06/14/04 - 06/18/04

Recuperating in style from martini tragedy

I sacrifice a lot for my job, but I think I'm most proud of the after-hours work I did as an official researcher for this week's XL piece on summer cocktails. I'm so dedicated that I was still researching a week after the story was finished. I stumbled on my favorite drink of the season, too late for publication, but just in time for summer. It's a variation of the cosmopolitan that uses blackberry juice instead of cranberry.

Sadly, my first encounter with this blackberry beauty was tragically cut short. I was happily sipping the drink (it's a martini after all — I'm very civilized) when the server came to our table and asked if we'd like another round. Although my glass was still a quarter full, I decided to make it easy on her and order another along with everyone else. As she turned to walk away, she suddenly reached back, grabbed my glass and set it on the tray held by a passing busboy, who swooped it through some double doors, never to be seen again. This took two seconds.

My table full of friends, who witnessed the crime, flagged the waitress down when she walked by again, and we explained what happened. Instead of apologizing or offering to not charge me for it, she gave me her best "I'm sorry for your loss" look and said something along the lines of "Oh no! That's too bad."

I'm still recovering. . . .

Ah, recovering. After the wedding, the honeymoon, the car breakdown and the car break-in, I am not flush with cash. But luckily for me, it's summer. If you have to skimp on shopping for one season, this is it. The classic flip-flop/skirt/T-shirt combo is the centerpiece of the stylish wardrobe. If you don't believe me, then please refer to the New York Times' Sunday Styles man-on-the-street a few weeks ago, which in typical groundbreaking fashion announced that T-shirts, colorful skirts and sandals are What Everyone is Wearing. My friends and I now feel very original and cutting edge, even though we're in the same clothes from last summer (though we freshened our supply of white T-shirts and cheap flip-flops. Rest assured that yellow stains and dirty feet are always Out.)

For the first time ever today, I'm wearing flip-flops to work, thanks to the good people at the Gap. I've decided that the dark orange/melon color of my pair of jelly flip-flops will fool people into

thinking I'm wearing shoes that aren't flip-flops. I'm not sure why.

However, there's one element of summer dressing that I've never quite mastered: sunglasses. We just don't have a healthy relationship. If I spend more than $20 on a pair, I will undoubtedly lose or break them within the week. But if I spend less, then I feel like I'm wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses but pretending that they're not cheap and everyone knows they're cheap. The other problem is that I can't find a pair that's remotely flattering, no matter how many "suit your face shape" charts I refer to.

I feel like giving up and just squinting my life away, but then I remember that one glorious summer week in July 1986. I found a pair of red sunglasses in the sand at Myrtle Beach, where my family "summered" at a campground. Although they didn't seem "me" (but oddly my lilac pedal pushers with matching pink and purple plaid cowl-neck shirt did), I put them on and instantly I felt like Molly Ringwald at Prom. They were just the right thickness, shape and size to have some magical transforming effect on my face. I have this weird, partly slow-motion memory of a red-sunglassed-me walking down the beach surrounded by a group of guys with perms while "Party all the Time" by Eddie Murphy and Rick James came out of a boom box in the back of someone's black van. I felt worshiped and adored.

Tragically, the magic glasses disappeared from my life as mysteriously as they entered, leaving me to search for them in every department store, every Sunglass Hut, every drugstore glasses rack that I see. Eighteen years later, and I'm still looking, through sun-damaged, wrinkled-corner eyes.

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From: Sarah Lindner e-mail me

Throw me to Pedro and the Lion

My family? They're gold. Friends? The best. Older kids who introduced me to cool music during my formative years? Ah, now there's the painful void in my life.

I went to a conservative little college in Georgia. Late '80s, early '90s. The older kids were into Amy Grant (this was back before she was a harlot), Steven Curtis Chapman, Mylon LeFevre. Nobody thrust copies of "3 Feet High and Rising" or "Nevermind" into my hands. Instead, they encouraged me to kick it with that crazy Bryan Duncan.

The whole Christian rock thing never worked for me. I'm just not chipper enough. But the more I read about Pedro the Lion and the band's raw, not-at-all chipper lyrics, the more intrigued I got, intrigued enough to go to last Thursday's show at Emo's.

Pedro frontman Daniel Bazan didn't do any proselytizing. He took questions from the crowd, and some of those got biblical, but he never lapsed into the contemporary Christian-ese that I remembered from college. No mention of being saved or witnessing or lifting up this punk club for God. Bazan was just honest. He didn't try to make his faith all shiny and smug (

this article has more about Bazan's feelings on faith and music). He just made good, honest songs. And it was awfully refreshing.

More fine music: I don't have a Tweedy shrine in my room like most of you cool kids, but after a first listen to the new Wilco record, I am in rapturous love. It is, in fact, the saddest music in the world.

Ray Charles got a great, spontaneous celebration at my H-E-B (Congress and Oltorf) last Friday. When "Hit the Road, Jack" came on, the place practically turned into the musical episode of "Buffy." There was singing along, there was some shimmying as carts were pushed, there was one woman who could do an awesome "what you say."

Occasionally, even a common girl like me will find her way out of the sweaty clubs and into the lobby of a fancy hotel, and sometimes she will even look over to her right and, lo and behold, there will be Keanu Reeves. He graciously took photographs with a wedding party at the Four Seasons — conveniently giving the rest of us license to gawk. That's going to be some wedding album: "Here's me with my bridesmaids . . . here's me with Neo . . ."

Scene from the Warehouse District: a valet parker, waiting for customers, reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

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From: Omar Gallaga e-mail me

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I'm getting old

The act of watching any awards show on MTV has become an act of making myself feel old, like looking at wrinkles in a magnifying mirror or poring over old yearbooks.

But I did get a brief moment of joy during last week's "MTV Movie Awards" watching one of my favorite bands, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, perform their dirgey "Maps" for a gently swaying crowd that couldn't quite figure out why there weren't go-go dancers in short shorts or dudes wearing basketball jerseys bouncing around the stage shouting into hand-held microphones. Clearly something had gone awry.

Never mind that singer Karen O.'s voice was drowned out by her admittedly rockin' bandmates. The "You Can't Do That on Television"esque dropping of many, many red papers on her head more than made up for it, as did her goofy grin after these multiple paperings from above.

But why did Karen O. steal Elizabeth Daily's dress from "Better Off Dead?" . . .

The yard, people. The yard!

When I moved into my South Austin house, we loved the yard. The yard was good. The yard had potential. The yard, thanks to the former owners, had been pampered and loved.

Now as we look toward a new house elsewhere, the yard is bad. It's mean with its prickly, 6-foot-tall weedstalks and its stubborn refusal to keep its growth away from the formerly trim white-rock barriers around the trees.

The yard went from its patchy drought death throes last year to irrational exuberance and expansion. This pleases me in a Hank Hill way, but it means much more work as the FOM (Frequency of Mowing) must be ramped up. Weed eaters must be employed. The thick moistness of the grass in the front yard demands the use of the leaf blower/sucker to pick up yard trimmings, a problem you don't have when everything is yellowed and dying.

My editor likes to joke about how married life is going to lead to my absorption in the world of Weed 'n Feed and lawn hardware. I'm way ahead of you, boss. I have two mowers (one with bag attachment, one without) and a gas-powered trimmer.

When I wasn't working on the yard, I was putting up shelves in the garage.

Just call me Old Man Gallaga. Keep yer Frisbees out of my yard, you little hooligans, and turn down that loud MTV!

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From: Michael Corcoran e-mail me

Sure, I knew the Pistons could do it

Oh, man, I came so close to making a complete fool of myself. I mean, I was minutes away from ruining my reputation as the most knowledgable sports fan in the Austin music scene.

In my blog last week, after I went ga-ga over "The Irish Chef" Bobby Flay, I had a little prediction about the Los Angeles Lakers-Detroit Pistons series, which was starting in a couple days. "The only suspense here," I wrote, "is whether Ben Wallace will sport an Afro or cornrows at game time." Listen, I wasn't alone. Everybody picked the Lakers, who had dismantled the Spurs and the Timberwolves like the Prime Time Players of old. The only debate amongst sportcasters and writers was whether it would go five games or six.

My blog was in the system, waiting to run the day after game one, and as I watched the Pistons outhustle, outshoot and outrebound the Lakers, I quickly logged on and deleted the prediction. Many other prognosticators, including Philly sportswriter Stephen Smith, the most obnoxious man on TV, weren't so lucky, though they had a week to wiggle the Pistons' way.

The Lakers would still win the series, I figured after game one, but the Pistons would provide much tougher competition than imagined. Then after game two, when Kobe Bryant sent the game into an overtime (which the Lakers easily won) with a truly heroic three-pointer, I was ready to declare that he was, indeed, as great a player as Michael Jordan. Surely, the heartbreaking loss would deflate the Pistons and bring them back to Earth. But the Motor City Maulers just mopped the floor with L.A. and their four future Hall-Of-Famers. I can't remember a bigger upset, by a more convincing margin, in the history of best-of-seven series.

It doesn't seem like it now, as Mike Tyson has proved to be a true punk (and I'll say it to his face the next time he comes on TV), but the Buster Douglas knockout of Iron Mike is the biggest sports upset of my lifetime. Bigger than "the Miracle On Ice," bigger than NC State beating the Phi Slamma Jamma, bigger than "Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade," more shocking than, I forgot his name already, the nag that beat Smarty Jones.

In a one game or one match situation, anything can happen. The deflection of a puck, a lucky punch, an eyes-closed home run swing can change everything. But over the grueling course of a series, upsets become unlikely. Eventually, the best team wears down the lucky one and takes their throne.

As the world now knows, the Detroit Pistons were the best basketball team in the NBA. Five very good players beat two great ones and a cast of extras like a red-headed mule. I have to admit that going into game five, I still thought the Lakers were going to win the whole thing. See, they'd steal that last game in Detroit, come back to L.A. needing to win two in a row and they'd get the Staples Center rockin' and Jack would be jumpin' and at the end there'd be Kobe telling Jim Gray that the Pistons gave them fits, but the Lakers were able to stay focused and take it one game at a time.

Luckily, I wasn't dumb enough to put that in print.

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From: Joe Gross e-mail me

The Sword will cut you, mixtapes galore, Ian McShane: still the don.

It's been a minute since we last spoke, so let's cover as much as possible, shall we?

• Jakarta Jack's is the cleanest saloon, tavern or bar I've ever been in. It's brand new, so that's probably why, but still. Shiny wood bar, shiny wood bar stools, reasonably priced drinks that one really shouldn't have at 11:45 on a Monday night. (Man, that's some headache I'm working on right now.) The show wasn't bad. I tried to get there in time to skip the two hardcore openers, but a sound system malfunction started everything late, so I ended up hanging out with Church of the Friendly Ghost majordomo Aaron Mace and preaching about the Dead C. I had gotten to work at 7:30 that morning, so I just didn't have the energy to hang out for the headliner, Dove, but I think I have a new favorite local hard rock band. The Sword is everything great about biker metal all at once: lumbering drums that find a monolithic swing, incomprehensible vocals and thunder-lizard riffs. Excellent.

• Mix tapes, son. I've become a convert, and like a convert, I can't stop preaching. When I worked in D.C., my favorite after-work stop was Nico's tapes on 12th, near the Metro Center subway stop. This being D.C., Nico mostly dealt in go-go, but he had plenty of hip-hop. After Biggie died, I played a mix I picked up from Nico until the tape stretched. But now I'm back on the wagon (or off the the wagon; one of those two). As many hip-hop theorists have theorized, mix tapes (or mix CDs, as they are now) are where the action, the energy, the power is in hip-hop. Exclusive freestyles that sound tossed off versus polished studio joints that fill out a weak album? It's no contest. The ones my pals have pointed me in the direction of are hotness incarnate: Ghostface Killah's "Hidden Darts II" and Jadakiss' "The Champ Is Here."

• Ian McShane: still a small, mustached acting god, still the most powerful thing on the idiot box on "Deadwood." The scene where he mercy-kills the pastor, an act of love only he truly understood or could perform, was astonishing in its complexity and emotional vigor. Can I get a witness?

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From: Chris Garcia e-mail me

Some Jaws should stay shut

I pulled a (Captain Quint during the screening of "Jaws" at the Paramount Sunday night. A gaggle of punks two rows back decided it was hoot night at the movies, and so, beers in hand and wit in retreat, they proceeded to get all funny for the crowd.

Such entertainers! "You're gonna need a bigger boat!" one of them whooped just as the lights dimmed — for the trailers. With timing that sharp, it's amazing they weren't getting paid. My buddy Margaret and I let this initial gem pass, figuring these guys were too dough-brained to keep it up. They'd already depleted their ammunition, blurting the movie's most famous line out of the blue and into a comic vacuum. (No one laughed. Cringes were audible.)

They murmured through the trailers, little needles prodding me into my famous half-turn death stare. They hit the mute button until "Jaws" began, when their barbershop quartet of quips prompted the row behind us to gather up and move. I snapped an acid "Shut up!" at the goon squad, to which they replied: "Whaddup? Whaddup?"

Whaddup? I'm whaddup. I went to fetch an usher to duct-tape a few mouths, when, mid-step, I realized that the Paramount ushers ... well, let's just say they are not a hardy, confrontational bunch. So I stopped at laughing boys' row and glared at them exactly the way salty Quint glares down the giant fish in the film. Fuming, I didn't even care that I was basically throwing myself into the sea like shark chum, soon to be martyred at the movies.

But it worked. They zipped it for the next two hours. (Well, they murmured bits of the "Jaws" theme on occasion, something I hope they reflected on in the morning.)

The film, which I saw as a wide-eyed lad in its original 1975 release, holds up beautifully — a masterly horror-comedy on par with the uncompromising character studies of the '70s New Hollywood. The long takes and frantic, overlapping dialogue issue an Altman echo, and Spielberg (who was all of 27 when he made the film) trusts his scenes to work without John Williams' score — an approach he has long since forsaken. There's not a moment in his new movie, the gooey "Terminal," without Williams' aural cotton candy underscoring every blink and gesture.

How powerful is "Jaws" today? I'm nursing a sore wrist from Margaret's adrenalized clench during the movie's killer last act. ...

Speaking of seafood, I apparently ticked off actor Nicky Katt with something I wrote during the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. Now in town making a short film, Katt asked a friend what's up with me ("Whaddup with him?") and if I hated him or something.

He took issue with the way I described his fashion flair during a screening at (where else?) the Paramount. The mention was a purely observational parenthetical, a color line: Katt "sat quietly in the audience in a low-rider outfit straight out of East L.A.". Which is true, he did. Click the hyper-link. That's him.

"What does that have to do with film?" he asked my friend. Well, nothing. Funny, he didn't mention my two-line review of the movie he was there to watch, and in which he has a part. If he had, tears might have been involved. ...

Man, legendary Austin band The Horsies is good. Caught the kooky group at Hole in the Wall on Saturday, where all sorts of people I know gathered to hear the ineffable collision of groovy sounds. A German Web site dubs Horsies songs "Fleetwood Mac meets B-52's meets square dance and country-rock under African JuJu sun," and that's not far off.

I hooked up with Margaret and Kym and lovely Lara, who, I'm telling the world for the record, owes me a shot.

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