I hate to say it, but Deutsche Bahn has just made getting to Paris even quicker, with a train that goes Berlin-Frankfurt, from which you transfer to a Frankfurt-Paris (Gare de l'Est) train on DB that gets you there 15 minutes or so quicker, not to mention that you don't have to ride the Thalys, the Belgian/French/Dutch high-speed train which I've always found dark and cramped. Plus, there's apparently some deal going with DB that gets you first class for something like €20 more round-trip, which I sure took advantage of. They even serve you a free meal which wouldn't be out of place on an airplane, but hey, it's free.
* * *
As always, there was more to do in Austin than listen to music and eat. The Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus was hosting an exhibition called On The Road With the Beats, which I couldn't wait to see. The center of the thing (although it's displayed right as you walk in) is 48 feet of the original, unparagraphed, manuscript of On the Road, which Jack Kerouac famously wrote on a roll of teletype paper. Even though I get more ambiguous in my feelings about this book as I get older, it's still a part of every American counter-culturist's heritage, and it's an incredible thing to actually see it stretched out like that. The exhibition is text-heavy, and you're going to have to do a lot of reading if you're really going to get into it. It's also very fair, including the Los Angeles scene, and such supposedly minor figures as Ted Joans. There's posters for Beatsploitation films, photos (although not enough) by Allen Ginsberg, and much, much more. I kind of raced through it because I didn't have much time, but it's worth devoting an afternoon to if you have any feeling at all for this period of history.
Even better, next door to it is a show devoted to the undeservedly obscure artist Jess, who was a modern master of collage inspired originally by Max Ernst. You may know him from his Tricky Cad cutups of Dick Tracy comics, which got him sued, but which are often cited as important precursors of Pop Art, or, if you're into poetry, you may know him as Robert Duncan's partner (they had a wedding ceremony in 1951, which sure was ahead of the curve), who provided art for many of his books. I'd never seen much of his stuff, and was very impressed by the show.
I just noticed that the Beats show is up through the beginning of August but the Jess show closes soon, so if you're in Austin, get down there! I'm glad I did.
* * *
There was all the music at SXSW, and then there was the best music I heard in Austin. That was on a pirate radio station I found somewhere in the middle of the FM dial (hmmm, it seemed like a familiar frequency, somehow), which brought back all the joys of free-form radio I used to listen to -- and use to discover new stuff -- back in the early '70s before consultants brought their heavy boots down on the radio industry and utterly ruined it. Oh, sure, there was stuff I didn't much like -- '50s pop a la Rosemary Clooney, one evening that seemed heavy on handbag house, some heavy-handed comedy -- but that's the way free-form radio works. At one point, a guy's voice came on and said something like "You are listening to an illegal radio station. See that cop over there? He's part of the control for this sector. Immediately change your dial to a commercial radio station. Listen carefully to the ads, and then buy everything you hear advertised. You'll feel a lot better." The signal doesn't always come in clearly -- in fact, sometimes the station's off the air for a few hours -- but in central and south Austin it usually sounds pretty good. The big problem is not knowing what you're hearing. I heard a couple of tunes by artists I'd like to investigate further, but with no DJ to announce them, I can't tell you who they were. But I sure like that rebels out there are defying overdetermined radio, and risking their necks to do so. Whoever's behind this has good taste in music and one hell of a record collection. Long may it wave!
* * *
From Austin, I flew to Newark, changed planes, flew to Paris, and then went to the TGV train station inside the airport, waited two hours, and got on a direct train to Montpellier. I was one cripsy critter when I got there, in part because Continental Airlines now offers some 350 movies on demand and I watched a couple of them instead of sleeping, which would have been a far better idea. But the hotel I stayed at has great beds, and I was able to nap and begin conquering my jet-lag immediately.
The idea of going to Montpellier directly after Austin was to find students who'd be leaving their large, cheap places this summer, talk to their landlords, and get a reservation to move into one if I found one I liked.
Unfortunately, I looked at exactly zero apartments. Apparently, there was a student strike last year, which means that many students won't be vacating until mid-June instead of May, like usual. This means that I'm going to have to go down there again, and that timing will be crucial, since school will undoubtedly start up again in August. Fortunately, though, I seem to be developing a great network of folks down there who'll help me look. Some of them, like Marie the translator and of course Bart (go ahead, click the link; he only gets 6000 hits a day, as opposed to my maybe 100 on a good day, not that I'm jealous or anything), I know from blogs. Others I met through Bart's friends at the Bar Vert Anglais, which is a friendly spot. Others I met randomly through friends. I'm a great believer in networks, so I really hope I get results with this one.
Of course, moving means raising around €3000 between now and the first of June. I'm not at all sure how I'm going to do this. I was hoping to sell my old guitar in Austin, but it proved to need too much renovation to make this practicable at the moment. Now I'm just praying that some work will come over the transom, and that, at long last, I can say good-bye to Berlin.
* * *
Of course, I'm back now, and it doesn't look so bad now that spring is beginning. But I got a potent reminder of where I am the very night I returned. Walking back to my building after going out for dinner, I passed a ground-floor apartment. On the wall was a huge poster edged in black, with the scowling face of Kurt Cobain on it. Beneath the photo were the words, written in huge capital letters "I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE." Just what I'd want in my living room, I'm sure.
Yup, I'm back in Fun City, all right.
Showing posts with label American notes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American notes. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
SXSW '08: What Happened
I think it's very telling that the question people ask most when they hear you've been to SXSW is "What music did you hear?" Increasingly, that's the only reason people attend the music segment of the event, and maybe it's my preoccupations of the past couple of months, but it does seem, in a way, to be whistling past the graveyard.
I saw music. Not much, but I saw some. Some was good, some was not.
The first night, for instance, was almost a total disaster. As it turned out, the two main acts I wanted to see, the Slits and Charanga Cakewalk, were on at the same time. This is business for usual at SXSW for me; it's inevitable. I calculated that the Slits might be overcrowded and/or not so good, and Michael Ramos' Charanga Cakewalk record has remained one of my faves since it came out a couple of years ago. Trouble was, there was nothing I actually knew anything about happening before then. I parked my car (tip for those with autos at SXSW: the official Convention Center parking lot is only seven bucks, you get three ins and outs, and you can get your car any time of the night or day
although these signs are a little disconcerting), and set about finding the Rio, the club where Ramos would perform.
I found it, and a Danish "world music" band, Afenginn, was performing some grim fusion of musics they didn't seem to understand. The blond-dreadlocked frontman was particularly earnest. I did a U-turn and left. What now? There was an hour and a half to kill. Moping along to Congress Avenue, I decided to see what the Intuitive Music Orchestra from Moscow was all about. The Copa, the club where they were performing, was sort of dingy, and on stage a motley crew of time-warped hippies was surrounded by hundreds of "little instruments," basically noisemakers of various sorts. They were in the process of picking them up, tinkling or rattling them, blowing into flutes, and so on. Clearly this wasn't, as advertised, "world music," but instead something far worse: "free improvisation," a genre of music that can be fun to play, but pretty trying to listen to. Still, sometimes it rewards sticking with it for a while in case inspiration strikes.
Inspiration didn't strike. Inspiration seemed to be fleeing as fast as it could. Soon, so was I.
Soon, I was back at the Rio. Rupa and the April Fishes, a band whose CD I'd gotten shortly before leaving, was on. I hadn't had time to listen to the CD, but the premise seemed interesting. Rupa is a waif-like young woman of East Indian extraction who grew up in Iceland and France and was currently based in San Francisco. The band on the album was a nicely-mixed bunch of oddballs, so this could be interesting. But it wasn't. For one thing, only two of the band had made it to SXSW, a drummer and a cello-player. Rupa herself strummed the guitar and breathily intoned new-agey platitudes while the cello shrieked glissandos. I lasted a couple of songs, then went outside to await Charaga Cakewalk. Standing there, I found myself in the odd position of having various people walk up and show me their badges, thinking I was a doorman.
Finally Rupa & Co. left the stage to a smattering of applause, and I went in. Walking over the floor, I saw a wad of bills lying there. As I reached for it, a guy turned around, patting his pocket, and we both realized it was his. I fell into conversation with the guy, who told me he was in the cleaning fluids business back in England, but had used his profits to get into the music business, coming to Austin frequently and finding bands to manage. He was also a journalist. I sort of envied him, especially when a very attractive Texan woman joined him. They'd met accidentally the night before, and had hooked up. Some guys have all the luck.
Ramos had far more equipment than anyone else, which figured, due to his electro-goes-TexMex approach, and it took him a long time to set up. I wish I could say that the stage show matched the record, but while workmanlike, it wasn't particularly inspirational. Or maybe I was just tired or something; at any rate, I left after he performed because it was getting late, knowing that I'd be fried if I waited for 1am, when 17 Hippies were going to play. They had another showcase the next night, anyway, so I'd see them then.
And I did. There were some other acts I half-heartedly wanted to see on Thursday, but logistics were against me. Uncle Monk, the bluegrass duo Tommy Erdyeli of the Ramones is half of these days, was on, but the word later was they were terrible. There was also an Americana group, the Wilders, which I missed because they were on at the same time as the Hippies (who, being friends and neighbors, I didn't want to miss), and I also missed Susan Cowsill (who's usually great live) and a reunion of her family's band, the Cowsills, which was intriguing, but alas, both were on too early for someone who, like me, sees SXSW as an opportunity to grab a good dinner as often as possible.
The Hippies, I gotta say, were great. I got to the venue too early, and had to suffer through a guy named Vinicio Capossela from Milan, who embodied everything I dislike about Tom Waits in a relentless, over-adrenalized set. I thought he'd never stop, although once the Hippies took the stage with their own brand of enthusiasm, the mood lightened considerably. The Hippies' music is almost impossible to define -- world music from a yet-undiscovered world, folk music from a decidedly odd group of folk -- but they can win over audiences in an instant. Poor Christopher took a hit for the crew, getting bashed in the face by an accordion while dodging in their bluegrass-band-like microphone choreography, and bled from a wound above his eye for half the set. At the end, the band and the audience were both exhausted, and everyone was talking about them for the rest of the conference, which bodes well for their summer U.S. tour.
Friday's main attraction was the Ponderosa Stomp, which ran all night at the Continental Club. This is a praiseworthy event, which is held in April in New Orleans, run by a bunch of maniacs led by a guy named Dr. Ike, who find performers from the 1950s and '60s -- soul, country, and the odder corners of rock -- and present them in a huge all-day, all-night concert. They publicize it at SXSW with a mini-Stomp, with short sets by participating artists, and it's usually pretty good. Unfortunately, I only caught the end of Ralph "Soul" Jackson's set, which I heard was pretty good, and saw Barbara Mason, whose voice has never been great, and is still much like it always has been. I'd have stayed for more, but the "Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians," who followed, were dire, not least because Dr. Ike's wife had somehow become a member. Lost for anything else to see, I headed back to the hotel, missing Little Freddie King, who followed the Indians, and who I heard was pretty good.
One of the problems that's plagued SXSW has been the trend towards various entities putting on parties during the day, only a few of which are aligned with the conference, but all of which drain attendance at the panels and interviews (about which more in a minute). I rarely attend them, but this year I had a good reason to: Jon Hardy and the Public, with whom I'd had dinner the night before, and who've applied two or three times to SXSW and never been accepted, were playing a party sponsored by his home town of St. Louis' big roots festival, Twangfest. I didn't envy them, driving all the way from St. Louis for a 45-minute set on what turned out to be a 90-degree-plus afternoon, but they acquitted themselves well. I'm not as fond of Hardy's current material, informed as it is by the breakup of his marriage ("Lotta competition there," said a friend. "Blood on the Tracks, Shoot Out the Lights..."), as I am of his absolutely unique, more surrealistic earlier stuff, and I hope he finds healing in what he's doing next and re-introduces more elements of what I think is his major gift as time goes on, but I certainly wasn't unhappy with the performance, held outdoors at Jovita's, South Austin's funky Tex-Mex restaurant.
That evening, I had dinner with Jason Gross and his friend Tim Broun, and, in keeping with Jason's usual manic schedule, wound up seeing the flavor-of-the-month, Duffy, a young woman from Wales who's burning up the British charts. It sounded like your basic MOR to me, lending credence to my suspicion that this isn't a very good year for music, although her single is okay -- but just okay. Leaving there, I caught the end of Andre Williams' set at the Continental Club, predictably raunchy, and then settled in for a set by Jon Dee Graham, an always reliable, always enjoyable performer.
And that was it for the music.
As for the panels, I'll be brief, because this post is already too long. The keynote by Lou Reed was downright weird, with him declaring "I've got a BA in dope, but a Ph.D. in soul!" at one point (um, perhaps we have different definitions of soul...), hyping his new DVD of Berlin to the teeth, and then going on a great rant about how we've all come to accept unacceptably low fidelity as the default. He was jeered in the press by this, but dammit, he's right. Sorry.
Immediately afterwards, the highlight of my SXSW: Thurston Moore interviewing Steve Reich. Moore did a phenomenal job of keeping the conversation going, and Reich was as personable as can be, parrying questions with great good humor, keeping things on a basic enough level that the curious non-classical majority of the audience could follow what he was saying, and making it utterly impossible for me to believe he's 71 years old. I really regret having missed the concert of his stuff Thursday evening, but there was no program available, and I wanted to cherry-pick what I heard. Also, because it wasn't his own group performing his works and because what was performed was earlier stuff, it somehow didn't seem as urgent to go hear it. I'd heard what I wanted from Reich that afternoon, and for that I congratulate Thurston Moore.
Jason did a great job with his blog panel, which I walked into just to let him know I was there, and stayed to bring myself up to speed on the "new rock press," which, unfortunately or not, blogs are. (Unfortunate because, as I've said earlier, they don't much allow for long-form writing and of course they don't pay). Just after that was a really inspiring panel entitled Boomer Power, from which I didn't expect much despite Bill Bentley's being the moderator, but which turned out to be incredibly thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked will emerge in subsequent posts, I promise. Doug Mosurock also had a great panel on the revival of vinyl, although once again, I just showed up because I had a message for him and stayed to learn a lot. And finally, Margaret Moser predictably did a great job with her panel on 16 Magazine and the Birth of Music Journalism, in which we got to hear not only from former editor (and, among other things, Ramones discoverer) Danny Fields, but also former teen idols Susan Cowsill and Taylor Hanson, both of whom had hilariously scary stories about being marketed to young girls.
But one piece of wisdom I'm going to follow next year was voiced by musician/rights administrator Andrew Halbreich (aka George Carver), with whom I check in every year for a little nachas. "You know, " he mused, "music has for a long time defined itself as a counter-culture, but what I find interesting is that the Interactive conference -- where you didn't attend any panels, and you should have -- is much more of a proto-culture." He's right, and I'm going to need to bend my focus towards that next year. SXSW's directors have long been saying the whole thing is involved in a complex convergance, and I believe that to be true.
But there's always next year.
Next up: food and other follies in Austin and Montpellier.
I saw music. Not much, but I saw some. Some was good, some was not.
The first night, for instance, was almost a total disaster. As it turned out, the two main acts I wanted to see, the Slits and Charanga Cakewalk, were on at the same time. This is business for usual at SXSW for me; it's inevitable. I calculated that the Slits might be overcrowded and/or not so good, and Michael Ramos' Charanga Cakewalk record has remained one of my faves since it came out a couple of years ago. Trouble was, there was nothing I actually knew anything about happening before then. I parked my car (tip for those with autos at SXSW: the official Convention Center parking lot is only seven bucks, you get three ins and outs, and you can get your car any time of the night or day
although these signs are a little disconcerting), and set about finding the Rio, the club where Ramos would perform.
I found it, and a Danish "world music" band, Afenginn, was performing some grim fusion of musics they didn't seem to understand. The blond-dreadlocked frontman was particularly earnest. I did a U-turn and left. What now? There was an hour and a half to kill. Moping along to Congress Avenue, I decided to see what the Intuitive Music Orchestra from Moscow was all about. The Copa, the club where they were performing, was sort of dingy, and on stage a motley crew of time-warped hippies was surrounded by hundreds of "little instruments," basically noisemakers of various sorts. They were in the process of picking them up, tinkling or rattling them, blowing into flutes, and so on. Clearly this wasn't, as advertised, "world music," but instead something far worse: "free improvisation," a genre of music that can be fun to play, but pretty trying to listen to. Still, sometimes it rewards sticking with it for a while in case inspiration strikes.
Inspiration didn't strike. Inspiration seemed to be fleeing as fast as it could. Soon, so was I.
Soon, I was back at the Rio. Rupa and the April Fishes, a band whose CD I'd gotten shortly before leaving, was on. I hadn't had time to listen to the CD, but the premise seemed interesting. Rupa is a waif-like young woman of East Indian extraction who grew up in Iceland and France and was currently based in San Francisco. The band on the album was a nicely-mixed bunch of oddballs, so this could be interesting. But it wasn't. For one thing, only two of the band had made it to SXSW, a drummer and a cello-player. Rupa herself strummed the guitar and breathily intoned new-agey platitudes while the cello shrieked glissandos. I lasted a couple of songs, then went outside to await Charaga Cakewalk. Standing there, I found myself in the odd position of having various people walk up and show me their badges, thinking I was a doorman.
Finally Rupa & Co. left the stage to a smattering of applause, and I went in. Walking over the floor, I saw a wad of bills lying there. As I reached for it, a guy turned around, patting his pocket, and we both realized it was his. I fell into conversation with the guy, who told me he was in the cleaning fluids business back in England, but had used his profits to get into the music business, coming to Austin frequently and finding bands to manage. He was also a journalist. I sort of envied him, especially when a very attractive Texan woman joined him. They'd met accidentally the night before, and had hooked up. Some guys have all the luck.
Ramos had far more equipment than anyone else, which figured, due to his electro-goes-TexMex approach, and it took him a long time to set up. I wish I could say that the stage show matched the record, but while workmanlike, it wasn't particularly inspirational. Or maybe I was just tired or something; at any rate, I left after he performed because it was getting late, knowing that I'd be fried if I waited for 1am, when 17 Hippies were going to play. They had another showcase the next night, anyway, so I'd see them then.
And I did. There were some other acts I half-heartedly wanted to see on Thursday, but logistics were against me. Uncle Monk, the bluegrass duo Tommy Erdyeli of the Ramones is half of these days, was on, but the word later was they were terrible. There was also an Americana group, the Wilders, which I missed because they were on at the same time as the Hippies (who, being friends and neighbors, I didn't want to miss), and I also missed Susan Cowsill (who's usually great live) and a reunion of her family's band, the Cowsills, which was intriguing, but alas, both were on too early for someone who, like me, sees SXSW as an opportunity to grab a good dinner as often as possible.
The Hippies, I gotta say, were great. I got to the venue too early, and had to suffer through a guy named Vinicio Capossela from Milan, who embodied everything I dislike about Tom Waits in a relentless, over-adrenalized set. I thought he'd never stop, although once the Hippies took the stage with their own brand of enthusiasm, the mood lightened considerably. The Hippies' music is almost impossible to define -- world music from a yet-undiscovered world, folk music from a decidedly odd group of folk -- but they can win over audiences in an instant. Poor Christopher took a hit for the crew, getting bashed in the face by an accordion while dodging in their bluegrass-band-like microphone choreography, and bled from a wound above his eye for half the set. At the end, the band and the audience were both exhausted, and everyone was talking about them for the rest of the conference, which bodes well for their summer U.S. tour.
Friday's main attraction was the Ponderosa Stomp, which ran all night at the Continental Club. This is a praiseworthy event, which is held in April in New Orleans, run by a bunch of maniacs led by a guy named Dr. Ike, who find performers from the 1950s and '60s -- soul, country, and the odder corners of rock -- and present them in a huge all-day, all-night concert. They publicize it at SXSW with a mini-Stomp, with short sets by participating artists, and it's usually pretty good. Unfortunately, I only caught the end of Ralph "Soul" Jackson's set, which I heard was pretty good, and saw Barbara Mason, whose voice has never been great, and is still much like it always has been. I'd have stayed for more, but the "Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians," who followed, were dire, not least because Dr. Ike's wife had somehow become a member. Lost for anything else to see, I headed back to the hotel, missing Little Freddie King, who followed the Indians, and who I heard was pretty good.
One of the problems that's plagued SXSW has been the trend towards various entities putting on parties during the day, only a few of which are aligned with the conference, but all of which drain attendance at the panels and interviews (about which more in a minute). I rarely attend them, but this year I had a good reason to: Jon Hardy and the Public, with whom I'd had dinner the night before, and who've applied two or three times to SXSW and never been accepted, were playing a party sponsored by his home town of St. Louis' big roots festival, Twangfest. I didn't envy them, driving all the way from St. Louis for a 45-minute set on what turned out to be a 90-degree-plus afternoon, but they acquitted themselves well. I'm not as fond of Hardy's current material, informed as it is by the breakup of his marriage ("Lotta competition there," said a friend. "Blood on the Tracks, Shoot Out the Lights..."), as I am of his absolutely unique, more surrealistic earlier stuff, and I hope he finds healing in what he's doing next and re-introduces more elements of what I think is his major gift as time goes on, but I certainly wasn't unhappy with the performance, held outdoors at Jovita's, South Austin's funky Tex-Mex restaurant.
That evening, I had dinner with Jason Gross and his friend Tim Broun, and, in keeping with Jason's usual manic schedule, wound up seeing the flavor-of-the-month, Duffy, a young woman from Wales who's burning up the British charts. It sounded like your basic MOR to me, lending credence to my suspicion that this isn't a very good year for music, although her single is okay -- but just okay. Leaving there, I caught the end of Andre Williams' set at the Continental Club, predictably raunchy, and then settled in for a set by Jon Dee Graham, an always reliable, always enjoyable performer.
And that was it for the music.
As for the panels, I'll be brief, because this post is already too long. The keynote by Lou Reed was downright weird, with him declaring "I've got a BA in dope, but a Ph.D. in soul!" at one point (um, perhaps we have different definitions of soul...), hyping his new DVD of Berlin to the teeth, and then going on a great rant about how we've all come to accept unacceptably low fidelity as the default. He was jeered in the press by this, but dammit, he's right. Sorry.
Immediately afterwards, the highlight of my SXSW: Thurston Moore interviewing Steve Reich. Moore did a phenomenal job of keeping the conversation going, and Reich was as personable as can be, parrying questions with great good humor, keeping things on a basic enough level that the curious non-classical majority of the audience could follow what he was saying, and making it utterly impossible for me to believe he's 71 years old. I really regret having missed the concert of his stuff Thursday evening, but there was no program available, and I wanted to cherry-pick what I heard. Also, because it wasn't his own group performing his works and because what was performed was earlier stuff, it somehow didn't seem as urgent to go hear it. I'd heard what I wanted from Reich that afternoon, and for that I congratulate Thurston Moore.
Jason did a great job with his blog panel, which I walked into just to let him know I was there, and stayed to bring myself up to speed on the "new rock press," which, unfortunately or not, blogs are. (Unfortunate because, as I've said earlier, they don't much allow for long-form writing and of course they don't pay). Just after that was a really inspiring panel entitled Boomer Power, from which I didn't expect much despite Bill Bentley's being the moderator, but which turned out to be incredibly thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked will emerge in subsequent posts, I promise. Doug Mosurock also had a great panel on the revival of vinyl, although once again, I just showed up because I had a message for him and stayed to learn a lot. And finally, Margaret Moser predictably did a great job with her panel on 16 Magazine and the Birth of Music Journalism, in which we got to hear not only from former editor (and, among other things, Ramones discoverer) Danny Fields, but also former teen idols Susan Cowsill and Taylor Hanson, both of whom had hilariously scary stories about being marketed to young girls.
But one piece of wisdom I'm going to follow next year was voiced by musician/rights administrator Andrew Halbreich (aka George Carver), with whom I check in every year for a little nachas. "You know, " he mused, "music has for a long time defined itself as a counter-culture, but what I find interesting is that the Interactive conference -- where you didn't attend any panels, and you should have -- is much more of a proto-culture." He's right, and I'm going to need to bend my focus towards that next year. SXSW's directors have long been saying the whole thing is involved in a complex convergance, and I believe that to be true.
But there's always next year.
Next up: food and other follies in Austin and Montpellier.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Las Migas de Austin y Califas
And the debate on the websites continues about SXSW -- did they shut down parties they didn't control by releasing a list of them to the police and fire departments? is music doomed? did Iggy suck or not? -- while I think that the most shocking music-related shark-jump happened sometime in the last year without anybody telling me about it: Gibson Guitars seems to have donated a bunch of 8-foot-tall guitars for local "artists" to paint or otherwise decorate under the aegis of a corporate sponsor in much the way that Berlin's got its stupid bears, Chicago its stupid cows, and so on. Ever since Austin declared itself the "live music capital of the world" I've been waiting for the city to make a really boneheaded gesture in that direction, and now I can relax, because they sure have.
* * *
Food in Austin's been mainly on the go, with no great new discovery yet, although it's wonderful to see that my pal Sappachai has opened a Madam Mam's in South Austin. I've known him since he was the manager of my local supermarket in Austin, and got passed over for promotion and was certain it was racially-based. He decided to open a Thai restaurant, of which we had none at the time, and arranged a partnership with a cousin, as well as backing from some rich Thai guys. He confessed, though, that he was scared: they didn't think Americans liked spicy food. I told him that the solution was to take them to a Mexican place -- I think I even recommended one -- because the first thing that would happen would be that the waiter would plonk down some chips and salsa (and I recommended a place with good fiery stuff). When the Thais noted all the gringos (and farangs) around them nonchalantly eating fire on chips, they'd get the picture.
And thus it was that Satay was born, a sort of pan-Southeast Asian restaurant which spawned a family of sauces and other jarred groceries. Sap and his cousin argued, though, and he went over to the UT campus area and opened a little hole-in-the-wall place called Thai Noodle, which, despite its near-inaccessibility, did very well. But a long-lost romance re-bloomed in Thailand, and Sap went back for a while, returning married to his high-school sweetheart, whose mother, Madam Mam, was a masterful cook. Along with his new wife, he had a bunch of Madam Mam's recipes, and, in an incredibly audacious move, he rented a huge storefront on Guadelupe -- "the Drag," as UT students call it -- and opened a vastly expanded version of his old Thai Noodle joint, with entrees starting at $3.00 and going up to $14 for an astonishing catfish soup with an incendiary, fruit-infused broth that rated 5 or 6 chiles on the menu (which markings are to be taken seriously) and remains one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten.
Needless to say, with a menu that pleased both impoverished students and high-end foodies, not to mention one so vegetarian-friendly that whole tables of various Indians and hippies were a full-time feature, he started printing money, so it was with great pleasure that I accompanied Patrick and Denise down to his brand-new joint for my second meal here on this trip. Denise really scored with a special, which I've just returned from enjoying myself: a sort of coconut custard made with salmon and a fine spice mix, with chunks of salmon stirred into it and a bed of collard greens. Again, an incredible achievement.
On the other end of the spectrum, I had another great oyster po'boy from Gene's, which I so loved last year. My love was somewhat diminished by the fact that it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get my sandwich. There was a young guy who entered after me who'd phoned his order in and he left with his order with five minutes to get back to work. It's a great place, but apparently not at the end of the week.
* * *
And what's a trip to the States without some bumper stickers and t-shirts? There are many, many Republicans for Voldemort bumper stickers around Austin, but the one that had me chuckling most was non-political and said "Yes, this is my pickup truck. No, I will not help you move." And anyone who's been around bands on their way up will appreciate the t-shirt on a kid who got on my Denver-Austin flight on the way back from California: "Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver."
* * *
The California trip was short and sweet, mostly concerned with meetings and hanging around Village Music, having dinner with some folks from the Well, and having lunch with legendary CREEM writer Jaan Uhelski at Viks Chaat, which I'd long wanted to try. I'll have some photos of all of this later, but if you're looking at their page, the Dahl Batata Puri was the winner, and I scored a couple of killer tiny Indian cookbooks at the grocery store next door, which was paradisical -- if impractical for my Berlin-based Indian cooking needs. More different kind of dal than I'd ever seen, though. And I also had a great meal cooked by my friend Bob, whose long service as art director of Salon hasn't diminished the talents that once made him the Bay Area's best-kept secret chef, at whose restaurants the celeb chefs could be seen dining contentedly on their days off. All in all, a nice trip.
There's more, but it involves photos that are hard for me to download at the moment, so stay tuned.
* * *
Food in Austin's been mainly on the go, with no great new discovery yet, although it's wonderful to see that my pal Sappachai has opened a Madam Mam's in South Austin. I've known him since he was the manager of my local supermarket in Austin, and got passed over for promotion and was certain it was racially-based. He decided to open a Thai restaurant, of which we had none at the time, and arranged a partnership with a cousin, as well as backing from some rich Thai guys. He confessed, though, that he was scared: they didn't think Americans liked spicy food. I told him that the solution was to take them to a Mexican place -- I think I even recommended one -- because the first thing that would happen would be that the waiter would plonk down some chips and salsa (and I recommended a place with good fiery stuff). When the Thais noted all the gringos (and farangs) around them nonchalantly eating fire on chips, they'd get the picture.
And thus it was that Satay was born, a sort of pan-Southeast Asian restaurant which spawned a family of sauces and other jarred groceries. Sap and his cousin argued, though, and he went over to the UT campus area and opened a little hole-in-the-wall place called Thai Noodle, which, despite its near-inaccessibility, did very well. But a long-lost romance re-bloomed in Thailand, and Sap went back for a while, returning married to his high-school sweetheart, whose mother, Madam Mam, was a masterful cook. Along with his new wife, he had a bunch of Madam Mam's recipes, and, in an incredibly audacious move, he rented a huge storefront on Guadelupe -- "the Drag," as UT students call it -- and opened a vastly expanded version of his old Thai Noodle joint, with entrees starting at $3.00 and going up to $14 for an astonishing catfish soup with an incendiary, fruit-infused broth that rated 5 or 6 chiles on the menu (which markings are to be taken seriously) and remains one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten.
Needless to say, with a menu that pleased both impoverished students and high-end foodies, not to mention one so vegetarian-friendly that whole tables of various Indians and hippies were a full-time feature, he started printing money, so it was with great pleasure that I accompanied Patrick and Denise down to his brand-new joint for my second meal here on this trip. Denise really scored with a special, which I've just returned from enjoying myself: a sort of coconut custard made with salmon and a fine spice mix, with chunks of salmon stirred into it and a bed of collard greens. Again, an incredible achievement.
On the other end of the spectrum, I had another great oyster po'boy from Gene's, which I so loved last year. My love was somewhat diminished by the fact that it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get my sandwich. There was a young guy who entered after me who'd phoned his order in and he left with his order with five minutes to get back to work. It's a great place, but apparently not at the end of the week.
* * *
And what's a trip to the States without some bumper stickers and t-shirts? There are many, many Republicans for Voldemort bumper stickers around Austin, but the one that had me chuckling most was non-political and said "Yes, this is my pickup truck. No, I will not help you move." And anyone who's been around bands on their way up will appreciate the t-shirt on a kid who got on my Denver-Austin flight on the way back from California: "Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver."
* * *
The California trip was short and sweet, mostly concerned with meetings and hanging around Village Music, having dinner with some folks from the Well, and having lunch with legendary CREEM writer Jaan Uhelski at Viks Chaat, which I'd long wanted to try. I'll have some photos of all of this later, but if you're looking at their page, the Dahl Batata Puri was the winner, and I scored a couple of killer tiny Indian cookbooks at the grocery store next door, which was paradisical -- if impractical for my Berlin-based Indian cooking needs. More different kind of dal than I'd ever seen, though. And I also had a great meal cooked by my friend Bob, whose long service as art director of Salon hasn't diminished the talents that once made him the Bay Area's best-kept secret chef, at whose restaurants the celeb chefs could be seen dining contentedly on their days off. All in all, a nice trip.
There's more, but it involves photos that are hard for me to download at the moment, so stay tuned.
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