This Is The Stuff, A Tale of Two Restaurants

Every now and then, it becomes necessary to head over to Louisiana and visit my old pal Mr. LeJeune for some of his superb meat products, most notably garlic sausage and tasso. In the 40 or so years I've been making this trip, a lot has changed. There are, for instance, more and better places to stay. There's been a resurgence of pride in the local culture. And these two things have resulted in a lot more tourism. Which is a good thing (for the locals making money off of it) and a bad thing. Which we'll get to in a minute.

Now, last week it became essential for me to get out of town before I lost my mind. You know, mostly the same thing that's been oppressing all of us Americans, but also the fact that I just wanted to be somewhere else, even for a short time. I had a short visit to San Francisco in January that was pretty unsatisfactory for the most part (some day I'll realize that that place and I just don't get along, plan the trip so as to get what I wanted done, see who I wanted to see, and leave before my blood pressure gets too much of a workout), but nothing since then. With little money, but my flexible work schedule (I'd just finished the next-to-last chapter of The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 2) it boiled down to a quick drive to Lafayette, overnight in a hotel, visit Mr. Le Jeune the next morning, and come back here.

It's a long trip, but my friend K said she'd like to join me, to keep me from nodding off or becoming too tired along the way. The only downside is that, as in San Francisco, my sense of taste and smell is still intermittent. I'm probably going to have to go see the only doctor who's actually treated me for it successfully, and he's in France. (American doctors, motivated by greed, want to do an operation that works briefly, then shuts off the sense for the rest of your life. I don't want that, thanks. And a flight to France would be way cheaper than the operation, as would be the price of the medications.) These days, though, it's been clearing up in the mornings most days, so that was a plus.

The drive out was hellish, mostly due to a stretch east of Houston, where we sat while three lanes folded into two somewhere around Bay City. We got in to Lafayette about 5 and checked in to a place I'd stayed at before, the Hilton, a giant high-rise and probably the tallest building in town. The last time was in the late '80s, when it was the only decent hotel in town, and I spent most of a day fighting food poisoning I'd gotten at Mulate's, which had once been a decent place to eat before they started courting the still-rare tour-bus crowd.

The hotel's now a Doubletree By Hilton with modernized decor, and it was filled with pre-teen baseball players and their parents, but that didn't matter: I passed out for a half-hour nap as soon as the bed was within striking range. I woke, refreshed, and then the next decision was where to eat. Weirdly, in the middle of a place famous for its food, there weren't many choices. I didn't want to drive too far from Lafayette, like to Breaux Bridge, and crawfish season has been over for a while, so it was a problem. Both of us were dressed fairly casually, which left out Café Vermillionville, which was getting kind of long in the tooth anyway. What remained wasn't very inspiring to say the least: there was a chain called the Blue Dog Café, an annoying reminder of the late George Rodrigue, who made an empire out of a cutsey cur (he was an okay painter before the dog took over his life, but not nearly as good as Francis Pavy). The only remaining choice seemed to be something called the Bon Temps Grill, which Tripadvisor rated #1 in the city and which happened to be real near the hotel. So the Bon Temps it was.

Now, from a cursory glance at the website, I knew this wasn't going to be traditional Cajun food, but food -- described as "swamp edge cuisine" -- that took from Cajun traditions and worked with them. Fine with me. My taste buds had shut down, but that was nothing new. The place was hopping when we got there, so it was evidently popular, and the waitress was top-notch. The only warning of what was to come was a basket of cold, dry garlic bread slapped onto the table first thing. K wasn't very hungry, so she ordered the seafood stuffed mushrooms as a main and a side-salad. I saw remoulade shrimp, which is a traditional dish, albeit from New Orleans, and since I'd only made it myself years ago (and, I should add, made it well), I ordered that, along with a stuffed pork chop, something I'd discovered at the long-gone Stop & Shop supermarket in Lake Charles ages ago. The butcher there was a genius, and his boudin, beef tasso smoked on mahogany, and stuffed pork chops were sublime.

Well, the food came quickly, my shrimp and her mushrooms, followed too quickly by the salads, which caused the waitress to come apologize for that lapse. I assured her that it wasn't as if they'd get cold. My shrimp seemed to taste okay, though, although I could only barely discern the taste, but K was irate: here were these mushroom caps with, well, basically a lump of bread on them, surrounded by supposed tasso-and-pepper gravy that was indistinguishable from the stuff you get on a chicken-fried steak. I soon found out, too, that the shrimp were done like guacamole in a bad Mexican joint: piled on a mountain of shredded lettuce. Then came my pork chop. It was a pork chop. It was thick. Instead of being sliced lengthwise and filled with stuffing, there was a hole a little bigger than a quarter with a tiny plug of stuffing wedged into it. The pork chop was pretty good, but hey, I grill pork chops at home all the time. Annoyingly, they also provided a knife to cut it with that was like a cutlass.

It was while I was sawing away at the chop that K noticed something. "This music is fake," she said. "I don't recognize any of it." What she meant was that the Muzak, which was blues, wasn't the original recordings. And she was right: just then some song I did recognize played, and it was...off. The whole thing left me puzzled. We paid our bill and left, full but unsatisfied.

The next morning the idea was to get to Eunice to see LeJeune before noon and head back, but as usual that's not the way it happened. But there was another restaurant I'd seen on my last trip over that interested me and from what I could tell, it was breakfast and lunch only. The name, though, worried me a bit: T-Coon's. I remember being shocked 35 years earlier by discovering a guy named T-Neg in the Cecilia, Louisiana phone book (slightly smaller than a monthly issue of Reader's Digest). But then I remembered the word "coonass" referring to Cajuns. A lot of them don't like it; some claim it's derived from a regional French word, conasse, meaning a stupid woman, or silly bitch, according to my French dictionary. But the front of the restaurant shows a coon stirring a black pot. And anyway, a decent breakfast is the hardest thing to find in these parts, so we went. Again, the place was packed. Unlike the night before, though, my nose was playing nice, and the smell was excellent. So was the Mellow Gold coffee, a coffee/chicory blend, light on the chicory, that's the house java.

K still wasn't hungry, but she ordered a sausage-and-biscuit combo. The waitress asked her if she wanted pork sausage or a link and I urged the link: that's what we were here for. I was intrigued by the courtbouillon omelet. To me, courbouillon was always (in Cajun cooking: it's a whole different thing in French) a fish stew with a roux-based tomato sauce served over rice. The waitress said it was mixed seafood with a sauce in an omelet. Okay, I'll take it, with a biscuit and grits, which I wasn't going to eat much of. While we waited, I picked up a box of seasoning from the table. It was T-Coon's The Stuff. Okay, I'd seen and used Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning for years, and on one of my recent visits I'd stopped at the Slap Ya Mama! store in Ville Platte on a Cajun friend's recommendation and bought a box of their seasoning, which was a bit better.

The breakfast came, and I noticed a nice touch: both biscuits were wrapped in some paper: old timey! But...where was the butter? K surfaced out of hers long enough to say "It doesn't need any." I took a bite. She was right. And, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I very lightly dusted the grits with The Stuff. Quite different from the others. But enough carbs: this omelet was sending my nose a message that my mouth needed to investigate. The courtbouillon turned out to be much thicker than I was used to, but the mixture of catfish, crawish, and shrimp, not to mention the seasoning, was exquisite.

As we were enjoying the meal, a guy with a T-Coon's shirt that said David on it came over to ask how we were doing. Then he asked where we were from  and K said "Austin." "Well," said David "I'll try to keep from makin' any librul jokes." A chorus of grunts came from behind me, and a couple of ominous chuckles. (I later saw that it was a quartet of gentlemen in camo, either Army or National Guard). I told him that his coutbouillon was different than what I'd encountered before and he was off, talking with passion about how he was about to raise his prices 12 ½ percent because he refused to stint on quality. "That's a quarter pound of crawish goes into each omelet. I have those links made by a friend over in Abbeville to my own recipe. The catfish comes from over in Mississippi and it's fresh, not frozen." It was a nice little conversation.

"I'm gonna change your life," he told me. "I'ma give her a box of The Stuff, and when she starts adding it to your food, well, look out: things are gonna get a lot better for both of you." And he told the waitress to make sure she gave K a box of it.

There it is: The Stuff

By avoiding politics and other minefields, I was rather liking David, because without mentioning tradition, he was still passionate about it. (You can see more of this passion on the front page of his website). As I waited in the car for K to finish smoking -- she only takes a few puffs, but puff she must, and she does it outside, not in the car -- I saw the list of daily lunch specials painted on the front of the restaurant: smothered rabbit, short-rib fricassée, smothered chicken and okra, and that courtbouillon on Fridays. But it was getting on, and we still had to vacate the hotel and get to Eunice.

We did, and now I have 20 lbs of sausage and tasso in the fridge waiting to be packed into freezer bags and frozen, except what I'll use to make red beans and rice (without rice) for dinner tonight. But before I press "publish" on this, I've been thinking about Cajun culture, tradition, and Americans.

My takeaway is this: As I've long realized, Americans are so alienated from their own country by this point that they usually don't know where they are. Oh, sure, they can check their phones and use Google Maps, but that's not where they are. The thousands of people who've moved to Austin since I last lived here, they don't know where they are, either. They've bought into the marketing slogan of keeping Austin weird, mouthed the slogan about the live music capital of America, but they don't know how it got that way in the first place, nor why it actually isn't either of these things any more.

And Americans who go to Cajun country don't know where they are, either. They come to Lafayette and stay there, possibly because they're attending a Ragin' Cajuns football game or doing oil business (not much of that left), or whatever. Few of them have even a superficial knowledge of where they are: the imagery in their heads are of alligators, crawfish, Blue Dogs, and swamps dripping with Spanish moss. There are accordions and fiddles involved somehow, probably to play blues, because the often-subtle distinctions between Cajun and Creole music is of no interest. They probably think Dr. John, Mac Rebbenack, is a Cajun. They don't understand the distinction between New Orleans and Lafayette, let alone New Orleans and Grand Mouton, Eunice, or Ville Platte. And ultimately, this is sad, especially if they spend more time there than we did this time. So they go to the Bon Ton and get their buttons pushed, no matter that it's a mediocre joint just a bit above a fast-casual restaurant. They hear piped-in blues, no matter that that's not the local indigenous music (hey, shaddup, Eddie Shuler), no matter that it's 21st century remakes by the Muzak Corporation or that ilk. They go away happy.

In no way will they want to engage with David Billeaud and T-Coon's, unless they happen in by mistake, in which case they'll be wary and a bit conservative about what they order and then be surprised that it's as good as it is. They're not going to get his cultural conservatism (not to mention his background music, which is mostly zydeco: I recognized two versions of "Hip et Tai-yo," both, I think, by Clifton Chenier), or understand why he'd rather raise his prices than compromise his quality. And if they got to talking politics, well, who knows?

Mr. LeJeune up in Eunice is just as culturally conservative as Billeaud is. He even makes ponce, a rarity which is sausage meat stuffed into a pig's stomach and smoked. I bought one last time I was there but couldn't find anyone to eat it with me. It was, unsurprisingly, excellent. I have no idea what his politics are, and after 35 years, I don't give a damn. Some things are above that, and these men have that figured out. They're members of their community, they practice their faith (which is Catholic: another ominous thing is the incursion of evangelical fundamentalism in Cajun culture, which could erase it before you know it), they interact with their neighbors, like the soldiers and the table of teachers who were finishing up when we walked in. And when I interact with them and their kind, I know where I am, know I'm a visitor who's treated with respect because I treat them with respect, as I would if they were visiting me. This is what's increasingly being lost in this country, as we tribalize and march towards one-party rule and fascism. It's an emergency, like so many other things happening at the moment, and an emergency that's so small it risks getting lost. I feel it because I don't feel at home in Austin, and haven't since returning almost five years ago, so it's a personal emergency for me.

Anyway, that's my takeaway. That and a box of The Stuff.

Notes From An Attic: The Never-Ending Vacation, Maimondes' Autograph, Promoting The Book, And More

Two months since I've touched this blog? Apparently so. And a very odd two months it's been. To recap: in early October, while on vacation in Spain, I received photos of water seeping outside the door to my house, which water proved to be the result of a toilet valve failing and 48 hours' worth of uncontrolled release of water. The landlord quickly shut it off, but sheetrock, ceiling, and wooden floors all needed replacing. He predicted three weeks or more.

More. If the most optimistic forecasts are correct, I'll have been out of the house for three months by the time I get to move back in. Christmas and New Years will be elsewhere. Fortunately "elsewhere" isn't as onerous as it might be: after a week and a half in a horrible, expensive, poorly-run "extended stay" hotel, a Facebook friend offered me one of his airbnb properties, this not being the high season, and I moved into an attic on his property. It has its down side.

First rule: don't be tall. Photo credit: Special K

Also, I packed for a three-to-four-week stay here, which meant I grabbed a few clothes and some kitchen stuff that was either in excess of what I needed or not enough. There's a stove (oven doesn't work) and a microwave, but cooking has been a problem. When the weather got cold, I had to buy some new shoes (fine: the winter shoes I bought in January sucked, and REI will take them back) and a down jacket thing (already have one, but can't get to it). Fortunately, the place is centrally located, which means I can walk a lot of places, and driving isn't quite the pain it is down south, where you have to drive places to get places. You kind of have to get out of where you are before you can start going where you're going, if you see what I mean. Here, it's a lot more like living in a city.

So I'm still living out of a suitcase, eating out much too much for my comfort (both dietary and financial), but things could be worse: the main focus of the past couple of months has been assuring a smooth launch for The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 1, which has certainly been interesting. Fortunately, so far most of the reviews have been very positive, and I've mostly done interviews with really intelligent people, like Gil Roth, whom I'd never heard of before, and Michaelangelo Matos, whom I had. There have been some radio interviews, most notably on KQED's Forum, which had the most chaotic, ill-prepared, ignorant host I'd ever dealt with. He'd never so much as opened the book, knew nothing of its subject, and couldn't keep the conversation on track. Unfortunately, I had a severe attack of cedar fever just as the mike went live, so I wasn't at my best initially, either. Fortunately, I recovered. The host...maybe not so much. And there was the Bellowing Celt who called in, completely bonkers. I'm still shaken, but I suspect that's the worst of it.

That cedar fever, too, has slowed me down some: there was a cold snap in Austin and the trees went wild. Me, I went to New York and Montreal, where it was cold enough, caught some kind of flu in all the subways and airplanes and trains and whatnot, so I had to deal with that and the cedar disease when I got back. I haven't been very active, to put it mildly. Oh, and in November there was the Texas Book Fair, where all the music book writers were up against one another, so who do you think got the crowds: Thomas Dolby, me, or the woman who wrote a biography of Guy Clark, beloved late Texas songwriter, who, instead of having a panel in the Capitol building, had the Paramount Theater at her disposal, and had several local high-profile songwriters on board to do some of Guy's songs? I got to the signing tent, there was a huge line...but not for me, of course: her publisher had sensibly augmented Barnes & Nobel's supply. B&N only had 30 books for me to sign, and five were for the store. There were a lot more at Book People, though, for the official release event, and I even had to go down again to sign another raft of them there. (They have 'em on mail-order, too, if you want one).

Still there, newly renovated for your Manhattan office address. Brill himself was in the menswear biz. 

This is all pretty un-chronological, I see, but at the end of November, I went to New York for a week on a project totally unrelated to the book (but got a bit of promo, if you can call five minutes' worth of interview on an AM New York Jesus station "promo": who knew New York had a Jesus station called THE ANSWER? Who knew New York had a Jesus station at all? What can the listenership of an AM station like that be?). Before I left, though, I decided to go to a couple of museums as long as I was in town, and it really felt good.

MOMA had the first US retrospective of Surrealist painter Francis Picabia, whom I'd mostly known as a major pain in the ass to the entire Paris art scene throughout Cubism, Surrealism, and beyond. It wasn't until after I saw the show that I learned that at the age of 15, Francis, son of a wealthy man, learned to paint so that he could copy his father's collection of old Spanish paintings, replace them with his copies, and sell the originals to dealers so he could buy expensive stamps for his stamp collection. That, however, is consistent with the rest of his life, as is the excerpt from one of his writings that gives the show its title: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. His thoughts certainly did: austere drawings of machines that actually do nothing, colorful abstracts, odd cartoon-like stuff, bland but disturbing hyper-realist oils, some of them sourced from soft-porn magazines, during the German occupation of France, and, if your feet are tired, you can sit and watch a film he and René Clair made called entr'acte, which was shown during the intermission (entr'acte) of an Erik Satie ballet. It's exhausting and goofy, and the show made my day. Heads off to Picabia!

The show I knew I wanted to see, however, was up at the Met, and I devoted a day to it: Jerusalem, 1000-1400, Every People Under Heaven.  It was a bit odd: having not quite returned from a trip to Spain to try to get a handle on the three-culture Christian-Jewish-Muslim culture there, from which Crusaders went off to try to "reclaim" the Holy Land, here I was in New York watching the story from the other end of the telescope. It's not a particularly arty show, because two of the religions involved weren't much on representational art, and also because a lot of the prize exhibits are books. Delicate and tending towards fading, they're displayed in darkish rooms, and you really have to want to look at them -- and you need to to get the show's message.  Here's a beautiful illuminated manuscript, obviously French 14th century, groaning with gold leaf, showing a biblical scene. The lettering's in Hebrew, though, and it was used by the Jewish community of Tours. Here is a deluxe fold-out map of Jerusalem, prepared for tourists -- or, rather, for a tourist, since it's hand-lettered and hand-illustrated. Of course, the guy who did it had never been there, but it's still amazingly accurate. Over here, a letter asking that some hostages be freed -- the caption says such letters are quite common from this period -- signed by Maimondes! That gave me an electric shock and once again reminded me that this story I've been chasing -- whatever it is -- spreads over a huge area. I have to say, the show is huge, painstakingly fair to all sides, and not only fills in a lot of blanks on the three-culture story for me, but also shows that the idea of the tourist trap is millenia old: lots of the stuff on display was made for pilgrims to take back to Europe with them. Only open until January 8, so get down there if you can.

Most of the rest of my time has been spent waiting for the house down south to be finished. At some time after the first of the year, I'm confident that my publisher will make an offer for Vol. 2 of the book, and I can get back to doing what I do best: writing. I may attempt a couple of signing tours -- I'm trying to work one up with Amtrak so that I can take the train up the West Coast -- which I'll have to finance myself. But that's in the future: right now I want to move back into my house, sit on my couch, sleep in my bed, and cook in my kitchen again. Three months is too damn long. When you're walking up Madison Avenue (to the Grand Central Oyster Bar: some things never change) and you realize that you're taking a vacation from your vacation and soon will be on a train to Montreal to visit friends as a vacation from the vacation to the vacation, you realize how much you miss having a home.

Of course, I've been feeling that way for about two years now, and the recent election only firmed up my decision to leave again once this next book is finished. I could, and no doubt will, go into that in some detail. But not today. Today is Christmas Eve in the attic. I have to stockpile some food for the weekend. Ho ho ho, y'all.

Barcelona, Back To Texas, Viewing The Ruins

The room might not have been great, but Barcelona still was. I only had the afternoon to do all the things I'd planned, if I could beat back the drumbeat of the oncoming chaos I was sure would greet me in Texas. One thing I knew: I'd need some new clothes, because I wouldn't have access to mine for a while. Anyway, all the weight I'd lost in the past year meant all the pants I had that fit me -- two pairs of regular ones and one of Levi 501s -- were in my suitcase. I had the Levis on. They'd need washing soon.

I've always like the clothing I'd seen in the high-end Spanish shops along the Paseig de Gracia and, indeed, on some of the Spanish men walking along the street, so, since it was nearby, I went over to the Corta Inglés, the giant department store one sees all over Spain, to see what it offered. It was much like any other department store except that it had Spanish stuff (and, of course, a giant supermarket in the basement, the only part of the store I'd ever been to). The guy at the Hugo Boss boutique on the men's floor even suggested I look at Spanish brands, which were just what I wanted, as it turned out, and considerably cheaper than what brands I can get in Austin like Ralph Lauren and Boss and so on were offering. Two shirts and a pair of pants later, I had what I needed. I'm not a shopping-as-therapy kind of guy, but it did feel good to know that I wouldn't be naked in Austin.

And yes, I did head to the basement to pick up three cans of olives stuffed with anchovies and a couple of cans of Spanish tuna. I'm not a complete idiot.

And, as is my custom, I had my last dinner in town at the always-wonderful Nou de Granados, one of my favorite restaurants: a nice salad, and oxtails in a wine reduction on a pillow of truffled mashed potatoes, garnished with potato chips. Don't sneer at potato chips in Spain: they're a great example of the virtue of simplicity. I can't eat many because of the diabetes, but when they're perfectly crisp and greaseless but redolent of fine Spanish olive oil -- as these and many I was offered at bars were -- they put Lay's and the like to shame.

The next morning I woke early, had a decent breakfast downstairs in the hotel and grabbed a cab to the airport. Barcelona to Paris Charles de Gaulle (the hellish Terminal 2) to Atlanta to Austin. I was lucky: not only had I bought economy plus fare (recommended for large or tall people and/or people with legs, not to mention those of us who've experienced lower vein thrombosis or a pulmonary embolism as the result of a long flight), but it was a Tuesday, so not that many people were travelling, and I had no seatmate. Air France has a fairly crappy selection of films (unless you've always wanted to see The Angry Birds Movie with Arabic subtitles), so I had lots of time to read and think.

Something that's always annoyed me about the menu at the Nou has been the silly errors in the English translation, in particular "backed" for "baked." If I lived in Barcelona, I'd offer to edit their menu in exchange for a bottle of wine or something. (They've also confused "cherries" with "cherry tomatoes," the former of which one doesn't really hope to see in the Caesar salad -- and doesn't) But something Miguel had said in Madrid clicked in my head. He'd noted that Franco had suppressed the teaching of languages during his reign. I knew he'd suppressed Catalán and Basque and Valencian because he rightly feared that allowing them would lead to nationalism, but apparently all foreign languages were ignored until the university level, when it's arguably harder to learn a new tongue. So unlike Germany or France, elementary school kids didn't start adding languages until after Franco was gone.

Of course, this was just the end-point of the story I'd been living in for the past couple of weeks: in 1492, Spain expelled its mathematicians, physicians, philosophers, navigators, businessmen, bankers and intellectuals -- ie, its Arabs and Jews -- turning the country into a land of peasants under the mighty heel of an autocratic church and its Inquisition and a bloated and not very intelligent class of aristocrats, up to and including the royal family.

King Fernando VII, by Goya (detail). Does this look like a reasonable man? An intelligent one? Right on both counts, and obviously Goya detested him.

By the time Spain revolted and threw out the Inquisition in the early 19th century, it had missed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and had to import British and German workers to ramp up their technology. Fortunately, those workers did a great job -- and the Germans taught the Spaniards how to make good beer and sausages. To this day, a Frankfurt is a Spanish joint featuring beer and sausages! But the progress was halted again with the appearance of Fascism in the 20th century: it wasn't until 1974 that the transition to democracy -- and cultural freedom -- began, which is why the vibe of post-Communist Berlin is still noticeable in the air.

Spanish design of the '60s and '70s: a collection of SEAT automobiles in the Valencia train station. 

I think this explains a lot about Spain, and why it appeals to me: the process of discovery of new possibilities is still in the air, the Catalan secession movement may not succeed, but, like the Scottish one, may force some interesting and needed change, and the arts and the young people who make them, are still charging ahead.

* * *

Meanwhile, I was on an Air France flight back to a country where, for the first time in its history, it was being challenged by an overtly Fascist candidate in a Presidential election. And, on a more personal level, I was returning to a house that was unlivable and many possessions that had been destroyed, including materials I'd need for my next book. To soften the blow, I rented two nights in the most reasonable hotel I could find, actually a big B&B in Travis Heights that I found on the Hotel Tonight app. The first night, I just crashed, destroyed by 20 hours of flying and changing planes, including two hellish airports, CDG Terminal 2 and Atlanta, where CNN is blaring at an unreasonable volume out of the sound system. The next day, a friend and I went to see what was left of my house. 

It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. 

Looking from the living room into the office: the toilet that exploded was in the bathroom whose entry is seen on the left. 

These giant honking dehumidifying fans were everywhere. The electric bill will be stupendous, but I do believe the damage will be far less because of them.

Not a great picture, but a lot of stuff was saved. 

My landlord was great: he sprung into action and got a company involved that specializes in this kind of rescue. Despite my lack of renters insurance, his insurance covers the packing and storage of the contents of the house until it can be rebuilt. (Presumably they also bring the stuff back, too). The company gave me the weekend to take what I wanted for the period ahead, which, jetlagged and just a bit traumatized, I sort of did. I checked into the Extended Stay America on the corner of W. 6th and Guadelupe for a week, and arranged for a Facebook friend's airbnb to be my home for a month after that. Heaven knows if the renovation will be done by then; the landlord says the construction folks say it'll be ready by Thanksgiving, but he thinks mid-December is more likely. Whatever. All I can do is take it a day at a time, passively waiting for word.

Eventually, there'll be dealing with Austin Water and the electric company. On November 6, I'll be on a panel at the Texas Book Festival with Joe Nick Patoski and David Dunton, my agent, talking about writing about music from two viewpoints: biographical (Joe Nick's specialty) and historical (mine) and how the two approaches do in the marketplace. It's free, and I'll be signing some early copies of both the rock and roll history and the Michael Bloomfield book. If you're in town, drop by. If you can't make it then, there'll be a rock and roll history release party at Book People on the 19th.

* * *

This hotel I'm writing this in is a circle of hell, and I'll be glad to be shut of it in a couple of days (the parent corporation has been pestering me with e-mails for my thoughts, and boy are they going to get them!), but when I moved in, I decided to try an experiment. Downtown Austin, in the 20 years I spent in Europe, changed utterly and completely. It's like aliens dropped an entire new city onto a few square miles, but I decided to try a little experiment while I'm here and spend as much time walking and looking at the new city as I could. There are primitive cooking facilities in the hotel, and there's the Whole Foods corporate mothership within walking distance, again making it my neighborhood supermarket like it was 30 years ago (except in a different location and with about a dozen times the floor-space). Waterloo Records and Book People are also at 6th and Lamar, and there are loads of new high-rises and boutiques and restaurants scattered all through the west downtown and what the property developers call the "warehouse district," which, yes, it used to be. 

There's been much talk during the development of this of a "revitalized downtown" and a "walkable city" and how much revenue the property taxes will bring the city. I had lunch with a lifelong Austinite who used to live downtown yesterday, and his views were very interesting. "When I was down here," which was in the '70s and '80s, "the residential population of downtown was between 1000 and 2000. Now it's more like 20,000," although another friend had noted that many of the new buildings are 30% empty because they're used as second residences or "investments." I mentioned to my friend that as I'd walked the streets -- something not too many other people seemed to be doing -- I'd noticed that not only the people I'd seen, but the whole way the residences were marketed, were young, rich, and white. The boutiques also slanted that way, and certainly the restaurants did. (Many are parts of luxury chains with branches in upscale parts of California, Arizona, and elsewhere in Texas, and there's a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse not far from my hotel). 

"Yeah," he said, "there was a lot of talk about rentals and a certain percentage of affordable housing, but in practice the way that plays out is that the renters of the affordable spaces live there for a while and then get offered enticing buy-outs so the developers can up the prices or condominiumize the place. As for the places that are already condos, they're hit and miss." He pointed out a couple that are pretty full, and indeed there's one particularly hideous one near me that's all lit up at night with just about every unit seeming to be full. Others, though, especially some of the more expensive ones, don't seem to be much occupied at night. Still, they keep building them and advertising luxury. Certainly West 6th, which is the thoroughfare I'm on and which I walk daily, is lined by very upscale bars (and a few corpses of failed ones), in contrast to East 6th, which has been party central for ages, and attracts frat boys and sorority girls to bars where the aim is to get blotto. West 6th isn't much different, but I sense that the bars are more expensive here. Offering valet parking for $6 to $10, which you won't see on the other side of Congress Avenue, they seem tonier, the patrons better-dressed and maybe more seniors and MBA candidates or law-school types than on the other side. It's comforting that UT's jeunesse dorée has its own blotto-toria. 

As for the restaurants, I've found very few I'd want to return to. An exception is Lambert's, which has made a workable gimmick out of very good barbeque served in a fine dining context. But even there, the sheet listing the day's specials included a $27 shot of bourbon. As I remarked to a friend last night, for three times that you could probably buy an entire bottle of it. And Manuel's is doing a good job with upscale Mexican food, which needn't be as expensive as you'd think. The service bordered on servile when I was there, but it's usually a good bet. 

It's a cliché for old Austinites to lament what's passed, but to me, there's change and there's change. I'd be a lot more in favor of the new downtown if it were more racially, economically, and culturally inclusive. It's not. I love the idea of waking up what was a wasteland of auto parts shops, printing supplies, and derelict spaces, but it looks like greed had far more to do with it than I'm comfortable with. Imagine that. 

And yet, and yet... One of my favorite memories of West 6th was the spring day I had lunch at Hut's Hamburgers (still there! -- although now paired with an inedible pizza joint) and was walking back to my car, crossing the small bridge over Shoal Creek, and saw a mother turtle plodding down the creekside, with five or six youngsters following her. The other day, I was walking back from Whole Foods on the other side of the street and saw something by the creek. I stopped and held my breath: a heron, four feet tall, was stalking down the creek. It was a really magnificent bird, and I edged closer to the side of the sidewalk to look at it. A Type 1 jogger, togged out in expensive sportswear with some sort of phone/music player strapped to his bicep, swooshed past, hissing "Thanks" as he went by. I didn't do it for you, man. But I'd do it for a few seconds more with that bird. Anytime. 

Critter Report, Summer 2016

Any day that starts with a lizard in my pants is okay with me. This morning, I walked out of the bathroom, put on a t-shirt, reached for my pants, and saw a swift motion out of the corner of my eye. Fortunately, I didn't reach out to smash whatever it was, mostly because I thought it was a roach, and those guys are filled with goo that you have to clean up. Nope, I could see it clearly, looking up at me: a tiny lizard. And I knew just which one it was.

• • •

Don't make it sound too good. Tell 'em we got bugs that'll hurt you bad. Plants that'll poison you. There's rattlesnakes and other critters that don't mean you no good. People should think about that before they decide to move here.

Hondo Crouch, in an interview with me, Luckenbach, Sept. 26, 1976

* * *

I grew up in a lizardless region, the New York suburbs. There were salamanders, and I always liked our vacations in Vermont because there were toads and frogs around the lake the cabin we rented was on, but there were few critters around the place I spent most of my time. 

But, as Hondo Crouch (who died the day after I interviewed him) made clear, that simply isn't the case in Texas. You've got to be careful in Texas. The plants can get you: I've never seen such opulent poison oak as used to thrive in the woods by my old house on West 9 ½ Street. Pecan trees were everywhere, and you could pick up a snack any time from the windfalls. If, that is, you were willing to crack them and then very, very carefully pick out the membrane from the meat. It contains so much tannic acid that your mouth will pucker so badly you'll be hard pressed to get anything in it. And of course, there's cactus, but nothing as lethal as the cholla that's all over the place in Arizona. 

Some of the animal life seems incredibly exotic, too. One morning my dog got very excited, the hair standing up on his back as he ran around on tiptoe, growling. I was still asleep and yeah, I heard something walking outside the window, but it was moving quickly and after a while the dog calmed down. After breakfast, the dog and I went on our customary walk in the woods and found two cops with Stetsons and rifles on horseback, and a very excited little Latina girl, about six. "Did you see the pantera?" she asked. "Yeah," one of the cops said. "We got a report on a panther on the loose around here." It happens, I guess. The lady next door to me complained about armadillos digging up her garden, and I'd see them occasionally when I went to pick up my girlfriend in way-far-north Austin (hardly way-far-north these days, of course) and once, on Thanksgiving, I was invited to dinner out in the country, and took a British friend who was about to return home. "I've really enjoyed my stay here," he said, "but I'm sorry I've never seen an armadillo." As if by magic, two appeared at the side of the road. They were, um, making more armadillos. 

So far, there's been a decided lack of such critters here in suburban far south Austin. There are birds, of course. My office looks out on my back yard and I can hear birds with the windows open, which alerts me to their presence. For a while, I had a woodpecker who pecked a wound in one of the trees he visited daily. The wound bled sap, which was sweet, ants were attracted to it, and the bird would show up to eat them. I'd always assumed there were bugs in the wood that they were after. There's also a cardinal couple, who seem to hunt as a pair. He is the most brilliant red imaginable outside of the tropics, a magnificent bird. She, conforming to the ways of birds, isn't. She's a kind of drab brown with a tiny bit of red on her head. That seems to be how bird love works: "Darling, I've seen some drab females in my life, but you're really drab." "Ooh, listen to mister sweet-talk." 

The one bird I've been wanting to see, but hadn't until recently, was the monk parakeet. Friends tell me of them visiting their yard, but they don't come here. Finally, one day when I was walking to the nearby middle school to vote -- it might have been the primary -- I heard a familiar sound, and sure enough two green birds, bickering loudly, swooped over my head and onto a branch. I have no idea why they don't come to this side of South First, but I've never seen one here, although I'm about ⅛ of a mile from that sighting. I also enjoy them in Barcelona, where they seem to outnumber pigeons. 

Bigger than a budgie, and surprisingly omnipresent. Wikipedia photo

But this year I made the decision not to mow the back yard. This was in large part because of the regal toad that used to come every night and sit beneath the light on the back of the house, which also attracted bugs, or, as he thought of them, dinner. I hoped there were more critters out there. Benign ones, of course. And there were: as springtime came on and the rains let up a bit, at sunset giant clouds of lightning bugs would lift off of the plants back there, a luminous flying carpet. That was nice. And I knew I was getting somewhere when I found a small brown Cuban anole hanging out on the deck sunning himself. 

The toad hasn't been back, but the back yard wasn't my only concern. The tree in my front yard was host some days to a magnificent Texas spiny lizard, which I'd never seen before, and whose commanding presence (at about 11") just plain looked good, even though he was expert at dodging the camera. 

Not a great shot, but not mine, either. Wikipedia.

He hasn't been back yet, either, but I gather they have a pretty good range they wander, eating bugs as they go. Welcome back any time, dude. 

And I was aware that there was other critter action in the front, dating from two years ago, when I found a J-shaped toad turd in the driveway, and running up to early May of this year, when I returned from shopping to find a small snake waiting by the front door. I ran inside and grabbed a camera (or maybe it was my phone) and found he'd stuck his head under a pile of leaf litter, so I took a stick and pulled him back to photograph. His head arched up and he took a good snap at the stick, hard enough that I felt it. Then he sat back and let his picture get took:

Healthy snake, wounded stick

A Texas garter snake, a useful website told me. 

I haven't seen him since, but I suspect he showed up because a bit up the hill Google Fiber was putting in cable. This has resulted in a bunch of eco-upheaval, because there's a tiny stream up there, right where they're working, and its critters are abandoning it. The most remarkable one I've seen was hanging out in the parking space in front of my house, fortunately when I was carrying my phone. 

Somewhat traumatized by the speed at which he was moved, a red-eared slider,  who later moved on to another small creek. 

You can tell by the pattern on the shell that he was just hanging out in a diminishing stream when the decision was made for him to move. Nine inches long, and plenty heavy. 

Then there was the night when I went out to light the grill and this guy hitched a ride on my shoe and hopped off when we returned to the house.

Not a great photo, but he was jumping around like crazy, and I wanted him outside where he could do some good: a tiny, tiny toadlet who could have perched on a quarter. Progeny of Back Door Toad? Maybe, maybe. At any rate, a quick ride on a piece of paper, and back to foraging for bugs. 

Because there are bugs. Anybody who lives here knows that. The most common one is the ant, of which Texas seems to have 23,847 kinds. My computer hasn't gotten clogged with Raspberry Crazy Ants, fortunately, but there are small ants who manage to squeeze through the windows, and, recently, great big ants I call Iron Ants because you step on them and they kind of go "ow" and keep on walking. They hold regular love-ins in my shower, where I literally pour cold water on their assembly, and they either go down the drain or retreat behind the shower lining into the wall. Last night, though, I saw something odd that I've never seen before: an Iron Ant walking with another one in its mandibles, a kind of a T walking across the living room floor. I have no idea what that was about. 

And, sadly, there are roaches. Mostly, there are the big ones, the ones you can't step on unless you want to get down on the floor with a paper towel or something to clean up the ooze that results. My research, though, says that these so-called palmetto bugs or waterbugs don't want to be in the house, since it's not their natural habitat. The way I deal with them now is to stun them with a broom and then go all Canadian on their asses and play curling with them, opening the door and launching them outside. Sometimes I say "cheeseburger" to alert the neighbohood reptiles and birds that a sumptuous meal awaits. (Or any Thais who might be around: I found a small Thai grocery here that sells them canned, and in Montpellier there was a Thai restaurant with an insect menu that I never went near). They're not real smart, but they are real fast. And, according to Wikipedia, they're properly called American cockroaches. The ones you don't want because they do want to live in your house (and which you can whack with impunity) are brown, or German cockroaches. I never saw one in my 15 years in Germany, so maybe this is a xenophobic leftover from one of the World Wars, like "liberty cabbage" for sauerkraut or the more recent Freedom Fries. 

Another new visitor this year was one I found irrationally scary. I routinely approach the bathroom by my bedroom with watchful eyes, because there appear to be a couple of entryways from outdoors, and the big roaches get in. Well, the other night there wasn't a roach, but under the sink was a three-inch scorpion, reddish brown. There are over 1000 species of scorpions, none of the ones in Texas are lethal (for that you have to go to the Sonora desert in Arizona), but I, a Scorpio, freaked out, whisked it out with the broom, and stomped the hell out of it. Then I swept it out the door and waited for the adrenaline to subside. 

Right there, on the wall, under the brace, that's where it was. 

But wait, the lizard in your pants, aren't you going to tell us about that? Well, yes, because the above photo is about that, in a way. 

A few weeks back, I was passing in and out, grilling something for dinner, and a two-inch brown Mediterranean gecko (not unlike the Moroccan geckos who occasionally visited in France) ran in. I tried to dissuade him, but no soap: he ran to where I couldn't get him and it was at a crucial part of dinner so I gave up. Anyway, I don't mind a gecko in the house. They have prodigious appetites, and the summer I moved away from Austin to go to Berlin, my house suddenly had two of them in the kitchen. There had been a problem with German roaches, as there usually is in a house with no central air conditioning and open windows and doors. There was, within 24 hours of these two moving in, no longer a problem with German roaches at all. And, with his propinquity to the shower and the ant love-ins, I suspect this one had found a good place to hang and was hanging and dining well. I tried to photograph him, but it was before I'd had my coffee, so it didn't happen: the camera refused to click when I had him in focus and when I returned with the phone (and its clip-on fancy lenses) he'd vanished. But I was curious why the camera wasn't working so I aimed it at the under-sink area, and hence the above photo. 

I'm blessedly without mammals, although a large, fat white cat with black blotches saunters through my yard each day. He is manifestly not welcome: I caught him staring at an area where the toad hung out during the day last year, and wished I had a pan of water to throw at him. Cats are stupid hunters and predators, and with the cardinals and the various reptilia, I just don't want them in the yard. And yes, there are squirrels. I don't pay them much mind, but this spring, there was a very cool sighting. Remember Pizza Rat? He was a thing on the internet a few months ago, a tiny rat straining to take a mammoth slice of pizza down the stairs to the New York subway. Well, one day this spring, I noticed a squirrel behaving oddly, and saw that it had a slice of pizza in its mouth. No camera nearby, no phone, and he was moving quickly: he was, after all, bigger than Pizza Rat, and the slice was smaller. And I kind of felt sorry for him.  Pizza Rat was rewarded by a luscious New York slice. Poor Pizza Squirrel probably had Domino's. But no matter where it was from, it didn't matter: none of us critters in Austin have access to good pizza. 

On Returning, Part...Uh...

Lord, it's been a while since I touched this thing. I have to keep reminding myself it's not just a travel diary, but, then, what else has been of interest recently? I've been contemplating using my new camera to keep a log of the critters that have been in and out of the house, but I'm waiting for a moment when there's a critical mass of critter-to-photo data. Anyway, the summer's only just settled in. I'm sure there'll be more.

As for the rest, I'm mainly just hanging around waiting for the books to come out. Not a lot to write about there. I'm reading, doing very little writing, taking the opportunity to grab DVDs from Netflix while they're still trafficking in physical media, and, well, that's about it.

But it was that last bit that inspired me to write something today. A friend recommended a film, suspecting that I might have a reaction to it. Since none of the things I actually want to see on my Netflix queue are coming very quickly, this one got delivered last week and I watched it last night.

Having been elsewhere during his ascent as a filmmaker (although I think I got screwed by Mother Jones under his leadership), I'd never seen this one, but the premise intrigued me: Moore visits ("invades") a bunch of mostly-European countries, "stealing" good ideas to take back home as the spoils of his invasion. Thus, we learn about why Finland's educational system rates as the highest in the world, how workers in Italy get so much time off but still manage to be productive and competitive with other economies, why the French take school lunches and sex education so seriously, and so on. So I watched it, and fired off this e-mail to the guy who suggested I watch it. I've edited it somewhat, but this is mostly first-draft, top-of-the-head stuff.

* * *

On your recommendation, I checked out that Michael Moore film last night. Knew most of it, of course. Some random comments. 

 

As you might expect, I looked for counter-arguments and/or hidden nuances behind the rosy pictures he presented. Here are a few of them. 

FRANCE: Despite the nutritional benefits of those school cafeterias, he tiptoed around the big issue, which is that they also have to accommodate Jewish and Muslim students by observing dietary laws. The good news is, Kashruth and Hallal are almost identical. The bad news is, nativist right-wingers are using this as a wedge: several schools in more right-wing parts of the country have refused to stop serving pork. This became a major issue in Denmark, actually, where the Right is blooming like the Occupation never happened. 

ITALY: Yeah, that lifestyle looks good, but a lot of Italians don't pay the taxes that support it and it's a good question how much longer they'll be able to keep going unless some serious enforcement among the titans of industry takes place. On the other hand, Berlusconi is obviously dying, and I would imagine his type of "legit" "businessman" (ie, non-mafia) is also becoming a thing of the past, since there's no postwar economy to build up and make obscene profits from these days. 

GERMANY: Yes, they're hyper-vigilant about any possibility that fascism will return. So much so that neighbors like Austria and Denmark worry about the effect on free speech and the foreigner-in-the-street wonders why the few undeniably positive things that can be said about German culture and history are so rarely mentioned. In fact, that's one of the things that made life there finally unbearable for me. Well, that and the food and the weather. But the fact that they've hidden the remains of the Old Synagogue in Berlin always spoke volumes to me: starting in the 18th century, it spawned a revolution in Jewish thinking, leading to a renaissance in German intellectual life, German business, and, not coincidentally, the birth of Reform Judaism. But not a peep about that on site, and Libeskind's much-vaunted Jewish Museum, like much contemporary German thinking, continues to present Jews as victims. 

(I'm having zero luck finding the photos that went along with this blog post and hope they're still recoverable, and the post makes far less sense without them, but whaddya gonna do?)

NORWAY, FINLAND & SLOVENIA: One thing missing here is the lives the ordinary people live, and the spaces in which they live them. Mile after mile of postwar identi-housing, very small living quarters, dreary public spaces. Of course, some of this is inherent in the physical properties of the countries themselves. My guess is that prison in Norway isn't quite as cheerful in February as it was when Moore and his crew visited, and yes, the old town of Ljubljana sure is pretty but I'd guess that a ten-minute walk in any direction from the central square puts you smack in the middle of a bunch of Tito-era kleenex-box buildings. And it's nice that the Finns enforce equality the way they do, but it's a very small population they're dealing with, so micro-solutions work. 

TUNISIA: Moore's surprise ending may well present an over-optimistic view of the situation here, the one country in the film that I don't have as much first- or second-hand knowledge as I'd need to comment with any authority. The reactionary Islamist forces aren't as benign as the old man with bad teeth who comments here, especially the ones operating out of the country's neighbors like Algeria and Morocco. My optimism is a bit more guarded than what's on display here. 

The film seems to naively suggest that these solutions -- made, as several Europeans note, out of American ideas (Thomas Dewey, among others, I imagine) -- could work if applied here. The problem with that is that they *are* in fact American ideas, and they've been tried and discarded here. Not always for good or even desirable reasons, or with enough of a trial period to make a reasonable assessment of their viability or worth, but there is definitely a large, well-funded, powerful opposition to them. Barring a catastrophe, our grandchildren will die of old age before even modest progress will be made along those lines. In other words, I continue to believe that this country is doomed. Self-doomed, at that. 

As I am not the first to mention, Moore is a very clever polemicist and propagandist. It's just that it feels nice to be in the choir being preached to. For a change. 

Moore does not look well. He's gargantuan, and it's all fat. Expect we'll be losing him soon.

* * *

If you think the above touches on my ongoing deep ambivalence about my repatriation to the US, well, you don't win a prize. For a long time after my last blog post, way back there in April after returning from France and Spain, I struggled to make clear an idea that had formed during the trip, and finally it came to me. I had returned from a civil society to a highly uncivil one. This goes way beyond the events of this past week here, the various cop shootings and shootings of cops, or the candidacy of the most manifestly unsuited candidate for President in American history. For me the annoyances are far more granular: the way people drive, the astounding amount of self-absorption, the refusal to give an inch in compromise, even when all that's gained is getting to the red light faster. I try not to let it get to me, and I fail a lot. I got too used to something different, and it's not that I'm having trouble adjusting, it's that I resolutely don't want to adjust. 

I'm pretty sure by the time we figure that all out it'll be way too late. As for me, I have two books coming up that I have to promote, as well as another one to plan and, I hope, write. So for now, I have to stay where I am, get out when I can, and put one foot in front of the other. Live like the alcoholics, as I always tell people, one day at a time. And plan my escapes wisely: I may well be house sitting in Jersey City and then go to Montreal next month, and I'm planning a trip to Spain at the end of September and the beginning of October. Then back to taking it as it comes. Which is okay, given that I'm living somewhere I don't particularly like. But hell, I've done that before, and at least I'm pretty capable of expressing myself in its native language. 

SXSW '16: Where Did It Go?

Events that lead off with deaths tend to be muted, and so it was for SXSW this year. Even before it started, the news that my old friend and former Rolling Stone editor and housemate John Morthland had been found dead at his home on Monday the 7th was on a lot of people's minds. Mostly us old folks, of course, those who knew him or passed his way. Although he apparently lived nearby, I never ran into him or saw him socially since I've been back. He was very private, very mysterious. Then, at the end of that week, news came that Louis Jay Meyers, a co-founder of the event who was also a musician, an artists manager, event promoter, and former head of the Folk Alliance had had a fatal heart attack in his sleep. This news came as President Obama was addressing the conference, an event I missed due to a Fresh Air taping.

So this was all history by the time my SXSW began this year, on Friday. I hadn't particularly prepared for the event, but I knew the first thing I would do: BANG! The Bert Berns Story had its premiere on Friday evening at the State Theater, and, having seen a rough cut some weeks back, I was anxious to see it on the big screen. The film had its genesis with a Fresh Air piece I'd done some years ago, after which I'd been contacted by Brett Berns, the producer/songwriter's son, to thank me for it. He talked about doing a full biography of his dad, which sounded great, but perhaps because I was still living in France, the topic faded out. Later, I heard that Joel Selvin had gotten a deal to write it, and figured the project was in good hands. Then, when it was turned into a documentary and Bob Sarles signed on to direct it, I got excited, because Sarles is good at what he does. The film, as expected, was pretty wonderful, and told the story of Berns' short but action-packed life -- music, gangsters, money, and the looming diagnosis of a weak heart due to childhood rheumatic fever hanging over his head -- in fine fashion. After the screening, various unsavory characters were spotted in the lobby.

Director Bob Sarles, right, at the premiere. Photo by telebob

I now know better than to attempt to attend most of the Interactive panels. They're mostly hype for a book or an app, anyway: one learns to read between the lines of the titles and descriptions. Last year, I'd gone to a couple of South Bites food panels, but this year they were more oriented towards technology and less towards discussions of issues, and a couple were pretty obviously "sponsored." Any time you see a panel entitled "The Future Of ______ " you can bet that the presenters have seen the future and it's them.

Sunday was the 12th annual Ed and Jon Breakfast, this year at Manuel's again, which made it a bit hoity-toitier than when it was at Curra's, and a lot of the people who RSVP'd didn't show (it being the first day of Daylight Savings Time might have had something to do with that) but it was a good time even with the smaller crowd. After that, I sauntered over to the Convention Center to pick up my bags and program books and check out the trade fair.

I've always been a devotee of trade fairs, and a quick trip around my desk shows various useful and not-so-useful things I've picked up at them, just as my closet has a few t-shirts for mysterious Taiwanese tech incubators and one from Adobe that, in a fine example of techie arrogance, declares "I know something you don't know." Well, don't we all? But that gets worn only as an undershirt. This year, though, the show was big, both in terms of exhibitors and square footage, although it was as enigmatic as ever in terms of just exactly what some of the stuff was. There was the usual film stuff, the gear pretty to look at, the services not of much use to me. Then there were all the apps for things some people might find necessary, less music sharing than in the past, more stuff of use to businesses. An aisle of future-of-food exhibitors had some interesting folks: a tuna-fish vendor whose product was guaranteed to have no mercury was pitching to pregnant women and kids, and gave me a can of tuna, which will come in useful, although the pitchman said he ate tuna about five days a week, which I thought excessive. Still, he's in the business.  There was also the mysterious Pico Brew, which claims, against all scientific evidence, to be able to make five liters of craft beer out of preassembled ingredient packs from a long list of brewers, in two hours. I don't have much experience making beer, but someone who does asked how you can do a second fermentation in so little time, and now I'm wondering, too. And something calling itself the National Hispanic Cultural Center turned out to be a front for Bueno Foods, who gave me a fistful of coupons and a very interesting cookbook. There were fewer enigmatic stands than usual, although Japan had a row of app developers whose products made no sense at all: "Your stuffed animals can chat with each other!" one booth proclaimed. It was a very long time ago, but I remember having a small menagerie and it never once occurred to me that they weren't chatting with each other when I was away. But then, I had an imagination. I do wonder how that may have changed when I see parents letting smartphones calm their little kids. But that's a rant for another time.

I had some other takeaways from the trade fair. Like this thing. It has a peel-away strip for an adhesive on the back, and is made from some kind of rubber. I have no idea what it is.

Quarter added for scale. 

Anyone?

There were a couple of booths selling clip-on lenses for iPhones, and I was impressed with this one, and even more impressed once I bought it and took it home to play with. There's a wide-angle, a fisheye, a zoom, and a macro lens for extreme closeups which you get by unscrewing the fisheye lens.

A bit unwieldy in that it's hard to carry in your pocket the way your regularly-configured phone can be, but I believe it'll get some use, especially in the next couple of weeks. And out in the atrium of the Convention Center, Mazda, one of the event's sponsors, had a deal whereby if you signed up (I had, in advance) you could get rides within six miles of the event anywhere in town. Anticipating this, I'd parked in front of a friend's house in South Austin and taken Lyft (another sponsor) to Manuel's. Mazda got me back for free. (Which is good, because tricky Lyft was charging a 75% surcharge due to increased demand. At least it wasn't Uber, who, as I noted in January, charged me a super-premium rate with no warning, and who are now trying to unseat an Austin city councilwoman who -- horrors!! -- is trying to get them to do background checks on their drivers. Regulation? Libertarian billionaires will have none of that! Mazda also handed me this when I got my ID bracelet for the rides. Apparently the clip grabs your rearview mirror and your smartphone-cum-GPS fits into it.

Clip hidden on right by inept photographer

I had to sit out the Monday events -- none of which looked appealing anyway -- in favor of going over the copy-edited manuscript of the Bloomfield book and answering the fact checker's questions, but Tuesday afternoon saw me at the Rollins Theater at the Long Center for a couple of films. The first one was Goodnight Brooklyn: The Story of Death By Audio, a most curious document. A couple of guys who made stomp boxes for guitars needed a space to make them in and found an industrial space in an odd corner of Brooklyn. Before they quite knew what happened, several of their friends moved into the space and they all worked on renovating it. Another bit of evolution was when they started putting on shows there, using word of mouth to get the word out. By now, this corner of Brooklyn wasn't so odd, and they helped make it so. Then, Vice Media announced they were buying the building (and the buildings of several other Brooklyn underground venues, interestingly enough) and served DBA with eviction papers. It seems (the film treads lightly here, for reasons those with a deep knowledge of Vice may understand) that harrassment and sabotage now entered the picture because Vice wanted them out quicker. At any rate, there was nothing they could do but plan a last month of concerts, evacuate the building, and document it as it happened. As soon as the impact of the film cleared, I found I had a buttload of questions, all revolving around a central issue: first, why didn't the DBA guys (this is a heavily male scene, apparently) talk to the other venues Vice was threatening? Why weren't they a sort of community all along? Not to get all 1930s labor union on them, but there's strength in unity, surface differences notwithstanding. Vice's inability to see that they were killilng birds who were providing them with golden eggs of content is perhaps understandable: it's a monster consumed with greed. But where was a sign of resistance, not only from the venue owners (the other venues only get a couple of minutes, if that, in the film, interestingly enough), but from the audiences? Are audiences so passive, so bent on being solely consumers, that a thriving music scene in their back yard means nothing to them? Do they just think "oh well, there'll be more venues?" DBA is gone and, um, that's the end of the film. Sorry to be all '60s hippie, but I was pretty shocked.

Then it was time to go outside and line up again for the next film at the venue, Orange Sunshine. This, speaking of '60s hippies, was about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the gang (there's really no better word for it) that first provided massive quantities of marijuana, hashish, and psychedelics to America's illicit drug consumers. I was quite excited at the prospect of this film: the Brotherhood was very tightly knit, and only managed to get busted rather late in the game. I had understood that part of its unravelling was due to internecine quarrels and betrayals, not to mention ongoing cooperation -- or did they? -- with organized crime. Well, folks, what we have here is a heartwarming tale of some hippie entrepreneurs who just wanted to spread the love and beauty they found in LSD. Of course, the story starts with two of them robbing a film producer of his LSD stash at gunpoint and then taking it to find out what it was. You kind of forget about that once the tale starts: these guys took insane risks and, because nobody was looking for these drugs (LSD wasn't even illegal yet), getting away with them. At one point, they claim, they were sitting on a ton of pure LSD: 100 million hits. But... There are other sides to this story, the outrageous outlaw aspect aside. They befriended and abetted Timothy Leary, an alcoholic renegade Harvard professor whose ego, far from being dissolved by his many acid trips, caused him to self-promote, equating himself with the psychedelic experience, much to the chagrin (never voiced here) of a research community who were on the verge of impressive discoveries about easing addiction, depression, and what came to be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I (and many others) hold Leary responsible for the swiftness with which the federal government declared the drug to be on the same level as heroin and cocaine. And, it should be noted, after the Brotherhood and the Weathermen helped Leary escape from prison, it was rumored that he threw some of the Brotherhood under the bus to save his own skin. This is never whispered in the film. It would seem that one day -- bummer! -- there was a huge raid on their complex and it was over. Now, they're just a passel of silver-haired lovable old hippies, talking heads in their own movie. And -- there's no denying this -- that movie is a triumph, technically: there are reenactments of a lot of the past feats that are so skillful they made me wonder how crazy these people must have been to film themselves loading kilos of pot into Volkswagen buses or going through customs inspection of antiques coming back from Afghanistan. But I would point you towards any of the several book-length histories of LSD and, in particular, the CBC-Saskatchewan documentary Hoffman's Potion, for a clearer and more reliable account of all of this.

And that, to my surprise, was the end of my movie-going: two in one day. Unlike last year, when I missed a couple I dearly wanted to see, there were very few films clamoring for me to attend them. There were a couple that looked like knockoffs of Twenty Feet From Stardom, the blockbuster about backup singers from a few years ago, a film about the fabled Austin honky-tonk the Broken Spoke that I missed a couple of times, the Miles Davis biopic, which friends who saw it at the Berlinale weren't so hot about, and some mildly interesting non-music flicks. The descriptions of all of these films was beyond awful: reading the review of Midnight Special in the New York Times, it sounded way more interesting than that SXSW description made it out to be. And yet, you sit in the theater watching the promotional slide show and wonder who'd want to watch some of this. I probably missed something, but I didn't hear any buzz, so maybe not.

Which left the music part of the festivities. I no longer go see live music, at SXSW or, for the most part, anywhere else, which is, again, a matter for further discussion elsewhere. But as SXSW's original panels coordinator, back when it was just a music event, I'm always up for the panels and the music tradeshow. The film/interactive tradeshow closed early on Wednesday afternoon, so I figured it'd reopen on Friday. Wrong. For the first time in its 30 year history, there was no music tradeshow at SXSW. It used to be that at least the national exhibitors -- Brazil had a huge presence this year -- would swap out their tech guys for their music guys and just change the focus. Some of the gizmo folks would stay on, and organizations promoting their music scenes -- New Orleans was always predictable -- would promote their showcases, give away CDs, and otherwise loll around. Not this year. What this means is not only that the worldwide music industry is broke, but that the export agencies of the various foreign countries see no sense in promoting the music other than via live showcsaes. Of course, when you're Italy and the best you have to promote is a band called Moustache Prawn, maybe that's for the best. Moustache Prawn?

That left the panels, most of which were squeezed into one day, Friday. As usual, I went for the history-oriented panels, and unfortunately I missed Tony Visconti's keynote (I missed Michelle Obama's, too, the protocol for attending which was announced at about 3am the day of the speech), and I understand he was very pessimistic, as one would expect from a veteran of his stature. I did, however, get into town in time to catch a panel on Ardent Studios' 50th anniversary (some neat stories, but you kind of had to be either a studio nerd or a Memphis music nerd to really enjoy it), another on the Ramones, which was uncharacteristically dull, one on British punk, which was much better, and finally an onstage interview with Dion by Richard Gotterher, which was hilarious. At the end, I thanked Dion for distrupting my childhood and left.

Friday evening there was a memorial for Louis Meyers, which was like a homecoming. In fact, I resolved to skip my annual ritual of wandering around the Sunday softball game because everyone I knew who would be there was here. The mayor read a proclamation, there was some funny video, and everyone wandered around talking to each other until the venue evicted us. I walked across town to the bus stop and, well, although I went in the next day for a short while, my SXSW was over.

Kind of a muted affair, like I said.

* * *

A week from this evening, I'm taking one of those brand-new BA non-stop Austin to London flights, and connecting in London for a hop over to Barcelona, where I'll spend a couple of days and then head to France, where I'll explore part of the Languedoc region I've never seen and then head to my old home of Montpellier for a few days' exploration and wine-hunting. Expect a bunch of blogging when I return -- I can't feed pictures from my phone or my camera into the iPad Pro I'll be taking to keep in e-mail and web communication -- and it should include a bit of food porn, too.