Zombie Lapdance

I’ve got to the point where I listen to more podcasts than I download every week, so I’ve got to working on the backlog. Some of the podcasts that I haven’t been listening to are not that good, and they probably deserved to be stored in a cobwebby corner of the media player’s flash memory. But there are a few gems.

A particularly nice surprise is Night Transmissions, an archive show of public domain material. Each episode is two hours long, which is daunting, especially if you end up halfway through, but they are filled with old-timey radio dramas and science fiction audio plays that are worth the trouble. One episode of Night Transmissions had a radio play by Vincent Price. He played himself, and most of the story was Vincent Price talking about the amazing food all the characters were eating, but it built to a reasonably gruesome ending. My other recurring favorite on the show is a suspense drama hosted the "The Strange Doctor Weird," a host who is every bit as campy as you might imagine.

I can’t say I’m too happy about the public-domain music used as filler at the end of each episode of Night Transmissions, but by the time you’re a hundred minutes in, you feel like you’ve earned the right to delete the rest.

I remember when Manor Road seemed like the hippest thing the East Side had to offer. But that was before the East Sixth renaissance. But there’s still some vestiges of coolness here and there. For instance, in the parking lot of a convenience store, where there used to be a sushi trailer (!) there is now a hotdog cart.

I like to think of hotdogs as the Caucasian taco. The "Man Bites Dog" stand has taken the common-man appeal of the hotdog and made it all fancy. Which I can’t say I entirely approve. The menu is a string of slightly cutesy names with esoteric ingredients.

But the "old school dog" was reasonably priced and served with simple fixins. Note the split-grilled method of preparation, which brought out the full flavor of the dog, without undermining the trashy greasiness.

The bun was one of the best hotdog buns I have ever encountered. It walked the delicate line between a pillowy texture and the virile tooth-feel of a real bread.
Man Bites Dog "Old School Dog" – Grade A

Just before the UT baseball team broke their winning streak, Julia my food-frakking deputy and myself attended a game. To be honest, I mainly wanted to eat hotdogs.

The footlong chili cheese dog screamed mediocrity. The machine chili and extrudable cheese product were little different from what you can get from your average 7-11. The bun and the meat were strictly off-the-shelf. Yet, just by being in the ballpark, the hotdog sublimated into its essence the spirit of baseball and the charisma of summer.

The corndog was slightly better fare. Hot and crisp, it was a near perfect example of the form.

The funnel cake (pictured next to it) was probably the worst purchase I’ve made. It felt like a brick of fry oil in my stomach, and to top off the embarrassment, the wind blew the powdered sugar topping onto everyone in section C. Not the best outdoor food.
UT Ballpark Dogs – Grade B

You may have heard that the American Academy of Pediatrics have called for a redesign of the hotdog on the grounds that it causes way too many choking deaths because of it’s esophagus-plug shape. Shortly thereafter I was forwarded a link to a design blog where they attempted to deconstruct the hotdog to make it safer.

Not to be outdone but what are surely a bunch of effeminate Mac-users, I have put together my own ideas. They’re thinking a little out of the box, but I’m sure you can appreciate that they are simply the first generation.

I took apart a vintage cast-iron lock the other day. Inside could be found a delightfully American engineering solution. There’s a deadbolt bar that can only be slid once a spring latch has been tripped.

It’s not the most precise locking system in the world (although one of the more rugged I’m sure), so I twisted a bike spoke into a skeleton key.

It totally worked!

Now I will never be locked in a Victorian mansion against my will by a Nancy Drew villain.

Here’s what’s wrong with the internet. You get three stories about a man who get’s his bowels devoured by an eel after his friends insert the eel up his rectum (1,2,3). And in those three stories you get pictures of four different species of eel. What sort of reporting is that? I want to know if it was a spiny peacock eel. Because I’ve had some of those in my bowels and that’s the sort of journalistic detail I can relate to.

I was biking home yesterday, when I ran into David Johnston, who designed our primary (and best looking) Space Squid logo. He was in his front yard putting together a paintboard that he was giving multiple stains of dye-infused water. Since this is Texas, and it was already some 94 degrees out, watching water dry involved no great time investment. I borrowed a camera tripod from him and recorded the artistic process as a time-lapse video. Watch it here:

While driving up on Anderson Lane, I caught a glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, of the message "Pizza! Tacos! Tortas!"

Those are three things I really love, I thought to myself. A while later, I convinced Jeremiah to accompany me to Pizza Zi, a store that has everything my heart desires. Or at least the three most prominent things.

We didn’t have the tacos (perhaps another trip) but we did have tortas and pizza in the same meal!

The torta was pretty decent, as was the pizza. But what was truly amazing, is they sold us the pizza at taco-cart prices. You live in this town too long and you forget that pizza is a cheap food, and it doesn’t have to cost fifteen or twenty bucks.

Jeremiah and I speculated amongst ourselves if it would be possible to get a pizza with al pastor and nopalitos as topping. Next time for sure.

I was at Shangri La, a hipster bar on E. Sixth and a guy came up to me carrying a drink cooler. "You want to buy some tamales?" he asked. "No thanks," I said reflexively. After he had walked off, I thought, why the hell did I say no to such an amazing offer? So I chased after him, buying a half dozen for a fiver.

The tamales were served wrapped in aluminum foil and held in a previously-used HEB plastic grocery bag. Because they were in the drink cooler they were still piping hot, probably even above the health department mandated safe temperature. They may have been the best tamales I’ve ever eaten. The corn meal was soft and moist, held together by hot chicken fat. And the chicken meat inside was juicy and flavorful.

Which goes to show, sometimes the guy making you a sordid offer in the bar has something you actually want.

A trip to the New Oriental Market came up with these pastries.

They looked delicious, but I should have read the ingredients. They were filled with beans. Yech.

I still don’t see how anyone can call something non-carbonated, let alone filled with yogurt, a soft drink

But it was pretty good.

A little mixer-platter of fish cakes came with a soup base packet, presumably to boil and serve the fish paste items.

The fish-paste fish-cakes, despite the variety of shapes, tasted pretty much the same. Although there was an interesting subtle gradation of texture. Some had the consistency of rubber, and some were almost as soft as fish marshmallows.

These are called skwinkles.

They were in a bargain bin at the Fiesta. Basically there’s these hard fruit sticks that you’re supposed to dip in the obligatory tamarind and chili paste.

This isn’t particularly food-frakkin’ but it’s an example of a particular type of slacker/hipster food. This is from "Your Mama", a burger bar on Caesar Chavez, which has been open for only a few months but has nevertheless already landed an appearance on Man vs. Food. It’s one of those places that names all its modest variations of a simple food after celebrities; a somewhat saccharine exercise in stretched metaphors. This was the Frida Kahlo.

Why was it named that? It’s unclear. Maybe because of the fried egg. But the gimmick of Your Mama is to fry the meat patty as two separate patties with a filling in between. So it’s sort of like the Pizza Hut stuffed crust but with all meat.

Went down to the corner fruitcup stand with Toasterwaffel and I got a torta hawallana. It’s Hawaiian because it has pineapple, ham, and sliced hotdog wieners.

I snuck a picture of the altar in the corner. You can’t see it from this distance, but all the statues have folded dollar bills wedged into every crevasse.

And of course the actual fruitcups.

Toasterwaffel had the strawberry malt (maltada fresa?), and I had a cup of chopped ice filled with strawberry, cucumber, salt, chili, and watermelon. It would have tasted a lot better if it had been about twenty degrees warmer.

My food-frakking deputy Julia and I bought some frozen, salted flounder.

The fins, head, scales, and guts had been removed but it was otherwise whole. A fascinating exploration of flounder anatomy.

It seemed like a regular fish that had been mutilated and squashed, a birth-defect hunchback of a fish. But it fried well.

There were some odd little bones near the edge, a line of tiny little support structures, but otherwise the bones peeled out of the fish like a cartoon drawing of a skeleton. It was a flavorful and slightly oily meat.

The City of Austin recently unveiled a plan to remodel a section of Interstate 35 that runs through downtown Austin. Karie Meltzer has written an excellent article about the project. She cuts to the heart of the matter, that I-35 is not just a big road, it is a racial and cultural boundary, even if gentrification has been blurring the line.

This particular section of I-35 is home for a weekly church service for the homeless, and it just happens to be the setting for my story, Anasazi-35, which you can still read up at Fusion Fragment.

The future is catching up to this humble Austin monument. The city plans will involve LED light arches. Supposedly they represent a gateway between the socio-economic districs, but a.) they are pointed 90-degrees the wrong way, and b.) the downtown socio-economic district has already extended about ten blocks through this particular gateway in the direction indicated. But it’s a nice try.

I like how the concept image, like the reality, is filled with thousands of grackles.

First step the low-power LED arches. Next step is an adobe squatter village of techno-savages.

I’ve been following Cayetano Garza’s Magic Inkwell comics for a while now. He’s one of the early adopters and experimenters in the webcomic form. So I was pleased to acquire his meat-space compilation of comics, Year of the Rat.

Cat’s comics are a powerful blending of retro early-Disney stylings with a modern psychedelic manga aesthetic.

Yep, it’s a whole bucket-full of neat.

I had a two hour layover in Oklahoma City (or OKC for those in the know). And while I should have been keeping an eye on Greyhound to see what they were doing with my bags, instead I let my curiosity get the better of me. Just down a block from the bus station was a dip in the ground, hiding a park the likes of which I have not seen.

It’s called Myriad Gardens, a public works and community beautification project from the 70s. But it looks like a forgotten world of tomorrow from the 50s. It’s as if someone built all the modernist golden-age dreams in the middle of Oklahoma and just let it rust.

The centerpiece of the gardens is the pond, a good twenty feet below the flat plain that OKC sits upon like saltshakers on a table.

There’s a rusting bridge crossing it, an enclosed space inside that is dusty and filled with trash. Within the pond swim dozens of coy as large as dogs. I saw one leap halfway out of the water, a shining marvel with a fleshy mouth that could swallow a child’s face.

No public works project is without a performance space. The stage is surrounded by a moat, patrolled by the golden coy.

Crystal Bridge seems like something out of a 70s science fiction movie. It looks like the utopia where the effete supermen plan how to use Zardoz.

A wall of glass filled with a bubble of tropical vegetation.

It was closed for renovation when I visited, but it looks derelict and overgrown. Every single window is dirty and dead leaves pile into the cracks.

There’s a lot of strange and derelict spaces in Myriad Gardens. There’s empty underground rooms with windows looking onto landscaped lagoons.

And pits with windows leading into uncharted catacombs.

What a brave new world has such architecture in it.

And directly across from the bus station is a self-consciously post-modern theater center.

If I had walked really, really fast, I could have made it to the Oklahoma City "riverwalk" and the Toby Keith-themed bar. But I don’t know if I could handle that much aesthetic excitement.

I had a little time between Conestoga being essentially over and my bus leaving for Texas. So I killed some time by walking around downtown Tulsa.

This photo was taken from Bartlett Square, which is in effect the very heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is a very fair representation of how dead the downtown is on a Sunday afternoon.

In the absence of people, there is some very stunning architecture. Tulsa was founded in 1907. A few years later it had fully embraced the art deco architecture style of the 1920s. From what I could see, this was the first and last time that Tulsans cared about the beauty of their city. The rest of Tulsa is stripmall, chain restaurants, and inexplicably empty fields. It’s less a city than a thickening of the countryside.

Here’s a good example of the beauty left neglected at the heart of Tulsa, like a pearl in a jar of pinto beans.

This is the South Boston Building or the National Bank of Tulsa Building (it had both names written on it). Note the meticulously ornate stonework.

Is that real gold on its door? I’m going to assume that it is.

Just across the street, lions barf iron chains.

These buildings remind me of temples found in the jungles of Thailand. Etched across them are the achievements of a forgotten generation of workmen.

They are buildings meant to be photographed against a dramatic Oklahoma sky.

There’s about a dozen square blocks of this, tapering off from the tallest buildings at the center to the humbler at the edges, before become empty parking lots and decaying industrial space.

The decay is seeping into the downtown too. One whole building was burned out, all of the beautiful concrete flare within arms reach of the fire escape covered with graffiti, like beetles covering a dead wildebeest.

Steel beams, now the nesting place of sparrows, are all that remain of an architectural feature.

And in a disused storefront, are the concrete crusts of a once proud edifice.