A true story. Featured in my letter, “One thing after another.”
Downtown Austin recommendations
People always ask me for recommendations when they visit my city, so in today’s newsletter I put a few walkable downtown-centric recommendations for folks who might be coming in for SXSW. (In short: use the hike and bike trail and get tacos at Veracruz.)
6. Walk the hike and bike a mile west from the convention center and you’ll arrive at our civic cathedral, The Austin Public Library. Take in the view on the roof and check out the Recycled Reads gift shop downstairs for souvenirs. If you’re tired, you can get queso and chips at Torchy’s, a smoothie at the JuiceLand, or a picnic at the Trader Joe’s nearby. If you have a bit more energy, you can either walk south on the pedestrian bridge across the river and hit Terry Black’s BBQ, or you can head north on what I call the Shoal Creek Book Walk and get to the corner of 6th and Lamar, where you can shop at the flagship Whole Foods, buy my books signed at Bookpeople, and possibly catch a free day show at Waterloo Records.
7. Another nice walk from the convention center is north along the Waller Creek Greenbelt and up to the brand-new Waterloo Greenway. Go a bit further north and you can hit Scholz Garden, where our best radio station, KUTX 98.9, is throwing a series of morning shows open to the public. A few blocks north of that and you can take in the Blanton Museum’s wonderful show of Anni Albers’ thread and paper work. A few blocks west is The Harry Ransom Center, the gem of The University of Texas. If you aren’t dead of heatstroke by then, you can walk back downtown through the Texas Capitol grounds (take a selfie with The Ten Commandments!) and down Congress Avenue.
8. Radio: We have great stations here. In addition to KUTX 98.9 FM, there’s classical KMFA 89.5 FM and our community KOOP 91.7 FM. I’d add those as favorites to the Radio Garden app before I came down.
I’m a middle-aged dad who doesn’t get out much, so take my recommendations with a grain of margarita salt.
One thing worth mentioning: A bicycle opens up the city in amazing ways for people visiting downtown. There’s a bike lane that runs from west 3rd to the Convention center, under 35, and east on 5th street that can link you up to a bunch of stuff.
Read the rest of today’s newsletter here.
Melted 45s
On her morning walk yesterday Meg found a melted stack of 45RPM singles left on the curb. I couldn’t stand to leave them there, so I walked a couple of tote bags over and carried the stack home.
I didn’t know what the heck I was going to do with them until I decided to just go through the stack as I found it and add the songs to a Spotify playlist in order (and then go back through and add the other sides):
Unbelievably, some of the records survived, and I had fun posting some of the survivors to Instagram. Most exciting to me was a decent copy of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”/ “Wind Cries Mary”:
I’ve heard “Purple Haze” a million times, but it sounded new to me on this 45 — I don’t think I’ve ever actually listened to it on vinyl, and the echo on Jimi’s voice sounded like it was coming out of a large tin can. Pretty excellent.
There were many, many casualties. The Beatles and Beach Boys must’ve lived at the top of the heap, so to speak, because they were all warped beyond play. Two of the saddest casualties for me were Otis Redding and the Electric Prunes.
But there were some other survivors! Roy Orbison, Barry White, Sinatra, Stones — I was most excited about “Little Girl” from Syndicate of Sound and Shadows of Knight’s “Gloria” cover. (It was right on the edge, but I love that Dunwich label, so I kept it.)
I don’t know how often I’ll listen to them, but I have enjoyed the Spotify playlist.
I was tempted to knock on the door and talk to the people in the house, but in some ways, I’d rather them be a mystery and think about who they are or might’ve been…
Update: I’ve been going back to some 45s I overlooked and keep finding some playable ones, like this wild Pete Drake track, “Forever” — the single version on the 45 actually isn’t streaming. It’s great!
Rolling on the streets of Austin
“One of the few aspects of living in Austin that’s become less of a hassle over the last 15 years is riding a bicycle,” writes Kevin Curtin in his recent essay, “The Joy of Bicycling in Austin.”
Deleted bike scene from Slacker … ? pic.twitter.com/egoTeSlf0e
— Marty (@BBrosMarty) April 24, 2023
Meanwhile, Aaron Chamberlain biked the I-35 “Hell Route” from Austin to San Antonio for Texas Monthly. (He previously rode every street in Austin and circumnavigated the entire state of Texas.) He writes:
Everyone wants to ride the best routes. The beautiful routes. The fewer cars the better. Sure, I do too. But what about these poor routes? Who will ride them? I almost feel a responsibility to ride them.
This ethos reminded me a bit of the skateboarders I’ve read about, who take the ugly or invisible parts of the city and turn them into a playground.
Aaron recently tipped me to this skate video, victims of boredom, by Igna, a local Austin skater and filmmaker who is still in high school. I found myself mesmerized by it, for at least two reasons: one, it just delights me that there are teenagers out there cutting it up like this and making trouble (I find the title ironic, as these kids seem like conquerers of boredom), and two, one of my favorite things about biking in Austin is that it gives me glimpses of a city I’ve never really seen. This video does the same.
We got to meet a screech owl!
Meg and I had an amazing morning yesterday out in Elgin at Austin Wildlife Rescue: we got to spend some time up close with Thurston, a 4-year-old eastern screech owl, just like the Coconuts who live in our back yard.
One thing you might notice is just how tiny Thurston is! The screech owls look larger than life through the spotting scope, but they’re just itty bitty raptors.
Here’s a comparison of our screech owls to the famous Flaco, the eagle owl now loose in Central Park:
What’s funny about this is that one reason I love looking at pictures of the magestic Flaco is that I recognize so many of the postures and behaviors I’ve seen from my little owls:
I don’t know why this pleases me so much, this juxtaposition of the grand Flaco with the more modest but still majestic Coconut. Finding majesty in the mundane is one of my favorite things, I guess. The little behavior the same as the big behavior. (And I think a lot about how photography scales — big and small scale to the same size on the phone screen.)
It’s like Hedda Sterne said: “For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 5
- Older posts→