Dale Watson’s Annual Christmas Show & Dance

The Luv Doc Recommends

December 22, 2009

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

Austin Chronicle’ Hot Sauce Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 27, 2009

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

Texas Testosterone Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 7, 2009

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