Schmillion – The Pleasurecraft

Augusat 24, 2011

The 2011 Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival is this Sunday at Waterloo Park. That’s all you really need to know. Even still, you might have some questions. You might, for instance, wonder why the Hot Sauce Festival logo features a dude on a dirt bike. Touché. Nailed us on that one. Dirt bikes are wicked cool and whatnot, but they don’t really have much to do with hot sauce. Correct. So, why is there a dirt bike in the logo? Here’s why: Because it isn’t a Doberman in a Quaker bonnet or a clown with a vacuum cleaner. It’s not difficult to imagine that after 21 years of Hot Sauce Festival logos, we’ve completely exhausted meaningful hot sauce iconography. We’ve had the chips and hot sauce bowls; the cowboy/-girl riding the jalapeño; the hot-sauce-eating bat/armadillo; the sweating, hot-sauce-eating Satan; the happy tomato; and even a logo that included a cherub with flames shooting out of its mouth and ass. Like Keith Richards, we’ve pretty much done it all. Next year expect a logo that features Slim Pickens riding a jalapeño into an apocalyptic bowl of hot sauce. Just sayin’. Nonetheless, if you’re counting on this year’s logo for information about what to expect at the festival, that’s probably a mistake. Yes there will be flames and peppers, but dirt bikes are strictly verboten on festival grounds, even if they are wicked cool. There are, however, some things you can expect, so you should be prepared. Expect it to be hot. Not only will the temperature be in the 100-plus range, there be will thousands of hot, sweaty people who will be radiating a considerable amount of heat themselves – an amazing amount of biomass considering the temperature. Plus, they will all be eating hot sauce and swearing – with watery eyes and flushed faces – that they love it. They really do too … so much that they bring along their children, even babies in strollers (who truly wouldn’t want to miss it), as well as dogs (ideally festooned with a jaunty bandana fastened about the neck to ward off the chill) and all manner of other attention-grabbing fauna: sugar gliders, hamsters, snakes, parrots, falcons, really anything that might entice a curious member of the opposite sex to strike up a conversation. Really, if you haven’t bought a spider monkey in an attempt to reel in some strange at an outdoor festival, you probably don’t even care about getting laid at all. Something else you should expect at the Hot Sauce Festival: dirty feet. If that’s something that bothers you, keep your chin up. Shoes are hot. Dirty feet in flip-flops are not. It’s that simple. You may have the priciest pedicure in town, but after you’ve shuffled around Waterloo Park in late August for a few hours, your feet are going to look like you spent the day hippie-spin-dancing at a Leftover Salmon concert. That’s bad, yes, but it could be worse: You could be wearing Vibram FiveFingers. That kind of ugly you can’t wash off. There’s plenty of pretty stuff, too. Some people actually look better when they’re hot and sweaty. Just think of the Hot Sauce Festival as one big, hot oil-wrestling match with snacks included – only the hot oil is perspiration. Well, either it’s that or the tiny sample drop of habanero oil on the end of a toothpick that ruins your taste buds for the rest of the day. Really, the only way to fight the heat is with ass-coal bear. No, that’s not a typo. It’s a phonetic representation of the way Texans pronounce the phrase “ice-cold beer.” You could also drink ass-coal warter, but that wouldn’t make it a festival, would it? Water isn’t very festive, but bands are, and the Hot Sauce Festival has a lineup that will surely dirty up your dancing feet: Schmillion, Moonlight Social, Foot Patrol, La Guerrilla, and the Bright Light Social Hour. Best of all, the Hot Sauce Festival doesn’t put a dent in your wallet; it frees up space in your pantry. All it takes to get in is a donation of three nonperishable food items to the Capital Area Food Bank. That’s all you really need to know.

March 2, 2011

If this year’s Academy Awards taught us anything, it’s that no matter how many successful flights you’ve had, you can’t just put the plane on autopilot and go take a nap in the back. Sure, it might work out … but there’s also a really good chance you’ll leave a charred crater in some wheat field in South Dakota. Last Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a spectacularly ugly crash – at least metaphorically speaking. A few minutes after the now obligatory introductory montage, you could hear the air hissing out of the tires. It’s not that the hosts weren’t fascinating and charming. James Franco brought his trademark Cheshire-cat-holding-in-a-bong-hit smile, and Anne Hathaway brought her Disney princess looks, eight spectacular dresses, and more bubbly enthusiasm than any host in recent memory, but it still wasn’t enough to drag the dead horse of the Oscars across the finish line. No, that was left to a bunch of public school kids in T-shirts. T-shirts? WTFingF? It’s the Academy Awards, not Tosh.0. Surely the Academy has enough petty cash lying around to pimp each and every one of those kids out like Liberace … or at the very least Jay-Z. Instead, they were dressed like they were hired to pick up trash on the side of the interstate. Stay classy Oscar. Worse yet, the T-shirts had each kid’s respective chorus section printed on the front. Wow. Apparently the Academy thinks that kids who go to public schools in Staten Island must be too retarded to know where to stand without looking at the front of their T-shirts. Saving money by hiring a couple of noobs to host the awards is almost understandable (hey, with the type of sharp, pithy writing the Oscars are known for, a trained monkey could host, right?). In these tough economic times you have to think outside the box, but going cheap on the big closing number is just unforgivable. Those poor kids sang their hearts out, and all they got was a lousy T-shirt? Somewhere over the rainbow the dreams that you dare to dream really don’t come true … well, unless maybe you’re Charlie Sheen, who somehow managed to overcome the hardship of being born the son of a Hollywood celebrity by transforming himself into a tiger-blooded, bitchin’ rock star from Mars with the ability to turn tin cans into pure gold. Talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps … even if it is just to snort a line of coke off a porn star’s bare ass. If the Academy truly wanted an entertaining Oscars ceremony, it would have hired Charlie “Chuckles” Sheen. It would have cost the Academy a few million dollars and a briefcase full of blow, but it would have been a psychotic laugh riot of Alex Jones Show magnitude. Instead, the Academy got cocky (not unlike Sheen himself) and slaughtered its cash cow. The same could never be said of South by Southwest, the little local music festival that blossomed into the world’s largest – seemingly overnight. Well, not exactly. This year marks a full quarter-century of SXSW’s existence, and through all that time, the oversight of SXSW’s directors has been vigilant, perhaps even psychotically obsessive. It could easily be argued that this obsession fueled not only SXSW’s prolific growth, but Austin’s emergence as the cultural mecca of the Southwest. This Saturday at the Austin History Center you can hear two of SXSW’s directors, Roland Swenson and Louis Black talk about the last 25 years of the Festival in a panel discussion moderated by Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski. There will also be musical performances by locals Why Not Satellite, whose members actually played in the first SXSW, and Austin Music Award winners Schmillion, whose members weren’t even born yet. Later in the evening in Wooldridge Square Park will be a preview of the upcoming SXSW documentary Outside Industry: The Story of SXSW, as well as a screening of 1943 documentary Austin: The Friendly City.