Results tagged “columnist”

Dear Jody Denberg, WTF? WTF? WTF? AT-WHAY E-THAY UCK-FAY?!! Okay, so I was in the car the other day when I hear the news that you are leaving KGSR. There was irony, for Kevin Connor was the one who was doing the announcing. Now, I know Kevin has long been on KUT, but I will forever associate him with KGSR. Plus, since he was talking about you, and you’re not on KUT, I got confused and thought I’d entered some weird place of crossed signals. When he said the words, Those last songs are for my friend Jody Denberg, I actually looked to see which station I was listening to. Then, I had that dreadful thought that sometimes visits when, say, I hear four songs in one day by an artist not typically played so much-- Oh shit, is he dead? But no. You’re not dead. And yet, I realize I’ve been writing this letter to you in my head, an epistle with the distinct feel of a eulogy to it. Not such a terrible thing. See, I went to a fancy reading recently, the star of which was my great friend Sarah Bird. Sarah just won a big fellowship, and UT threw a gala in her honor. Before she read, there was this speech about her, and a slideshow.

As illustrated by the back hatch of my Scion (aka the Japanese ambulance) I am a big fan of pithy expressionism. I leap and swing from motto to slogan to uber-encapsulated life wisdom as if playing some sort of philosophical hopscotch. If it fits on a bumper sticker and moves me, I will adopt the approach, if only briefly. Let’s call it stuck-in-traffic therapy—you’re sitting there, gridlock, and you let your eyes shop around for that which appeals: Wag More, Bark Less; Be the Change that You Want to See; Breathe; Namaste; If You Don’t Like My Driving Call 1-800-Eat-Shit. And then, of course, there are all those utterly unique rearranged Waterloo messages. (My son’s is a favorite, enigmatically proclaiming: This Whip Slays Dragsons on the back of an old SUV.) I also cull advice and inspiration from t-shirt slogans, though this is a bit more challenging. Self-trained to not look at boobs—though like the rest of y’all, I really am intrigued by the miraculous mounds of mammary magnificence—I miss out on a lot of cools text and graphics. I have even extended my never-lock-eyes-with-nipple-line rule to menfolk, wanting to be fair and all. So I must consciously remind myself that if a slogan is being sported, the wearer does want you to look.

'I would see Bill Clinton across the table. He would be eating a banana sandwich. He would talk about... stuff... There would be lurking secret service agents.' "Make sure you frame the goal positively. Don't say I have to quit smoking. Say, I will be happy when I can breathe clearly." 'I will be happy when Bill Clinton is eating a banana sandwich while sitting across the table from me... He will talk about... stuff. There would be lurking secret service agents.' "And make sure it's something you can influence. It can't be I wish he/she would do such and such. It must be initiated and influenced by you." 'Re-frame: I will be happy when I am eating a banana sandwich and Bill Clinton is sitting across the table from me... I will talk about... stuff. There will be lurking secret service agents, but I will make them go away.'

Months ago Warren sent me a link to the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a wonder that, after watching it, I could focus on anything else but while I waited for the films release. For you see WTWTA is not just another book for me. It was my First Ever Favorite Book. I say first ever because, being the voracious reader I am (and have been since first being introduced to the alphabet) of course many other favorites joined the list along the way. Little Women, The Handmaid’s Tale, Of Human Bondage, and about 90,000 others (and that’s the short list—the long list is about two million). I got WTWTA back in the sixties, not long after it first came out, and Sendak had me at hello. This was not a book I ever forgot or relegated to some dusty heap of childhood memories. Max was and remains the bomb. I’ve read the book hundreds of times (at least) and I think I could, without exaggeration, give that book plenty of credit (or blame?) for my decision, very early on, that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

Have you ever forgotten everything you’ve ever learned? I had a severe case of amnesia last week that lasted maybe 48 hours. During this period, out the window went every single bit of accumulated sage advice from friends, any wisdom picked up over years of therapy, the philosophy behind my martial arts training, each hard won bit of insight from nearly a decade of almost daily meditation and plenty of Buddhist teachings and god knows how many self-help books, and all those lessons learned in the School of Hard Knocks. In short. I got pissed off. Really, really, really, really fucking pissed off.

After all, these were practical folks. Problem-solvers. Puzzle people. How could you be concerned with something as trivial as how much your all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast cost ($20) when code monkeys all over the world were making unauthorized changes to databases on mission-critical servers? When they were creating massive outages and expensive system downtime? When they were causing unfathomable revenue losses? When you could wake up in the morning and read about #ITFail (gasp) after #ITFail after #ITFail?

Leave the tandem jumps to lesser men and women. Tandem jumping is like eating your favorite ice cream with a balloon tied around your tongue. It’s like being introduced to Leonard Cohen through his 80s synth recordings. After all, you made up your mind to jump, possibly to your messy doom - really only about 30 people die from this a year - out of an airplane and paid good money for it. Wouldn’t you rather experience the full effect? If so, call up Texas Skydiving in Lexington, ask about the AFF program.

Years ago, when I was researching a story for the Dallas Morning News, I interviewed a therapist who worked with abused kids. At that point I’d been a working journalist for maybe fifteen years and I think this was the first time I cried on the job. The story that got to me involved a little boy who had been presented with one of those bounce-back bop toys— you punch it, it goes down, then it pops back up. The boy was asked to say three things that upset him about his neglectful mom, and he was allowed each time to hit the bag. This he accomplished with ease. Then, a harder task was presented: Name three good things about your mother and hug the bag. He hesitated, unable to think of a single good memory until, at last, one came to him.

Here's the deal: Have you ever been in a room full of hardcore computer geeks? You know how they talk in a different language, even though they're still speaking English? You know how it's more confusing than if they were, say, speaking Aramaic? Well... That's kind of how I felt sitting in the living room surrounded by these hardcore football geeks. I mean, sure, I understand football, but this is different. This is work. Pencil-behind-the-ear, squinty-eyed, brain-straining work. Research. Analysis. Statistics. Psychology. Stacks of paper. Extensive Google searching. Limiting beer intake to maintain clarity...

So, I had a job interview this week. I have no idea how I did. Maybe I was impressively assertive, just the right amount of I-am-so-fabulous-yet-appropriately-humble proclamations emitting from my piehole. Or perhaps I fool myself. Maybe I was way too Jersey, and that what I hope came across as confidence instead sounded like Yo, you give me the job or I breaka you face. Either way, it was an interesting exercise and gave me a chance to reflect on a few things while I wait to hear back if I got the gig. Do you remember that scene in Bladerunner where the investigator is sitting across from a replicant but he’s not sure if the guy is a replicant so he asks a question designed to prompt a certain response that will reveal the truth? I believe the question was, Tell me about your mother. And the replicant says, My mother? I’ll tell you about my mother. And then he blows the guys to smithereens laying the groundwork for Harrison Ford to, among other things, spend the rest of the flick lusting after Sean Young while the rest of us drool over Daryl Hannah. (I mean, really, was she hot or what?)

This week, I signed up for a Speed Dating event. It seemed like a pretty fertile subject. What could be more fascinating than a whole bunch of single folks in varying states of desperation and curiosity trying to find true love in four minutes or less? That's kind of like randomly meeting someone on the street...

For the past couple of weeks, we've been speaking with local bartenders about their recommended libations. But you know what? The Informed Drinker has some drinking recommendations of her own, based on thorough field research gained from office happy hours, various dates, Alamo Drafthouse sing-alongs, “you go girl” confidence-building sessions, lunch meetings gone awry, feigning interest in spectator sports, and celebrating the fact that it's Tuesday.

A little after 8 o'clock on Saturday, the Texas Longhorns will be cruising to a victory over outmatched University of Louisiana-Monroe. Colt McCoy and most of UT's other stars will be resting on the sidelines while subs and first-year players mop up in what is little more than an organized scrimmage. And as you consider leaving early to get a jump on the crowd at Rio Rita, you'll ask yourself, "I paid $65 for this?".

I heard Meat Loaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light the other day and the muse screamed at me to tell you all why PBTDL is possibly the greatest pop song ever written, how magnificently it captures teenage angst, hormones, and the power of pussy in negotiations. So there I was, all set to wax poetic on Ellen Foley’s dramatic interpretation and beautiful pipes. And I was even going to give a nod to Scooter Rizzuto. Then I was going to tie it all into the radio conversation I started here last week by putting forth the theory that the real reason Paul and Larry got cut back has nothing to do with money or ratings, but simply because they didn’t play near enough Meat Loaf. But then… then something happened at the Elvis Costello show and blew that imagined column to hell. Because you will not, will not, will not believe what I witnessed at the Bass Concert Hall on Tuesday night. But I have just got to tell you anyway.

This week I shall reflect on the concept of change. I will disguise my reflection as a defense of recent decisions at KUT, which brought about some change, which apparently has made some people angry. These people, in turn, have lassoed their anger into cranky emails, which they have then forwarded to their friends, who have forwarded them to me. So now, not only am I receiving unsolicited emails telling me I need to be pissed off over something I am not pissed off over, but also these sloppy forwards are filled with those annoying headers, loaded with the email addresses of others I don’t know. Which would—if this fucking triple digit heat wasn’t totally stifling me into full on slothfulness— piss me off. To the point I might have to start an email campaign of my own, whereby I tell people that their cranky emails are making me cranky and then I ask them to forward my email to a bunch of other people not because I think it will accomplish anything, but simply because, you know, misery does love company. In short, KUT recently cut way back on the hours of Larry Monroe and Paul Ray. They still get to do Blue Monday and Twine Time. But much of the airtime previously dominated by these old dudes has been taken over by Matt Reilly, some young whippersnapper who—the fucking nerve of him—is playing both non-jazz AND (gasp!) stuff from the eighties and even—tres risqué!—the nineties and beyond! By which I mean, compared to what we had before, extremely modern and avant garde selections that, according to some are a threat to civilization as we know it.

The girl on his right introduced herself. "I'm today's Word Master," she said. "The word for this meeting is arcane. Arcane means difficult to understand, mysterious, knowable only to the initiate." She pointed to where she had written the word on the wipe board; the applause was deafening.

"Someone in Austin will start the conversation by telling you how progressive Austin is. The expression goes something like, "As goes Austin, so goes Texas in the opposite direction." But that may not be the whole story. Let’s take a journey through Austin history through the eyes of our local newspapers and tell the story of John Shillady’s visit to Austin as Executive Secretary of the NAACP in 1919." This is the second half of our two-part guest column.

Two weeks ago my friend Scott died suddenly. Two days ago my friend Charlie also died suddenly. I’d been mostly out of touch with both of them—Scott for a couple of years and Charlie for a couple of decades save for his trip here last spring for SXSW, when we reunited over Ethiopian food along with Chad, whose wife died suddenly five years ago. Chad and Charlie and Scott and I were all, I think, born in 1964, making us not terribly old. But perhaps, as some friends have speculated aloud upon hearing news of these deaths—and I have speculated, too—it’s getting to be “that time.” That time being, of course, when news of dying peers is going to become more common.

"Someone in Austin will start the conversation by telling you how progressive Austin is. The expression goes something like, "As goes Austin, so goes Texas in the opposite direction." But that may not be the whole story. Let’s take a journey through Austin history through the eyes of our local newspapers and tell the story of John Shillady’s visit to Austin as Executive Secretary of the NAACP in 1919."

Once, back in New York, my cancer-surviving-and-deep-in-medical-debt friend and I were sitting around, watching a Japanese movie. I don't remember which movie it was, but I do remember that, as the opening credits rolled, the word 'EMOTION' popped onto the screen and some happy little music played.

Oh my gosh, y’all! Have you seen the news? All these Tea Party people are, like, storming Town Hall meetings hosted by Democrat representatives, and getting all up in their grills, and screaming at them that health care reform is turning us into Russia. Clearly these protestors have not had the pleasure of a bottle of Stoli and a night with Natasha—as have I—hence their poor view of our Soviet comrades. But before you go getting all pissed off at them, let’s just stop for a minute and hear them out. I think maybe they have some valid points, which is, no doubt, why they are making these points so LOUDLY. So we can hear them! Now, you might say, Spike! Are you off your nut? To which I respond, Not at all. See, I have spent the better part of the week in Midland, TX, hometown of George and Laura Bush. And, as a temp resident of the La Quinta Inn out on I-20 in Midland, not only have I been drinking the agua, I’ve had the benefit of complimentary morning lobby waffles in the shape of the Lone Star State and the pleasure of Fox News being blasted from the TV as I waffle-munch. And you know, from what I’m hearing from the Foxy anchors, sounds like this Obama fella is trying to pass some sort of sinister program that is going to, among other things, insist that we euthanize the aging baby boomers asap.

Believe it or not, Satanists are pretty much just like you and me. This is assuming, of course, that you and me wore black trench coats and played with big foam swords in the courtyard outside my college dorm. Which I did not do. But still. There's more to a person than his or her taste in outerwear or choice of sword construction material. When it comes down to it, the meeting of Satanists, Dark Pagans, Left-Hand-Path Occultists, et al. really wasn't that different from any other meeting of like-minded individuals that I've attended.

Last Saturday, I got a cryptic notice from Travis County suggesting, as best as I could understand it, that my last divorce—which happened over two years ago—did not, in fact, happen. As the courthouse was closed until Monday, this gave my adorable inner-neurotic plenty of time to race to all sorts of dark corners. This despite the fact that I possess a signed, stamped, official copy of the divorce decree, which I clutched to my bosom, like a newborn to the tit, for 48 hours straight waiting for word that the county clerk had made an error. Of the various scary places I visited in my mind, I imagined what still being married might mean. It could mean that my gay marriage to Warren—we have a domestic partnership so that I can have insurance— was void. This, in turn, could mean that I wasn’t legally insured when I had my womb ripped out last fall. Which could mean I might owe $20,000 to the insurance company or even that I might have to return to the hospital to have this faulty part reinstalled.

Obviously there are lots of folks who never outgrow the spirit realm. Shirley MacLaine comes to mind first, but also some people I actually know and trust. And I've always had a sort of lurking question regarding subject: Are they feeling something I've forgotten how to feel, or do they have skills that I don't have, or are they just plain crazy?

Too hot to write long Contemplative thoughts today Instead: Haiku lite! Triple digit trip Me up triple digit trip Me up. Fucking heat. Barton Springs Night Swim is free but in this damn heat they could charge millions. Legal bare breasts catch The eyes of teen boys, old men And hungry babies.

The best thing about doing anything naked is that you're always prepared. It's not like going to the gym, where you have to remember your shoes and, well, your clothes. This became evident earlier this week as I was contemplating attending my first co-ed naked yoga class. I was late leaving work and didn't have time to run home and get ready, so I was on the verge of wimping out until I realized that, quite literally, um, I was born ready.

With the beginning of football season finally in sight, fans looking to learn about what to expect are bombarded with a stream of lists and predictions. Too bad they're all bunk.

Two windows down, with an arm hanging out the driver’s side. Round about the roundabout on Riverside by Long. One ear has an iPod dripping down from it because the radio’s shot, but having both buds in place combines with the oppressive air temp and makes me feel too confined. Like a coffin of boiling music. A blazing cocoon of last year’s not-hot list. Tunes of was-hot which are no longer the now-hot that targets the aged and baby-like. So, so, so crippling, and the back of my seat is damp from my body’s tears.

A couple of weeks ago Warren and I went to see the movie Moon, sort of a thematic mash-up of that old classic Gaslight meets the Disney flick Parent Trap meets Castaway with a dash of A Boy and His Dog thrown in and some sub-themes that might’ve been derived from Bowie’s Major Tom and Elton’s Rocket Man. That I was able to gather all this from the film is a testament to my ability to multi-task. While it’s true I sometimes purposefully multi-task in the theater—yes, I can knit in the dark—in this case I found myself unintentionally and unhappily tri-tasking. Because the couple sitting next to us WOULD NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP.

When Lance Armstrong all but conceded a Tour de France victory to teammate Alberto Contador after Sunday's mountain stage, reaction was divided into the two camps that follow most any news about Armstrong: those offering unconditional support and those ready to slice him up with cutting opinions.