Luv Doc Writings

Holiday Hat Party 2010

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December 1, 2010

Speakeasy

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote: “A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” When you have a fat Irish head the size of P.J. O’Rourke’s, those are definitely words to live by. There is also a strong case against hats being made by the resurgence of straw fedoras – especially those worn in conjunction with clothing featuring tattoo designs. Wearing a straw hat with a Christian Audigier knockoff shirt doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a douche; it just means you probably shop where they shop. Is that so wrong? Not everyone can rock a chapeau like Justin Timberlake, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. It seems to be working for Jason Mraz and Kid Rock (and really, as long as you’re going to rip off other people’s music …). There’s nothing inherently wrong with wearing an interesting old hat that you found in a thrift store or your grandfather’s attic. However, if you’re wearing a hat you found in the accessories aisle at Walmart, you just might be a douche. Don’t worry though; the mere fact that you found it at Walmart means that there are thousands, if not millions, of other people who did exactly the same thing, so you’re not alone. Plus you probably saved the job of some 8-year-old Chinese orphan. Here’s the thing: Straw fedoras aren’t inherently douchey, they just end up on the heads of a lot of douches. Straw fedoras don’t make douches in the same sense that guns don’t kill people. It’s a symbiotic relationship at best. The crazy thing is that hats are every bit as utilitarian as any other piece of haberdashery. Baseball caps keep the sun out of your eyes, stocking caps keep your head warm, hard hats prevent head injuries, and cowboy hats attract drunk blond chicks. Not surprisingly, hat types are myriad and vary in relation to functionality. There are some hats, however, that seem to serve no purpose other than to just look fucking ridiculous. You might be tempted to lump Kid Rock’s fedora into this group, but that might be a mistake. Think about the big, foam cowboy hats you see at football games (really, any hat made of foam is ridiculous – be it a leprechaun, pimp, cheese, or pirate). Top hats and bowlers are pretty F’d up too (well, except for the one Lena Olin wore in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), so are beer caps, fezzes, yarmulkes, huge sombreros, and pretty much anything worn at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Keep in mind: There is no shame in wearing a truly ridiculous hat. The mere fact you’re wearing it means you’re comfortable with sacrificing your dignity and ego, and nothing is cooler than a willingness to be a complete dork. If you want to get in on some serious dork action this weekend, you need look no further than Speakeasy. Friday night it’s hosting Holiday Hat Party 2010, a fundraiser for Florence’s Comfort House featuring music by Dysfunkshun Junkshun, Aquadrums, and Tyler Guthrie. There will also be drink specials and a tequila tasting – as if holiday hats aren’t fun enough.

Marmalakes, the Frontier Brothers, Mother Falcon

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November 23, 2010

Parish – Closed

Simmer down, Aggies, simmer down. Yes, the rotting corpse smell of the Longhorn football season has you deranged and howling like a pack of starved coyotes, but remember: Like Jesus, the Longhorns will rise again. Texas may be 5-6, but they’re still sick with talent. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Dixie Chicken, the Bush Library, and the Animal Husbandry Barn aren’t the highlights of the Longhorns’ recruiting trip. Down on the Forty Acres, recruiting is a bit more of a slam dunk. All Texas has to do to land a Top 10 recruit is to take him to 50-cent wings night at Sugar’s. College Station doesn’t even have a Sugar’s … or even a Yellow Rose or a Landing Strip … unless maybe you count the Animal Husbandry Barn, which is sort of like the Chain Drive only much bigger, smellier, and freakier. Needless to say, College Station’s quaint charms don’t appeal to everyone, so when the Ags have a respectable season, you have to give them props. It’s not easy to Shanghai decent athletes to College Station – certainly not intelligent ones, so big ups to Mike Sherman and crew for cobbling together a winning Aggie team this year. Other than former A&M legend Jackie Sherrill – a true innovator with the insane brilliance to use livestock castration as a motivational tool – few heirs to the Aggie coaching throne have shown as much promise as Sherman, whose competence and sacrifice is rewarded with a paltry $1.8 million a year contract (the kind of chump change that Mack Brown keeps next to his toilet). For such a meager sum, it’s amazing Sherman even crawls out of bed in the morning, but somehow this year he and the Aggies have put together an 8-3 record. That’s a complete turnaround from the Aggies 4-8 season in 2008 when he began his sentence. Fortunately Sherman’s stint as head coach at Green Bay was good training for his return to Aggieland. He now knows that the bitchiness and petulance of a highly recruited college athlete are nothing compared to that of an NFL player making 10 times the coaches’ salary. At least you can bully a college kid with curfews, extra laps, and harsh, withering looks. If it gets really ugly, you can even tell the boosters to stop leaving envelopes full of cash in his locker (remember, this is A&M) or, worst-case scenario, cut off his supply of steroids. Whatever Sherman is doing, even if he’s hacking the nuts off a bull before every game, it seems to be having a positive effect. Mack Brown, on the other hand, seems to have spent the last nine months tooling around town in his bling’d out Mercedes, snorting rails of coke off the bare asses of coeds, and breaking mirrors with his maniacal, high-pitched Appalachian cackle. While it’s true that kind of playa lifestyle never hurts recruiting, it can cut into the actual coaching. After a humiliating six-loss season, it’s safe to assume that Brown is now back on task. He may have grown a little soft in the middle – possibly even the prefrontal, but Brown is smart enough to understand that last Saturday’s smackdown of Division I-A powerhouse Florida Atlantic won’t satisfy even the most soft-headed of Longhorn fans. He also knows that if he loses to A&M, DeLoss Dodds will be after his balls with a rusty pair of pruning shears. Even still, there will be joy in Mudville. Why? Because we’re the goddamned live music capital of the known universe. An average Saturday night in Austin rocks the shit out of College Station on New Year’s Eve. This weekend is no different. Saturday you can (and should) catch an awesome bill at the Parish featuring a homegrown trifecta of musical badasses: folk-pop funsters Marmalakes, party punkers the Frontier Brothers, and orchestral tour de force Mother Falcon. A set by any one of these acts will put a smile on your face that not even a gloating Aggie can wipe off.

Extravagasm Fantasy Ball IX: East of Hedon

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November 15, 2010

ND Austin

How about one last chance to party like a porn star before the wet blanket of holiday wholesomeness spoils all the fun? Sure, nothing makes you want to flick your tongue between your devil horns like the thought of a crisp, rosy-cheeked night of wassailing bundled up in cozy, androgynous winter layering, but somewhere in the deep, depraved recesses of your mind you’d rather be nearly naked, slathered in baby oil, and writhing around on a crowded, pulsating dance floor – or at least you would rather be watching something like that, perhaps through the unzipped mouth hole of a leather gimp suit. Remember, you’re only about a week away from the maddening boredom of Thanksgiving Day, your yearly ritual of binge-eating bland pilgrim food then slumping catatonically on the living room sofa and listening to your catnapping grandpa’s stale beer farts ricochet off his vinyl recliner. There’s a reason they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Ibiza – and it’s not because they can’t get the A&M game on satellite. Hot on the heels of Puritanfest is Christmas, which tops off the Turkey Day wholesomeness with a huge layer of cheese: shamelessly crass commercialism, frog-in-a-blender color scheme, Lawrence Welk soundtrack, garish, Vegas-style lighting displays. Of course, the cherry on top of Christmas is the children: snot-nosed, greedy little chumps who believe a fat man from the North Pole with an unironic hipster beard is going to drop down their chimneys and deposit Call of Duty: Black Ops in their stockings. Why? Because they’ve spent the last few months scrawling deranged, incomprehensible shopping lists for Santa, fucking up the lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” and leaving half-finished candy canes in either the crack in the sofa or their little sister’s hair. Yes, children have their place during the holidays, and that place is called “Grandma and Grandpa’s house.” That way, instead of spoiling your holiday party mojo with their incessant whining about being hungry, wanting to go to sleep, and needing to have their soiled pull-ups changed, they can instead while away prime time with the blue-hairs drinking eggnog, making popcorn garlands, and watching Jimmy Stewart stammer his way through It’s a Wonderful Life. After all, Christmas is for kids, isn’t it? For adults, it’s more about finding excuses to binge-drink in order to forget about all the credit card debt they’re piling up. So, before the boring pall of the holiday season descends, blow it out one last time this Friday, Nov. 19, at Extravagasm Fantasy Ball IX: East of Hedon. Friday’s ball is an exotic, erotic dance party featuring the Brass Ovaries Pole Dancers, Miss Sophie, the Jigglewatts, Sky Candy aerialist Miss Winnie, the Golden Go-Go Squad, Starlite with Shi Feticcio, and music by DJ Cauzeone and DJ Orion. Along with the erotic dancing there will be fantasy photos by Flash, chocolate body-painting, and spanking stations. If that’s not freaky enough for you, keep this in mind: If they’re willing to let a name like “East of Hedon” slide, it’s a pretty sure bet anything goes, so bring an open mind and maybe some wet naps.

Game On Austin

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November 10, 2010

Mohawk

If you’re looking to get laid, there’s probably an app for that, it just won’t be as good as the real thing. Building a program that simulates a pan flute isn’t exactly the same as building one that stimulates your skin flute. This may come as a shock, but there are already several masturbation apps for the iPhone – one allows you to shake an onscreen image of a fish until a milky liquid oozes out of its mouth. Another is a geolocation app that allows users to place penis icons on a map to show the most recent place they had sex or masturbated. Nice. Seems like a great way to avoid getting nailed by an errant money shot while innocently walking your dog through Pease Park. Speaking of, maybe someone will whip(?) up a map app for people who don’t scoop their dog’s poop … or how about one for people who vomit frequently? There is also iVibe, an app that turns your iPhone into a vibrator. You might want to get a waterproof case for that one … or maybe not. It is, after all, just an iPhone. If you’re one of those skeptical types who aren’t totally on Apple’s cock, you might be happier with the Android. The Android has an app store called MiKandi that carries actual porn apps: things like 3D Mobile Porn (you’re probably safer wearing some sort of eye protection anyway), a YouPorn app (because YouPorn is so hard to find on your Web browser), and Sincasso, a nasty photo-sharing app which, like YouPorn, has a shamefully derivative name and boasts a “super clean user interface” as one of its features. Hmmm … sounds hygienic. You might think that MiKandi’s cesspool of smut apps might give Apple the moral high ground over the Android filth mongers, but you’d sort of be wrong. iPhone users can still surf the same freaky porn that pervs, sexual deviants, and mimes leer at all day long in their mothers’ moldy basements. The difference with iPhone is that they don’t allow porn apps – well, except for soft porn apps like the Cosmo Sex Position of the Day app, which features flesh-colored silhouettes going at it in a variety of unrealistic, uncomfortable, and unstable ways. It’s surely a lot of fun to look at – especially if you have a Mattel-ish hostility toward nipples, but put into actual practice by real people, it has all the titillating allure of a farty Bikram yoga class. Successful as its app may be, Cosmo is unlikely to follow it up with a Oral Sex Tips app, and even if it did, it’s unlikely Apple would approve it. They’re not porn merchants … or even pimps for porn merchants. Apple has your back like that. You won’t fall into the pits of perdition on Apple’s watch – well, at least not yet. There may be a game-changing app just around the corner that’s so awesomely filthy/hilarious/shocking that Apple just won’t be able to refuse it – especially if everyone is buying Droids just to get it. Who knows what the future holds? Well, if you want an idea, show up at Mohawk Tuesday, Nov. 16, from 6 to 9pm for the Chronicle and South by Southwest ScreenBurn’s Game On Austin, a free event where local game developers will be on hand to show off their latest wares, some of which may actually be designed for the iPhone … or perhaps those filthy, filthy Droids.

2010 Lone Star Vegetarian Chili Cook-Off

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November 3, 2010

Old Settlers Park

The world is teeming with all kinds of animals you can kill and cook and eat. A good number of them taste like chicken – at least that’s what the man at the fried-rat stand in Taipei is going to tell you. Of course, pretty near anything is going to taste like chicken if it’s battered and fried – even Homo sapiens. It’s doubtful that you would take a bite of deep-fried human flesh in a blind taste test and declare, “Hmmmmm … that tastes suspiciously like Homo.” You might, however, say it tastes like chicken, only gamier. Over the centuries, humans have whittled down the number of edible fauna to just a handful of species – generally the fat, slow, quiescent ones. These days – at least on this side of the pond – we’ve broiled it down to three basic meat groups, any or all of which might end up in a hot dog: chicken, pork, and beef. Someday, through a miracle of genetic engineering, we might even be able to graft them all into one animal: a chiporcow. Ideally the chiporcow would weigh a few thousand pounds; give milk; lay eggs; eat anything, including ground-up parts of other chiporcows; and spend its entire life confined in a cage designed to completely restrict its movement and maximize the tenderness of its flesh. Really, why even eat meat unless you can cut it with a cheap plastic spork? Even still, don’t throw away your steak knife in a fit of ecstatic optimism just yet. It might take another 20 or 30 years of genetic engineering to grow a chiporcow that is completely devoid of bones, tendons, and cartilage. Until then, all that stuff can still be pureed into a steroid infused, protein-rich paste that is sure to find its way to a nugget or patty at a fast food restaurant near you. Yum … well, with the right amount of sodium, sugar, and artificial flavoring. It’s hard to believe that there are still people out there who insist on killing, butchering, and eating their own meat – not just the crazy ones who are responsible for cats disappearing in your neighborhood, but normal people who wake up in the wee hours, strap on some camo and a fluorescent orange vest, and heroically try to control the mushrooming deer population. Hey, somebody has to do the dirty work – especially when joggers are out there Swiss-cheesing natural predators with laser-sight pistols. Hopefully Gov. Goodhair had the decency to mount his kill (pause for a moment to consider the nastiness of that unfinished sentence) on a cedar fencepost as a warning to all the other coyotes to back off the shih tzus, kittens, and Pomeranians and go back to killing sick cows and lost sheep. Deer? Killing those are a lot of work, unless you’re golfing at Lakeway or driving down U.S. 290 in the middle of the night, and coyotes, like just about any other intelligent animal including Homo sapiens, are likely to choose the easy way every time. It’s no wonder so many people are vegetarians these days. Meat is a lot of goddamned work – not just with your pastor or psychotherapist exploring the moral implications of offing other living things just to crap them out a few days later, but in a real physical sense, like cold, chewy street fajitas. Getting off the meat tit is getting more popular because it keeps getting easier. People are making plants into just about everything. Why not food? Some people have even figured out how to make great tasting fake-meat dishes. Don’t believe it? Head over to Old Settlers Park this Sunday for the 22nd Lone Star Vegetarian Chili Cook-Off and see for yourself. Taste veggie chilis made by 20 different teams from all around Texas, and decide if you’re lazy enough to stop eating meat for good. Love it or hate it, one thing’s for sure: It won’t taste like chicken.

Butthole Surfers Halloween Shows

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October 26, 2010

The Scoot Inn

The best thing about Halloween isn’t the candy; it’s about making memories. Sure, it’s plenty of fun to get all jacked up on candy corn and Pixy Stix and run through the neighborhood wilding trick-or-treaters in your flammable Chinese-made Darth Vader costume, but when the sugar rush subsides, a night of whacking unsuspecting kids on the back of the head with an inflatable plastic red lightsaber is just going to seem a little childish no matter how fun it was. Plus … and this is an important thing to remember … if you’re looking to get laid on Halloween or any other night of the year, it’s best to avoid places with children altogether – even and especially if you’re a pedophile. This is not to say you can’t score some strange with children around, but they do make it immensely more dangerous and difficult. No doubt there are brave souls who managed to achieve coitus on a McDonald’s playscape at 3:30 in the afternoon, but they are probably few and far between and incarcerated with muscled-up cellmates who share an equal penchant for risky sexual behavior. Besides, everyone knows going to McDonald’s is a bad idea – especially if you’re wanting to eat a taco. So really, even though you’re certain that your assless altar boy robe will be the hit of the elementary school Halloween carnival, you may want to save it for someplace where subtle irony is better understood and appreciated … like the Chain Drive for instance. You’ll make memories there that will last a lifetime too, and you’re less likely to end up on a sex offender Google map. Of course, you don’t have to engage in outrageous behavior to make memories, but outrageous behavior definitely makes memories that last – especially if they’re outrageous enough to get you tagged in an action photo on Facebook. Don’t hate. Facebook is just extra incentive to come up with a well-designed costume, ideally something with a comfortable mask – a mask that won’t fall off should you decide to do a keg stand in that Cinderella dress that was so long you decided you might as well go commando. As long as your luchador mask is laced up tight, you can claim that lots of other girls probably have a crucifix pull target with an inscription that reads, “Everybody gets nailed sometime.” Normally only your proctologist gets to see that far beneath your panty line, so it’s unlikely your boss is going to have the balls to call you on it. Point is, the only obstacles to making the memory of a lifetime are things like self-consciousness, self-esteem, and a sense of dignity and propriety. With proper costuming, you can abandon all that and get down to the dirty business of making lasting memories – or at the very least, shockingly hilarious YouTube videos with millions of hits. Being outrageous isn’t all that difficult. It just means that you have to be willing to go where other people aren’t. If you want a good example of how to do that, you should study up on the Butthole Surfers, who have been bringing the punk rock equivalent of shock and awe for more than a quarter century: cross-dressing, nudity, flames, destruction, blood (fake and real), all accompanied by screeching, roaring, howling soundscapes and epilepsy-inducing light shows. This weekend at the Scoot Inn, the Butthole Surfers will be playing Friday and Sunday shows that are sure to pack the Scoot to the gills. Friday night’s performance will focus on material from the band’s 1987 Locust Abortion Technician, and Sunday night’s Halloween show pairs the Surfers with fellow punk legends the Meat Puppets, who are calling Austin home these days. You could wear a costume for the Halloween show, but first and foremost, wear some earplugs, the bands will surely take care of making memories.

Goblin Gayla

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October 20, 2010

Tiniest Bar in Texas

No, it’s not Halloween just yet, but it is the beginning of the Halloween season. That means there’s a crispness to the night air, but it’s not crispy enough to keep you from sweating like a Chilean miner (and going blind like one too) inside that homemade ape suit you got for a steal on Craigslist. Really, any costume involving rubber and fur is always a bad idea in Austin. You don’t want to have to sip your gin and juice through a straw jammed into a nose hole. You don’t want to have to pee into an astronaut diaper. Yes, Halloween is the second biggest Holiday after Christmas, but it’s not big enough to actually warrant true suffering. That’s what all those other holidays are about. Halloween, like spring break, is a time for binge drinking in skimpy outfits. You don’t want to wear anything that can’t be quickly yanked down to your ankles while you pop a quick squat behind a dumpster on Sixth Street. No, seriously. If you think you’re going to find a vacant public bathroom stall anywhere Downtown in the next 10 days, you may want to get back on your meds. Available bathrooms during Halloween are as rare as buying a winning lottery ticket or getting in the fast-moving lane at the bank drive-through. That kind of thing only happens to other, wholly undeserving people. Yes, there are those who would argue that skimpy costumes aren’t scary. Au contraire. Not even Borat can rock a Borat slingshot without making normal people throw up a little in their mouths, and he’s a movie star. Imagine how scary average people would be if they were wearing something similar: birthmarks, moles, body hair, muffin tops, saddle bags, beer guts, goiters, cysts, varicose veins – really, there’s nothing more profoundly disturbing than the average human body on display. Even still, if you’re one of those lucky few who is blessed with supermodel looks and an awesome body, you still don’t have to suffer to be scary. Just pick up something sexy – say a European male swimsuit or a string bikini from a thrift store, then hose yourself down with fake blood. That way, if you get really drunk and fall down and crack your head open trying to jump over a vomit patch in your 4-inch stiletto heels, no one will even notice. Don’t worry, guys fall down wearing stiletto heels on Halloween all the time – especially in Austin. It’s no big deal. They just get up, dust off their bikinis, and get back to being the best slutty, blood-and-vomit stained zombie booze weasel they can be. After all, if you’re going to do Halloween, do it all the way. It’s one of the few two-week periods of the year that you can try out being someone more drunk, outrageous, and slutty than you normally are and still get a pass when it’s all over. Awesome, right? Well, you can start this weekend at the Austin Gay and Lesbian Pride Foundation’s Goblin Gayla. No, that isn’t misspelled. Saturday night at the Tiniest Bar in Texas, AGLPF will be hosting a mad bash complete with apple-bobbing, a photo booth, tarot card readings, a wig auction, two DJs, dancing, and, of course, cocktails. Note to the Debbie Downers and Killjoys: Costumes are optional.

Austin Yam Jam

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October 16, 2010

Threadgill’s World HQ

Every time you’re tempted to moan about another benefit for some musician who wrecked his car, had his equipment trailer jacked, or broke his wanking arm in a spectacular dive into an apathetic mosh pit, remember that in Austin, benefit money usually flows the other way – and by a large margin. It’s amazing that a city with such abundant wealth habitually relies on the inhabitants of Hand-to-Mouthville to fill its charity coffers. In other cities, fundraising is done with walkathons, bake sales, golf tournaments, or car washes featuring bikini-clad high school girls with soapy sponges, but here in the River City, fundraising involves calling your musician friend and seeing if he can rustle up a few bands that will play for free … for a good cause, of course. Fortunately in the “live music capital of the known universe,” bands outnumber good causes by a hefty ratio, so there is almost always a stellar lineup willing to step up to the plate. Sure, some of the savvier bands might request an ice chest full of Lone Star tallboys or first dibs on the VIP buffet table, but that in no way undermines their altruism. In fact, most bands playing fundraisers don’t even make gas money. If it weren’t for their girlfriends’ day jobs, they would have to walk to the gig. You’ve probably seen some scruffy-looking guy walking down the street with a guitar and thought, “Wow, someone should have a fundraiser for him,” never realizing that he was just between girlfriends and on his way to play a fundraiser. That’s so Austin, isn’t it? Of course, not all fundraisers in Austin are benefit concerts. It just seems like it. There are plenty of golf tournaments, road races, garage sales, and cook-offs that don’t necessarily feature live music but include it nonetheless. Why? Because live music gives it that Austin twist. What runner wouldn’t want to hear 15 seconds or so of original Austin music played by live bands scattered intermittently along the 26 miles of a marathon course? And what band wouldn’t want that gig? Well, as long they are allowed to sell merch and put out a sign up sheet for their mailing list. You really can’t beat that kind of exposure. As common as they are, benefit concerts can be a bit of an ego boost for musicians. People are much more willing to pay a hefty cover for a benefit than they are for a regular show. Maybe it’s because they feel much better about dropping a 10 spot on cancer victims than having it all go to some terminally broke slacker who gets to do what he loves and still manages to score talent that is way above his pay grade. Regardless, as far as benefits go, musicians have been the golden-egg-laying geese in Austin for decades, so forgive them if they sometimes complain about the pain in the ass. Don’t hate; appreciate. It’s a successful, long-standing symbiosis, and ultimately, no matter what the motivation on either side of the relationship, it does good for Austin. If you want an example, check out Sunday’s Yam Jam at Threadgill’s World Headquarters benefiting Operation Turkey, which provides food and clothing for the Austin-area homeless during the Thanksgiving holiday. From 3pm until close A-string artists like Malford Milligan, Jake Andrews, Guy Forsyth, Lance Keltner, David Holt, and Driver will take the stage to help someone other than themselves. That’s truly something to applaud.

Texas Freedom Network’s 15th Anniversary Celebration

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October 6, 2010

Bullock Texas State History Museum

In the world of politics, activism beats apathy every time. A small, well-organized group of complete nut jobs has a much better chance of forwarding its insane agenda than an unorganized multitude of like-minded, reasonable, uninvolved intellectuals. Don’t believe it? Consider Hitler. People are every bit as likely to vote with their guts as they are with their minds – even smart people. More importantly, intellectuals are much less inclined to do the dirty work of politics: the canvassing, the mailing, the sign posting, the cold calling, and the fundraising (which involves more knee pad work than most intellectuals are willing to endure). To be fair, intellectuals are also disgusted with the political process itself, which inherently undermines the integrity of its participants. Anyone who has campaigned for anything – be it PTA second vice chair or assistant county clerk – knows that politics involves a humbling amount of compromise, and very often the first thing that gets compromised is ethics. Politicians who start out on a march toward truth and light sometimes lose their way in the dark forest of financial necessity, public opinion, and political cronyism. What begins as a “means to an end” becomes all about the means with no end in sight. Politics can be very rewarding – especially for those seeking rewards. Thus the ongoing American fascination with “political outsiders.” The problem with political outsiders is that in politics, there aren’t any. Even if you want to somehow subvert the de facto plutocracy of the American political system, you’re still going to have to get on the cock of a whorish number of needy special interest groups in order to get elected. As the Bob Dylan song goes, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Ideally it’s your constituency. Sometimes your constituency is a corporation that funnels millions of dollars to your campaign through a fictitiously named bank account in the Caymans, and sometimes it’s a group of senile, xenophobic old timers with nothing better to do with their time than show up at the polls on voting day. Feeling jaded? You should be, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon politics entirely. Far from it. As mired in bullshit as American politics may be, things are not going to get any better with you sitting up there on your high horse. You’re not going to get rid of Sarah Palin, tea baggers, or even Rick Perry’s spectacular head of exquisitely styled hair by simply bitching about it or wishing it away. You’re going to have to drop some coin … or if you’re financially strapped like most big thinkers, you might even have to do some shit work. Either way, you have to get involved, otherwise you’re going to wake up someday and find the lunatics are running the asylum – just like they were two years ago. Rest assured those crazy bastards always try to get the keys. Thankfully there are sensible, hardworking people like the folks at Texas Freedom Network who make it their daily mission to keep the crazies out. This Thursday TFN is celebrating 15 years of being Texas’ watchdog against the political far right with its Let’s Shake It Up! fundraiser at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Enjoy dancing, drinking, and silent and live auctions that include, among other things, VIP passes to The Daily Show With Jon Stewart as well as platinum badges to South by Southwest 2011.

Band Together for Hope

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September 29, 2010

Spider House Ballroom

If you’re like most people in Austin, you probably walk around with some extra pocket change. It might be just a few coins that jingle in your jorts and tip off the Hooters waitress you’ve been stalking, or it could be something bigger – maybe some fives and tens that you keep in your wallet for stoned, late-night food-trailer binges – or perhaps you like to roll like a playa and keep a couple of hundies wrapped around a spool of lesser bills, the kind of pocket chum that gold diggers instinctively swarm. Regardless, any way you fold it, you have more than you need. If you weren’t compelled by your love of humanity to deny the tin-can-rattling con artists at traffic lights, the cardboard-sign-carrying fauxmless dudes who work the interstate intersections, and the Drag-worms with their cute, hungry-looking stray dogs in dirty red bandanas, you might go broke – well, except for your Platinum MasterCard. To be fair, you’re probably not one of those people who thinks charity is just a really unimaginative stripper name. You may not be Bill Gates or Eunice Kennedy Shriver, but you’ve hit your share of theatre-group fundraisers, celebrity silent auctions, and high school cheerleader bikini car washes. Really, what more can you do? You can’t save everybody because … as the saying goes … not everybody wants to be saved. In fact, if you were to lean in close enough to that Somali orphan on the TV who appears to be dying of starvation, he just might whisper, “It’s all good,” in your ear. Then again, he might not – and how can you be sure you heard him correctly over the buzz of the fly swarm? That’s what really freezes you into inaction. How can you know for sure? Where do you draw the line? You pony up for a couple of bags of famine rice, and next thing you know, you’re dodging Uzi fire on an aid flotilla headed for Gaza. Truth is, there is a mind-boggling number of worthwhile charities in the world to which you can devote your leisure time and money. How do you decide? Which is most important? Is it better to feed a starving child, keep a kitten from being euthanized, or teach an adult how to read? Who reads anymore anyway? Other than Twitter? Reading just leads to a guilty conscience. Why spend money on something that makes people feel guilty? Don’t we have churches for that? Besides, where would Jesus or Muhammad or Stevie Ray Vaughan want you to bestow your largesse? Save the Children or Ducks Unlimited? Everybody loves ducks – even the people who shoot them. You can’t say that about children. Probably the best thing to do is lean in a little closer to the starving Somali orphan. Maybe he really is saying, “It’s all good,” but maybe what he means is, “Anything you can do will be appreciated.” You’ll need to brush up on your Somali to know for sure. Even still, any time you can step out of your own little drama and help improve the world for others, you’re doing good. No need to get stuck up about it. There’s plenty of selfishness in altruism, but it’s a selfishness that requires wisdom and patience. Yuck. Of course, if you practice doing good regularly, chances are it won’t seem so strange and churchy. You might even learn to have fun with it. Here’s some good news: You can start practicing Saturday, Oct. 2, at the United States Art Authority when the Mother Truckers and Dertybird perform in the third annual Band Together for Hope, a fundraiser for the DiscoverHope Fund, which provides an opportunity for women in poverty to create their own prosperity through microcredit, entrepreneurship, and training. Sound good? It is.