57 posts tagged “austin”
This morning I am, as usual on a Sunday, at Quacks sitting at my regular table and contemplating the graffiti on the wall next to me: “Omens will eat you alive.” It appeared months ago, barely a week after the new paint job dried, and I’ve been wondering what it means ever since. Or more to the point, what it meant to the person who wrote it.
The joy of graffiti often comes from its crypticness, though from my experience that’s usually more of a pleasure for the scrawler than the observer. People love in-jokes as long as they’re in on them and there’s little in this world that’s more an in-joke than graffiti only you and maybe one or two other people will understand. At least that was my experience back when I fearlessly wielded a Marks-A-Lot.
Defacing any flat surface of common property seemed to come naturally in my school years – it was, as my brother later said of bumper stickers, “just another way to carry on the dialogue.” Desks in every classroom and stall-dividers in every boys’ bathroom at Westtown were covered with graffiti and even as a day student I contributed my share – Ramones lyrics, derogatory comments about the Student Body President (the one my senior year weaseled his way into office on a promise of beer in the water fountains), even just the names of the King Crimson members on the first album. When I first started using the Upper School bathrooms in 7th grade I spent any number of hours pondering other messages left: who felt compelled to share with the school that “Kintner is burned out on glue”? Why did someone draw a mangy likeness of a mutt closely modeled on Thurber’s Muggs and title it “Potto’s Dog” (Potto being the name assigned to an Assistant Boy’s Dean who reputedly patrolled the grounds at night with a flashlight, shaking bushes to flush out pot-smokers) when Potto, far as anyone knew, didn’t even have a dog? And so on.
Things got a lot more out of hand in college, as they will when you gather a bunch of young people who think they’re just so damn clever. At first I was content to confine my wall-scrawlings to my own dorm; one winter night left to my own devices in Seymour after practically everyone had already gone home for winter break and feeling particularly nihilistic, I wrote “Is it true as you say that we’re on the eve of destruction?” in peanut butter in the stairwell. It wasn’t until I fell in with Ivan junior year that I learned the folly of this; Ivan worked part-time for Buildings & Grounds and told me, “They all know it’s you, man, and they’re just waiting for you to fuck up.” Ivan taught me how to graffiti the smart way like he did, which was every-damn-where else on campus. Also how to make it cryptic enough so it wasn’t easily traceable to its source; Ivan hated hippies, but no one who didn’t know him well would ever guess that “No tofu for you!”, which appeared ubiquitously in El Marko throughout senior year, was his handiwork.
And when I graduated and moved to Boston I viewed the city at first as an extension of Bard. I took a house in Somerville with Lori, who had grown up in Tivoli and was getting away for the first time; Lori bought a magnum marker, the biggest the art supply stores sold, and proceeded to use it everywhere she went in Somerville – even (or especially) on sidewalks. She was freaked out by Harry Hood, at the time a pint-size animated spokesman for the area’s predominant line of dairy products, so she tried to exorcise him by prefacing nonsensical statements with “Harry sez:” or often just “Harry gives Hood head!” I preferred my favored Bard icon, a stick figure with wedge-shaped head. For us this was only perfectly reasonable behavior and I had no idea how annoying it probably was to the working-class folks around us.
(Actually, I kind of did. We both hated Somerville. If we’d stayed in that neighborhood longer than three months and kept that shit up one or both of us would have likely made the acquaintance of the local PD and not in a good way.)
Leaving Boston though broke me of the habit, pretty much for good. Greenpeace shipped me to Greenwich, then Philadelphia, and finally San Francisco and in the course of my travels I gradually absorbed the idea that in most of the real world – specifically, the world that I wanted to learn to be a part of - there’s just no place where graffiti doesn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. And because I never did it as performance art or as a revolutionary act or really for any reason but getting (and hopefully provoking) a cheap laugh, it didn’t seem worth the risk.
Or maybe joining up with Greenpeace channeled my need to act out into a more socially acceptable (and certainly better-protected) venue. If you want to call 80s-era GP “socially acceptable.” I suppose I could have done much worse and gone for Earth First instead.
Whatever. No here I am 25 years later, back in a college town where the graffiti is good, great sometimes, but mostly still cryptic. I don't feel any particular desire to join in; cheap laughs are just as easy to come by these days from other sources. I'll probably always feel the urge to interpret, though, as I'm proving this morning at Quacks.
Every month I need to find something new to blame for not blogging more and this time it’s going to be Evernote. Since I got back from CA I’ve been working heavy-duty with this program and by now am well into the refinement part of the process referred to back in July. Problem is, the more I do the more I want to do; delving into your own history can be addictive. My attention to the outside world has been suffering as a result. So has, fortunately to a much smaller degree, my job performance. Time to get focused come tomorrow and a new month.
Meantime, things don’t stop happening in real time. Sunday night saw me at the Paramount for what was billed as a panel discussion of bicycling in Austin, past present and future, moderated by none other than the famous David Byrne. Mr. Byrne, who while not exactly closely familiar with the vagaries of cycling in this town (as he graciously was the first to admit), did certainly serve to get the place packed. I was in the front of the balcony so I don’t know if it was SRO downstairs but I wouldn’t be surprised given how even the most uncomfortable seats around me were all taken.
It wasn’t exactly a panel. Byrne gave a presentation on what he’s seen cycling in Austin earlier that day and elsewhere in the world (presumably this was a win-win appearance for him given he’s got a book just out on the topic), followed by Rob D’Amico of the League of Bicycle Voters, Annick Beaudet of the City of Austin, and someone else (Jan McCann?) who spoke on the place of cycling in Austin’s civic and commercial development plans. That all took well over an hour, with about 20 minutes left for questions at the end. There was no interchange between the panelists which I found a little disappointing, but since admission was free for all there’s hardly room to complain.
One of the best questions came from my friend Michael Zakes, who runs Waterloo Cycles (my vendor of choice for hardware and repairs): “Mr. Byrne, was it you or Michael Stipe who first started taking your bike with you on tour?” Byrne, unruffled, responded that as far as he knew they were both preceded by Kraftwerk. Good answer! I’ve only seen DB once before in public, fronting the Heads in 82, and the other night I was struck by how unexpectedly (no pun intended) autistic he increasingly looked as the evening progressed, nervous and overly tic-y. I think the man needs a podium or a mike stand to be behind to feel comfortable for more than 10 minutes on stage.
Well… I suppose that’s another one for the records.
Some time back on another blog I did a number of “10 years ago” posts detailing what I was doing at this time, approximate or exact, in 1996 and 1997 and etc. Those posts were fun and better yet they were valuable but I stopped because reminiscing publicly like that carries a certain risk of inundation. Those years were fertile and pivotal ones for me, but most of all they were active as hell. Even I could barely keep track of myself at the time. (I suppose if I’d been keeping at least a paper journal then it would have helped but I didn’t start that until late 2001.)
This marks a resumption of those posts, which in turn marks a special occasion: tomorrow, September 2, it’s been 10 years since I met Angela. That meeting was in a way the culmination of much of the activity of the preceding years; it seems now that so much of what I did served to nudge me towards that one little point in time, being at that particular place under those particular circumstances at that particular moment. Cattle in a chute is how my mind’s eye sees it. Maybe I’m romanticizing or self-mythologizing or whatever you call it; wouldn’t be the first time I've done that.
What I do know is if I’ve ever had an hour that changed everything that was to come after, it was on that Thursday afternoon in the Blue Light District, Black Rock City, Nevada, USA. I think it was about 2:30 but don’t quote me on that. Maybe Angela noted it in her journal. She was always the more meticulous of the two of us.
On the face of it, the importance of that meeting is pretty simply explained: leaving California and coming to Austin has been the single biggest influence on my life in the decade that’s followed. Next to writing and Quakerism, Austin (and the conditions I’ve lived under here) is the only factor that’s mattered this whole time. And I would have never come to Austin if I hadn’t met Angela. Two plus two always adds up to four.
Not that I necessarily had a clue as to that meeting’s watershed status when it happened. It barely rated mention in the next day’s morning pages, the closest thing I kept to a journal then – there were so many other things, heavy-duty things in my little sphere of existence, going on that same day and the ones right before it. It wouldn’t be until nine months later that I went back and reconstructed that day and its circumstances in full, devoting an entire entry of my new blog to it, and nine months is plenty of time for romanticizing and self-mythologizing to creep in.
At the time and immediately afterwards, Angela’s appearance seemed like a head-spinning combination of the absurdly random and heavy-handedly miraculous: if I hadn’t offered her my apartment to stay in while I was already on the playa, she’d never have needed to come to my camp to return the key. If she’d come on that errand a day or even a few hours sooner or for that matter later, presuming I’d even been there I would almost certainly have blown her off or maybe her me. (Never mind how, I just know: one or both of us would have looked the other over briefly before making a mental checkmark - “Ah, nice but not for me, not with so many other fish on the playa” or something like that.) If while lounging with Tom Morgan and Lynn Adesko in their camp 100 feet away, discussing old Led Zeppelin records, I’d ignored the sudden, urgent intuitive prompting to for no discernible reason whatsoever return to mine right this very moment, I’d have missed her completely - she’d have just left the key under one of my big brass candlesticks and I’m pretty sure I would have never heeded the note she planned to leave with it inviting me to her camp way the hell on the other side of BRC.
And so on. What I’m trying to get at here is that us meeting at all, let alone exactly when and where we did, was the culmination of an unlikely series of events in a chain so fragile that any little deviation would have destroyed it completely. “A series of coincidences on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes” is how I believe Stephen King once put it. That's certainly what it felt like then.
And still does, to a degree. Yet it happened, it did, and nothing’s been the same since. I’m guessing such stories aren’t exactly unique in the history of love, but it’s the only time anything like it has ever happened to me.
That'll probably remain the case too. You’re lucky if that kind of love, that seems-like-fate coming together, that resulting complete alteration of your life’s course, happens to you even once in your life. That’s what I’m thinking about ten years minus one day later. That’s why I’m dragging out the hoary old “ten years ago” meme once more.
What gets to me is that I forgot about this anniversary until last Friday, and when I remembered I was afraid it was already past. A little record-delving settled that but it’s been on my mind ever since. Can it really have been ten years? is one major question; What does it mean now? is the other. Neither really has a satisfactory answer at the moment.
Not that they necessarily need to. Given all that’s happened since, it’s likely enough to just remember the date, and by remembering honor it.
As part of the ongoing frenzy of tear it down and build something new and shoddy that is present-day Austin, the School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on 45th St. is getting some major kind of facelift. Actually I don't know if the result will be shoddy, but it sure is a mess in the front yard right about now. Even their marquee admits it.
Myself I'm wishing they had more room on the sign so they could put up something like "Our students can't see the mess so don't let it bother you either," but that's probably me just being insensitive.
Closer to home, someone finally did something about the collapsing-on-itself storefront on 50th St. that looked like this awhile back:
Now you just know there was no way they were going to let that stand, not in increasingly-appearance-conscious Hyde Park, not to mention letting prime real estate go without generating revenue for long. I was hoping for a renovation to turn it into a small grocery kind of like the long-standing one on Avenue B, but of course whoever went for the rental housing instead.
And it doesn't look too bad, I concede. At least the building's got its right angles back again. Hate to be inside during a hailstorm, though.
I suppose that shed to the right is next in line. Can't wait to see what they do with that.
Austin and surrounding areas are in what's officially designated an Exceptional drought, which is the most extreme category. Apparently we're the most drought-stricken part of the country and have been for some time. Way to fuggin' go, CenTex!
This year's wildflower crop has suffered accordingly but while nowhere as voluminous as last year there are still some very pretty patches scattered here and there. Yesterday I biked along the southern edge of the Mueller development (Manor and Anchor) and snapped a few of them.
Unfortunately a fringe of bluebonnets does little to make that giant spider less creepy.
Aren't they worried about giving kids nightmares?
Item: the fire-hydrant at 44th and Speedway I saw open and gushing Saturday. I called it in but didn’t take a picture because a) it was 7-frickin’-30 in the morning and who thinks about taking pictures then, and b) who in the first world doesn’t know already know what a gushing hydrant looks like? Now the neighborhood list-serv informs me that it was open for 24 hours and more, to an estimated total of 300,000 gallons. Something about draining the pipes because the water tasted bad. Dude: this is Austin. The water always tastes bad here. I now feel totally, officially disrespected in all my piddley little personal efforts to conserve water. For instance, no longer habitually flushing the toilet (piddley, get it? ha ha). Discouraged would be another word for it.
Item: the list-serv also informs me of something discouraging regarding our beautiful huge new blue single-stream recycling bins – namely, that in many cases sanitation workers aren’t even bothering to hide that they empty them in with the garbage. Scott told me while I was visiting this is widespread, he’d heard it from Penn & Teller, and I refused to believe him because how seriously can you take a show called Bullshit to begin with? I see one apology I really don’t want to make in my future.
Maybe I wouldn’t take either of these so near to heart if I hadn’t just come back from two lovely weeks in lovely California, where people (except Scott) recycle fastidiously and act like they know they’re in a drought and pass laws that restrict vehicle emissions and do all kinds of other things it rarely seems to occur to Texans might be a good idea. Or maybe I would. All I know is when you see this sort of shit happening even in Austin, it can really put a damper on your green passion.
Token California-is-so-goddam-better-than-here picture:
Apparently I don’t have all that much to say.
A few weeks back a friend took me to task for being mostly incommunicado. I told her I’m holding my breath, voluntarily or not, until after the election and that breath-holding doesn’t leave you much to speak with. She seemed to understand. I think many of us are holding our breath, those of us who want to see some measure of reason and light overtake the wholesale deception and fear-mongering of the last 7+ years.
Plus we’ve been in Mercury retrograde for what, two weeks now? With another to go. Mercury retrograde doesn’t help anything. It never does.
And all of the posts I’ve thought of putting up - pictures of the finally-completed north end of the UT stadium, or my new iPod Touch, or even this year’s Park(ing) Day - just seem so inconsequential considering what’s happened to our country in this last month. Any of those posts feel like denial, and while I’m quite good at that I try to practice it selectively.
I read blogs where the writers are all “Ohhhhh, I’m so worried about the economy and these high gas prices really suck and I hope everything’s going to be all right” and then go on to yak yak yak about their cat or kids or newest purchase. People, it would be easy to conclude from this, are by and large idiots. They don’t seem to get that everything is not going to be all right for a long time to come, not like we’ve known it, and perhaps not ever again. I presume this is because they don’t want to.
Not like I blame them, or anything. But still.
You’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog, or any of my previous, for any length of time that I’ve been waiting for some sort of crash to hit this country. Now that it’s happening it’s no comfort. Just thought you should know.
I’ve got a university job and am thus fairly well-protected – my poor manners didn’t keep my recent performance evaluation from coming overwhelmingly positive, leading to that large raise mentioned earlier – but probably not as much as I think. And even if I was, ignoring the implosion of the U.S. as a whole would be not only unsensible, but a little bit too much of the Screw You Jack, I’ve Got Mine that came in with Reagan in 1980 and is as much as anything responsible for us being in this mess today.
However, just because I’m not ignoring it doesn’t mean I have much to say about it. I’m scared. That’s what makes you hold your breath.
Oh all right. Here's National Park(ing) Day on The Drag. At least someone is doing something for the common good - creatively! - rather than just focusing on bread and circuses (UT football, I'm lookin' at you).
Liveblogging from Netroots Nation 08, though don’t be too impressed because all that means in this case is I’m sitting in a hallway on the top floor of the Austin Convention Center while the next-to-last session of panels for this year is about to wrap up. Lots of people I see look fatigued. I bet – many of them have been at this three days now and networking is a draining business.
So is partying at night, and there’s been plenty of that too. Or so I hear; you know me, I thrive in the daytime so Lord knows why I live in a town of such concentrated nightlife as Austin. Not even that most liberal of 3-ring circuses that is NRN can get me out after sunset, apparently.
Especially when it’s been a day like this one, a 6-hour volunteer shift monitoring video feed from six rooms at once and wending my may through crowded corridors of chattering libs in between. I got to see Nancy Pelosi bring in Al Gore as a surprise guest in the morning session, but even though they were technically only 300 feet away since I was watching it all on the Ustream feed I might as well have been in Djakarta. That’s just life at a high-tech conference.
I didn't get to meet any of the luminaries attending or presenting either because pretty much all I talked to were other volunteers or staff. I don't care much; all told I’ve really enjoyed my time here and regret not having more of it. There's a really great energy to this gathering, very positive and festive and - dare I say it? - hopeful. It’s always something special when the circus comes to town.
OK, I’ve totally fallen behind on my posting. Or more accurately, been keeping up elsewhere, just not here. And today I’m hopping a plane for the east coast for 10 days so no promises that I’ll resume much soon. Usually on a trip I take a lot of pictures but don’t post them until I get back, in spite of whatever resolutions I make beforehand. Actually it’s going to be kind of nice to be away from a computer for awhile, and if my experience last year holds wifi’s going to be a bit spotty everywhere I’m going anyway. Be nice to see if there are more free hotspots in Boston than a year ago, at least.
Right now I’m sitting in ABIA waiting for my delayed flight to Newark. That’s my plane sitting on the tarmac right outside the window, where it’s been for an hour already. I hope if the delay is because they have to fix something, they do a good job of it.
It’s not weather, not on our end. It’s a beautiful day outside, cool and sunny with Wednesday night’s huge storms having washed the humidity out of the air for a day or two at least, and I almost wish that I were just staying home to enjoy it. But not much. I’m looking forward to getting out of Austin for awhile, and to seeing friends and family and some familiar terrain that’s not in Texas.
Last night it must have rained, because this morning there was water in the creekbed. I’m quite good at this level of deduction. You ought to try me sometime.
For the first part of my walk to the bus stop, down my block and over the creek, I sometimes have interesting company. At various times both cats have independently followed me as far as the bridge and then ducked into the bamboo stand on the far side; I guess that’s how long it takes them to realize their own life isn’t so boring that they want to come to work with me. For awhile after the last time change there was a little possum that gallumped across the street right in my path and one day when I said “You again!” aloud it looked startled, turned around and gallumped right back into the bushes where it started. And of course there’s the various toads hopping around during and after storms in the warmer months.
But this morning right as I was crossing the bridge a medium-large seabird glided down and perched on the rail. (No idea what kind it was, deduction and not investigation being my strong suit.) I wasn’t altogether surprised because 200 miles really isn’t that far inland and I’ve seen herons standing in the shallows below the Longhorn Dam now and then. Still, it was a bit surreal seeing one right on my street. I guess it must have sensed the pickings were good in the stream because after a half-minute’s survey it hopped down into the bed and started craning its neck around.
I was lucky to snap a few pics and still make the bus on time and from then on it’s been a regular day. Nonetheless I can’t shake the feeling there’s a rip in the fabric somewhere.
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