Statesman > XL Blogs
We’ve moved
XL Blogs have gotten a makeover. The folks you’re used to reading here have all broken off into our individual blogs (but don’t worry — we’re totally staying friends).
Keep up with the eclectic and erudite Michael Barnes at Out and About.
Omar Gallaga, to whom I need to return many, many borrowed DVDs, gets all smart and techy at Digital Savant.
Rhiannon Gammill, the living legend of Red River Street, writes Miss Adventure, and Dave Thomas keeps it real at Bottlecaps & Wingnuts
Me? I’m over at Tex and the City.
Also part of our XL blog family are Diane Holloway’s On TV and Matt Thompson’s video-game blog, Pretty Flashing Lights.
If you’ve been reading us on a news aggregator, please change your feed. Because we’d miss you if you didn’t. Here’s a handy list of all the feeds:
Bottlecaps & Wingnuts http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/bottlecapsandwingnuts/index.xml
Digital Savant http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/digitalsavant/index.xml
Miss Adventure http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/missadventure/index.xml
On TV http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tvblog/index.xml
Out & About http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/outandabout/index.xml
Pretty Flashing Lights http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/videogames/index.xml
Tex & the City http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/texandthecity/index.xml
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: By Sarah Lindner
Follow the trail
Meant to attend an art opening at Shoreline Grill, but missed the bulk of it, so landed instead at McCormick and Schmick’s. The long bar, with its busy, upbeat attendants, is perfect for street-watching (the restaurant is below sidewalk level), sipping a Tito’s with lemon and sampling the seafood appetizers.
Peeked into Glass, the new upscale bar at Fifth and Congress, which, in fact, is swathed in heavy fabric, while Fabric, the new gay bar that shares the same building, is all clean lines and cool lighting. Huh. Lingered at Fabric, which feels like a cross between Oslo and Apple (the owners of Apple launched this spot, with its great, curving bar, comfy lounge niche and enclosing dance floor).
Then it was off to La Zona Rosa for the Dennis Quaid Charity Weekend opener. The first band (I’m pretty sure it was Dan Dyer) was very good, but wrong for such a big hall — and a downer. Then came Buddy Quaid’s roots/country/rock band, which proved eminently competent, but uninspiring. Finally, out come Dennis and the Sharks, thrashing, growling, raising the audience’s temp to a boiling point. Ducked out before guests such as Robert Rodriguez joined him onstage. Hard to believe Dennis is 51.
Permalink | | Categories: By Michael Barnes
The cruise report
So here’s the recap of the Alaska cruise. Seven nights. Three ports. Many Dramamine.
Life’s sweetest reward: There is a misconception that one spends a cruise rolling naked in prime rib, burying one’s face in giant creampuffs. Nothing so decadent happened on my watch. The food was decent, though — and certainly scads better than on my first cruise. We ditched the formal dining room, which means that somewhere there’s a very angry waiter who wanted out tips, and went to the casual cafe every night. I was pleased with the tasty soups, salads, antipasti and stir-fry, and flat-out enraptured with the suspiciously decadent low-fat frozen yogurt. But there were some surprising misfires. I revised my rule that in a ramekin=good. And how do you mess up just a plain old hunk of cheese? Sarah confused. Head hurt.
Come aboard, we’re expecting you: Want to see our ship? Pretty cool, eh? There was even actual art all over the ship, and it touched my heart my heart that someone went to the effort to make this happen.
An irrational pet peeve of mind is that various places onboard had names and, the cruise line tried to convince us, unique identities. As if someone had decided to open up a hot new nightclub and it just happens to be on Deck 13.
And I had a lot of trouble finding my way around the ship. I went upstairs when I should have gone down. Sometimes I had to circle around a few times to find the exit to the cafe. But the cruise line cannot be blamed for this.
Fellow travelers were occasionally problematic. After we spent the day in Juneau, my dad overheard two other passengers pondering what the capital of Alaska was. They decided it was Anchorage.
One evening, we sailed into prime whale-watching territory. Suddenly, everyone was Captain Ahab, freely tossing around phrases like “He’s breaching!” I also heard a lot of this: “Hey, there’s one … oh, wait. That’s a wave.”
Your ship’s crew: My stateroom attendant’s name was Vaughan. I kept him expecting him to turn to me and say “My name isn’t really Vaughan …” and then get smashed by a breaching whale.
At first, I thought Vaughan was emotionally withholding because he wouldn’t fold my towels into animal shapes, but on Thursday, there was a little towel dog waiting on me. Or maybe it was an elephant.
Constantly haunting me was the disembodied voice of Allan, our cruise director. Really, by the second day, he could have just begun his announcements with “Hey, it’s Allan, what’s up?” but he never failed to remind us that he, Allan, was our cruise director. I was worried that Allan, my cruise director, had been up for about three weeks solid, concocting exciting shipboard activities for me, but not worried enough to actually partake of them. Not the art auction, not karaoke, not even Strippers of the Sea, which I feared might involve seeing way too much of Allan, my cruise director.
On a friendly shore: Off the ship, our fate was often in the hands of tour guides, and that was indeed a gamble. I missed this, but I’m told that one of the guides instructed the group to do “moose waves” This apparently involved sticking your thumbs in your ears and flapping your hands as if they were moose antlers. I know — it makes no sense to me either. This is the kind of thing that will win you the enmity of my family. Later, we took a blood oath to destroy the guide and her people, no matter how many generations it might take.
I think I was the sole Lindner grumpy enough to be bugged by another guide, whose every sentence had both unnecessary pauses and ended on an up note, as if it were a question. Like this: “We …are the rainiest … city in the nation?” Wishing very, very hard did not make my iPod Shuffle fly to me from the ship.
On the other hand, low-key Ian, who walked us through a rainforest, had appropriate inflections and did not try to make anyone dance the hokey-pokey or something like that.
And the helicopter pilot my brother and I had on our glacier tour totally rocked. My mom, who was in another copter, said it looked like he was being more daring than her pilot, which made us feel quite “Top Gun.”
Set a course for adventure: I have a lot of problems with how often cruise lines use the word “adventure” to try to get you to take cruises. I’m not trying to disparage the experience at all, but I think for an adventure you need a pickup truck and guns.
That said, you can do some neato things on a cruise. We saw four glaciers on the helicopter tour, which was amazing (a couple of amazement points were deducted because the tour company force-fed us Enya on our headphones). One of the glaciers was called The Hole in the Wall, but I hear it used to be better.
We got out and walked on one of the other glaciers. I know you’re holding your breath here, but I didn’t fall. Or even almost fall. This at least partly due to the “Napoleon Dynamite”-type boots we slipped on over our regular shoes. It kind of made me want to dance on the glacier, but there was no point pushing my luck.
I did have one moment of fear. I went in the Interpretive Center at one of our stops, thirsting for knowledge, and the only thing in the room was taxidermied animals. You know that one part in “Sin City”? Yeah.
Let if flow — it flows back to you: I liked visiting Alaska — how else would I have found out that Juneau has tanning salons? — but I was awfully happy to see Texas again. Stepping off the plane, I felt a blast of hot, humid air — and of pure joy. My John Cusack Medal of Honor-winning boyfriend picked me up and we spent the next day shopping, eating and couch-sitting. Home rules, even if there aren’t any towel animals.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: By Sarah Lindner
Beer me: I’m headed for the produce section
Shannon and I are not much for crowds.
If it’s the in place, you won’t see us there. In April we read a Dale Rice review of the semi-new restaurant Freddie’s Place and the first five words were all we needed: “Cars circled the parking lot…”
Yogi Berra is quoted as saying “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” Lots of people find that to be funny, but I know exactly what he meant.
And don’t get me started on tourist season. Ah spring, when this young man’s fancy turns to “Get the (expletive) out of my way.” I much prefer summer, when the students have gone home and the Yankees and most everyone else are hiding inside their refrigerated boxes.
All this helps explain why we haven’t been to the new Whole Foods megalopolis. Too many people, most of them way too proud of themselves for being there.
But my attitude changed Wednesday when I read in the XL section — thank you, Moira Muldoon, bar girl and investigator of alcohol hotspots — that you can drink beer while shopping at Whole Foods.
Now that’s shopping I can get on board with.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: By Dave Thomas
Bluegrassy ‘Black Star’
You could do many worse things to your iPod than installing upon it Gillian Welch’s very nice cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” (remember back from the days of “The Bends” when Radiohead did simple melodic rock?), which has become a staple on KGSR lately.
The woodsy cover of the song has yielded opposing opinions in my household, from “It’s nice” to “I don’t like her voice.” It is a bit “O Brother, Where Art Thom Yorke?” but I can’t think of a better example of why I like KGSR than Gillian Welch covering a prog-rock-but-electronica band from England.
Her Web site offers the song, recorded last year live in Minneapolis, for direct download (99 cents, cheap) and goes so far as to offer it to you in your choice of AAC (iTunes format), MP3 or FLAC format (best for listening to Roberta Flack songs). You can even pay for it with Paypal.
Go to the Download section and check it out under “Latest tracks.”
Would that all songs you like on the radio could be acquired this easily.
Permalink | | Categories: By Omar Gallaga
More Quaid memories
John Harris, formerly of the American Statesman, writes in response to the XL cover story on movie star and new Austinite Dennis Quaid:
Enjoyed your story on Dennis Quaid’s early years. You knew him in college; I knew him mostly in elementary school and in our neighborhood and shared what might have been a couple of his first performances: traipsing around the playground during recess in probably the first grade, arm in arm, pretending to be drunk and singing “How Dry I Am� with fake hiccups; and performing in a fourth-grade play about none other than the Alamo. I last saw him in 1982 at our 10-year Bellaire High reunion, where he was friendly and down to earth and gracious, as you described.
Permalink | | Categories: By Michael Barnes
Another closing
It is with sadness that we report the demise of Sidekicks, the lesbian and gay venue at Riverside Drive and South Congress Avenue. The combination sports bar and dance club enjoyed a healthy run and was home to many benefit shows. At least it lasted longer than some predecessors at the cursed location. The closing leaves the lesbian community, especially, without a centralized social spot.
Sipped martinis and sampled tender calamari with Fortunate vanguard Mary Margaret Farabee at the new, cool, curvy 7 bar on South Congress Avenue. This extension of the seven-seas themed 7 restaurant includes an affordable appetizer menu and some generous happy-hour deals. What did Farabee spill? It was all off the record, but eminently entertaining and educational.
Permalink | | Categories: By Michael Barnes
Cami crisis continues
Response to Wednesday’s camisole blog:
— First, I got an e-mail that seemed to be from an an actual, real-live reader, and I was all set to treasure it for the rest of my life (because that is what I do with e-mail and comments). But upon further examination, it seemed to be from someone whose job it is to promote a particular brand of camisoles. It was not the brand of camisoles that I wear, which was decried in the e-mail as “cheap and tasteless.” That’s me, friends.
— I also received this comment from reader Lisa:
I don’t understand this at all. What are you talking about?
An explanation: I was trying to make fun of Lucky magazine’s declaration “Who isn’t at a turning point with her lace cami?” To me, this was a very funny thing for Lucky to say, as if all of womanhood were seized by worry about how to wear lace camisoles. I don’t think Lucky meant this to be funny at all. I imagine that a lot of productivity has been lost at Lucky because staffers have been unable to think about anything besides what they’re going to do with their lace camis. Most of us who do not work at Lucky are not at a turning point with our lace camis. Most of us thought turning points occurred only in relationships with humans, not fashion items. Anyway, I was attempting to have some fun at the expense of Lucky’s seriousness about lace camisoles. I apologize for being baffling.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: By Sarah Lindner
The camisole crisis
Back from vacation, I’m trying to get caught up on everything, and by “everything” I mean “reading magazines.”
Last night, I found a sentence in Lucky that is the zenith of Lucky-ness. It may be my favorite sentence ever.
It is:
Who isn’t at a turning point with her lace cami?
Who indeed.
I am. Your mom is. Hilary Duff. Hillary Clinton. Jennifer and Angelina. All of us. Lucky has been brave enough to expose the pain that dared not speak its name.
We wanted to tell you, but we didn’t know how. You don’t understand the pain of it, all the restless nights wondering “What am I going to do with my lace camis?”
So if we’ve been distant, if we’ve been irritable, if we, say, have run off and claimed to be kidnapped when we really just didn’t want to get married, that’s why. It’s not you. It’s our lace camis.
Hold us.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: By Sarah Lindner
Herzog, ’Horns
Every sentence of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel “Herzog” makes me hurt with envy. The recently deceased Nobel winner can pack more meaning into a descriptive paragraph than most writers can in an entire book. I’m reading the story of a unraveling scholar very, very slowly in order to savor every syllable.
This is the only time of year I pay much attention to baseball, whenever my ’Horns are in the running for the College World Series. (In almost every sport, college athletics are more interesting than professional games, because more is at stake, emotionally.) The suspense during the final innings of the elimination game against Mississippi on Monday nearly killed me. Don’t call during the games this weekend.
Permalink | | Categories: By Michael Barnes
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This might be a question for your programmer. Rather than having just multiple feeds, why not have one aggregated feed as well?
... read the full comment by Tim | Comment on We've moved Read We've moved
Thanks for the shout-out, and as always, I wear my Cusack Medal with pride. Great wrapup of the cruise, although I miss the story of your dad's reaction to the music played at breakfast & lunch. ("What's that called?" "Dance music, Daddy?" "No, that's not
... read the full comment by Jeff | Comment on The cruise report Read The cruise report
What a nice surprise. When I clicked on this link, I fully expected a brief "what?" reaction to Tom popping the question...
... read the full comment by Ellen | Comment on The cruise report Read The cruise report
Sarah -- Thank you for this snip of brilliance ...
"My stateroom attendant’s name was Vaughan. I kept him expecting him to turn to me and say “My name isn’t really Vaughan …� and then get smashed by a breaching whale."
... read the full comment by kk | Comment on The cruise report Read The cruise report
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