The Luv Doc Recommends

How many words can the Luv Doc write that don’t actually pertain to the subject he’s writing about?

FronteraFest Long Fringe’s ‘The Dick Monologues’

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January 27, 2009

The Austin Motel Sign

Consider the possibility that you don’t know dick. You might think you do … rather intimately even. Some people might have mistaken you for a dick once or twice. In fact, you might have actually been one at some point or another. Even if you haven’t been a dick, there’s a small chance that your name is Dick. No shame there. Richard sounds a little pretentious anyway … especially if you’re French and put all the emphasis on the back end. If you’re not a dick, there is a (roughly) 50% chance you’re at least attached to one – not necessarily by marriage, but by arteries, erectile tissue, epidermis, and the like. Being attached to a dick doesn’t mean you have to write it love letters. In fact, writing love letters to your pecker is kind of dickish, really. That doesn’t mean you can’t possess some affinity toward it however. After all, if you have a dick, you know that your dick leads you around on some rather exciting escapades. Such adventures are bound to engender a sense of bonding. You might even feel a certain camaraderie with your little downstairs neighbor. After all, you seem to share so much in common. You have the same taste in women … or men. When he’s overworked, you both get really tired. Sometimes he’s awake when you’re asleep. Sometimes he’s asleep when you’re awake. Sometimes he might need a pill to stay peppy. Sometimes he’s so … out there … it’s downright embarrassing. On occasion your dick needs correcting. Like a wayward child, at times he needs to be pointed in the right direction. Some dicks need constant adjustment – not just the dicks on major league pitchers and gangsta rappers but also dicks on big-bellied rednecks in Bermuda shorts and overly curious toddlers. After all, you’re never too young to learn that even though your dick might not always live up to your expectations, he’s always an available and willing playmate. If you’re like most people attached to a dick, you probably feel like you know it pretty well. You’ve spent a questionable amount of quality time exploring its ins and outs. You might even feel like you’re something of an expert on the dick. Well, get over yourself. It turns out that nearly everyone is a specialist on the dick, whether they have one or not. Take FronteraFest’s Dick Monologues, for instance. You might think a show so named would be a veritable sausage fest. Not so. A full nine of the 11 members onstage lack a member themselves (unless, perhaps, there’s an incredible Crying Game plot twist). Can they make up for their dicklessness with oral acumen? Very likely. Members include writers Spike Gillespie, Sarah Bird, Diane Fleming, Robin Chotzinoff, Sarah Barnes, and Marrit Ingman, plus performers and bons vivants Laura Lane, Kristine Kovach, and Jaycee Wilemon. If you feel like you’re missing the meat, don’t worry. Dick Monologues throws you a couple of bones with songwriter Southpaw Jones and actor/performer Rudy Ramirez. How can hilarity not ensue?

Jo’s Third Annual Chili Cold Blood Chili Cook Off

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January 20, 2009

Jo’s Chili Cold Blood Chili Cook Off

Kind of hard to wipe that shit-eatin’ grin off your face, isn’t it? We’re only a couple of days into the new administration, and you’re still expecting cash and Ecstasy to start falling out of the sky … followed maybe by Osama bin Laden’s corpse … but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? With so many problems looming, it’s nice to take a break and remind ourselves that things could be a whole lot worse. Sure, we’re on the brink of financial ruin, our infrastructure is increasingly decrepit, and most of the Third World hates our guts (maybe because our guts are so much larger than theirs?), but when it comes to riding out great depressions, even Kansas is preferable to places like Somalia or Sudan, if only by a small margin. Plus, unlike Somalis, Kansans actually speak our language … often better than we do and without an annoying accent. Yes, it’s good to be an American. It’s good to be able to whine about the high price of gas. It’s good to be pissed off that some evil, greedy bastard on Wall Street gutted your retirement account. It’s good to be able to criticize the ineptitude of our government to the point of libel. In Somalia, none of those things seem to make it on the to-do list. People mainly just sit around all day listening to their stomachs growl, waiting for Osama bin Laden’s corpse to fall out of the sky. Really any protein source would do, but asking for Rush Limbaugh almost seems a little too greedy. Fortunately, thanks in no small part to the good ‘ol U.S. of A., food does fall out of the sky in Somalia and Sudan, and with a much more reliable frequency than if left to … say … Somali warlords. If the God of Moses had amber waves of chemically enhanced grain and a fleet of C-130s, he might have hooked the Israelites up similarly. Nonetheless, this year and in the years to come, we might have to take a few steps back in order to go forward. Needless to say, it’s going to take lots of time and ceaseless ingenuity to get those solar-powered air cars off the ground, but think of the money we’ll save in road maintenance. On the energy conservation front, we’ll probably have to completely cover the state of Nevada with wind turbines just to light up Vegas. That should create a few jobs. Getting off the health-insurance tit will take Herculean resolve, as well. In fact, that job may have to wait until Jesus himself becomes president. In the meantime, until sobering reality sets in, it’s time to eat, drink, and be merry. You can do just that this Saturday at Jo’s third annual Chili Cold Blood Chili Cookoff. Starting at noon, you can sample chili, enjoy beverages, and listen to music by Chili Cold Blood, Tina Rose & the Jo’s House Band, DJ Chicken George, Honeybread, Woodsboss, and more. Chow down. No one will be able to tell if your shit-eatin’ grin is really just from the chili.

Bye Bye Bush

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January 13, 2009

Bye Bye Bush Poster

It’s very likely that sometime around 3am on Jan. 20, a fleet of black helicopters will descend on the White House lawn, their speakers blaring the Star Wars Evil Empire theme, and Bush and Cheney will begin their sad, dark perp walk into the annals of infamy. The only thing left for historians to squabble over is whether Bush was some sort of Machiavellian supervillain or just a nitwitted, bungling simpleton like Barney Fife. If only Clinton, à la Andy Griffith, had been wise enough to drop a single bullet into George Jr.’s shirt pocket at the beginning of his term with the admonition: “Use this only in case of an emergency.” The most likely scenario is Bush shooting a hole in the floor of Air Force One. Worst-case scenario involves a Kenedy County quail-hunting trip with Deadeye Dick. Then again, there are those who will say that beneath Bush’s aw shucksy faux country boy persona is a criminal mastermind – the type of pure evil who pronounces “nuclear” as “nucular” on purpose. That way, he can honestly say that he never said that Saddam had nuclear weapons. Saddam might have been hiding WMDs, but our WMD (Word Mispronouncing Doofus) was right out in the open for everyone to see, and it took us eight years to get rid of him. Maybe Clinton should have given Cheney the bullet, although Clinton is smart enough to know that such a close encounter with Cheney is probably something like the scene in Poltergeist where the little girl touches the TV and is sucked into an evil netherworld. That’s probably not really the case. After all, Cheney lives in Jackson Hole, Wyo. J-Hole is wicked cold in the winter, but it could hardly be called a netherworld. It isn’t particularly scary either, except for the fact that the town square features four arches made from thousands of Elk antlers. One is left to guess how many contributors met their fate at the business end of Cheney’s quail gun. Would it be that much of a stretch to discover that the entrance to Cheney’s ranch is an arch made out of the bleached bones of dead Iraqis? When you’re the shadow vice president and former CEO of Halliburton, pretty much anything is possible. That’s why even at 3am on the morning of Bama’s inauguration, Bush and Cheney will still be living like kings, even though their lives will feel a bit more like a deposed dictatorship. Don’t worry, Bush won’t be carting off White House memorabilia, unless maybe it’s tapes of his cabinet meetings. Keep your fingers crossed. With any luck, when those black choppers take off from the White House lawn, they’ll drag all the darkness, cynicism, and secrecy away with them. We won’t have King George II to kick around anymore either. Bush’s departure might actually be the “death of sarcasm” that all the Republican pundits were flapping their jaws about after 9/11. With all the hope and optimism in the air, will anyone even want to make snide comments about Eagle One? Only time will tell. Until then we can look only back at what a fertile time the last eight years have been for political criticism. You can get started on that this Saturday at the Hideout when the Latino Comedy Project revives its popular Bye Bye Bush, a revue of sketch comedy, videos, and music that pays tribute to our nearly departed 43rd president. Go ahead. Bury the hatchet one more time.

Eldridge Goins Benefit Concert

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January 6, 2009

Carolyn Wonderland

Damn, maybe you shouldn’t have voted for Obama. Think of all the great benefit concerts that won’t ever happen if he somehow manages to pull a universal health-care rabbit out of his hat. You really screwed the pooch on that vote, didn’t you? Imagine if the next time an Austin musician gets leukemia, hep C, or hit by a car, all he or she has to do is just go to the doctor. Weird. Besides, the current system is clearly working: The ailing musician hopes that their friend or manager calls a benevolent club owner, a publicist, and some really kickass musicians and begs them all to donate time and services to put on a free concert to defray medical expenses. Hey! Health care in Austin rocks! Imagine if we blew the $200 million a day we’re spending to foment Iraqi hatred on keeping Americans healthy? Yeah, it does seem a little shortsighted and simplistic, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, getting Congress to vote against their insurance lobby constituency would be a Jesus-sized miracle, to say the least. You can’t fly to the French Riviera on the gratitude of voters. Really, the best we can possibly hope for is some sort of taxpayer funded überinsurance, very likely underwritten by a subsidiary of a shadow corporation owned by Dick Cheney. Lest you recoil in horror, remember that, regardless of how recent indiscretions in the financial sector have torpedoed the economy, America still runs on money. If we can’t make enough of it here, we just borrow it from China or Japan or Germany or some other chump B-list country that doesn’t have the guns to collect. You can’t expect the U.S. government to run on the power of love either. This isn’t Cuba or France or even Canada. It’s nearly impossible to get a doctor to roll out of bed for less than a hundred large a year. If it’s a surgeon … fahgeddaboutit. Surgeons drop about half that per annum just paying malpractice insurance, and if you think you can get an insurance executive (other than Warren Buffett, aka the Mother Theresa of insurance and investment) to roll out of bed for less than a million a year, you need to get back on your meds. Seriously. With the recent shakedown of the investment and insurance industries, the best way to keep the economy strong is to keep taking drugs. We can’t have Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Abbott Labs taking a nosedive. Think of how that would affect Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. What to do? What to do? For now, you can continue to prop up the status quo and support musicians by going to benefit concerts until Obama ruins it all with his progressive agenda. You can get started this Sunday by attending the benefit for Eldridge Goins at Antone’s. Eldridge is a truly phenomenal drummer who just underwent expensive surgery to remove a tumor in his chest. Fortunately he’s got an all-star cast to help him out. This Sunday’s performers include Carolyn Wonderland, Guy Forsyth, Drew Smith’s Lonely Choir, and Suzanna Choffel as well as other surprise guests. Cover is only $10 and won’t cancel out your vote for Obama, but it sure will do Eldridge and Austin music a solid.

Riverboat Gamblers

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December 29, 2008

Riverboat Gamblers

Prediction: In ’09 free will be the new rich. It always has been, really, but this year while millions of Americans are trying desperately to dig their way out from a mountain of debt, just being able to break even and walk away will seem a huge luxury. It’s small consolation that the government is in the same boat. Hey, weren’t they supposed to be smarter than us? The good news is that that best things in life are supposedly free, which means Gulfstreams, Bugattis, Bolivian marching powder, $1,000 hookers, and GameCubes off the list. Wow, there must be some free shit out there that’s really spectacular – stuff that’s not included in the gift bags at the Academy Awards or with the Presidential Suite at the Waldorf. Damn! If only there were an online catalog! No, not YouPorn, but something a bit more comprehensive, perhaps even metaphysical. Here’s something: Love. You can’t put a price tag on that, can you? Sure, you can probably buy something amazingly similar. For instance, if you tucked a couple of billion into Charlize Theron’s waistband, she could probably pretend to be a convincing soul mate. Seriously. Did you see her in Monster? Of course, she probably wouldn’t lay on a grenade for that kind of money, but if you can afford to buy a couple of billion dollars worth of fake love, you should be able to stay out of hand grenade range. Dick Cheney seems to manage on his measly government pension. Dick probably has a cut-rate fake soul mate, too, but you have to think that Deadeye Dick doesn’t stay awake nights worrying about whether he feels loved. Another freebie is friendship. It doesn’t get the same respect as love, but it’s nearly as hard to cultivate. You don’t necessarily need to roll with a Suge Knight-sized posse. A few friends are better than none at all. Real friends will stick with you regardless of the situation. Whether you’re standing in a soup line or snorting rails with supermodels in the back of a stretch limo, good friends will always be there for you: holding your hair back when you vomit, taking the B team on the double date, making bail, pointing out the hot chick’s Adam’s apple … you can’t put a price on that … at least not with anything on the gold standard. Lastly there is the beauty and splendor of the world itself. Yes, that’s largely a matter of perspective. It’s easy enough to find beauty in majestic mountain ranges, breathtaking coastlines, sweeping plains, and the like, but most people experience the world on a much more limited scale: deteriorating privacy fences, lots overgrown with weeds, car alarms, barking dogs, the smell of urine on the sidewalk, ShamWow ads. If you’re somehow able to see beauty in a plastic bag swirling around in a whirlwind, you’re as rich as the pope, spiritually speaking at least. Either that, or you’re really stoned and wasting videotape. Point is, you don’t need money to enjoy life, but you do need a certain amount of freedom. This year it looks like money will be in short supply. Good thing some of the bars in the Red River District are having free week to start off the new year. Between Jan. 2 & 10, the Mohawk, Club de Ville, Red 7, Beauty Bar, Emo’s, and others will be presenting free shows. This Saturday at the Mohawk, you can see the Riverboat Gamblers for absolutely nothing. That’s really spectacular. Get on it.

Hayes Carll and the Band of Heathens

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December 22, 2008

In the immortal, drug-addled words of the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” Tough year. Ugly ending. Now, poised on the precipice of what will surely be the most rigorous, white-knuckled anal rogering of the American populace in decades, it’s difficult to look back on the Bush administration with anything but bitterness and contempt. After half a decade of dropping roughly $300 million a day fucking up somebody else’s country, America finally looked inward and found that it was fucking itself in the process. In the past few months, American citizens finally let out a well-deserved, collective “Doh!” Of course, easy as it is to engage in hindsight finger-pointing, assigning blame is unproductive. Ultimately, the finger of blame points squarely at the American electorate. We were all busy having the time of our lives, racking up credit-card debt on crappy consumer goods so worthless they probably even disgusted the child laborers who manufactured them. Now that the orgy of misplaced materialism is sputtering out, Americans need to pull together. Maybe we should print up some brand-new Uncle Sam posters featuring an old, gray-haired, slightly Asian-looking dude standing with his pockets pulled inside out, the zipper of his striped pants undone, with a caption that reads “I WANT YOU … to kiss the bunny.” Yes, we’re all going to have to put in some quality knee time servicing the enormous Asian debt we’ve pumped up. So begins the long, slow slog back to fiscal responsibility. Work local; pay global. It’s pretty much the model we’ve unwittingly been living under for the past five years anyway. The good news for Austin is that our economy will probably fare better than most. We have the government, the university, and very shortly lots and lots (buildings and buildings, too) of brand-new condos. In fact, just a few long years from now, Austin might set the record for the city with the most available affordable housing and the highest number of homeless people. We’ll probably still be the live music capital of the world, though. There’s no reason to think that musicians won’t keep moving to Austin in droves. If you’re going to be broke anyway, you might as well be broke in a city where you can do something you love for no money. Musicians will probably be attacking cars on street corners like squeegee men and streetwalkers. On the bright side, it might be kind of cool to drive around with a shoe-gazer indie band as your living hood ornament for 50 cents an hour. Until then you’ll have to pay at the door, just like everyone else. Might as well support live music in Austin while you still can. This Saturday, you can do just that by taking your folding money to Antone’s, where local faves the Band of Heathens and Houston songwriter Hayes Carll share the bill. It’s been a long, ugly year, but both acts’ fortunes seem to be on the upswing. Who knows? Maybe Obama will toss a fourth quarter Hail Mary and put America on an upswing, as well.

33rd Armadillo Christmas Bazaar

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December 16, 2008

Let’s assume for a moment that you’re growing psychotic from holiday shopping and want to take the edge off your misanthropic rage with a couple of longnecks at the Carousel Lounge. You exit the top ramp of I-35, cross Airport, and head north on the access road where you will cross 51st onto Cameron and hook a hard right on 52nd. You’re so close, but wait a minute … you forgot … in order to get to the Carousel from the I-35 access road, now you have to make a completely unnecessary, asinine detour through the Mueller development. You’ll be driving past Best Buy and Home Depot and Rack Room … all the big, big boxers … plus their hordes of greed-crazed shoppers who drove into town from places like Marble Falls, Elgin, Lockhart, and Smithville – ostensibly so they can go 5 mph in front of you in the left lane, periodically hitting their brakes and turn signal and weaving perilously close to either the curb or the traffic speeding around them. Fortunately, you are sustained through your journey by the knowledge that there is a pawnshop just around the corner on Cameron where you can buy an assault rifle to hunt down the evil dirtbag city planner who signed off on this depraved boondoggle. Surely he will be the one walking around with a huge lump on his ass from a wallet stuffed fat with developer payoffs. He will be the only city worker who drives a Hummer with gold rims and a license plate that reads, “BBOXBUKS.” You don’t actually have to shoot him, but maybe keep a muzzle trained on the security guards while your buddies put the beat down on him with a couple of orange road cones. Scarier still is the possibility that there is some sober rationale behind the design – that perhaps some committee got together over cold bagels and Starbucks and hatched this idea out of thin air. It had to be thin air. Clearly their brains were oxygen starved at the time. Maybe they were exhausted after a full day of replacing four-way stops with traffic roundabouts, the beloved panacea of urban planning – unless you happen to be a bicyclist pasted to the brush guard of a ¾ ton 4-by-4. Maybe that’s what they were going for with Mueller: a huge traffic circle – albeit with stoplights and product placement. You never know when someone is going to get a hankering for a bigass chain-store burrito or some discount child labor sneakers on their long journey back to traveling in a straight line. The concept isn’t new. Highways all over Texas are routed through dying little towns with empty main street storefronts and Wal-Marts the size of football fields. You can’t blame a chamber of commerce for a couple of speed traps and some schmaltzy holiday decorations designed to lure casual travelers into buying fake antiques, chainsaw sculptures, and tooth-breaking peanut brittle, but the Mueller development isn’t some Rockwellian hometown fallen on hard times. It’s a pricy piece of downtown dirt – pricey enough, apparently, to prohibit participation by local businesses. Then again, local businesses would probably have been too ashamed to sign on to such a gallingly deceitful site plan. They’re more likely to dangle the carrot of live music, which is exactly the tack the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar has been taking for several decades. This week’s performers include local favorites like Paula Nelson, Jimmy Lafave, Shelley King, Butch Hancock, and the Eggmen, plus 130 booths of arts, crafts, clothing, furniture, and jewelry by local artisans. Admission is $6, and you have to drive to it, rather than through it, but it sure beats big boxing.

Cherrywood Art Fair

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December 9, 2008

There’s a decent chance your office holiday party is this weekend. Excellent. After 11 months of petty politics, gossip, bickering, and backstabbing, you and your annoying co-workers are going to put the cherry on top with a booze-fueled yuletide blowout. Merry indeed. Still, corny though they may be, office holiday parties are exactly the kind of team-building exercise that upper-management types spend thousands of dollars trying to recreate with overpaid consultancy firms. It really sucks being put in uncomfortable situations where you have to relate to and rely on your co-workers, but at least with the holiday party you get the reach-around of being inebriated. Of course, that is, as long as you do it right. Surely somewhere in a magazine, on a website, through a Sunday sermon, or perhaps even in your employee handbook, you have been warned about the dangers of overindulgence at the office holiday party. And now every time December rolls around, there’s a little white angel on your shoulder whispering in your ear: “Don’t get drunk and say something stupid or embarrassing in front of your co-workers or, gasp! Your boss!” Right? Bullshit. Swat that self-righteous little bitch off your shoulder, and order up an afterparty cab ride home right now, while you’re still sober enough to remember the address. Here’s the dirty little secret the man doesn’t want you to know: The problem isn’t getting wasted at the holiday party. The problem is not planning on getting wasted at the holiday party. Spontaneous alcoholism is cute and all. In fact, it has made for some really interesting Girls Gone Wild video footage, but real drinkers know that like any other potentially dangerous activity, it’s best to observe some basic precautions. Remember: This is the office holiday party. You’re not trying to pledge a frat. First things first, you’re going to need a ride home. Cabs are great, but don’t rule out that unctuous Baptist co-worker who listens to Joel Osteen tapes. On a team, everyone has a role. Hardcore stoners will work too, but be prepared for a long ride home – possibly with a three-taco pit stop at Jack in the Box. Whatever, just work it out in advance. You don’t want to let your crotch arrange for your ride home. Sure, you’re in control now, but a good holiday-party buzz can turn a chaste mistletoe peck into a slobbery game of tonsil hockey. Avoid PDA. You can’t just assume that people will know you’re only bi when you’ve been drinking – especially your boss. Especially when your tongue is down his throat. Really, when you think about it, team building is about learning to trust your co-workers, and nothing builds trust like sharing a really embarrassing secret that probably wouldn’t have happened if you were sober – something the Human Resources Department would have to write you up for. You don’t have to accidentally kill a prostitute or anything, but what happens in a hotel hot tub will probably stay in a hotel hot tub, which is why sober people avoid hotel hot tubs unless they’re sure the hot tub has recently been sterilized. You don’t have to go there. Leading a bunny-hop line with a lampshade on your head will do just fine. Some people might see that as attention whoring douche baggery, but others, mostly the ones in line behind you, will see it as leadership. Ideally, one of them will be someone who can give you a raise. Remember though: Team building isn’t about personal recognition. It’s about doing what it takes to get the job done. That’s a good description of what’s happening at Maplewood Elementary this weekend at the Cherrywood Art Fair, the annual fundraiser for the school’s art and gardening programs, as well as public art projects in East Austin. Buy arts, crafts, and clothing from original Austin artists, plus hear live music from bands such as the Coffee Sergeants, Colin Gilmore, Joe McDermott, and Troy Campbell. Admission is free, but you’ll want to bring a fat wallet to buy some nice gifts for the folks in Human Resources.

A Night of Music From Around the World

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December 2, 2008

Living atop the monolith of American superiority, sometimes it’s hard to remember that there are nearly 200 other sovereign states living in our prodigious shadow. Some are tiny places like Monaco, Lichtenstein, and San Marino, countries you could literally pee across on a full bladder, but there are also sprawling giants like China, Russia, India, and Canada. Yes, that’s right. Canada. It’s sobering to think that there are countries out there with fully developed governments, economies, and cultures that are fundamentally different than ours. Better? Hard to say. You can’t really put a chili dog and tater tots head to head with moo goo gai pan on any rational qualitative scale. Nor can you definitively say that China’s brand of communism is any worse than American capitalism, especially considering China, like McDonald’s, has more than a billion people served. Granted, cheeseburgers are somewhat complicated – especially when you’re using reconstituted onions and frozen meat patties, but providing basic social services for more than a billion people has to involve some impressive, Byzantine, Rain Man-style calculus. As far as religion goes, that’s a wash as well. Sadly, not even Don King himself could get Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and the ghost of Nietzsche (a serious rhetorical stretch anyway) to throw down against each other in some sort of chain-link death match for moral superiority. As sexy as it sounds, a cage full of blissed out pacifist deities and the ghost of a deranged, syphilitic, coke-abusing German philosopher would probably only muddy the issue even further. Besides, if Nietzsche were to win (assuming he could score some ghost coke before the bout), the fact that he is a spiritual being blows his whole moral construct completely out of the water. In fact, the whole idea is pointless – sort of like following the path of a Möbius strip. Does it lead to infinity or futility? Is there a difference? Fortunately, Americans generally leave the mental thumb-twiddling of philosophy to foreigners anyway. If we can’t kill it, cook it, snort it, smoke it, drive it, buy it, or fuck it, we’re not really all that interested. This mindset has surely slowed our cultural development over the past few hundred years, but it has kept us mean and greedy and on top of the heap – geopolitically speaking at least. Badass as we are however, occasionally Americans pop our heads out of the sand and concede that other countries have something useful to bring to the table. For the Saudis, it’s oil. For the Argentineans, it’s breast augmentation techniques. For Canadians, it’s maddeningly inexplicable perkiness. Whatever the case, the dark, ugly truth of American culture is that ours would be pretty shitty if we didn’t steal so much of it from other places. American culture is a stone soup, and we contributed the stone. If you want to get a taste of some of the ingredients before they hit the pot, head down to Momo’s this Friday at 8pm for A Night of Music From Around the World, a live performance of music from diverse cultures by the University of Texas world music ensembles. Hear music from the Middle East, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries. Proceeds from the performance help the ensembles acquire new instruments, as well as guest artists and teachers. Might as well pony-up for this deal because that chain-link death match just isn’t going to happen.

Jean-Claude Van Damme Thanksgiving Dinner

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November 24, 2008

Thanksgiving. What an awesome opportunity to sabotage the Rockwellian preconceptions of family and friends. If you’re full of loathing at the thought of this year’s Turkey Day being another endless, boring, bloated, recliner-bound football watching fart fest, don’t despair. You just need an attitude adjustment. You need to get on the right side of Thanksgiving. First, start by meditating on how wonderfully lucky you are to be in America instead of some dust pit like Somalia, whose version of tailgating involves an ultimate fighting death match with a few hundred other motivated contestants for a sack of rice tossed off the back of an Oxfam aid truck. Check. You’re in the plus column there. That alone should be enough to make you want to put on a pilgrim outfit and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but this is America. You don’t have to attend the pep rally if you don’t want to. All you have to do to get in the spirit of Thanksgiving is to be thankful. That other attendant bullshit is all negotiable. Traditions are swell, but like laws, rules, hearts, and piñatas, they were made to be broken. Just because your Thanksgiving doesn’t look like it leapt out of the pages of Martha Stewart Living doesn’t mean you aren’t doing the holiday justice. You can be equally thankful with malt liquor and chili dogs. Sure, Bo Pilgrim would like you to stuff your gob with gobbler, but that doesn’t mean you can’t whip up a big batch of Bhindi masala or sag paneer. If the pilgrims had run into the same American Indians Columbus was looking for, they would have feasted on that stuff anyway. There’s no reason your culinary expression of gratitude should be the byproduct of the navigational ineptitude of an Italian glory whore. Show your thanks with something you’re truly thankful for. If you can honestly look into your heart and say your favorite dish is oven-roasted turkey with giblet gravy, then rock that shit, yo, but if you’re into sushi or baby-back ribs or baba ghanoush, don’t let tradition con you into buying canned cranberry sauce. Seriously, cranberries are only barely tolerated by people with urinary tract infections. Maybe the pilgrims had a lot of trouble peeing. Who knows? It doesn’t mean they had to lay that trip on you, though. Similarly, if you prefer margaritas or banana daiquiris over white wine or beer. Treat yourself. It might be a little awkward when you show up at your mother-in-law’s house with a quart of hooch and a blender, but she can’t say you aren’t festive. Plus, the tequila should help counteract the Demerol effect of the turkey. After all, nothing says party like a roomful of fat nappers, eh? Then again, you can just blow the whole thing off and be thankful that you’re not one of them. In that case, you’ll want to thank the Alamo Drafthouse for offering up a Turkey Day screening of JCVD, the new Jean-Claude Van Damme flick in which Van Damme plays himself playing himself. Sounds complicated, but it’s really just French. The good news is that even though it’s Turkey Day, you can still order from Alamo’s regular menu, but if you want to pay homage to Bo Pilgrim, you can still preorder and get a full Thanksgiving feast with all the trimmings. Just tell your waiter to wake you up when the movie’s over.

Night of the Moustache

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 18, 2008

Hold it off one more week. Do it for us. We know you’re all ready to take that peppermint-flavored candy cane stick pony ride into the holiday season, but it’s not here yet. It’s not time. You just think it is because the Madison Avenue greed whores are already burning up prime time with yuletide schmaltz, no doubt shitting trou at the thought of millions of Americans staying home for the holidays this year making eggnog and wassailing instead of wearing out the magnetic strips on their MasterCards at the shopping mall. Pretty much everyone except Bill O’Reilly knows that the “X” in “X-mas” stands for mark next to the line on the credit card receipt where you sign your name, and the credit card season starts whenever the ads start airing and the chumps start charging. For now, it’s the day after Halloween, but in a few years the Neil Diamond Christmas Special will be bumping out a tedious, awkwardly uncomfortable hour of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. Who loses? The kids. Well, not Jerry’s kids. They’ll at least get to see the Jewish Elvis belt out a soul-stirring rendition of “O Holy Night” instead of watching Gary Lewis phone in his millionth cruise-boat version of “Everybody Loves a Clown” while papa Lewis squeezes out a well-rehearsed teardrop of pride. No, kids all over America will lose because after they’ve whined for four months about Wiis and Game Boys and pee-squirting dolls, their parents will either a) attempt infanticide or b) actually turn to Jesus. Either scenario is a huge money saver for the parents but an even bigger bummer for the kids. Being dead is no walk in the park (unless you’re still haunting one), but being the spawn of a Jesus freak is a one-way ticket to Dullsville. It’s the difference between a white-knuckled car chase in Grand Theft Auto IV and freezing your ass off handing out sack lunches to the homeless. Both are skills that should be useful to children in the hard times ahead, but real homeless people are rarely as entertaining as video-game gangsters. Plus, all that do-gooding will send the wrong message to America’s youth. Capitalism works best when the money trickles upstream to the most wealthy. Turn it around, and the whole model goes to shit. It’s probably just as well for the time being. Philanthropy isn’t going to service all that Chinese debt any more than irresponsible consumerism, but if the economy is going to hell in a handbasket anyway, we might as well help out the home team, right? That’s not a very X-massy sentiment, but Creditmas may not come at all this year. If you want to give this altruism thing a try, you might want to start small, and what better place to do that than at the Tiniest Bar in Texas? This Friday at TBIT a group called Team Spiridon is hosting the “Night of the Moustache,” a benefit for Emancipet, an organization dedicated to preventing animal homelessness, and the Dick Beardsley Foundation, a nonprofit providing grants for people seeking treatment for chemical dependency. The event features a silent auction plus music by Eat a Peach, an Allman Brothers tribute band, and Girl Guitar, a group of up-and-coming female artists.

Billy Joe Shaver and Adam Carroll

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 11, 2008

If you’re new to Austin, consider this: You can’t really call yourself an Austinite until you’ve spent some quality time in a South Austin back yard – ideally one decorated with Christmas lights, old beer signs, and a liberal scattering of dogs, mosquitoes, and dirt-smeared children. There should also be an makeshift stage – perhaps a piece of plywood laid on the grass or maybe the corner of a back porch or a rusty old flatbed U-Haul trailer that somehow never made its way back to Grand Blanc, Mich. On the stage should be a man of indeterminate middle age – somewhere between 40 and 70 – whose skin appears to have been slow-cured for decades by a combination of relentless sun and unfiltered cigarettes. He should be wearing an old snap shirt – not vintage, but some faded, half-polyester turquoise and brown job that was purchased at a Montgomery Ward back in 1979. It will have wear holes and a few buttons missing. He may or may not be wearing a sweat-stained, straw cowboy hat too, but if he is, he’ll be wearing sandals instead of boots, or maybe some old Payless running shoes. If he is actually wearing boots, they are older than you – maybe even older than your parents and your parents’ parents. Still, in spite of the fact that he looks like he has raided the Crypt Keeper’s wardrobe, he will be playing a really expensive guitar – probably a Taylor or a Guild or maybe an ancient Martin that was signed by Willie or Waylon or Townes – well, maybe Townes. It’s hard to say, because the signature trails off at the end. In the midst of all the conversational murmur, children’s squeals, dog barks, and airplane/traffic noises, he will unobtrusively be playing a song. If you actually pay attention to it, you might find that it is the most beautiful and true song you’ve ever heard. You might be absolutely shocked you’ve never heard it before. Incredulous, you might turn to the person next to you and ask who wrote it, and they will respond, “He did.” You won’t recognize his name. He’s nobody special, but when you finally hear that song, you’ll be able to call yourself an Austinite. More importantly, you can carry that beautiful memory with you when some pretentious fuckstick doorman jacks you up about not wearing proper attire. This is Austin motherfucker. We are playing a much bigger game here. Like Billy Jeff Clinton used to say, “We are expanding the definition of us and shrinking the definition of them.” That’s what makes this town special. So maybe you haven’t gotten the South Austin Backyard Dirt-Patch Party e-vite. Don’t sweat it. Your time will come. You just have to start mixing it up with the right people. Try Ruta Maya HQ this Friday. Somehow a wormhole opened up somewhere in the space-time continuum and is dropping country songwriting legend Billy Joe Shaver smack dab in the middle of one of Austin’s biggest hippie havens. That’s OK. He could use a little more peace and a little less war these days. If you haven’t seen Billy Joe, you need to put him on your bucket list before he finishes up his. Shaver is one of the finest living American songwriters. See him now at Ruta Maya, so you won’t have to watch the PBS documentary about his life and wish you had.

Fun Fun Fun Fest

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October 4, 2008

Oh sweet, sweet, glorious victory! Finally we’ll have somebody in the White House who doesn’t pronounce “nuclear” like a kindergartner. Seriously. How fucking hard is it? Not nearly as hard as bringing lasting peace to the Middle East or hunting down Osama bin Laden, but you have to start somewhere – ideally in kindergarten. Kindergarten would have been the perfect time for George Sr. to give Junior a crisp rap to the head with his 1948 Yale class ring and say, “It’s nooo-cleee-eerrrr!!!” Didn’t happen. Then Andover dropped the ball and subsequently Yale, and here we are several decades later with a president whose best attempt at intellectualism is a furrowed brow. Thanks, Ivy League, shall we grease up another hole? Sure, in retrospect it seems nitpicky, especially with all of the relatively apocalyptic shit that’s been going down in the last few terms, but you can’t slack off on the wealthy. You never know if some silver-spooned, coke-swilling frat boy is going to wake up some morning and decide he wants his grubby palms on America’s joystick. It’s been painfully illustrated in the last eight years that being among America’s financial elite isn’t a sufficient prerequisite for running the show – no matter what Donald Trump thinks. There is a certain amount of intellectual rigor involved in governing a country of 300 million people – even more to govern them well. Eagle One should at least be in the Top 10%. Who could argue with that? Who could make the case that our president shouldn’t be one of the 30 million smartest people in America? That still leaves a staggering amount of leeway. We’re not necessarily asking for Stephen Hawking, just someone who doesn’t rely on fingers and toes to do arithmetic. You could make the cut, and there could still be 29,999,999 people smarter than you are. That doesn’t seem stuck up at all, does it? Also, emotional intelligence is charming but not a sufficient substitute for real intelligence. It has been said that Bush has a high emotional IQ, but apparently it didn’t help him understand why the ice caps are melting or why mindless consumerism isn’t always the best response to national crises. Maybe a presidential aptitude test is in order, or maybe not. Regardless, we’re off the hook for another four years. All we have to do now is weather the upcoming depression and figure out a diabolically genius way to drag ourselves out of this Bushhole we dug in the last two elections. Education would be a good start. If W was able to slip through the cracks of the crème de la crème of American scholastics, imagine what must be coming out the other end. Frightening, isn’t it? For now, however, we can celebrate the fact that America pulled its head at least partially out of its ass for the first time in eight years. Boo yah! Strike up the band, Tito, and let’s get the party started. Where? How about down at Waterloo Park this weekend at Fun Fun Fun Fest? Sure, the promoters spent about as much time on the name as Bush spent on planning the Iraq war, but at least this event has a decent payoff. Some of the many acts scheduled to perform include Dead Milkmen, the National, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, All, Atmosphere, Bouncing Souls, Dan Deacon, and Clipse. If you blow your money on this, you won’t have to watch it whither away in the next great depression.

Austin Humane Society’s Rags2Wags Benefit

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October 27, 2008

If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about whether or not you should wear a Halloween costume to work on Friday, quit it. This is Austin. Of course you should. Yes, there are a few exceptions. You probably shouldn’t wear a Barney costume to your job as a fry cook at McDonald’s. Bad idea. If you’re a fireman, you’ll probably want to avoid any costume you can get at Wal-Mart or Walgreens or any other Wal retailer, even and especially if it promises “Wal-o-ween savings.” Wearing one of those cheap bastards is like walking around with a diesel fuel-soaked dead Christmas tree strapped to your back. The tag might say “flame retardant” in English, but the Chinese symbols really read “flaming flower.” Surgeons, on the other hand, should probably avoid three-fingered cartoon characters like Porky Pig and Mickey Mouse … for obvious reasons, and cops should avoid feathers, fringe, glitter and high heels – unless they’re paying for it after hours. Most people however – the kind who have time to pick up this paper (and not just to wash the windows at McDonald’s) – don’t work in a job where they already wear a costume. They fall outside the standard Village People caricature set. For them, Halloween is a slam dunk. In the words of vampire pop icon Gerard Way: “Shit is easy peasy pumpkin peasy pumpkin pie, motherfucker.” In most offices, a festively themed sweater is enough to score you some holiday street cred, but why halfass it in the name of job security? Victory goes to the bold … or more often the bold and slutty. If you can’t rock it like Liberace, at least show enough skin to make a whore blush. This is a once a year deal, a free pass to get your freak on full tilt. Wear the tube top even if it exposes your chest hair. Go for the mini-miniskirt – just make sure your boys aren’t hanging like church bells. That’s probably a line item somewhere in the employee handbook. If you really go over the top, you’ll show your co-workers and upper management that you’re willing to do what it takes … even if it takes sweat lodging it all day in a stinky, sweltering, rented rubber and fur Chewbacca costume communicating only in Wookiee growls. If you roll that strong, you put everyone in the office on notice that you’re willing to boil the bunny. Respek. Regardless of how you decide to go, the important thing is to lose your sense of dignity. Nothing queers a good Halloween costume more than trying to “tone it down a little.” For a costume to really work, you have to feel utterly ridiculous. If you don’t, then maybe you chose something too close to home. Pets understand this concept. Dachshunds are absolutely humiliated to be dressed in tutus, but deep down they know they look hilarious. Otherwise, why would they wear them so often? If after a full day of Halloween indignity, you feel like laughing at something other than yourself, head over to the Austin Music Hall for Austin Humane Society’s Rags2Wags dog and cat celebrity fashion show. Enjoy cocktails and food from Pascal’s Catering Company; a silent auction for trips, spa packages, jewelry and more; plus live music and dancing with Bruce Robison, all benefiting Austin’s only no-kill animal shelter. Boo! Yeah!

Scare for a Cure’s World of Horrorcraft

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 21, 2008

West Coasters who visit Austin for the first time – those who spend a few days getting to know the place – often remark about how people here are “unpretentious” or “genuine.” It’s basically the same thing people from Austin say about people in Giddings or Lampasas – the same thing that could be said about a huge swath of America, the Western hemisphere, or even the world. But really, what’s the point of saying the people of Tikrit are down to earth? Does it mean that they have nothing left to eat but dirt? Does it mean somebody just screamed, “Incoming!”? Or, could it simply mean that they’re too busy scraping out a subsistence to worry about what anyone else thinks? Here in Austin, we’re hardly scraping out subsistence. In fact, we get along well enough that we have plenty of free time and energy to engage in all sorts of dorky pursuits, and we do so shamelessly. We’re so immersed in our dorkitude, in fact, that we sometimes forget that anyone is paying attention to us at all. We’re basically a town full of nutty professors, wandering around in a daze with our heads crammed full of arcane facts about things like Frisbee golf, hallucinogenic mushrooms, zombie movies, minor league soccer, interpretive dance, and Townes Van Zandt. Not only that, we’re willing to share this information with anyone unfortunate enough to meet our gaze for more than an instant. Sure, it may seem like earnest sincerity to the uninitiated, but really it’s just psychotic self-absorption. Is that an admirable quality? Who knows? What people really mean when they say Austin is “authentic” is that we embrace our dorkiness instead of hiding it. We’re unabashed. We go to the grocery store in spandex biking shorts and hiking sandals; we freely admit to attending renaissance fairs, sci-fi film festivals, and drum circles; we ride Segways, dance salsa, and participate in live action role-playing, then talk about it over beers at Opal Divine’s. It’s precious, really, until your landlord hands you a flyer for his experimental performance art piece at the Off Center. The upshot of all of this unrepentant dorkiness is that it’s really hard in Austin to be a bigger dork than everyone else. You have to really work at it, and that’s just not the Austin way. So, you can pretty much revel in all the dorky shit your heart desires. This weekend you can do just that when Scare for a Cure opens its World of Horrorcraft (no, that’s not a misprint) haunted house at the Elks Lodge on Dawson Road. For $20 you can scream your lungs out and dirt your trousers in support of local cancer-related charities. After all, a pretend haunted house is scary but not nearly as frightening as cancer, which is about as unpretentious as you can get.

Keep Austin Young: Celebrating the Life of Danny Roy Young

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 14, 2008

Sunday night’s Keep Austin Young concert at the Music Hall might be a little misleading. A quick scan of the lineup reveals that pretty much everyone on the bill qualifies for an AARP discount … or soon will. Surely this irony wasn’t missed by the promoters. More likely they embraced it because the Keep Austin Young concert isn’t a scenester rave or a Methodist youth rally. It’s a celebration of the life of Danny Roy Young, a man who would have appreciated the title’s irony more than most. Young, who died in August at the age of 67, was the owner of the now defunct Texicalli Grill, a restaurant that in its later years occupied a converted Taco Bell on Oltorf next to Curra’s. Unlike its corporately homogenized predecessor, the Texicalli was a uniquely Austin establishment. The walls were cluttered with Young’s collection of music memorabilia, and the tables were usually filled with his colorful collection of friends: musicians, politicians, bubbas, hippies, and slackers. All came to eat good food, drink, and swap stories. Young was as much a raconteur as a restaurateur, and a good part of the charm of the Texicalli was the outgoing, good-natured banter of its owner, the “Mayor of South Austin,” an honorary title that was the result of Young being named Best Mayor for the City of South Austin in the Chronicle’s 1992 “Best of Austin” issue – partly for his political activism opposing expansion of South Lamar (where the original Texicalli was located) and partly because Young was so beloved by his unofficial constituency. As with any true South Austinite, Young was also a musician – a rubboard player for several bands: Ponty Bone, Texana Dames, and perhaps most famously with the Cornell Hurd Band. During their Thursday night residency at Jovita’s, Hurd would often refer to Young as the “Lord of the Board.” In true South Austin style, Young’s rubboard was handmade, played with leather gloves that had mercury dimes glued to the fingertips – exactly the kind of thing you might come up with while stoned at a South Austin back-porch jam session. Although Young retired from the restaurant business a couple of years ago, he continued with his rubboard career as well as his role as a South Austin icon, emblematic of an era when Austin valued creativity and talent more than money and style. The fact that Young’s benefit is at the Austin Music Hall piles on further irony. All the rapacious development – those towering new condos and sleek new businesses were built on the bones of the scene that greedless good timers like Danny Young created. It’s fitting that Young’s family should benefit from them in turn, if only indirectly. If you didn’t know Danny, you still have plenty of reason to pay your respect. He’s part of the reason you and thousands of other people live in Austin. If that’s not reason enough, how about several hours of music from the crème de la crème of Austin’s old guard musicians: the Texana Dames, Ponty Bone, Marcia Ball, Ray Benson, the Cornell Hurd Band featuring Teisco del Rey, Floyd Domino, Blackie White, the Antone’s House Band, and perhaps the finest songwriter in the known world, James McMurtry.

Apocalypse Wow!

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 7, 2008

It makes sense that Francis Ford Coppola would make a respectable wine – not just because he’s Italian and lives in San Francisco but because he’s unquestionably enjoyed some bacchanalian excess. Over the years, his body has become a huge, hairy dirigible advertising the dangers of la dolce vita. Ironically, Coppola is carrying roughly the same weight Marlon Brando was when he played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. No need to throw stones, but perhaps the paparazzi should shoot Coppola entirely in the shadows – like he did Brando in the movie (well, at least the scenes where he wasn’t using a manatee as Brando’s body double). Really, when you’re paying a couple of million dollars for a sweaty sumo wrestler with a speech impediment, what’s a few hundred thou more to maintain a saltwater stock tank full of hydrilla and turtle grass? If a manatee contract rider seems excessive, maybe you’re not cut out for Hollywood. Movie-making isn’t for the faint hearted. Ask Martin Sheen. At 36, he suffered a heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now – probably because at some point he found out what Brando was being paid. That might also explain the drunken, improvised Elvis-kwon-do hotel room scene at the beginning of the movie – the one where he breaks the mirror with his fist while Jim Morrison slurs the apocalyptic lyrics to “The End” in the background. Sheen should have probably won an Oscar for that scene, but unfortunately, he wasn’t acting. It was his birthday, and he was depressed and alcoholic. Plus, it was fucking monsoon season for Christ,s sake. Coppola himself threatened suicide on several occasions, not only because Brando gave him a frightening vision of his physiological future, but because back in ’78, $30 million was a lot of money to flush down the toilet on an ego trip. Of course, how could he know that nearly 20 years later Kevin Costner would make that figure look like chump change with his idiot-epic Waterworld (aka Fishtar), which tabbed out at $176 million, a stark illustration of what happens when you trade Thai Stick for blow. As a result, no one in Hollywood returns Costner’s calls anymore, not even Flavor Flav. You can see how after more than 200 days of slogging around the Philippines in monsoon season, Coppola would get serious about stomping grapes. Who could have guessed he would blow up like one? Big as he is, Coppola’s films are even bigger, and Apocalypse Now might be the biggest of all. If not, it’s at least the most ambitious. Bottom line is that art takes balls … unless, of course, you’re a burlesque troupe, in which case balls aren’t a requirement. You still need moxy, chutzpah, nerve, and cheek, though, and nowhere will you find more cheek than the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang burlesque troupe. This Saturday at 9pm, they will be performing a new show called Apocalypse Wow! at the Compound, which sounds like the set for a Rambo movie, but it’s really just a performance space next to the Scoot Inn on East Fourth. Apocalypse Wow! pairs the Bangers with Tom Waits Peepshow cohorts the No Salvation Army Band in an “apocalyptic musical romp” that may be the most artistically ambitious thing you’ve seen that doesn’t involve killing a water buffalo.

Texas Freedom Network’s 13th Annual Celebration

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 30, 2008

It would be really awesome if Jesus returns to earth in a tricked-out intergalactic spaceship with chrome trim, rocking George Clinton party-colored dreads and sparkly, high-heeled, Funkadelic zip-up disco boots. That shit would be fly. Maybe throw in a little acid house woofing out of some wicked monster subs screwed on to the chassis – something like a skanky, bass-heavy remix of “Love Train.” Jesus shimmies down the landing ramp, throwing ass, thrusting crotch, flashing his godly white overbite, grooving like the son of the inventor of groove itself. Oh, and don’t forget the 18-carat diamond encrusted dollar-sign money clip. What would Jesus do? You have to think God would be whispering in his ear, mimicking the voice of Lil’ Wayne, rapping, “Got money, and you know it. Take it out your pocket and show it; and throw it, that a way, this a way … And of course G Junior would be flinging handfuls of hundreds to the unsoaped, outstretched hands of the poor, because really, what does God care about scratch? He invented that shit too – both denomination and devil. The poor will be all cheerful, patting themselves on the back knowing they were smart enough to stay meek so they could inherit the kingdom of heaven. After all, they’ve been holed up for years home-schooling with legions of other knuckle-draggers and slack jaws, learning creationism and how the hip bone connected to the thigh bone and all that, but mostly hoping Jesus shakes a leg and brings on the Rapture before they end up in the same dead-end, minimum wage shit jobs as their parents. After all, Jesus was a carpenter, so you’d think he would show up for the job early. He did the first time around, but (also like a carpenter) he knocked off early and left us to finish His work. At first it was all, just love each other and hope you don’t get slaughtered by the Romans, but then the Romans got hold of the Bible and plunged Western civilization into the Dark Ages, which sadly seems to be when most Christian fundamentalist textbooks were approved. Fundamentalist dogma is pretty much the same today as it was back then. It’s easy to cast aside a couple of thousand years of scientific advancement and social progress when you’re a dumbass, and fundamentalists seem particularly talented at churning them out – if only so succeeding generations of dumbasses can continue to make their way to textbook approval committees and school boards. In America, we attempt to be polite to hair-brained fundamentalist knuckleheads, mainly because our country was founded by them. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with them or adopt their simpleton textbooks however. Even if the Moral Majority really is a majority, it would truly be immoral of the immoral to let them set the educational agenda. Soon enough, we’d all be wearing pilgrim hats and buckle shoes and fucking through holes in blankets. Thankfully, here in Texas, we have the Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog organization that presents a mainstream voice to counter the regressive agenda of the religious right. This Saturday they’re having their 13th annual fundraiser at La Zona Rosa. You can nudge along the progress and enlightenment of Western civilization simply by eating delicious food, bidding in the silent auction, and dancing to Ian McLagan & the Bump Band and fiddle prodigy Ruby Jane Smith. Or, you could just sit around waiting for the Rapture.

Austin City Limits Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 24, 2008

This weekend will be an epic smackdown: burnt orange vs. Birkenstocks. 100,000 football fans vs. 60,000 music fans – some of them might even be from Arkansas, but don’t assume they are just because they’re standing barefoot in front of the Drive-by Truckers stage making hog noises. Trying to clear the sinuses of a day’s worth of Zilker Park dust and ragweed pollen can make anyone sound like a 1,200 pound Berkshire, even if it’s just a 90 pound emo kid. If it rains, there’s a good chance the Foo Fighters mosh pit will greatly resemble a hog wallow as well, but just because people are half-naked and covered in mud doesn’t necessarily mean they’re from Arkansas. It’s a pretty good sign, yes, but it’s not a lock. Think about Woodstock and Bonnaroo and Kerrville. Those people were dirty and smelly, but they couldn’t have all been from Arkansas. Sometimes outdoor music festival fans just look like they’re from Arkansas. For instance, those really cute, sexy shorts you normally only wear with open-toed sandals? Can’t do that at ACL. You could rock that combo at, say, the Longhorn game, even though it’s not necessarily wise considering you’ll be dragging them through the garbage slough underneath the bleachers while trying to get to your seat, but there’s at least a chance you might make it home without coating your piggies in Skoal spit, popcorn husks, and nacho cheese. At the Austin City Limits Music Festival, however, wearing open-toed shoes is sheer fucking lunacy. Unless you’re superhuman, at some point you’re going to have to expose your bare dogs to a porta-potty floor – or worse yet, negotiate the sewage swamp that leads to it. Maybe you can get right with that, but traditionally only the dirtiest of dirty hippies (not to be confused with people from Arkansas) can walk that walk. Going open-toed at ACL takes a mind either brave or simple enough not to be troubled by things like E. coli, hookworm, tetanus, impetigo, or the condemnation of more fastidious friends. Fortunately, for most people, pragmatism takes hold and those cute, sexy shorts get paired with something really dorky like hiking boots, track shoes, or Crocs, which technically are open-toed but have the advantage of holding up well to a pressure washer. Even still, if you wear Crocs to ACL on Saturday, you can rest assured that by the time Robert Plant and Alison Krauss break into a rousing, hillbilly banjo pickin’ version of “Black Dog,” the song title will be a reasonably accurate description of either of your feet. Later, if you should have the audacity to ask your date for a post-festival foot rub, be prepared to have your feet splattered with the regurgitated remains of a fried-avocado wrap. Fortunately at ACL, most people keep their eyes turned upward. What’s happening onstage is usually more exciting and less nauseating than what’s going on down at foot level. This year, the ACL lineup is particularly spectacular, so there shouldn’t be much shoe-gazing going on. Get your pass while you can, or you may end up with all those shoeless Razorbacks at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.

Fantastic Fest Rolling Roadshow Screening of ‘The Road Warrior’

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September 16, 2008

There are a variety of ways the apocalypse could go down: We could be smashed … by a giant asteroid. We could particle accelerate ourselves into a black hole. We could catch a nasty virus, fry in a solar flare, or get a wobble in our axis. There is also the possibility that aliens could land and save us from the preceding calamities … or instead, they might just conquer and enslave us. You think your boss is a bitch now, wait until you get one who can chew your ass out with seven scaly heads full of razor-sharp teeth and slimy, acrid smelling saliva. You’ll be praying for the days when you got dressed down by a menopausal state worker with a bead-blinged ID lanyard and wicked coffee breath. If the apocalypse does occur, it’s not going to arrive with a whimper. By definition it’s going to involve shock and awe; people running through the streets screaming, fire and brimstone. Otherwise it’s not really an apocalypse; it’s just a shitty turn of events. If a couple of investment firms file bankruptcy and the stock market plunges, that really sucks, but it’s not the apocalypse. Unemployment? Inflation? High gas prices? All are certainly turds in the punchbowl, but to truly be apocalyptic, the situation has to deteriorate beyond measurable statistics. You can’t just nickel and dime your way to an apocalypse. President Bush has been trying to bring on the end of days for some time now but, like his father, hasn’t quite gotten the ball across the goal line. Why? Well, contrary to popular opinion, he’s not the Antichrist. Sadly, no matter what Alex Jones tries to tell you, Bush just didn’t have an Antichrist grade point average. Plus, here’s a really important point: The Antichrist would never try out for cheerleader. Pom-pom maybe, but never cheerleader. So, how will you know when the world is coming to an end? Well, that’s the kicker. You probably won’t, and that’s probably a good thing. If an asteroid the size of Hawaii slams into the Earth, you’ll probably have just enough time to say, “What was tha…?” In the Sudan, they call that mercy. Similarly, with a black hole you won’t have to worry about whether you left your iron on. You won’t have time to to be thankful that it was a black hole that did you in rather than, say, a death star. The ugly truth of the matter – the higher probability – is that somehow mankind is going to fuck things up and drag out the suffering unnecessarily. We’ll deplete the ozone or poison the oceans and air or procreate ourselves into one big, teeming, filthy, rugby scrum clusterfuck of a planet. That’s not the traditional view of the apocalypse, but it’s probably the most spot on. There probably won’t be a postgame. We won’t be tooling around the empty outback in a supercharged Ford Falcon saving little fur-vested, mulleted kids from gas hording thugs in shoulder pads. That’s a best-case scenario – a fantasy – the kind of stuff Hollywood does really well, but nature can’t seem to put together … even with an unlimited budget. This Friday you can live the fantasy right in the middle of Republic Square Park when Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest hosts a special Rolling Roadshow screening of The Road Warrior, starring a younger Mel Gibson and the even younger aforementioned kid with the even more spectacular mullet. You could be in a much worse place if the world actually does come to an end.

PDAP Benefit with Kelly Willis and Patrice Pike

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 9, 2008

If you’re not high on life, maybe you need to take a bigger hit. Suck in hard, and burn it up. Make it glow. Live large. Love strong. You don’t need chemicals for consciousness expansion. Certainly they’ll do in a pinch, but they’re costly and messy … like Bonnaroo. Sure, you can probably cook up a cheap batch of trashcan meth, but in the long run, you’re better off directing that kind of energy into something that won’t rot your teeth out and make you scratch holes in your skin. Open sores are messy, but finding a bloody brown bicuspid in your frozen yogurt is just fucking disgusting. Having something like that happen on a first date is even worse that wearing a belt-clip cell phone – but only slightly – and only if you’re not doubling it up with a Bluetooth. Without a doubt, speed kills, but stupidity definitely chambers the bullet. If you’ve ever purchased meth, you know that it involves a mobile home, vicious pit bulls, the smell of cat urine, and a sketchy, paranoid, tattooed guy named Cody whose wife sits on the couch and leers at you through a recently blackened eye. K-L-A-S-S. No doubt Cody is grabbing life by the balls, but after a normal meth transaction your first Darwinistic impulse should be to immediately enroll in a convent or seminary or at the very least ITT Tech. If you’re feeling all high and mighty because you’re just a pot smoker, bring it on down. It’s probably because you’re stoned. Dope smokers may still have most of their teeth, but they’re not a whole lot higher … up the food chain. Well, maybe the fast-food chain. Yes, there are some highly successful dope smokers, but the same could be said of just about any drug. Hitler was a crank addict. Manson smoked dope. Maybe you’ll be as successful as they were. You may, on the other hand, see yourself as the next Seth Rogen, sitting on your sofa all day getting baked and thinking up wicked funny shit to make into movies. That is an excellent plan albeit with one slight little hitch: You probably didn’t star in a critically acclaimed but canceled TV series. Ouch. Yeah … truth hurts. You probably missed the audition, because you were on the couch getting stoned. Had you been high on life, you might have at least been first in line. They probably still would have picked Seth Rogen, but at least you tried, right? Life is hard, but mostly interesting if you do it right. New experiences can be quite addictive. If you’ve never experienced Kelly Willis, she’s quite intoxicating. This Friday at Antone’s, she, along with award-winning rocker Patrice Pike, will be performing a benefit concert for Palmer Drug Abuse Program, a support group that helps young adults and their parents recover from the effects of mind-changing chemicals. Antone’s alcohol sales might take a nosedive Friday, but this is for a good cause, so somebody is going to have to step up to the plate and knock back a few in the name of sobriety. Could that be you?

Will’s Mad Hatter Boat Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 2, 2008

As your burnt-out lawn will attest, it was really hot and dry this summer. Thankfully, it’s almost fall. In a few more months, you may actually have to throw on some leg warmers with those hot pants and heels. It really depends on the look you’re trying to achieve with your Halloween costume. Temperature-wise it will still be hotter than dog shit in a skillet. So, in late October when you’re thrashing through the aisles at Lucy in Disguise with a couple of underarm sweat crescents in full blossom, try to remember that anything involving rubber, fur, or feathers should only be trotted out for effect – ideally in a pay-by-the-hour motel room with the thermostat set on 50. Otherwise, a Wal-Mart bikini, some pink flip-flops, and a Clearblue Easy wand should do the trick (hello … Bristol Palin?). Of course, in Austin, you don’t have to be topical to run around half naked. It doesn’t even have to be Halloween or Election Day. Here in River City, it’s legal to bare your boobs in public … as long as you don’t charge a cover. Same thing goes if you’re sporting moobs. In fact, as long as your boys are cradled in a slingshot or a jockstrap or maybe a bright-yellow banana hammock, you are walking on the right side of the law. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you don’t stand a chance of getting maced, Tased, or nightsticked by our boys in blue; it just means that when your case comes up for a hearing, you can impress the judge with your comprehensive knowledge of state and municipal statutes. She’ll probably still fine you for public indecency, disorderly conduct, or walking around in a bright-yellow banana hammock with your moobs hanging out (all three of which are basically the same thing), but at least you’ll have the legal, if not necessarily moral high ground. The main thing to remember is that in a couple of months, it will actually be pleasant outside – pleasant enough that your clothing won’t feel like a recently steamed tamale husk. By then, you’ll probably want to try out some new fall fashions or at least get some use out of the L.L.Bean stuff in your closet that you wear only three months out of the year. That may sound really nice and Rockwellian right now, but by November you’ll miss all the glistening tanned flesh and the smell of chemically created coconut. Cold weather is much too high a price to pay for pert nipples, so carpe the caliente diem while you can. How about a little recreational boating? This Saturday DJ Will Konitzer will be hosting Will’s Mad Hatter Boat Party on Lake Travis. Starting at Riviera Marina in Volente at 4pm, Will, along wth DJs Joshua Triplet and Rez, and special guest Andrew Parsons will be pumping up the jams on their party boat. Dress code: swimsuits and hats. Beer and hot dogs will be provided, but it’s still BYOB – that goes for booze and bowlers.

Wild Weekend Power Pop Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 26, 2008

If you read this paper, chances are you’re not engaged in real labor – at least not on a daily basis. Good for you. Sure, you may occasionally spend an hour behind a push mower or a weekend helping your buddy move out of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. You might even spend 36 hours of horrible, agonizing, blood-splattered labor having your taint torn to shreds by a 12-pound-melon-headed freak of nature you’ll someday refer to as “the love of your life,” but that’s still a one-off, even if you get mad props for bearing down and gettin’ ‘er done. More than likely you bide the bulk of your time with your ass planted in a plush, ergonomic office chair designed with extra width to give that burgeoning badonkadonk some room to grow. Yes, you can go to spin class, water aerobics, Jazzercise, and krav maga; you can do Pilates, take yoga, lift weights, and run and run and run and run, but you’re always fighting an ugly battle with eons of evolutionary conditioning and genetic predisposition. Hey, isn’t it wonderful that you don’t have to work all day in the unmerciful sun busting rocks like Spartacus? Rest assured that even though Kirk Douglas looked totally ripped in that role, the real Spartacus would have pissed himself at the prospect of fattening his ass surfing porn, sucking down Red Bull, and eating Little Debbie snacks. Aside from being able to do his laundry on his abs, Spartacus probably didn’t benefit much from the lean, ropy, Abercrombie model look back in the days of the Roman Empire. Back then being fat was a sign that you could afford to lay around all day at the spa drinking wine, popping grapes in your mouth, and practicing wanton acts of pedophilia and bestiality. That may not particularly be your cup of tea, but it’s a safe bet that just about any Roman slave would have preferred fucking a lion to being eaten by one. The ancient Greeks … well, they were kind of kinky. Anyway, the point is that you’re probably not out on the range digging potholes, and that’s a good thing. In fact, you will probably get more exercise celebrating Labor Day weekend than you do on an average day at work. Part of the credit for that goes to some truly backbreaking labor done by some of your ancestors (Yes, that even includes folks like Kennedys and the Astors. Their progeny may have run liquor and chased beaver, but they surely didn’t have to work as hard at it). Regardless of how mentally, psychologically, and spiritually challenging your job is, you still have it pretty sweet, all things considered. By all means, celebrate! If you’re particularly removed from the blue-collar, chain wallet, Docs and Dickies crowd, you might appreciate the Wild Weekend Power Pop Festival going on Friday and Saturday at Beerland and Mohawk, respectively. Check out awesome skinny tie bands like Paul Collins’ Beat, Pointed Sticks, Nikki Corvette, and the Boys, plus relative latecomers Grand Champeen, Power Chords, Poor People, and Luxury Sweets. Night shows at Mohawk are a paltry $25 a night, and the day shows at Beerland are free. So if you’re employed or even if you’re unemployed, there’s a show for you.

Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 19, 2008

If you are what you eat, wouldn’t you rather be hot? Exactly. The hotter the better. There will be plenty of time to cool off when you’re dead, so you might as well peg your needle to the red. Food is no exception. There’s nothing wrong with mashed potatoes, roasted chicken, and banana cream pie. They’ll keep you alive, but they aren’t very exciting – well actually, banana cream pie can be interesting with the right models and photographer, but the same could be said of a pitcher of milk. There is a place in the world for blandness – probably somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa – but Austin is a little closer to the edge … of the continent. We bump and grind against other cultures a bit more than the folks in the soft middle, and we like it. Our preference for mixing things up carries over to our food as well. We put garlic and pepper in our mashed potatoes, jalapeños in our cheeseburgers, and pretty much anything that isn’t still moving in our tortillas. Most importantly, we put chips in our hot sauce – again and again and again. So many times that we’re often too stuffed for the entrée. You might ask yourself, “Why do we call it hot sauce instead of salsa?” Answer: We’re south, but we’re not that far south. Our tortillas are still mostly flour instead of corn. We like cheese and sour cream on our tacos too, but when it comes to salsa, we like it hot, which may be why we can’t seem to consistently call it by its true name unless we’re trying to bridge a language barrier. We got the love, though. Austinites will forgive a frightening amount of culinary ineptitude as long as the hot sauce is decent. If you’ve ever bought a day-old sausage-and-egg taco out of a cooler in the back of a dented Toyota pickup truck with a camper shell, sold by someone with dirty fingernails who counts out your change entirely in Spanish, you truly understand the importance of good salsa. When it’s made right, salsa is the culinary correction tape of the Southwest. You can burn your brisket, overboil your beans, steam your rice into a soggy paste, but if you can make a good hot sauce, all is forgiven – bonus points if you can back it up with a decent margarita. There are plenty of Austin restaurants that have built their clientele on those two items alone. Where else in America can you peddle saltines and government cheese and stay in business for more than a week? It could be that Austinites just need more sweat and vitamin C than other blander burghs, or it could be that we’re simply a city of masochists. Whatever the case, hot sauce is unquestionably the most important element in Austin cuisine, even though it’s rarely listed on the menu. If you don’t believe it, come down to Waterloo Park this Sunday where more than 10,000 of your fellow Austinites will prove their love in the withering August heat. Sample hot sauce from some of Austin’s favorite restaurants, or bring a batch of your own to enter in the contest. And, since this is Austin, there will be plenty of beer and music by Girl in the Closet, Fingerpistol, Jungle Rockers, Band of Heathens, and Black Joe Lewis & the Honey Bears. Best of all, admission is free when you bring three nonperishable food items for the Capital Area Food Bank.

Madonna 50th Birthday Sing-Along

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 8, 2008

This Saturday, Madonna turns 50. That means Blondie must be hobbling around on a tennis-ball walker somewhere. Or maybe she’s launching a comeback tour under the name “Grayie.” She’s probably doing the Four Seasons Retirement Home circuit, playing back-to-back shows at 8:30 and 10:30am, croaking out, “Once I had prunes, and they gave me gas” for her big encore, which is inspired by the soft patter of well-medicated hands. Polite applause is about the best you can hope for anyway. You don’t want the Q-tips pelting you with lingerie purchased out of a medical-supply catalog. Titter if you want, but working the activities center stage (well, to be accurate, it’s not really a stage but generally the most well lit corner of the room – usually where they keep the fake Ficus) is a tough gig. So respek, yo. Madonna, on the other hand, probably just finished wet-nursing baby Banda last week – and not just for pleasure. If 50 is the new 30, Madonna is still 25. She could cougar a 12-year-old if she really wanted to and if it were legal, which it might actually be in England. Plus, any Italian chick who routinely pisses off the Vatican in order to sell more records is infallibly hot. Why? Because she knows her hell ticket’s already punched. So really, what’s a wild night on a Motel 6 vibrating bed with a midget, a goat, and a couple of gallons of Vaseline? Does she care? Hard to say. The pope gets to spend eternity in heaven with Jesus and His Dad, but Madonna played Seven Seconds in Heaven with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on national TV. There hasn’t been a pope with that kind of mack since at least the 11th century. Jealous anyone? It’s a nonissue anyway, considering the current pope is probably a huge Blondie fan. It’s easy to ride the high horse of celibacy when you’re an octogenarian, but that doesn’t mean you need to piss holy water on the head of every fishnet-wearing pop star who incorporates masturbation into her stage show … unless … it’s mutually consensual. More than anything, Madonna is a globe-straddling (yeah, that’s hot too) icon of her hedonistic, self-absorbed generation who turned all preachy once she popped out a couple of guppies (and then borrowed one from another fishbowl). You get the feeling that if you were to attend a high tea with her and Bono, they would bore you to death with their hot-winded bullshit – right up until you whipped out the Bolivian marching powder and cranked up the Erasure. At that point, all bets are off. Just cover your exposed holes, and try not to give the paparazzi a decent angle. If you’re like most people who haven’t been permanently crossed off the pope’s “nice” list, you don’t need that kind of scenario to have a good time. Some good music, beer, and a roomful of fun-loving people should do the trick. You can get just that this Friday night when the Alamo Drafthouse hosts the Madonna 50th Birthday Sing-Along. Get into the groove with a Madonnalicious night of revelry celebrating the birth and, more importantly, the dogged resilience of one of America’s … scratch that … England’s greatest pop-culture icons.

Second Annual Austin Ice Cream Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 5, 2008

Yes, of course it’s hot. You’re in Austin. It’s August. Every day when you walk outside it feels like you’re standing in front of oven … an oven with a big steaming bowl of water in it. Even the breeze feels like a Labrador panting on the back of your neck. This is the time of year when you ask yourself, “How boring is San Diego … really?” Sure, there are plenty of other places with a milder climate: Hawaii, Miami, L.A. (those 13 million people don’t live there because of the Mexican food and the smog), but all have their drawbacks. Hawaii, along with having too many vowels in its name, also has Hawaiian shirts, which even on people like Tom Selleck are an unforgivable blight on the landscape. Sadly, most are worn by dudes who look like Wilford Brimley. Imagine if Texans went around wearing shirts with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes on them. Same difference. Miami would be cool – especially if you could turn off the Sound Machine and just lay out on the beach all day without having to watch the leathery funbags of European tourists bounce by above your head. El Lay? Seriously? Eventually those 13 million people are going to figure out a way to fuck up the sweet climate, too. They’re already off to a great start. The irony is that the valley holds in the smog like a huge, toxic bong hit – a veritable red-carpet treatment for the grim reaper. There’s plenty of fresh air in places like Montana and Alaska, but you have to weigh that against half a year of nipple/nut shrinking cold. Just when you start to develop those sexy tan lines you have to wrap them up in Gore-Tex or goose down until the spring thaw. It gets cold in Austin, but you never have to dig a snow tunnel to your driveway or sleep with your sled dogs to fend off frostbite. Generally staying warm isn’t much of a problem at all, unless you pass out on a park bench in mid February and your mangy, homeless, canine companion (wearing the obligatory Bobby McGee, “dirty red bandanna”) doesn’t wake you up by licking the vomit off your face. If you ever needed reassurance that Austin’s climate is nicer than, say, Minneapolis, just compare homeless populations. Ever been annoyed by a squeegee-wielding homeless man on a Minneapolis street corner in February? Right … because there aren’t any. They’re all down in Austin working on their winter tans. Of course, the payback comes in August when the challenge is staying cool. It’s not as tough as it sounds. City pools are free and frio. There’s also Barton Creek, the fountains at Palmer, and if things get really ugly, Waller Creek. If you’re one of those fortunate people whose résumé isn’t printed on a piece of cardboard, you have the option of cooling down in a more genteel setting. Perhaps an Evian spritzer poolside at the Four Seasons? If you want to try something a little more modest but equally decadent, head down to Waterloo Park this Saturday for the second annual Austin Ice Cream Festival. Cool down with ice cream from a variety of different vendors, and enjoy a variety of games, activities, and contests, as well as live music by acts like the 3 Balls of Fire, Loose Cannons, Chad Thomas & the Crazy Kings, and the Biscuit Brothers. Admission is $2, but you’ll want to bring an extra wad for the ice cream. Sometimes being cool can be costly.

Erotica 2008

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 29, 2008

There is so much porn on the Internet these days, really, why even bother with an erotica art show? Perhaps you have a beef with representationalism? Maybe you like your body parts all angled and askew and akimbo like a Picasso cubist nude? Or maybe you’re into Bambi-eyed hentai bimbos with huge, shiny, watermelon boobs and hairless nethers who straddle anaconda-sized penises spewing ropy fountains of shimmering jiz? Maybe you’re especially fond of the ones where the girls have furry bunny ears and hooves instead of feet? With animé, anything’s possible. Same with Photoshop. If you haven’t taken a nude picture of yourself and then pasted Johnny Wadd’s tally-whacker (enlarged 1000% so it’s roughly the girth of a duffel bag) over your shrunken tadpole, you’re not really utilizing technology to its fullest extent. If you do it right, people will be asking you, “What’s that giant mushroom in the foreground of your MySpace photo?” So what if you can’t deliver the goods in meatspace. Real life is just a consecutive series of crushing disappointments anyway, isn’t it? Besides, imagine having to schlep around a duffel-bag-sized penis all the time. The carnies would tease you mercilessly. You’re much better off packing your spandex banana hammock with a baby-arm-shaped wad of biscuit dough. Sure, it might start smelling a little yeasty down there after a while, but people expect that from someone wearing a spandex banana hammock in the real world. Rocking a slingshot on the Internet, however, is considered kitschy, especially if you’ve grafted your head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1967 Mr. Universe photo. Of course, you shouldn’t miss out on all the fun just because your Y chromosome is on permanent sabbatical. Imagine how many Facebook friend requests you’d have if your profile photo featured a Dolly Parton-sized cleavage crevasse? Having a plastic surgeon load that kind of baggage on your fragile desk chair spine would be insane, but the Internet is a zero gravity environment. Even if you decide not to go top-heavy, at the very least you should drop in a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark. Passing up an opportunity like that is just being lazy. With just a little more effort, you could also throw a little digital collagen into those lips and pencil in some butterfly eyelashes. First impressions go a long way, and really, expecting people to live up to their image on the Internet is sort of like expecting all radio DJs to look like Ryan Seacrest. And really, for all you know, Ryan has three nipples and a wicked case of toenail fungus. Reality isn’t always pretty, even when you dress it up and hit it with an airbrush. People are inevitably imperfect – even Jenna Jameson doing a muff-n-duff with a couple of well-greased Gold’s Gym night managers is still going to reveal a few moles and stray hairs. Art, on the other hand, is always perfect because it’s always the embodiment of the artist’s ideal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t butt-ugly a lot of the time, it’s just that it’s as good as it could have possibly been at the time and under the circumstances in which it was created. Porn may be exhibitionistic, but certainly no more so than any other kind of art. The artist exposes his or her idealism to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world gets to appreciate it or mercilessly ridicule it, as the case may be. It’s a sort of porn of idealism. So really, art and porn aren’t even distant cousins. It’s just that when art gets sexy, it’s called erotica, and there’s usually not a money shot. That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting and worth a peek. Maybe you should relax your grip on your joystick and head down to Gallery Lombardi, where this Saturday night from 7pm to 11pm they’re opening Erotica 2008, an exhibit of 50 erotic works from area artists. Along with erotica you can actually meet real people, who, although they’re imperfect, are much more interesting and erotically satisfying than porn could ever be.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

July 22, 2008

Say what you will about our shoeless neighbors to the north, you have to give them one thing: Their state song kicks our state song’s ass. Go ahead and piss and moan and beat your chest all you want, but deep, deep in your heart of Texas, you know it’s true. By comparison, Texas’ state song is a plodding funeral march. Plus, if you want to get down to the ugly truth of the matter, it’s a little braggy: Texas, our Texas, all hail the mighty state!/Texas, our Texas, so wonderful, so great! Sounds like a state with a chip on its shoulder. Sounds like a state trying to hide its inadequacies. Oklahoma, on the other hand, is a study in stately humility: You’re doing fine, Oklahoma. Oklahoma, OK! Notice the omission of superlatives like “boldest” and “grandest.” Really, there’s no need to make Kansas and Rhode Island feel shitty. You’re doing best, Oklahoma? Not even Okies are that gullible. They will, however, concede that the “wind comes sweepin’ down the plain” (that ain’t bragging; it’s the brutal truth) or that “the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet.” Can sure smell sweet – meaning, it’s conditional. There are plenty of situations where it doesn’t smell sweet – like when your wheat field is downwind from a seaboard hog processing plant. If you live next to one of those babies, the wind coming right behind the rain is about the worst possible thing that can happen to you – well, short of actually working in the bastard. But still, it’s not really fair to compare Texas, our Texas, with Oklahoma! The former was an amateur work composed by British-born TCU choir director William J. Marsh, with lyrics by Gladys Yoakum Wright, described by various publications as a “resident of Fort Worth.” Curious, considering she was employed in the office of the auditor of revenues for the Frisco Railway in St. Louis, Mo., when she accepted her half of the $1,000 prize for writing Texas’ state song. Who knows how that collaboration went down, especially since it ended with Gladys taking the train to St. Louis, but most disturbing is the fact that she apparently didn’t have access to a rhyming dictionary – seriously: state with great? Are you fucking kidding? Sounds like something an auditor would come up with. Oklahoma, on the other hand, is a skillfully crafted American masterwork penned by a talented team of Broadway composers who probably never set foot in Oklahoma. All you can say is, point Oklahoma for fielding a pro team. Similar things have been said about Oklahoma’s football program, but either way they’re winning. And lest you think that Oklahoma wasn’t saddled with dog of a state song, keep in mind that until 1953, their state song was Oklahoma, a Toast, which included lyrics like “fairest daughter of the West” and “fruit trees greet with a burden sweet” and ended with the word “quaff.” Theirs was written by Harriet Parker Camden (what’s with the lyricist serial-murderer names?) originally of Kingfisher, Okla., who relocated to Fair Oaks, Calif. Hmm … Clearly Oklahoma was in a similar pickle, but they stepped up and did what needed to be done. Will we be able to say the same of Texas? Maybe Willie will whip one up then move to Hawaii. Regardless, we need to bump this one up to the top of our “to-do” list. If you need a reminder of how the pros work, you can check out Summer Stock Austin’s production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! this weekend at St. Edward’s University. Ballsy move to do Oklahoma! in the heart of Texas, but that’s what Texas is all about, isn’t it? Says it right there in our state song: “boldest and grandest.” Surely we can put on the boldest and grandest production of Oklahoma! too. It might even inspire us to be bold enough to change our state song. Wouldn’t that be grand?

First Ever Film Fight Party

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

July 15, 2008

When historians finally hammer out a coherent synopsis of post-Eighties America, it will surely be a fascinating paragraph: A couple of Gulf Wars, Branch Davidians, the internet, the dot-com boom and bust, presidential fellatio, electoral thievery, the Twin Towers, the War on Terror, the moron terror (aka George Jr.), global warming, Iraq, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears. Exciting times. All in all however, other than that Internet thingy, post-Eighties America really left some skid marks on the foundation garments of Western Civilization. It’s like the Greatest Generation handed off the ball for a fullback dive up the middle and instead got a swinging gate Fleaflicker that degenerated into a Vaseline-greased naked dog pile with the marching band on the 50-yard line. How did it happen? On our watch? There are only two plausible explanations. Either we were stupid or stoned. Stupidity isn’t a stretch. Given the number of people who claim to have been duped by a low C average ex-Yale cheerleader and his evil oompah loompas, it’s safe to say we’re a nation full of knuckle draggers. Certainly no other civilized country at this point would deny it. When traditional global slack-jaws like Scotland and South Africa start slapping “kick me” signs on our ass, it’s time for a little collective introspection. Unfortunately, Americans don’t have time for introspection because we’re too busy getting stoned and playing video games. Now, some people would claim that getting stoned is pretty much the same thing as being stupid. Not so. Claiming that you’re stoned implies that in your normal, unbaked state you’re not a developmentally arrested fuck-up who collects action figures, comic books, and Escher prints; that were it not for all the THC coursing through your system, your carpet wouldn’t be littered with empty Funyun bags, popsicle sticks, and weedseed; you wouldn’t let your cat shit in your stolen Sonic dope tray; and you would roll out of bed sometime before noon wearing something other than fart-holed boxers and a stained Spongebob T-shirt. Claiming that you’re stoned implies that you might actually amount to something if you weren’t such a hardcore, badass party animal. Otherwise, how could you possibly score 170,000 on Guitar Hero? OK, so maybe we didn’t put our boot up Hitler’s ass (well, outside of Call of Duty), and we didn’t tear down that wall or make the world even remotely safe for democracy, but this generation did bring pop-cultural onanism to breathtaking heights. We may not be able to point out Darfur on a map or give a detailed treatise on why ethanol is fool fuel, but if you want a painstaking analysis of the evolution of Batman from Keaton to Clooney to Kilmer to Bale, torch one up, sit back, and prepare to have your mind blown. We’ll get back to this environmental/geopolitical/economic clusterfuck soon enough. Right now we have work to do. This Thursday night at 7pm, the Chronicle is hosting its first Film Fight party at the United States Art Authority. Film Fight is a monthly online debate featuring Chronicle Film critics Kimberly Jones and Josh Rosenblatt going at it on a variety of film-related topics. Check it out for yourself. This month’s topic: comic-book movies. When you’re done, come down to the Art Authority and find out who won this month’s debate. You can also meet Kim and Josh, enjoy happy hour drink specials, and see a special genre-related film screening. If you’re lucky, you could also win movie passes, I Love Video gift cards, and other assorted swag including superhero action figures. If somebody asks where you got them, you can just say you were stoned.

50th Annual Zilker Summer Musical – Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

July 7, 2008

OK, it’s highly unlikely you are going to get laid by attending the Zilker Hillside Theatre’s production of Beauty and the Beast. In fact, it’s probably not a good policy to go trolling for strange at a venue where nearly half the people are under legal age – even by Arkansas standards. However, if you’re the discriminating type – someone who can tell the difference between a South Austin cougar divorcée and a dreadlocked high school hippie chick (hint: check for gray underarm stubble) – you can probably do a little browsing without subjecting yourself to criminal prosecution. Life is full of risks, isn’t it? You could make the argument that going solo to a G-rated play in the park is like cruising past an elementary school in a panel van wearing a clown suit and waving candy, but it isn’t exactly the same. There is legitimate business you can claim to be up to over at Zilker – and not just the choo-choo ride. First and foremost is Barton Springs. Yes, that Barton Springs, the most revered piece of Austin real estate that hasn’t been converted into condos or a shitty theme bar. The thing you need to know about Barton Springs – Austin’s dirty little secret – is that people like the concept of Barton Springs much more than they like the execution. Yes, it’s an idyllic setting with shade trees and grassy hills and the shrieks of little children, but the centerpiece of the whole scene is one motherfucking freezing pool of water. Pay a little closer attention, and you’ll realize that those aren’t just the shrieks of children. Yes, they’re in the same tonal register, but a good many of those shrieks are coming from full-grown adults. It doesn’t matter whether you’re packing fully formed ovaries or big, swinging brass balls, the natural reaction of any normal adult when coming in contact with Barton Springs water is to scream like a little school girl. A token few may be able to stifle the sound or at least throttle it down to an inaudible dog whistle, but regardless of what’s coming out of their mouths, their minds are twisted into an agonizing Edvard Munch painting. If you tiptoe into Barton Springs, your mind will tell you to tiptoe right the fuck back out. You can’t acclimate. The only way to go into Barton Springs is to dive headfirst … ideally not into the shallow end. The benefit of diving headfirst is that your scream will be muffled by the ice water. Jump in feet first, and there’s still a few milliseconds for air to escape past your larynx, which has already contracted to the size of a pinhole. Think about it this way: The lifeguard will be less likely to notice you’ve had a cardiac arrest in the deep end if she is mopping up the blood trickling out of her ears. Do it right. Put your towel down on the grass, walk all the way around the pool to the diving board, dive in, and swim as fast as you can to the other side. Then you can pick up your towel and make your way to the solar-heated, open-air showers, where after a few minutes your balls will descend from the far reaches of your abdominal cavity. Wasn’t that awesome? Barton Springs is such a great natural resource. Now, if your complaint was that going to see a play in Zilker Park in the middle of July would be too hot, rest assured that a quick dip in the Springs will keep you shivering for the rest of the night. It will also serve as a perfectly acceptable excuse for a grown person to stumble into a Disney musical. You can say you always carry a folding chair and an ice chest full of Shiner longnecks in your trunk. Austinites are used to inexplicable eccentricities. The payoff? Well, there’s the strange you aren’t going to get, plus the consolation prize of a damn fine Disney musical, played exuberantly by a talented cast of locals who could hold their own on any stage in America. You don’t have to be a child to enjoy the energy and unrepentant camp brought to this production, but you might have to get over your coolness – if only to keep your teeth from chattering.

Fourth of July Concert and Fireworks

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

July 1, 2008

Friday is the Fourth of July, when Americans celebrate the glorious day their forefathers shot the bird at ol’ King George – presumably the American solo bird and not that confusing, two-fingered UK flip-off that’s sometimes tragically mistaken as a peace sign by American tourists who encounter rioting soccer hooligans. The average Yank doesn’t give a flip about Hank 5’s (that’s Henry of Monmouth and not Hank Williams’ unborn progeny, aka “Quincephus”) stirring speech at the battle of Agincourt about the French lopping off the bow fingers of captured English archers. Here in God’s country our bird doesn’t operate on the buddy system. Our bird flies solo. Our bird is an army of one – especially if that army is clutching the joystick of an F-15 Eagle with 23,000 pounds of high tech, laser guided ordnance – think of it as bird-on-bird violence. After all, when you’re pushing buttons, one finger is usually enough to do the trick. Think of how irritating it is when you see foreigners holding up one finger and chanting: “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Everyone knows that’s America’s chant, even though we’re not even in the Top 10 when it comes to health care, education, or human rights. Doesn’t matter. We’re No. 1 in the most important thing: Ass-kicking. Since the revolution, America is something like 11-1-1 … and that’s not even counting Grenada. As long as we don’t piss off China, we pretty much own the planet. We’re No. 1! It even says so right on our coins: “Out of many, one.” Sounds cocky, but cockiness is what independence is all about. It’s why America didn’t sign the Kyoto Accord. America doesn’t need to work with other countries to stop global warming. We can do it ourselves. We’re No. 1. One nation, under one God, with one finger for the rest of the world. Why? Because two fingers don’t represent independence. Two fingers represent interdependence. Two fingers represent reliance and cooperation. That’s not what the eagle is all about. An eagle is a high-flying opportunist, gliding along, waiting for some varmint to make a mad, suicidal scramble for safety – a ritual known to eagles as “supper time.” That’s right, America’s bird is a bird of prey – not some shit-dropping pigeon or screeching goth grackle but a majestic, sharp-clawed killing machine with keen vision and a wingspan like Manute Bol. America’s bird is an absolute fucking terror – which more than just about anything else keeps it independent. Independence is something to celebrate, isn’t it? This Friday you can celebrate America’s independence for free with the Park and Rec’s Annual Fourth of July Concert and Fireworks. Join 100,000 independence-loving Austinites at Auditorium Shores for a rousing rendition of the 1812 Overture (yeah, we won that one, too) and a spectacular fireworks display. Unfortunately, this is one thing you can’t do alone.

Keep Austin Weird 5K and Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

June 24, 2008

Keeping Austin weird is full-time work. The weirdness is not like it used to be. It’s on a much broader and more magnificent scale. You can’t just skate along baking pot brownies every morning or wearing glitter mascara and fairy wings when you go to the convenience store. Yawn. Seen it. Weird isn’t just about feathers and body paint and colored hair and dirty-faced children in soiled diapers with balloon animal hats. That kind of sophomoric shit might play in Omaha, but here in New Condonia, you need a couple of million dollars worth of Downtown dirt and a daring dream of building unaffordable housing for people who don’t exist. Now there’s an idea that just might be weird enough to actually work. If you were a loan officer, you would sign off on that, wouldn’t you? Big, crazy ideas aren’t exactly without precedent. A couple of thousand years before Christ, the ancient Egyptians put a lot of money and resources into high dollar housing for dead people. Keep in mind this was before resurrection was all the rage. Surely the pyramids were an insane idea 2500 years ago … they still are now, but you have to give props to Cheops; they are one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Awesome. Why are the pyramids a wonder? Because for the last 4500 years no sane person could look at them without wondering, “What the fuck?” Normal, reasoning people have a similar reaction when they see all the condos being built in Downtown Austin. Those huge monoliths to speculative zeal inspire the same incredulity as seeing Leslie Cochran on a street corner in a dirty thong and torn fishnets. The really weird thing is that Leslie is easier to explain to the tourists. Without a doubt, Austin’s entertainment district has a certain allure – especially for street-walking attention-whores like Leslie, but is it enough to lure some rich, fun-loving rube into dropping 500 large on a glass box with yearly maintenance fees? Maybe. After all, we’re one cute little city and more importantly … we put out. Austin doesn’t have any dry counties or bible belts or entrenched social stratification. This is the city where the mayor dated a local rock singer, where a local rock singer dated a movie star, and where a movie star got busted for getting stoned and playing bongos in the buff. And guess what? He wasn’t even trying to keep it weird. He didn’t try to run that idea past a group of investors and loan officers and city officials and political activists and have them all sign off on the deal. Even though he got a lot of ink, McConaughey was in the bush leagues of weird, which is probably the safest place for weirdness to be. When the weirdos start marching in lock step – that’s when the shit is about to hit the fan. If you’re looking to get your weird on in a mostly harmless way, put on your feathers and body paint (or slingshot and dog collar), and head down to Auditorium Shores this Saturday for the Keep Austin Weird 5K (yes, running is pretty freakin’ weird when you do it and don’t have to) and Festival. Not only can you sweat with your fellow weirdos – before, during, and after the 5K, you can see some pretty weird Austin acts as well: Alejandro Escovedo, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and Black Joe Lewis & the Honey Bears, among others. There’s also a costume contest, but if you’re really keeping it weird, you can’t call that thing a costume, now can you?

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

June 17, 2008

Wallflowers get all the wool. There’s a T-shirt you’re never going to see. Sure, there may be a few bashful types who manage to reel in some fish, but you can bet they’re so good looking they can only be viewed directly through welding goggles. If your looks are anywhere short of magnificent, you’re going to have to develop some game. Pretty is good, but pretty will only get you so far. At some point you’re going to have to read a book or run a marathon or do a YouTube remake of First Blood with you playing Rambo. Actually, scratch that. Make it the Tom Hanks role in Sleepless in Seattle. Really, any Tom Hanks role will do, but just remember that if you do Big or Splash or Cast Away, you’re probably overplaying your hand. The point is that if you can’t look like Brad Pitt or George Clooney, you at least want to be interesting like Brad Pitt or George Clooney. When you’re a horse whisperer or an astronaut or a teenage mutant ninja turtle, deal killers like back hair, third nipples, and unibrows aren’t nearly as deadly. Before you drop a lot of money on electrolysis, corrective surgery, or an Abercrombie & Fizzitch shopping spree, you may want to hike the Himalayas or motorcycle through South America. Worked for Che Guevara. Che’s childhood nickname was “El Chancho” (the pig) because he hated fashionable clothing and eschewed personal hygiene – traits he carried proudly into adulthood. Even still, Che was a notorious womanizer, and you can be sure he wasn’t scoring all that strange because of his scruffy beard, rumpled clothes, and cheap cigar breath. Keep in mind, however, that interesting can be a bad thing, too. It is a point of interest that Che was responsible for the execution of hundreds of infidels – some personally – without giving them the benefit of due process. Fascinating yes, but that kind of mojo is usually a negative when you’re trolling for chicas. Sure, there are some women who are turned on by ruthless power, but they’re also the ones you should submit to a bag search and frisking on the first date. Besides, there are plenty of interesting things you can do without capriciously whacking your subordinates, and even if your area of interest is completely uninteresting, you still have one last resort: Enthusiasm. Really, if you can’t get fired up about chess or bass fishing or your remote-controlled airplane, why should anyone else? Enthusiasm is infectious – so is apathy and pessimism. Ever wonder why Charlie Brown never gets laid? OK, besides the fact that he hasn’t reached puberty? (Cue the Debby Downer horn riff.) Other than occasional berating from Lucy, Charlie doesn’t get much love. You can easily imagine Charlie as a jaded, middle-aged bachelor cruising for prostitutes in a weathered PT Cruiser. Of course, you don’t want to cheat yourself by missing Chuck’s adolescence – and you don’t have to. A playwright named Bert V. Royal has already imagined it in an off-Broadway production called Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, the local production of which has been so successful that the Hyde Park Theatre is holding it over for one more weekend. This may be your last chance to see it before it hits the big screen – probably starring Tom Hanks. If you miss it, you’ll just be that much less interesting, won’t you?

Pride Texas Festival

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

June 10, 2008

This weekend both the ROT Biker Rally and Pride Texas are knocking knees Downtown. Talk about a summer blockbuster. It’s like Jerry Bruckheimer, Judd Apatow, and the Cohen Brothers had a business lunch at Hooters, smoked a fatty, and dreamed up this weekend. Bikers … gays … lesbians … if the Convention and Visitors Bureau was really on the ball they would have booked a mime festival this weekend too … or better yet, the Southern Baptist Convention (same amount of make-up really, just different technique). Regardless, you can expect about 40,000 bikers, 15,000 gays, 100,000 or so wide-eyed onlookers, and roughly 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats buzzing around Downtown this weekend. That’s a goldmine in guano alone, but the ROT claims to rev up the local economy by nearly $40 million – the bulk of which surely ends up folded into the g-strings of local tittie dancers. Basic trickle-down theory states that the surplus tittie-dancer cash will make its way into the pockets of meth dealers and all-night day-care centers, which will in turn blow its respective wads on Sudafed and disposable diapers, thereby feeding the vicious cycle of corporate consumerism through which the bikers define their freedom and individuality. Ronald Reagan couldn’t have sketched it up any better … right down to the self-fulfilling prophecy of overinflated economic impact. Bitch about their flatulent, lumbering, gas-sucking anachronisms of modern engineering all you want, Harley riders are superior in at least one way: Brand loyalty. That’s a state of economic Zen that’s hard to achieve in modern society. You really have to ignore a lot of facts and statistics and just go with your gut, which, if Harley riders are any indication, is one of the most lovingly developed parts of the human anatomy. You should be seeing plenty of spectacular ones this weekend – usually stretching out a T-shirt that says, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off” on the back. Of course, fetish leather, chaps, and biker outfits aren’t the sole domain of motorcyclists. Remember that on Saturday Auditorium Shores will be teeming with Pride, Austin’s annual celebration of lesbianity/gayness/bisexuality/transgenderdom that loosely coincides with NYC’s Stonewall Uprising (Google it) of June 1969, aka the summer of reciprocal oral gratification. Pride may not have the shock and awe of ROT (maybe because the parade’s participant waiver form expressly forbids anything racy, or for that matter, gay), but at least you know that the participants are parading ostensibly for LGBT rights and not because they want a venue for their AARP qualifying bitches to show off their boob jobs. Subtle difference but worth noting. In other cities you can see plenty of tit in the Pride Parade (even if you didn’t necessarily want to), but the smart gays here in Austin decided that assless chaps, banana hammocks, and cosmetically unenhanced boobage are not the best way to sell gay rights to the breeders. Thus, the kibosh was put on the exhibitionists, and Pride took on a fam friendlier tone. This is not to say there aren’t still some occasional flashes of freakiness, but don’t expect the parade route be littered with empty amyl nitrate vials, spit-soaked dental dams, and spent condoms. Selling the idea that gays should have the same rights and freedoms as the model citizens out at the Expo Center takes a certain amount of decorum and restraint. If they can just keep it buttoned down long enough to get some gay rights to the hets – maybe someday the LGBT crowd can be as obnoxious as their ROT Rally rivals. Imagine 50,000 gay exhibitionists on Congress Avenue gunning their pastel Vespas and showing off their hairy-legged, braless bitches. That’s worth popping for the $15 entrance fee for Pride, isn’t it? You bet it is. Plus, you get Meshell Ndegeocello and Pansy Division as a reach-around. Could this weekend get any better or what?

Great Guitars Rock for Van Wilks and Prostate Cancer Awareness

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

June 3, 2008

Austin is a guitar town. You can’t throw a pick into an audience without hitting a guitar player – and he’ll probably just toss it back because it’s not his brand or thickness. Anyway, nice throw because he was standing in the back of the room with his arms folded thinking, “This guy isn’t such hot shit.” After the show he’ll come up to the stage and shove a napkin into the tip jar on which he’s scrawled his MySpace page with his girlfriend’s eyeliner pencil. You can pretty much bet that if you go, there the first thing you’re going to hear is diddly diddly diddly wah diddly diddly diddly. Fuck. He is better than you. What were you thinking? You just got suckered into the musical equivalent of looking at other guys’ dicks in the shower. Turns out your show isn’t nearly as impressive as you thought it was. Lesson learned: Keep your head up. Hendrix kept his eyes turned toward the heavens. Why? Not because he was checking out the competition, but because the only person he had left to impress was God. Besides, as every true guitarist knows, if you have to look down at your fretboard, you’re a hack. SRV kept his eyes closed for entire songs, and on the rare occasions when he did open them, he was playing guitar behind his head – not just cheesy hammer-ons but complicated, jaw-dropping improvisational runs that barely drowned out the collective whoosh of thousands of panties hitting the floor. Why were Stevie Ray’s eyes closed? Because there was this other kid, a hometown hero named Eric Johnson, who was playing a bizarre clusterfuck of jazz, fusion, and rock with New Agey elements tossed in – intricate, technically dazzling, and mathematically precise fretwork that earned hushed respect from metalheads to chicken pickers and everyone in between. E.J.’s lead runs sound like something Steven Hawking would dream up in a sensory deprivation tank. Perhaps even more intimidating is that he looks like he got his clothes and hairstyle at the mall. Seriously, if you’re going to blister like that, you at least need to pop a few buttons on your shirt and throw some scarves around your neck. Being a guitar god in a guitar town ain’t easy. You can’t walk around Mount Olympus in a plain, white tunic and expect that everyone will recognize you as Zeus. Even Redd Volkaert rocks that Notre Dame mascot beard and a leather hobo hat. Truth is, there are just too many awesome guitarists in Austin. Our D-list is an average city’s A-list. If you really want to test your chops as a guitar god, there’s no better place to do it than right here in River City. On any given night, you can see at least five or six guitar slingers who will blow your socks off. For instance, this Sunday Antone’s is hosting Guitars Rock for Van Wilks and Prostate Cancer, a benefit to both raise awareness about prostate cancer and to help with medical expenses incurred by veteran Austin guitarist Van Wilks, who was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer last Christmas. The heavyweight lineup includes Eric Johnson, David Grissom, Carolyn Wonderland, Derek O’Brien, Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon, the Dave Sebree Band, Joker Fireants, and, of course, Van Wilks. If all that musical talent depresses you just remember: Keep your head up.

Austin Poetry Slam Benefit

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

May 28, 2008

If you haven’t bought a cheap piece of East Austin, you’d better get on it. Recession or not, there’s a whole shitstorm of hipsters looking to put a down payment on authentic Austin. Sure, you could blow three-hundred large on a spacious ranch house out in disturbia, but all that gets you is a neighborhood full of truly authentic people who don’t appreciate authenticity. You don’t want to end up sandwiched between a car salesman and a UPS driver. You don’t want their real kids punting soccer balls into your organic vegetable garden or rolling up in front of your house in a Kia with spinny rims blasting Chamillionaire. Worse yet, you don’t want their parents to invite you over for surf and turf only to dry gulch you with an Amway presentation or maybe a meet-n-greet with the cool new pastor of their church. Everybody knows the best neighbors are aging blue-collar types on fixed pensions who can’t afford to upgrade their hearing aids. They might pop out into the daylight every once in a while at six in the morning to pick up the paper or pull aimlessly at random weeds in their lawn, but mostly they stay inside watching soap operas, cooking things in their Crock-Pots, and doing books of crossword puzzles. It doesn’t take much ontological acumen to realize it doesn’t get any realer than that. People who are simultaneously on death’s doorstep and a fixed income tend not to live large – certainly not large enough to get all up in your business. Sure, there may be occasional extravagances like an oil derrick mailbox or windows covered in tinfoil, but nothing as dangerous or frightening as a sullen suburban goth kid whose MySpace page is a homage to Columbine. You may also experience a few awkward, fence-side conversations while enduring the farty stench of an unchanged colostomy bag or maybe Cains coffee breath, circa 1973, but all things considered, your old buddy Carl from next door is not a bad guy, even if he never zips his fly and wears sneakers with no laces. Plus, you can invite Carl to all your parties in full confidence that he won’t show up because he’ll either forget or won’t care enough to put his pants on. If he actually shows up without pants, your party guests will certainly have something to blog about, won’t they? All in all, gentrification is a win-win situation, especially if you’re the gentry. If you’re not, you always have the option of selling that rattrap of a house you’ve been letting deteriorate for the last 40 years and moving into an assisted-living facility. With all the hot meals and Dixie cups full of meds, you’ll think you’re in heaven already. And if some hipster blows a couple hundred thou to remodel your 2-1 post-war tract home into a 3-2 green-friendly urban space, you’ll sleep peacefully knowing that in 50 years or so he’ll be just as cool as you are – maybe even cooler if his nurse parks his wheelchair over the floor vent in the sun room. Point is, if you want to get a piece of authentic Austin, you better get one now while you’re still young enough to bust your ass trying to make it livable. Once the tide of trendiness completely floods East Austin, you’ll have to head out to Pflugerville to look for something real. If you want to dip your toe into East Austin – both what it was and is – make some time to visit the Scoot Inn, a cool little bar at East Fourth and Navasota. Like it’s companion Longbranch Inn on East 11th, the Scoot Inn is an old dive bar dressed up just enough to draw the cool kids but still homey enough for the locals. If gentrification has a best-case scenario, this is probably it. On Saturday they’re hosting a benefit for the Austin Poetry Slam, which takes place Wednesdays at the Scoot. Poets are trendy people for sure, but fortunately they’re generally too broke to outbid you on your East Austin dream shack. Maybe the tide is already turning.

Austin Wine Festival

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

May 20, 2008

If you know a lot about wine, good for you. Everybody should have some sort of skill. While other people were busy learning how to knit, play guitar, build model airplanes, and swing golf clubs, you were lolling about drinking bottles of fermented grape juice. Well done. Now your palate is so refined that you can taste the booger on the fingernail of the cooper who built the cask for your bottle of 1995 Château Margaux. Lest you think you’ve wasted too much time and money on your obsession, consider that when it comes to sensory sophistication, you’re right up there with Annie Sprinkle and drug-sniffing border patrol dogs. Congratulations! You are now a resource for the rest of the world who, by and large, can’t tell the difference between a bottle of Champagne Aubry Brut Jouy-les-Reims Premier Cru and a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. They’re not losing much sleep over it either. The hard truth of the matter is that the Strawberry Hill will get you every bit as fucked up as the Premier Cru and with nearly half the syllables. It will also give you the same wicked hangover. This is the wine drinker’s paradox. As an epicurean endeavor, wine is a fascinating, varied, and rewarding sensory experience. As a drug, however, it ranks somewhere between huffing glue and shitty trashcan meth. Say what you will about the hygienic practices of the toothless hillbillies who cook up meth, you never see them stepping on it – at least not literally – in bare feet. Wine on the other hand rarely smells like cat pee and has the additional benefit of being mostly legal. It also has enough congeners, sulfites, and tannins to adequately punish overindulgers. Is it any wonder Jesus chose to turn the water into wine instead of crack cocaine? Heaven isn’t a very enticing carrot to dangle when you have buckets full of cocaine. With wine however, Jesus could be relatively sure that everyone would wake up the next morning saying, “Jesus, what was I thinking?” Lord knows if you’re going to be drinking wine, it’s best to pound a glass of water every now and then. If you can afford it, you might want to nosh a little too. Don’t worry, there are always plenty of wine-geeks who will advise you on what wine to pair with what animal/mineral/vegetable. How about a glass of Pinot Noir and a dip of Copenhagen? Maybe a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and an altar boy? Truly, the possibilities are endless, which is one of the things that makes wine such a fascinating bev. If you’ve never tasted wine, there’s really no excuse. Whether you’re a polygamist, a Baylor alumnus, or just a hardcore Muslim, there’s probably a wine that’s right for you. This weekend, you can see for yourself at the Austin Wine Festival, a three-day celebration of Texas wines taking place at the Domain this Memorial Day weekend. Not only can you taste some of the Texas Hill Country’s most popular and award-winning wines, you can nosh at the Whole Foods Market Bistro and listen to music by acts like Walt Wilkins & the Mysterquiros, Autumn Boukadakis, Patrice Pike, the Bellville Outfit, Band of Heathens, Brandon Rhyder, and more. What a great chance to learn a lot about wine, and if you already know a lot about wine, good for you!

Livable Vision Awards Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

May 13, 2008

There must be something like 5K road races in Austin every year. Seriously. Anyone with a working ink-jet printer and a box of safety pins seems to host some value of K. There are even kids’ Ks and dog Ks – which might lead you to ask: What the hell’s up with all the Ks, yo? It’s simple: “K” is short for “kilometer,” and runners don’t have the time or breath to pronounce huge, multisyllabic words like “kilometer,” much less spell them out. Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re a runner, and you’re blowing past some panting, purple-faced quitter who blurts out, “How far is it to the next first aid station?” You could stop and attempt to render assistance but that would shave precious seconds off your finish time, and you would be mortified to come in any lower than 6,543rd place, so instead you simply bark, “2K.” Problem solved – well, that one at least, but there’s also the larger problem of so many people exercising … and even worse … talking about exercising. Sure, exercise is a common thread in the modern human experience but so is breathing and taking a shit, either of which are infinitely more fascinating than hearing some hard-bodied half-wit drone on endlessly about her workout. What happened to the simpler times when exercising was more like masturbation – something to be done privately and in shame? Shame because back in the day a real job demanded a Herculean amount of effort – the kind of backbreaking toil that kept you from flabbing up like a sissy. If you happened to be one of those unfortunate bean counters with an embarrassingly cushy desk job, you spent your weekends doing something productive like chopping wood or digging potholes. Exercising for the sake of fitness alone was the type of limp-wristed bourgeois narcissism best left to Europeans and ancient Greeks. Sure, people still worked out, some even shamelessly and in public, but it wasn’t something you talked about outside of a confession booth. And really, admitting to anyone that you’re trying to sculpt your glutes should be worth at least 10 Hail Marys and a dozen Lord’s Prayers, minimum. No, there’s nothing inherently sinful about the sporting life – if Jesus were alive today, he would probably be on the pro-barefoot skiing circuit – but there’s nothing particularly virtuous about it either. Would the Lord rather see you run a marathon or spend the same energy framing houses with Habitat for Humanity? Admit it, running is a hugely narcissistic endeavor anyway, isn’t it? Unless you’re carrying an important message to your field commander or just shoplifted some food for your starving family, running is all about you. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if you feel the urge to share the experience at a cocktail party, stifle it. That’s what blogs are for. Besides, talking about your workout is sort of like patting yourself on the ass for your self indulgence. Every once in a while it wouldn’t kill you to pat someone else on the ass (unless it’s verboten in the employee handbook), would it? Well here’s your chance: This Wednesday, May 21, from 6pm to 7:30pm at the Carver Museum, Liveable City will be hosting their annual Livable Vision Awards Party, which recognizes the contributions of local businesses and organizations in making Austin a more livable community (i.e., and even better place to host a few K more Ks). You’ve always wanted to check out the Carver Museum anyway, haven’t you? It’s right off the bus line, but if you live in Central Austin, it’s only a few K away, so you might as well jog.

Movies in the Park at Republic Square

The Luv Doc Recommends

May 6, 2008

If you’re looking to get laid, it’s always best to have a reliable wingman. You can fly solo, but it amps up your creep factor considerably. Other than a handful of tight-lipped cinematic tough guys like John Wayne, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood, mysterious loner types don’t have a good track record. They’re always stacking bodies down in the crawl space, cooking their victims up with fava beans, luring little kids into windowless vans, and perforating the skulls of innocents with stunbolt guns. Loner chicks don’t exactly inspire a vote of confidence, either. How about Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Or Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians? What is it with Glenn Close and small, defenseless animals? No doubt the casting director figured that if Glenn didn’t mind boiling a bunny, she probably wouldn’t have a problem with stitching up a puppy coat. And really, as crazy as that bitch was, you have to admit the coat was pimpin’, yo. This is not to say that groups of people don’t do some crazy shit on occasion (Bush … twice?), but generally the group dynamic includes a normalizing effect. Maybe if John Wayne Gacy had a few more friends, one of them might have chimed in with “Dude, you definitely have a dead animal in your crawl space” – or maybe one of them actually did and ended up there. Regardless, no matter how pure your intentions, no matter how mentally sound you are on paper, if you roll up to a party in a dented cargo van wearing a clown suit, most sane people will scatter like cockroaches. The only way you’re going to get anyone to come near you is to whip up a breathtaking menagerie of balloon animals. So, yes, at the very least a wingman is important – especially when trolling for strange. Ideally your wingman is a trusted friend and not some homeless person you lured along with the promise of a convenience-store rotisserie hot dog and a 40-ounce malt liquor. People judge you by who you hang out with, which is why your wingman should be cute, but not so hot that people will want to fuck him. He should also know when to keep his mouth shut. That story about the time you had freaky motel sex with that chick with huge hands and an Adam’s apple may be hilarious, but when it comes to impressing the ladies, you might as well be wearing a blood-stained clown suit. It’s hard enough to find good friends, but finding a good wingman is even harder. That’s why a lot of people choose to get a puppy, instead. Everybody loves puppies (with the exception of maybe Glenn Close, who loves them in a different way). Everybody wants to pet them, too. They’re like furry, little magnets for the opposite sex. It’s true that they eventually grow up, get fatter and lazier, and develop halitosis, but even the ugliest dog beats no dog at all – especially if you tie a DayGlo bandanna around its neck. Plus, getting a dog is much easier than making a friend. Finding friends takes a lot of time and effort, but all you have to do to find a dog is visit your local animal shelter. Sure, there’s also the many years of feeding, walking, washing, and following it around with a plastic bag, but if you’re friendless in the first place, it might help with your character development. This weekend you can get further instruction on the care and feeding of your wingman at Republic Square Park, where the Austin Parks Foundation and the Alamo’s Rolling Roadshow are screening Christopher Guest’s classic, Best in Show. This bring-your-wing event also includes dog training demos, dog agility demos, silly pet tricks, and giveaways from Emancipet, the city’s Scoop the Poop Program (huh?), Lofty Dog, and the Austin Parks Foundation. You could come solo, but if you do you might want to bring a pocketful of skinny balloons.

B Scene

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 29, 2008

To say that Texans have a bit of a cultural chip on their shoulders is a gross understatement – sort of like saying there’s not much fresh air in outer space or that the KKK is racially insensitive. The ugly truth is that the folks who settled Texas were pretty much riff-raff: Immigrants, opportunists, criminals, rubes, and other desperate types looking for the big score – sort of like Qua on a Saturday night. Sounds like a lot of fun, until you realize the shark tank dance floor is just chump bait for gold diggers and leased Lexus douche bags with nugget jewelry. Back in the day, of course, clubbing was an entirely different activity, and when people sported nuggets, it didn’t mean they were frontin’, it just meant they had poor hygiene. Most importantly, there wasn’t a lot of high art going on, which is understandable. When you’ve spent the whole day busting sod in the Panhandle, chopping cedar in the Hill Country, or slogging through an East Texas swamp hunting nutria, it tends to put the kibosh on your artistic oeuvre. Though some would have you believe differently, art isn’t a necessity; it’s a luxury. Art is what you do when your stomach is full and you’re not freezing to death or parched with thirst or trying to outrun a vicious mountain lion. Happily, all of that early industriousness and opportunism eventually paid off, and today Texans are able to buy all the art their hearts and tax accountants desire. Except … most Texans wouldn’t know what art was even if it smacked them in the head like an oak two-by-four (which might, in fact, be folk art if it was colorfully painted by a toothless, barefoot Appalachian illiterate). Furthermore, Texans generally don’t care that they don’t know art … until they get some money or some edumacation or both. That’s when things really get ugly, and the cultural pissing match begins. Just because ol’ Jed became a billionaire without the advantage of a high school diploma doesn’t mean he doesn’t have culture. In fact, he’s probably got bigger and better culture than any Art History major from Wellesley – and if he doesn’t, he’s willing to pay for it. Nobody out-cultures a Texan, which goes a long way in explaining why Texas is blessed with some of the finest art museums in the nation. One of them, the Blanton, is right down on MLK. Not only is the Blanton the third largest museum in Texas, it’s also the largest university art museum in the country – might have something to do with the fact that its genesis was a $12 million gift from Houston “Endowment” Inc. Regardless, eat it, New York. Texas wins. We’re crazy sick with culture. If you want to see for yourself, you can for 10 bucks this Friday, at the Blanton’s monthly B Scene party. Not only can you check out the Blanton’s wicked big art collection, you can nosh on complimentary hors d’oeuvres, drink “Blantinis,” watch a sample theatrical piece from the Fuse Box Festival, and groove to the sound of Austin’s own Future Clouds & Radar. This deal is totally worth the money. Aren’t you glad Austin is endowed?

Lone Star State Jam

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 22, 2008

It’s a good thing Texans were smart enough to put in all those toll roads before gas got so expensive. We probably couldn’t even afford to build them now what with the economy swirling down the toilet. Imagine what it would cost to haul all that concrete these days. Fortunately, folks around here were farsighted enough to plan for the future, which is why we built six lanes of toll road access to pastureland out in Manor. Fuck it. People are eventually going to get tired of those breathtaking West Austin Hill Country views and demand to live downwind from the dump and closer to the flea market. Sooner or later, those happy rubes out in Lakeway are going to grow weary of driving their Hummers and Escalades up those steep grades and swap them for Smart Cars and solar-powered manufactured green housing. It’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, think of all the money and gas we’re saving as we whoosh down those huge empty concrete slabs in our Tex-tagged, half-ton four-wheel drive extend-a-cabs on the way to the office. It’s a long, lonely drive, but when you own a rugged half-acre of well-graded, treeless suburbia, you need a vehicle with a headache rack, a chrome-plated brush guard, and all-terrain mud tires that can negotiate a 5% incline driveway and tow your his-and-hers Sea-Doos out to the boat ramp at Carlos’n Charlie’s. Yes, it’s painful to have to shell out the better part of a hundie every week at the Tiger Mart, but it beats the indignity of having to share personal space at the Park-n-Ride with all those state worker commuter chumps. Plus, where would you put your matching “Bud” and “Sissy” personalized Texas license plates? And do you think that those new light-rail commuter trains are going to have gun racks, spittoons, or deer-poaching spotlights? Think again. They’ll probably have Internet access, though, which will be really nice when gas hits $10 a gallon and the only economical way to get to your big suburban spread will be by train or mule. Now might be a good time to get right with public transportation – maybe learn to interact with real people on a daily basis, learn how to be friendly again. That’s what Texas is all about anyway, isn’t it? Friendliness? Isn’t that our state motto or something? It’s also a town in Texas, but you probably can’t afford to drive there. Instead, you could take the bus down to Waterloo Park this Saturday for the Lone Star State Jam, a full day of Texas and Red Dirt (code word: Oklahoman) music benefiting Young Texans Against Cancer and the Dell Children’s Medical Center. Tickets are $32.50, but that’s way less than you’d spend driving to Friendship, and you get to see these exciting acts: Kevin Fowler, Cross Canadian Ragweed (the other CCR), the Eli Young Band, Cory Morrow, Roger Creager, Wade Bowen, Bleu Edmondson, Adam Hood, Ryan James, and the Bart Crow Band. And if it makes you feel any better, most of these acts will be arriving in buses, too.

ColdTowne Improv and All-Night Sixties Dance Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 15, 2008

Comedy is hard. Not everyone can be Moe, Larry, Curly … or even Shemp. Some people are just born without a funny bone. It’s not a completely debilitating handicap. Look at how well Deadeye Dick Cheney has done for himself. Funny as he is, Donald Trump is never intentionally so. Marilyn Manson is a laugh riot who never even cracks a smile, and if you’ve ever been pulled over for doing 90 in a school zone with an open container, you probably share the suspicion that the only cops with a sense of humor are the fictional ones in Police Academy (which, unfortunately, cannot be said of all six sequels to Police Academy). Still, the world is full of humorless wretches who, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, set off on a journey to find their missing part. Some of them make their way into the clergy or politics or the funeral home business, and some (thankfully just a few) end up in improv troupes. It’s unavoidable, really. People, on the whole, are basically good, and it takes a real asshole to jettison the dead weight that’s dragging down a comedy team. It’s much easier to send them out to get coffee or have them play an inanimate object like a chair or a footstool. Ever wonder how mimes got started? “Just shut the fuck up, Marcel, and go stand behind that imaginary glass wall.” Watching a mime is always an uncomfortable situation, but watching unfunny improv can be every bit as unsettling. At least Cirque du Soleil’s tent is roomy enough to offer a reasonably discreet exit when things get too creepy, but most improv theatres aren’t big enough to avoid direct, soulful eye contact with the performers. Mimes might be sad, but seeing an improv comedy troupe bomb at close range is as emotionally exhausting as watching someone strangling baby bunnies. Therefore, when it comes to improv – or rather, if it must, you should always take care to choose a troupe composed of people you’re not employed by, rooming with, dating, or paying rent to. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Sure helps if you live someplace like Copperas Cove; otherwise there’s statistical probability someone on stage works with you at Party Pig. Fuck it, you’ve got to roll the dice every once in a while. Why not this Saturday at ColdTowne Theatre behind the I Luv Video on Airport? Starting at 10pm comedy troupes ColdTowne and Look Cookie throw down with an hour and a half of High Larry Us improv. ColdTowne has won numerous awards including two Chronicle “Best of Austin” awards, so chances are you’ll spend at least part of the evening convulsed … with laughter. Don’t bust a lung, though; starting at 11:30pm is the Mod Party, an all night Sixties dance party that lasts until 6am – just in time for a healthy donut breakfast at Mrs. Johnson’s. Cover for the improv and the dance party clocks in at under $16, but it’s BYOB, so you know the drinks are going to be stiff.

Sex Toy Coming Out Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 8, 2008

As interesting as everyone makes it out to be, sex is one of the most unoriginal things you can do as (or with) a human being … ditto for just about every other vertebrate as well. You had sex. Big whoop. We’re supposed to applaud? Do you expect a big pat on the back for breathing, taking a whiz, or going No. 2? Yes, sex is an activity you share in common with Brangelina, George Clooney, and Heidi Klum, but you also share it with Rosie O’Donnell, Donald Trump, and that guy with the plumber’s crack who works the suck hose on the honey-dipper truck. Get some. Birds do it; bees do it; even educated fleas do it. What makes you think you’re so special? Really, the amazing thing – the anomaly is when you’re not doing it. As any priest will tell you, abstinence takes balls. You really have to not want to. You have to be absolutely unwilling to take matters into your own hands. You have to get right with the harebrained notion that nature will just take its course and hop right in your lap – and with ample lubrication. Not even Jesus could pull that off, so why should you? And yet, even if you’re not pulling it off, regular sex can get monotonous after a while. Even Dr. Ruth would agree that for the most part, it’s just in-out, in-out, until the right amount of friction/stimulation is achieved. Of course, sex is much more complicated than that, especially when explored in an HBO special. In the real world, however, people don’t need a lot of whistles and bells to pop off – at least not the first few thousand times. Once you have the hang of things, though, the general consensus is that it’s good to mix it up a bit, maybe bring in some vegetables or a well-manicured hamster or a goat or a monkey or maybe even the entire Sugar’s lunch shift. Some magazine articles will tell you that the best sex organ is your imagination. That may be right, but the more likely explanation is that they just don’t want to show the pictures. Everybody knows that pound for pound, the best sex organs are the kind that end with an “is.” Ask Clinton. He liked his is wrapped in a Lewinsky. Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to have an intern under their desk or a sugar daddy who’ll use them as a makeshift humidor. The vast swath of humanity has a different fall-back plan: Objects that stimulate the ises – inanimate pleasure slaves that fit in the nightstand or maybe your Dooney & Bourke. Until recently (the day before Valentine’s, to be exact), those objects were considered to be “obscene devices” according to Texas Penal Code. It took us 27 years to loosen up, but we finally did, and to celebrate, Forbidden Fruit is having a Sex Toy Coming Out Party this Saturday, April 12, from 2pm to 6pm. Enjoy live music from Heather Bishop’s Graceful Riot and Tribella, and witness the ceremonial removal of signs and release forms from the obscene devices. There will also be lots of free stuff and a drawing for a “rabbit habit,” which, though it has a little hare on it, doesn’t need to be manicured.

15th Annual Louisiana Swamp Thing and Crawfish Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 1, 2008

Crawfish look like dark, runty lobsters – exactly the type of desperate, freaky cuisine expressly forbidden in the Old Testament. It’s like the Lord was saying that if you’re willing to stoop that low on the food chain in order to survive, you weren’t looking forward to heaven anyway, right? Have some dignity, mortals. If man truly was made in God’s image (woman, too, only on the nights when He’s cross-dressing), then you can probably bet that He doesn’t want to see mini replicas of Himself drunk on Bud Light and covered with saltwater and bug innards. “Levi, take that out of your mouth this instant, and go eat some matzo.” Of course, God seems to have slacked up on the rules a bit in the last couple of thousand years, otherwise Mother Teresa would have had to leave Calcutta one week a month so she could experience the shame of her menses in isolation and seclusion. Sucks to be unclean, yo. Well, at least in a biblical sense. Eating crawfish is filthy too, and in the most genteel of worlds, people would only do it in isolation and seclusion – say, up some remote backwater bayou you can only get to with a fan boat and a machete. Plus, as any Cajun will tell you in a nearly indecipherable patois, when you eat crawfish, you have to “suck the head.” They even make T-shirts about it – which somehow end up sleeveless before the cash register even rings. Why? Because it’s steamy on the bayou, and the phrase “suck the head” sounds nasty even if you’re doing it to a dead freshwater crustacean. And really, if you’re willing go down on a mudbug, you deserve to have it publicized on your T-shirt. In fact, all crazies should be clearly marked. At least marathoners recognize this and pin huge numbers to their chests to let everyone know they’re fucking bat-shit insane from all those surging endorphins. Say what you will about crackheads, stoners, and assorted other dope fiends; not a single one would run 26 miles to get a buzz on. True nutjobs like that should be avoided like Ebola – maybe even outfitted with orange prison jumpsuits. If you’ve ever been trapped at a cocktail party listening to some health nut’s workout soliloquy, you fully understand and appreciate the need for early detection and avoidance. In terms of vices, sucking mudbugs barely even rates as a misdemeanor. You have to ask yourself: Which is worse? A parking lot full of sweaty, mud-fingered drunks or a street full of sweaty, Jamba Juice-swilling bores? If you’re on the fence, maybe you should consider the musical lineup. The Swamp Thing has George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. George Clinton is entertaining even when he’s sleeping. Plus they have other fun acts with fun names: Cowboy Mouth, Chubby Carrier, Bonerama, Dirtfoot, Dr. Zog, Big Chief Kevin Goodman, a burlesque troupe, and zydeco dance lessons, which is how Cajuns purge when they don’t want to stick a muddy finger down their throat. Ahh, laissez les bons temps rouler!

Nancy Coplin’s Big 6-0 Benefit for HAAM

The Luv Doc Recommends

March 25, 2008

There is so much money in Austin. It’s crazy, isn’t it? All those penthouse condominiums, lakeside estates, and hillside mansions that stretch all the way to the horizon and beyond have to be owned by someone, right? Who are these people? Where do they come from? And most importantly, where did they get all that goddamned money? Austin is the Live Music Capital of the World, so naturally you would think that the majority of Austin’s high-dollar real estate is owned by scruffy, tattooed, coke-snorting rock stars who sleep past lunch and spend their afternoons wallowing in coconut oil greased kiddie pools filled with Girls Gone Wild. The ugly truth of the matter is that there aren’t any musicians in Austin who fit that bill. In fact, only Billy Gibbons could make that type of thing happen (OK, maybe Britt Daniel, but he doesn’t really seem like he’s into that scene). Sadly, Billy Gibbons doesn’t even live in Austin unless you count his occasional sojourns at the Four Seasons – swank digs, to be sure, but lounging poolside with a mangorita while a dude in a white coat brings you treys of cold washcloths and spritzes you with a mist bottle full of Evian doesn’t really rank as a double-devil-horns-type, rock & roll experience, even if you’re chilling in a colorful knit cap and sporting the beard of Methuselah. At some point you have to get amped up enough to defenestrate a TV set or something. Just saying. In reality, the working musician in that scenario is probably the guy in the white coat pulling the trigger on the spritzer. Life is full of vicious ironies isn’t it? Maybe “Live Music Capital” should be amended to the more appropriate “Live Music Capital (Loss) of the World.” Let’s not pull anyone’s chain. Musicians in this town are cheap whores – at least the successful ones – the rest are just sluts trying to work their way up to being whores. Sounds a trifle insulting on the surface, but at least a slut does it for love, and isn’t that the best reason to make music? Of course it is, but the payments on those new high rise condos aren’t going to be built from the tip-jar cash at the Mean Eyed Cat – at least not until the inevitable real estate bust. Until then, artistic types will have to depend on the monetary largesse of the people who enjoy the benefits of their artistic largesse. After all, those Downtown condos didn’t spring up so people could enjoy the pretty office buildings and corporate culture, did they? Nuh unh. So, Austin, how do you afford your rock & roll lifestyle? Here’s how: By supporting organizations who support the musicians who make Austin such an interesting and desirable place to live. For instance, this Sunday you can attend Nancy Coplin’s Big 6-0 Benefit for HAAM at Antone’s on Fifth Street. Coplin, whose primary job of recent years has been supporting Austin music by booking bands into actual paying gigs at Bergstrom Airport, is celebrating her 60th birthday with a benefit for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, which provides low cost primary health care services for uninsured professional musicians in the Austin area. Even if you’re not overwhelmed with gratitude, the lineup for this gig is well worth the $15 cover. Acts scheduled to perform include Marcia Ball, Delbert McClinton, Wendy Colonna, Shelly King, Sunny Sweeny, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ricky Trevino, Ruben Ramos, and Stephen Bruton. It’s not a kiddie pool full of GGW, but it should be a great show since they’re all doing it for love.

KOOP Easter Sunday Soiree

The Luv Doc Recommends

March 18, 2008

Here’s hoping your band got signed last week so you can peel off those skinny jeans and let that thing breathe for a while. Your privates don’t need to be sealed up like a Nazi treasure cave or Christ’s tomb. It was 95 degrees last Friday. Heat like that demands a certain amount of ventilation, so unless you’re cooking up a big batch of cooter stew, you can untruss yourself and just … by God … let it flap around a little. Plus, if the sales associate at Urban Outfitters wasn’t tea-bagging Mammon, she would have done you a solid and had you turn your ass to the mirror so she could point out the areas where you and the anorexic model in the Lucky Magazine ad diverge morphologically. It’s so hard to get good service these days that honest service is just a pipe dream – sort of like your skinny jeans. Same deal for your drummer. Tell him he doesn’t always have to dress like he did in the picture on your MySpace page. You were going for that brooding goth look, which dovetails rather nicely with the climatological idiosyncrasies of the Pacific Northwest, but to survive in the music business, you have to adapt. Get out some scissors. Carve up some evil looking Daisy Dukes. Don’t worry that the world can see all your ingrown leg hairs. We were already imagining them. It’s OK to be all funereal and whatnot, but trolling around in a black hoody, leather pants, and Dr. Frank-N-furter mascara in the middle of a sunny afternoon in the ATX isn’t goth, it’s just fucking silly, and being silly is pretty much anti-goth – at least as anti-goth as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, who were more about kicking ass than shopping at Hot Topic. Point is, you can unbutton, unbuckle, and undo now because there isn’t anyone left in town to impress. No matter how we tried to front last week, Austin is still Austin, after all, and even the sharks in the dance floor at Qua could care less about your high-dollar, ghetto-girl wardrobe. Shit, they’ve been staring up into the eye of God for so long now they’re blind to the window dressing anyway. So just relax, let your hair down and have a noncorporate sponsored beer of your choosing. You might have to pay for it out of your own pocket, but karmically at least, it’s much less expensive. Sometimes free isn’t really free at all. Take radio for instance. You can either pay for it up front (Sirius, XM) or pay for it on the back end by having to listen to annoying ads. Ever find yourself humming the jingle for a plastic surgery center? Yeah, you’re going to hell, but before your flesh is consumed in an eternal lake of fire, you might want to drop by Ruta Maya International HQ this Easter Sunday to support the resurrection of KOOP, Austin’s free community radio station that was the victim of a recent arson attempt. Starting at 8pm you can rock out to a truly Austintatious musical lineup including Wendy Colonna, Carolyn Wonderland, Shelley King, Dave Madden, Dan Dyer, and Guy Forsyth. Wear your skinny jeans if you want, but just remember: No one will care.

SXSW Free Concert

The Luv Doc Recommends

March 10, 2008

OK, let’s do this. Cue the intro vocals to Starship’s “We Built This City.” You feeling that? Are you ready to throw hair and pump fist? Is the fist wrist accessorized with a colorful bandana? After all, this is the Starship we’re talking about, not Axe. Otherwise you’d be rocking something in stainless-steel spiked leather, right? Let’s pump it up, yo – take this thing to the next level. This is Austin, Texas, baby: Home of South by Southwest – the largest music festival in the known universe. Instead of a couple thousand bands fighting a chain-link grudge match just to get booked in a handful of venues for low/no pay (after all, Austin is the “Live Music Capital of the World” every day of the year and not just the four days in March when the weather’s actually tolerable) this week there are like a zillion bands scratching and clawing to play anywhere they can for anyone at any time: the street, back yards, living rooms, tailgates, parking lots … and sometimes in actual SXSW venues … which are basically any place you can run an extension cord and hang a banner whose names and addresses appear out of thin air on the SXSW schedule. Habana Calle 6 Annex Backyard? Creekside EMC @ Hilton Garden? Sure, we know where Habana is, but where is the annex? And the annex has a back yard? What does EMC stand for? Entirely mentally constructed? WTF SXSW? There are thousands of musicians all over the world with fond memories of playing in an Austin club that never even existed. “Hey dude, if you ever get down to Austin you need to book a gig at the Habana Annex Backyard. I don’t remember the address, but they have really ass-kicking mojitos.” Of course, if you think the folks at SXSW are the only ones crapping venues out of midair, think again. Pretty much every place in town with something to sell seems to clear out a space to put a crappy PA and daylong lineup of desperate musicians. It’s certainly OK to try to hack off a piece of Austin’s biggest cash cow, but as usual, the musicians are usually the ones who end up getting chumped. No matter what the owner tells you, having a “showcase” at an antiques store in Kyle during SXSW is not the same thing as having a SXSW showcase. Sure, you could argue the dubious merits of either, but the former only has a highly tangential relationship to the latter – similar to the way Dwight Schrute is “assistant to the manager” rather than “assistant manager.” Whatever. Part of becoming a playing musician is getting played every now and then. Still, as often as not, the users get used as well. It’s hard to say whether providing free music, barbecue, and booze to several hundred slackers, musicians, and SXSW volunteers during a day party provides any real boost to a company’s long-term viability, but it sure makes for a nice buzz that day. The same could be said of the free SXSW concerts at Auditorium Shores. Those big-name sponsors may not be feeling it on the back end, but the locals seem to appreciate the fact that SXSW is giving them a reach around. If the word gets out, this Saturday’s concert should be one of the bigger ones in recent years. The lineup features big name acts like Lyrics Born, Talib Kweli, and Ice Cube. SXSW might have built this city on rock & roll, but Saturday night they’re definitely going to burn it up with some rap.

Texas State Arts Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 25, 2008

If you don’t think laser hair removal is an art, think again. It’s not all about carving landing strips and bisecting unibrows. There may be occasions where a customer requests to have his back hair depilated in a facsimile of C.M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker or his butt rug burned into Escher’s mirror ball. Exacting craftsmanship like that requires a steady laser hand and a finely honed aesthetic. Just because they don’t offer laser hair removal classes at the École des Beaux-Arts (which is, of course, pure conjecture based on the idea that the French are both stuck up about their art and huge body hair fetishists) doesn’t exclude laser hair removal from the arts entirely. Similarly, art made in Texas isn’t necessarily automatically relegated to a starving artist sale in the basement of an interstate Ramada. There are plenty of Beaux Artistes here in Texas – and not just the ones selling painted driftwood on the side of the road next to the beef-jerky stand. There are gobs at the flea markets and in the booths in front of the Fiesta Mart. After all, what would the world be without dream catchers and rope dragons and sea shell art and wind chimes? And what about chain-saw sculpture? Why fuck around with a chisel and knife when you can lay into your art with 3.5 horsepower of ozone-depleting artistry? Want a log that looks like a bear? Want another one? How about a set? Maybe a coffee table made of tree trunk slices? Imagine Rodin trying to sculpt The Thinker with a screaming, bucking 40cc Poulan “Wild Thing?” Wouldn’t happen. Chain-sawing, even as an artistic outlet doesn’t involve a lot of deep thinking. The chain saw is surely an ingenious feat of engineering, but like NASCAR, the guy running the machine usually isn’t the brains of the operation. Ol’ Leatherface was crafty enough to outsmart a few teenagers, but he was still a far cry from a Mensa membership. Nonetheless, the happy news for chain-sawers – and Texans too for that matter – is that art isn’t a brain-heavy endeavor. At its core, art is about communicating emotionally rather than intellectually – sort of like George W. in a presidential debate. Artistic genius is, to say the least, a different type of genius. Pollock splattering canvases with paint or Mapplethorpe shoving a bullwhip up his ass or Christo wrapping islands in pink polypropylene takes a certain amount of noodle, no doubt, but it’s not like they were designing fusion reactors. So in other words, when it comes to art, the pressure’s off – intellectually at least, which makes Texas a great place for artists of all stripes, many of whom will be in residence at this weekend’s Texas Arts Festival, a two-day art and fun filled event celebrating Texas independence and art. Not only will there be nearly 100 booths filled with arts, crafts, food, and drink, there will also be live music from morning to night by diverse artists like Sunny Sweeney, American Graveyard, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Grupo Fantasma. All told, 28 bands will take the stage Saturday through Sunday. At a $5 cover, that comes to just under 18 cents per band. When was the last time you saw Ray Wylie Hubbard for 18 cents? You don’t need to be a scientist to see that’s a damn good deal. Maybe you can take all the money you saved and get your cooter depilated to look like the Mona Lisa.

Spring Salsa Dance Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 19, 2008

“You’re painting by numbers/Connecting the dots/They don’t have to tell you you don’t call the shots/You jump when they say jump/and you don’t ask how high/’cause painting by numbers they know you’ll get by – James McMurtry, “Painting by Numbers” Salsa dancers look at their feet a lot. For the dancers themselves, this might just be a comfort mechanism, a way of mentally rehearsing the steps before they happen – the peace of mind of knowing what’s just ahead. For the wallflowers, whose primary solace is making catty comments about the grace of the chosen, this type of foresight is both annoying and dull – comparable to watching someone who moves their lips when reading. Like karaoke or NASCAR or ice-skating, the thrill of watching people dance is not derived from how well the participants perform, but rather from how badly they screw up. Sure, it’s a blast doing the “white-man’s overbite” or the “sorority-girl step through” or the “broken-armed robot,” but watching someone butcher any of the aforementioned is even funner. This is precisely why dancing is so popular, not just because it’s entertaining for the people who do it well, but because it’s equally entertaining for the people who don’t. Why? Because dancing is something nearly everyone has tried at one time or another. They might have failed miserably at it themselves, but even the most horrible dancer has just enough dance experience to be an excellent critic. Should you let this stop you from dancing? Absolutely not. You should, in fact, embrace it. Ridicule is an excellent forge of character. If you’ve never endured the merciless ridicule of friends and peers, you probably aren’t living. At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to live your life crippled by self-consciousness and doubt, or at least occasionally give yourself over to bouts of wild-eyed abandon. Or, maybe you just need some training wheels for those fits of wild-eyed abandon. If so, Salsa dancing might be just the ticket for you. For many people, even having fun demands some guidelines, a framework in which to be wild and crazy. Salsa dancing looks pretty wild and crazy. You can find out for yourself this Friday at the Texas Union Ballroom, where UT Informal Classes is hosting the Spring Salsa Dance Festival 2008 featuring salsa, merengue, cha-cha, and probably a lot of other dances you don’t know anything about. Don’t sweat it. From 8 to 9pm there will be free salsa lessons. Once you’ve got the whole salsa thing nailed, one of Austin’s favorite and long-standing latin flavored bands, the Brew, will be cranking out dance music until well after midnight. Even if you think you’re a shitty dancer, it wouldn’t hurt to give this deal a try. If nothing else, it brings the shoegazing thing to a whole new participatory level, that’s for sure.

Harold and Maude

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 11, 2008

If there is a god in heaven, you weren’t even a zygote in 1971, otherwise you’re one of those hags or geezers who are dragging the Chronicle’s demos north … as in up I-35 toward Sun City. As far as the publishing business goes, that’s a death march – certainly for the alternative press, whose advertisers like to think they’re tapping into an age range where “MySpace” means a web page and not a burial plot. Apparently the older and looser you get, the more your purse strings tighten (unless, of course, you want to buck the trend and blow a lot of money on vaginal reconstruction). Really, the alternative press should be nothing but thankful for the enthusiastic support of the “me” generation. They brought us into this world and they will very likely take us out of it. With any luck however, their children will get hooked on us like Starbucks or trailer-trash crank and we can blather on for a few more years – at least until the rapture. If you were actually alive and sentient in 1971, you probably don’t need to be told why Harold and Maude is perhaps the second most important American movie made that year, holding down the silver between gold medalist Billyjack and bronze medalist Shaft. Yes, there were other noteworthy contenders that year like Academy Award winner The French Connection (aka the un-American Connection), and runners up A Clockwork Orange (too British), Fiddler on the Roof (too Russian), Nicholas and Alexander (ditto) and The Last Picture Show (too Texan). Billyjack wins, of course, because like America, Billyjack wants to be perceived as peaceful, but he pretty much spends all his time kicking ass, not to mention the movie itself is a fist-pumping, peyote-dropping, hippie-loving martial arts flick done up in a Southwestern motif. Fiddler on the What? Harold and Maude, on the other hand is a touching primer on cougaring (Google it) with wicked sick cinematography by John A. Alonzo (who like Gary Oldman and the Oscars, has been inexplicably snubbed for posthumous induction into the Texas Film Hall of Fame) and a whimsical soundtrack by Cat Stevens before he started sucking up to the muslims. Harold and Maude wasn’t the first film to deal with cougaring. 1967’s The Graduate certainly got that ball rolling in fine style, but Harold and Maude unquestionably took cougaring to a freakish extreme by pairing a baby-faced, death obsessed 19-year-old Bud Cort with the grizzled/wizened/hoary but perky 79-year-old Ruth Gordon. To his credit, director Hal Ashby managed to keep from turning art house theatres into vomitoriums by crafting Harold and Maude into a touching seize-the-day parable instead of depraved wallow in granny porn. It’s a feat that may never be so skillfully duplicated again, though many have tried. In fact, right here in Austin a plucky young director named Steve Bilich is bringing Harold and Maude to the stage at Mercury Hall with his mother Sue Bilich playing the role of Maude, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Not even Freud on a coke binge could dream up a scenario this bizarre (i.e., a 16-year-old even faking getting it on with a woman in her 70s), so you’ll surely want to be on hand to take in the spectacle. Maybe you’ll meet a cougar yourself, or maybe by reading the Chronicle you already have.