Went to the Burleson/Parker Neighborhood watch meeting last night with Julie. It’s always interesting.

For instance we learned how to identify prostitutes. They are the women in our neighborhood carrying white styrofoam cups. Which they tip over to show they’re empty to say - open for business. So be careful about wandering around highway access roads with empty styrofoam cups, ladies.

We also learned that the Timberridge HOA had torpedoed a condo project where one of the hotels is currently on the I-35 northbound access road before Oltorf. It was apparently a 30 unit project that was going to sell for about $500k each. They thought that no one would pay those prices and they’d end up having to sell them out to the city as low-income housing. So now they’re going to get another cheap hotel. And more prostitutes. Hopefully this isn’t going to happen with the Riverside condo projects.

I don’t understand the mentality to keep competition away from your property at all costs. A $100k condo sitting next to a bunch of hotels is going to stay a $100k condo. A $100k condo down the street from a $500k condo might become a $200k condo. Although, I do feel for Timberridge. My friend Erin has lived there for 9 years now, and they have consistently stayed one of the nicest condo neighborhoods in Austin. I’m sure there’s a lot of stubbornness involved in thinking that you can have a fantastic community when bordered by rental slums, low-income housing, hotels and gas stations.

Many of you may have noticed that there’s some sort of amazing lot with a big house on the South-East corner of Riverside and IH-35. 1317 E. Riverside Drive. I think it’s been a day-spa and a bed-and-breakfast. According to the Timberridge inhabitants, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright that’s going to be destroyed for condos. From looking at a list of Wright houses, he never built any in Austin, so it’s probably one of his students. Anyone know anything about it other than it was built around 1947?

Apparently one of the houses on Manlove street got the condo developer to change the buildings so that they would still have their view. Which is awesome. Although the views from those condos are going to be spectacular.

The final thing we talked about was panhandling. Which is such a weird issue. On the one hand I feel like people who are really destitute should be able to ask for help from their fellow man without going to jail. On the other hand, I know from taking the bus that most of the panhandlers in Austin are not homeless. They’re not rich people, but they’re not homeless. Our Neighborhood Association(NA) is going to join with a bunch of other NAs when the new city council is elected to do a letter writing campaign to try to crack down on panhandling. I don’t think it’s the solution to the problem, but we’ll see.

I also pulled up some poison ivy for my mom after the meeting was over, and I’m happy to report that I still seem to be unaffected by poison ivy. It’s fun monkeying with it for me. Because every time I psych myself into thinking, “maybe this is the time that I’ll be affected”. Then for about 2-3 hours afterwards I’m scratching constantly. But always in places that could not possibly be affected (like the back of my head). Then I wake up the next day, happy that it was all just in my head. Of course, writing about it, I’m feeling itchy again. scratch

Julie and I watched “No Country for Old Men” last night. And we were underwhelmed. To say the least.

Did we just not get it?

I mean, you have a pure-evil bad guy. No nuance. No suspense since you know he’s going to kill everyone. You have a sort-of main character, and then you have Tommy Lee-Jones’ cop whose character is distinguished mainly by the fact that he is NOT investigating crimes. And chatting a lot.

And the biggest death of the movie? Happens offscreen. Not like, “You shouldn’t have to watch this violence” offscreen. But like, “we didn’t shoot that scene offscreen”.

Our friend Josh Meyer was great in it though. It was one of the few scenes where the actors finished their scene. It didn’t feel like the director just eventually said, “Ok, um… I guess we’re done staring at the scenery. Time to move the camera now.”

We were wondering if perhaps it was funny if you weren’t used to Texas accents and Tommy Lee Jones, ala Fargo.

We didn’t get it. Which shocked us. Because we both really thought we were going to like it. A lot.

Robert Reich has this fascinating quote on his blog from FDR’s fed chief:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth — not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced — to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

It’s an interesting repudiation to supply-siders and seems somewhat inevitable. To make an economy work you always have to have a balance between captialism and a view more oriented towards the commons. I think the Clinton administration was decent at this. It found a balance, but by embracing some of the dogma of supply-side they cemented it into the public’s mind as fact. And now we’re stuck with a tanking economy because very few people want to discuss whether this wealth equation is completely out of balance. It’s interesting too, because unlike in the 1920s most of the “robber barons” have not been asking for the tax cuts and regulatory cuts that have made them into these capital vacuums. It’s coming from the Republican middle-class who are essentially giving away their money. Giving away their quality of life, and schools, and roads. I don’t know how we’re going to fix this. Thoughts?

You can read the whole post here.

So Julie and Stella are currently in Kerbyville visiting Julie’s grandparents. I have low tolerance for spending vacation days traveling to the middle of nowhere to sit around and do nothing, so I stayed at home.

I’m really enjoying the sleep. I just go to sleep at night, and it’s this satisfying solid sleep. I wake up feeling like I’ve been hibernating. So good.

So last night, I was painting the front door and listening to the 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions on TV.

The front door will be orange. I picked out the color myself. It matches the blue, so it’s not like I picked out a really ugly color, but I worry it might be too bright. Of course, bright was the point. I don’t know. We’ll see. We’re going to water down some black paint and get it into the cracks of the scrollwork to give it an aged look, so that should dim the wattage a bit. On the upside, you can now actually see the scrollwork from the street.

Did anyone else see Iggy Pop performed Madonna’s songs? That was really strange. Talk about covers that sound nothing like the original.

Damien Rice sang Hallelujah when they inducted Leonard Cohen. It was nice, but you could tell everyone there was thinking about Jeff Buckley’s version. Even Damien was channeling it. I really don’t know of a more beautiful song than Jeff Buckley singing it.

I think this might be Leonard Cohen’s acceptance speech. Which is a poem and perhaps the best speech I have ever heard.:

It speaks so eloquently about why we create art and the meaning of it. Beautiful.

So, I was listening to “The Luxury Gap” by Heaven 17 again today. I got it for Christmas. I got introduced to the band with their song “Temptation” which was the club music in Trainspotting. Upon hearing it, I just couldn’t help wondering how this band wasn’t bigger.

Then I got “The Luxury Gap” and it all became clear. The entire album is essentially about the pitfalls of Thatcherism and commercialism. There’s a song about mindlessly slaving away. A song about the dangers of easy credit. A song about trophy wives. The first track on the album is “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry”. Which screams to me “happy-go-lucky dance song”.

I love it. I can see how most people wouldn’t. And I have no clue how they played this in clubs in the eighties. I know people don’t listen to lyrics, but still…

Yesterday I was reading my rss feeds. I monitor craigslist austin for the term “mid-century modern"". A post came up for two herman-miller-esque shell chairs for $35/each. They were in great shape so I decided to try to get in contact with the seller even though Julie was still asleep. I got a call from the seller and woke Julie up, showered, and piled everyone in the car.

We ended up at a very nice apartment complex in north austin. Sandwiched between some of the scariest complexes I’ve ever seen. Say what you will about where I live. There are no apartment complexes with razor-wire. Yeah. Razor-wire. Julie, saw a drug deal as we were buying the chairs. In any case we got the chairs for the price and got them in the car. I still can’t quite believe it. I’m never one of the people who find vintage pieces for amazing prices.

Since we were up North we decied to go check out Eubank Acres. Elle who owns Austin Modern came to our oscar party. And complimented our house. She then talked about where she lived as being similar. Eubank Acres is bounded by Braker on the South, Lamar on the West and I-35 on the East. It looks a lot like our neighborhood although with fewer traditional houses. Lots of amazing houses with amazing windows. They also have lots of hills and creeks. Very nice place. And the fact you can get a house for under $200k should make it a really nice alternative to the Shoal Creek area. We drooled and drooled.

View Larger Map

Anyway, here’s a picture of our craigslist steal:

American Gods is available online for free. This was part of the “books people don’t finish reading” if you remember. Here’s your chance. I loved it. One of my favorite books in recent memory.

http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060558123&WT.mc_id=author_AmerGods_FullAccess_022208

So today I got hungry. And I decide to make popcorn.

We had some unpopped pop corn in the pantry from our Oscar party. And I had read on Treehugger how you can make microwave popcorn with the normal stuff. You don’t need to buy the bags. And you really shouldn’t buy the bags, since they can kill you. And not just in laboratory rats. Real-life microwave popcorn eaters have gotten cancer from cooking the fake butter. But I digress.

You’re supposed to put the corn in a brown paper lunch bag. But that doesn’t seem very treehugger-y.

First, I tried a paper boat. Which I realize is also disposable and negates my argument above. But I didn’t have any brown paper lunch bags, so the environmental reasoning came later. It’s one of those boats that they served French Fries in at your school cafeteria. We got about 100 of them when we purchased our house. I don’t know why the previous owners needed so many paper boats (and obviously they didn’t either since they left them). But I like to imagine the previous owner sitting down to lunch every day for a steaming paper boat full of Frito pie. Mmmm… sounds good.

So, I put them in the boat. This resulted in some really cool visuals and a bit of popping, but not enough. I cleaned out the microwave. Put the popped popcorn in a bowl and put the unpopped kernels in another bowl. Then I put a third bowl on top of the unpopped kernels and threw that back into the microwave. This time the popping was more contained, although not as entertaining. Ok, it was still pretty entertaining. I like watching the top bowl, slowly separate from the bottom as the popcorn inside gets bigger and bigger. What can I say, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV as a kid.

This worked pretty well. Still too many unpopped kernels, but a lot more popcorn. The only problem is that it kind of fuses to the bowls. So, I’ll have to work on that. At this point I had enough popcorn to eat, but I’ll return to my experimentation at a later date.

Just read this CNN article on people’s reactions to rising gas prices. It’s fascinating to see that people are starting to get it. It’s starting to hit home. They do these fairly frequently and in the past they’ve had a lot of mixed opinions. This is the first one that has been overwhelmingly negative.

Personally, we’re getting hit by the rising food prices a lot more than gas. We had our first $30 tank of gas recently, but that’s not really that big of a deal. We use about 2-3 tanks of gas a month. So $15-20 isn’t gonna break us. But we did fuel up my parent’s truck last week as part of moving in our set for The Automat, and it was $50. I don’t know how people who commute can afford 4 tanks of gas a month at $50 a pop. You really start to see how moving to the city can become affordable. If you have two sub-20mpg vehicles and two commutes that require filling up a gas tank weekly, you could afford about $40,000 more house for the price of your commute. That’s nuts.

In the past a lot of artists have drawn images of what they imagine suburbia will look like during a nuclear winter. I wonder if we’ll see that in an

So I spent a bit of time arguing with a guy a while back about taxes. He felt that I “did nothing to prove to [him] that you or anyone else is entitled to the money I work my ass of[f] for.” Which is interesting. After talking to him a bit more I found out that he really just doesn’t like medicaid and welfare, which of course get a lot of people up in arms. Even if those programs are only a fairly small amount of the tax we pay yearly. But it got back to the government “taking” money from people (of course no one every complains about the military “taking” more than half the taxes you pay every year, but I digress). Which I think is a big perception problem. The government is for us. It is us. We are paying for the services we use or could potentially use. And we agree to pool our resources to get things done that we couldn’t alone. Pretty simple. But the anti-tax rhetoric is out of control.

Which brings me to the President this morning. He was jibber-jabbering about nothing much, and got a question about the economic stimulus package. Here he is explaining the purpose of the package:

And the purpose is to encourage our consumers. The purpose is to give them money — their own to begin with, by the way — but give them money to help deal with the adverse effects of the decline in housing value. Consumerism is a significant part of our GDP growth, and we want to sustain the American consumer, encourage the American consumer and, at the same time, we want to encourage investment. So we’ll see how the plan works.

First off. I love the fact that he can say “their own [money] to begin with” when referring to rebate checks paid for with debt to the Chinese. But we all know that facts are not where Bush excels.

What blows my mind is this discussion of consumers. That we have become in essence a national resource. Like lumber, minerals, or oil. And we’re apparently the only one left. That rather than deal with the underlying problems that got us here, like consumer debt, a housing bubble, and financial market corruption, we should instead spend our way to financial security! We must be fed and sustained, like the endangered animals we are. I can’t wait to have a president who can think outside the shopping mall.

On a side note, the set for the Automat looks fantastic. I want to go in and have a meal. You guys gotta check it out. Got your tickets yet? http://lgt.buyplaytix.com.