Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2008 > September > 26
Friday, September 26, 2008
Farther along Barton Springs Road toward ACL
In the future, I plan to post all my columns from places with refreshments, WiFi, electrical outlets, quick service and an understanding of journalism. Kind of the way Damon Runyan and other newsmen from mid-century filed from restaurants, clubs and bars.
Right now, I’m at Gypsy, the Italian place on Barton Springs. Calamari with cracked pepper. Superb. Gypsy is not busy. Their regulars are scared away by the traffic and closed roads. ACL types not interested in fine dining.
Still 20 parking slots left at Palmer for $7 apiece. $25 across the street at Ice Beach. $20 at Austin Tri-Cyclist.
From Tri-Cyclist’s view, there are fewer pedestrians this year, perhaps because the bus service is more efficient.
Barton Springs Saloon heady place to watch ACL ped traffic. Server says not much concert trade, mostly kids working the surrounding businesses, taking breaks.
Traffic beginning to reverse a little bit. Sun-scorched festers heading back east. Hanging out at the Saloon rather than sticking with the festival. Still knots of music lovers crossing Lamar Boulevard headed to Zilker.
Why is a fire engine passing by? Did I miss something?
Well, I’m jealous. Clearly this is going to be the coolest year out on the field. And I chose to cover everything but the fest itself. Ah well. It’s great to be right here.
Will probably take a break before heading out to the after-shows at Speakeasy, Pangaea, Momo’s and Scoot Inn.
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Along Barton Springs Road to ACL
Famously, news stories once sketched history. More recently, blogs sketched the news. Now tweets sketch blog posts.
Examples:
Capital Cruises is charging $8 for a round-trip lake shuttle from the Hyatt Hotel to Zilker Park. Don’t know if the beer and margaritas are included.
The Hyatt staff is more wrapped up in the bourbon vs. scotch debate this afternoon than in its ACL guests.
Hyatt has kicked pedicabbers off its porte couchere. Now they sit on their bikes in the sun, invisible to the guests leaving the hotel. They are not happy.
Three-day ACL pass going for $200 from customer at Aussie’s bar. The place is otherwise quiet. “People will stop by for a drink on the way out,” says the bartender.
Jax deserted. While Aussie’s expects late crowd, Jax closes too early to harvest from ACL. People still shopping for tickets.
Threadgill’s gets huge crowds after 8 p.m. during the fest, employees agree. They pump out the live music to attract those festers skipping ACL marquee acts.
Last year’s Bob Schneider act last ACL was the busiest Jeremy Skelpon has ever seen Threadgill’s. He’s making huge vats of margaritas.
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Paste & Moximity parties — and in between
Where does one find a glockenspiel at the last minute in Austin? If you’re Mates of State from San Francisco, playing the Paste magazine pre-ACL party at Emo’s on Thursday, you turn to Austin’s Quiet Company, which once again had made the Final 5 cut during the Sound and the Jury contest the previous night. They just happen to be hauling around a portable set of the orchestra bells.
Rebecca Ewing, John Erik Metcalf
Paste Party host Tim Basham, welcomed industry types to the ultra-cool upstairs lounge at Emo’s, which apparently has been there for a while. Big hit at the party: The austin360.com Twitter mode. I entered the above item, shortened, into my iPhone via Twitter and seconds later it appeared on the lounge’s giant iMac for all to see. Paste editors were very interested in the technique. (No photos were allowed at that party? Why? These guys love publicity.)
Larry Chiang, CEO of Duck9 and writer for GigaOm; Angela Tang, Bare Essentials
How often does one witness a street crime in Austin? On a huge tourist weekend? Just after 10 p.m. — between the Paste pre-ACL party at Emo’s and the Moximity launch party at the Belmont — a woman screamed at Congress Avenue and Sixth Street. “Stop him!” Fleet friends chased the perpetrating purse-snatcher north on Congress. After a block, your 53-year-old reporter ceased pursuit.
Jason Black, Drew Dunlavy
Still don’t know exactly how Moximity links all your social media, but sounds like a helpful service. Considerate Bryan Jones threw a lovely party for the new company at the Belmont. Too bad the audience began to abandon the mesmerizing Dublin band, Automata. Omar Gallaga reported some drama from the TechCrunch panels earlier in the day.
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Stan Watts, Illustrator of Anxiety, Part 4
Continued from posts below…
“Living in Los Angeles, we kept moving one step ahead of the violence,” he says. “We made it out to Thousand Oaks, and right away there was a murder right across the street. Great area. But it just kept coming. We lived through our share of earthquakes and race riots. It just got hairy.”
So he loaded his family up for the move to Texas and a superior Leander school district for his daughters. Chris Rhea’s yearning song “Texas” played a role. (Watts’ story brought the lyrics to my mind. He instantly begins to sing them.)
As soon as he arrived, a massive storm cell hit Jarrell and the surrounding area. “‘I thought you said we were going someplace safe,’ my daughters said.” Memories of big storms during his Oklahoma childhood also may influence his art of jeopardy.
“I remember waking up all the time in the night to those World War II sirens going, my mom and dad with flashlights, taking us down into the cellar. How can that not scar you?” He also shares with his fellow Baby Boomer a lingering Cold War nuclear anxiety.
“I had a recurring where I’m in a theater and they announce we need to go home because we are under attack. I’m running through my neighborhood and there’s a ditch. I jump in. A flash with no sound comes running through the neighborhood.”
That anxiety manifests in more than nightmares. During Desert Storm, Watts was convinced that the big one had come, and so searched out culverts and drains to hide his family.
A 30-minute coffee session at the Green Muse on West Oltorf Street does not fully excavate the motivations behind Watts’ images of anxiety, but the surface is now permanently scratched.
“When I go to the place where I want to create, that’s the stuff that’s there.”
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Stan Watts, Illustrator of Anxiety, Part 3
Continued from posts below…
Watts’ biggest triumph — an album cover with a “Silence of the Lambs”-like mask for one-hit wonders Quiet Riot — also represented a low point in his business acumen.
“When I met them, they were practicing in a hand-made studio next to a Midas brake store,” Watts remembers. “I thought: ‘These guys are not going anywhere.’ I did the job for just $2,000 (with no royalties). The album went triple platinum. They sold that image on everything. Just when MTV started, I walked by the television to see a Quiet Riot studio concert. The camera panned audience and everyone wore a plastic replica of the mask I made. It as a real freak-out moment.”
Watts was primed for big profits when the second album Quiet Riot came out — his contract was “the size of the New York phone book” — but the recording tanked. He was never into QR’s music anyway, preferring classical or class rock from his youth, acts like Led Zeppelin.
“I don’t lift a brush without music on,” Watts says. “I get lost in it”
To be continued…
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Stan Watts, Illustrator of Anxiety, Part 2
Continued from post below…
So why the unsettling pictures?
“Go figure,” Stan Watts says. “Maybe I need to lie down on the couch for this question.”
No, Stan, that’s for emotionally unsettled. You’re the definition of functioning mental hygiene, father of five grown daughters, a longtime householder concerned about property taxes and quality education.
“My work has always been dark,” Watts says. “I always put a low-key, low-light affect into my pictures.”
Given a normal turn of events, Watts would have spent the past few decades working the Oklahoma oil patch like his hometown buddies. But in 1976, he entered a painting in a national contest. His image was selected to appear in a New York exhibition — he took the train to the big city to participate — and it was reprinted in a major publication, “200 Years of American Illustration.”
One image became his passport to an art career in California, then the epicenter of illustration. He was hired to design rock album covers for groups like Black Sabbath, advertisements for products like Friskies cat food (“it paid the bills big time”) and the posters for movies such as “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Howling.”
To match these projects, he invented a quirky painting technique. He took composite photography of sculptural elements or, say, a drawing in black and white, then blew up that image into a large print. He quickly applied an acrylic sealer to create a textured surface, after which he substituted colors for black and white.
“It creates a niche between photography and illustration,” he says. “Illustration at the time, in the 1970s, was very bright, flat, smooth. My stuff is the antithesis — moody, dark, textured — more realistic than illustrated.”
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Stan Watts, Illustrator of Anxiety, Part 1
His name is Stan.
Not Headbanger or Wolf or some other tough biker handle. Just plain, Midwestern Stan. Stan Watts.
Alright, yes, he rides a motorcycle. But not a chopper or a touring bike. Just an Indian Chief Vintage, an elegant red-and-cream, American-made machine that looks like something out of the Jazz Age.
So hardly a rebel — with or without a cause.
Watts is a nice guy with a sunny disposition. So why has this stubborn non-malcontent spent the past 30 years dreaming up psyche-searing images — slashers and storms, creepy puppets and snaking tornadoes, anthropomorphized animals and anatomically incorrect humans — for rock album covers, movie posters and edgy advertisements?
For 10 of those years, this son of Ponca City, Okla. has made those nightmarish pictures in suburban Cedar Park. Here he sits at a South Austin coffee shop, hair slightly stringy, but still rocker-ready for a man in his mid-50s. He grins readily from behind his pale-colored road glasses.
So why the unsettling pictures?
“Go figure,” he says. “Maybe I need to lie down on the couch for this question.”
To be continued …
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Not ACL: The first night
Well, this will be interesting. In a little preview of reporting on “Not ACL,” I attended three parties tonight, all with ACL themes, but not at Zilker Park. I tweeted during all three. Only a few of those micro-blogs made it to the austin360.com home page. Yet if you follow Out & About on Twitter, you got them all.
Blackbird Bakery owner and non-gluten activist Karen Morgan with Scott Butler
I’ll post images and descriptions before hitting the streets tomorrow. As a foretaste, the Blackbird Bakery Coming Out Party at Lamberts matched hip people with healthy people feasting on non-gluten goodies. Several were in town specifically for ACL.
Brighdie Grounds and Chance Barnett, in from LA for ACL
The Paste Pre-ACL Party at Emo’s mixed music industry types with all stripe of social media. (The austin360.com tweets were a big hit on the big iMac in the upstairs VIP lounge.)
Heather Carroll and boyfriend Jim Trungale
So it was off to the Belmont for the Moximity Party, attached to Austin Ventures’ TechCrush, but also ACL-themed. Loved the hypnotic Irish band Automata. Of course, some partiers were distracted by Oregon State’s amazing defeat of USC. The VIP Lounge here was filled with actual high-tech celebrities. We’ll reveal more later.
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