Lucy's here. We've already been swimming once and gone for nice long walks more than that. She seems to like Texas.

I'll post some more when I'm not playing tour guide to a broken ankle hobbled sister.

Lucy The Dog

Lucy is in the Great State of Texas. She should be in my house, along with my sister, by dinner time tonight.

I’m getting my pup back.

A Public Service Announcement

Now that Microsoft has revealed themselves to not only be a Monopoly Hungry, Giant Corporate Bag of Ass Suck whose products are security risks, vulnerable to viruses and spyware, but also Corporate Cowards Who Abandon Long Held Company Principles To Placate Right Wing, Homophobic Bigots, isn’t it time you switched to Firefox?

Seriously. It’s a better product. It’s free. It’s not made by Microsoft. Go get it. There’s a button over there to your right.

South Congress Street, Austin, TX

The area of Austin known as South Congress (or SoCo if you have a big city desire to create a name by combining two longer words to make a shorter one) is perhaps Austin's most "hip" neighborhood. I call it the Williamsburg of Austin; it is the place to go to meet all your trucker hat needs.

Still, there are some great music clubs, including the legendary Continental Club which has played host to the likes of Elvis and Stevie Ray Vaughan over the years, some good restaurants and the side streets are among my favorite residential neighborhoods in town.

It's the real, old Austin, with funky houses, big old Pecan trees and outrageous profusions of flowers that might be called gardens but seem to lack the coherence that word usually implies.

I wandered around there yesterday and took in the sights.

But, what I love most of all is the occasional not so subtle reminder that though Austin is a Blue City State, it is surrounded by the vast Red State of the Rest of Texas.

Photoshop. Fun for the whole family.

Brown's Flower Shop, 43rd and Avenue A, Austin, TX









Pull Back the Veil



Look inside. Has the cat been guarding the store all this time?


Look closer. Is that old stock or something growing wild?


And nature brings chaos to a place that once tried to bring order to nature.

In a fit of procrastination today, I began organizing some of the photos from SXSW.

I like the shots from the two Trashcan Sinatras shows best, so I've put some of them up here and here.

I had good access at these and the light, shadows and colors were interesting. At least to me.

Bear with me. It’s been sometime since I sold my soul in order to partake of a number of pleasures specifically denied by Catholic doctrine. But, I seem to remember learning, during an interminable CCD class on a fine Saturday morning when I could have been outside, that the Pope is God’s Mouthpiece on Earth.

Which sounds pretty cool. I remember wondering if there was a sort of Bat Phone, connecting the Pope to the whims and declarations of the Almighty:

Interior, night. The sound of a phone ringing.

"Would someone answer the damn phone!"

"Office of the Holy See. How may I help you?"

"One moment please. Pontiff? It's for you?"

"At this hour?"

"Yes sir."

"Who in the name of Mary is calling me now? Don't you know what time it is?"

"He says it's God, your Holiness. He says it's urgent."

"Son of a Pharaoh. Okay. I'm coming. Tell him to keep his pants on."

But that is neither here nor there.

Instead, this is my understanding of how things work:

A bunch of old Cardinals, who are decidedly not God’s Mouthpiece on Earth, gather in the Vatican when a Pope goes to his heavenly reward (which, by the way, you have to assume kicks total ass). They lock themselves in a room. According to news reports over the last several days and the trashy Andrew Greeley novels I used to steal from my Grandmother, the Cardinals then vote in an atmosphere that would make a Democratic Ward Boss in Chicago cringe.

At the end of this, they’ve “elected” a new Pope. So, I want to know something. When the new Pope is elected, is that when he first becomes God’s Mouthpiece on Earth? Does it take a few days for the connection to be established? Can he feel it coming over him? I know doctrine says the Pope is only being God’s Mouthpiece when he speaks Ex Cathedra so does the new Pope secretly spend a few minutes privately saying to himself, “Ex Cathedra, not Ex Cathedra, Ex Cathedra, not Ex Cathedra” just to see what it feels like to have God speaking through him?

Because I totally would.

And, how does that Andrew Greeley know so much about sex, being a priest and all?

I don’t watch a lot of television these days, but I love me some of that Fox Network blockbuster 24 in which the former Mr. Julia Roberts saves the United States from the bad, bad plans of bad, bad men. But, this isn’t about that. Instead it’s about a commercial that aired tonight during the show, interrupting a scene in which the former Mr. Julia Roberts was trying to thwart bad, bad men from completing an element of their bad, bad plan.

In this commercial, advancing the agenda of the morally corrupt and throughly evil diamond industry, a man of roughly forty is vacationing with a woman of roughly forty. He says to her, “I’d marry you all over again,” or some such twaddle and then she realizes her mom and dad are there and he gets on one knee and, I guess, re-proposes. The whole square bursts into applause, so it’s either a really bored group of people or a “this is your life” moment, in which everyone in this little bit of Europe actually knows this couple. Fine.

But, then it goes to the screen with some fugly, sparkly diamond ring and the announcer tells us to promise you’ll love her forever with this 10th Anniversary Bauble Which Costs More Than the GDP of Half of Africa Where The Sparkly Bits Come From.

And, I’m thinking, as I wait for the former Mr. Julia Roberts to return to thwarting bad, bad men from completing their bad, bad plans, isn’t the whole idea of the first, “Till death do us part” deal with the first diamond ring to do with already having promised that you’ll love her forever?

Later this week, my sister will get behind the wheel of her car and point it towards Texas. Sitting in the back, with her nose pointed at the cracked window: Lucy.

I was sent this in an e-mail. I've no idea who created it or where it started. But it makes me laugh (Click on the image to enlarge and take special note of the sponsor at the bottom).

Of Course I'm Being Catty--Want to Make Something of It?

Like Ms. Bri, I’m willing to ascribe at least half of my loathing of Jonathan Safran Foer to sheer jealousy. He’s a big literary superstar with a hot wife and a lot of cash and his own brownstone. I’m not. The jealousy thing is valid.

But, and here’s the rub, I also suspect his work sucks. I don’t suspect it enough to actually read it and find out. I’m content to read about his books and make snarky comments thank you very much.

Towards that end, I’d like to direct everyone to Harry Siegel’s review of JSF’s latest tome in this week's New York Press.

Instead of my own thoughts, here’s a sampling of Siegel’s. If I ever read JSF, I hope to agree with him.

Having "read" Foer's latest—if that's what one does to this cut-and-paste assemblage of words, pictures, blank pages and pages where the text runs together and becomes illegible—it's time for bad form.

Foer isn't just a bad author, he's a vile one.

and

To be fair, such neglect might be in Foer's best interests, since the book is an Oprah-etic paean to innocence and verbosity as embodied by Foer's latest saintly stand-in (there was a character named Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated), nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who has a business card, speaks French, walks the city at odd hours by himself, writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other luminaries, knows more facts than any of the adults he speaks with, flirts with women, is a vegan, an atheist and otherwise equal parts unbelievable and unbearable. Foer, I should note, is a Jewish atheist, wrote letters to Susan Sontag when he was nine, and otherwise sounds like he'd make unbearable company, though perhaps not as much as the obnoxiously precocious, overeducated brat Schell. If Foer is beginning to sound like a minor Saul Bellow character (think the masturbating uncle in Mr. Sammler's Planet), he has only himself to blame.

and

Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald (the illustrations and Dresden), Borges (the grandparents divide their apartment into something and nothing), Calvino (a tale about the sixth borough that floated off, ripped off wholesale from Cosmicomics), Auster (in the whole city-of-symbols shtick), Night of the Hunter (the grandfather has Yes and No tattooed on his hands) and damn near every other author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning.

And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous. The book's themes—the sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write about—have nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden or Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.

Before aluminum cans; before two liter plastic bottles and before three liter, one and a half liter, twenty ounce, sixteen ounce and whatever other ounce plastic bottles; before corn sweetener; before diet; before cherry and before vanilla, before caffeine free; before caffeine free diet; before C2, before “"new"” and before the “"re-introduction”" of "“classic;"” before the marketing and research departments of a mega-corporation decided in the interests of sponsorship and branding and competition and cost effectiveness to tinker and expand, there was just plain Coke.

It came in satisfyingly heavy, sixteen ounce glass bottles, tinted a soft green. It sat in coolers and behind hinged doors in refrigerator machines. It was made sweet by the flavor of real sugar and didn'’t cloy in your mouth with the residue of corn syrup. It required a church key dangling from a chain or a bottle opener bolted to the wall or the deft use of a cigarette lighter to open. On a really hot day, the bottle would sweat in your hand and the cool glass against your brow felt like the memory of a mother'’s good night kiss.

One of my earliest memories is visiting the school where my mother then taught. In the faculty room, those glorious glass bottles of Coke waited in their machine, even as those bottles were fading from the American consciousness, replaced by the convenience and gluttony offered by their modern replacements. Later, on trips to the South, we sometimes came across those bottles and they were a rare treat. Now, the Coca-Cola Corporation, playing on nostalgia, puts out the little eight ounce brothers of those bottles around Christmas every year and even the large glass bottles are around sometimes, a luxury priced item, but the soda inside is still sweetened by corn syrup and while it tastes better than the Coke clad in plastic or aluminum, it is never as good as memory.

But, there is still a place where they make Coke the way God and Nature intended. In Mexico, the Coke is made sweet with real sugar. It is bottled in light green, heavy glass. You need a bottle opener to pop the top, and once it is open, there'’s no re-sealing it.

In New York, if you knew where to hunt, you could find Mexican Coca-Cola. There is a certain bodega on Park Slope'’s 5th Avenue that usually had a reliable supply. But you had to go out of your way. Here, due I suppose to a combination of geographic proximity and ethnic mix, it is widely available and it makes me very, very happy. Refresco indeed.

On a related note, there is one bottler left (in Dublin, TX) that makes Dr. Pepper with real sugar. It too comes in glass bottles and is damn near impossible to find. But you ain’t really been a Pepper until you’ve tasted it.

Friendship and Frisson

I discovered, over the last couple of years, that I’m really, really bad at dating. During those years when people first started to date, while everyone must have been going to movies or dinner or the malt shop, I was holed up in my room, reading books, damaging my hearing by blasting early REM records through my Walkman headphones and praying that puberty would find its way to me someday.

And then, when I was finally graced by the puberty fairy, my three longest relationships sprang ready made out of existing friendships. Simply, the people I’ve been with the longest are people I’ve known well for a long or longish time before we started smooching.

The problem with that model is that you hit a certain point in your life, say your mid twenties, and most of the people you know seem to be paired up. And, you can’t start smooching your friend if she’s already smooching your other friend. It makes for awkward dinner party conversation.

So, I started to date. And, I didn’t really like it all that much. I met some really terrific people–a couple of whom pop into this page from time to time–but the whole thing felt like some weird job interview.

You e-mail and talk and go out once or twice or thrice and sometimes you end up smooching, but the subtext of the whole thing is more, “I’m 25-35 years old and I’m evaluating you as a life mate because, frankly, otherwise this is all just a waste of my time.” And that just doesn’t seem like a good model to me.

Also, because I’ve been tainted by literature and pop songs, I have an improbably large inner-romantic. I really, really want that big, engulfing, enduring love. I want it to happen to me. I know I project my carefully arranged, mildly cynical face to the world. But, inside, there’s a big ball of hopeful mush that results in a regrettable tendency to rush into things that are ill advised.

I went on my first “date” (defined as an outing with one other person you do not otherwise know well, based upon the prospect of romantic and/or sexual congress in the not too distant future) at the ripe age of 31. And, despite some hopeful moments, nothing really panned out from that series of adventures. I don’t regret the time at all. As I said, I met some interesting people. I ate some nice meals and drank some nice wine. There were some minor disasters. But no enduring harm was done.

I sort of resolved to forget about it all when I moved here. To just meet people and see what happens. I’ve mostly been doing that.

But, and that was a really long winded introduction to the topic at hand, I did something I never thought I’d do in my life one afternoon a while back. I was driving along a four lane road called Red River, alongside another older Volvo. There were two big Labrador Retrievers in the back of this other car and the sort of bumper adornment (in small doses) that assured both political compatibility and a sense of humor.

The driver of this other Volvo and I did the drive-alongside-and-glance-over-at-each-other thing for a while and went our separate ways. But, sly dog that I am, I posted a note under “Missed Connections” on the local Craig’s List. One of her friends saw it, passed it along to her and she e-mailed me.

We corresponded for a while and finally met up.

That other Volvo was driven by the Hon. A, who has become my closest friend in town. Simply, we get along. We make each other laugh, she takes pleasure in showing me things she loves about Austin and I seem to love a lot of the same things that she loves.

We’ve both revealed quite a lot about ourselves to the other, things we’re both normally guarded about showing to others; we’re getting to know one another, playing with her dogs and cooking meals and going to see live music. And not smooching.

It feels like I’m doing something right and not rushing into anything. I’d be lying if I said that the possibility of smooching wasn’t occasionally on my mind, but it’s not dominating the interaction, and that feels good.

I’ve been searching for the right adjective, and I think it is comfortable. Not in the “boring, we’ve been doing this forever” sort of way, but in the, “This person is easy to be around” way.

So, thank you Craig, for providing me with that List.

And, a Screech Owl Update. All four eggs have hatched, Mme. Owl has eaten the shells and has begun to share her meals with the young-uns. The proud papa seems to be providing many more geckos than before. There is no confirmation on the rumor that he was seen swooping around Austin, bestowing cigars on other owls.

It is established fact that I am a huge dork. But, this cartoon by Patricia Storms had me laughing.

I'm still waiting for my check for the modeling work I did for Moby’'s latest album cover.

Of all the terrible things I’'ve witnessed in the world, none has come close to the Spam Cram. It was the single, most revolting spectacle that I'’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I couldn’'t get close enough to much of the action to record the true horror.

Picture it with me if you will. Many contestants. I'’m not sure how many. Eventually, I had to leave the area due to the very real danger of sympathetic vomiting and the meaty odor of Spam wafting across the grass. Each contestant is charged with one simple task: Eat an entire can of uncooked, unaltered Spam, including jelly, in the shortest possible time.

Here is contestant number one. He was an amateur. It took him well over four and a half minutes to choke down his can. I mean, really, people regularly run a mile in less time.



Forgive the graininess of this image, it is a very tight crop from the previous picture. But the expressions these people are wearing just about sum up the experience.



Here he is again, in the home stretch. The small red head in the lower lefthand corner, a product of Austin, is thinking, I’'m sure, “"What exactly is potted pork? Some kind of Tofu?”"



I was boxed out for much of the rest of the event. Contestant two seemed scrawny and under trained, but as you can see from this Zapruder like shot, he was impressive, downing his Spam in just under three minutes.


Contestant three, with the nonchalance and rainbow sweatband of youth, managed to take time out of his cramming to check his own time early on. He started well.


But he ran into trouble around three quarters of the way through his cake. Youth. He’ll learn to pace himself, I'’m sure, for future events.


Alas, at this point, I couldn’'t handle anymore. So the Hon. A and I retreated to the beer tent where an ice cold can of Shiner Bock proved restorative and we waited on the long, long line to enter the Spam Off tent. Believe me, even you would wait on line for Spam if you were at Spamarrama. While on line, we caught some of the commentary from the waning moments of the Spam Cram ("“You must eat the jelly!"” "“Watch out for chunks!"”). But, we were unable to determine who won. There was a dog entered. The dog consumed its can of Spam in twenty six seconds. Somewhere, Lucy The Dog is whispering, “"I coulda been a contender. Twenty six? I could eat a case of Spam in twenty six seconds."” Sadly, canines are ineligible for the trophy, and his performance was ruled an exhibition of Spam Cramming Prowess only.

I was much too overwhelmed by the offerings in the Spam Off to properly record the event. There was the expected Spam Chili. The New Orleans scented Spambalya. Spam, I shit you not, Spam Juice. Deep fried Spam and Brie Puffs. Spam in a Marsala Sauce with Truffles and Other Fancy Stuff. And more. Much, much more.

Here, just for my faithful readers, are two examples of what people can do with just a simple can of Spam and some good old American ingenuity .

Spamcargots



Spambread


It wouldn't be Austin without some kind of socio-political statement.


I regret arriving too late to witness the Spam Toss. But there’'s always next year.

And, finally, a poor, poor, poor Great Dane that has had every shred of its dignity removed.

How Many Acts of Contrition, Hail Marys and Rosary Beads Does It Take To Erase This, Especially Given It Was Snapped Within Hours of The Pope Dying?

Screech Owl Update.

I can'’t be certain because I'’m very tired, but this appears to be an owlet.

I think they'’re hatching.