33rd Armadillo Christmas Bazaar

The Luv Doc Recommends

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.

Concert to Save Town Lake

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

JULY 17, 2007

Really, the question is, who wouldn’t want to live in $500,000 condo in a 44-story high rise on the breathtaking shores of Shoal Creek? Imagine leaning over your balcony railing on the 42nd floor and squinting downward at that tiny fissure of green space below and knowing that, just a few miles upstream under a bridge in Pease Park, a homeless man just dropped trow and is squeezing out a three-coiler on the dry creekbed – a pungent pâté of digested pizza rinds and cinnamon sticks from the Mr. Gattis Dumpster. Don’t worry, there’s not enough line in your Pocket Fisherman to get your lure below the 20th floor anyway, much less hit top water, so you don’t have to worry about reeling in a big batch of E. coli. Besides, it’s not like you really want to fish, it’s the idea that you could fish if you wanted to. You like to be close to the water, even if that water is a fetid drainage ditch for Downtown developers. Sign here … and here … and here. After all, you didn’t just spend half a mil on a condo, you bought a lifestyle. You wanted to be able to roll out of bed at 10am, take a quick four minute elevator ride to the ground floor and hire a pedicab to pump you up to Starbuck’s for a Vende Latteccino and a copy of The New York Times. Maybe afterward you could strap on your heavy hands and take your (circle one) Shih Tzu/Pomeranian/Chihuahua/Pekingese for a brisk power walk around Town Lake … but wait … some asshole put a 26-story condo right in the middle of the hike and bike trail. Worse yet, the City Council signed off on the deal. Now, just like the rest of Austin, you’re getting the runaround. Enraged, you shake your fist at the cranes and construction workers and without a trace of irony yell, “Damn you, developers! Damn you!” What kind of livable city is it when you can only enjoy Town Lake from behind the plate glass of an expensive condo? Well sure, it’s livable all right. So is the riverwalk in San Antonio. C’mon, they turned their drainage ditch into a tourism gold mine. With some knee-jerk urban planning and lack of foresight, Austin can turn Town Lake into a similar cement moat – maybe even with flatboats full of fat Midwestern conventioneers. Dare we dream? Maybe. If you want to have a voice in whether Austin will go from River City to Moat Metropolis, show up down at Stubb’s (nestled on the beautiful shores of Waller Creek) for the Concert to Save Town Lake, a fundraiser for Austinites for the Responsible Development of the Town Lake Corridor, an organization with a tough job and even tougher name from which to draw an anagram. Local musicians Bob Schneider, Dale Watson, Stephen Bruton, Jimmy Lafave, and Kinky Friedman will join forces to rock block the potential riverwalk.