Zombie Lapdance

In my ongoing series on my recent trip to Chicago, I would like to show you some of the things I put in my mouth.

The journey begins in the airport at Austin, where I have an early morning breakfast that consists of the most expensive and worst tasting breakfast taco I’ve ever bought.

You can clearly see the slice of American cheese.

Looking for some Chicago-style pizza, we wander into a restaurant that actually has "pizza" in its title, only to discover that they don’t actually serve pizzas at all. They do have this pizza pot-pie, that’s all the fixings for a pizza baked in a dish, and then inverted onto your plate.

The Mexican groceries in Chicago appear functionally identical to the ones in Austin. But Julia, the food-frakking deputy, pointed out these series of advertisements for Jell-o dishes.

Near where we were staying there was a Mediterranean grocery and bakery. So I bought this flatbread straight out of the oven, and then we smeared it with labna, some sort of yogurt thing.

The flatbread was about the size of an extra-large pizza and piping hot. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in a while was not buying two of them.

I also got this "traditional floss-style halvah."

Imagine cotton candy flavored like pistachios and sesame paste.

These Turkish cookie things prove once again, that only America should be allowed to make cheap cream-filled cookies.

Then Ms. Thora took Julia and me to see a meat and sausage shop in the Lincoln Plaza area.

They had a bowl of turkey necks right out on the counter. They were only 50cents each!

Yum! Julia satisfies her turkey neck craving.

There is surprisingly little meat on them turkey necks.

I also had the deli guy shave off a pound of the "Tongue Blood Head Cheese."

The deli boy said that it was probably good as a cold sandwich meat, but he was too candy ass to have tried it for himself, so he didn’t really know.

It tasted exactly like wafer-thin sheets of tongue packed in gelatinous blood paste.

When I was in Chicago over the weekend, I took this photo of water in its solid state.

Which was less exotic once I realized that Austin is looking down the barrel of a hard freeze.

Then there was this Olmec head.

Which is just like the one at the LBJ school here in Austin. And come to think of it, that Julia standing next to it is also exactly like the one at the LBJ school.

Here I am with the monument that the people of Chicago erected to memorialize the "Dubya" administration.

Something that you only see in the big city is boxes and boxes of vermin.

This box was in the Lincoln Park Zoo.

For those of you who have never been to Navy Pier, don’t sweat it, it’s really dull. When we were there, the only really important attraction, the funnel cake stand, was closed. But they did have this photo commemorating the history of the Chicago police. It’s a little hard to see, but on the right you can see a whole bunch of thugs with tommy guns and fedoras. On the left, there’s an armored SUV, and cops with riot gear and shotguns.

Yup, the Chicago PD hasn’t changed much. I’m surprised the mural doesn’t show the cops with blood-stained hundred-dollar bills hanging out of their pockets.

Because we felt that we owed it to the ailing US economy, Julia and I spent some money on a ridiculous attraction, this hyrdaulic motion-simulator ride.

Inside it has a projection TV (using actual cathode ray tubes!) that’s about six feet across and has pixels the size of a baby’s fingernail. During the "ride" it displays the best CGI graphics 1996 had to offer.

Then we went to the Shedd aquarium. It takes a little while to notice that the entire building is decorated on a marine theme. Here’s an eel lintel.

This is a chandelier with crustaceans and mullusks.

Inside the aquarium it was total madhouse considering that it was a holiday weekend.

Very carefully, I identified all the fish. Like this moray eel.

Or this marine isopod.

One should note, while looking at this picture, that the isopod was about the size of a football.

They also had examples of walleye, a fish which I have frequently praised.

And remember, the fish hate it when you point at them.

Sorry about the space between this and the last entry. Me and my food frakking deputy, Julia, have been up in Chicago doing the family Thanksgiving thing. In the frakker family we celebrate every Thanksgiving with a ritualized hunting of the wild rutabaga (also called a Swedish turnip).

Here we see the brave young rutabaga hunter dashing out on his hazardous quest.

The hunt is temporarily delayed as the brave young hunter expresses a perfectly reasonable reluctance to tangle with this wily root vegetable.

The hunt ends as we ceremonially compare the size of the rutabaga with the size of the brave young hunter’s head.

During dinner, we feast on our kill.

Rutabaga, once boiled and baked, tastes a lot like radishes crossed with a squash casserole. Frakker-deputy Julia summed up all our feelings by saying, "No, I don’t particularly care for it."

Another traditional food is beans-a-dean.

Any simularity to bean almondine is vehemently denied.

This was the first year that I tried to make the official Thanksgiving side dish of NPR, Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish. This dish involves cranberries, sour cream, a raw onion and horseradish.

You can eat this relish without much complaint, but you have to really love NPR to like it.

Not to ruin the spell of the previous post, but I was just incorporated into a rap and I need to talk about it.

There I was, biking down by campus, doing some errands. I pass by this SUV parked next to a liquor store, and there’s loud hip-hop beats coming out of the open windows. And I hear the guy in the passenger seat go:

"Guy * on * the * bike / With * the * torch * light"

Not only did he bust out that verse THE INSTANT HE SAW ME, but it was a near-rhyme, which is even harder than an actual rhyme.

I’m not sure if it’s upsetting, flattering, impressive, or just plain weird.

Yesterday, my deputy food frakker, Julia, and I rode our bikes around East Austin, participating in the East Austin Studio Tour.

Now, I wouldn’t mitigate the art-enjoyment experience by taking pictures of people’s actual artwork and posting them on my blog, but I would like to share with you some of the little spaces and environments we visited.

There were tiny little studios, there were nearly derelict houses, posh yuppie mansions, industrial spaces, and converted warehouses. It was as much fun to walk through all the out of the way pieces of real estate as it was to look at the art.

This was the first place we stopped, the Austin Metal Authority.

This place had pretzels, M&Ms, a keg, and a picture of kid holding up a stringer of bream.

In one corner of Super! Alright!, through the kitchen, behind the server stack, and in the closet, was this room with a couple of easy chairs and an old-fashioned slide projector on two-second automatic.

Most of the pictures in the slideshow were roller girls. It also had a series of photos where a naked tattooed girl shaved a pierced naked guy on a barber chair.

This was a converted shopfront that had a warren of closet-sized painters’ studios.

And a dog.

This East Side home had been converted into private studio spaces. This pile of art supplies might have once been a kitchen pantry.

The inside of this home had been completely gutted. Paintings hung from bare studs. Pieces of plywood lay over the gaps in the floor that opened right onto the crawlspace.

The Decoder Ring Design Concern does "seriograph" printing, whatever that is. More importantly they have a huge property, filled with a jungle of exotic plants and hidden pathways.

Needless to say, the children had almost as much fun exploring the grounds as I did.

This studio/gallery space was in a huge complex of art studios that might have once been a public school.

The studio tenant came back as we were swiping his pretzels and bottled water, so we had to pretend to look at his art.

There was another slideshow projector, this one in an antique camper trailer.

The slides were all vintage photos of life in West Texas. The iPod sound system played non-stop novelty cowboy songs.

Nearby, we saw this sign. You will want to read the first paragraph in its entirety.

The warehouse space dominated by the Sustainable Waves people (who do great work BTW) had this re-assuring sign:

Julia is well on her way!

Back in one of the sheds, we found this art exhibit called "The Womb."

Here I am, obediently following the written instructions.

Inside it was warm and soft. The kaleidoscopic display soothed my mind.

There was a brief moment of discomfort as the tube projected from the sculpture’s wall and inserted into my stomach, but I quickly forgot about that. From time to time, people have knocked on the lid, but they go away after a while. I anticipate some problems when the laptop battery runs down, but by then I don’t think I’ll need human artifacts. Things are just a lot happier and simpler in here.

Look! It’s a blonde!

Okay, maybe it’s not that exciting.

As someone who is a fan of both Thomas Pynchon and Buckaroo Banzai (who have never been photographed together by the way – think about it), I of course am familiar with the Yoyodyne family of companies.

I took the time to look up Yoyodyne on wikipedia and discovered several interesting things. For instance, it was frequently referenced on the John Larroquette show, which apparently made a number of cryptic Thomas Pynchon references that only wikipedia updaters have ever noticed or cared about.

But Yoyodyne Industries is now primarily working with making "Brane Power" amulets like this one called "El Brujo" (Spanish for "the witchcraft" or "the warlock").

If you look carefully, it does appear to have what looks like a crystal radio circuit, complete with zenier diode. I don’t recall much about crystal radios dampening beta waves back when they were in more frequent use, but we can assume that people were just more brane-intensive back then anyways.

I would buy one myself, but I think that $125 plus shipping is too much to pay to find out that my brane-waves are FM not AM.

Julia and I went out to catch the Leonid meteor shower. After a lifetime of hard-won experience, I have learned that meteor showers are never as exciting as the hype. If they say "there may be 300 meteors an hour", that means that you might see one or two before you run out of hot chocolate and have to head in.

So we found a spot out east of town, which was actually pretty popular with the meteor watchers. There was a little gypsy village of pickup trucks and cars by the side of the road. We found a spot that was out of sight, but not out of hearing of this community.

As meteors present significant technical hurdles to photography, so once again I have taken this opportunity to draw you some pictures of the event.

At some point when I wasn’t looking, riding bicycles went beyond a stiff-nosed vaguely political and eco-conscious activity and became a phenomenon. Austin has a fairly sophisticated community of social bikers that use facebook groups and blog announcements to organize riding events of varying degrees of difficulty, weirdness, and social acceptability. Last night I went on the Thursday night ride for the first time.

There were about four-hundred people who showed up to bike, which was about average I was told. The ride took most of the evening, from 8pm until nearly midnight. Of course there were plenty of stops.

It will be no surprise that many of these stops involved beer.

I wish that I had my ground-effects LED lighting system working. That would have made me a king among dorks. And I should have brought my complete bike repair set. With four-hundred civilians all biking together, you’re guaranteed a novel equipment failure every few blocks. There was a guy who had his crank fall off, and although I own the ideal tool for fixing that, I don’t typically carry it with me.

But it was an easy ride in general. I’ve been on the "Heavy Metal" fitness ride a couple of times, and that’s typically twenty or so miles in an hour and a half, over the biggest hills in the Austin area. I’ve never taken any pictures of that ride for the blog because I didn’t want to bring along extra weight. And yes, I realize that my camera is particularly small. It’s just that kind of ride.

The Thursday night ride was a breeze in comparison. Anybody who was a bike that still rolls could keep up with the pack.

As an unrepentant bike radical who thinks that more people riding bikes will make America a better place, it warms my heart to see bikes capture the high ground of fashion.

If you’ve read any of Derek J. Goodman’s stories, you will no doubt greet the announcement of his new novel set in the Apocalypse Shift with squeals of glee. I know I did. I had the pleasure of reading it before publication, so Derek sent me a couple copies of the final issue.

I will no doubt be giving one of these books away as a prize for the taco quiz, so start working yourself into a lather of excitement now.

I recently went on a binge of donating money and buying merch from podcasts I love. I feel that podcasts are a vital part of our collective culture and they deserve our financial support, and they need it a lot more than that mutherfucker John Aielli at KUT.

Decoder Ring Theater has been threatening to stop podcasting without some monetary reimbursement, a prospect that I find frankly terrifying. So I bought Greg Taylor’s novelization of the Red Panda Adventures.

As soon as I have time to read, I’ll be reading that.

I am also a huge fan of the Drabblecast, as is a well-documented public fact. But people walking around on the street wouldn’t know that. Until now.


I also got a CD of Drabblecast host Norm Sherman’s musical offerings. This CD proves that Norm is the rockingest dude in all of spec-fic podcasting.

I’m listening to it at this very moment, and I can tell you it’s really hard to type while Norm is singing about fetuses and milking whales.