The In-Laws is the latest movie to carry an Earl Dittman quote: "A knockout action/comedy packed with laughs". For him this is half-hearted and tepid compared to his usual all-out "You'll laugh from start to end at these comedic legends! Your trousers may never dry!" type raves. Is he getting jaded?

There's another piece on the world's most uncritical film "critic" that may have actually found the illusive Wireless Magazine -- it's either a free Houston music mag that stopped publication in the 80s or else a trade magazine for mobile phone dealers, also based in Houston. Either way, it's a funny old game when the multizillion dollar film industry has to rely on a guy who claims to be a reviewer for a magazine that either hasn't existed for two decades or is only read by phone salesmen to flog their magnificent creations....

They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but for some reason Edgar and Johnny Winter objected to being portrayed as "villainous, gnarly half-worm, half-human creatures with green tentacles sprouting from their chests". (Via Bookslut.)

Hot diggity, the weather forecasters are getting excited as today looks like it's gonna be A HOT ONE -- 99F or 100F degrees at Bergstrom and Camp Mabry, possibly the hottest May 30th on record for Austin. The air feels like it's solidifying, like you could burn yourself on it if you move too fast. Time to stock up on sun blocker, factor nine million. And insect repellent, the kind that carries an essay-length warning on the can. Nature is encroaching. I had to fax the maintenance people about the sudden build up of hornet nests outside the apartment. Take two steps outside and its a wildlife show, two types of gecko snacking on spaceship-shaped bugs before scurrying off into the cracks in the warped woodwork. Yesterday there was some sort of heron wading through the inch or so of water in the creek a hundred yards or so from our door, looking something between goofy and majestic. Soon there'll be Mexican parrots....

Finally found the right bread to go with Gentleman's Relish. Sour dough toast plus Patum Peperium equals a transatlantic marriage of mouth-tripping start-the-day goodness. Oh yeah. Save the local breakfast delicacies of fish tacos and gravy-slathered biscuits for later....

Shock! Horror! Yawn! Turner prize continues to court controversy. Well I never expected that. Knock me down with a cheque for £20,000. Nominees include a man who makes models of Sir Nicholas Serota out of his own earwax and a woman who intends to pickle her grandparents. Just kidding.

I'm not as aghast at the news that Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" is to be adapted into a feature film as some people seem to be. I mean, strip the song down to its basic story...

...which captures the divide between cliques and cultures, is about a teenage girl who rejects a skater boy with a crush on her because her friends didn't approve of him -- even though she secretly likes him. Years later, he becomes a famous rock star and she is left with regrets.

...dump Avril and you've got the seeds of... well, a decent writer could take it anywhere. Shakespeare was working with lesser resource material for most of his plays, flicking through some dubious old history book for kings with meaty problems. Assuming that some sort of resolution is needed, it could be developed into a comedy or tragedy, action movie, horror, whatever. Mood piece like The Virgin Suicides, all-out psycho-drama like Misery or icky Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy vehicle. Here's a few posibilities:

1. Girl is indeed played by Reese Witherspoon or Witherspoon-substitute. She is about to marry rich but boring corporate lawyer when she realises that her whole life is a sham. Hilarious consequences as she tries to punk it up Lavigne style, outraging her family and friends. She gets together with "sk8ter boi" only to find that success has made him a big phoney and even more of a capitalist sell-out than her fiance. She returns to her old life and movie ends with her wedding -- but "sk8ter boi" shows up, promises her he'll be true to his old Avril-punk ways and they ride off into the sunset on his board. Way to go, dude.

2. Girl is played by Hilary Swank. Her life is a mess. She lives on welfare, her kids have been taken into care, she has a crack habit, abusive boyfriend and bad hair. She sees "sk8ter boi" on TV and discovers he is doing something local. She manages to meet him but he fails to recognise her. Rejected by him, she is mistreated, abused, humiliated by his minions, with harrowing consequences. Distraught, she decides to kill him and despite having managed to screw up everything else in her life she comes close to doing this for the last nailbiting half of the movie. "Sk8ter boi" has to kill her in self-defense at the end and only at that moment does he realise she is his lost love. Oh. My. Gawd. That is so sad.

3. As version 1, but instead of running off with "sb" she rejects both suitors and starts her own all-girl punk rock band and they RULE!

4. Girl is played by Jennifer Lopez. Despite being brilliant with PhDs in everything she has dedicated her life to helping the poor and keeping it real. She even wears slightly unflattering glasses. She meets the world's richest and most handsome rock star (played by Ben Afleck) and although they initially get off to a bad start because of that school cliques and cultures thing, he falls madly in love with her and agrees to join her crusade to make the world a better place. With his money and influence and her unspoilt saintliness they cannot help but succeed.

5. Girl is played by Madonna and the film doesn't get made.

6. Girl is played by Sandra Bullock. Despite being kooky and klutzy she becomes a top government agent and has to convince "sk8ter boi" that his country needs him to go to the centre of the earth and/or impersonate the president for some reason. This may need more work.

7. Renee Zellweger. Hugh Grant. This one writes itself.

Notable drinks of the last five days:
-- most nostalgic: two dozen bottles of Bass from Central Market, although I rarely drank it back home.
-- largest cocktail: Jumbo Margarita, Chacho's, Houston.
-- signature Austin: Jalapeño Margarita, Z Tejas, Austin (yes, whoever asked when I moved here, they still make 'em)
-- best dirty martini and best strawberry daquiri: me, here.

Putting off two postings about specific and personal matters, for reasons that I'm also going to put off mentioning.

Thank you, Blogger for eating a big and link-festooned post about Houston, Galveston, pelicans, hyenas, and some rather over-the-top imagery about pirates, cotton warehouses, slave traders and stuffed shrimp the size of chicken drumsticks that can never be retrieved. And thank you for making blogspot sites like No Rock 'n' Roll Fun open up at a mighty 23 bytes per second. This may be today's only posting as I'm feeling somewhat miffed about it all.

That's the imagery that can never be retrieved, not the shrimp. There was also something about Tindersticks cover of Lee Hazlewood's "My Autumn's Done Come" but I may be able to reconstitute this masterpiece.

The big word brigade are having fun debating good bad taste and bad good taste and "hipster oneupmanship" over at blissblog, k-punk and twanboc, and as usual it makes my head hurt. I've never even been able to figure out the "so bad it's good" concept, which always makes me think of a self-nullifying mathematical formula: bad + good = nothing at all. Good bad taste? Bad good taste? Good good taste? Cripes, not having an academic or journalistic background I'm usually content to accept something as good or bad and leave it at that. In this blog I've made a hamfisted attempt on ocassion to say why I think something works or doesn't, but my mental synapses start to become dangerously untangled if I try to make any deeper inroads into the analytical malarky. When presented with a piece of music that I like I haven't developed the need to understand and explain why I like it, why I need this new thing, why it's better than X, Y and Z, how it fits in with other things I like and why I'm a more useful member of society for having the 12" remix on transparent vinyl. It's just alrite, innit? Got a good beat. Besides, I have trouble answering the most basic of questions: what does "better" mean in the context of two pieces or collections of music? Is Loveless "better" than Metal Box, and if so by how much? 12%? Two and a half stars? A bushel and a peck? Can a piece of music be judged on its own merit, without reference to other music? Even the most high-faluting pieces of criticism tend to boil down to "this is better than the rubbish you listen to". By what criteria is a piece of music successful? Can you like a piece of music for the wrong reason? And is it just plain silly to prefer a little-known b-side by the Ornate Gobblers from 1979 to the music the rest of society holds most dear? Until I can deal with such vexing issues with confidence, I'll stay in the shallow end and stick to being rude about Atomic Kitten and Jemini.

The evil corporations have completely taken over, dude! In the Austin Chronicle's Restaurant Poll for 2003 published today, Starbucks got the most votes in the readers' "Best Coffee" category. What foolishness has taken grip?

I have no idea how to begin writing about disco sushi karaoke night at Seoul Restaurant & DK's Sushi Bar. It was like a crazy Korean gong show with a Howard-Stern-meets-Pam-Grier emcee and a sushi-munching, sake-gulping audience. It was bizarre, funny, uncomfortable and boring. All at the same time....

Moira Muldoon's "A Girl Walks Into A Bar" column this week probably should have been called "A Girl Walks Out Of A Bar Very Quickly".

I'm a big softy and it's always cute to look up from the computer and see one of these fellas outside, just a few feet beyond the window. I'm sure I'll be sick to death of things that creep and slither by the end of the summer, but right now.... aaaaaaaah, innit sweet?

Is Austin the only place in Texas -- or anywhere else in the SUV-lovin' parts of America -- where a country music station would organise a pro-Dixie Chicks rally?

I was tickled that Natalie Maines' T-shirt got on local TV news and the live feed to the Country Music awards without anyone appearing to notice the acronym emblazoned upon it: FUTK. Now what could that possibly stand for? (And could it have been responsible for making a certain big fat phoney leave the event before collecting his award?)

Your grandpa's internet -- people still listen to short wave radio, you know.

Being lulled into a midmorning daze right now by Peter Garland's The Days Run Away (Tzadik, 2000), languid, melancholic, minimalist piano pieces played by Aki Takahashi. Late Satie is the closest comparison, the barely-there Satie pieces that don't get used for coffee creamer and fabric softener commercials. (UT's Fine Arts Library is my main source of CDs these days and their curious purchasing policy is guiding my listening into previously neglected areas. Where else could a poor boy get to hear the likes of local droners Charalambides, Rotten Piece, Brekekekexkoaxkoax and Artificial Subteranne?) I am preparing myself, nay, girding my loins, for an afternoon's listening to two CDs of full-on free European jazz from the Brotzmann/Van Hove/Bennink Trio with Albert Mangelsdorff, noisy buggers sure to make the neighbours worry about my mental wellbeing.

Took a peek at the second issue of The Believer when I was out buying skimpy items of intmate apparel peanut butter and jelly. Hmmm. Obviously I approve of such a worthy publication and its "high culture for young snots" asperations on an abstract level, but it'll take a bit more than an interview with Pat Benatar to winkle eight bucks out of me.

What America really needs is an 18c coin....

That crazy Guardian -- first Ann Coulter, now Dave Lee Travis gets the oxygen of publicity.

In case you're wondering where it went, or have a hankering to read how Ol' Ma Gutteridge's 1931 recording of "Seems Like I Ain't Polished That Table Leg Since Tuesday" (reissued on Aeolian Jug and Kazoo Folk-Blues of the Tupagalalapa Mountains Volume 37) relates to something Bob Dylan said in 1973, Greil Marcus's "Real Life Rock Top 10" can now be found in the City Paper every third week.

It's pretty darn convenient having Half Price Books across the street. If I read about some fabulously acclaimed but mostly forgotten author online then I can nip out and see if they've got anything by him or her. Usually they have. Picked up Edward Whittemore's Quin's Shanghai Circus for $1.75 and Charles Portis's Norwood for $3.48. As a bonus I also found Kreidler's Appearance and the Park CD on the 98c shelf -- you can usually find some real bargains in a store where most of the staff's musical tastes seem to stop with B.B. King or Wyndham Hill. (Although I did have a conversation with one of the guys who worked there about the Italian Plastic Records label and Armando Trovajoli, so I shouldn't generalize.)

This looks truly poptastic, but where's Spit the Dog, the Phantom Flan Flinger and the condensed milk sandwiches?

From Saturday's Washington Post, "No Political Fallout for Bush on Weapons":

"It's just very strange," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of a Pentagon advisory board who had predicted weapons would be found a month ago. "There will certainly not be the quantity and proximity that we thought of before." Adelman says Hussein may even have launched "a massive disinformation campaign to make the world think he was violating international norms, and he may not have been."

The cunning bastard! Even the scriptwriters on 24 haven't come up with a twist that scheming and devious....

Is the Guardian looking for a replacement for Julie Burchill or something?

So you could dislike Ann Coulter pretty intensely. But my suspicion is that, despite herself, she could end up wooing even the very Guardian-reading, cheese-eating, Bolshevik girly-boys she disparages with such ardour. She is, for one thing, a sharp-witted writer whose tart, terse columns make an easy, compelling read.

-- Jonathan Freedland, "An Appalling Kind of Magic"

I'd never heard of the author Edward Whittemore and his Jerusalem Quartet until I read this review in the current Harper's, which has got me intrigued. So I'm glad that the obligatory website was waiting for me to discover much more. Apparently he's "the best American writer you've never heard of", although I thought that was supposed to be Charles Portis....

The Penman spills a veritable bibful today, and as well as the obligatory swipes at Jools Holland and the Hollandization of music on TV in the UK -- "if it ain't aimed at 12 year old girls then leave it to Jools" -- he gives the icy finger to Word, the latest attempt at saturating the Nick Hornsby market by "the people responsible for the launches of magazines like Q, Mojo and Empire". I happened to leaf through a copy of this for the first time last week. I had a vague memory of reading something good about the magazine in a normally trustworth blog, but I have to say it's just more of the same. It looks exactly like the three aforementioned rags, as if there's some machine that churns out articles on the usual subjects and the only role for the editor(s) is to decided which title to run them under. ("Okay, a piece on why comics aren't just for kids anymore... let's see, we had that in Q three months ago so we'd better stick it in Word. And oh dear, another look back at the Clash? Better start a new magazine as we've already run that in all the existing titles this year.)

On the Word webpage it sez:

"It’s been started in the belief that there are some people whose interests are as broad as they are deep, who want to read something more than a caption and are more interested in what’s going on right now than in re-hashing the past."

Fair enough -- although you could probably argue that these special people would find their interests already catered to if they looked beyond the mag rack in their local Safeway's. So who's in the current issue, who epitomises what's going on right now?

Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, David Gray, Chrissie Hynde and Benny Hill.

I'll stick to rehashing the past if that/s what the hip kids are getting down to right now -- and I'm allowed to choose the past that gets rehashed.

There's something about a campus town when the students are leaving. Even more SUVs clogging up the streets, driving in ways that may be appropriate everywhere else in the USA but not here in Austin... apprehensive 22 year olds blinking in morning's harsh light and suddenly looking fourteen now they're flanked by parents in matching slacks and crisp just-purchased-at-the-UT-shop t-shirts, filing into Trudy's for breakfast and wondering if they dare order their usual Mexican Martini... independent art-chicks with their canvases and easels and miscellanious stuff spilling out of their cars as they make one last stop at the drive-thru bank to ensure they've got enough ready cash to see them through the first dreaded weekend of being back home in a little town where they still don't "get" Cindy Sherman... no more attempts at bass playing from the apartment below at four in the morning... no more strange little notes from the guy way on the other side of the "block" apologising in advance for the noise coming from his forthcoming 21st birthday party which didn't take place.... and last night the sound of fireworks marking the end of the ceremonies, the UT tower blazing orange, taking me back three years to when Stacey graduated. Then it was Bill Moyers giving the commencement speech -- you could get away with letting PBS liberals do that sort of thing back in those days. This year it was Dell-boy, what's-his-name, Michael Dell. who dropped out of UT to sell computers and is the world's richest 38 year old and longest tenured CEO or something. All well and good, but:

Some at the ceremony didn't think he was the best choice for commencement speaker. Katie Rutherford of Odessa, who received her bachelor's degree in history, said she had been ranting about it all day. "I think that UT is a prestigious enough university to have gotten a more prestigious speaker than the local hometown millionaire," she said....

No wonder he believes in mind control, weird conspiracies and such -- search for "yellow" on this page: David Icke's Symbolism Archives: Masonic - Occultic Numerology. What strange alien force could posibly have infiltrated this text with "seemingly" nonsensical words like "cyellowit", "occuyellow", "hundyellows" and "retiyellow"? The fnords, the fnords!

I've got a French compilation album called Texas Punk from the Sixties (Volume 2) which features such great unknowns as the Reddlemen, Oedipus & the Mothers and -- possibly the best name for a Texan group ever -- The Y'alls. In this week's Austin Chronicle there's a feature on an English compilation called Texas Funk which sounds pretty cool, except that it's only available here on import. That's not right is it?

Apparently George W. Bush doesn't know how much he's worth. No wonder he understands the needs and desires of the ordinary folk, you know, the ones who are behind him...

On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in the crowd behind Mr. Bush to take off their ties, WISH-TV in Indianapolis reported, so they would look more like the ordinary folk the president said would benefit from his tax cut.

-- "Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights", New York Times

Remind me to read Jeanne D'Arc's Body and Soul at least once a day so I don't lose track of what's going on in the world. Visiting it every week or so is just asking to be overwhelmed by the incredible amount of stuff you really need to catch up on to have half a clue about what's been happening beyond the breakfast TV news' ghastly slaying of the week and Rene Zwellweger latest movie....

The website for the 4th JournalCon, being held here in Austin, is now up. I have nothing to do with it, you'll be glad to hear. However I may show up at some godforsaken hour, clutching a 1.75 litre bottle of Titos and claiming to be someone else.

Forget the Matrix sequels! A new Carry On film is being made. Called Carry On London and staring the likes of Dale Winton and Graham Norton. Be still my beating heart.

Note: the only things less funny than post 60s' Carry On films are Guardian G2 squibs about how awful the Carry On films were....

According to this piece in Salon, Buffy didn't simply jump the shark, Spike turned into the Fonz.

I'm not sure if this does have any relevance to what's gone wrong with the show -- I suspect it's been "wrong" right from the start and it's been the inventive and risktaking ways they've managed to avoid having to accept this from episode to episode that made it, on many ocassions, so great. It was always the piling on of incongruous ideas, the refusal to explain or justify or even think things through very thoroughly that gave the show its momentum and resonances. It's never been less than ludicrous, which given the subject matter is how it should be. It's never stopped to think "hmmm, what would really happen if..." but simply sent another monster or adolescent hang-up crashing through the door.

This last season has been, uh, problematic, however. Certain subplots have been rushed, snipped at the point where they might become interesting while others have been dragged out to ridiculous lengths. The way Giles was seemingly beheaded at the end of one episode, which then seemed to be forgotten about for a while and finally shrugged off with a feeble explanation was where it jumped the you-know-what for me. And if they're going to steal from Vertigo comics they could have had Giles as a disembodied oracular head packed in ice for a while. With it being the last season they could afford to do something wild like that. Buffy and Spike have become Moonlighting's Maddy and David or Cheers' Sam and Diane. Fights aren't won by intelligence or cunning -- they just go on until Buffy gets kicked in the head and thrown against the wall the requisite number of times and then somehow finds the brute strength to kill the baddy. I didn't think I've ever be one to complain about gratuitous sex on Buffy, but last week's episode did seem like they wanted to push the limits of what you could get away with at 7.30pm, working through a checklist of black-on-white, girl-on-girl, vamp-on-slayer action. I'm suprised we didn't get to see Giles giving Andrew the eye. Anya has been relegated to staying home and playing Karen and Jack with Andrew while everyone else is off being pulverised and murdered. The promising theme of Buffy's alienation, expulsion and return to the gang was all over too quickly and the sense of impending doom, of a final climactic battle, has been diluted by a distracting mix of brutality and silliness. The mix of comedy, drama and action hasn't jelled the way it used to. And there's a half-heartedness about the acting too that is obviously due to this being the last season and they've all got new projects on their minds. I'll watch the finale next week and will miss the show when it's gone, but after the longeurs and letdowns of this season it won't be such a terrible wrench to lose it. Hey ho. Now about 24....

And what about this?

TAMPA, Fla., May 13 -- When David Taylor's wife began spraying perfume and air fresheners around their house, he called 911.

"I need an officer at my house," Taylor told the 911 dispatcher on April 4. "It's a domestic problem. My wife is trying to hurt me. I'm chemically sensitive and she's spraying perfume around the house and whatnot and it's gonna hurt me," he said.

I suppose the next step will be for Texas to declare Oklahoma a rogue state for harboring wanted Democrats....

Maybe I'm being too generous in thinking that there may have been some substance behind the New Romantics -- judging from this reminder, at least. I'm probably looking in the wrong places, but surely there must be some defence of that scene somewhere on-line, some site where fortysomething ex-Classix Nouveaux fans try to claim a place in pop culture, to delve behind the easy jokes and silly haircuts, to posthumously beef up their manifestos with some Deleuze, Foucault and Walter Benjamin? Maybe Simon Reynolds sez all that needed to be said:

In lots of ways Associates were like New Romanticism if it had actually been any good, had lived up to its name: the debts to Bowie and Roxy, the Europeanism, the Teutonicized funk, the androgyny/homoeroticism/male hysteria.

But what about RoMo, the supposed New Romantic revivial that came and went in the mid 90s? Or was that just electroclash for sissies?

Hell, I don't understand the politics here in Texas:

Fifty-three Texas House Democrats, more powerful when they don't show up than when they do, hid out Monday and halted the legislative process as state police tracked them down in Oklahoma.

Fifty-one of the missing lawmakers, who oppose Republican efforts to redraw the state's congressional boundaries, were holed up at a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Okla., dining at Denny's and plotting their next move, several of them said late Monday.

I assume the democrats are the good guys here, and the boundary changes do seem to be a blatant attempt at abolishing their existence in Texas, but running away and hiding does seem to be a strange way to put their case across.

Meanwhile, nudged by entries by k-punk and blissblog, my pretty-much-marooned-in-the-early-eighties-mind turns to the Unspeakable Subject: New Romanticism. Too easily seen as the archetypal I-laugh-at-the-80s Paul Ross "What the fuck wuz that about?" soundbite, a little bit of archaic pop-culture with nothing to redeem it, I'm starting to suspect that there might have been something there, something that those of us outside the scene in those days either missed or felt obliged to ridicule, something that just looked like fannying around in a borrowed tablecloth and pantiloons in elitist West End clubs. But as I recall it all came and went too quickly to give any real consideration to at the time, leaving nothing but Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" video and Visage's "Fade to Grey". And there was so much else going on at the time. What was it really about? Where did it come from and where did it go? How did it relate to goth, that other big post-punk thing and how come goth became the subculture that will never die whereas new romanticism became the big frilly shirt too embarrassing to mention?

George Orwell, weblogger. Oh blimey. (Via TMFTML.)

Having watched the trailers for a million bad movies on TV, I've grown aware of Earl Dittman of Wireless Magazines, who is always resorted to when no critic of any note can be found to provide an enthusiastic quote. Maybe it's because there have been so many trailers for awful films lately but I found myself wondering who Dittman was and why I'd never seen or heard of Wireless Magazines except in connection with his rave reviews. And lo, entering his name in Google pulls up a couple of recent articles asking the same questions:

Searching for Earl Dittman, anti-critic

EARL DITTMAN EXPOSED – Film Criticism’s Greatest Shame

Neither article manages to prove or disprove the existence of either Dittman or Wireless Magazines, although if it does exist it obviously has a very small and limited circulation, possibly somewhere in Houston. Dittman was one of the "blurbmeisters" whose fawning raves were referred to in a class action lawsuit brought against major movie studios in 2001 by Citizens for Truth in Movie Advertising, and has been regarded as a joke or worse since the mid 90s, and yet his words continue to be used in ads, trailers and promotions....

I'm suprised I haven't seen any rants yet about the remake of The Italian Job that opens at the end of the month. I suppose everyone's just thankful that Guy Ritchie didn't get his grubby hands on it and cast Madonna in the Irene Handel role. But it doesn't bode well that the film isn't set in Italy and they're replaced the likes of Benny Hill, Fred Emney and John Le Mesurier with Seth Green and Mos Def. Mark Wahlberg in the Michael Caine part seems almost inspired casting by comparison, although I'll wait until I hear his delivery of "You were only supposed to blow the doors off!" before casting final judgement. After all, there were those who scoffed at the Sylvester Stallone remake of Get Carter....

Coming next, Jennifer Lopez, Vin Diesel and Ice T in Passport to Pimlico.

The heat index was up in the 100s yesterday. I must find out what this means. They give so much information on the weather news here. What is the dewpoint? How can you have humidity of more than 100%? Does that means there's more water in the air than, uh, air? Do people really need to know how deep Lake Travis is before they can set off for work?

Jon's excellent piece on the Associates is now up at the Astronaut's Notepad (dated 5/8/03 -- I shouldn't rely on blogger links, should I?), relieving me of the urgent need to untangle my clotted thoughts -- although there is much I have to say on Billy and Alan's fabulous adventures in swoony pop, circa 1981-2, seeing how this coincided with my own greatest need for and receptiveness to such music. Go read Jon, then ask yourself who's going to write a piece like this about The White Stripes or Coldplay in 2023?

Scraps on my desktop that may never be turned into fully-grown blog entries let alone the footnoted essays I probably envisioned them as being in my deluded noggin. Something about the laboured pointlessness of Sandra Bullock and her comedies of mild klutziness. A big piece on the Associates, concentrating on Billy MacKenzie's impersonation of Sean Connery on "Skipping" from Sulk for some reason. Surely I got further than just a paragraph about Amon Duul's Para Dieswarts Duul and a sentence about Scritti Politti's "Is & Ought the Western World"? How did I mean to connect them? A half-hearted attempt to explain why "Why?" by a London band called Seize, "which pares the traditional two chord thrash down to a two note thrash" was the most perfect record of 1980, even though I didn't hear it until last month. Various rants about the war on Iraq, all of which are out of date and wrong or at least no longer reflect my thinking. A piece about how weird it is to go to a mall in Austin -- it feels like you're entering another America, where "the solitary bookshop contains mostly hateful crap from those talk-radio pundits who reckon everything that is decent about the USA is about to be crushed beneath the jackboot of the liberal media, feminazis and Hilary Clinton". And so on, and so on.

The air quality here in Austin is being buggered about by agricultural fires down in Mexico and Central America. Currently the level of crap -- I mean PM2.5 (Particulate Matter 2.5 microns and smaller) -- in the air rates "moderate" but the sunsets have been pinker over the last few days....

Let's see if I've got this right. The BBC makes a show that was obviously commisioned as "like an English version of Friends with added smut" and then sells the idea back to NBC as they look for a replacement for Friends. Maybe NBC will take out the smut, make it more cutesy and then wonder how come they've paid all this money to end up with what they had in the first place.

You never read about the big American networks wanting to do a US version of Keeping Up Appearances or As Time Goes By or any of those other Brit-coms that seem to have infinite reruns on PBS. And there's a good reason for that. I have no idea why PBS shows these dreadful relics. It's truly embarrassing, especially when they have some servile ninny bleating about how fabulous they are and how PBS needs your pledges so they can go on showing these versions of England where everyone is in their 60s, lives in Maidstone and gets a laugh for saying "Oh Geoffrey, you really are the absolute limit" or mentioning British Rail sandwiches. Send in $100 and you can get a video of Hyacinth Bucket getting her hat knocked off....

Back to the gym last night. Still deeply ambivalent about the whole fitness deal and the motives of everyone around me. All this physical effort, all the sweat and metal and curiously cut outfits -- for what? I just want to be able to eat real food and not turn back into the fat boy I've been for most of my adult life. I don't want to go back to the cabbage soup regime and counting the number of tortilla chips I can have for my precisely timed snack. If the occassional half-pound of pot roast on rye followed by half an order of blueberry blintzes at Katz means I have to sweat it out for a couple of hours a week on the elliptical machine then that's fine by me. It gives me a chance to catch up on those back issues of Harper's. I suspect that my motivation -- exercising so I can drink and pig out now and then -- would be frowned upon by many of the gym members. But I suspect few of them have seen their pants and shirt buttons ping! off across the room. There was a section on the application form when I joined the gym where you could tick off what your goals were. "Being able to eat deep fried camembert without shortening my life expectancy" wasn't listed.

I also discovered that the Fall's "Gut of the Quantifier" is the perfect piece of workout music.

Somehow the bit about wearing a flat cap and supping pints of Timothy Taylor's down the Dog and Duck (not this one) got missed out of the "rap" on "American Life"...

At least she's got good taste in beer, I'll give her that.

The Modern Drunkard gets the thumbs up from TMFTML and the Washington Post, but what is one to make of their "perfect martini" (sic indeed!) that contains one-third vermouth, bitters and lime juice? Why not go the whole hog and add half a can of Red Bull, an orchid and a pint of cream? Blasphemy. The perfect martini contains one-eighth vermouth at the very most and just the oil from a twist of lemon. If you want a dirty martini, the few drops of brine that cling to an olive are enough. This is assuming you're using a fine, imported gin. If you're using cheap domestic vodka you'll probably need to dump all that crap in.

"Hi, I'm in my late 40s, miserable and facing up to reality -- buy my album!" No, not Madonna this time, but Annie Lennox. Why can't these old gals handle being past the first flush of youth like Tom Waits or, better yet, Paolo Conte?

Hardly seems worth mentioning that Will Wynn did win. No big surprise there. Nothing very interesting about the mayoral election except for the fact that 4th placer Brad Meltzer spent at least $135,000 on his campaign, which works out at about $25 a vote....

Hurrah, and about bloody time. But who would've thought that it would have been Thomas Pynchon who would ride out of the mists to reclaim Orwell for the left -- the "dissident left" -- after the recents attempts by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan to pressgang him into their perculiar version of neo-conservatism? Discovering that Pynchon probably knows his well-thumbed copies of Orwell's collected essays and review by heart is a very fine thing for a Monday morning. (And whoever it was at the US Penguin office who had the notion of getting him to do the introduction to the new edition of 1984 rather than the aforementioned Sullivan or Hitchens deserves a big wet kiss -- and not necessarily from me.

Also missed the Showdown in Texas rally, although we caught the march down Congress when we came back from the desperately disapointing Pecan St. Festival (endless stalls selling chunky mugs, chili oil, homemade soap, fried things, mobile phone covers and doggles -- sunglasses for dogs). It looked amiable and focused enough except for one truly deranged woman who seemed to be close to disemboweling herself in her unexpressible rage at the very concept of America. I still have my doubts about protest march culture, however, as anything more than a chance for old pals to meet up and feel that they've done their bit for the cause. There are plenty of serious issues behind the "showdown" but I'm sure to bystanders and the media these things are mostly cute puppets and bad Bush puns.

"Your mother want to go to Hooters?"
"No, Hoover's, Hoover's with a vee..."
Ah yes, Hoover's is the place to go when Texas cuisine isn't quite southern enough for you, when you want comfort food that comes in uncomfortably large portions. You wonder why they have skinny little girls showing you to your seats and clearing up but big, hefty guys waiting on table until you see the amount of food they had to lug to your table. The chicken-fried steak is implausibly tender, which is how it should be but rarely is. Southern comfort cooking means you should be able to eat everything on your plate with a spoon or maybe through a straw. Most things are just this side of mushy, unless they've been fried -- in which case they're totally mushy, held together by batter. Everything is aimed at the meat-eater -- even the vegetables come with half a farmyard of animal produce. Green beans appear beneath a mound of shredded pork. Spinach comes laden with cream and bacon. There's probably half a pound of meat hiden away in the basket of bread rolls. Eating at Hoover's ought to carry a health warning, not because it's bad for you -- which it certainly is -- but because it's so addictive. There's something about the combination of the very bland with the sweet and spicy.... You ask for a box intending to take half of your meal home then discover you've already eaten it all. When you find yourself mopping up peppery, spicy gravy with cinnamon rolls you know you're hooked. You try to work out how many hours on the running machine that last forkful of mashed potatoes and gravy will cost you and vow to eat nothing but wheatgrass for the next two weeks....

Missed No Pants Day on Friday. Not sure whether this falls into the Keep Austin Weird category or the Striving Just A Little Too Hard To Keep Austin Wacko. Besides which there are plenty of folks on the drag on any given day who really don't need another excuse to disregard conventional concepts of lower body wear....

Obviously I won't be voting on the 3rd, not being a citizen and all, but if I could I'd probably join the 7/8th of the eligible Austinites who don't bother to do the democratic thing. It would just be too bizarre to vote for someone called Will Wynn even if he probably will win. He's the only candidate who looks and sounds like a proper politician -- he has the shiny hair and nice suits (or maybe it's the other way around) and all the local community groups are behind him from the firefighters to the lesbians -- but there's something too packaged and uninspiring about him. I suspect the main point in his favour is that he isn't one of the other candidates.

Marc Katz is a likeable guy and there are probably people who'd vote for him just for bring 24 hour blueberry blintzes and reubin sandwiches as high as they are wide to Austin, but his policies are somehow both vague and combative. He has a tendency to get all worked up about wanting to do things that turn out to have already been done, and no-one has a clue what his slogan "less is more" is all about.

Brad Meltzer is another restauranteur (and not the best-selling author of The Tenth Justice, Dead Even, and The First Counsel), but he justs owns a couple of Benihanas -- the fake Japanese Steakhouses that are like TGI Fridays with knife-juggling chefs. He just goes on about running Austin like a business, which in a city where a lot of people are losing their jobs because of the way the economy dictates businesses be run isn't such a great slogan.

Max Nofziger used to be the perennial freak candidate, but he got voted onto the council for nine years -- although they weren't a very effective nine years, I gather. Now he falls into the limbo between the weirdos and the guys with money and connections. I don't know much about him, but he has the best facial hair of all the candidates and his website has the endearing line: Max earnestly wants to revitalize Austin's magic, not in a hippie-dippy, pie-in-the-sky, get-back-to-the-Sixties, take-me-home-to-the-Armadillo sort of way, but in the manner of a seasoned fifty-five-year-old practical and experienced City leader. So why bring all that hippy-dippy stuff up?

Leslie Cochran is famous for being Leslie Cochran, the homeless transvestite whose taste for fishnets and miniskirts make him a tourist attraction in the downtown areas where he isn't banned. (Right now his attire is fairly tasteful, but just wait for summer.) He isn't the weirdest candidate, however. That might be Jennifer Gale, the homeless transgender candidate who stands for every public office going and claims to have once been a marine. Or maybe Hermann Luckett whose occupation is given as "revolutionary" and whose main concerns seem to be cutting the police budget and legalising marijuana. And then there's Christopher N. Keating who owns a demolition company and a sixth street bar, which seems like a neat combination. All I know about him is that he complains about people not knowing what floor of City Hall you need to go to to get a planning permit.

There are other positions up for election but oh, I grow weary of Googling and typing....

As usual TMFTML gets it right. This time on the subject of three of the most unjustly neglected novels of modern American writing: Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Good as Gold and God Knows. Maybe people think that having written Catch 22, everything else he did was just indulgently superfluous, showing off. Something Happened is the most terrfiying intepretation of what happens when the American Dream comes true. I wouldn't recommend anyone under 35 or planning a career in the business world read it. I tried to read it when I was twenty, got about a quarter of the way through, peeked at the end and knew it would mess me up if I went any further. But I still believe it is one of the ten best novels of our time, darker and bleaker than a stack of Russian novels and too damn real for comfort. Good as Gold is usually where critics think the rot set in -- he changed editor half way through and if you're a real smarty pants you can probably spot where -- so I'm pleased to see that someone else finds it his funniest work. Like his previous books it's still a savage, unflinching attack on the systems we think we need to live by but that in fact smother us and make us shadows of what we could be, whether the system is government, family, religion or fate.God Knows is way too long, but has such a noble, epic sadness that you go on reading until the end. His subsequent novels -- I take the word of the critics and reviewers on those. I think I may have read an extract from one or two and whatever Heller had wasn't there. But two great and two nearly great novels are more than enough.

Made myself all nostalgic and sad reading this old Uncut article about the Associates and listening to 4th Drawer Down and Sulk, such maddeningly implausible records from two decades ago that still astonish and startle like the discovery of another world -- one that's brighter, more vivid and alive, irridescent and shimmering with posibilities that somehow slipped away.... I know it might be creeping oldfartism on my part but I can't imagine anyone getting the same thrill from anything that's around today, not even ___________ (insert name of this week's NME fave). Nothing either Billy MacKenzie or Alan Rankine did after splitting in October 1982 was touched with the otherworldly magic of those two albums and MacKenzie's suicide, 15 years later, terrible though it is to say it, wasn't a complete shock. After that initial surfeit of beauty and experience what was left? Normal life, a reluctance to get involved in the machinations of the music biz (I can't imagine him singing "Part Fears Two" to nostalgia-in-a-basket 40-somethings alongside ABC, Heaven 17, Altered Images, etc), his whippets, the ocassional recording. Maybe it wasn't so bad, maybe it was the death of his mother that drove him to the shed with the paracetemol and amitriptyline and his one word suicide note: "Sorry".

Alan Rankine survived. Now he teaches Music Business Studies in Glasgow. Everyone know the story of how Belle and Sebastian made their first album as part of their class project but I didn't know until today that Rankine was their teacher and responsible for setting that project. (He also apparently writes songs for boybands like 911, but I don't want to believe that.)

I couldn't bring myself to look for Billy's grave when I worked in Dundee for a year. Despite my infatuation with the Eastern Necropolis across the road from my boarding house I wouldn't do such a thing. Seeing the special displays for posthumus releases in Virgin and his biography made me weepy enough. (Nothing else about Dundee made me think of him or where his inspiration came from -- sorry, the place really was a shithole.)

For the first time ever I feel sorry for him: Cilla prepares birthday treat for Blair. No wonder he wants to find out where Saddam is hiding....

More "oh please like me" stuff from Mrs Guy Ritchie the other night on NBC's Dateline. The only bit worth mentioning was an impromptu strumalong rendition of "Like a Virgin" and even though she and the one musician who knew the chords did their best to turn it into "Kum-by-ah" it stirred enough memories of the original and the "Blonde Ambition" version to make me feel rather sad and old. The ghost of what the song once was and through it what Madonna once was won't be buried despite her attempts at trashing her past achievements just to get a few cheap laughs and come across as... as Avril Lavigne's gran or whatever her new re-invented persona is meant to be.

Weird thought: I had imagined that this Madonna was so pointless and dull because it was the "real" Madonna we were seeing, the hollowness at the core of two decades of re-re-re-reinvention, hair dye and zeitgeist-surfing appropriations. But what if this is just another persona, a variant on the serious, brunette Madonna, a Madonna that is right for this time? And what does that say about this time? Do we get the Madonna we deserve, and all we deserve right now, that represents this moment, is this limp sham promoting a vapid, attention-craving approximation of sincerity? Maybe Madonna is still brilliantly encapsulating nowness, comodifying the wavefront of popular culture and the more digestible bits of the underground as acutely and cynically as ever -- only there's nothing glamorous, sexy, dancable or smart about the current now for her to sell back to us?

(Hey ho. At least this made me laugh: Jim DeRogatis turned his column in the Chicago Sun-Times over to the mail he got from rabid Madonna fans in response to his critical review.)