being the delicate blogging of an english chap in austin, texas, who has recently
ressumed his technical writing career but is still searching for eternal verities in
the bottom of his martini glass and on curious web pages. he is married, quite old
and off to the gym in a few minutes. you can email him at anything-that-doesn't-have-the-word-blog-in-it (at) nerichardson (dot)
co (dot) uk...
Sunday night: we had dinner at Threadgill's - the one that used to be Armadillo World Headquarters - then watched the bats come out from under Congress Avenue Bridge. This - the batwatching part - is something I've intended and failed to do every time I've been to Austin but now I'm living here it's something to be done on a whim rather than as part of the tourist schedule. Eating at Threadgill's has already become a sort of Austin tradition for me after just two visits, comfort food even if I'm not feeling particularly discomforted and just want to load up on meatloaf or pecan-crusted chicken or pork roast, not to mention the fabulous non-vegetarian vegetable sides. There's something wholesomely debauched about the way the waitresses ask you if you want seconds the moment you bloatedly flop back in your seat. Having only just got used to the idea of free coffee and iced tea refills I couldn't resist asking for more mashed potato and gravy. I could easily put back on the 30 pounds and two surplus chins I've lost since February if we go on eating here....
The bats were pretty amazing. I've seen bats before, obvious, but never a million or so of them emerging at the same time to the whoops and camera flashes of almost as many spectators. It happens every day between March and November; twilight descends and suddenly a dense, smokelike stream of free-tailed Mexican bats comes swirling out from beneath the bridge and head down the Colorado River for dinner. Apparently they eat between 10,000 and 30,000 pounds of mosquitos and other insects a night, so they're all right by me....
From today's Statesman (and you know that when I say that now I mean the Austin American-Statesman and not the New Statesman): Thomas Van Orden, a homeless lawyer temporarily barred from practicing, is suing to get a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments sculpture removed from the Capitol grounds. He says it violates the U.S. Constitution's separation of church and state. I've visited the Capitol a couple of times but have yet to see this ludicrous "sculpture". I don't know why someone didn't "accidentally" back a truck over it when the place was renovated back in the early 90s. The Capitol is probably my favourite place in Austin that doesn't sell coffee, martinis, fried pickles or obscure Lee Hazelwood albums, built of gleaming pink granite, bigger than any other state capitol and - this being Texas - seven foot taller than the US capitol itself. It's one of those rare buildings that helps make me understand the concept of "civic pride" and after visiting I feel I should start spend my copious free time reading deeply serious books on Texas and particularly Austin's politics and history instead of watching King of the Hill reruns (which are informative in their own way, of course).
Now this is news to me: the most popular novels in the United States are "Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's phenomenally popular 'Left Behind' series, a Tom Clancy-meets-Revelation saga of the Rapture, the Tribulation and, presumably, the eventual return of Jesus". (The Sideshow via Atrios.)
I'm thinking about changing the format of this thing back to a diary as I'm not really making full use of blogging technology - I'm just letting it encourage my slothful ways. I can upload a single paragraph entry about nothing, or just type up a list of recent searches that found my site (they usually involve "amateur housewives" or Charlotte Church's bottom) every week or so and this convinces me that I'm keeping it up-to-date. I need some sort of structure or mechanism that encourages me to get fluid again with my writing and produce stuff like I used to do back in the days of old, when blog was just an arcane SF fandom accompaniment to crottled greeps. I really ought to be able to write an endless stream of stuff right now, churning out thousands of words about this strange new (to me) world around me, where tiny, translucent geckos crawl up out of the plughole in the bath, where I can walk to the local co-op (pace Matthew Engel) and buy just 5 cents worth of parsley, where the buses are free if the ozone level reaches a certain level and flash GO LANCE GO! on their destination boards, where ESPN televises dogs jumping off a pier as sport, where the night sky's constellations all seem to be in the wrong place and mostly unrecognizable even to a lapsed astronomy nerd, where... oh well, you get the picture. Every day, no matter how routine, ought to spark a million new thoughts and at least a hundred words. Even though I'm not a thinker or a linker and my political thoughts these days rarely get clearer than "uh, I suppose that's one way of looking at it" I should be able to write something at least once a day....
(And so far my favourite - sorry, favorite - snow cone flavour is blue coconut with cream, but there are several thousand combinations I still have to try. Keep reading and I'll go through them all.)
Two fairly meaningless posts I didn't get around to uploading yesterday:
Somewhat miffed to discover that despite having access to 75 television channels, nonstop reruns of The World's Funniest Animals, at least three simultaneous interviews with Dana Carvey dressed as a turtle and untold quantities of esoteric stuff like bikini'd coeds having cod liver oil drinking contests on MTV's I Bet You Will, I have to get up at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning to catch the single weekly rerun of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Why?
Been reading blogs all morning to try and get myself back in the swing after a few days' hiatus, but I suspect I'm missing that vital blogging gene that makes a person want to churn out severalthousandwords about an unheard Steve Earl song and the seemingly difficult concept of a writer adopting someone else's point of view. Political blogs are starting to bore me now and I'd rather read about someone's favorite comic, their favorite snow cone flavors or what they nearly stepped in on the way to the office. I've grown particularly weary of those that claim to be "Anti-Idiotarian", a smug, self-validating title for those that think pointing out Michael Moore's girth and shabby dress sense is the epitome of incisive political commentary.
The first Mahogany Brain album, With (Junk-Saucepan) When (Spoon-Trigger) from 1971 (or then-abouts) has been reissued. As I've said before, their second album sounded like they'd never encountered musical instruments before so this should be a treat....
I'm getting a bit bored by stuff like this: 100 Albums you should get rid of. (Link via Boing Boing) Right now I'd rather hear about one good album than 100 supposedly bad ones. Besides, anyone who thinks Bitches Brew and Trout Mask Replica are too much like hard work shouldn't be allowed access to ears....
Latest excuse for not posting: we finally got cable installed last week (after a screw-up on their part that got us free installation and a free month's subscription to nineteen billion channels - i.e., the standard package), so I've been soaking up all the iconic cultural references I really need to fully understand America. Staying up until two in the morning to watch classic episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, Gidget, The Flying Nun, Gilligan's Island, Bonanza, Mr. Rogers, The Dick Van Dyke Show and many, many more. Flipping through Austin community stations showing earnest, identikit local guitar bands, the strangely mesmorising conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pun-a-thons and the obligatory worthy but dull public interest stuff. Skipping endless made-for-TV movies mostly starring Meredith Baxter and John Ritter and/or entitled A X Y where X = Woman, Love, Child, Baby Mother, Daughter, Heart, Soul, Spirit, Miracle, etc and Y = Lost, Scorned, Torn, Alone, Regained, etc. Infomercials! Somewhere between two and ten shopping channels! Four or five episodes of the Simpsons (and not the 1996 episodes BBC2 are still showing back in England) in a row. Richard Simmons! Two weather channels! A channel devoted to the worst aspects of Country and Western! The Amazing Revo-Styler! Ann Coulter professing that the religious right is just a heartless liberal myth! And, as I type this, Mexican wrestling, six chubby guys in masks sitting on one anothers' faces. All part of any American's birthright, I know, and I suppose this will all seem normal to me soon, but back home we only had four channels (plus the snowy blur of Channel 5) and for most of the year these seemed to show nothing but snooker and DIY. I am overcome by choice. Fortunately it all seems to be repeated on a daily basis....
We drove down to San Antonio on Monday just to get out of Austin for a few hours. Naturally we went to the Alamo, which is an odd and slightly deflating experience as the main surviving structure, the mission chapel, is now mostly a gift shop selling inappropriate Chinese-made knick-knacks like glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets, pens shaped like rifles, double CDs with titles like Scotland Remembers the Alamo and salt and pepper pots shaped like the Alamo itself with the actual historical remnants squeezed in between trashy replicas, postcards and giant "Texas-size" jelly beans. Even without all the commercialism it strikes me as weird to celebrate the slaughter of a couple of hundred American men, women and children by a bloodthirsty dictator as a symbol of Texan freedom and liberty. (Stacey likes the gift shop because it is so incongruous.) Maybe there's something more appropriate at San Jacinto, where Sam Houston and his troops defeated the Mexican army and secured independence for Texas a month after the Alamo massacre.
Next stop was the Hertzberg Circus Collection and Museum, except that had recently been closed. You can still see the exhibits through the dusty windows as they haven't figured out what to do with Tom Thumb's carriage, various flea circuses and Buffalo Bill memorabilia yet. Half-covered in dust sheets and half-abandoned it looks like the setting of a old-fashioned horror movie....
We had planned to go horseback riding at Brackenridge Stables, but the phone number we had was answered by a guy who claimed to know nothing about horses except that people had been ringing him about them for years....
Went to Mi Tierra for lunch. This place is pretty famous (in San Antonio, at least) and has served archetypal old school Tex-Mex for about fifty years, everything slathered with melted cheese, floating in oil, tongue-flayingly spicy and as irresistible as it is unhealthy. Tempted for about three millionths of a second by menudo - a soup made from beef tripe. The strolling mariachis left us alone.
San Antonio in the rain isn't such a great place to stick around - the river was particularly stinky - so we left sooner than expected, feeling vaguely depressed.... and then the car's air conditioning died....
Took my driving test - well, the "written" part - last week and was most surprised to pass. After decades of avoiding not just driving but anything connected to it, I hardly expected that one evening's study of the Texas Drivers Handbook would be enough to scrape through. I don't feel quite as freakish being unable to drive in Texas as I thought I might, but I actually want to drive now, which isn't something I ever wanted to do back in England.
I also got my permanent resident card on Friday, so I don't have to carry my passport around with me and feel like a tourist anymore. And now my mosquito bites have all subsided I'm starting to feel at home. I'm even acquiring the first hint of a tan. All I have to do now is start refering to all soft drink as "coke" and no-one will know I'm a Limey, don'tchaknow.
Got a replacement mailbox key yesterday - I'd misplaced ours last week. The management company folk had been away for a long weekend and a fair amount of mail had built up including my social security card. I now have a social security number! I am a valid human being. Back in England you have a national insurance number but you only ever use that for tax forms and other dealings with the government, but here you seem to need your social security number to do anything. The mailbox was jammed with stuff that had been forwarded from our place in Leeds, half of it junkmail. Pretty weird to be going through all that stuff half a world away...
The Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History. Full of stuff I didn't know, like the guy who wrote it "had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons. In his retirement in Florida, he stopped attending church because he disliked the racial bigotry he found there." The troublesome words "under God" weren't added until 1954 after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus.
To Emo's last night for Momus and the American Patchwork Tour. Had a couple of real drinks in the Club de Ville first - a 50s style bar that combines all the right qualities for a perfect drinking hole - dark, cool, loungy, long, long Long Island Teas and dirty vodkatinis you could drown in - if only they didn't play Van Halen. There's something evocative about this part of town - probably the smell of B-B-Q and the competing din of unknown and mostly horrible rock bands coming from almost every doorway.
Momus was fun in that slightly (and uniquely) creepy way of his and we got to chat with him beforehand. Last time he played Emo's he hated it and still shuddered at the memory of stepping in excrement onstage. Rock 'n' roll, whew. He, the Gongs (arch, academic types playing homemade primitive guitars, wailing about bats and Willie Nelson and only occasionally cohering into something you'd listen to for pleasure), the Super Madrigal Brothers (17th century jigs and gavottes arranged for video game consoles and then dismembered and buried in old school laboratory electronics) and the curiously named Phiiliip (Syd Barrett reborn as Beck at a Morrissey karaoke night) are driving insane distances around the USAto play to tiny audiences, sleeping wherever they can and probably losing a fair amount of money in the process. Freelance technical writing looks like a very sensible career choice by comparison.
Archetypal American Experiences part 97: The Yard Sale. Up at six on Saturday morning with a list of eight yard, garage and fire sales culled from one of the 83 sections of Thursday's Austin-American Statesman, a map of the city and a thermos of strong coffee, then off out into the suburbs through eerily deserted streets. In addition to those advertised in the newspaper there are an equal number posted amongst the lost cat and found dog fliers on street corner lampposts. First one we lose our nerve and drive right by as it looks too scary, too many intense people pawing at too few items. The next one is a bit less frantic but that's because it's 7.08am and all the good stuff has long gone. An inch thick pile of Viewmaster slides for $2 looks tempting but it's all recent, Disney stuff, nothing vintage, cheesy or worth putting on eBay. After a few more sales we start to suspect that eBay may have killed the yard sale. People put all their half-decent stuff in online auction and only the detritus that no-one bids for ends up piled on their lawn. Best bargains were at a fire sale at a weddingwear shop. Dresses and shoes from the early 60s for size 2 Jackie Kennedy wannabes. $600 wedding dresses for $19.99 that could have been dyed black and sold to morbid goth chicks for much more. Stacey couldn't resist four pairs of dainty white gloves at a dollar a pair, a tiara and a 50s hat with a veil. Nothing much for me, however....
By the sixth or nineth sale we were starting to flag. We were recognising other yard sale surfers including a guy whose t-shirt should have said IF I'M HERE THE GOOD STUFF WENT TEN MINUTES AGO. We started to predict correctly what would be waiting for us at each sale - always a coffee maker, usually a juicer, a rack of shirts no-one bothered looking at - although one sale flummoxed us by consisting almost entirely of ratty old brown wigs and plumbing supplies. By 10.00 we'd had enough and the sight of 20 middle-aged couples milling around on a lawn or a bright green or orange poster on a corner made us groan. Time for breakfast at the Magnolia cafe....
The mosquito population seems pretty glad that I've moved here - fresh, virginal man-flesh for the tasting. I must now drink a pint of jungle-strength Off before leaving the apartment....
Where does the time go? Should have put something up about the 4th July firework display in Zilker Park - a painless crash course for me in American patriotism. I like the idea of celebrating a nation's creation. The only thing that makes me uneasy is other people's unease that I might feel a bit victimised or oppressed by this reminder of Britain's defeat in the War of Independence, which is a bit silly. Even those of us back home have got over that by now. No-one back in England thinks of the 4th of July as a grim memorial for a military defeat and I don't see any evidence of people here celebrating it as a victory. It's the commemoration of a people's revolution, the birth of a nation, of an idea of liberty and self-determination. And while this idea may no longer be as pure as it was, it does my heart good to attend a popularist celebration that doesn't invoke gods, monarchs, despots or triumphalism of any kind. I think one of the hardest things for us English lefties to comprehend about America is the fact that the patriotic icons and displays have always been held close by the people and never allowed to become entirely appropriated by rulers, scoundrels and thugs. Back home (or should that be "home" now?) we never had these things in the first place. We were subjects at best, the iconography of England imposed on us. Our anthem and all associated malarky was all about being ruled. I think even the most emotively patriotic American would have second thoughts about singing an anthem that contained the words "long to reign over us". Or maybe it isn't hard to understand at all and we just resent it. You guys got a declaration of independence, we got to keep a class system, sucky aristocrats and a costly fairytale of subservience. Gee thanks, Yanks....
It started raining about an hour after we moved in last Tuesday and seems to have continued ever since, one long flash flood warning. And with this being a flat roofed apartment it has sounded like we're living under Niagara Falls. According to the weather reports there's been about six months' rain since Saturday. Every day the Yahoo weather forecast for Austin shows scattered thunderstorms. People warned me about the baking Texas heat but nobody mentioned monsoons....
We picked up a vintage drinks trolley at Uncommon Objects down on South Congress between the storms yesterday to add a little 50s style to all the minimalistic Ikea furnishing. Just need to stock up on exotic booze and we can start using those cute 50s nudie cocktail glasses Stacey got on eBay. Dinner was fiercely hot green chicken curry at the Thai Kitchen, followed by ice cream at Amy's, both barely a five minute walk away. All we need now is to find a good local gym, get a decent stereo system, wait for our 29 boxes of stuff to arrive from England (the ship docked at Philadelphia on the 27th June)... oh, and get a couple of jobs....
