy? Yes, a DJ. Live music? Seen it: Foot on the monitor, double devil horns, microphone stand crotch rub, gratuitous drum solo, never-ending narcissistic guitar solo, “What? It’s my turn?” bass solo, sweaty hair throw, insincere “great to be here in …” salutation, breakdown section with Barry White-style let-me-be-serious-for-a-moment voiceover, power chord chorus with above the head hand clap, garage band clusterfuck ending replete with split-legged stage jump apostrophe. Really, how can a skinny kid with a terabyte hard drive and a pirated copy of ACID Pro compete with game like that? Fog machine? Disco ball? LED Strobes? Rhythm would definitely be a start. Seriously. There is only so much shoegazing a city can do, no matter how cool it thinks it is. Yes, lyrically dense, self-absorbed, multisyllabic soliloquies can be set to music … interminable, droning, cacophonous soundscapes that challenge preconceived notions of rhythm and tonality. They can also be thrown in the fireplace. Every once in a while, people need something with a chest-thumping, ass-shaking groove. Ooonnn tssssss ooonnn tssssss ooonnn tssssss. Hands in the air like you just don’t care … or maybe you do care. Maybe that’s why you’ll be attending the Rude Mechanicals’ Sci-fEye Ball this Saturday at the Off Center: Because you really do care about supporting original, innovative live theatre in Austin … East Austin … in a converted warehouse … because that’s the kind of place where original live theatre is done. You care enough about live theatre to dress up in “Retro-Futuresque” attire (think Sky Captain, Buck Rogers, the Rocketeer, only sans the rocket pack, because it can get hot up in that bitch) and brave potential derision and merciless heckling by ungentrified Eastsiders, who will surely be wondering what the fuck you’re doing in a hot-assed spacesuit in 104 degree heat (making Sci-fEye Ball soup, no doubt). Come to think of it, you might want to consider rocking that chain-mail bra and cutoff mesh half-shirt shimmel that Daryl Hannah made famous in Blade Runner. It’s only slightly retro, and it gives you an excuse to try out that flying scissor headlock you’ve been working on. How theatrical would that be? Of course, you don’t have to go costumed – remember, it’s legal to go topless in Austin – but it does show you’re committed to the cause. If you want to go a little lower profile, you could just drop some major coin on the silent auction, which boasts, along with a lot of other cool stuff, a vacation on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. Seriously, how cool is that? Pretty fucking cool. Plus, even if you go on the cheap, you still get free beer and phat jams DJ’d by Austin supercomposer/rock star Graham Reynolds. Even if it is low hangin’ fruit, this ball is still pretty sweet.

Texas Testosterone Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 7, 2009

If you were thinking you could pick up a couple of ounces of pure testosterone at this weekend’s Texas Testosterone Festival, think again. To score the real stuff you’re going to have to go across the border and meet an acne-scarred Russian guy in some seedy cantina in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He’s probably going to make you do a bunch of Jell-O shots and take you to the donkey show, but if you want that competitive edge. On the other hand, you could just buy some online at Steroid.com. Hey, it’s cool. You’re not playing right field for the Cubs or defensive end for the Saints. You just want to bulk up a little so you’ll get a little more action down at Oilcan Harry’s. Of course there’s also the side benefit of looking like you could kick your boss’ ass … or tap it if you felt so inclined. Still, when purchasing any kind of drug, there are dangers involved – and they don’t always have to do with your dealer being all methed out and paranoid. More often than not your drug dealer is a multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical company pulling the puppet strings of your personal physician. Can’t sleep? Don’t give up your Starbucks grandes or your Rockstar Energy Drinks or your late-night porn surfing. Just throw back some Ativan or Ambien, and you’ll sleep like the dead. Feeling a little down in the dumps? Don’t give up your daily regimen of habitual pot smoking, couch potatoing, and junk-food binging, try Zoloft, Prozac, or Paxil instead. You’ll feel like you just hung the moon – instead of feeling like your ass is the size of it. So maybe the big pharmaceutical companies aren’t all bad. At least they don’t have scabby skin or rotting teeth like proper drug dealers, but that doesn’t mean they’re less nefarious. Drug companies not only have their hands up the asses of doctors; they’re “directing the American health-care debate” by greasing up legislators, as well. They probably wouldn’t be above recruiting poor Mexican kids to whack consumer health-care activists, but their game is much more polished than that. Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on legal drugs. In contrast, illegal drugs are chump change. If you think selling crack to school kids is morally reprehensible, you might be able to work up a little indignation at the usurious cost of prescription drugs for elderly people on fixed incomes. It turns out that old age is really depressing, especially when you can’t afford to spend money on anything but the anti-depressants your doctor prescribed to avoid having to figure out what was really wrong with you. Maybe the answer to America’s health-care woes is for old people to start flooding across the border to buy testosterone … and maybe some adrenaline to wash it back with. That might keep the doctors in line. Nothing is scarier than a raging old coot, especially since so many own firearms to protect themselves from drug-crazed teenagers. Maybe they could redirect their rage at profit-crazed pharmaceutical companies. Something good might finally come from too much testosterone. Sounds crazy, though, doesn’t it? Sort of like promoting an event called the Texas Testosterone Festival, which, believe it or not, is happening this weekend at the Palmer Events Center. Yes, the Test Fest is two man-tastic days full of butch stuff: a bikini contest, a model search, a video-game tournament, a fantasy football mock draft, a home-brewing demo, a hot rod show, a poker tournament – the kind of stuff that takes big, hairy balls. Oh yeah, and there’s also a jujitsu tournament. If all this sounds a little douchey to you, maybe you aren’t getting enough testosterone, eh?