Month: September 2019

Texas State Arts Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 25, 2008

If you don’t think laser hair removal is an art, think again. It’s not all about carving landing strips and bisecting unibrows. There may be occasions where a customer requests to have his back hair depilated in a facsimile of C.M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker or his butt rug burned into Escher’s mirror ball. Exacting craftsmanship like that requires a steady laser hand and a finely honed aesthetic. Just because they don’t offer laser hair removal classes at the École des Beaux-Arts (which is, of course, pure conjecture based on the idea that the French are both stuck up about their art and huge body hair fetishists) doesn’t exclude laser hair removal from the arts entirely. Similarly, art made in Texas isn’t necessarily automatically relegated to a starving artist sale in the basement of an interstate Ramada. There are plenty of Beaux Artistes here in Texas – and not just the ones selling painted driftwood on the side of the road next to the beef-jerky stand. There are gobs at the flea markets and in the booths in front of the Fiesta Mart. After all, what would the world be without dream catchers and rope dragons and sea shell art and wind chimes? And what about chain-saw sculpture? Why fuck around with a chisel and knife when you can lay into your art with 3.5 horsepower of ozone-depleting artistry? Want a log that looks like a bear? Want another one? How about a set? Maybe a coffee table made of tree trunk slices? Imagine Rodin trying to sculpt The Thinker with a screaming, bucking 40cc Poulan “Wild Thing?” Wouldn’t happen. Chain-sawing, even as an artistic outlet doesn’t involve a lot of deep thinking. The chain saw is surely an ingenious feat of engineering, but like NASCAR, the guy running the machine usually isn’t the brains of the operation. Ol’ Leatherface was crafty enough to outsmart a few teenagers, but he was still a far cry from a Mensa membership. Nonetheless, the happy news for chain-sawers – and Texans too for that matter – is that art isn’t a brain-heavy endeavor. At its core, art is about communicating emotionally rather than intellectually – sort of like George W. in a presidential debate. Artistic genius is, to say the least, a different type of genius. Pollock splattering canvases with paint or Mapplethorpe shoving a bullwhip up his ass or Christo wrapping islands in pink polypropylene takes a certain amount of noodle, no doubt, but it’s not like they were designing fusion reactors. So in other words, when it comes to art, the pressure’s off – intellectually at least, which makes Texas a great place for artists of all stripes, many of whom will be in residence at this weekend’s Texas Arts Festival, a two-day art and fun filled event celebrating Texas independence and art. Not only will there be nearly 100 booths filled with arts, crafts, food, and drink, there will also be live music from morning to night by diverse artists like Sunny Sweeney, American Graveyard, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Grupo Fantasma. All told, 28 bands will take the stage Saturday through Sunday. At a $5 cover, that comes to just under 18 cents per band. When was the last time you saw Ray Wylie Hubbard for 18 cents? You don’t need to be a scientist to see that’s a damn good deal. Maybe you can take all the money you saved and get your cooter depilated to look like the Mona Lisa.

Spring Salsa Dance Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 19, 2008

“You’re painting by numbers/Connecting the dots/They don’t have to tell you you don’t call the shots/You jump when they say jump/and you don’t ask how high/’cause painting by numbers they know you’ll get by – James McMurtry, “Painting by Numbers” Salsa dancers look at their feet a lot. For the dancers themselves, this might just be a comfort mechanism, a way of mentally rehearsing the steps before they happen – the peace of mind of knowing what’s just ahead. For the wallflowers, whose primary solace is making catty comments about the grace of the chosen, this type of foresight is both annoying and dull – comparable to watching someone who moves their lips when reading. Like karaoke or NASCAR or ice-skating, the thrill of watching people dance is not derived from how well the participants perform, but rather from how badly they screw up. Sure, it’s a blast doing the “white-man’s overbite” or the “sorority-girl step through” or the “broken-armed robot,” but watching someone butcher any of the aforementioned is even funner. This is precisely why dancing is so popular, not just because it’s entertaining for the people who do it well, but because it’s equally entertaining for the people who don’t. Why? Because dancing is something nearly everyone has tried at one time or another. They might have failed miserably at it themselves, but even the most horrible dancer has just enough dance experience to be an excellent critic. Should you let this stop you from dancing? Absolutely not. You should, in fact, embrace it. Ridicule is an excellent forge of character. If you’ve never endured the merciless ridicule of friends and peers, you probably aren’t living. At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to live your life crippled by self-consciousness and doubt, or at least occasionally give yourself over to bouts of wild-eyed abandon. Or, maybe you just need some training wheels for those fits of wild-eyed abandon. If so, Salsa dancing might be just the ticket for you. For many people, even having fun demands some guidelines, a framework in which to be wild and crazy. Salsa dancing looks pretty wild and crazy. You can find out for yourself this Friday at the Texas Union Ballroom, where UT Informal Classes is hosting the Spring Salsa Dance Festival 2008 featuring salsa, merengue, cha-cha, and probably a lot of other dances you don’t know anything about. Don’t sweat it. From 8 to 9pm there will be free salsa lessons. Once you’ve got the whole salsa thing nailed, one of Austin’s favorite and long-standing latin flavored bands, the Brew, will be cranking out dance music until well after midnight. Even if you think you’re a shitty dancer, it wouldn’t hurt to give this deal a try. If nothing else, it brings the shoegazing thing to a whole new participatory level, that’s for sure.

Harold and Maude

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 11, 2008

If there is a god in heaven, you weren’t even a zygote in 1971, otherwise you’re one of those hags or geezers who are dragging the Chronicle’s demos north … as in up I-35 toward Sun City. As far as the publishing business goes, that’s a death march – certainly for the alternative press, whose advertisers like to think they’re tapping into an age range where “MySpace” means a web page and not a burial plot. Apparently the older and looser you get, the more your purse strings tighten (unless, of course, you want to buck the trend and blow a lot of money on vaginal reconstruction). Really, the alternative press should be nothing but thankful for the enthusiastic support of the “me” generation. They brought us into this world and they will very likely take us out of it. With any luck however, their children will get hooked on us like Starbucks or trailer-trash crank and we can blather on for a few more years – at least until the rapture. If you were actually alive and sentient in 1971, you probably don’t need to be told why Harold and Maude is perhaps the second most important American movie made that year, holding down the silver between gold medalist Billyjack and bronze medalist Shaft. Yes, there were other noteworthy contenders that year like Academy Award winner The French Connection (aka the un-American Connection), and runners up A Clockwork Orange (too British), Fiddler on the Roof (too Russian), Nicholas and Alexander (ditto) and The Last Picture Show (too Texan). Billyjack wins, of course, because like America, Billyjack wants to be perceived as peaceful, but he pretty much spends all his time kicking ass, not to mention the movie itself is a fist-pumping, peyote-dropping, hippie-loving martial arts flick done up in a Southwestern motif. Fiddler on the What? Harold and Maude, on the other hand is a touching primer on cougaring (Google it) with wicked sick cinematography by John A. Alonzo (who like Gary Oldman and the Oscars, has been inexplicably snubbed for posthumous induction into the Texas Film Hall of Fame) and a whimsical soundtrack by Cat Stevens before he started sucking up to the muslims. Harold and Maude wasn’t the first film to deal with cougaring. 1967’s The Graduate certainly got that ball rolling in fine style, but Harold and Maude unquestionably took cougaring to a freakish extreme by pairing a baby-faced, death obsessed 19-year-old Bud Cort with the grizzled/wizened/hoary but perky 79-year-old Ruth Gordon. To his credit, director Hal Ashby managed to keep from turning art house theatres into vomitoriums by crafting Harold and Maude into a touching seize-the-day parable instead of depraved wallow in granny porn. It’s a feat that may never be so skillfully duplicated again, though many have tried. In fact, right here in Austin a plucky young director named Steve Bilich is bringing Harold and Maude to the stage at Mercury Hall with his mother Sue Bilich playing the role of Maude, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Not even Freud on a coke binge could dream up a scenario this bizarre (i.e., a 16-year-old even faking getting it on with a woman in her 70s), so you’ll surely want to be on hand to take in the spectacle. Maybe you’ll meet a cougar yourself, or maybe by reading the Chronicle you already have.

The Reivers Reunion Show

The Luv Doc Recommends

February 5, 2008

Every once in a while when you’re stuck in gridlock on the upper deck watching some dirty construction worker in the back of a pickup dig a booger out of his nose that looks like a chandelier out of a Dr. Seuss book, you might start to wonder … how did this happen? All these people? All this traffic? All this insane overbuilding? In short: What we got, they ain’t got? It’s not like Austin is tucked away in a scenic valley in the Swiss Alps or nestled in a cove on the French Riviera. For that matter, we’re a couple of shades uglier than most parts of the OC, and the surfing really sucks. The soil isn’t particularly fertile, the trees aren’t very majestic, and the temperature is only mild during allergy seasons. Why all the fuss, yo? Is this urban engine running entirely on hype? Well, yeah, sort of, but we do have a nice river (recently retitled Lady Bird Lake), some cool springs (cool enough to shrink your Willie down to a Bill) and some nice hills – especially if you like your hills liberally sprinkled with million dollar homes. Still, attractive as that trinity may sound, it’s not jazzy enough to spawn the 30-plus condo developments slated to remix the Austin skyline in the next 10 years. No, there’s something deeper and more insidious going on here in River City: nostalgia. Nostalgia because those condo buyers think they’re buying in to a scene – a scene that will be gone long before they crack the packing tape on their moving boxes. It will vanish just like all the scenes that preceded it to be replaced by something newer, more polished, and more expensive. In the same way the cosmic cowboys gave way to the new sincerity, which begat South by Southwest, retrobilly, post punk, shoegazers, and then the shitstorm of bands that made Austin the “Live music Capital of the World,” the current drummer-in-every-ThunderCloud clusterfuck will be squeezed out to more affordable locales. Like their sign says, Waco may just be what Austin was twenty years ago. Even if it’s not, Austin will never return to those halcyon days when condoms were used mostly for water-balloon fights, Ecstasy was free, pot cost something like $1.50 an ounce (but only if you wanted the really good shit) and every obnoxious garage band was sure to redefine the American musical landscape. Such is the stuff of legend … and legends (call them lies if you’re picky) are how condos get overbuilt. The big difference between the 1980s and now is that the musicians make less money – and that’s not even adjusting for cost of living. Sure, there are a lot more places to play. As long as there are trust funders with coke habits there will be venues to fill, but the days of the slacker musician are fast drawing to a close. Trying to scrape out subsistence as an original musician in Austin these days is like taking a vow of homelessness, and regardless of their pure intentions, those eager condopolitans who are plopping down a half mil for a chance to enjoy Austin’s “rich cultural diversity” aren’t going to have a lot of patience for any artistic experimentation outside the covers of a piano bar songbook. Whine about it all you want, the old scene is dead, but if you want a glimpse of what it used to be like, trot on over to the Parish Sunday night for the second, as of yet unsold-out night of the Reivers reunion. Back in the overbuilt Eighties, the Reivers were known as Zeitgeist, one of a cluster of bands associated with Austin’s new sincerity era. They’re all older now and fully schooled in the nuances of irony, but the smart money is betting they can rock it like they still believe. And who knows? If all those condos go bust we might just get the scene they spent all that money trying to exploit. Maybe the next big movement is the new irony, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

KLBJ’s Pleasurefest

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 29, 2008

If you can listen to KLBJ’s sausagefest morning show without wanting to put a fist through your windshield, then Pleasurefest ’08 is probably going to be right up your alley, especially if you’re thinking that “up your alley” is some sort of clever homo euphemism for your tradesman’s entrance. Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, by listening to the KLBJ morning show you’re showing solidarity with the devil-horns tongue-flick crowd. You may not drive a louvered window Camaro or a wallet on a chain, and you may not rock it in a wife beater, halter-top, or Kentucky Waterfall, but in your heart of hearts that’s how you’d like to roll. You may not blow your lunch money on Hooters, Bikinis, Twin Peaks, or the surf and turf at Sugar’s, but as long as you’re eating, why not enjoy a little eye candy as well, right? And when it comes to sex, you’re the type who likes to explore every facet of your sensuality – ideally in less than five minutes with your pants at your ankles. What you don’t know or haven’t tried you can surely fill in with a quick visit to your favorite Internet porn site. After all, who could possibly know more about pleasure than porn stars? Anyone who has ever watched porn knows that the actors aren’t really acting; they’re truly wracked with violent, shuddering spasms of pleasure – well, after a few tortuous minutes of obligatorily contrived “need-a-plumber/let-me-see-your-tool” setup. The problem with the Internet is that it involves literacy – computer literacy at the very least – which isn’t your strong suit. You’re the type of person who learns best in a 3-D, interactive environment, which makes Pleasurefest just the ticket for you. Instead of sitting at home painting your desktop monitor with pearl drops, at Pleasurefest you can actually meet and take pictures with porn star Brooke Haven. Is that her real name? Are those things really real? Does she really get into it like she’s acting like she does? Those are just a few of the questions you won’t remember to ask in Dale and Bob’s Ask a Porn Star session. Don’t worry, there’s plenty more to be dumbfounded by as well. There’s also “Miss Maulie” in her giant martini glass, a “gravity defying pole demo” by Mercy Killings, a lingerie show by Tabu, burlesque performances by Kitty Kitty Bang Bang and Southern Sirens as well as cash giveaways and more. All told, there’s probably nothing you’re going to take away from this deal other than some unrealistic expectations about the opposite sex that will undermine any chance at a meaningful relationship therewith, but you’re probably going to have a kickass time anyway. And if the legacy of this fest is you spending more time shellacking your computer screen instead of being out on the streets procreating, then mission accomplished, right?

Austin Air Sex Championships

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 22, 2008

You might be tempted to question the wisdom of Alamo Drafthouse in preceding their Air Sex Championships this Saturday night with a screening of There Will Be Blood. The bill sounds a little “dark ages” – as if the air sex competitors have to hoist a stained sheet to prove they’ve consummated their imaginary act. That would be impressive though, Wouldn’t it? If the promo video is any indication, not all air sex is virgin sex – at least not as it’s pantomimed. The competitors however, are another matter entirely. It’s fairly safe to say that whoever came up with the idea of air sex (well, actually it was the Japanese) didn’t do so as a response to getting bored with the real thing. Apparently if you wait around long enough, even the worst air pocket becomes a reasonable substitute for a meat pocket. We’d like to think American society isn’t nearly as repressed. Here in the states, air sex is traditionally relegated to hack comedy routines, excessive end zone celebrations, and obscene gestures by construction workers stranded on girders. That is, until the culturally co-optive folks down at the Drafthouse dropped air sex into their lineup. It turns out that the Japanese are only air sex dilettantes. The real pros live right here in River City. If you’re swelling with pride about Austin’s previously untapped talent, consider this: It’s not because Austin is teeming with savvy sluts and skilled swordsmen. No, most air sexers get their training just like everyone else: Online. That’s understandable. Unless you’re Ron Jeremy, Traci Lords, Mick Jagger, Pamela Anderson, or Wilt Chamberlin, your real-life experience with visually robust scenarios like double penetration, bukkake, and analingus is going to be relatively limited. However, through the miracle of the internets, even the most undefiled virgin can find a treasure trove of information on the biomechanics of freaky sex – certainly enough to bluff their way through a frenzied pantomime of a muff and duff with a couple of monstrously hung weightlifters or maybe a dizzying ride in a Vietnamese spin fuck chair. Question is: Will that be enough to impress the judges? Hard to say. Then again, maybe it really isn’t about the judges. After all, this is air sex, so you can pretty much start with the supposition that everyone’s a loser and has nowhere to go but up, both figuratively and literally. That kind of sick, sweaty desperation always leads to bizarre and entertaining situations, and you wouldn’t want to miss them, would you? Yes, the competition will be fierce, and There Will Be Blood, but only the imaginary kind which, like the air sex, won’t stain your clothing.

James Brown Live 1968

The Luv Doc Recommends

January 15, 2008

Monday is MLK Day. If you’re one of those fortunate 33% of Americans who actually get the day off, knuckles, yo. You deserve some extra shuteye. Nothing wears a body out like a grueling eight-hour shift in some faceless bureaucratic sinkhole. You have to work three times as hard when everything has to be done in triplicate, right? Just maybe not three times as fast, and one less day shuffling down fluorescent-lit corridors at a sleepwalkers pace for no other apparent purpose than to generate static electricity in your orthopedic shoes is reason enough to get on the civil rights bandwagon, isn’t it? Not to mention you can work that same slow, shuffling gait past all those sucker furniture salesmen and department store clerks who are surely wishing they could hitch a ride on the government gravy train too. Sadly, that’s about the limit of possible MLK Day merriment. Sure there are political rallies, a smattering of marches and parades, a lecture or two, but ultimately, MLK Day lacks the festivity of a St. Patrick’s Day or Valentine’s Day or even a Cinco de Mayo. This may have something to do with the fact that it’s wicked cold outside in January. It could also have something to do with the fact that MLK Day is a relatively new holiday – a holiday memorializing a man who got shot in the head by a stupid cracker – or maybe a conspiracy of stupid crackers, depending on who you believe. Regardless, it’s hard to find a party angle that doesn’t seem a little disrespectful. Given enough time however, you can bet that Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors will come up with something to put the PAR-TAY in MLK. That’s the bottom line: MLK Day hasn’t made it to prime time because corporate America hasn’t figured out how to make money off it. Give the Madison Avenue product pimps enough time and pretty soon the shelves at Walgreens will fill up with Martin Luther King Cakes, I Have a Dreamcatchers, Civil Right Guard, Selma-Nilla Wafers, and Montgomery Bus Boycottage Cheese. That’s when the real party starts. Until then you’ll just have to make do with relatively somber, reverent memorials to one of America’s greatest civil rights champions. Or, you could go to Alamo Drafthouse Downtown where, as a part of their usual Music Monday series will be featuring James Brown Live 1968, a recording of a live, televised broadcast of the James Brown concert at Boston Garden that took place less than 24 hours after the Martin Luther King assassination. City leaders felt that televising the concert would keep attendance down and thus limit the possibility of rioting in the downtown area. They were right. Only 2000 people showed up for the concert in a venue with capacity for 14,000. True to form, Brown still put on a blistering performance. The legacy of the concert however, is an extraordinary recording of Brown at the peak of his abilities and a moving historical document of the times. If you’re still revved up after the show you can attend an afterparty at the The Jackalope sponsored by Dewar’s featuring music from the film. Sounds like a crazy cultural clusterfuck, maybe not the promised land Dr. King described, but at least a little bit closer.

Rock & Roll Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

Jan. 8, 2008

If you did them up right, the holidays should have packed a couple of extra pounds of suet on your frame. Don’t freak out and buy an expensive gym membership just yet. Anything could happen. You might swallow a tapeworm. You might go on a hunger strike. Your soccer team’s plane might crash in the Andes. Besides, more and more people are getting right with chubbiness anyway. Take a quick stroll along the drag and you’ll realize that your anachronistic prejudices about body image don’t trouble the youth of today. You won’t see any hint of the roomy, asexual styles of yesteryear. Mostly what you get is clothes that truss the body like sausage casings, split with intermittent herniations of white, doughy flesh. In ill-fitting clothing, nearly anyone can look voluptuous. Take “skinny jeans” for instance. They might make your legs look skinny – especially if you could throw a poncho over your upper torso – say like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, but the average pair of skinny jeans these days has belly fat oozing out of the top like dough from a broken can of biscuits. Perhaps it’s Eurocentric designers taking revenge on Bush-voting red states, but clothing seems to be tailored for people who spend their days in the tailgate mosh pit of Oxfam trucks, not for pudgy middle Americans whose most physically demanding tasks are fingering their remotes and cracking the pull-tops on cans of Red Bull and Rock Star. If people aren’t leaving their houses as much (and they aren’t) there really isn’t much need for them to look presentable, but they could at least look and feel comfortable. It’s really sad to think of a whole nation of teenagers passing out, popping buttons and splitting seams in the comfort and privacy of their own homes just because they don’t have enough self-esteem to buy their clothes in the “husky” section of J.C. Penney. If wishes were horses, they probably wouldn’t try to fit into Greyhound harnesses, would they? Ah, but how to change the demented mindset of a whole generation? Fuck that, you’re probably better off buying an Ab Lounger and training for ultra marathons. Or, you could have your mouth wired shut. Before you do, you might want to check in with Jennifer Marchand, who is the beneficiary of a rock & roll concert this Friday at Ruta Maya. Marchand who runs Bleu French Laundry productions, a promoter of musical events like the Zeppelin hoot night and the Stones Sticky Fingers album hoot, was hit by a car in November and suffered, among other things, a broken jaw, which required her mouth to be wired shut for four weeks. This Friday’s show will help cover some of her medical expenses and get her back in business, so to speak. Acts scheduled to play include: Amplified Heat, Chili Cold Blood, the Alice Rose, the Summer Wardrobe, Ralph White, the Murdocks, Carolyn Wonderland, Tony Scalzo, Jade Day, Paul Minor, and surprise guests. The Ruta Maya should be packed tighter than a pair of skinny jeans, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to squeeze you in.