I was just reading an article on washingtonpost.com, and as the page was loading I got first “false” in an alert. Then “true”. Then “true”. I do that sort of thing all the time with Loaded Gun Theory, but live production debugging? On a national newspaper site? Just sad.
I really don’t have much to say today. I’m sad right now, because my jogging stroller has a really flat tire. I tried to put in some fix a flat type crap. That involved removing the valve core. This apparently is something that you just happen to know how to do. In much the same way that you know what a valve core is. I personally didn’t. The tool they gave me for removing it mysteriously had threading on the opposite end of the tool. I figured this meant I should screw it onto the stem. And it fit. But nothing budged. I finally found out online that I was supposed to use the other end of the tool to remove that little sticky outie (yes that’s the technical term) part of the valve. It just screws out. Fascinating stuff. The goo didn’t really want to go into the tire though, and after jogging for a mile, stopping to fill up the tire every 200 meters or so, I gave up.
So tonight I’m going to pretend I know something about bicycle repair. Take off the tire. Pull out the tube. Put it in water to see the little bubbles. Patch it. The whole nine yards. I’m hoping I can do it quickly so I can still run. I haven’t run since Friday because of this flat. And I REALLY want to go out running in this beautiful weather. I have so much fear that I’m never going to get the tire fixed that I’m tempted to try to get some sort of frame to put Stella in and start a Degobah training regiment. I know that’s ridiculous though.
In other news, as part of our savings plan I’ve been knocking out 6 -7 meals a week for approx $130 a week. I’m pretty excited by that. It’s amazing to me that I really can cook that many nights in a row. Who knew I had that kind of self-control.
Oh, what else. They’re blowing stuff up in Algeria. That’s where Julie’s Dad works. That’s not making anyone around the house happy.
Oh, and so Julie was talking about attachment parenting and how we both kind of try to find things to keep Stella occupied, and we’re really practicing a detachment parenting style. This makes me wonder if perhaps kids have so many behavioral problems because we pay too much attention to them. I mean even the whole carrying your kid around thing is only attachment parenting until they start wanting to get out and do things.
I’d like to paint a different picture. In the beginning we had hunter/gatherers in the African plains carrying around their children as they foraged for tubers and roots. Tubers are roots, but we’ll ignore that for now. As civilization grew women had a lot of work to do. Washing clothes . Cooking food. Often working themselves should they happen to be born as slaves. So obviously they carried their children around until they were old enough to move on their own and then my guess is that they left them to their own devices out of necessity. At that point the kids ran off and dug holes and threw rocks at each other, like they’re supposed to developmentally.
And in the industrial revolution, the parent’s didn’t do any parenting. If you were rich you gave them to a nanny to ignore. If you weren’t they went to a sweatshop where a kindly singing manager would keep them in line by withholding soup. At least until you all got sent to the poor house. Then those chains and fellow prisoners stacked like cordwood were helpful for keeping the kid in line. Those who were pioneers didn’t have it any better. They would give the youngest children jobs sewing those quaint bonnets and splitting wood as soon as they could hold a needle or an ax. The closest thing they had to a structured game was cow milking. In the fifties women were still presented with many of the same tasks they had during the industrial revolution just with better drugs. And playpens. Playpens and earplugs allowed them to bake a cake every single day, and concoct elaborate ways of suspending all manner of foodstuffs in animal protein. In the seventies, women went to work outside the home and left their kids with the keys. Yet in the nineties it was decided that we should start paying attention to our children. That we should do things with them constantly and provide structured play. Bunk I say! Just give them some rocks and a gully! They’ll sort things out.
2007-04-11T19:31:23.000Z
I’ve been meaning to take my bike to the Yellow Bike Project for weeks now so they can show me how to do it myself. I wonder if they could help out with strollers too. Can’t be that different. There was an interesting article about kid’s childhoods being stolen by having too many activities and such planned for them by well-meaning parents that now I can’t seem to find to leave a link to. Kind of the same-old same-old about kids having too many activities with no time for play, except now I read it differently since I, you know, am a parent. Also, I wouldn’t say that overplanning your kid’s life and being all up in their business (“do things with them constantly and provide structured play”) is quite attachment parenting. Not sure if that’s what you meant, but thought I’d toss it out there.
2007-04-11T19:50:22.000Z
I was defining detachment parenting, by negating one of the tenents of attachment parenting, which is “Avoiding frequent and prolonged separations between parents and a baby.” So obviously the idea of throwing the kid in a play pen in the living room while you cook dinner in the kitchen is not ideal attachment parenting. But it is ideal detachment parenting! I think both attachment and detachment parenting are ideally suited for people to abuse and sign up their kids for too much structured play. For one it’s a way to help their kids develop, for the other a way to get the kid out of their hair. Ideally with attachment parenting you find balance. And with detachment parenting you let the kid run wild until they get brought home by the police.
2007-04-11T21:54:39.000Z
Bicycle Sports shop (both the N and S locations) do free bicycle maintenance clinics like once a week. They’re only like an hour, and they show you how to change mountain bike tires. I’d recommend it, but it may be overkill for what you’re doing :) Oh and if you have a favorite picture of lil’ Stella, Julie or something you want at the top of your blog, send it over and I’ll gladly spruce it up for ya in the same manner you have Stella’s pic up now… at worst, I can use the same thing you have now, but anti-alias the jagged edges.
2007-04-12T04:16:46.000Z
So this is the actual IM conversation that Tim is referring to: (12:27:53) Julie: i’m awful. i gave stella a teething biscuit as her pre-lunch snack just because it would occupy her for longer. she’s really clingy and needy these days (12:28:07) loadedguntheory: I’m sorry. (12:28:07) Julie: i would be a horrible attachment parent. i’m more like a detachment parent (12:28:23) loadedguntheory: I’m the same way. Basically I’ve gotten used to Stella being pretty darn independent since she learned to crawl at about 10 months and now she is clingy and wants to be held or coddled like all the time and it’s driving me crazy! I love to cuddle with her, but cuddling has a time and a place. Basically I signed on for needy baby for like x amount of time and now I thought we were over that hurdle and I’m having a difficult time that we’re not. Tonight and last night when I went to rehearsal she wailed as I left. Ooh, boy, this whole “separation anxiety” thing is fun!
UPDATE: I couldn’t get any of the image links to work… :(. Go here to look at all the cool lego sets. http://www.lugnet.com/pause/
So Julie found met his fantastic article on Salon. Go read it. It’s fascinating. I’ll wait.
Ok, so wasn’t that good? I think both the teachers and the conservative columnist make very good points. The conservative columnist doesn’t delve quite as much as he should, but I’ll let that slide because his last sentence is such a doozy…
All structures will be standard sizes. At Hilltop Children’s Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.
Ouch! And yet very true. I lived the Lego Town experience growing up. In New Jersey we had a separate room in the basement that was dedicated to Lego. It was probably a 20’x10’ room with a nice hard rug that kept the Lego off the damp concrete, but didn’t cause it to fall over. We were allowed to build whatever we wanted as long as we didn’t “block the traffic pattern” as my Dad used to say. That meant we had to keep a 3 foot runner from door to door free of stray pieces. I have 2 older sisters and a younger sister. When my older sisters started collecting there was nothing but Lego town sets. Eventually a lego castle was added. Christine got this for Christmas one year. It was amazing. It had several knights. It had six baseplates that were hinged to open up the castle walls for play inside. It was quickly broken down for pieces. It is still a significant source of pieces in our lego collection. A collection that now spans over 3 full xerox paper boxes. The 6 green baseplates, and countless 1 and 2 stud lego pieces were quickly repurposed into the town. The entire town that had formerly had a red tinge (don’t know why. Lego just liked that color in sets up into that point), now took on a yellow tinge. The town grew with town homes, chalets, villas with outdoor fireplaces, a riding stable, hospital, fire station, airport, police stations, cargo ships, and trains . Man, looking back I’m realizing that we probably got 75% of the lego sets released in a given year.
I got my first lego space sets in 1984. They were 3 small sets. With sensors and probes that looked far too much like guns, they were immediately arrested by the town police if they ventured into town. They were relegated to exploring space. And by space we mean “the area outside of town”. Many fights broke out, and eventually order was restored, and the space “guns” were converted into telescopes on second floor balconies of palatial mansions.
My oldest sister stopped being as heavily invested in the lego town after we moved to Texas (probably a result of being in High School), my second oldest sister was not far behind. Around that time Lego introduced a second round of castle sets. I immediately moved to transform lego town into a medieval fiefdom. Weapons were clearly in play at this point, and the already strained relationship between my little sister and me reached the breaking point trying to decide who would get to play the infinitely cooler “Robin Hood” type characters, and who would be playing the King and his Knights. As my little sister lost interest the town became infested with pirates and their colonial overlords. What was interesting here, was that even as the play space became dominated by me, there was still ostracism. The learned behavior was still there, and the knights and thieves were banished from the pirate towns.
Growing up we always had a snobbery against people who mixed lego towns with their other toys. There were rules to be followed. And other kids were rarely invited to play in our lego town since it would have taken to long to get them up to speed on the laws of the land.
I completely agree with Drew in the article:
“Sometimes I like power and sometimes I don’t. I like to be in power because I feel free. Most people like to do it, you can tell people what to do and it feels good.”
I’ll be honest. I like power. For me sharing became a power situation. Sharing is essentially being the one in power and being “nice” enough to give your friends a turn playing with the toy. By sharing, your generosity inflates your feelings of self-worth. So I definitely learned the rules and structure of our capitalist society through Lego. And I find I still am that way. I’ve ascended quickly in the business world by “helping” people in my workplace. But the constant helper is motivated by the same things as the political cutthroat (money, power, less crap work). The methods are just different.
I didn’t give up on the system, I played within their rules. Kept the spaceships and castles outside of town, and eventually came to own the system. But my little sister gave up. And the same thing happened with our computer. I was often blamed for monopolizing the computer growing up. I’m almost certainly guilty of that. But even more of a problem was the fact that my sisters gave up. They found the process of asking me to get off the computer so they could use it, and then asking me for help on how things worked, to be too much. So they opted out of the system. I controlled that system, and it wasn’t worth it for them to try to find a place within it. The barrier was too high, and the pay out too low. They were used to being in control, and when confronted with a lack of control they just gave up.
But back to Arists being inherently capitalists. It was only after I had driven my sisters away from playing lego, that I began truly experimenting. At one point I built a 1/3 height self-portrait of myself. That was only possible because I was able to use all the pieces without negotiation. It would never have been feasible under the old systems (and who knows where it would have fit in the town). So I was able to create art because I was “rich”. It’s possible I would have been able to create art under the old town system, but that would have involved negotiation the patronage of one of my powerful older sisters. They probably would have asked me to tone it down to fit into the scale of the town. And they probably would have had ideas on color and placement as well.
We take a lot of pride in the fact that Loaded Gun Theory is self-sustaining. But it’s only self-sustaining because of large (relatively. at the time we were poor and just out of college) sums of cash the founding members put into the pot. So our art is a byproduct of the fruits of capitalism, and good accounting practices. Hardly a socialist utopia. And we still can’t get motivated to go look for patrons. Because it’s too hard. If you take city money you have to prove you’re providing benefit for the community. So you have to give classes, and get kids involved, and do plays with redeeming social messages. And who has time for that. We’re artists. Pursuing our own goals…
Yeah, I guess I’m pretty selfish. I find my actions are definitely those of a capitalist, and I’m not sure how my motivations could be otherwise. I think unfortunately, there are always people who are going to pursue power from those in power. Whether it be a socialist or capitalist system. In the case of the article, they’re painting it as a Utopia at the end, but I’m wondering if the new rules just caused different sections of the population to give up on the system. It seems as though in any system there are those in power, those who are trying to challenge those in power, and those who have just given up on the whole thing. Obviously we can give the disenfranchised the power, but then we’ll have another whole subset of the populating giving up. It’s harding building a Lego utopia.
2007-04-04T21:24:21.000Z
That was quite a post. You can’t remember to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer, but you remember all the rules and inhabitants of your childhood lego town? Wow.
2007-04-04T21:29:50.000Z
You don’t want to get me started. I was looking for pictures for this, and I realized I could remember almost every single one of the sets we owned. Plus I could remember individual houses and vehicles. Features of them, etc. We had a fascination with trapdoors and revolving walls for a while. I could even identify whether I had some of the sets based purely on remembering unique pieces that were in the sets and whether we owned them. So yes. I have far too much brain space caught up in this.
2007-04-05T03:24:00.000Z
I think Williams’s comment misses a major point. The exercises that these children went through between the time of Legotown’s destruction and the return of the Legos undoubtedly did more for their young imaginations than any amount of Legos could have done, not to mention their critical thinking skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence. I might have agreed with him if the teachers had simply yanked the Legos, redistributed them equally, and screeched “you kids play nice or no snack!” But that’s clearly not what happened. They engaged these kids in a pretty serious discussion that gives them a lot more credit as thinking learning individuals than somebody crying foul on liberal elitism and claiming it’s all just kids being kids. It’s interesting that they spent so much time discussing the nature of power. For myself, I don’t believe that power is strictly about control. True, that’s what we often think of when the word “power” is used, the ability to make others bend to our will. If we’re in control, then somebody else who’s not in control only gets something when we say so. In certain situations and in the hands of a wise person, this can be a good thing, but in many other cases, it obviously leads to exploitation and marginalization, and creates a paternalistic system that only further entrenches “the way things are.” Hence its often negative connotations. But there’s another more positive side to power as well, which I think this story illustrates quite nicely, that of being able to influence others in an empowering way. Teachers obviously have a measure of power in their classrooms, not as brutal overlords or anything, but simply as the ones whose role puts them in charge. The teachers in this case could have exercised their power by just shutting down Legoland once and for all, or by forcing the kids to share. But they didn’t. They took it a step further and used their influence to draw the kids into a critical examination of the system that had cropped up. They empowered the whole class to be a part of it, including those who had previously been marginalized. They empowered those who had been in charge of Legoland to examine their behavior, and those who had been left out to join back in. You’re almost certainly right about the fact that there will always be those in power and those under power. But let’s not forget that it’s always the second group who forces society to evolve and move forward and question the way things are. And I think there’s another group as well, which are those who are not interested in having any more power than is required to maintain their own autonomy. I’m guessing this is the group where most artists fall, that is, until the first group encroaches upon them.
Stella and I ran to Garrison Park last night. And it was just one of the best nights ever. I put her in the swing and she laughed and laughed. She figured out a couple of times that if she shifts her weight she can make the swing go faster. She tried to watch the ground go by. She does this by leaning completely forward in the chair so her head is completely upside down. This freaks me out. As anyone who’s seen me with Stella, not a lot freaks me out. So that probably means this is ridiculously dangerous. I took the time out to stop her, lean her back in her chair and put her hands on the chains. She immediately took them off and threw her hands in the air, doing her best imitation of a teenage roller-coaster rider. I have created a daredevil.
Stella spent a lot of time watching a little girl who was being chased by her parents. They were playing tag I think, but in the way that very small children and dogs do. It’s all about the chase, not so much about the tag. I notified her that we would chase her like that the moment she is able to walk. Then she started holding up her hands. So I started slapping them as she came close to me. And I clapped as she went away. It was a rudimentary form of patty-cake. Ah, soon I will be teaching her how to swear without getting into trouble (…Miss Lucy went to heaven and the steamboat went to hell-o operator…) On the way home Do You Realize by the Flaming Lips came on my iPod. And I had to say that, yeah, that was pretty much a perfect memory. And as we floated through space on our side of the earth that was slowly rotating away from the sun, I pointed out that the streetlights were coming on.
2007-03-30T04:30:18.000Z
I love that song.
I saw the quintessential Austin scene from the bus today. I get to dub things that I see through the windows, so they’re always highly entertaining. There was a guy getting his bass out of the car to take it into Cash America Pawn. He was looking very sad. His girlfriend/roomate was yelling at him. As though perhaps he was having second thoughts, and he needed encouragement to be reminded that they had to pay the rent and his “hobby” was not as important as the roof over their heads. At least that was the plot of my movie.
So I went running last night and took Stella to Garrison park. This was really just a ruse to go scope out the bus stops around our new house. I then decided to see how Stella would walk to school. There’s a path two houses down from us that connects to Buffalo Pass which goes right to the Elementary School. This will be great for Stella as she can walk to school without getting anywhere near a busy road. Anyway backing up to our house there are a bunch of one story “apartment houses” that look like military barracks. The first thing I noticed was that they had a really nice sign with the name of the neighborhood. Then I noticed a sign on one of the buildings. “Curfew 10:00pm. No alcohol allowed.” Which struck me as odd. What is this, temperance housing? so I did some googling and it is public housing. But that’s not the shocking part. The average income of a public housing resident in Austin is $6,558. The average rent is $137. That means that if I do my math properly, the majority of the people in my brand new neighborhood will be making in a month or two, around what my neighbors in public housing to the South are making in a year. There’s a 56 month average waiting period to get into this housing. I have no clue what you do until then. It’s not like there’s anywhere else to live in town for people with that little money.
So the buildings are in bad shape, but the neighborhood is a quiet tree lined no-outlet culdisac that borders a farm and some other neighborhoods. There were a lot of kids playing outside on their playground equipment. In fact that’s what struck me most. The whole existing neighborhood around there is full of kids. There were two baseball practices going on at the elementary school when I went by. Lots of kids playing basketball. It really looked like a fun place to grow up. Our neighborhood currently always seems to have a lone kid on a bicycle. Circling. Hoping that someone will come out and play with him.
But it’s odd because you have prejudices against public housing. And it’s hard to shake those sort of prejudices. But there seems to be some human tendency to not want to be reminded of being poor. Of the possibility that the poor exist. That we somehow equate being poor with crime. And that while we want to advocate for the poor, we certainly don’t want them living near us.
I remember in high school when a band member who was giving me a ride home wanted to drop me off at the corner of my neighborhood because she didn’t feel safe driving into it at night. And I thought she was insane. I mean, my neighborhood wasn’t that bad.And I’m saying “that bad”. Why am I saying “that bad”. There was nothing bad about it. The occasional run down house does not a bad neighborhood make.
But it brings back the year in elementary school when I had two pairs of sweat pants that I wore a lot. But they weren’t eightees sweat pants. The kind with the elastic at the bottom and that ballooned out a little between the waist and ankle. They were seventies track pants. With a white stripe down the side. One pair was maroon (maroon! this was the time of jams. dayglo only!) and one black. They looked exactly like the kind that european hipsters wear now. Except there were no european hipsters in the eightees. This was one of many pieces of clothing that I got from “The Boutique”. Let it never be said that missonaries have no sense of humor. That was the name of the place we could go at the Wycliff Center and get donated clothing for free. A lot of my clothing came from there on and off over the years. Now I don’t think it would be quite as big of a deal. But in the eightees you needed brand names, and things that looked new. And you forget how some days you just wanted to be normal and fit in.
Then there was the year we were going to move to Papua New Guinea for missionary work. My mom bought all t-shirts and shorts for my school clothes. I couldn’t wear shorts to school, so I ended up with one purple and black striped shirt and one pair of acid washed black jeans as my sole new school clothes. That was the year I started junior high. But that was pretty much it for me. That and the occasional envelopes of grocery money slipped anonymously under the front door, were the only things that made me realize that perhaps my family was not seen as being well off.
After all there were kids who had it worse. There was my friend in elementary school who had the free breakfast. All the kids with the free breakfasts got made fun of. I mean, we may not have had a lot of money, but dadgummit we didn’t get free breakfasts. His dad committed suicide. I went to his house shortly after that and it was really odd because his mother wouldn’t come out of the house, but he and his brother seemed almost happy. I guess losing their father hadn’t sunk in and they were just relieved to have a little less depression hovering about. A week or two later they didn’t come to school anymore.
So you know, you always make excuses about how someone has it worse. We always build an idol in our minds of that which is poorer and worse off than us. “Why I live like sultans compared to them.” I just wonder what it’s like for the free breakfast kids. The kids living in the projects. Do they have someone they use as their model of being poor?
In any case, I think it’s going to be very interesting watching how Stella deals with this disparity in her friends as she grows up.
2007-03-22T18:08:41.000Z
Your recounting of your childhood made me cry. I want to say “I’m sorry”, but at the same time, is that the right response? Would you be who you were without those hardships? Of course, this is from the girl who never wanted for a thing. The only time I ever felt a pinch was when my father lost his job briefly while I was in high school. We had to buy off-brand lunch meat from Sam’s. We bought the store brands and didn’t eat out. Oh, the horror! But I was old enough to understand and it didn’t last long enough that we had to make serious changes in our lifestyle. In fact, it was kind of fun in a way because my Dad was around a lot and he drove me to and from school and took me to get my license and stuff. I went to an elementary school from 1st through 4th grade that was all upper middle class kids with lots of money. I hated it and switched to a much more middle class school in 5th grade, one that actually had POOR KIDS, OMG, some didn’t even have running water or electricity. It was much better, but I was often embarassed when my friends came over to my big house. Luckily, my parents didn’t spoil me. I drove a POS which I was eternally grateful for when I turned 16, not some fancy new car, and my parents let me know the value of a dollar. In fact, I got a job at 15 just because I wanted my own money that I could spend how I wanted without a lecture:) But I never wanted for anything.
2007-03-22T19:20:23.000Z
Man, I grew up sooo poor. The first 10 or so years of my life, I grew up in various trailer parks, mom had another baby and we graduated to a house that barely cost more than the down payment on my current house. I was that kid who had free breakfast cards (and lunch, too!), and I was totally hip to food stamps, welfare, WIC, etc. The only cereals I ate came in 5lb bags and visions of big ol’ blocks of cheese danced in my dreams. That said, there’s an RV/trailer park down the road from my house, that I wish would hook itself to the back of a truck and be gone :) Brings down my property value and the appeal of my house, purely from an investment standpoint. And I do care about my house as an investment, as I don’t plan on living there forever. Fucking poor people!! Go be poor somewhere else!
2007-03-22T20:24:02.000Z
I got the same crappy kind of treatment in high school. There were some people who wouldn’t give me a ride home becuase I lived in “the ghetto.” Translation: you might have to see some minorities as you drive through, and the houses don’t cost as much as yours.
2007-03-22T20:36:56.000Z
I still have insanely horrible image issues with my own living quarters from growing up in that environment. Thus, hardly anyone I know has been to my house :(
2007-03-23T06:40:22.000Z
It’s odd how perspective changes things. I remember being in elementary school where over half the school got free lunch (they didn’t do breakfast at first… no budget for it) and it seemed like the rest of us were close to it. Basically, everyone was pretty much equally poor. There was no ghetto to be in. I don’t remember even being aware until basically being in high school, that there were class distinctions like that. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing. Just is, I guess. Anyway, so I think I missed something along the way… you guys bought a new house? You’re moving? Since when? What brought this about? Sounds like it’s still close by, but when are you all going to be there?
2007-03-23T16:09:53.000Z
My dad has always made a pretty good living. We have always had everything we needed, and a lot of want we wanted. I think he did a good job of not spoiling us too badly. I knew kids that weren’t as well off as we were, but not really poor by any stretch. Most of the families that weren’t in the same tax bracket as us were much wealthier. There were two high schools in Carrollton, I went to the “other” high school when I was taking summer courses one year. I was struck immediately by how the school was in worse repair, with older fixtures, and that some of the students seemed actually poor. It was an odd to me, and I felt out of place. I didn’t feel like I was better than them, but more like I was intruding in their space. I didn’t have to be there, I was only taking classes so that I could graduate early. I was treated like the outsider that I was, and although I did make some friends, I was more than ready to leave when the summer school was over. Ian, if you want more info on the house situation your should check out Julie’s blog. http://juliesdramas.blogspot.com/
2007-03-23T16:12:08.000Z
I should probably point out at some point that my point with writing this wasn’t “poor me”, but to question why we are so averse to being around the poor. It’s really fascinating. I think I took some sort of test at that high school in Carrolton. The second story floors freaked me out because they felt like they were going to fall through.
2007-03-23T17:00:32.000Z
Personally, the sight of poverty, of people begging or living in a box next to a ditch, or hearing about a single mom who’s going hungry so her kids can eat, anything like that always throws me for a loop because it never fails to knock my own problems back into perspective. I might whine and complain because I don’t have this or that, but right around the corner somebody’s struggling to stay fed. It’s one of those “I’m a whiny white guy who needs to hush and count his blessings” moments. It knocks me out of my comfort zone, which is not a bad thing. As for outright aversion, well, it’s hard to theorize about that without coming across like a judgemental asshole, but I presume it’s a mixture of ignorance about the root causes of poverty (the “why can’t they just get a job” complex), lack of compassion, a violent reaction to being reminded of the reality of human suffering, and/or just plain old xenophobia. Of course, there’s also fear about the mental instability of many of the homeless, like the guy who accosted Ashley and I. That was scary. And since I’ve already made this a long-ass comment, I’d just like to add this: Tim, it is weird trying to write with your Viking-helmeted sneer staring at me. It’s just an odd feeling. Maybe I should just move that part of the browser off-screen.
2007-03-25T03:25:00.000Z
For those south austinites familiar with the crockett high school area you will know that it doesn’t pull in any even remotely “well-off” kids. That is for sure. I didnt pay much attention at the time but we had the best house and nicest neighborhood of all the kids that I knew. It just never caught my attention till much later. Especially since my dad got laid off when I was in high school and we almost lost everything, inclduing the house. I remember having 1 pair of white Keds to last the whole year when I was a sophomore. Why did I get white?! My dad was out of work for something close to two years. When I was a wee lass they bused us to east austin for elementary school. That was before the hipsters and yippies “found” east austin. WAY before. That is when I saw my first crack head, homeless, etc…You dont realize how sheltered you are until you aren’t. Until I was almost 7 we lived in Richardson and there were no “poor” people with a very small exception: there were some vietnamese immigrants in a house near the school. I was friends with their daughter. Long story short; when we moved to Austin I started school at Sunset Valley elementary and I asked a hispanic girl if she was French because I had never seen darker skin than mine. yikes!
2007-03-27T02:18:23.000Z
Mostly for the bit about the suicide house - I had some exposure to the rest.
I missed about 4 posts there. I’d recommend reading Julie’s post on the topic. It pretty much sums it up. We did some amazing deck work this weekend. We used a fairly open wire fencing on our railings which looks really nice. Especially with the Lavender which has decided to bloom this year. I saw four butterflies this weekend on it, and they were two different species.
Roxie still can’t handle the fact we’ve moved the stairs. She can generally get off the deck, but has no clue how to get back up. Especially now that we’ve closed off 95% of the outside of the decking with railing. Apparently the lack of choice has left her stymied. We’ve still got to put caps on the railings and build out the stairs. I’m not looking forward to building the stairs. I have to build a concrete anchor in the ground and then get everything level… it’s so tedious.
Yesterday after church I did a lot of lawn work. I’m not going to miss lawn work at the new house. I mowed, edged, weeded. Then I cleaned up the “place where I throw stuff”. Apparently this is the sort of the thing you have to do to sell a house. I pulled out all of the old branches I had been “storing” there and moved them to the curb for large brush pickup. Then I raked down the 5 foot pile of dirt that had built up from me just throwing dirt and weeds and stuff over the fence. It’s beautiful dirt. Lots of earth worms. Just a little freighting as a 5 foot tall hill. I threw away some old pots and things, moved out some rotten wood I had been “storing” there. It looks great.
We’re trying to save like mad for our down payment, so I really worked on the menu last night. We got 6 meals for $130. And we had to buy tons of staples like toilet paper and paper towels. Should make a massive difference if I can keep coming up with the menus…
So not really a SXSW wrapup. I think next year we might just pay cover. We end up staying at a given bar for more than one band a lot anyway. Finally here’s a link to Space Mission by Brute Force & Daughter of Force. That song rocks. I’m so glad we got to see them.
So we didn’t have much planned for Wednesday. The two big shows were Lily Allen at Stubbs and Beirut, The Mountain Goats, and Blonde Redhead at Emos. Both had fantastic lines so we didn’t even attempt them. We started at Elysium seeing “The Hourly Radio” who were really good. Somewhere in between Placebo and The Secret Machines in sound. After them were Blacklist. They sounded really good recorded, but I think the singer couldn’t play guitar quickly and sing so all the songs were really slow. And the singer sounded like Peter Murphy, who neither Julie and I are that into. We ended up ditching that show and looking for something else. We ended up at Spiro’s seeing Electrico. They are apparently the hot band in Singapore right now. And they were pretty amazing to watch. They quality of the singing and playing was definitely head and shoulders over pretty much anything you see at SXSW. It wasn’t completely my style, but it was done really well. Julie didn’t enjoy it as much as I did since she got slapped by some old lady who was trying to get her to dance, or something…
We ended up going to see The Unbearables at their free showcase at Trophies after that. We’d pretty much exhausted all of our SXSW options and we really had missed seeing the Unbearables. They rocked and were done too soon. They should have had a showcase…
2007-03-15T18:26:02.000Z
So did you get time off of work to do the SXSW thing? Or were the shows you mentioned later in the day? I wish that I was dedicated enough to fight my way through the south by experience. I’ve never done it, but it doesn’t seem like my speed. The whole being out in public in a crowd thing and all. Ick. Sounds like you guys are having fun so far! Keep updating on the shows so that I can live vicariously. :)
2007-03-16T06:05:24.000Z
Damn right we should have! Thanks again for coming. Hope you guys have a great weekend.
So Jonathon of Yellow Tape sent me this video which is a promo for their next play “I Am Not Tartuffe” (get your tickets now, especially since they’re going up against SXSW. Copyright Denied went up against ACL fest. It wasn’t pretty. Show them some love):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM_1mtFiS5c
So it’s very well done. Looks great. Nicely edited. But I’m watching this and I’m not laughing. The subject matter appears to be making fun of arty European movies. Are they saying that I’m somehow bad because I like arty European movies? Or somehow intrinsically French? Actually I like the French. I might even have some French ancestry. So um… yeah. I’m confused. Wait, isn’t France God in the play? Does that mean I’m Godlike because I like European movies? Or perhaps even God himself? I even had a friend drop out as a groomsman in my wedding because he had prior miming commitments. Part of my childhood took place in an Eastern Block country. I think I am in an arty European movie without even realizing it!
Anyway. Watch it. You’ll probably enjoy it. I on the other hand need to go add The Seventh Seal to my Netflix queue. And perhaps Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey to round out the night.
Originally written Monday February 26th.
I got the message in my newsreader at about 12:45 today. They were technically supposed to be announcing that the wristbands were on sale via SMS. That’s one of those newfangled technologies I don’t really understand. I tried to get my phone hooked up, but I have no clue if it worked. In any case, I left my phone at home to charge today so I wouldn’t have gotten the message.
I set out at 12:45. Walked the 3 blocks over to 6th street and hopped the number 21 down to Sixth and Lamar. When I got there, I walked around the line, towards that little alley on the northside of Waterloo. By the dumpster I got a stamp on my left hand and got in line. I thought at first that there were two lines going. There was actually one line. It streched from the dumpster, up to the corner at sixth and lamar. Down past Amy’s and Waterloo Video, turned right, went past a few houses. Turned right again, and came back down the alley past the dumpster, past the parking benches and finally into the store. I was in line for something like 3 hours. The fancy video sign on Waterloo had the temperature at 91 degrees. Twice waterloo employees wheeled around a shopping cart and brought us water and ice. It felt sort of like ACL fest without the music. In any case, I’m now in possession of two SXSW wrist bands, and I’m psyched!
Loaded Gun Theory is a sponsored project of Austin Creative Alliance.
For more information on Austin performing arts visit Now Playing Austin.
