One Stop Shop for Blog Rock Slop (Edited)

{original photo: Hi, How Are You? - Ed.}

• What follows is a bunch of notes that I wrote in the past couple of weeks that I was thinking of compiling into a larger article that was to be called "South by South of No North." I'm putting the best of it up here instead, though.

• My sister, Thee Famousperson, occasionally comes up with what we in our family - or, really, probably just the two of us - refer to as "Handy Tips."

"I can never remember my license plate number," I said to her over the phone one day. I was somewhere on the outskirts of San Antonio, looking for an inexpensive place to stay the night because all the hotels in Austin were booked solid through the week. The motel I was trying to get a room in needed my license plate number so they would know to not have my car towed away in the morning.

"You should program it into the 'notes' section of your cell phone," she said.
"Thanks," I said. "That's a 'handy tip!'"
I think she should start her own YouTube show, where each week she would dispense a new invaluable nugget of advice. I imagine it would look something like this:










Protip Handy Tip: Do not attempt to move to Austin during SXSW. It won't be any fun. You will not see Black Mountain play a 1 A.M. at the Mohawk even though they are your favorite band. You will be spending that time instead covered in sweat in a motel room in San Marcos with no working A/C because, like I said, the rooms in town are all full, and you don't know anybody in Austin.

• I wrote these notes in the worst notebook ever. I don't know how anybody else does it, but I everything I write generally starts out written in longhand. Anyway. The cover of this fucking thing ripped completely off seconds after I opened it up for the first time. The pages themselves are as thick and yellow as yellow toenails, and the perforated edge is totally for shit. After this I'm retiring it, by which I mean, of course, that I'm throwing it away.

• {This next little part was written after a day during which a real estate agent got all mad at the author for having the audacity to find an apartment without her, thus "taking money out of her pocket." The author, having lived in Austin now, even for a little while, isn't exactly convinced that much of the following is accurate to any degree whatsoever. - Ed.}

The sheer number of apartment locators in business in Austin - and they are in business, buddy - speaks to the impossible volume of people constantly meandering its way here. They all figure, incorrectly, as they have always figured, as I now figure I might have figured, too, that they have found themselves a little city with a cosmopolitan atmosphere and a laid-back attitude. Where no one ever steals, and you can probably just work some job for two or three days a week, which would leave you with ample time to get on with the important business of constructing dreamcatchers and repainting coffee tables in bright primary colors. They - we - are all wrong, and are all suckers who bought it. I have a suspicion that I've been lured here by the Austin hype machine, been given the old bait-and-switch, and introduced instead to the cutthroat world of hair-trigger rental property real estate in what might be a secret government plot to turn a bunch of leftover counterculture idealists into strict capitalist Little Lebowski Urban Achievers in short order. Perhaps the GOP has recognized a shortage in young devotees with a working knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite.

















• Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States of America, was a hell of a raconteur¹. As evinced, of course, by a talking animatronic version of him that I encountered when it was cold and wet and grey outside.

Some time ago I visited Austin, on a bit of a recon mission. I won't say that I immediately fell in love with the city, but I was immediately greatly intrigued by it. More than anything, it seemed like a place where a young dude like myself could start to, as they say, get his grown man on. When I visited, it was cold and wet and grey for the whole trip.

When I returned to Austin some time later - weeks? months? I have never been good with precise chronology - to find a place to live, it was, again, cold and wet and grey for like the first five days. So I thought that cold and wet and grey was just sort of how Austin was. It's not.

But it was when I stumbled into the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library. (Full disclosure: I wasn't really altogether aware that it was a presidential library. I thought it was an ordinary public library, and I needed badly to use the restroom. So I went there with the notion that, you know, homeless people damn near bathe in public library restrooms, and I was, in some sense, homeless at that point myself, so what the hell. 'This is how it starts,' I thought, in the parking lot.)

Leaning on fencepost, doffing cowboy hat, wearing chambray workshirt, the robot president looks over his robot shoulder to make sure Lady Bird's not around before delivering the punchline.

"'Well, hell,' he said, 'I liked what was drinkin' more'n what I was hearin'.'"

¹The other day I was in a record store, and I'm pretty sure I came across both a greatest hits collection from the Presidents of the United States of America, and the new Raconteurs record. So.

















• I've decided that if I'm going to be in Austin, I might as well get hip again, right?

{It should be noted that the author has not been "hip" since sometime around 2003. - Ed.}

So I guess I'm going to brush up. Reread that one book. Try and get through that controversial essay that Mailer wrote. Investigate the story behind Stagger Lee. Go to shows. Renew my Fader subscription. Try and get an MFA. Scarf. Vintage sunglasses. French cigarettes. You know.