Selling cupcakes on South congress out of an Airstream trailer - 100% wade approval.

Alamo Drafthouse, the fine people who made the brilliant connection of serving beers and real food with movies instead of crap popcorn and high-fructose-corn-syrup, are moving into their new digs at the Ritz in downtown Austin this week.

The Ritz was never a ‘nice’ theatre, per se. It was never very opulent; it was kind of a working-class theatre, never very high on design. But back in the Thirties, when Sixth Street was a crazy, wild place, it was known as the ‘Western’ theatre and actual cowboys would come in, a lot of whom had never seen a movie before. They’d get freaked out, liquored up and loving it, and end up pulling out their six-shooters and shooting at the screen! The Ritz screen was riddled with holes from drunk cowboys.”

More about the history and the future of this space over on The Chronicle.

In Austin, when you die, they say you go to Willie Nelson’s house.”
- Kinky Friedman - The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A “Walk” in Austin

One can only hope.

Party at the moon tower. Everyone’s invited.

Austin, Texas is the only city in the world known to still operate a system. The towers are 150 feet tall and have a fifteen foot foundation. This type of tower was manufactured in Indiana and assembled onsite. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 used lighting towers from Detroit. A single tower cast light from six carbon arc lamps, illuminating a 1500 foot (460 metres) radius circle brightly enough to read a watch. In 1993 the city of Austin dismantled the towers and restored every bolt, turnbuckle and guy wire. The 17 remaining towers were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and are therefore protected from demolition. (read more…)

I’m not trying to brag or anything but I’ve been around more than a few of the various out-doorsy scenes around this town. The mountain bikers, road biker, rope climbers, boulderers, gym-rats, running people, tri-people, stoner-backpackers, kayakers – the list goes on. The rowing dock people though, are probably the most interesting (from a people perspective), the most diverse for sure. Old, young, fat, skinny, tall, short - take your pick. The old guys that run the dock are what imagine myself being like as an older cyclist - as knowledgeable as they are cranky. A fine example is Sommers. I don’t know if this is the guy’s first or last name, but he seems really cool until you screw something up (which no matter what you do, you will screw something up around this dude) after which his handlebar mustache just exudes dismay-for-the youth-of tomorrow. Once you get ‘the look’ you’re pretty much left with the options of running away, or drowning yourself in the lake in the hope that your death will at least give him hope for the world, as there will now be one less asshat screwing up his day.

Take yesterday. After spending the entire day recovering from Saturday night, I decide to go for a row. As I’m getting setup I glance up to see what looks like half the 15 to 17-year-old population of Austin, in sit-on-top kayaks heading my way. A part of some ill-conceived youth outing. I imagine it was a similar feeling to the Japanese at Guadalcanal, looking out over the pacific and seeing nothing but American ships and slowly contemplating how monumentally screwed they were. Thus, in my haste to get the hell out of dodge, I didn’t push off from the dock hard enough, while simultaneously some freak gale decided to fire down the lake at precisely the wrong moment.

The result was chaos: I got pushed into two other rowing shells, and passel of giggling high school girls who had less of a clue as to what to do than I did. Finally the trip leader for the kayak excursion essentially tugboated me out of the traffic snarl. Quite humiliating. As I’m getting pushed to freedom, there’s Sommers standing on the dock, staring directly at me - the cause of the wretched clusterfuck . He stands there perfectly still for a moment, while his mustache imperceptibly twitches. Then his mouth flattens into an underscore and he shakes his head ever so slightly, walking away, leaving me to pursue option one of the Sommers-scorn-avoidance plan.

Like I said. It’s an interesting scene.

For those of you that don’t live here, there’s dog park somewhere under all that water. Downstream thousands of lost tennis balls are on a grand new adventure as they are swept out into the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently this if going to keep at it for a while, if you believe the world’s worst newspaper.

I recently decided that I didn’t have enough hobbies and as I live pretty close to the lake now, rowing would make a nice compliment to the other stuff I do. I’ve thought it looked like a good time especially in the summer when running gets pretty awful and bike rides are curtailed to after dark madness to dodge the heat.

We had the second of four lessons today, which basically consisted of a bitchin-80’s-style safety video and a recap of what we learned before (don’t drown, don’t run into things, try to go straight – I got two out of three right). Anyhow mechanics of rowing aside, this is quite a zen thing. It’s a pretty cool thing to strike out on the lake at sunset and crank out few miles, soaking up the relative coolness of the lake.

You also run into a lot of lake-people, some hard core (you know who you are), some not so hard core (stoned hippies, who couldn’t put the J they were smoking down long enough to turn their freakin canoe out of my way) and some just damn funny, very Austin types. I was coming back to the dock today and this big guy in a sit on top Kayak kind of meandered into my path. In these rowing shells, they got fast and straight really well, but they don’t exactly corner on a dime. On Town Lake it’s kind of like driving a super tanker in a bathtub.

So I drop the oars in and slow myself down in order to figure out where he’s going so we don’t reenact the Exxon Valdez disaster. With the boat stopped I can hear singing. It takes few seconds but coming form a 300lb dude, in a lil-bitty kayak is the Beatles Yellow Submarine in damn-near perfect pitch. And not softly either, he was going for it with gusto, as they say. I reset my aim on the dock and cruise by the guy, singing along with him. I can only hope that somewhere George Harrison was watching.

This why I hate seeing shows at Emo’s. Doors at 8PM really means the band you paid to see goes on at 11:30, so when you show up to get your tickets at will call, you’re stuck with an hour and a half to burn.
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Not quite as cool as #27 (go to outer space) on the list of things to do in this existence, but still a nice way to spend a Sunday morning. Only Austin could turn this into a civic event - there haven’t been this many people downtown, this early, since the 30’s.
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Give me 95 and sunny any day over this.

The entire city is shutdown for a bit of ice and snow. The weathermen are all having aneurysms, they’re so excited and the statesman is, of course, calling this the end times.

People in the northeast are laughing at us similar to the way we laugh at their ‘heat waves.’ An amusing anecdote to Texas is that nobody can drive in ice, snow or really anything slippery. We do many things well here, but not that. Hence the metropolitan lockdown.

A bike ride would be pretty cool though…

South Austin is one of those special places in the world. If you’ve never been here you probably don’t understand. Take some old hippies, some new hippies, some Mexican culture, a good music scene that runs the gamut between country to punk, mix them all up with some great food to be found in some fantastically crusty dives, and you’ve got a close approximation.

Artz Rib House is a great example. Serious BBQ, live music, and one of the top five sketchiest bathrooms on South Lamar. Last night they sat our party of four at at six-top in the main room where the music was happening. Soon enough our spare seats were taken by two Old-Austin-Type-Folks. These are the ones who’ve been here since the mid 70’s when there were more prostitutes than musicians and frat boys on 6th street. They’ve been the music scene and presumably they all personally knew Stevie Ray Vaughn.

So J.B. and MariBeth. They plop down at our table, absolutely taken aback that the hostess would try and seat them anywhere other than directly in front of the weee stage, so would we mind sharing our table ? He’s got the long grey hair and leather motorcycle vest thing going on. Dimes to Dollars he’s seen some interesting days in this town and others. A musician, a pianist classically trained. They know and introduce us to members of the band. They know Art, proprietor, slinger of excellent BBQ and sides and introduce us. Orbits and trajectories that would have remained mutually exclusive are smashed together by the inexorable force of gravity that is South Austin. That’s why we love it here.

At the end of dinner, brow perspiring from the excessive meal, I scrape the last resisting remnant of the baked potato through the detritus of a half rack of baby back ribs and sausage. J.B. regards the wreckage of my plate, finished in record time and says, “Son, I’m proud to know you.”

You too man.

The future of Radio
This panel featured one of the best (if a little over gesticulating) panel chairs who really directed the conversation regarding the interaction of internet radio vs. traditional terrestrial radio. The panel itself is pretty impressive, with a DJ from Soma, Roman Mars the guy from This American Life, the president of Bjorks label, Celia Hirschman, and the owner of Pandora, Tim Westergren.

Whether you like it or not starbucks is a gatekeeper of a certain type of culture…indy, non-tradtional radio does the same thing. -Hirschman

Interesting thought, that there are certain cultural entities that introduce us to whole cultural components, (e.g. Starbucks to Latte’s). Since you can have 80,000 songs at your finger tips in the form of your ipod these days, it becomes overwhelming and unmanageable. The radio stations act as the cultural gate keepers for music.

Bennie Burns Keynote

Who owns these (internet) clouds that are raining money ?
- Burns

What’s coming: the end of the free access to the network cloud. (interesting parallels between the the new AT&T logo and the second death star). Content providers will begin charging the users and original content producers for the privilege of using their networks. Of course everything the guy said last year was dead wrong, so here’s hoping he’s going for a repeat.

The End…

The music crowd has started to show up today, with a lot more distressed-emo-types with pink hair roaming the building (or hell a purple suit with purple boots, whatever flaots your boat, man). If anything this festival makes this town even weirder which is a good thing. I will say this about the interactive portion: Just because you know alot about a specific subject matter, doesn’t mean you should get up and talk about it…there’s been some really wretched public speakers at this thing. My overall experience is good, but there’s room for improvement.

That and $5.50 for a four inch pizza is just plain stupid.

Bruce Sterlings up next, and then a blessed day off…

He says it better than me:
Bruce Sterling

They bureaucrats are so busy trying to monetize this country, that they’re turning us into a bannana-republic with rockets…

Only in America do dying phone comapnies lobby the federal government successfully….

If I’ve learned anything hanging out with Eastern-European dissidents, it’s never make a descison out of fear…

When you can comprehend poetry, it means your hearts not broken…
-Sterling

At least that’s what I think he said. I was fairly engrossed. Man he opens up on American culture and the death of it by obesity, creationism and stupid politics.