Typerotica ... Um, Wow.

Now, you would think The Virtual Typewriter Museum would be a little bit of a snooze. I mean, I love typewriters as much as the next guy, but come on

Well, I was wrong.

Turns out there was a lot more going on that just stenography and a little light clerical. There was some down and dirty going on back in the day behind the old Underwood. And this is the tame stuff. Wowza!

If more museums were like this, we wouldn't need topless bars.

There's even a book about sex and typewriters! That kind of research is almost -- almost -- enough to make me go back to grad school.

Some Last Words About Buck

I was thinking about Buck Owens today. I’ve been meaning to write something about him since he died recently, but my thoughts hadn’t come together yet. I still don’t know that they have, but I figured I’d take a shot anyway.

The music of Buck Owens was about sheer exuberance – you can’t listen to his music and not smile. It’s like the old CCR song about sitting on the back porch and listening to Buck Owens. The sound of his guitar generates an emotional response.

It’s too bad that most people will only remember him for Hee-Haw, a magnificent piece of pop culture cheese that seems almost surreal looking back on it. The man was a guitar virtuoso who managed to blend many opposing musical tangents of the 1960s into the Bakersfield Sound, a sound as American and relevant as bee-bop.

When you compare him to Johnny Cash, another mega-entertainer of his generation, they may have shared the genre but their art was substantially different. JR Cash was more of a poet fueled by anger and pills and it’s easy to trace an arc of redemption through his life and music. Buck isn’t quite so complicated. He was more of a pure entertainer and was more of a Horatio Alger story of a poor boy making good. He just wanted to put on a good show and make a little scratch.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Merle Haggard. Both Buck and Merle were products of the Dust Bowl and the Okie migration, but where Merle would continue to dwell on this in his music, Buck just kept steaming forward with good-time Honky-Tonk music. The music of Buck Owens wasn’t about rage or introspection, it was the great American postwar music of laughter and forgetting.

Maybe the lack of deeper themes will keep Buck from assuming his rightful place in the pantheon of country music gods. Now maybe he’s not a poet the way Johnny and Merle are, but if you listen to the bridge of Foolin’ Round, you will hear a caliber of American poetry that would humble Walt Whitman.

Godspeed, Buck. We’ll miss you.

We Are All Little Before Him

I have a new hero. His name is Eric Harshbarger and not only does he do cool Lego Skylines of Fort Worth (pictured above), he does Lego sculptures of Milhouse Van Houten, Dean Cain, and Conan O'Brien. Check him out!

Thinking of Walt Whitman

April is National Poetry Month and I am looking for a poem for my daughter to read at her elementary school poetry slam. And I stumbled on a poem by that grand old man of American poetry, Walt Whitman. It's totally not appropriate for the occasion but thought provoking nonetheless, especially the end:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Walker Evans Wannabe

I'm giving it my best shot here. I took this in Marfa last summer.

I Like This One The Best

Abbey Road
Originally uploaded by Digger Digger Dogstar.

It has a cool Paint By Numbers quality.

All You Need Is ... Legos?

Sgt Peppers Lego Hearts Club Band
Originally uploaded by Digger Digger Dogstar.

Not quite as cool as the Lego Aircraft Carrier, but cool nonetheless.

Come Fly With Me

The ring-a-ding spirit of old time Vegas is alive and well in Dallas thanks to one Mr. Ricki Derek. Ricki and his 15-piece band launched their first attempt to channel the spirit of the Copa at last Saturday night's Supper Club and they were successful -- mostly.

Ricki is an unbelieveably charismatic performer who doesn't possess a voice as rich as Ol' Blue Eyes but his stage presence establishes him as the real deal. He nailed it Saturday when he covered my favorite Bobby Darin song, More. He has star-power and makes you believe he could hang with Frank and Dino. And his band was as dead-on as any of the Nelson Riddle orchestras from the Capitol Records years. And although he stuck with a vintage set on Saturday, he's not above a loungy cover of The Doors' People Are Strange or The Church's Under The Milky Way.

All this was hosted at Victoria Hall next to Tucker Restaurant. The place gets its name because it is housed in an old Tucker dealership, but thankfully it's not an automotive-themed TGIFriday's monstrosity, its tastefully done with lots of wine bottles and wood paneling. I suspect the food is pretty good, but the meals didn't reflect it at the Supper Club. Food was lukewarm, hors d'oeurves were MIA, the servers surly. And the band overwhelmed the space and conversation was hard to come by. Ricki's six-piece outfit would have done fine. And I would have preferred to eat first, then see the show.

I'm hoping they get the bugs worked out because this is an idea whose time has come.

Alive

Another photo I took during my Magnolia Street jaunt. It may be immodest to say, but I love this picture.

Donald Judd Auction Scheduled

Donald Judd’s children work hard to preserve their father’s legacy.

On May 9 the Donald Judd Foundation, established after Judd's death at 66, in 1994, will put 35 sculptures up for sale at Christie's in New York, in an effort to create a $20 million endowment for the support of its properties in New York and Marfa, where Judd owned 3 ranches and 15 buildings.

Update on the Kinkster

A thoughtful write-up on Kinky Friedman inthe Dallas Morning News (registration required).

255-Year-Old Tortoise ... Dead

A 255-year-old giant tortoise named Adwaitya died at the Calcutta Zoo on Wednesday. The animal had been brought to India from the Seychelles Islands in the mid-18th century as a gift to the British colonial ruler Robert Clive.

What to do now? Make one big, nasty bowl of turtle soup. Yum.

What's the Coolest Thing in the World?

That would be a Lego Aircraft Carrier, of course.

Neko Case Esta Bueno

Neko Case. Is there anything more to say? Her voice is amazing, clear and haunting. Her new album, Fox Confessor Brings Flood is my album of the year pick. But, my, she has a little bitterness toward her parents. But don't we all.

Must I Paint You A Picture?

I love me some Billy Bragg and always have since the 80s. There's an interesting interview with him on the Onion's AV Club. Couple of interesting things about it.

Says Billy: "I think the politics that we had in the 1980s in America and in the UK were a lot more ideological than they are now. Reaganomics and the essence of what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do was a lot more aimed at pushing back at what had been achieved in the 1960s." Wow. I remember the 80s, too, and I think this is most poisonous political climate in my memory. Not only are there many in the U.S. interested in undoing the Sixties, they want to undo the New Deal. And they're doing it. That is much more frightening.

However, one thing he said that I completely agree with:

"One thing that's always impressed me about America is your ability to do things when you set your mind to it, even if it is something fucked-up like invading Iraq. You know, you guys logistically are right up there. None of us have got that capacity for moving shit from A to B. It's very powerful. And I would like America per se really to get back in touch with what you Americans refer to as "barn-raising." You know what I'm talking about? When someone in a community wants to build a barn or a house, everybody in the community gets together and spends an entire weekend to help the person to raise the A-frame of their house or their barn. That ability to go out and help people.

"You know, if everyone in the Middle East who met an American met one who had come to help them, rather than an American armed to the teeth who had come to police them, I think we could begin to move away from the situation we've found ourselves in. There's a great film to be made, or maybe a book to be written, called Go Home, Yankee, And Take Me With You. So many people out there look to the United States as a place of great opportunity. And I think that maybe your manifest destiny is to help people rather than to hinder people. I would like to see the American people live up to that."

Readymade Art

I love old signs. I look at them as little pieces of readymade art. Here's one of my local favorites, across from Benito's on Magnolia.

Another Award

My friend Johnny D. Boggs is my hero. He's a guy who follwed his dreams and has had things work out nicely. He quit his day job wrestling with the elements of style in daily newspapering and became an award-winning writer of western fiction. He just won his second Spur Award this weekend for his book, Camp Ford. Check him out and buy a book.

A Picture of Jim

I like taking pictures of people painted on walls. This is Jim. I snapped this back in January down on Magnolia.

Not Staying On Top of Things

Today is Texas Independence Day, which I usually celebrate by not celebrating at all. It's usually something along the lines of, "Oh, today is March 2. Texas Independence Day."

Anyway, I wanted to write about Black History Month, not Texas Independence Day, so bear with me. My daughter read the following poem from Robert Hayden poem "Frederick Douglass" at her school assembly. She's a very articulate, confident reader for an 8-year-old, which is why they asked a blonde-haired white girl to read a poem for Black History Month. And this poem is amazing:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

For a thoughtful examination of this poem, read the Say Something Wonderful Blog.

Would You Let This Man Run Your State?

Although I think one of the biggest problems with the blogosphere is the tendency for people on the left and the right to spew forth about their ideology when in reality they are merely regurgitating the talking points set out by the party or some think tank. Hey, I’ve done it, too. But I’m a lot more interested in a person’s authentic inner or artistic life rather than how effectively a person toe’s the party line. I think that is where the medium becomes an art form.

With that in mind, let’s talk politics.

I’m supporting Kinky Friedman in his run for the governor’s mansion because I think he has a point: people get the kind of government they deserve. Something is seriously, spiritually wrong in Texas and it is up to the people to fix it.

I know that the problem isn’t just Texas. Special interests and their big money have a stranglehold on Washington, D.C., too. But if you live in Texas, you can’t do anything about D.C. This is a one-party state, the reddest of the red. It is going to take someone to seriously rock the boat in Washington and it ain’t coming from here.

But we can do something about it here in Texas. The Kinkster is an authentic, independent voice who is as fed up as I am and is prepared to do something about it. To paraphrase his talking points:

Education
An educated workforce and top-notch schools are essential to keeping our state attractive to new business, but we're failing the test.

Texas has the 8th largest economy in the world, but we're 1st in drop-out rates and 49th in education spending in the country.

Teachers' salaries in Texas are over $6,000 below the national average. This lack of respect for the people who do our state's most important job must stop. As governor, Kinky will work to make sure that teachers are paid what they're worth. Period.

The TAKS test and its predecessor, TAAS, were invented essentially to make legislators look good on education. But studies show that rigid enforcement of standardized test scores doesn't help kids learn or make teachers more effective. Teach to the test and kids will learn the test—but not much else.

Healthcare
Texas ranks rock-bottom in providing for the basic needs of its youngest and poorest residents. More than one fifth of Texas children have no health insurance at all. In 2003, Texas legislators slashed the Children's Health Insurance Program, pulling the rug out from under 170,000 kids. Not only did this put more of our children at risk, it ended up costing the state tens of thousands of health care jobs and $16 billion in lost productivity. Kinky believes this is reckless and short-sighted—no way to invest in the future of Texas. We're a state that prides itself on friendliness and responsibility, but the message we're sending our kids is that if you're going to be born poor, you'd better not be born in Texas.

Renewable Energy
It's time for Texas to reclaim bragging rights as an energy icon. As governor, Kinky will accomplish that by encouraging investment and innovation in new methods of electricity generation and new fuels like biodiesel.

Think these are fringe technologies? Think again. Wind power plants, solar power arrays, and landfill gas capture systems are already in operation across Texas in cities from Fort Stockton to Fort Worth. Texas has been called "the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy," and firms from TXU to Kyocera are already clamoring for a piece of the action.

Despite our staggering potential, only 0.7% of Texas' energy needs come from renewable sources. That puts us 51st in the nation, behind even Washington D.C.

Biodiesel—it's good enough for Willie Nelson’s tour bus, and the city of Denton is using it to fuel their entire fleet of diesel trucks. Biodiesel is fuel you can grow. That's good for farmers, good for the air, good for the Texas energy industry and good for Texans. With biodiesel, everybody wins but OPEC.

OK, that’s the party line right there. I’ve never worked on a political campaign before, but I am now. If you live in Texas and are looking to vote for the Kinkster, here’s what you need to do:

Register to vote: There’s still time.

Don’t vote in the primary: Don’t vote in the Republican or Democratic Primaries on March 7. It’s weird asking people not to vote, but I didn’t make these crazy rules.

Sign the petition to get the Kinkster on the ballot: Kinky has 60 days after the primary to get 45,000 authorized signatures. Maybe that doesn’t sound so tough, but consider this: the last person to do this was Sam Houston in 1850. I find a petition, contact me or go to KinkyFriedman.com.

Get Involved: The governor’s race cost $100 million last time around. That money only comes in large chunks from people who have it. If you want to make history and put Kinky in the Governor’s Mansion, please give your time and money to make this happen.

Thanks for letting me on the soapbox. Back to your regularly-scheduled noodlings.