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04/12/04-04/12/04

04/15/04, 12:27 p.m.

From: Sarah Lindner

Liberté, egalité, less Beyoncé

So, I just got done taking a little TV sabbatical. Nothing strict, nothing self-righteous — I just wanted to see what was possible for a person who had Loved the '80s many, many times.

I always thought that I'd be a better person if I didn't watch so much TV. Instead, I just read more magazines. I can safely say that no woman needs to follow Vogue's "The Shape Issue" of April with Glamour's "Dress and Feel Sexy at Any Size!" May issue. In the addled, carb-deprived minds of Vogue editors, the height of plucky bravery is a society hostess who dares to enjoy life at — oh, the horror — size 12/14.

Glamour put "curvy, proud" Queen Latifah on the cover — copiously congratulating itself for this — and did some good reporting on why women spend so much time, money and energy hating their bodies and trying to change them. The magazine points out that "the perfect body" is a whole lot more perfect than it used to be thanks to all the stars with great trainers — and even better plastic surgeons. But it all rings a bit hollow when you know one of those very stars will be on the cover next month.

Depressed by the whole thing, I felt a lot better when I started looking at the women around me. I'm wondering if we've got some immunity in Austin to the national compulsion to look like Jennifer Aniston. "Pretty" is a lot more equal opportunity here. At my salon last weekend, I saw women built more like Buddha than Beyoncé, women who made a little ab flab look cuter than a six-pack, women who weren't Botoxing lines they'd probably earned with a whole lot of fun — all of them proud of their bodies. All deservedly.

It struck me again seeing Toni Price Tuesday at the Continental Club. Here's this woman who's a long way from 22, graying hair, who I doubt has ever even glanced at one of those "Firm Your Thighs — Fast!" articles. And she was beautiful. It'd take an armada of supermodels to match her sexy life force. It made me glad to live here all over again. We know what a real Glamour girl looks like.

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04/14/04, 1:26 p.m.

From: Omar Gallaga e-mail me

'The Swan' takes flight with stark reality

We've hit the late-season, pre-sweeps period. A lot of TV shows are coasting, setting up their myriad story lines for some sort of cliffhanger conclusion (or in the case of some comedies, a long-overdue farewell).

Thank goodness for Fox's "The Swan."

In my house, TV doesn't have to be good to get watched. It just has to stand out from the pack of endlessly formulaic dating reality shows, crime dramas and no-laughs midweek sitcom fillers.

And "The Swan" did just that, adding a creepy veil of voyeuristic emotional manipulation that, in its first episode last week at least, was the most compelling thing on the tube.

The premise is simple: Two women, described as "ugly ducklings" (only "ugly" in the hierarchy of TV prettiness) are chosen to undergo a massive transformation: a weight-loss program, extensive plastic surgery and even counseling to get through the emotional issues in their lives.

In the first episode, both women endure stagnant relationships stymied by esteem issues. That the show suggests their problems would dissolve with a more positive outlook on one hand, while encouraging them to have their faces and bodies readjusted like Play-Doh is just one of the program's many delicious complexities.

Both women are indeed transformed into the kind of puckery-curvy attractiveness you might see hosting a local morning talk show called "Wake Up, Walla Walla!" It's a chirpy, push-up-bra hotness, the kind that may be helped along by what seems to be about $100,000 worth of surgery and dietary deprivation, but which seems to depend just as much on good hairstyling and lots of makeup.

The final insult comes after the women are shown the grand "reveal," as when "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" brings home the hetero to see his crappy apartment transformed. The before-and-after on "The Swan" is remarkable, but they're not done. The team of surgeons, trainers and cleavage artisans then chooses one of the two women to go on to a "Swan" pageant where they'll compete against other scar-healing, freshly implanted women. The consolation prize for the loser? She gets to keep her new looks and show them off to a stunned significant other and her family on national TV.

But wait — there's more! If this were the entire content of "The Swan," it would just be another edition of "Extreme Makeover." The nugget of wisdom in "The Swan" is in its profiles of the two women, showing what led them to want to forsake everything old about their bodies and start anew.

They are sad. They have childhood traumas that have turned them into meek mirror avoiders. Their relationships and sex lives suffer from the kind of self-image shame that could fill the coffers of a psychiatrist for years.

In one revealing sequence, one of the pre-"Swans" calls her husband. Bandaged and pained (and likely doped up on painkillers). Rachel finally gets a hold of her husband after nearly a week of missed calls. The conversation, awkward and awful, is more painful to watch than the surgery sequences. He sounds unenthused and indifferent; Rachel's mad and frustrated at his lack of support. In that moment, you wonder if any amount of scalpeling, counseling or eye shadow is going to make a difference in her life.

At the reveal, the women fall to their knees and wail, "I'm beautiful!" The mascara struggles not to run. They cup their hands to their face as if to hide all that newly formed skin, as if it's too much to take, this image they'll see for years to come. The closest thing I can compare it to is the pustulant pageantry of Courtney Love's "Miss World" video. It's depressing and gaudy and triumphant.

I'd take the exploitative, yet anthropologically divisive dynamics of "The Swan" over the mind-numbing spectrum of shoddy network programming any day. It's uncomfortable watching, a show that makes you think and examine your own ideals of beauty and vanity.

As I watched the new women tucked into their tight gowns and pushed out toward shaky futures, I could only think of the millions watching, many of whom have to be thinking, "I wish that was me."

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04/13/04, 8:47 p.m.

From: Joe Gross e-mail me

Where art thou, Kate?

God bless VH1 Classic. Where else can you see your childhood, you older cousin's childhood, your younger brother's childhood and possibly your uncle's childhood shuffled like 52 Pick-up?

Not MTV2. MTV2 is the opposite of VH1 Classic. MTV2 has been nothing but a disappointment since it went from the amazing, little-known and-even-littler-seen M2 to the alterna-rock marketing nightmare MTV2. No, that thing is terrible, but VH1 Classic, man, that's just genius.

Why such love? Three days ago, I saw the video for Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" for the first time.

I'm not completely sure how I missed it for this long. I became a hard-core Kate cultist (have you ever met another kind?) in high school, when a friend of mine lent me the Kate anthology "The Whole Story". I was totally hooked. Her astonishingly lovely looks, her hypnotically sublime voice, her Victorian obsessions, her songwriting sense as odd as it was magisterial, the pretensions she wore like a housedress . . . I dug it all.

But I never saw any of her videos. I was the sort of kid that sought out VHS collections of videos (what's up, Jesus and Mary Chain, New Order and the Cure) but I missed hers.

So I nearly dropped my drink on the cat when I came upon the video for "Wuthering Heights." There she was, all of about 20 in BBC-looking videotaped glory, spinning around in a white dress, putting that mime she allegedly studied to good use, doing slow motion cartwheels in front of a red backdrop, lip-synching to those absurdly overwrought lyrics about Cathy and Heathcliff and peoples' souls and all that stuff, twirling her hand around her head during "Wuthering/Wuthering /Wuthering/Heights!!!" It looked like it was made for about a buck-forty, was one of the oddest things I've ever seen, and easily one of the coolest videos in the medium's history. I ran into my office and broke out my Kate records out for the first time in years. Yes, you remember them correctly: everything Peter Gabriel did, she did better, sexier and funnier.

Why years? Well, after making some remarkable albums here and there in the late 1970s and throughout the '80s, she made the very mixed "The Red Shoes" in 1993, and proceeded to sit the next decade out. I mean, she vanished from the scene. Never one for hanging out in front of cameras when she was active, she became a straight-up recluse. Occasionally, you'd hear bits of news: She was busy with her family, she was almost done with the album, she was perfectly happy living in seclusion, etc. At this rate, a new album from Kate Bush seems as likely as this one.

And in her absence, lots of smaller Kates took up her cultural space, most notably Tori Amos, who has a minor-league version of the voice and the lunatic fanbase, but never came off as well-read. Sarah McLachlan has absconded with as much of Kate's massive atmospherics and melodrama as she could fit in her pockets, but doesn't seem even close to as strange. Like "Highlander", there can be only one.

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04/12/04, 1:55 p.m.

From: Chris Garcia e-mail me

Eternal sunshine of the aging mind

I've hardly been out on the town since South by Southwest, except for two movies — the staggering "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the deliciously gross "Dawn of the Dead" — and meals at two newish restaurants on South Congress.

Breakfast on Easter at the Texas Music Cafe was satisfactory, though it took the server 10 minutes to bring a neglected piece of toast the size of an Altoids tin. The cheese grits were tangy, fried up like a crab cake and shaped exactly like a hockey puck.

On Friday night, my pal Margaret took me to dinner at the South Congress Cafe, where we ate at the curvy, dimly lit bar. Margaret was also my date for the above movies and breakfast, but here we might have actually passed as a couple, presumably to her horror. After the salsa sampler (8.5 on a scale of 10) and elaborate salads (7.5), we split a Brandy Alexander (10), served in a tall malt glass and topped with whipped cream. Sitting on bar stools, facing each other, we sipped from two straws. It was 1953 in Smalltown, USA. . . .

Beyond that, my main excursions have been to a series of leathery-smelling shoe stores where I've sought "orthopedically correct" running shoes. Doctor's orders. Apparently my armada of funky sneakers are too narrow and lack arch support. Now I'm growing a sixth toe on both feet.

Running shoes are so comfortable that when I put them on I fall asleep. But they're so ugly that after five stores and 100 shoes, I haven't found a single pair I can tolerate on the faintest aesthetic terms. I'm no dandy — I wear jeans and cords exclusively and haven't tucked in a shirt since 1989 — but the shoes look like they were designed by Boeing. What is it with the metallic sheens and motley patchworks of materials commonly found on Italian cars? I'm not sure what the rubber on top of the shoes is about, nor those hydraulic spring heels. When I put on a particular pair of Nikes, I thought I might start flying. I need shoeware, not hardware.

My feet are killing me. And in a week I'll be ambling around China with almost no aid from taxi, rickshaw or the shoulders of able-bodied persons. (Bikes, yes, in Beijing.) I need a good-looking shoe fast. Something simple, suave. Otherwise my feet will only get worse, said Dr. Stinky Feet. Surgery could be imminent. In that event, I'm going to have the doc cut off my feet and implant small wheels in their place. Shoe shopping's for suckers. . . .

Another reason to stay in: Why pay for a concert when you can hear it free in the comfort of your living room? I had the front door open during the downpour Saturday, and wafting through with a distant thump was "No More Mr. Nice Guy," which was getting an exuberant spin by Billy Bob Thornton and the song's author Alice Cooper. The rock rolled from the Gridiron Heroes concert at Auditorium Shores to my ears on the southernmost edge of Travis Heights. . . .

My birthday last week reminded me that I've started lying about my age. I've only done it a couple times, during travels abroad. That's because a) no one's going to catch me there (and if they do, what of it?) and b) Europeans: so gullible. I frequently plan trips around my birthday — hence China — and many times I've spent this strangely neglected national holiday in far-flung lands. It's good. None of the hooey, all of the debauchery.

I'm a pretty sharp liar, though I only produce my expertise when cornered. At a Parisian jazz club in fall 2002, I met a young, fashionable British woman. We talked; I bought her a glass of wine. I asked her her age, a blunder because she asked me mine. (Forest-dwelling animal crossing street, headlights.) "28," I lied. She gasped in a gummy English accent, "No you're not. You can't be more than 24!" She whiffed a lie, just not in the right direction. Fantastic. Pulling out my passport would be a bust either way, so I stuck to 28, fibbing with impressive gusto and feigned dismay. Suddenly I felt like her dirty old uncle.

Untruths were tendered in Germany, too. Berlin — a grand city for prevarication! It was April 2002 and I was sipping absinthe cocktails with two poised German women I'd met earlier in the evening. Eventually the age thing came up and I reflexively pruned four years off mine. They were in their late-20s, so we weren't that far apart. Still, enormous guilt consumed me for almost a minute.

Last week in Austin, the young woman at the grocery store carded me. She squinted her eyes as if teasing out the legality of the person in front of her imbibing suds and spirits. After long study, she did not withdraw her request. "Bless you, my child," I said with a gentle, beatific nod, and then ambled out into the eternal sunshine.

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