ann richards is dead. and i can only assume that it has something to do with what a great day i had yesterday. because this sort of thing always balances out.
first off, i had a couple of chorizo and egg breakfast tacos at austin’s tamale house. the tacos cost a mere 85cents each (and conspicuously there is no tip jar at this establishment) and they had the tacos out to me before i even got my change. it was a cool morning and i ate them out on the porch.
then i holed up at a coffeeshop and spent seven straight hours writing. sure, there was a bit of emailing and online chess in there, but all in all i did over 4000 words. if only i could do that every day. if only my body could stand that much coffee.
then i rounded off the evening at the nueva onda movie nights, this week featuring a series of short films under the headline of ‘ancient alien android action’.
for those of you who are not hip to nueva onda movie nights, it’s run (in part at least) by my space squid co-conspirator david chang. what you get is patio seating at a mexican restaurant, where you can eat nachos and drink shiner, and watch short films. for the most part the short films are of fairly high caliber. of late dave’s been acquiring a lot of shorts from the vancouver film school, which tend to have all the loving attention one would expect of desperate grad students trying to make a name for themselves.
this week was particularly amazing. 8 shorts and not a single dog.
south african filmmaker neill blomkamp had three shorts in the program and i can’t stop thinking about. in ‘tempbot’, a temporary office worker/robot meets corporate malaise and wonderwoman linda carter. in tetra vaal we see apparently the same robot from tempbot (and this is some jaw-dropping special effects, CGI seemlessly integrated into jittery documentary footage) who is now a gun-toting police enforcer among the slums of south africa.
but most amazing, is ‘live from joburg’ (and you absolutely must stream it from here or maybe here). after describing it to my co-worker johnny motard he summarized it as "’alien nation’ in south africa’". it had all the imagery and rhetoric which has become a familiar part of the public perception of south africa: poverty, militarized police brutality, the collapse of civic infrastructure, and the disgruntled reluctance to provide any public resources to the under-class, including the very space they take up. only they’re talking about aliens. aliens with battle suits.
the only thing that tarnished the day (other than the death of ann richards, the governor of my heart) was all the boogers stuck to the walls of the nueva onda restroom.
