20th Annual Buck Owens Birthday Bash

August 10, 2011

Why Buck Owens? Why the fuck not, motherfucker? First of all, his name is Buck. That name is badass molasses on a stick. You can’t shake it off. No, it wasn’t his given name. That was Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. – the sort of name that inspires in most people a primal urge to hand out a vicious noogie. Not even Mike Tyson could have survived a name like that. Fortunately, at the age of 3, little Alvis Edgar saw the writing on the wall and adopted the name of his family’s favorite mule, “Buck.” It’s possible that at that young age, Alvis Edgar had no idea that he would be endowed like a mule – not just with a spectacular overbite that rivaled Mr. Ed’s but also, rumor has it, with an equestrian-sized beef whistle. It’s probably just as well. Irony, like wealth, beauty, and good liquor, is wasted on children. Suffice it to say that later in life, Owens could both eat corn on the cob through a picket fence and party like a porn star. Being a bona fide country star meant that Owens was able to exercise the latter talent more than most, but his true gift was of a more aural nature. As much as anyone else, Owens helped define the Bakersfield sound, a genre of country music defined by twangy Telecaster guitars, honky-tonk drum beats, fiddles, and steel guitars. Originally, the Bakersfield sound had its beginnings in the music favored by dust bowl Okies, Arkies, and Texans who moved to the San Joaquin valley in search of jobs in oil and agriculture. Owens’ family was among those fleeing the dust bowl. However, they never made it as far as California. Their car broke down in Mesa, Ariz., and that’s where they stayed. In his early years, Owens picked cotton and potatoes in the fields until he figured out that playing music was a much easier way to make a living. At age 13, he dropped out of high school and started working as a Western Union messenger, a truck driver, and a car washer until he teamed up with guitar player Ray Britten and began doing radio shows – first in Mesa, then in Phoenix, where he met his first wife, Bonnie, who would later divorce Owens and marry Merle Haggard (imagine how big the Hag’s hardware must be …). A few years later, Buck and Bonnie moved to Bakersfield, Calif., and the rest, as they say, is history … or at least a really salacious biography. Sure, his personal life was a bit of a train wreck. He married and divorced four times, sired four sons, and through it all still managed to amass a healthy fortune. With it he bought radio stations, houses, a bunch of really outlandish stage costumes, and, perhaps most famously, a Nudie Cohn-custom-decorated Pontiac Grand Ville, tricked out with pistol door handles and a huge “longhorn” hood ornament – actually, Owens didn’t buy the car, he won it from Nudie in a poker game. It now sits behind the bar at Owens’ Crystal Palace nightclub in Bakersfield. Much of Owens’ wealth was due to his 17-year run on Hee Haw, the corn-pone comedy show that pretty much defines homespun hillbilly humor – even though it was mostly written by Canadians. Owens’ true legacy, however, will be his contribution to defining a unique version of the country sound. It’s mostly that the folks down at the Continental Club will be celebrating at the 20th annual Buck Owens Birthday Bash this Friday. Expect great performances from a huge list of Austin musicians including Libbi Bosworth, Ricky Broussard, The Texas Sapphires, Ted Roddy, the Wagoneers, Lucas Hudgins, Roy Heinrich and many others. Proceeds benefit the Center for Child Protection – which may not be as fun as a tricked out Grand Ville, but it’s still money well-spent.

‘Texas High School Football: More Than the Game’

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 3, 2011

If you’re reading the Chronicle, there’s a pretty good chance that you were never too big on football – at least not the American kind. Let’s just be honest with ourselves, shall we? Yes, you might enjoy football for its camp and spectacle. You might even own a slightly stained, vintage, 1970s-era Dallas Cowboys cheerleader poster or perhaps an autographed photo of Walt Garrison (who was both a Cowboy and a cowboy, and America’s number one spokesperson for Skoal smokeless tobacco), but you probably didn’t actually play football – at least not much past Pop Warner. That’s understandable. After all, American football is a violent, brutal sport where size, strength, and aggression dominate. Walt Garrison himself sustained five concussions over the course of his football career before he was finally forced into retirement – not because of a nasty case of mouth cancer, but because of a knee injury sustained while pursuing his favorite leisure activity: steer wrestling. Yes, Walt was a bit of a badass, which is something that could be said of just about anyone who makes it to the NFL … with the exception of maybe the place kicker and the equipment manager, and even they are fairly butch in relation to the average male. Troy Aikman would certainly vouch for that. He had 10 concussions during his career. In fact, he claims he doesn’t remember anything about Super Bowl XXVIII … not even playing in the game … because of a concussion suffered in the NFC playoffs two weeks before. Now that is getting knocked the fuck out. The crazy thing is that Troy Aikman is a big, strong dude by just about anyone’s standards. He was certainly the big man on campus at Henryetta High School, where he was a center on the basketball team (that’s the tall guy in the middle). High school football is a bit more accessible to the average male (and in rare cases, female), but its players are still a relatively small percentage of the overall population – some would say a dumber, brutish, and belligerent percentage. Again, let’s be honest here … they’re mostly right. Nonetheless, we live in a state and a nation that either cherishes these traits or at least finds it enormously entertaining watching them play out. Perhaps it’s a little bit of both. Football is about the closest you can get to human demolition derby, and really, nothing is more satisfying than watching the asshole alpha male who gave you a swirly in the restroom during lunch break get the snot knocked out of him by someone even bigger and meaner than he is. Whatever the reason, in Texas, football is an unrivaled Friday night ritual. Yes, we could have chosen karaoke … or cock fighting … or naked baby-oil twister … but we chose instead to watch the tough guys beat up on themselves for a couple of hours … right after we spend a few hours in the parking lot getting our swerve on. Just about everyone who grows up in Texas has memories of Friday night lights, for better or worse. You might have been in the marching band, the drill team, the cheerleading squad, the pep club, a mascot uniform, or underneath the bleachers getting stoned, but football will most likely always be at least a small part of your identity as a Texan. This Saturday the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum is hosting a free opening day pep rally for “Texas High School Football: More Than the Game,” a special exhibit that examines high school football’s cultural influence in the state of Texas, curated by writer Joe Nick Patoski. The pep rally will feature marching bands, dancers, and a crash course in football rules. You might not be big on football, but you might be surprised to find you know more about it than you thought.

Lights. Camera. Help. Film Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 27. 2011

Do-gooders are an especially irritating lot, if only for the fact that their actions are a humiliating indictment of the self-absorbed, hedonistic, slothful, and apathetic majority of humanity – those of us happily occupying the meat of the bell curve, so to speak. While it seems only natural that folks who enjoy a happy, healthy, prosperous existence ought to feel at least the tiniest tinge of moral conscience – some sort of faint desire to give back to a world that has given them so much – it’s not always the case. Doing good … really doing good … takes a lot of time, energy, resources, and creativity – things that are often collectively referred to as a big pain in the ass. Just the overwhelming prospect of really doing good tends to completely bury that tiny voice of conscience, and if you arrange your life just so, you can pretty much ensure that voice never gets through at all. There’s a reason people move to the suburbs. A venti latte from Starbucks is so much more enjoyable when you don’t have a scrofulous homeless dude leaning across your windshield with a dirty squeegee and a wad of newspaper. There’s no shame in avoiding such ugliness, only honesty. People don’t acquire wealth so they can continue to wallow in poverty and squalor. In fact, the mere idea that people have the chance to improve their conditions is what powers the American way of life. Regardless of the relative success of our collective endeavors (the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, World War II, Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk … as opposed to Michael Jackson’s), Americans still hold firmly to the ideal of rugged individualism, and it is exactly this contradiction that is proving to be a sticky wicket in current political discourse. Can we rely on self-interest and the profit motive to do what’s best for the public good, or as individuals are we better served by a sense of altruism and the notion that by improving the lives of everyone, we also help ourselves? The former seems to be holding sway in most of America these days. The puzzlingly (or, given the very powerful insurance lobby, maybe not so puzzlingly) vitriolic assault on “ObamaCare,” the president’s highly watered-down attempt at bringing down crippling (poor choice of metaphor?) health care costs, leads the charge, followed by a nearly unilateral assault on “entitlement” programs, otherwise known as social welfare. Sadly it seems, the issue of the efficiency and efficacy of social welfare programs has become secondary, tangential even, to the issue of their actual necessity. The question that is not being asked stridently enough is: What is the cost of their absence? Will weaning people off the government tit prove adequate incentive to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? What if poor people get so poor they can’t even afford boots? Tough questions like the preceding are pondered most safely and comfortably in gated suburban communities – or rather, mostly not at all. However, if you’re the type of masochist who would like to expose yourself to the pressing social issues of our times, but would maybe like to do so without smelling vomit and dried urine, this Friday you should head down to the Spirit of Texas Theater at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum for the 2011 Lights. Camera. Help. film festival, which celebrates nonprofit and cause-driven films. Friday features eight screenings covering topics such as homelessness, urban farming, and sexual violence against Native American women, among others. Who knows? These films might eat at your conscience, but they might also change your life. Oh yeah, one more thing: All proceeds go to the nonprofits associated with the films.

‘Never Heard of ‘Em’ Book Release Concert

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 20, 2011

If you think it’s tough being a has-been, try being a never-was. The sad byproducts of Austin’s status as a live music mecca are the legions of musicians who endure in spite of heartbreaking obscurity, who never seem to be able to score anything better than a midnight Tuesday slot batting cleanup on a five-band bill at Headhunters. (Note: If you actually happen to be a member of Half Baked 69, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re condemned to obscurity, but it’s a pretty good hint that some introspection is in order regarding your music career.) Sounds a bit cruel, yes, but the ugly truth is that not everyone can be a winner. The music business in Austin is a heartless bitch – not necessarily because of the people who run the show, but because of the people who don’t. There are literally thousands of them, and none of them moved here because they thought they were shitty musicians. In fact, quite the contrary. It takes a certain amount of hubris to think you can waltz into Austin (or two-step or polka or watusi) and experience the same heady success and adoration you enjoyed back in Possum Snatch, Ark., or Bug Tussle, Ala. In fact, just scoring a free happy hour gig in Austin often involves disturbing amounts of fellatio – mostly metaphorical, yes, but that can sometimes be even more humiliating and nauseating than the actual physical act, especially if the booker or club owner has a huge metaphorical cock … and they usually do. Most don’t admit it, but it takes a staggering amount of time, energy, and enthusiasm just to be a working musician in Austin. It also takes at least a modicum of talent (which is what nonmusicians call skill) to even get your foot in the door – where it will get slammed many times before you actually gain entry. In Austin, it is obnoxious to assume that a musician you’ve never heard of lacks talent. It’s quite the contrary, in fact. One of the basic rites of passage in Austin is seeing a musician who literally knocks your socks off – someone who impresses you so much that you are actually incredulous that person isn’t touring with Springsteen or at the very least headlining the Austin City Limits Music Fest. After it happens five or six times, your incredulity will inevitably start to wane. After a few years of having it happen again and again, you begin to question whether or not the music business is even remotely merit-based at all. Well, it is and it isn’t. Music fans are a fickle lot, prone to fads, fashion, and spectacle. If it were all about “talent,” Lady Gaga wouldn’t have to wear a dress made out of meat. As it turns out, she’s not only in the music business, she’s in the entertainment business, so it’s kind of her JOB. If she thought she could wear a dress made out of baby seals, dalmatian puppies, or the foreskins of little Jewish boys, rest assured she would … just as soon as she could find some Chinese orphan toddlers to sew it. The point is, the music business is a complicated concoction of a lot of repulsive shit that doesn’t have a lot to do with music. Is it any wonder that musicians loathe doing the business part of the music business nearly as much as they do holding down a day job? Not at all. Really about the only thing you can assume about musicians in Austin is that they really enjoy playing music … and that’s a good thing, because for a majority of them, that’s the only reward they’re going to get out of it. This Sunday at Threadgill’s World Headquarters, a great lineup of musicians – some more anonymous than others – will be playing a show celebrating the release of Never Heard of ‘Em, a book written by Sue Donahue, former owner (along with her husband Mike) of the now defunct Local Flavor record shop. Given the relative obscurity of its intended subjects, it’s hard to say that the book will be especially profitable or highly publicized. You should not, however, assume it isn’t good.

Wammo vs. Forsyth

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 13, 2011

Yes, but at least it’s a dry heat …. Welcome to Austin! Don’t go thinking the weather is going to be this pleasant for the rest of the summer. This mercifully low humidity can’t last forever. Normally in July the humidity in your car is enough to make you look like Alice Cooper applied your mascara while tripping on peyote buttons. Ever get in your car, close the door, and have the rearview mirror fall off because the glue on the stem melted? Get ready. If you’re not an epileptic or prone to bouts of vertigo, you can have a friend try and hold it in place as you drive, but in terms of driver safety, you might as well just have someone attempt to burn a hole in your retina with a laser pointer. Your best bet is to just not worry about what’s happening behind you and focus on the road ahead – which will probably resemble a Salvador Dalí painting because of the heat waves coming off the asphalt. Don’t trip; that’s the way Texas looks in the summer. If you’re a big pot smoker, you may want to rein in your usage for the next three months. Heat is its own hallucinogenic. Plus, the only thing more disturbing than seeing the highway melting in front of you is getting a wicked case of cotton mouth in mid-July. Hint: If flies land on your tongue and get stuck there, you’re either: A) completely baked, B) in the death throes of dehydration, or C) you’ve actually turned into a frog. If you’re either A or C, you should write your dope dealer a nice thank you note. If, however, you look out your windshield and see Satan himself doing a reverse cowgirl on your hood ornament, you’re not hallucinating. He’s just here enjoying the weather. Think about it: If you had to spend eternity swimming in a lake of fire, you’d probably want to pop out and dry off occasionally yourself. What better place to do that than right here in River City? After all, we have plenty of sunshine and warm breezes and, barring some act of God … like a hurricane, for instance … the forecast isn’t going to change until late September at the earliest. Don’t let your hopes get crushed, but it is unlikely that God is going to get involved even if Satan is riding around sodomizing himself on your hood ornament. God doesn’t get into dick-swinging matches with the devil. Besides, how big of a beaker would you need to do a reliable water displacement test on God’s cock? Is the scientific method even a valid way to quantify the divine? While most Austin musicians lack the confidence to tackle big, tough questions like the preceding ones, former Asylum Street Spankers Wammo and Guy Forsyth are certainly brave enough to try. Both are mightily prolific, talented, and worldly emissaries of the Keep-Austin-Weird aesthetic. If you haven’t seen them perform together, this Friday at the Continental Club may be your last, best chance for a while. Wammo is headed off to Philadelphia, and though he will surely be back to visit, it probably won’t be for a while. The show is titled “Wammo vs. Forsyth” and features songs the two have written together as well as favorites from when they were in the Spankers. There probably won’t be a winner declared, unless maybe it’s the audience. You should make plans to be a part of it.

Artly Fest

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 1, 2011

Here’s something the Austin Chamber of Commerce fliers fail to mention: Usually when some hoary old beer-bellied coot starts blathering on about the good old days when Austin was cheaper, cooler, friendlier, more relaxed, and less pretentious, he’s not fucking around. It’s true. Back in the days of the Armadillo World Headquarters, Lone Star was a nickel a pitcher, pot was a dollar an ounce, and condoms were as rare as the Hope Diamond. In fact, you needed to be at least that hard to put one on. No one ever wore them mind you, because the CIA hadn’t even invented AIDS yet. That’s why pretty much every house party or beer bust devolved into a roiling clusterfuck reminiscent of the tangle of earthworms at the bottom of a bait can. When people weren’t sunbathing nude down at Barton Springs, they walked around shoeless and commando. The only fashion (other than freeballing) was daisy duke cutoffs and worn out “Keep on Truckin'” tank tops, and you really only needed a car if you had to drive some place way out on the edge of town like Oltorf or North Loop. Sadly, there weren’t any smart cars back then … only art cars. There was nothing smart about art cars, but they were wicked clever. For instance, art cars didn’t come with amenities like windshield wipers, door handles, or brake lights, but then again Detroit never offered a car that was completely covered in plastic army men, Lone Star bottle caps, or snow globes. In Austin, art was a pretty big deal back in the day. Everybody did art all the time, even if they were smoking pot, dropping acid, or making huge submarine sandwiches. The best way to make really good art is to not have a job, and back then you didn’t need one. Everybody shared everything: clothes, food, transportation, housing …. Instead of dropping major coin on an expensive Downtown condo, you could just crash on the sofa of Willie’s tour bus, park your Good Times van down by the river, or pass out in a bathroom stall at some dive bar down on Sixth Street. Yes, dive bar. It’s nearly impossible to imagine now, but Sixth Street used to be skeevy for very different reasons than it is now. Instead of teeming with crowds of binge-drinking tourists and douche bags with gelled hair and Ed Hardy shirts, Sixth Street used to be a dark, lonely place with just a smattering of bars, restaurants, and porno joints. In 1974, local artist Jim Franklin and his friend Bill Livingood got the Sixth Street ball rolling when they opened up the Ritz Theatre as a live music venue. Two months later, the Uranium Savages played their first show there. Thus began a colorful 36-year-and-counting career. Yes, these days the Savages all qualify for AARP discounts and abdominal trusses, but they’re still cranking out music that defines the Austin aesthetic: daring, derivative, irreverent, sloppy, fun, funny, and thought-provoking. Plus, they do it in freaky costumes with zany props. Artistically and stylistically the Uranium Savages are all over the map, which is just the way Austin likes it. This Saturday, they will be at the corner of Barton Springs Road and Riverside Drive at Threadgill’s World Headquarters (owned by a beer-bellied old coot from the Armadillo days named Eddie Wilson) for Artly Fest, a benefit for one of the Savages’ own, Artly Snuff, who was injured in a car accident back in December 2010. Bands on the bill include Extreme Heat, Cornell Hurd, Rick Broussard, Larry Lange & His Lonely Knights, and of course, the Uranium Savages themselves. Not surprisingly, Artly Fest also coincides with International Eddy Day, the Savages’ annual celebration of the Patron Saint of 709. If all this sounds strange and confusing, welcome to Austin. Just remember, it’s not as fun as it used to be.

Red, White ‘n Buda

The Luv Doc Recommends

June 28, 2011

Fourth of July without fireworks? What kind of America is it when people can’t blow shit up and recklessly endanger themselves and their neighbors? How can we have special memories of the birth of our nation if we can’t marry them with the memory of a cousin running into the house with a charred eyeball hanging out of its socket? Such graphic and disturbing mental images remind us of the sacrifices Americans made in the defense of freedom. Freedom always comes at a cost, so it only makes sense that celebrating freedom would involve some collateral damage as well. Remember how old Uncle Jumpy used to freak out and duck for cover whenever you lit a string of Black Cats at a family Fourth of July celebration? Hilarious! Well, at least until you got older and found out he spent most of the spring of ’68 at Khe Sanh dodging mortar rounds. Until then you just thought he was a crazy, pissed-off old alcoholic who chain-smoked Marlboros and wore a huge folding knife in a camo pouch on his belt. To him, the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air were more than just pretty poetic imagery in the National Anthem. Of course, that still didn’t keep you from having bottle-rocket fights with the neighbors across the street or Roman candle duels with your cousins in the backyard. In retrospect, that shit seems pretty stupid, but maybe on a larger scale stupidity is every bit as important as intelligence. Any dinosaur could tell you (were its brain not the size of a walnut) that Darwinism is a painfully slow process. Design changes take millions of years. Things that seem brutish and imbecilic in their current context (like bottle-rocket fights) may be essential to the evolution of mankind. Sure, you would have to be one dumbass giant ground sloth to just wade into the La Brea Tar Pits, but at least if you did you could be comforted by the thought that thousands of other dumbasses got mired in the same muck. In fact, you can safely bet that if the tar pits weren’t fenced off, the city of Los Angeles would still be fishing tarred (‘tarded?) dumbasses out of them every day. No doubt the fencing is good for public safety, but it’s also undermining the process of natural selection and putting a serious gap in the fossil record of dumbasses. Perhaps the irony of L.A. being home to one of the largest, smelliest, oozing monuments to stupidity in the world was not lost on city leaders. Fencing it off might have seemed like the smartest thing to do, but in the end, they’re only further slowing the glacial progress of evolution. Fireworks bans work much the same way, but don’t get impatient. Wars have been going on for thousands of years, and humans haven’t evolved much toward peace. Rather, we’ve evolved toward more efficient ways to kill one another. Case in point: gunpowder. You won’t smell much of it on Monday – at least in Austin – but you’ll be safer for it. Sadly, not only is the fireworks display canceled; you won’t even get a chance to heckle the Austin Symphony. Apparently the 1812 Overture just doesn’t work without live ordnance. So, it seems we won’t be celebrating freedom at all here in Austin. Thank God then for Red, White ‘n Buda, which takes place July 4 in the “Outdoor Capital of Texas,” just a few minutes down the interstate. All day at Buda City Park, they’re soldiering on with festivities that don’t involve incendiaries. Drive down early for the children’s parade at 10am, or wait until it cools off at 6pm and enjoy a musical lineup that includes Keith Kelso, Kevin Smith, and the Trishas. Is this as good as it gets? Don’t be stupid. It is, however, as good as we’ve got.

Shipe Pool Opening Party and Rally

The Luv Doc Recommends

June 22, 2011

Shipe Park isn’t Austin’s nicest use of green space – nor is it particularly spacious, well-designed, or attractively landscaped. It is, however, regularly used – not just by homeless people, dirty-faced toddlers, and anxious dogs looking to make a deposit, but by the sick freaks who insist on undermining evolution by experiencing life through something other than an LCD display. Weird, right? Instead of letting themselves mutate into wholly inert, amorphous blobs of gelatin like God clearly intended, some people choose to engage in subversive, antiquated activities like walking, running, playing sports, swimming, and other useless kinetic endeavors. While Shipe Park isn’t particularly ideal for these sorts of activities, it is convenient and serviceable. It has a small playscape, some swing sets, a tiny basketball court, tennis courts, and a small pool. All of these amenities make Shipe Park a literal playground for these pig-headed subversives. Who pays for this nonsense? You do! That’s right – your hard-earned tax dollars are being wasted on people who refuse to spend money on PlayStations Xboxes, or even Wiis. It’s a travesty, no doubt, but one that’s soon to be corrected. The city of Austin, long a shrewd custodian of municipal funds, has proposed closing the Shipe Park pool in order to save money – presumably money that can be used to fund vital shit like unnecessary traffic lights. Duval Street and 51st? Really? Perhaps there is a secret Office of Public Irony at City Hall that handles such things. If so, it is operating at peak efficiency. How about that? Government that works! Don’t go getting your Glenn Beck panties is a wad. Government, like any large organization, has its share of fuckups, but that doesn’t mean we should ditch it entirely. Big government like big business needs vigilant oversight, and vigilant oversight costs money. These days it seems, especially in conservative camps, spending money on social services and infrastructure (some call it government) is the equivalent of throwing it down a hole. The reigning wisdom these days, it seems, is to starve government of the money it needs to actually do its job. This perpetuates the image of government as being ineffectual, which acts as a disincentive to give government the money it needs. Genius. This way the working man can spend that extra 40% (that being the average amount an American citizen pays for income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, sin taxes, Social Security, and Medicare) of his income making his own smart choices about accessing quality health care, educating his children, saving for retirement, defending his country, policing his community, and building roads, reservoirs, public utilities, and other useless shit like playgrounds, parks, and … yes … even pools. Pools? Really? Why doesn’t the government just buy everybody a pony too? The crazy idea that Americans should elect people smarter than themselves to make wise decisions about improving society for everyone is a ridiculously outdated notion. We’re much better off letting Joe the Plumber figure that shit out on his own. Who knows? We might be amazed by what someone with a GED and a cosmetology license can do on her own with space exploration, brain surgery, or electrical engineering. Regardless of how helplessly the American people spiral into poverty and stupidity, the answer will never be more government. We tried that, and it didn’t work. We now know that private corporations can run things like prisons, tolls roads, and schools, and we all know that private corporations have our backs, 100%. So, will closing down Shipe Park’s swimming pool save us money? Hell yes it will! And if those subversives in Hyde Park still want a pool, surely the city can find some private pool-maintenance company willing to step in and keep it open – for a price. If you’re one of those subversives and want to have a say in the future of Shipe Park’s pool, show up at the park this Saturday at 4pm for the Shipe Pool Opening Party and Rally. Not only can you rally and voice your concerns about the pool’s future; you can also join the potluck party afterward for live music, burgers, and swimming! That’s a lot of activity, but that’s what parks are all about, right?

A Gil Scott-Heron Tribute & Juneteenth Celebration!

The Luv Doc Recommends

June 15, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, the self-titled “bluesologist” who is considered by many to be the progenitor of rap, was most famous for his spoken word poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a blistering diatribe about war, racism, commercialism, and the media backed up by a conga percussion section. Most of the references in the poem are somewhat dated now, but the sentiments are no less true. The title itself seems a bit ironic, especially in these days when the ubiquity of digital video recording devices and the convenience of YouTube ensure than damn near everything is televised. The interwebs offer everything from sick, revolting snuff videos like “3 Guys 1 Hammer” to disturbing videos of U.S. soldiers killing Iraqi journalists to nasty, nauseating videos like “2 Girls 1 Cup,” or that fascinating night-vision video of a hyena eating an elephant’s ass. Some things are best done in the dark, right? There is also a mind-numbing array of highly popular, horribly insipid home videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger” (Really world? 330 million views? Really?), “Sittin on tha Toilet” (25 million), and “Leave Britney Alone!” (39 Million) – real cerebral shit that you would never get to see in real life unless maybe you work at a day care, clean restrooms at a bus station, or chaperone a drama club field trip. There are also plenty of big budget videos that get a lot of attention. For instance, Justin Bieber’s “Baby” video featuring Ludacris to date has raked in more than half a billion views. Yes … that was half a billion. Are there even that many preteen girls and pedophiles in the English-speaking world? If you’re tired of your obnoxious co-worker/friend tagging you in embarrassing, inebriated videos on Facebook, imagine how Justin (Justine?) feels about the paparazzi? Imagine not even being able to cop a roadside squat without hearing the whir of a few dozen autofocus telephoto lenses. Still, despite the exhaustive supply of useless dreck, there is plenty of intriguing, inspiring, and informative video being shown on the Internet – and not just on Infowars.com. Real, actual revolutions are being televised. The uprisings of the Arab Spring have been documented exhaustively – live-streamed in many cases – and to dramatic effect. Nothing like a heart-wrenching video of schoolkids with shrapnel wounds or protesters being massacred to drum up sympathy and support from the Western world. Given the events of the last few months, it could be argued that not only is the revolution televised, television is the revolution itself, but that erroneous title wasn’t really the gist of Gil Scott-Heron’s message. His assertion was that real revolutions aren’t something that can be filmed because real revolutions are revolutions of thought … in how we perceive the world. When Gen. Gordon Granger read the contents of the Emancipation Proclamation from the balcony of the Ashton Villa in Galveston on June 19, 1865 – more than a month after the end of the Civil War and more than two years after the proclamation was to have gone into effect – many slaves in Texas still considered themselves just that: slaves. That revolution of thought was the impetus for Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and around the nation – one of which is happening this Saturday at the Gypsy Lounge when StrangeTribe Productions and Soul of the Boot Entertainment present A Gil Scott-Heron Tribute & Juneteenth Celebration, featuring DJ sets by DJ Sun, el John Selector (Thievery Corporation), and Felix Pacheco. Gil Scott-Heron (who died on May 27 of this year) deserves a tribute, and this certainly won’t be the first or last, but it might be worth checking out. Bring your camera. You never know when the revolution is going to happen.

ROT Rally Parade

The Luv Doc Recommends

June 8 2011

Time to break out the halter top. By Thursday there should be 40,000-plus motorcycle enthusiasts rumbling into Austin. If you go a little extra slutty, maybe you can unseat one of their bitches. Kat Von D bounced sweet Sandy Bullock out of the saddle with some low-cut leather, cleavage, and roughly 14 square feet of body art. Her epidermal illustrations might be breathtaking, but don’t discount the possibility that Jesse James is turned on by a girl who is into pain – if for no other reason than that she has to share nightly dinner conversations with him. Kat’s prize for enduring that agony is that she gets to regularly press her taint against some of the biggest, loudest, gas-powered vibrators in the world. Sounds like a rollicking good time, but is the juice really worth the squeeze? Only Sandy Bullock knows for sure, and if we can trust TMZ‘s vigilance, she’s not out cruising biker bars. Besides, there aren’t really any biker bars in Austin. Pretty much any place divey enough to serve as a biker bar in Austin is overrun with hipsters. Sure, there may be a few Vespas parked out front. You might even see some ironic “Mustache Rides” T-shirts, shitty tattoos, and a chinchilla farm of facial hair, but everyone will be under the age of 35 and surprisingly well-versed in post-feminist thought. Real biker bars have actual bikers … old, sweaty, hairy dudes with huge distended beer guts, plumbers cracks, and moobs … which may explain bikers’ adolescent obsession with female breasts. Rest assured that by high noon this Thursday, all the choice stage side seats at Sugar’s will be commandeered by retired accountants from Fort Worth dressed in leather fetish wear that would embarrass the biker from the Village People. The same scene will be repeated in similar establishments all over town: Exposé, the Pink Monkey, the Landing Strip, the Roses (both Yellow and Red), Twin Peaks, Bikinis and, of course, Hooters. These will be the de facto biker bars in Austin this weekend – along with the roiling trailer trash clusterfuck out at the Travis County Expo Center. So, if you’re jonesing for Hooters’ chicken strips, you may want to order takeout … or perhaps throw caution to the wind and explore more exotic culinary offerings not found on the Hooters menu: strange foods like pizza, tacos, and egg rolls. Regardless, you can be sure that just about any restaurant in Austin serving anything that could even be loosely construed as American food will be full of bikers. If you’re looking for a peaceful dining experience, go for the freakiest cuisine you can imagine. Ethiopian is a pretty safe bet … maybe Vietnamese … or Indian food … dot not feathers. In fact, if you don’t like bikers – or if you find the Kid Rock aesthetic particularly obnoxious – you may want to avoid Austin altogether. However, if you don’t mind seeing dirty denim; leather (and prematurely aged skin that looks like leather); T-shirts with racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive messages; the smell of gas and exhaust; and the sound of tens of thousands of motorcycles farting and rattling through the glass canyon of Congress Avenue, then you should strap on your halter and make your way Downtown Friday evening for the annual Republic of Texas Biker Rally parade. It’s quite a spectacle, and if nothing else, you will find out whether the juice is indeed worth the squeeze.