Results tagged “spikegillespie”

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 love, love, love fake shit. And when I say, “fake shit,” I am not euphemistically referring to, say, “reality” TV shows, imitation boobs, or the way some of the ex-girlriends of my young, hot, domestic partner treat me at cocktail parties. No, no, when I say “fake shit,” what I mean is prosthetic poo-poo, crafted ca-ca, faux fecal matter. So when esteemed Austinist arts editor, Emily, asked me if I might like to profile Kourtney Lea Moon-- aka Angry Olive-- and when I found out that Kourtney sews embellished excrement as part of her emporium of uber-cool crafts, I jumped at the chance. I emailed Kourtney to tell her of my love of fake shit, and how thrilled I was when Warren gave me a box of plastic dog crap for my birthday. She enthusiastically responded: “You can never, I repeat, NEVER be given too much shit! Fake, real, plush, cute, fossilized... We deal with it everyday- literally. Best present ever...”

My life as a study in contrasts extends to my travel. I am a fan of getting in very large airplanes and hurtling thousands of miles to get to places where I can then dispense with all modes of transportation besides my feet. I enjoy hanging out in little towns and villages where the best live entertainment comes in sitting around, drinking coffee amidst the locals, alternately eavesdropping and participating in the conversation. Such it was, then, that last week I headed off for Oregon. For the fourth year running, I lighted temporarily in Portland, then joined forces with my friend David, whereupon the two of us headed on over to Astoria, a town famous for a few things. This is the place where the Columbia spills into the Pacific, Lewis and Clark wrapped up their little walk, and Goonies and Kindergarten Cop were filmed. And it’s the first town in Oregon Country where a white woman—an English barmaid named Jane Barnes— lived.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Years ago I appeared in Mademoiselle magazine as one of those Before/After Fat/Skinny chicks that are constantly featured in women’s magazines. You know what I’m talking about—articles supposedly published to be all motivational for the fatties who dream of achieving that anorexic look we chicks have shoved down our gullets from the moment we wriggle our way out of the bloated, ruined, stretch-marked bellies of our mamas. Probably those articles are more about feeding what is, so often, an ongoing impossible dream. Because while achieving the look turns out not to be impossible for some of us, even those of us who manage to work our way back into our pre-adolescent jeans’ size have a hard time keeping it off. This is, of course, why diet books and pills, personal trainers, pre-packaged meals, gadgets like the Thigh Master, and programs like Weight Watchers do so well. It’s a perpetual thing, the yo-yo lifestyle. I’ve probably lost close to 200 pounds in my life. Now, I did not ever lose a grand total of 200 pounds. But I have, more than once, lost somewhere around fifty pounds at a time. If you want to know what lugging around an extra fifty pounds feels like, pick up a bag of soil next time you’re at Home Depot. Fifty pounds, particularly on the frame of someone who is 5’5” (as I am), is roughly a fuck ton of excess.

People, we need to talk about food some more. Awhile back I was discussing my addiction to food memoirs, particularly in the audiobook format. The past couple of weeks—as if purposefully trading in soft creamy brie spread across hot crusty French bread for Dickensian gruel—I swapped out those delicious bits of ear candy for more somber audio food fare. Which is to say I listened to The Omnivore’s Dilemma and currently am in the midst of The End of Overeating. Those books have left me with enough food for thought to merit a two-part series. I’m going to save the grimmer news for Part II—next week. For now, I’m going to tell you about the positive upshot of taking in exposes on the industry of food. Months ago, even before I checked out the books, I’d already made a note to myself on my Goals For 2009 list to eat better and more local foods.

I was just hanging up the new shower curtain when I noticed the tub stopper left behind by a former roommate. The tub stopper is purple and features one very small hand, protruding up, so that when it is in placed in the drain I suppose it might look like a very small person is on the other side, trying to get out. Before I tell you more about the symbolism of that little hand, let me tell you about the shower curtain. I went to Target recently to get a few things for the house. Not to help the economy or kick the terrorists’ asses through shopping. Just because I wanted a few little inexpensive nest brighteners. I wandered the aisles in that Target Trance, visions of a new rag rug, a shower curtain, and maybe a few pairs of big girl underpants to replace the old ripped ones dancing in my head. (Note: the visions, not the torn underwear, were doing the dancing.) I found one of those shower curtains with a map of the world printed on it, made no doubt by slave labor in China who will likely never get to see the outside of a factory, let alone the world. I silently sent both my thanks and my apologies to them.

Lest this come off as a negative review, let’s get a few things straight up front about Capital T Theatre’s production of Killer Joe, currently playing at Hyde Park Theatre. The acting is across the board spot-on. The set, co-designed by Mark Pickell and Tommy Grubbs, is nothing short of spectacular in its authentic, exquisite disgustingness. And Pickell, who also directs, is clearly a man who understands timing, suspense, and recognizes that kid gloves have no place in the staging of this piece. That said, a warning to the faint of heart, past victims of violent crimes, and sufferers of PTSD: you might be better off going to see a matinee screening of UP. Because Killer Joe is, even in its lightest moments, about as light as a pile of bricks buried under a slurry mound of wet cement. And then, as the plot thickens, so, too, does the concrete, until you feel your innards tighten and your organs harden at the spectacle before your eyes. It’s like somebody took MacBeth, All in the Family, and Sylvia Plath, tossed them in a blender, and splattered them inside a beat to fuck trailer out in Dallas County.

Sally Jacques, visionary dynamo behind Blue Lapis Light, is at it again.

I was recently musing aloud to my young, hot, domestic partner Warren, what it must sound like anymore whenever I call him at work. My guess was that it sounds like this: I hate my job, I hate everything, I’m going to lose the house, I have no idea how I’m going to make it, OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD SEE THE DOGS THEY HAVE YOGURT ON THEIR NOSES!! THEY ARE SO CUTE!! And that, really, is about all I have to say anymore. I’m trying to keep my chin up about this whole economy thing, and lord only knows I’ve been through hard—nay, harder times in the past. But the difference this time is that back in those days, I always had a good feeling that sooner or later another paid writing gig would come along. That’s no longer the case. I posted a blog entry a week ago about how paid writing gigs are shriveling up quicker than a stud’s nuts upon a swift jump into Barton Springs. And boy did I hit a chord—it is not my imagination what’s happening to writers, not at all.

My son, Henry Mowgli Gillespie, graduates from McCallum High School on Friday evening. It will be his first time on stage at the Erwin Center but perhaps not his last, as he is a musician and you just never know. Choosing the life of an artist (or having the universe impose the life of an artist upon you—who the hell knows which it is) is something I know firsthand. Living the nightmare that the dream sometimes seems—when you’re faced with three cut-off notices from the phone/electric/gas company, the rent is late, and the cupboards are bare— is, I can say with authority, most definitely worth it. Some parents might be horrified at the prospect of a child with no plans beyond playing the guitar and keyboards. I say to my son—You go girl! I am thrilled for you. And proud. And I’m not just saying that in hopes that you’ll skip writing angry songs about your fucked up childhood.

Satch died in my arms yesterday. Today is the seventy-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth. And while I have already written beyond extensively about my father’s life—namely our horrible relationship—and my oldest dog’s life (and waiting for his death), I’m not quite finished with all that yet. Living with Satch was, at times, like living with my father. There were vast differences, of course—for one, Satch was slavishly dedicated to me, eager for my time and attention, at the ready with a wag far more often than not. And yet, like my father, Satch was difficult, randomly aggressive, tenacious to a fault, not interested in putting things down, and extremely bossy with the rest of the pack. He snapped unpredictably, and in the end that snapping extended to me—twice in the past few weeks he came close to biting me.

My friend Mike and I were recently reminiscing about the awesome way Cap’n Crunch shreds the roof of your mouth, leaving all those little strips of irresistible-to-your-tongue skin hanging down, like some beaded curtain in a 1950’s French bistro. Mike, not even knowing that I had recently discovered a knock-off “healthy” organic version of peanut butter Cap’n Cruch, was excitedly telling me that he had just discovered a “healthy” organic version of the regular stuff. This prompted an animated swapping of childhood cereal memories, not unlike the scar-sharing scene in Jaws. Stud that he is, Mike was proud to announce that, having been lactose intolerant as a child, he didn’t just slice up his roof mouth like the rest of us who at least soaked our C’nC in milk for a few seconds before scarfing it down. Oh no, for him the experience was like shaving without the benefit of shaving cream. And he was delighted to revisit the sensation now that Kashi makes Honey Sunshine, the cereal with the name of a stripper, so that he can do so and still claim to be nourishing his body.

A friend of mine sometimes has what she calls the temporary suicide fantasy. Along the lines of the Jesus/Easter thing, this fantasy involves offing yourself for a few days but then getting to come back, all refreshed, and start again. I like this notion—it ranks up there with the recurring escape fantasy I was mentioning last week, the one that most recently revisited me when my hard drive crashed. In essence: I ditch everything, head West with the dogs, and nobody ever hears from me again, at least not until I can quiet my mind and empty my calendar which is always so full that I actually think it’s heavier than when I bought it, courtesy of all those inked in appointments. Mercury is in Retrograde right now, which, if you’re superstitious like me, you buy into the notion that for three weeks your best bet is to just stop talking. To everyone. Because MR means, among other things, that communication goes haywire. In my own life, call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but of late I unintentionally (but nonetheless very seriously) upset a beloved friend, got into it big time with my kid (on Mother’s Day!), and almost got into a fistfight with one of my Dick Monologues’ cast mates.

In 1919, T.E. Lawrence, the dude who wrote the autobiography upon which the movie Lawrence of Arabia is based, was riding on a train in England. With him when he got on the train: his first manuscript for the tome— about 250,000 words worth of detailed recollections of his life as a British soldier working “with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.” Not with him when he switched trains: The same manuscript. He lost it, and it was never to be found again. Bigger bummer still? He’d burned all of his notes and had to start from scratch. Ninety years later—just last week in fact—Spike Gillespie got up one morning and, as she typically does seven days per week, set to work on her beloved MacBook. She was chugging along, taking one of her frequent research breaks to post something VERY IMPORTANT on Facebook, when her hard drive crashed. Gillespie, though she had backed up her computer a few months prior, had been woefully lacksidasical about archiving her novel-in-progress (47 pages at that point) and the notes for a history book she’s writing.

Just as I managed to avoid the whole Star Wars thing—well, okay, except that one time I stumbled into some “Top Secret” Mister Sinus screening and that happened to be the flick they were showing—I also neatly stepped around the Harry Potter Doorstop Extravaganza. Oh, people kept telling me how great the books were. But two things prompted me to not go there. One—call me the snotty English major I can sometimes be, but if it has Oprah Approved! or NYT Bestseller on the cover, unless it’s a David Sedaris book, I’m going to exhibit extreme caution around even thinking about reading it. Two—and this is related—I got burned with the whole Celestine Prophecy bullshit. I should’ve realized when two different people told me, “I never read books but I loved this one… you HAVE TO READ IT!!!,” that taking book buying advice from non-readers is akin to seeking marriage counseling from a priest.

The other night, I drove past a young woman walking in the dark up my street, a busy thoroughfare in the ‘hood. I sized her up—maybe seventeen, probably less than a hundred pounds. I didn’t get three blocks before I circled back around, pulled up near her, rolled down my window, and mustered what I hope would be a no-really-I-am-a-safe-person-to-talk-to tone. Are you going far? I asked. She told me her destination, a couple of miles away, which would involve her walking along Airport Boulevard. If you feel safe letting me give you a ride, I could do that, I said.

April might be the cruelest month in some circles, but not for fans of The Bard, whose 445th birth anniversary is this Thursday. To celebrate, Austin Shakespeare is offering up two different events and you should Romeo on over to at last one of them (seriously, don’t ju-liet yourself miss the festivities). No word on how things currently are in Denmark, but certainly, nothing is rotten at this event.

I’ve been a loudmouth for a very long time. As with other dominant traits, I trace this one straight back to my childhood where, having to compete with eight siblings for food, clothing, and parental attention, I instinctively knew I had to differentiate myself somehow. The quest for attention was, quite possibly, also fed by the fact that I was born at the tippy tail end of the Baby Boom. It is precisely my age group that seized upon Punk Rock, shaved our heads, and lashed out in our own fashion back in the late seventies and early eighties. By the time I made it to the University of South Florida in the early eighties, I was an expert at leading with my chin and, not long into my stint at that place, I was afforded a weekly opportunity to spout my thoughts via a column, dubbed Bloody Monday, that ran in the student daily, The Oracle. I wielded my pen mightily, taking on the frats, the Catholic Church, and any other organization that spurred my ire. Letters poured in in response—some supported me, many condemned me, and at least once someone said I was being prayed for. I left that beloved writing gig in a huff, after an editor refused to run a particular column he deemed inappropriate.