Monthly Archives: April 2008
Crescent, croissant
| April 1, 2008 | Filled under Shorts |
I forgot to tell you about the docent at the museum who insists on pronouncing her title as “doh-sahnt.”
Four bands, two shows, one night
| April 1, 2008 | Filled under Photo Album |
Not much to say about Saturday night except it was so awesome I didn’t go to sleep until 5 a.m.
I was miraculously able to be in two places at once. Not exactly all at once, though. And I wasn’t the only one. Long-haired dude standing next to me at The Orange Show assuaged my fears by telling me that although the show at Rudyards was supposed to start at 9 p.m., the sound guy doesn’t even get to work until 10 p.m. Thanks long-haired dude, you were right.
I’ve never been to The Orange Show before. It’s a pretty awesome place, a very intimate venue, but damn hard to find. Cool thing about the show: at least 25% of the crowd was Cambodian. After they played I chatted up two of the guys from Dengue Fever, inviting them to Rudyards (they couldn’t make it but I got a nice phone call the next day).
At Rudz, Houston band The Born Liars blew my mind by playing some awesome garage rock wholly inconsistent with their Average-Joe images.
Friends of Formika® The Ugly Beats played loud and hard and set the tone for what was to follow. Not only that but all five of them were super nice and fun to dance with when The Fleshtones (also Friends of Formika®) finally hit the stage. EXCELLENT TRANSACTION WOULD DO BUSINESS WITH AGAIN11!!! Please come back to Houston soon, guys (and girl).
Everything you need to know about The Fleshtones you can learn here. Not content to play on Rudyard’s tiny stage, the guys took the show into the crowd for almost every song, creating more much energy in that club than I’ve felt since I was 16 years old and going to shows at Music D’s. The show was so loud my ears were ringing into Sunday night (I forgot my earplugs). Afterwards we all (Ugly Beats and Fleshtones included) went back to Formika’s house for cocktails and comraderie, which explains my extra-late bedtime.
Oh look, here are pictures of Formika (on the bass drum) and one of the back of my head dancing on stage with Peter.
Skull and bones
| April 6, 2008 | Filled under Photo Album |
Photo by Grind Slut
The Rule household has been hashing and camping with friends in the woods of Southeast Texas all weekend. We are currently recovering from fresh thorny-vine lacerations, sunburns and a two-week-old case of poison ivy.
What have you been up to?
Gilda and Me
| April 14, 2008 | Filled under Photo Album |
Photo by Robert Fox, thanks for such a great shot!
This pic was taken right before I lost in the slow races. More to come soon. Sandblast is over. Sandblast forever!
Two-lane blacktop
| April 24, 2008 | Filled under Blog, Photo Album |
Things look different on two wheels then they do from inside a car.
In Galveston, I could smell the jasmine blooming every time I drove past the state campground, and could feel the sea spray on my face as we cruised along the beach. I have been to Galveston dozens of times but rest assured I have never, ever driven my car on the seawall. Not the street named Seawall. The actual wall.
Sandblast was great fun. The weather was nice (though a little cloudy) and the rally games were some of the funniest and most entertainingly suicidal I have ever seen. The only bummer was Friday night, when my moto jacket was stolen off the front rack of my bike while it was parked with 20 other scooters in front of the fittingly-named Poop Deck. My scooter keys were in the pocket. Nothing else was stolen, but it wouldn’t be a scooter rally without something going wrong for Brittanie.
The newly revived Texas United River Rally is the weekend of my birthday. Be there or be square.
CLH and I have been on an extended vacation this month home. Camping, scooting every day, epic purchases and even more epic schemes. I might have to quit my job in order to accomplish all the living we have planned this summer. He’s leaving again Sunday, and knowing we’ll have to spend the next month apart makes the adventures of tomorrow, today, right now, feel extra-super urgent. You want proof? Us deciding at the spur of the moment this past weekend to drive the BMW to Dallas and back in a 24-hour period. Five hundred miles, round trip.
I have gone the distance between Dallas and Houston many times on my drives to and from Oklahoma, but I have never seen dogs fighting on the highway service road, or a raptor actually catching it’s prey, and while I usually just whiz by the forest this time I was able to look around, look closely, without a layer of glass between me and the world, without a radio humming in my ears and a windshield blocking the slight dip in the air temperature as one drives through the natural shade.
It’s kind of silly the fraternity you are automatically inducted into when you buy a motorcycle and take it on the highway. Every passing cyclist gives you a nod or a wave. You are a rebel, a shunner of comfort, a vagabond. It’s absurd but I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick out of it.
On the way home, at a tree-covered rest stop just north of Huntsville, we met another cyclist named James, a Brit who is riding the perimeter states of the USA for charity. He is keeping a blog, which you should read.
We were only in Dallas long enough to have dinner and drinks at the recently unsealed tomb of Trader Vics. I didn’t take many pictures of the drive, because with the wind whipping you at 80+ MPH it’s not very easy to hold a camera steadily. I did take pictures of the restaurant though.
Towards the end of our ride Sunday, 30 minutes outside Dallas, the sun was setting on us. C looked down at the pavement to his right, and then patted me on the thigh so he could point to our shadow, two bodies on a motorcycle, my arms wrapped around him.
The devil’s darning needles
| April 30, 2008 | Filled under Blog |
The worst thing about working in the museum is that, when I’m not at work, the last place I want to hang out is the museum. As a result, I have not yet seen the two biggest exhibits.
When Nan Goldin was there I did manage to eat lightening-fast lunches nearly every day so that I could spend my remaining 45 minutes sitting in the velvet-dark, cold gallery, watching her disturbing slide-shows. I first heard of Goldin when she was referenced in a passing comment on MetaFilter, and since then I’ve been borderline obsessed with her work. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it, and that might be the draw. Each photo alone is a glimpse into her strange and sad life, but look at them as a whole and you get a very vivid and complete picture of who the woman is, who her friends are and what her life has been like. After sitting through one of her slide-shows I leave convinced that I know this person, that we are friends. I get this feeling from other creators too, people who seem to have selflessly invited us into their lives, no matter how superficially, and who address us with the kind of familiarity with which one would address a sibling.
It might not surprise you to learn that two of these people are bloggers. It’s the nature of the medium.
Art and music and movies seem to have synchronistically melded into my life lately. There is a scene in CQ (which we just watched again) where Paul is talking with his French girlfriend about the film he’s trying to make. Frustrated with his own pretenses, he tells her he just wants to make something that is real and honest. Marlene turns right around and says to him, “But what if it’s boring?” Could there be a greater comment on our self-obsessed narcissistic blog-addicted generation?
Later in the movie Paul meets his father at the airport. Dad tells Paul that his grandmother used to believe dragonflies would come in the night and stitch up one’s mouth if one told lies. Dad finishes by saying “Maybe you can use it somehow. You never know when some little overheard story or image can find a place in your work.”
When my Inprint instructor Randi found out that CLH and I met through some scootering buddies she was fascinated by the story. She said to me, you don’t think there’s anything special about that because it’s your everyday normal life, but to me that sounds like a great beginning for a story.
Which leads me to Barton Fink, another movie we just re-watched. Throughout the movie Barton is surrounded by inspiration and muses and he remains willfully ignorant of them. Thus the beginning of his self-imposed writer’s block.
Not sure where I’m going here, just a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.
