Inside Austin City Limits

Thursday night I was down in Austin, making a side trip to visit our friend Momo in her new home city. I’ve always said, either you’re an Austin person, or your not. For me, it’s a good place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. For Mo, it’s just the right kind of crazy.

Think of New York on Xanax. It’s the same kind of intensity, just at a slower pace. Or maybe Los Angeles with a twang, given the amount entertainment focus they have (the SXSW film fest was starting up Thursday night, and Austin City Limits will be in the fall). And maybe even Seattle with sun, given the fervor for “alternative – buy local – go green” you’ll find. And I even found myself walking the 6th Street club scene thinking of Bourbon Street without the lingering scent of pee and vomit.

Drivers are their own kind of thing down there. About 90% are kamikaze drivers, barreling through intersections, changing lanes with abandon and giving only moderate consideration to the laws of physics let alone the traffic code. The other 10% are Midwest friendly, waving at you from the other side of the 4-way stop – “No, you go!” And you can never be sure which is coming towards you, but you should be ready to dodge either way.

You gotta love Austin food. Fussy doesn’t really cut it. Foods that can be wrapped in a tortilla or smoked over pecan wood take precedence. And a brisket taco is pretty much alpha and omega of Austin food. Especially if you can get it from one of the food trucks that have taken over downtown in the last couple of years. The only thing I was really missing as we wandered around 6th Street was a donut truck. Trust me, Austin. Hot, fresh doughnuts straight out of the fryer would be killer when you’ve had too much to drink. You’ll make a fortune. Nothing soaks up beer like fried bread.

But if you go to Austin, be sure you know somebody. Because the only way you’ll really know what’s going on is if you know a guy, who knows a guy, who dates this girl, who used to be in a band with some other girl. Because that girl is going to be the one who’s been to the newest place, with the hottest band and the coolest scene. Facebook’s got nothing on the Austin social network. By the time the newest place has made it into a newspaper, or god-forbid a guide book, everybody is on to someplace else.

And if you’re either an Austin person or not an Austin person, Mo is definitely an Austin person. She’s already the girl who knows where to go for a good time. Thanks for the hospitality, Austin Girl.

Point Taken

Okay, I’ve devolved to the level of point grubbing. You know that thing where they track points for the shows I volunteer for at the Performing Arts Center? You get a few perqs for volunteering so many shows: priority scheduling, show tickets. I was never going to get to the highest level. 100 shows in a year? Maybe if I was retired. Maybe. But I am homing in on 40. And two of my shows didn’t show up on my point tally. And it was making me nuts. So nuts that I actually e-mailed the volunteer coordinator and pestered her for them. I’m so embarrassed.

Cause that’s really not how I want to see myself. At all. I really want to be this “Oh, whatever. It’s for a good cause. Que sera.” kind of person who just let’s the points fall where they may, and basks in the glow of a good deed done. It’s volunteerism. I'm above all that.

But the fact that there are levels, and I could get to another level, and they’re not giving my points – aaaarrrrrrggghhhh! It’s just turning me into a person I don’t want to be. Part of it is the goal oriented thing. And part is the priority scheduling. I can get in a day ahead of most other people? Sweet! I luv being first. And Rock of Ages is coming, and dammit, I want opening night! Gimmee my points! Gimmee gimmee gimmee!

See? It happened again. Seriously. I don’t want to be that girl. Because, really, it’s for a good cause. And the perqs aren’t the point. Really they aren’t. But here I am. Petting my point total like Golem at Tiffany’s. Honestly. I can’t even look myself in the eye.

How can we sleep while our beds are burning?

The more people talk about radicalized Muslims (especially with what’s going on in the Middle East), the more I think “Yeah, you better hope they stay Muslims. Cause if they ever get a load of communism, you can kiss your sweet gas good-bye.” Either they’ll find away around that “religion is the opiate of the people” clause, or they’ll come up with some sort of Mohammadan/Marxist hybrid. And if conservatives think they hate Islam as much as they hate communism, they’re going to freak over those two great tastes in one.

Really, it’s kind of a recipe for a Marxist revolution more than an American one. While there was economic inequality between the Colonies and England, the worst of the excesses of the rich took place far from the Founding Fathers. It’s one thing to know that your labor is keeping the fat cats fat in a land far away. It’s another to have your face rubbed in it every day. Which is very much what the OPEC countries have had going on for decades. A very few have benefited greatly, and, in my humble opinion, used a false dedication to Islam as a red herring to keep the proles in line. If a lot of those same young men who are putting so much effort into reading the Koran started parsing the Communist Manifesto or a certain little red book, they might find just as much to inspire their fiery devotion.

Because when the huddled masses do rebel (France, Russia, China, Cuba), it becomes just as much about making sure the rich have less as it is about the poor having more. Bloody revolution.

Once upon a time, it would have been Russia being a communist state that would have turned those Islamic firebrands against the idea of going red. If there’s anyone they’d like to blow to smithereens as much as the US, it’s the Russia. But the Ruskies went capitalist, so that’s out. And, given how Sharia works, obviously a totalitarian state is not a turnoff. So, people better hope that the majority in the Middle East keeps believing that there is only one God and his name is Allah. If they go commie, we’ll never see another drop of oil out of the Gulf again.

Charlie Sheen's Heart of Darkness

There are a few things I’d like to get straight about the whole Charlie “Deepwater Horizon” Sheen environmental disaster.

1. This is not the tragic loss of a great screen actor. He’s always been fair to middling. He topped out working with Oliver Stone, and has been skating by on personality ever since. He’s lazy. He might have been a good actor, but he doesn’t put in the effort. His most indelible character has been a womanizing, semi-drunk actor – named Charlie! It’s not a stretch.
2. The character Charlie is a fun uncle who has paraded a string of bimbos through his nephew’s life, and eventually started dating a smart, competent woman. The real Charlie is a father who has paraded a string of bimbos through his children's lives, and the smartest woman he’s dated in that span has been Denise Richards, and he now lives with a porn actresses and a fetish model.
   
3. The Middle East. It’s still happening.
4. Rehab only works if you’re willing to admit your brain is fucked up, and are willing to surrender to the process and let someone else advise you (either 12 stepping it, or a sober living coach, or a trained medical professional) until such time as your brain is healed enough that you are capable of making decisions on your own. Being an arrogant ass is an impediment to the process.
5. Of course you don’t think you’re manic depressive. You take coke when you’re down and booze when you’re up. It’s called self medicating. Now that you’re clean, you’re brain isn’t able to cope and you are spinning like pinwheel in a hurricane.
6. I didn’t miss the Chaim Levine thing. On the naughty chair with Galliano!

Inside the bubble, no on can hear you rave

You know, the run of celebrities saying junk in public (Galliano, who loves Hitler; Sheen who is a high priest, Vatican assassin warlock; and Everybody Loves Muammar Gadafi), you just start to wonder how really, really, seriously thick the celebrity bubble is.

Cause, you and me, even if we did love Hitler, and we don’t, we’d have enough common sense to know that there aren’t too many rooms in the Western world where that particular statement plays. You should pick your crowd if you’re gonna blow anti-Semitic (and you shouldn't). Not while pawing a female cop in Malibu, and not while in a restaurant in Paris. It will get out.

Not that I’ve never been drunk and heard my mouth saying things that my brain did not authorize. But that’s more like telling somebody I work with that they have really pretty eyes (or something, you know, not that I would have said anything embarrassing like that, or started crying immediately after). And even if I loved Hitler (which I DON’T), I could down a bottle of Jack and still keep a lid on that bad boy in front of strangers. It’s a conditioned response. You keep the crazy on the inside unless you’re around people who love you and would go to their grave with their mouths zipped about your crazy.

But, if you’re lucky, you have 2 or maybe 3 of those people who guard your crazy secrets. Evidently, there were enough people keeping Galliano’s psychobabble on the down low inside his celebribubble that he thought everybody would just not mention the Hitler thing if he got soused and blurted it out. Same with Sheen. How many people have been standing between him and TMZ for so long that he no longer can tell which things should not be said in the outside voice?

I guess the lesson is not to get so hammered, or smoke so much Charlie Sheen, or well, I don’t know what Gadafi’s excuse is that you don’t know when you are inside your bubble or not. Especially when you’re at an office Christmas party, drinking tequila sunrises and talking to a co-worker with really pretty eyes. Seriously. Cause once the tequila starts talking, you can’t whistle that stuff back. Even if it doesn’t end up on TMZ.