05/03/04-05/07/04

From: Michael Corcoran e-mail me

Answer to 'Why Waco?' is the Lip Locker

I could live in Waco. There was a time back in 1996 when I considered moving to the city of Baptists and Bears to be closer to my son, who was living with his mother in Dallas at the time. Waco is an hour and a half to both Austin and Dallas, which is kind of a long drive to check your mail, but certainly not out of the question to hang out with the kid for a few hours or, going south, reviewing a concert. I figured I could listen to new releases while I drove and then pound out a couple CD reviews when I got home.

But I just couldn't imagine living in a town where yard sales noticably spike the excitement level. I mean, there were a lot of cool old neighborhoods and a downtown right out of the '60s, but where was the flavor, the character, the eccentricity? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there's no "why" there. The Waco whim went away.

But that was before I knew about Kitok Restaurant, a Korean hamburger joint whose Lip Locker with cheese buries any burger you can get in Austin. Located on 18th Street, about four miles west of Interstate 35, Kitok could make it on ambience alone, with all those Korean women with big, customer-comes-first smiles, running around the dark, cramped shack, while the sizzle of the griddle provides background music. Then you bite into that hand-formed cheeseburger and you close your eyes and moan appreciatively. I could live in Waco. I didn't have the Oriental fries, crispy shoestrings delivered in a clump with soy sauce on the side, but next time I'll come with more of an appetite. And I'll take time to read all the old newspaper clippings on the wall. I want to know more about this mysterious and satisfying comfort joint. And what brought all those Korean women to Waco? I thought that maybe they'd been recruited by Baylor, which had decided to focus on women's golf so they'd be able to be good at something. Then, someone told me that the owner is a former soldier who brought a wife back from Korea and her family members followed. . . .

Child safety. That's a major concern because every parent's nightmare is that their child could be hurt. But I'm wondering if, in the process of protection, we aren't maybe injuring a child's self-esteem a bit or slowing emotional growth. When I was a kid, nobody wore seat belts. We'd have seven kids in a station wagon, one holding the baby, while my parents barrelled down mountain roads in Idaho. I'd always lay in the cargo section in the back and devise the perfect Yankees batting order. Good times. By today's laws of restraint we'd have had to take two cars.

Seat belts are great. I feel partially undressed when I'm not wearing one in a moving vehicle. I guess airbags are also a good thing — I hope to never find out — but I wonder what effect it will have on my relationship with my son, now 10, that he has to sit by himself in the back, where the airbag can't possibly smother him. I can see this setup fostering, over time, feelings of inferiority. I'm talking about me, the chauffeur. I hope he gets old enough to sit up front before he learns the "Home, James" bit.

Has anybody done a study on the psychological effects of zealous child safety regs?

The "Friends" finale wasn't nearly as funny as the retrospective that aired in the preceding hour. The duck and chick in the Foosball table thread was a waste of time, the airport chase scene thriller was drawn out beyond the point of interest and Matthew Perry's delivery was a little off, like a star hoopster having a bad game seven.

Meanwhile, Ross and Rachel pledging to be soulmates is an ending I saw coming from about season three.

The show was rich in irony, however. Here was a visibly pregnant Courtney Cox Arquette playing a woman who's unable to have children with her husband. The scenes in the hospital when she's coaching the surrogate mother were utterly bizarre.

Brain cramp! Brain cramp! In my list of top 10 sitcoms of all time, I somehow spaced out on the best ever. But maybe "Fawlty Towers" was so surreally funny that I wasn't thinking about it as being in the sitcom format. You know you're getting old when you start leaving obvious choices off of lists. You also know you're not a young man anymore if, like me, you recently sought out the services of a masseuse and hoped your choice was a licensed professional and not a front for a hooker..

-- back to top

From: Sarah Lindner e-mail me

Stargazing can truly be enlightening

Pondering: Recent lessons and realizations courtesy of our friends, celebrities.

— Even if you are as luminous and talented a being as Julianne Moore, you will make stunning mistakes like "Laws of Attraction." That makes perfectionism a little silly for the rest of us.

— I am not a "big kid." I don't want to see Jennifer Garner acting like one in "13 Going on 30" and I don't want to hear her going on and on about how she is one in real life. I don't trust any woman who insists on talking that much about her own sweetness.

— Optimism, I've decided, reminds me a lot of the Darkness: funny-looking, cheesy, a little embarrassing. But sometimes — even if you usually prefer mopey, Chris Isaak cynicism — irresistible. I believe in a thing called love. Well, in theory.

Attempting: To ease the ache of missing "Sex and the City."

Look, I consume my fiber, my NPR, my BBC World News. I go all squee when the New Yorker comes every week because I can't wait to nod in assent to the lead piece in Talk of the Town, but I need my girl stuff.

Thoughtfully, the May 3 New Yorker puts the hard news and the glamour in one convenient package, thanks to the exquisite profile of artist, poet and lifelong "pretty girl" Dorothea Tanning, age 93. I think the last time I actually wanted to be the person in a celebrity profile it was 1983 and the subject was Belinda Carlisle. Dorothea Tanning is even better. If you can believe that.

I'm also loving Kathleen Tessaro's "Elegance," a smart and sleek little black dress of a book just out in paperback. Tessaro understands the power of a makeover better than anyone except maybe <Trinny and Suze. And her wit and subtlety are rare in the perpetually trying-too-hard chick lit genre.

I'm hoping this one becomes a movie. And I'm praying Sandra Bullock gets nowhere near it.

Not caring at all about: the "Friends" finale. You'd be amazed at how much time this frees up.

-- back to top

From: Joe Gross e-mail me

Loretta Lynn, Round 3

The respected critic R.J. Smith gave it five stars in Blender. The tougher-grading Entertainment Weekly gave it an A. Critics (including our own Joe Gross) have been falling all over themselves in praise of an album that I'd guess very few of them will ever listen to again.

Dude, not that this should change your opinion, but that list is getting longer).

Anyway, here's a dirty little secret about rock critics, and, unless I've radically misjudged his listening habits, one that Corcoran should know: It's rare for regularly working pop critics to listen to an album over and over after a review is finished, even one that they like. If they're keeping up with new material, they simply don't have that kind of time (or, at least, I don't have that kind of time).

According to some credible estimates, about 40,000 pop/rock/jazz/hip-hop/country albums are released every year, which means if you hear 1 percent of them, you need to listen to about 400. That's more than one album a day all year long. You can fit more than that into a day, but it's unlikely that you're going to listen to any of those more than once, ever.

Albums I may think are among the best of any given year may get spun a few times after the positive review is filed especially at the end of the year, when year-end Top 10s are due, but that's pretty much it. Albums that are in my all-time personal canon I don't listen to more than a handful of times a year. So whether I, a critic who gave the album four stars, listen to it again is irrelevant. In part, a critic's job, especially at a wide-angle daily, is to judge whether consumers might want to listen to it more than once. As for long-term value, (Read: Will R.J. and I be listening to this two, five or 10 years from now?) we have no idea what it is, because long term is then and this is now.

Corcoran's comment did prompt me to think about the star/letter grade system. When we assign grades to albums, a dicey practice to begin with that I think we've all come to accept as a necessary, and sometimes useful evil, are we grading against other albums released that year? Against the artist's own canon? For a posterity we can't possibly anticipate? Something to think about.

I addressed the first part of this sentence above, but I think the second half is misguided as well. White Stripes fans are going to eat this up. As Corcoran indicates later, White's production hand is a heavy one, and this sounds pretty much like a White Stripes record without Meg White's, um, primitive drumming. And the Stripes are on record as loving Loretta more than she loves herself, what with their frequent live covers of "Rated X" and all. I can't speak for Loretta fans.

Aside from apparently using the same black hair dye, this duo goes together like tempeh burgers at Luby's, like the Super Mario Brothers and Sister Rose.

Mmmmm . . . tempeh burgers at Luby's . . . oh, sorry . . .

Wait a minute, man, you just said that neither Lynn's nor White's constituencies will dig this album, then you say it's a way for White to get his hip card punched. Which is it? A useless indulgence that nobody is gonna like by a slavering fan for his favorite artist or an attempt to glom onto Lynn's supposed cred?

Now, I think Lynn has cred to burn, but I say "supposed" only because Lynn is not Johnny Cash. Cash has as sui generis a personal mythology as any in pop; many had written Lynn off decades ago. I don't think you necessarily automatically gain anything by producing a Loretta Lynn album, or not nearly as much as you do a Johnny Cash record. Cash's cool is eternal, even if he had died in Branson land.

Speaking of, the idea that the Rubin albums aren't as calculated as any other pop record of their era is simply nuts. There's nothing any more natural or "real" about a Cash with an acoustic guitar than Lynn with a garage rock band, and the idea that one is more authentic than the other is a myth that has got to go.

The AARP should file a protest.

Yes, because we definitely don't want old people making music with young people.

There's gotta be a law against making senior citizens sound ditsy and pretentious at the same time. The Von Bondies' singer may have inferred that White was simultaneously playing pinball while producing their previous album, but no one would make that mistake on this mess. White Stripes fans beware. Loretta Lynn fans beware. The critics are wrong and I am right. R.J. Smith's not going to refund your money.

It's true, we will not. And believe me, I'm as freaked out as anyone else that I like this album. Every year there's one album that ends up being the consensus album for every middle-brow critic with a pulse. A few years back, it was the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Last year, it was the Outkast double album. This year, it's the Lynn record. For those with doubts, listen before you buy, judge for yourself.

I've long held the theory that there's no right or wrong opinion when it comes to critiquing music, but I've changed my thinking.

You and me both, brother.

All of this being said, congratulations to Michael Corcoran for his second appearance in a row in the Da Capo Best Music Writing series for another story that appeared in the American-Statesman. If he gets the hat trick, rumor has it he gets a new turntable, a Lester Bangs commemorative plate and a lifetime supply of antacid, so let's pull for him.

-- back to top

From: Michael Barnes e-mail me

Yep, me again

Regular Monday diarist Chris Garcia is still in China. Wednesday scribbler Omar Gallaga is in France. Don't know why he couldn't interrupt his honeymoon to blog.

The prospects for fresh XL entries this week are thin. . . .

So what's up in my life? Two new books. Or rather, two older books new to my bedside table.

Since adolescence, I've attempted to juggle a novel with a nonfiction volume simultaneously. I'm 60 pages into William Makepeace Thackeray's comic masterpiece "Vanity Fair," printed in a handsome peacock-blue edition by the Folio Society. Reading about devious Becky Sharpe and Thackeray's other swiftly delineated characters in 19th-century London, I couldn't help snorting out loud every page or so.

Why did I wait so long to dive into this classic? Dunno. But from preliminary evidence, it belongs up there with the best of James, Dickens and Eliot.

For nonfiction, I've settled into Gregg Cantrell's "Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas." Cantrell's prose suffers in comparison to Thackeray's, but he proceeds smoothly and informatively through the life of the great colonizer. Although something of a Texas history buff, I knew little about Austin's Puritan heritage, his East Coast education and the years spent salvaging his larger-than-life father's businesses in Missouri.

But on to the burning question: Was Austin gay? The question recurs every few years in historical circles. Stephen F. loved dancing and wrote affectionate letters to female friends, but he never married, and modern observers have read homoeroticism into situations where there may have been none. There is no evidence about this supposed proclivity in Cantrell's carefully researched pages. . . .

What else happened this weekend?

Yesterday, I roamed through the Old Pecan Street Spring Arts Festival. Jamming Sixth Street and surrounding blocks on this prime afternoon were folks who probably visit downtown very rarely. Sunburned, a little tipsy and exhausted by Sunday afternoon, they seemed content and sated with the experience. People-watching ranks as Activity No. 1, followed by drinking, eating, watching musicians and other performers, and, lastly, shopping the craft booths. Good sign: more useful crafts, such as soaps, candles, etc., which do not rely on an aesthetic judgement for purchase. We need to cover this scene more closely in XL. . . .

I also met with the folks of Dance Umbrella, the hardy service group for the dance community. About a dozen dancers, choreographers and managers joined in a friendly stimulating discussion about journalists and artists teaming to meet each others' needs. Smart group. We chatted for 90 minutes and I heard dozens of usable ideas for future arts and entertainment stories. . . .

Most of Saturday was spent with seven other arts writers voting on nominations for the 2004 Critics Table Awards. Thanks to the organizational skills of Austin Chronicle arts editor Robert Faires, we started with a fairly thorough list of potential nominees from art, music, dance and theater. For 12 years, the critics have come to their decisions through consensus, and it was gratifying to watch these very opinionated men and women making cases, attempting to persuade, then graciously conceding points to one another. The list of nominees will be published simultaneously by XL and the Chron next week. . . .

Friday, I saw the Rude Mechanicals' "Stadium Devildare," which spoofed TV reality competitions, then added more serious observations about the super-patriotism of Iraq war vintage. Agreed with Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's review: sharp writing, sharp acting, but the pacing was way too rapid for Ruth Margraff's dense, lyrical writing style. . . .

-- back to top