An Unexpected Visitor

Thank you Tom for the graphic design insight and for the question of "what is authentic?" I encourage readers to take a look at the comments from the last post–it's good. Also, check out this link Anya found on the cassette funeral.

Tuesday was spent record hunting in Austin, Texas. I tried to find a recommended record store on the east side of town, but a Mexican beauty parlor has apparently taken its place. Like an intelligent tourist, I plan my hunting in advance according to a city's geography, so 'twasn't a thang when I saw the beauty parlor–there was another store a half mile away.

Often, my tack is to ask the locals for great record stores, and my back-up for the day was at the recommendation of David, the L.A. Hardcore veteran and Ph. D candidate. There are reasons things are called "punk as fuck" and Trailer Space record store certainly deserves the title. Austin has a smoking ban, just like every other city in the country now (except Wisconsin towns, bless their souls), but J.T. and his fellow clerk chain-smoked their way through my visit and proceeded to down Lone Star after Lone Star pints ("The National Beer of Texas"). There were a few cool records there, but I began to see a lot of stuff that I had previously seen at other Austin stores. In no city as of yet had the selection been that evenly dispersed across record stores.

The night finished with the co-opers and I going down to the local pub and enjoying "pint night," a weekly tradition amongst the Seneca House residents. I had the privilege of hearing about rural Texan rites of passage in which youths learn the valuable lesson of responsible and safe driving by practicing drunk on back country roads. I also heard the correct method of how to save cows idling in the middle of the road from getting hit by traffic–just punch 'em in the face!

I was planning on leaving the anomalous city of Austin Wednesday afternoon to see my dear cousin in San Antonio, but I had to get in touch with this one guy who was referred to me by a co-oper's friend. By the time I had finished in the library reading up on folklore recommendations (thank you Peter and Dan–these books only seem to be found at large universities) it was already 2 and I had to pack my stuff, leave a sweet note for my hosts, catch a bus to the east side of town to interview Chris who had some home-screen-printed CD jackets to show me before he went on tour with his band, Reverse X-Rays, and then boogie on over to the bus station for San An. This was not going to happen, and I'm glad I didn't rush things, because I never would have met the unexpected visitor alluded to in the title of this post. And no, the unexpected visitor was not a family of raccoons in the kitchen, but a lady named Lori, knocking on Chris's door, and who just happened to be the exact person I needed to meet at that moment. Was it fate that made me change my mind about the earlier bus to San An so I could stay a few minutes longer?

Chris described Lori as a filmmaker and his dear neighbor, though Lori would call herself a "maker" and "outsider artist." The newspapers call her a "Salvage Professional," while blogs and discussion forums on the Butthole Surfers call her all sorts of nasty things. I thought she was a nuisance and an intruder at first, then a crazy lady, and then as the three of us were talking, a really crazy lady. Lori finds and sells projector units, and has enough slides to fill twenty projectors playing simultaneously (she was the film performance artist for the Surfers a few years back). She also hosts a yearly Junk-a-Thon where she gets to sell all her treasures from the last year of salvaging, in addition to a small on-going "squirrel epiphany" piece–I shouldn't give it away, but its morbidity and awesomeness is right in line with the vagina and midget's arm, elbow-deep in a bent over man's ass snow sculptures outside my house.

She also makes her own noise-ist tapes and had some things to say about cassette culture, mail-art and experimental/industrial/noise!

Lori offered that some folk break things and use jackhammers and sheet metal to create sounds and cacophonies to calm themselves and their heads. Naturally, record labels can't give un-listenable-by-the-mainstream projects like those any funding (unless you're John Cage, the avant garde noise musician, but even his first recordings were homemade) so out of necessity they are DIY. It would follow that the album jackets would be DIY as well, and since such an endeavor is an individualistic one, the performance is quite different from the punk/indie process involving multiple people in a band, although Darien gave an extensive list of noise/industrial bands as well.

Perhaps we'll hear more about Lori in the future, but I wanted to briefly respond to Tom's question of authenticity, and to do this, I will go back to the conversation I had with Elizabeth and David, as it may shed some light on what is authentic.

Elizabeth has an incredible collection of homemade 45s and has been involved with bands all her life it would seem. Having spent a lot of time in Nashville, she saw many bands come and go and was so intimately involved with them that her comments on the networks of people surrounding the music can be taken with a high degree of validity and seriousness. She described how the southern rock band, Kings of Leon, could never be accepted as a "Nashville" band by Nashvillers because they didn't necessarily contribute anything to the scene there. Their social connections were somewhere other than with the musicians in the city, so they apparently never played with the locals, yet everywhere she turned after the band blew up, Elizabeth read that they were "of Nashville," a statement that reeked of unauthenticity.

Before I sign off, I have some personal things to take care of. Anya has informed me that she never received her record for the Homemade Album Art Historical Preservation Society that I sent off more than two weeks ago in San Francisco. Did everyone else receive theirs? Here's a list of those who I have sent records out to two weeks ago in San Fran:

Anya Dikareva
Truman Danz
Grace Grinager (sent off only last week from Denver)
Sarah Vig
James Linbloom
Matt Sario
Jesse Kegan
Brit Doolittle
Mr. Tzvi

I'll be sending Sean one as soon as I find a post office!

Also, thank you again Dan and Peter for the reading lists. I've been raiding the large university libraries whenever I get a chance, and I really enjoy the Sims book. The part on record store clerks is quite amusing.

From Texas with love,
James