Month: December 2020

Extravagasm Fantasy Ball

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 21, 2009

Ever notice how there aren’t any Renaissance faires in Texas in August? Here’s why: Wearing a suit of armor in Texas in August is a surer and perhaps more painful death than anything the armor might repel. A couple of hours in the full sun and the occupant would have the skin tone of a Renaissance faire turkey leg. You might be Sir James the Tumescent putting on the armor, but you’d be taking it off as Slim Jim. Of course, the same could be said of just about all faire wear, be you saucy wench or roguish knave. A bodice (aka “boob bucket”) is a perfectly acceptable means of support in most climates, but around here it’s just a recipe for a big ol’ pail of mam chowder. Really the chillest Ren wear would have to be the monk’s robe, which offers the opportunity to freeball it but wears like a Navajo sweat lodge. Judging by the dress code, you would think that the Renaissance bypassed Central Texas altogether. Not so. As early as the 1500s, Spaniards were sharing the wonders of the Renaissance with the indigenous peoples of the desert southwest: smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and cholera to name a few. They also brought along their co-pilot, God, who navigated them toward gold and glory but instead got the consolation prize of murder and slavery, referred to in history books as “missionary works.” Not surprisingly, the Renaissance isn’t remembered fondly by the locals. Sure, they found Jesus, scored some used blankets, and learned to make the beast with two backs, but all in all they found the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. They were happier running around in animal skins and feathers, hitting it doggie style, and worshiping the earth. They even have their own Renaissance faires – they’re called powwows, and even though you can’t get a turkeye legge, you can get a turkey leg, in full confidence that it’s authentic, historically accurate, indigenous cuisine. Huzzah! Really you haven’t lived until you’ve spent a weekend camping out, wearing leather, smoking “the peace pipe,” and munching on fried bread. Regardless, American Indian fetish wear is still a niche market compared to real Ren faire wear. Not only did Western Europeans overrun the New World, they cornered the fetish market too, which seems a natural turn of events considering that depravity and debauchery were perfected in the 17th century – probably near ye olde towne of Versailles. “S’wounds I say! Thou shouldst bynde faste ye rodentes’ pawes ere ye shoveth hyme up thy arse!” To this day, for a certain segment of the population, nothing swells the organs lyke the sounde of olde Englyshe and the sight of the tightly corseted torso of a pasty pale wench or pudgy knave. However fetishy it may be, Ren wear, like the Ren faire itself, leaves a lot to the imagination. If only you could sexy it up some how … show a little more skin. Well, happye newes, bytches! This Friday night at 9pm the Extravagasm Fantasy Ball returns at Mixx on Sixth Street. This year’s theme is Erotic Renaissance, which means the ball features all kinds of exciting activities: fire spinners, Hula-hoopers, piercings by Pineapple, belly-dancing by Z-Helene, rope bondage by Bydarra, body-painting by Curvy Canvas, tarot readings by Cat Dancer, and the Siren of Song Ms. Cat Mon Dieu. If you want to be on the ball, make sure to strap on your fetish-influenced fashion and fantastical costumery! Just remember: No blatant nudity, and all genitalia must be covered. Start with your own. Nobody wants to see your turkeye legge poking out of your tyghtes.

Evil Dead: The Musical

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 13, 2009

Really, why shouldn’t Evil Dead be made into a musical? After all, death is quite a showstopper. It worked for Romeo and Juliet. Remember the closing scene where Leonardo DiCaprio eats it (well, drinks a vial of it) and then Claire Danes wakes up, gets all emo, and blows her brains out with Romeo’s custom-made nickel-plated .45? Balls out, Claire! Stunning visual. Queue the Wagner and … scene! Death sure does tidy up the unresolved plotlines, even though it messes up the set. It works for God though, so it must be the right way to go. Death also has a big closing scene in Hamlet … well, except for the Gilligan’s Island version. In the castaways’ production of Hamlet: The Musical, nobody dies at all, although the depressed Dane and his associates are pretty well butchered dramatically. The real Hamlet however, has an impressive body count. In fact, more people die in Hamlet than in Evil Dead. That might change at some point – especially if Rob Zombie decides to tackle the Bard – but those are solid statistics to date. Of course, in Hamlet, none of the dead people reanimate – unless you count Hamlet’s pops, who does stir the turd quite a bit with his whole revenge trip. It’s disturbing to think that in the afterlife old King Hamlet has nothing better to do than backseat drive his son into a murderous rage. Would it kill God to install some slot machines in the afterlife – at least maybe some Tetris? Similarly, the evil dead in The Evil Dead need to get a life too, which they do … apparently so they can pad the guest list of the afterlife. Here’s the basic plot: A group of Michigan State students go to a vacation cabin in Tennessee where they find an old tape recorder in the basement. When played, the tape unleashes evil spirits. First a girl gets raped by trees possessed by the evil dead (really evil dead, possessing vegetables is just beyond slumming), then she gets possessed herself and starts going all white-eyed and stabbing people with a pen. From there it’s all blood and guts, death and dismemberment: chainsaws, axes, daggers, shotguns, fireplace pokers – a veritable tool shed of prop-room implements slathered with gore. Imagine Hamlet, but with Gallagher doing the set direction. It’s easy to see why The Evil Dead would eventually find its way to the live stage. As far as being a musical, that was a natural too. You can’t expect thezbos to suppress all that voice and dance training indefinitely. Eventually somebody is going to have too many cosmos at happy hour and blurt out, “What if we make it a musical!?!?” If it happened to The Grapes of Wrath, then it can happen to anything … Schindler’s List … Requiem for a Dream … Brian’s Song … and you can only imagine the big tap-dancing production at the end of My Left Foot. In contrast, Evil Dead: The Musical doesn’t seem so evil at all. When you really study the evidence, you realize that the dead aren’t nearly as evil as the living – they just have really bad PR. Dead people didn’t try to exterminate the Jews, sew together a bodysuit made of human skin, or author The Bridges of Madison County. Dead people are harmless. That’s why evil living people are always trying to make more of them. And yet, just because life is infinitely tragic doesn’t mean it isn’t infinitely comic as well. In fact, the two are so hopelessly intertwined it’s pointless to try to separate them. Your glass is either half full or it’s half full of blood. Drink up! This Saturday you can belly up to the bloodbath at the Salvage Vanguard Theater: its very own production of Evil Dead: The Musical! Make sure to wear something white and pay the extra $5 for “splatter zone” seating. After Saturday night’s show there is also a special Dead Man’s Party, with live bands, munchies, and more visual gore. How’s that for a good closing scene?

Lebowski Fest

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 6, 2009

It’s been nearly a generation since Rick Linklater’s seminal film established Austin as the center of the slacker universe, a lazy little college town where people mostly just sat around talking about weird, esoteric shit and did little else (except wander off in a sort of ADD tangent to the next vignette). Apparently, a lot of people saw Slacker and said to themselves, “I can do that! I can do nothing!” and moved here in droves. Initially some were old-school hand-to-mouth slackers who came for the cheap booze, drugs, rent, and slutty women, all of which could easily be had by working a 20-hour shift at ThunderCloud. Then came the second tier: folks who identified with the slacker lifestyle and aesthetic but were also able to pony up the increasing rents for slacker havens like SoCo, SoLa, NoFo, and Crestview. These semislackers often held down real jobs and were closet competents, regardless of their full-sleeve arm tattoos and ear pegs. Instead of getting shit-canned on Natty Light, Lone Star, Pearl and PBR, they enjoyed the more moderate, epicurean buzz of boutique brews like Fat Tire, Bootlegger Brown Ale, Sierra Nevada, and Firemans 4. Instead of gut-bombing wicked hangovers at places like the Tamale House, Arandas, Taco Shack, and the occasional construction site roach wagon, they had sit-down breakfasts at places like Güero’s, Curra’s, Maria’s Taco Xpress, Pato’s, and Changos. No shame in those names, quality is quality, but quality isn’t a regular part of the slacker budget. Sometime around the turn of the millennium came the third tier of slackers: the dot-com cash-outs and trust fund babies; late-in-the-gamers who also bought into Austin’s weirdness fully, first with their pocketbooks and then their hearts, so much so that they even created marketing campaigns to keep weirdness from being gentrified … albeit a day late and a dollar short. Their “no worries,” casual Friday approach to slackerdom was genuine – why sweat the small stuff when you truly don’t have to sweat the small stuff? – as was their utter oblivion to the fact that they were pricing the old-school slackers into the hipster wilderness of far East Austin (they eventually priced them out of that as well). For the latecomers, slackerdom is more a destination vacation than a journey of personal discovery. They’ve opened cute, hyperspecialized boutiques; bought overpriced condos; and actually pay for extravagances like valet parking and bottle service. What was unthinkable back in the day is commonplace now. It’s still Austin, just an entirely different Austin. Yes, there are still plenty of unshaven, jort-wearing, tattooed grad school dropouts with part-time jobs who share a rent house with five other overeducated, undermotivated velvet rutters, but they’re feeling the pinch. That East Austin shotgun shack is four times what it was back in the day. You could try to work that early Nineties slacker budget nowadays, but that lifestyle is now called homelessness – and no, you’re not fooling anybody by parking your rusty old shit-beater van down the street from Epoch. Makes you long for the good old days when slackin’ was cheap and your landlord passed out fliers for his interpretive dance performance. Those days may be gone, but you can relive them this weekend when the Lebowski Fest rolls into town on its Speed of Sound tour. For an unslackerly $45, you can attend Friday night’s Big Lebowski screening at Stubb’s and Saturday night’s bowling party at Highland Lanes. This is your chance to feel what it’s like to actually dress up as an old-school slacker … or one of the many other zany characters from this Coen Brothers’ cult classic. So maybe Lebowski Fest is as close as you’ll ever come to actual slacking, but that’s probably a good thing.

Capital City Marching Band Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 29, 2009

This is a big weekend for music lovers – or at the very least for people who like to watch music being made. Unlike a football game, a bullfight, or a tittie-bar pole dance, watching live music demands rapt attention. You don’t want to miss a second. For instance … what if the bass player stops looking at his fretting hand and gives a slight nod to his drug dealer offstage? Twitter that shit, yo. He may not do anything that exciting for the rest of the set. Besides, the dude offstage might not be his drug dealer at all. It might be Matthew McConaughey … baked to his gills! Tuh to the motherfucking weet! “Thrz is zo mrch fn! RcknRpll!” If you find the bass player visually captivating, check out the drummer. He may not be Darren King from Mute Math, but he’s the most animated person onstage. He’s moving his arms and his legs! You could stand there in the dust and the heat for hours and watch him hit that snare drum again and again and again. Fascinating. How does he do it? If you stare at him long enough in gap-jawed wonderment, you’re sure to figure it out. Samesies for the guitar player. You would expect him to stand perfectly still so he can concentrate on his intricate fingering, but no! He’s thrashing around like a crazy person, making weird faces, and flinging his guitar picks out to all the hot ladies. If he were on a street corner doing the same thing minus the guitar, you would probably insist the police take him out with a tranquilizer dart, but instead he’s onstage and you’re throwing him your hotel room key. Why? Because he’s so damned sexy! The crazy thing is that the guitarist isn’t even half as exciting to watch as the lead singer. Now there’s a character! When he reaches out in front of him and grabs thin air and pulls it back into his chest with a clenched fist, you can actually feel your panties sliding down your legs. He must be some kind of magical sorcerer. You are completely under his spell. When he claps his hands above his head, you clap your hands above your head. When he holds out the microphone to the audience, you automatically sing – even if you don’t really know the words! “OMG thid is brdass!” you Tweet. Every morning in the shower, you belt out atonal, wrong-lyric versions of these songs, but that doesn’t hold a Bic lighter to squealing like a spooked sow in the middle of several thousand other sweaty live-music fans. Otherwise, why would you have dropped a couple hundred bucks on a wristband that doesn’t even help cure cancer? That just makes no sense. No sense at all. No, you ponied up the cash because live music is awesomely exciting to watch – sort of like demolition derby only with a much nicer VIP section, and, of course, demolition derby doesn’t last all day. Even still, there are so many bands and so little time. How will you see them all? Well, get to Toney Burger stadium early on Saturday and plant your ass on the 50-yard line. That way you’re sure to get the best possible view of all 25 bands in this year’s Capital City Marching Festival. They might not do a lot of microphone-stand crotch-rubbing, but rest assured: These bands know how to move. In fact, it’s part of their act! Plus, unlike other music festivals, this one actually has a winner. Now that’s American! Here’s the best part: It’s only $7 to get in … oh, and the restrooms have running water!

Fantastic Fest Michael Jackson Dance Party

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 23, 2009

Michael Jackson was one seriously messed up … uh … let’s just say “dude” until the full autopsy gets published … but he produced some badass dance jams. If someone cranks up “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” in your immediate vicinity and you don’t start full on moonwalking – or at least a reflexive mook head bob – check your pulse. You’re probably dead. Look around the room. If you see Nicole Kidman, a couple of pasty-faced kids, and a frost-breathing Bruce Willis, you may need to start dancing toward the light. That could be where the Michael Jackson music is coming from. Here in the terrestrial world there is a considerable amount of debate as to where MJ will take up residence in the afterlife. If Michael manages to pull off a “Neverland: Extended Edition,” in heaven it’s safe to say that he should be blissfully content. There seem to be a lot of naked baby angels fluttering around up there – especially if Italian Renaissance paintings are to be trusted, and why shouldn’t they be? Italy is the home of God’s personal PR firm. Yes, if Michael makes it past the pearly gates, he’ll be set: No more need for the petting zoo, amusement park rides, and protracted court cases, just a smorgasbord of pink-skinned cherubim. If, however, MJ spends eternity a little farther south, no problem there either. As Pat Benatar says, “Hell is for children,” and you have to figure that in hell, even pedophilia gets the green light. Of course, the “down” side would be having to listen to Creed 24/7. Looking at it karmically you have to wonder: Does giving humanity “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” earn MJ any credit toward a twisted lifetime of alleged pederasty and general weirdness? Tough call. Yes, MJ was fond of sleeping with children, but so was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was also criminally negligent with the Jheri Curl and the geisha makeup and the plastic elf nose, but did that make him a monster? No, fame made him a monster (with maybe an assist from Diana Ross), and it was fame well deserved. If only MJ’s sexual proclivities leaned toward chubby Jewish girls like Monica Lewinsky instead of prepubescent boys, he might have gotten a pass. In his premutant days, Michael could have shagged anything he wanted – sort of like Elvis or Louis the 14th. Somewhere around the ten thousandth groupie, ennui has to set in. There has to be an inclination to improvise like Thelonious Monk: Animal. Mineral. Vegetable. Chances are MJ was just working through his smooth-skin phase. Had he lived to be 100, he might have gotten into snow leopard cubs or baby seals or something … who knows? And really, unless you’ve been there, it’s tough to throw stones. In the wake of MJ’s death, all we’re really left with is compassion, wonderment, and, perhaps most importantly, an ass-shaking oeuvre. You can enjoy that oeuvre this Sunday night at the Alamo’s new bowling alley/karaoke bar/lounge, the Highball, where boy band sensation Henri Mazza will be holding a Michael Jackson Dance Party as a part of this year’s Fantastic Fest. This is a good chance to see the Highball in all its tuck-and-roll splendor, before it’s grand opening in October, and a nice opportunity to honor the King of Pop through expressive movement.

Mother Truckers

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 15, 2009

Health care. We got it. Then there are those unlucky wretches who happen to have pre-existing conditions: obesity, arthritis, diabetes, depression, pregnancy – really anything short of acute head trauma is grounds for disqualification from most American health insurance programs. The remaining few crazy enough to actually provide insurance coverage for people with pre-existing conditions charge rates just slightly less than the actual medical treatment itself costs. Generally, people with pre-existing conditions are the lepers of the insurance world (and, by the way, leprosy is a pre-existing condition). Why shouldn’t they be? No insurer wants some obese, diabetic, depressed, pregnant chick pissing all over its actuarial tables. That’s no way to make a fast buck. On the other hand, you can’t exactly march all the pre-existing condition cases out to a shallow grave in the woods and pop a cap in the back of their heads either. The bleeding hearts ruined that gambit for Hitler, so there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t ruin it for Humana too. If Hitler had succeeded, however, his master race would have dressed up German actuarial tables nicely. Imagine what a nation of ruddy-cheeked Aryan Übermenschen would do for health insurers’ profits – especially if they were somehow conned into believing that their health insurance premiums weren’t artificially inflated. Attractive an idea as it may seem, using genocide to fleece up the gene pool is not without its problems. There’s corpse disposal, grieving relatives, and all the lost revenue for the health care industry. More importantly, if you start offing the old and the sick and the feeble-minded, where do you draw the line? Genetic purification is a sticky moral wicket to say the least. Do you start with the coma patients? People on respirators? Dialysis machines? Asthma nebulizers? If you really think about it, old people in general put a huge strain on the health care system. Maybe if you instituted an age limit … sort of like Logan’s Run? You could start modestly at first – maybe say that anyone over the age of 65 gets sent to the woods for “renewal.” If you’re worried about the Rolling Stones, don’t sweat it; they’re English. England loves it some old people. Case in point: Benny Hill. Here in America we’re into youth. We like hairless genitals; smooth skin; svelte, glistening physiques; brash confidence; inexperience and ignorance. People over the age of 65 are sorely lacking in all these qualities (at least let’s pray the Sun City spa isn’t overbooked for Brazilian waxes), so why should we let them drag down the finest health care system in the world? Make no mistake, insurance companies and their greedy shareholders are not driving up the cost of health care; old people are. Old people and the chronically ill are driving this country toward bankruptcy, and the only two choices are Obama’s death panels or spending even more on health insurance and crippling our already fragile economy. There is no other way … well, except for the health care systems in Japan, Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Maybe some Congress members should put in a few long-distance phone calls. Maybe somehow we could come up with a health care plan that covers all Americans for two-thirds of the cost we pay right now – like France. Maybe America could spend some of that extra money on things like drug abuse – which, depending on your health plan, is probably a pre-existing condition. Until then, those with chemical dependencies have to get support and treatment where they can. Fortunately there are organizations like the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, which provides free support for teenagers dealing with chemical dependency. Tonight at Antone’s the Mother Truckers are playing a benefit concert for the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. $10 gets you into the show and gives you an opportunity to help out local youth and, in a broader sense, the overly expensive but ailing American health care system. Remember: It’s either your charity or Obama’s death panels. There is no other way.

Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 9, 2009

In Europe, it’s almost impossible to tell a straight man from a gay man. Everyone carries purses. Everyone walks around in hipster shoes. Everyone wears really tight swimsuits. They’re not even embarrassed about it either. They’ll just stand there casually holding a conversation with a bas-relief of their kibbles and bits bulging out of a colorful spandex slingshot. Europe is a whole continent full of Brunos … not that there’s anything wrong with that, but pretty much everywhere you go your gay compass is spinning like a roulette wheel. You can’t help thinking: “If this dude isn’t gay, why is he still hugging me? What is that intoxicating smell? Sandalwood? With a hint of pepper?” For the average American – gay or het – it’s a confusing continent. If a Frenchman leans in for a kiss, it’s probably just tradition. He may find it confusing if you drop into a sexy, lip-parted swoon like Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Oh, and uh … ixnay on the onsil hockey tay. What we call French kissing here in the States is not the way people greet each other on the continent – not even on pride weekend, which is the same as just about any other weekend, except that it involves more paint and feathers. You would think that paint and feathers would peg the needle on your gay-o-meter too, but not so. Just because French people love paint and feathers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gay. Au contraire. Actually, they have quite an American Indian fetish – sort of like the English love queens – so you can’t really judge a Frenchman by his plumage. The French also have a thing for Jerry Lewis, who, even though he was Dean Martin’s bitch, was about as gay as an episode of The Three Stooges. Yes, Europe is a place of perplexing gender-bending extremes. On the hard, butch end of the scale you have female German weightlifters, and on the soft femme side you have Prince Charles. Hard to say who scores more vag, but publicly Charlie gives the German muscle gals a good run for their money, even if he might actually prefer a little man ass on the down low. Damn it all, apparently in the Third Millennium, stereotypical gender traits are not an ironclad bet to determine sexual orientation. What to do? What to do? The healthiest thing to do is to not spend a lot of time worrying about it. People are basically people, but if you’re not occasionally taken out of your comfort zone by the interests, activities, and proclivities of others, you’re probably not living a very interesting life, and that’s a damned shame. That doesn’t mean you should take up skydiving, scrapbooking or gerbiling, but it does mean you should occasionally expose yourself to other ideas. This week you have an excellent opportunity to do just that at the 22nd Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival. If you are gay, aGLIFF is a good opportunity to explore a broad range of issues relating to your lifestyle. If you aren’t, aGLIFF offers you a chance to gain a better understanding of what it means to be gay/lesbian/transgendered, even if it makes you squirm in your seat on occasion.

Out of Bounds Comedy Festival Headliners

The Luv Doc Recommends

September 2, 2009

Sweet. Three-day weekend! Of course, that’s assuming you have a regular job with a set schedule, benefits, and all that. Otherwise, a three-day weekend just means you’re pulling extra shifts to accommodate all those state and corporate drones looking to get their swerve and grub on. You wouldn’t mind it much if they were big tippers who could hold their liquor, but the ugly truth is that your pockets will be sagging with chump change and you’ll be spending a lot of quality time mopping mangorita barf out of bathroom stalls. Happy Labor Day! Bet you’re rethinking that fine arts degree now, eh? All you wanted to do was dance, right? Well, how ’bout you dance your ass down to table 7 and Hoover up that high-chair debris field that Junior laid down while his parents superhumanly ignored his cracker crumb and macaroni temper tantrum? They probably think they can buy you off with a 15% tip and a huge smiley face on your comment card, but for this travesty you’re going to need some serious payback. Sadly, you’ll just have to estimate. You can’t know the real damage until they lift that chubby little fucker out of his high chair and shake him like a can of Parmesan cheese. It’s truly amazing the amount of culinary detritus that can get trapped in a pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls: a whole sleeve of saltines, a half basket of tortilla chips – soggy on one end, of course – some Jell-O kernels, and a few hundred Cheerios (brought in by the parents to keep him occupied). Even to the most compassionate of food-service employees, that’s worth at least a couple of lung nuggets and a butt-crack silverware swab, but by the time you’ve properly assessed the damage, they’re already buckling him into the backseat of the Prius. Breath deeply. Hold it in. Visualize the huge bowl of pee soup you’ll be serving them the next time they decide to save money on a babysitter. Your boss and your unemployed dope-dealing roommate like to tell you there’s no room for bitterness or resentment in the workplace. They’re right. There is no room … unless you make room. If America has learned anything from its disgruntled postal workers, it’s that people can endure almost any amount of monotony, abuse, and humiliation in their jobs as long as they can nurture a psychotic revenge fantasy … hopefully one they won’t actually act out … at least not in real life. Besides, that’s what improv classes are for, right? Where else can you mow down an entire office full of co-workers with an AK-47 and get away with it? Maybe even score a few nervous chuckles in the process? You may not think it’s funny, but comedy is an important part of sanity maintenance. Somehow you have to soak up all the injustice, pain, and misery in the world and still manage to turn that frown upside down. It’s not easy. Sometimes you need an assist. This weekend Austin provides one in the form of the Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival, a seven-day “live performance festival that showcases some of the best improv, sketch, stand-up, and filmed comedy from all over the country.” Sunday night, the Independent features Austin’s Get Up and Melbourne, Australia’s Impro Melbourne at 7:30pm, then Chicago’s SCRAM and Los Angeles’ Cackowski and Talarico at 9pm. You might as well make a whole night of it. You probably don’t have to work the next day. If you do, you could probably use some comic relief.

Austin Chronicle’ Hot Sauce Festival

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 27, 2009

It’s going to be hot at The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival this Sunday. Crazy hot. Maybe like 1,900 degrees … in the shade. Don’t let Jim Spencer or Mark Murray or Troy Kimmel or that bouncy dude on Fox with the shopping-mall hairdo tell you any differently. They might appeal to your sense of idiotic optimism with the promise of a 10% chance of rain – dangle it in front of your nose like a bacon-flavored dog biscuit – but the only thing falling out of the sky on Sunday will be blistering rays of sunshine and dehydrated grackles. In other words, the weather on Sunday will be absolutely perfect for the festival: scorching – the kind of insanely intense heat that should scare away the curious, the delicate, and the apathetic. Besides, anyone who is really into hot sauce won’t let the possibility of 100-plus weather hold them back. They’re coming for the heat. They’re coming to sweat. After all, a good salsa will make you sweat no matter what the temperature. Like a whore in church. Like a pedophile at a preschool. Like the kid in the rat suit at Chuck E. Cheese’s. If the preceding sounds a bit masochistic, it is. The pepper is an acquired taste. Like coffee, it generally needs to be mixed with something to make it palatable: tomatoes, tomatillos, mangoes … anything to soften the blow. You may prefer your coffee black now, but back in the early days of your addiction, you liked it with lots of cream and sugar – the K-Y and Astroglide of coffee consumption. Capsaicin addicts tend to start slowly too. You can’t just shovel a bunch of habaneros into your mouth and expect a happy ending. Au contraire. In fact, you might want to prophylactically apply a topical ointment to your ending if you somehow managed to choke a habanero down your gullet. Perhaps some actual K-Y might do the trick. Regardless, like sex, with peppers your best bet is to work your way up slowly. A good road map is the Scoville scale: bell, pimento, poblano, jalapeño, serrano, habanero, and naga jolokia, which if eaten whole will kill you, your children, and your childrens’ children. Most people tend to put the brakes on capsaicin consumption somewhere around habanero. Really, beyond that you might as well just shoot yourself in the mouth with pepper spray. At a certain point, the pain from the capsaicin completely obliterates any other nuance of flavor. With habaneros, at least you get a few seconds of actual pepper taste before you start looking for a fire hose to spray out your mouth. Serranos are the peppers most often found in traditional red salsa. In the right quantity they can be exceptionally hot as well, but they’re also quite flavorful. The same is true of most peppers if they’re well prepared. That, of course, is the challenge, and the reason the Chronicle devotes one blistering hot Sunday a year to hot sauce and all its varied forms and flavors. It’s an epicurean adventure with a decidedly masochistic twist. It’s also an Austin institution, hell or hot weather. So … are you in?

Rude Mechanicals’ Sci-fEye Ball

The Luv Doc Recommends

August 19, 2009

Balls … seems like everybody has them. They’re the low hanging fruit of the charity business – maybe not quite as low as the benefit concert, but still easy pickin’. You would think it would be easier to scrape together two turntables and a microphone (the electronic retro-phallus of the DJ world) than it is to fill up a seven band bill, but here in Austin we pack in bands like slaves on the Amistad – and pay them even less. With all this musical talent laying around, how hard can it be to find someone who can match beats without sending the dance floor into arrhythmic epilepsy? Yes, a DJ. Live music? Seen it: Foot on the monitor, double devil horns, microphone stand crotch rub, gratuitous drum solo, never-ending narcissistic guitar solo, “What? It’s my turn?” bass solo, sweaty hair throw, insincere “great to be here in …” salutation, breakdown section with Barry White-style let-me-be-serious-for-a-moment voiceover, power chord chorus with above the head hand clap, garage band clusterfuck ending replete with split-legged stage jump apostrophe. Really, how can a skinny kid with a terabyte hard drive and a pirated copy of ACID Pro compete with game like that? Fog machine? Disco ball? LED Strobes? Rhythm would definitely be a start. Seriously. There is only so much shoegazing a city can do, no matter how cool it thinks it is. Yes, lyrically dense, self-absorbed, multisyllabic soliloquies can be set to music … interminable, droning, cacophonous soundscapes that challenge preconceived notions of rhythm and tonality. They can also be thrown in the fireplace. Every once in a while, people need something with a chest-thumping, ass-shaking groove. Ooonnn tssssss ooonnn tssssss ooonnn tssssss. Hands in the air like you just don’t care … or maybe you do care. Maybe that’s why you’ll be attending the Rude Mechanicals’ Sci-fEye Ball this Saturday at the Off Center: Because you really do care about supporting original, innovative live theatre in Austin … East Austin … in a converted warehouse … because that’s the kind of place where original live theatre is done. You care enough about live theatre to dress up in “Retro-Futuresque” attire (think Sky Captain, Buck Rogers, the Rocketeer, only sans the rocket pack, because it can get hot up in that bitch) and brave potential derision and merciless heckling by ungentrified Eastsiders, who will surely be wondering what the fuck you’re doing in a hot-assed spacesuit in 104 degree heat (making Sci-fEye Ball soup, no doubt). Come to think of it, you might want to consider rocking that chain-mail bra and cutoff mesh half-shirt shimmel that Daryl Hannah made famous in Blade Runner. It’s only slightly retro, and it gives you an excuse to try out that flying scissor headlock you’ve been working on. How theatrical would that be? Of course, you don’t have to go costumed – remember, it’s legal to go topless in Austin – but it does show you’re committed to the cause. If you want to go a little lower profile, you could just drop some major coin on the silent auction, which boasts, along with a lot of other cool stuff, a vacation on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. Seriously, how cool is that? Pretty fucking cool. Plus, even if you go on the cheap, you still get free beer and phat jams DJ’d by Austin supercomposer/rock star Graham Reynolds. Even if it is low hangin’ fruit, this ball is still pretty sweet.