The UnTexan

ANTHROPOMORPHIC MISANTHROPISM: NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

I have read comic strips my entire life and do not understand people who don't. These days I love the comic strip Pearls Before Swine in particular. I need my Pearls and I need my coffee before I go to work in the morning. I need them even if I am not going to work. They both make me feel better. The strip is full of sweet, kind, smart, and stupid characters. There is an "Angry Bob"; there is even a duck that is prone to excessive violence. But it is "Rat" who is at the center of things, who makes my day with his anthropomorphic misanthropism -- and puts a Rat's distance between me and my own misanthropic and cynical self. These days Rat is busying himself sprinkling schadenfreude on the heads and hopes of others. He once spent time consigning others to a Box O' Stupid People. He also has hit people (he knows they deserve it, that is never an issue) upside the head with various objects. My wife made me one of those and George W. Bush is there to this day. I even keep a collection of Pearls strips on my nightstand to put me in the proper mood before I go to sleep. Comics are good adult company (they are not for children). They make me a better man; at least they make me appear to be a better man. Sometimes people even mistake me for Mr. Nice Guy. Rat doesn't even have to pretend.

Pogo, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County all have kept me company at one time or another. One of them is living on borrowed time, the rest live on the Internet.

TEXAS LONGA, VITA BREVIS: THE WACKO-WACO VERSION

Some film folks wanted to spend $30 million to make a movie about the 1993 shootout between the feds and the followers of David Koresh up in Waco. And they thought the state was going to offer them tax incentives to shoot the movie near the scene of the crime and give it some actual Waco, Texas, verisimilitude. They had even scouted some sites with a member of the state's film commission. Then, much like the actual Branch Davidian debacle, some state official decided to burn the deal down. The tax incentives were jerked away because some guy on the film commission claimed he found "factual inaccuracies" in the script. This would be factual inaccuracies concerning an event about which the facts have never been clear in the first place? Go figure. But a flimsy excuse is still an excuse. The movie people claim it is censorship wrapped up in politics. But the film commission claims that even though what it is doing might seem like censorship, it's not really censorship and blah, blah, blah, and there is no politics involved. It turns out Texans are a sensitive bunch and they made a rule about it: If you want to get a tax break to make a movie in Texas, you can't be planning to show either "Texas or Texans in a negative fashion." That's actually part of the tax incentive deal, an idea introduced a couple of years ago by State Sen. Steve Ogden, who seems like a pretty ordinary Texas Republican guy when he is talking about things like the budget (he's smart about stuff like that) and until he opens his mouth and starts to pray (I heard him pray once at the beginning of one of those big toll road projects) and becomes a henchman for the God of development, roadbuilding, paving and generally fucking with the environment (a God Texans love to invoke), who Ogden claims (like James G. Watt before him -- remember him? The Reagan appointee who wanted to destroy the environment, insulted the Beach Boys and said charmingly of his own staff, "we have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple and we have talent" before being forced to resign) gave man the job of controlling and taming the earth and all the creatures on it (or paving the earth and killing all the creatures on it, or something like that). I guess Ogden's God (obviously a spindoctor deity at heart) must have handed down a similar directive about controlling movie content and keeping Texas and Texans unsullied (keep in mind that Ogden is always screeching about big government and how its rules intrude and hinder the work of ordinary people). Utah is the only other state with such a provision in its tax incentive regulations. Maybe Mormons and Texans both have things they need to hide. But in the effort to make Texans look good in the movies, Ogden and the film commission have simply made Texas look silly -- again -- this time in front of the world at the Cannes Film Festival. But Texas doesn't need some Hollywood types to make it look silly. Gov. Rick ("I'm not really a seccessionist, I just can't stand the thought of THAT WOMAN being governor") Perry takes care of that all by himself. The man can't help showing Texas and Texans in a negative fashion. Maybe Ogden can think up some sort of regulation that would take away Perry's salary for doing and saying dumb stuff. It would save Texas money. It would save Texas face. Somebody might make a movie about it if they received the right incentive.

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A Report from the Stephanie Klein Universe: The queen of hubris and bullshit wrote a bit about the final episode of the television series Lost last week. She really gets into it and apparently likes to bring the full power of her undergraduate education to bear on the topic. In other words, she loves to show off. Which led her no doubt to write the following paragraph:

"FYI: Everything that rises must converse by Flannery O'Connor, the book Jacob is reading as Locke is pushed out the window by his father, 'aims to expose the sinful nature of humanity that often goes unrecognized in the modern secular world.'"

Well. FYI. Not really. Everything that rises in Stephanie's universe must (unfortunately) "converse" even when it would be better to simply shut up. Or maybe things "converse" in the Cliff's Notes version. However, in Flannery O'Connor's version of the world, things that rise must "CONVERGE." It's Everything that Rises Must Converge. And talking about it doesn't help. And just where did that unattributed quote about humanity and sin come from? Surely not from Steph herself.

WHEN STEVE SINGS TOWNES, I LISTEN

I first heard Townes Van Zandt in 1977. It was in New Mexico at my friend Tom's house. He told me it was an album I needed to hear called Live at the Old Quarter in Houston and it was a two-record set. I think I sat there listened to it all the way through, both records, both sides. It was just about the newest music (with some of the corniest jokes) I had ever heard. The words. The words. They weren't strung together like other writers string words together; Townes' words gathered wherever words gather to lean against each other, touch each other with meaning, and be heard. In 1977, New Mexico was new to me too so I figured at first maybe Townes belonged to that time and place in my life, but that wasn't it. It is always the time and place for Townes. I bought my own copy of Live at the Old Quarter and played it nearly to death. It was among the first cd's I bought and among the first albums I put on iTunes. When I hit shuffle on the iTunes and a Townes song pops up, I still stop and listen. I have heard "Pancho and Lefty" hundreds of times; I even learned to play and sing it myself. It plays, I listen. Townes' songs remain some of the newest music I have ever heard. I know he ended up a sorry-assed drunk and a burden to his friends and family, but as I heard the novelist T.C. Boyle say a few minutes ago on television, a man doesn't have to be a good person to make great art (he was talking about Frank Lloyd Wright, but Townes probably falls into that category too). Having known some artists in my life, I have to agree.

Now Steve Earle has made a new album called Townes. Steve has been Townes-obsessed for a long time, even named his son after Townes. It turns out Steve is the right man at the right time to sing Townes Van Zandt songs. Steve is a word guy and he seems to have recognized the same thing I did a long time ago: Townes didn't write lyrics; he gathered words together and turned them loose to do what they needed to do. That is what the best writers do. Steve has that knack of setting the words free too. Of course, there is one song Steve should have left alone. A few years ago Willie Nelson turned Townes' song "Marie" into the saddest song I have ever heard on a Townes tribute cd and Steve doesn't even come close. But he makes up for it with a particularly raw version of "Lungs." Steve lifts Townes and all his darkness up into the light. This is a set of songs worth owning.

The New York Times did a good piece recently on Steve and Townes.

If only Texas could be as wonderful as its music.

DRINKING AND DRIVING AND THE KEYS TO PARADISE

Driving home from work, I pass a billboard warning people that a DWI can cost a driver in Texas more than $17,000. Why? I always drove better when I was drinking. We all did in those days back in North Carolina where I come from. We always assumed we drove better after a few beers, or more than a few beers, or a lot of whiskey mixed with a little bit of Coca-Cola. And it must have been true. It wasn't unusual to drink a six-pack before we ever got in the car. Then we drank while we were driving (who didn't) and tossed the cans out into the night. We puked out of car windows and kept on driving and pulled over to piss in the bushes on the side of the road (even if there weren't any bushes) then climbed back in and kept on driving, but no one seemed to notice. I never got a ticket for drunken driving. None of my friends did either. We drove better when we were drinking AND whatever we were drinking made us invisible too. It was paradise. We started driving at 16 and had a couple of years to practice before we started drinking (legally) and driving at 18, and I suppose the practice helped. Of course, a few guys died in wrecks or killed somebody else (usually a friend riding "shotgun" or a girlfriend) but it was never many, just enough to feed our adolescent need for a little death and a lot of drama. I still remember some of their names and I remember the cars some of them died in. Big cars. Chevys, Fords, any number of long-forgotten Chrysler products, one guy in a borrowed MG. I remember going down to the junkyard and seeing what was left of the cars, a little dried blood spattered here, a few strands of hair stuck there, beer cans in the floorboard. One car with a bumper sticker that read, "I'd Rather Be Flying;" we laughed at what seemed to be the irony of that one -- confusing stupidity and irony the way adolescents will sometimes. But we never saw anything at the junkyard that stopped us from drinking and driving. We never even saw anything there that made us give up our churchkeys. It took pop-top cans and twist-off bottle caps to do that.

TEXAS LONGA, VITA BREVIS or IF AUSTIN WERE IN CALIFORNIA...

I received an email recently from a guy from someplace else who visited Austin and didn't particularly like the place (he was refreshingly un-gaga about it). I liked him right away. In fact, he didn't seem to like Texas and Texans and what he called the "Texan indoctrination-hive mentality thing" (and he is right; Texans are as prickly as a fistful of barbed wire -or "bobwar" as they say down on the ranch - about who they are and where they live and how many generations they've been here and who you are and where you live and how long you have been here). That made me laugh and like him even more. As for the "Keep Austin Weird" thing that is some sort of local rallying cry, this guy had one thing to say: "...if Austin were in California, it would be called Sacramento" (with music). And I agree there too. The weirdest thing about Austin is that no one seems to recognize the Sacramento-ness of the place (the "Keep Austin Weird" slogan has been so formalized and institutionalized it belongs in Sacramento). But when you always look at the world through Texas-colored glasses, you are bound to miss a lot. The guy went home and I have to admit I envy anybody who can say of Austin, Texas, U.S.A. (as he did), "I just drove out of there and the further I got, the better I felt." I can imagine saying something like that. Bit I am not sure I will ever get the chance to say it. "Texas longa, vita brevis" or, to translate that so the locals can understand it, "Texas are long, life ain't, y'all."