Mirrors

Bonnie works a lot with mirrors: She stands next to, in front of and behind them all day long. As her clients admire their newly tinted hair, she shares their reflected space. Bonnie knows the worth of a mirror, and she knows how to hold one in just the right way.

Last weekend she held a mirror up to me: Damn, I’ve let myself go.

In that reflection I saw that the guys she yucks-it-up with, grabs a few drinks and a little sexy time are not even on her radar when it comes to dating material and building her future. God bless her. These are two separate, discrete categories of dude and it came into focus, sharp and clear which category I’ve put myself in. For now.

On Saturday night Bonnie pulled back the veil and showed me who she wants. I saw the house of a man who has made good career choices, shown professional maturity and stability, developed his assets and is a solid partner. Bonnie too deserves someone who brings plenty to the table – not a guy who mooches her lunch and bums a smoke from her when he’s done. She wants someone who is an asset to her life, not a liability.

And me, I’m all over the map – seems like every time I see her I’m excited about some new hair-brained scheme: I’ve spent the last 10 years in search of the next Pet Rock: the little idea that I’m going to retire on after it’s huge for one season. “In search of the next Pet Rock.” That’s going on my grave stone if I’m not careful.

She’s made me realize, that at this point in my life I can only get away with looking and behaving the way I do if I have something to back it up (like a record contract, a book deal or my own cult) – which frankly I don’t. Otherwise I run the risk of being perpetually mistaken for an urban lumber jack, the Second Coming or a homeless person. Actually that’s already happening. I may be able to pull off a convincing Jesus but Bonnie sees straight through the facade, she knows I’m not the one to save her from single girl perjury. Not just yet.

Why was I so taken aback? She’d already spelled it out for me when I first talked to her about the self-doubt I was feeling. Realizing something was awry, I’d finally had a revelation about my beloved Austin: It had become the eternal goof-off place.
“You can always get by in Austin” I’d said to her. “But that’s not what I should be doing. I need to get serious, align myself with people who are driven and successful in their lives, even if it means stepping away from this place for a while.”
“You don’t know how good it is to hear a guy say that,” she responded. “It’s really tough to find guys to date in this town.”

I often take myself out to the airport when I need to think; I’m there a lot these days. It’s a great place to sit and read and watch. I’m comforted by the constant movement and the happy reunions, and of course there’s always an expectation that I’ll run into someone famous.

There’s a shuttle bus that runs from Downtown out to Austin Bergstrom. It picks up passengers from outside the Driskill Hotel, which is where I stood last night, watching the Valets and Bell Hops work the new arrivals. Well-healed, well-groomed guys in jeans and jackets, rolling up in Lexus sedans and BMWs. Popping trunks that open with a slow, graceful, well-engineered hiss, and with the push of a button close the same way. Wives and girlfriends taking care of check-in while outside on the side-walk keys are exchanged for valet chits and $20 tips pass over in a handshake.

I get it, this is what Bonnie wants. God bless her.

I catch my reflection in the window of the Driskill. It taunts me. It knows that I drive a beat up old van, which is in a constant state of disrepair. It has so many quirks (read, busted shit) it would take me 15 minutes to explain to a Valet how to get the thing rolling. The conversation would go something like this:
“So the key for the door is different to the one for the ignition, and it only fits the lock if you have the logo facing front, and wiggle it back a quarter-turn before you take it all the way. The driver’s seat belt buckle is missing a spring, so you’ll need to give it a couple of sharp raps on the transmission hump to make it catch – or just stretch the belt across to the passenger side if you can get it to reach… Oh yeah, and it leaks about a quart of coolant a day, so make sure you top-off the radiator tomorrow morning before you try and start her. There’s a gallon of Prestone in one of the old milk crates behind the driver’s seat. Thanks. Here’s a couple of bucks… can you break a five?”

Bonnie drives a 07 Dodge Charger with aftermarket rims. She’s shy to admit it, but it’s her pride and joy, and quite rightly so – she worked damn hard for that car. Not to mention that it speaks to her razzle-dazzle within. My old van, the Black Pearl I call her, is a metaphor for what I’ve become: larger than life and still turning heads sure, but full of nothing, susceptible to cross-winds and in dire need of work. Serious work. Wrench-turning, knuckle-grazing, get up at 7:00am and hit it hard; focused, consistent, through rain or shine, and till the day runs out of light. That kind of work.

I can’t ask her to hold the flash-light or pass me up tools. Bonnie does not need a project. Besides which if I’m going to see this through I need her to do what she does so well, and keep that mirror held steady on me.

Bonnie knows the worth of a mirror, and she knows how to hold one in just the right way.

Arctic Monkey Business

A review of Midnight Sun by Elwood Reid

I remember a conversation I once had with my friend and local musician, Dollar Dan. I’d asked him about his provincial writing style – Dan’s songs are wonderful snapshots of life growing up in rural south-east Texas, peppered with sketches of the local diners and gas stations of Dan’s hometown. What had prompted this discussion was my new-found appreciation of UK alt-rockers, The Arctic Monkeys, who’s songs are crafted in a no-compromise writing style thick with cultural references and the tight, local vernacular of their Sheffield suburb. It would seem unlikely that their work would gain traction with anyone living more than a few miles away, let alone a growing fan-base in the New World.

It’s a fascinating subject how we project our own reality onto another’s canvas. Yet when we do it makes for the best kind of art. So Dan’s philosophy? “Just write about what you know.”

Just write about what you know: Sage words indeed. A writer takes risks not when he writes too close to home, but when he strives to shed light on a reality he is unfamiliar with. And I have yet to come across a better illustration of this than the book Midnight Sun by Elwood Reid.

Reid’s second novel (I have not read his first), starts fast and cool, set against the backdrop of Fairbanks Alaska construction sites and dive bars – and I’m going to guess Reid is intimate with both. There are some great lines in these early chapters – a particular favorite of mine, “Eye fucking” – Reid’s job-site handle for checking out the ladies. The book deteriorates rapidly however as Reid over-plots a back country excursion for his narrator, Jack and wingman Burke. The two journeymen carpenters heading off the grid to accomodate a dying man’s wish to have his daughter rescued from a new-aged cult. And so as Jack and Burke paddle upstream, exchanging the gritty familiarity of Fairbanks, for some fantasy lost valley, Reid begins to flounder.

Developing a fictional landscape should not be an insurmountable task: A great story-teller – John Irving for example – creates a framework, a space that a reader’s imagination can occupy and explore. Reid’s mistake, is to not only create the framework, but put up drywall, hang (really busy) wallpaper, nail a bunch of fru-fru shit to the walls, then stuff any remaining space with packing peanuts – suffocating the reader with unnecessary detail, minutia and clutter.

There are some points of light in the portraits of cult-camp life, particularly Reid’s fascination with smell: lots of sweet, rotting carrion and hippy chicks with foul body odor. But these interesting vignettes are quickly lost in the near constant back-beat of deliberate and clumsy attempts at building tension. My biggest pet peeve with this read are the all too frequent and breathy descriptions of the trails and landmarks in and around the camp. I consider myself to be a quick study, yet by the end of the book I still could not visualize the scale or the layout of the valley – Just give us a dang map Elwood, it’s not cheating – even Gorky Park has a map three pages in!

And so I really had to force myself to turn those last few pages, as the camp self destructs and Jack makes his escape with the girl (spoiler alert – what the hell – I’ll save you the heartache) the climax of the book resembles a cross between Blair Witch and a Benny Hill chase. And not in a good way!

La Jefa

So I put together a little impromptu East-side tour for my new friend, “Pants”

We’d spent a pleasant enough hour or at Cafe Mundi, drinking Yerba Mate and swatting flies – then critiquing the corporate sponsored graffiti that now lines the adjacent rail road tracks. I’m going to refer to that yuppie shit as “Gra-faux-ti” from now on. Thanks for nothing you a-holes, I actually really liked it the way it was before.

Standing there on the newly gentrified tracks, one solitary piece of trash caught my eye: a Lifestyles “Snugger Fit” condom wrapper – “Para una pinga muy poquita” Pants observed, as I flipped it over with the arm of my sunglasses. It sure is interesting what blows in on the breeze I thought; Yep, that’s the universe speaking to YOU graf-fauxti-ists…

Heading back toward the interstate along East 4th, slowing to admire the authentic murals on the back wall of the Habitat for Humanity Store. Pants and I take it in turns to call out the two-dimensional snap-shots of local gravitas: An Aztec pyramid, a pinata, a low-rider, El Cristo y La Virgen Maria, Selena, Mariachi players, a homeless person taking a crap… oh wait a moment – that’s no fresco.

Coming to a complete stop in the parking lot of the Scoot Inn (to confirm the date of establishment on the front of the building) we were approached by a most curious vato… [Note: At the time of writing this, Pants and I are discussing - via text message - Vato Curiouso's likely heritage. He struck me as looking Eurasian, Mongolian maybe, and the skull mounted on the front of his bicycle served to reinforce the aura that he shared at least a chromosome or two with Genghis Khan. He also put me in mind of the Chinese laborers who laid rail tracks out west in the 1840s. Pants on the other hand has rather lamely offered-up Mexican or Honduran.]

As VC ranted in heavily accented Spanglish about the “Fucking Mexicans” who had taken over the neighborhood, I tried to take in every bizarre detail of his “art bike” – including the contents of the handlebar mounted wire basket: Bones. And the contents of the lidless Styrofoam cup nestled in the front-fork mounted cup holder: Iced tea – Impossible to reach; Easy to spill. I also noticed that written across the brow ridge of the skull were the words, “La Jefa” (“Boss Lady” Pants muttered approvingly.)

Turning on to East 6th, past Birds, Rio Rita and Shangri-La, I reflected on VC’s concerns: It’s not the “Fucking Mexicans” you need to be worrying about, I thought to myself. It’s the fucking hipsters!

Crime Scene: Graf-fauxti-ists at work.

The Little Lady

I affectionately refer to my outsourced call center gig as “white collar crop picking” – repetitive, de-humanizing and low-paying. The commodity I handle is not tomatoes or lettuce, it’s information; the tools of this trade are not baskets and blades, but a monitor and a headset. On some intellectual level however, I find it fascinating. I can almost justify my being there as research – I know there’s a book in it (just as I know I have a book in me).

What has already been written on the subject examines Global Outsourcing from the outside looking in. Thomas Friedman’s seminal work, “The Word Is Flat” for example, focuses mainly on the enabling technologies of the industry – I’d like to hit the subject from the inside looking out: how it feels to be a small gear in this machine – a machine with an insatiable appetite for numbers and statistics (favorites of mine co-incidentally – I tutored high-school algebra for several years). In this business you live and die by your metrics. Everything is measured, analyzed, recorded and reported: the number and length of calls, hold time, wrap-up time, quality and resolution rate, all measured down to the second or tenth of a percentage point, and displayed daily on the white-boards affixed to each pod – yep, there are my numbers, right alongside “Bob from Bangalore” [I notice Bob's not doing so well with his "Rapport Building."  Overseas call centers have US Cultural Training - apparently when Bubba from Kentucky calls in about his wireless account, he likes to be able to shoot the breeze while Bob updates the billing address: "How 'bout them Yankees?"]

There’s also the people watching: These places are revolving doors. A never ending stream of colorful characters to observe. Sadly one of my current favorites was term’d yesterday – Linda, the Little Lady got into it with a customer. Brittany my long-suffering supervisor (who is now very pregnant and clearly feeling extremely maternal) was visibly choked-up at having to fire her. (I cannot begin to describe how bizarre the scene looked). We’d all grown kinda fond of Linda – the day she first moved into our pod it was fascinating just watching her. She arrived with all her crap in a milk-crate, which she carefully unpacked and arranged just so: several over-sized sippy cups, her corporate-branded koozy and chip-clip collection, a yellow foam stress-relief ball and a bunch of Kudos certificates. She then placed the empty milk-crate upside down on the floor and used it as a step to climb up into her chair.

Oddly enough just two days ago she won the grand-prize in the latest QA competition drawing: an I-Pod nano. I remember thinking how big it looked in her tiny hands… I also remember my last words to her: I had won Jeans-For-a-Week in the same drawing and immediately offered it up to the highest bidder (it fetched 5 bucks by the way). “Why did you do that?” she asked, straining to look up at me. “Linda” I replied, “I just don’t have the ass for jeans…” And then she was gone.

Lost and Found

Years ago I saw a daytime TV show that focused on those special relationships mothers share with their daughters. Although I myself am a son,  part of the show still resonated strongly with me: One mother had gifted her daughter with copies of books read earlier in her life – at that point in time when the older women had been the age of her offspring in the present. What I found remarkable and touching was that included with each book, was a note, written by mom describing to her daughter the significant events in her life as she read the work.

My own mother and I (we now live some 7000 miles apart and see each other at most for two weeks each year) adopted our own real-time version of this, occasionally mailing books across the pond to each other with short essays enclosed.

Most recently, “How to be Lost” by Amanda Eyre Ward.


Mother, I think you will really enjoy this book.

I can't recall what drew me to pull it from the shelf - it was in the clearance section of Half Price Books. It was a dollar.

Once it was in my hand, it must have been the reference to New Orleans that gave me cause to turn a few pages. Then I think the first-page description of the smell of the Crescent City sold me.

Caroline, the central character works at The High Ball, the cocktail lounge at the top of the New Orleans Trade Center. This place actually exists - we'd have seen it clearly from the Natchez that night on the Mississippi. So that's what gave me the traction to get started on this novel - then the strangest thing happened...

The theme of the plot is Caroline's search for her younger sister Ellie, who had been kidnapped as a child some 15 years prior. As I was just a day or two into the book, news broke from California that a girl snatched and missing since 1991 had been found alive: Jaycee Lee Dugard had been pulled into a car at age 11 as she waited for the school bus. For the past 18 years she had been held in a backyard shanty of rough buildings, tents and tarpaulin in sub-urban Antioch, near San Francisco.

The structure of How to Be Lost is complex, with narrative threads pulled from past and present, and through the eyes of multiple characters. It can make for a challenging read in places - with the reader knowing more than any of the individual characters, but struggling to put all of the pieces together. Everything comes into focus faster than you think, and I'm sure you're up to the task!

I was also unaware until I had finished reading the book that it had been written while the author was living right here in Austin, Texas - which makes some sense of the fact that this is a signed copy.

Love G.

Wave Power: Kate Bush

I would have been around 10 years old when Kate Bush topped the UK charts with Wuthering Heights;  (Kate would have been 20). Watching her Top of the Pops performances  scared the crap out of me – particularly once my mother had explained the context of the song: that Kate was channeling the deceased Cathy from Bronte’s novel of the same name. Spooky.

So why 30 years later did I find myself singing “Wuthering Heights”  as I washed dishes last night? Whatever the reason it led me to this little YouTube gem. And something about this video made me dig a little deeper. Turns out it was shot on the last night of her first-and-only tour;  Some 5 weeks earlier, on April 2nd 1979 her 21-year-old Lighting Designer Bill Duffield had fallen to his death as he broke-down equipment after a production rehearsal.

Taken as whole it’s an incredible piece of footage – the choreography is naive and clumsy, but made possible by the use of a prototype hands-free microphone (fabricated from a wire coat hanger by her sound guy). It gets real interesting at 2:50 as Kate collects flowers from the down-stage edge, and then again at the 4:00 minute mark. 4:10 gives me chills.

For the best quality viewing experience, start the video running then immediately click on it again to watch straight out of YouTube

Claudia

One Sunday in July, 2007

I live just a few blocks from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library – it is one of my mother’s favorite places to visit when she is in Austin. And yesterday morning it was where I stood in line to bid farewell to Lady Bird Johnson as she lay in repose in the Library’s Grand Hall – on the same spot that her husband had occupied some 34 years earlier.

She was my First Lady: I was born during the Johnson Presidency (although three-and-a-half thousand miles east of Washington DC) And today, my birthday, Mrs. Johnson is to be buried at the family plot in Johnson City, Texas. As I have hurtled though my fortieth year, I have grown increasingly curious about the times into which I was born – and I guess as with most ‘transplants’ enthusiastic to learn the history of my adopted home. From visiting the State Capitol – another of my mother’s favorite Austin haunts, I now know that John Connally was – by the grace of God – still the Governor of Texas in the year of my birth. It was Governor Connally and his wife Nelly who had been seated in front of JFK and Jackie as they drove through Dallas that November morning in ‘63. (Nelly Connally, the last surviving occupant of Kennedy’s Limousine died less than a year ago also here in Austin). President Johnson and Lady Bird had been two cars back in the motorcade. The next time you see the infamous Air Force One swearing in photograph, if you can pry your eyes from Jackie in the blood-spattered jacket (I know it’s hard), Lady Bird stands immediately to LBJ’s right.

So many years later it is hard to reconcile the stoic face in that photograph with the image of the ‘Wild Flower Lady’ that I have become so familiar with during my time in Austin. The Wild Flower Center that bares her name is, yes you guessed it, another of my mother’s favorite Austin destinations, as is Town Lake, which will no doubt soon shed its utilitarian name and become Lake Lady Bird.

As I write this the television behind me is running loops of the coverage from yesterday’s memorial service – it’s strange to think that I was sitting just three or four miles from Jimmy Carter, Laura and Barbara Bush and both Presidents Clinton (past and future!). But off with the computer and TV now, I’m headed outside – it’s what Claudia would have wanted…