This weekend has been rather busy, so I’m a little behind in blogging.
Friday was the annual barbecue roadtrip, in which a group of us rent a nice car and drive out into the Hill Country in search of barbecue.
After the jump, photos and commentary from the roadtrip, as well as the Texas Linux Fest:
The NYT finally got around to publishing an obit for “Coots” Matthews.
Also among the dead: Morris Jeppson, one of the two men who armed the atomic bomb on board the Enola Gay.
By the way, “new” copies of The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back
Here’s the Statesman summary of the first day of the Billy Joe Shaver trial. It is hard to judge from just the prosecution’s side of the case, but I’m not thinking it looks good for Mr. Shaver; all the testimony so far is from people stating the shooting was unprovoked.
Edited to add: The LAT is reporting the death of Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols.
The aggravated assault trial of musician Billy Joe Shaver began today.
Shaver is accused of shooting a man outside a roadhouse in Lorena, near Waco.
“Until yesterday, I didn’t know who you are, and I couldn’t care less,” one female prospective juror told Shaver while being questioned by prosecutor Mark Parker.
“Ditto,” said Shaver, who has been called the poet laureate of Texas music and has penned tunes such as “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train” and “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal.”
It amuses me that Mr. Shaver and Willie Nelson are scheduled to play at my parent’s church on April 25th. (I’m not going. The cheapest ticket is $30.50 including service charges.)
The NYT “At War” blog gives a rundown of some reasons why the Taliban are poor rifle shots.
Short summary:
(Hattip: Say Uncle.)
There’s a interesting article in the LAT about why everyone hates Alice Waters. I exaggerate a bit, but there does seem to be substantial and increasing animosity to Ms. Waters.
The Caitlin Flanagan article in the Atlantic can be found here.
My own feelings about Ms. Waters and her movement are…complex, and I haven’t sorted all the way through them yet. But I do want to pull this quote for comment:
…she takes a dim view of In-N-Out, though it touts fresh ingredients and hand-cut French fries. “It’s probably better than any other chain,” she said, “but it’s not real or authentic. I’d rather eat from a street vendor in Sicily.”
:When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepares a true quiche Lorraine, I always want to interrupt. “But did you like it?” I want to shout. “Did it make you happy? Did you clean your plate?” Any chance that I might someday acquire a serious interest in how closely what I ate resembled the true article disappeared one day at a block party near our house while I was eating some homemade gazpacho and talking about how it differed from the authentic gazpacho one got in Seville. The more I talked about the difference, the faster I wolfed down the gazpacho—until I realized that one way what I was eating differed from authentic gazpacho was that it tasted better.
Lawrence suggested that I might want to link to this Reason piece on the cocktail crackdown.
The makers of Tito’s Handmade Vodka have taken a plea in their pollution case.
Matthews worked closely with the legendary Paul “Red” Adair and Asger “Boots” Hansen in the oil well firefighting industry. Matthews and Hansen later left Adair and founded the Boots and Coots well control firm.
…Adair, Matthews and Hansen worked some of the industry’s most notorious blowouts, including a fire in Algeria in 1961 known as the “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter.” Experts thought the fire, which billowed 450 feet in the air, would take years to extinguish. They did the job in just a few weeks.
Edited to add: John Forsythe. The LAT fails to mention his lead role in “Kitten With a Whip“, which Joe Bob Briggs argues is a vastly under-appreciated film. (If you haven’t read them yet, let me recommend Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History
Here’s an interesting list of the 100 top-grossing independent restaurants in the United States.
I’ve been to two of these: Top of the World, and Aureole. I’ve been past the Harley Davidson Cafe, repeatedly; it looks like an enormous tourist trap, and I have no desire ever to eat there.
Lawrence and I both wondered about some Austin area restaurants. It would seem that both the Oasis and the Salt Lick could make this list, but maybe they don’t cooperate with R&I, or maybe we have an exaggerated perception of the volume at both.
It is also somewhat interesting that there’s a controversy about the Republican Party holding fund raising events at Tao, the top-grossing independent in the U.S.
(By way of Althouse: the comments section on this post is worth reading.)
This is one of those “only in Austin” stories. The mayor is proposing an event to celebrate Austin’s bat population, even though we’ve had an event for the past five years. However, the existing event has shut down the Congress Avenue bridge, which is a major artery, for anywhere from a day to a weekend: the mayor’s proposal would only shut down the bridge for a couple of hours on Sunday night. Plus, the mayor’s plan doesn’t involve charging admission; the existing festival does charge, although the promoter has said he plans for it to be free this year.
As part of the “Night of the Bat” celebration, Adam West , star of the 1960s “Batman” TV series, will attend a June 6 Paramount Theatre screening of the 1966 film “Batman”; RunTex plans to hold a bat-themed run/walk June 6 ; and the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau will host a private “Batini” contest for local hotel bartenders.
Obit watch: Jaime Escalante.
I’ve been neglecting the Nets. Sadly, they’re now 10-64, and out of record contention.
The WP has an article about the new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, devoted to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1976 “Running Fence”.
I wanted to call out this James Rainey column in the LAT, about LA’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFK, and the infighting there.
There’s two money quotes in this piece, both of them talking about early evening host Ian Masters:
He also has been outspoken in rejecting KPFK programming, and especially fundraising, that he sees as increasingly taken over by fear-mongering and conspiracy theories, like the 9/11 “truther” movement. In a speech a few months ago at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Masters derided fund drives that he said recommend “communing with extraterrestrials and munching mung beans and colonic irrigation and drinking liquid silver and not immunizing your kids is the way to a more sustainable and spiritual Pacifica.”
The other quote:
“It seems to me,” one member of the vanguard wrote last year, “that Ian Masters does not believe the United States is really that bad.”
This one is for Andrew: northbound Highway 45 bridge in Milwaukee closed after highway department discovers the bridge is falling apart.
I haven’t found any good photos of the actual structural cracks yet, but I’ll update this post if I do.
Because I know Lawrence is endlessly fascinated by the work of Frank Gehry, here’s a link to the LAT and Gehry’s preliminary designs for the Eisenhower Memorial. (Also, I’ve added a new “Gehry” subcategory to the “Art” category.)
Meanwhile, the NYT has a nice article on the art and music scene in Burma Myanmar .
This doesn’t really fit into the “Art, damn it, art!” category, but I do want to throw in a link to the complete 6 part LAT series on Philip K. Dick in Orange County.
My checking of the NYT on weekends is somewhat iffy, so I missed this piece about the Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA until Lawrence mentioned it.
…a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.
More:
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them.
And:
Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)
Here’s a link to MoMA’s webpage about the exhibition. I find it interesting that the NYT refers to the artist as “Abramovic” and MoMA refers to her as “Abramović”.
“At the Movies“. I gave up on the show when Roper and his rotating cast of guest hosts left; there was no way I was going to watch the pulsating ball of suck that was The Bens. I’d heard that Phillips and Scott were a vast improvement, but I couldn’t bring myself to start watching it again. It didn’t help that the show was usually on in the early early morning here, and was frequently postponed due to sporting events.
I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but Ebert’s been hinting at a new television project: I do look forward to that.
Edited to add: Ebert’s latest blog post does more than hint.
Capital Metro rail service from Leander to downtown Austin started yesterday.
How’s the ridership?
Day 1:
Day 2:
Note that these are just the morning boardings; the Statesman writer comments that afternoon ridership “tripled” yesterday.
Wolfgang Wagner, former director of the Bayreuth Music Festival, and grandson of Richard Wagner. The NYT obit gives a good overview of the bizarre world of Bayreuth:
In 2008, Bayreuth announced the appointment of Eva and Katharina — half-sisters more than three decades apart in age — as the festival’s co-directors. In keeping with longstanding family tradition, they had not spoken to each other in many years.
Also among the dead: Robert M. White, former X-15 pilot:
On July 17, 1962, he flew the rocket-powered X-15 plane to an altitude of 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, almost 10 miles above Earth’s atmosphere.
(Edited to add 2: Better obit from the LAT.)
Edited to add: Sort of an obit, anyway: The Hump, aka “that place that served whale sushi“, closed on Saturday. Their website makes this sound like something they did voluntarily; I am not convinced of this. The Hump was a tenant at Santa Monica Airport, which is owned by the city. The city was apparently looking into pulling The Hump’s lease. Plus there’s the whole thing about the fine for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the possible prison time. Plus there’s the whole question of whether people want to eat at a place that buys meat from a Mercedes parked behind the restaurant, instead of a legitimate restaurant supply house. (Hattip: LA Observed.)