Notes From An Attic: The Never-Ending Vacation, Maimondes' Autograph, Promoting The Book, And More

Two months since I've touched this blog? Apparently so. And a very odd two months it's been. To recap: in early October, while on vacation in Spain, I received photos of water seeping outside the door to my house, which water proved to be the result of a toilet valve failing and 48 hours' worth of uncontrolled release of water. The landlord quickly shut it off, but sheetrock, ceiling, and wooden floors all needed replacing. He predicted three weeks or more.

More. If the most optimistic forecasts are correct, I'll have been out of the house for three months by the time I get to move back in. Christmas and New Years will be elsewhere. Fortunately "elsewhere" isn't as onerous as it might be: after a week and a half in a horrible, expensive, poorly-run "extended stay" hotel, a Facebook friend offered me one of his airbnb properties, this not being the high season, and I moved into an attic on his property. It has its down side.

First rule: don't be tall. Photo credit: Special K

Also, I packed for a three-to-four-week stay here, which meant I grabbed a few clothes and some kitchen stuff that was either in excess of what I needed or not enough. There's a stove (oven doesn't work) and a microwave, but cooking has been a problem. When the weather got cold, I had to buy some new shoes (fine: the winter shoes I bought in January sucked, and REI will take them back) and a down jacket thing (already have one, but can't get to it). Fortunately, the place is centrally located, which means I can walk a lot of places, and driving isn't quite the pain it is down south, where you have to drive places to get places. You kind of have to get out of where you are before you can start going where you're going, if you see what I mean. Here, it's a lot more like living in a city.

So I'm still living out of a suitcase, eating out much too much for my comfort (both dietary and financial), but things could be worse: the main focus of the past couple of months has been assuring a smooth launch for The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 1, which has certainly been interesting. Fortunately, so far most of the reviews have been very positive, and I've mostly done interviews with really intelligent people, like Gil Roth, whom I'd never heard of before, and Michaelangelo Matos, whom I had. There have been some radio interviews, most notably on KQED's Forum, which had the most chaotic, ill-prepared, ignorant host I'd ever dealt with. He'd never so much as opened the book, knew nothing of its subject, and couldn't keep the conversation on track. Unfortunately, I had a severe attack of cedar fever just as the mike went live, so I wasn't at my best initially, either. Fortunately, I recovered. The host...maybe not so much. And there was the Bellowing Celt who called in, completely bonkers. I'm still shaken, but I suspect that's the worst of it.

That cedar fever, too, has slowed me down some: there was a cold snap in Austin and the trees went wild. Me, I went to New York and Montreal, where it was cold enough, caught some kind of flu in all the subways and airplanes and trains and whatnot, so I had to deal with that and the cedar disease when I got back. I haven't been very active, to put it mildly. Oh, and in November there was the Texas Book Fair, where all the music book writers were up against one another, so who do you think got the crowds: Thomas Dolby, me, or the woman who wrote a biography of Guy Clark, beloved late Texas songwriter, who, instead of having a panel in the Capitol building, had the Paramount Theater at her disposal, and had several local high-profile songwriters on board to do some of Guy's songs? I got to the signing tent, there was a huge line...but not for me, of course: her publisher had sensibly augmented Barnes & Nobel's supply. B&N only had 30 books for me to sign, and five were for the store. There were a lot more at Book People, though, for the official release event, and I even had to go down again to sign another raft of them there. (They have 'em on mail-order, too, if you want one).

Still there, newly renovated for your Manhattan office address. Brill himself was in the menswear biz. 

This is all pretty un-chronological, I see, but at the end of November, I went to New York for a week on a project totally unrelated to the book (but got a bit of promo, if you can call five minutes' worth of interview on an AM New York Jesus station "promo": who knew New York had a Jesus station called THE ANSWER? Who knew New York had a Jesus station at all? What can the listenership of an AM station like that be?). Before I left, though, I decided to go to a couple of museums as long as I was in town, and it really felt good.

MOMA had the first US retrospective of Surrealist painter Francis Picabia, whom I'd mostly known as a major pain in the ass to the entire Paris art scene throughout Cubism, Surrealism, and beyond. It wasn't until after I saw the show that I learned that at the age of 15, Francis, son of a wealthy man, learned to paint so that he could copy his father's collection of old Spanish paintings, replace them with his copies, and sell the originals to dealers so he could buy expensive stamps for his stamp collection. That, however, is consistent with the rest of his life, as is the excerpt from one of his writings that gives the show its title: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. His thoughts certainly did: austere drawings of machines that actually do nothing, colorful abstracts, odd cartoon-like stuff, bland but disturbing hyper-realist oils, some of them sourced from soft-porn magazines, during the German occupation of France, and, if your feet are tired, you can sit and watch a film he and René Clair made called entr'acte, which was shown during the intermission (entr'acte) of an Erik Satie ballet. It's exhausting and goofy, and the show made my day. Heads off to Picabia!

The show I knew I wanted to see, however, was up at the Met, and I devoted a day to it: Jerusalem, 1000-1400, Every People Under Heaven.  It was a bit odd: having not quite returned from a trip to Spain to try to get a handle on the three-culture Christian-Jewish-Muslim culture there, from which Crusaders went off to try to "reclaim" the Holy Land, here I was in New York watching the story from the other end of the telescope. It's not a particularly arty show, because two of the religions involved weren't much on representational art, and also because a lot of the prize exhibits are books. Delicate and tending towards fading, they're displayed in darkish rooms, and you really have to want to look at them -- and you need to to get the show's message.  Here's a beautiful illuminated manuscript, obviously French 14th century, groaning with gold leaf, showing a biblical scene. The lettering's in Hebrew, though, and it was used by the Jewish community of Tours. Here is a deluxe fold-out map of Jerusalem, prepared for tourists -- or, rather, for a tourist, since it's hand-lettered and hand-illustrated. Of course, the guy who did it had never been there, but it's still amazingly accurate. Over here, a letter asking that some hostages be freed -- the caption says such letters are quite common from this period -- signed by Maimondes! That gave me an electric shock and once again reminded me that this story I've been chasing -- whatever it is -- spreads over a huge area. I have to say, the show is huge, painstakingly fair to all sides, and not only fills in a lot of blanks on the three-culture story for me, but also shows that the idea of the tourist trap is millenia old: lots of the stuff on display was made for pilgrims to take back to Europe with them. Only open until January 8, so get down there if you can.

Most of the rest of my time has been spent waiting for the house down south to be finished. At some time after the first of the year, I'm confident that my publisher will make an offer for Vol. 2 of the book, and I can get back to doing what I do best: writing. I may attempt a couple of signing tours -- I'm trying to work one up with Amtrak so that I can take the train up the West Coast -- which I'll have to finance myself. But that's in the future: right now I want to move back into my house, sit on my couch, sleep in my bed, and cook in my kitchen again. Three months is too damn long. When you're walking up Madison Avenue (to the Grand Central Oyster Bar: some things never change) and you realize that you're taking a vacation from your vacation and soon will be on a train to Montreal to visit friends as a vacation from the vacation to the vacation, you realize how much you miss having a home.

Of course, I've been feeling that way for about two years now, and the recent election only firmed up my decision to leave again once this next book is finished. I could, and no doubt will, go into that in some detail. But not today. Today is Christmas Eve in the attic. I have to stockpile some food for the weekend. Ho ho ho, y'all.

Barcelona, Back To Texas, Viewing The Ruins

The room might not have been great, but Barcelona still was. I only had the afternoon to do all the things I'd planned, if I could beat back the drumbeat of the oncoming chaos I was sure would greet me in Texas. One thing I knew: I'd need some new clothes, because I wouldn't have access to mine for a while. Anyway, all the weight I'd lost in the past year meant all the pants I had that fit me -- two pairs of regular ones and one of Levi 501s -- were in my suitcase. I had the Levis on. They'd need washing soon.

I've always like the clothing I'd seen in the high-end Spanish shops along the Paseig de Gracia and, indeed, on some of the Spanish men walking along the street, so, since it was nearby, I went over to the Corta Inglés, the giant department store one sees all over Spain, to see what it offered. It was much like any other department store except that it had Spanish stuff (and, of course, a giant supermarket in the basement, the only part of the store I'd ever been to). The guy at the Hugo Boss boutique on the men's floor even suggested I look at Spanish brands, which were just what I wanted, as it turned out, and considerably cheaper than what brands I can get in Austin like Ralph Lauren and Boss and so on were offering. Two shirts and a pair of pants later, I had what I needed. I'm not a shopping-as-therapy kind of guy, but it did feel good to know that I wouldn't be naked in Austin.

And yes, I did head to the basement to pick up three cans of olives stuffed with anchovies and a couple of cans of Spanish tuna. I'm not a complete idiot.

And, as is my custom, I had my last dinner in town at the always-wonderful Nou de Granados, one of my favorite restaurants: a nice salad, and oxtails in a wine reduction on a pillow of truffled mashed potatoes, garnished with potato chips. Don't sneer at potato chips in Spain: they're a great example of the virtue of simplicity. I can't eat many because of the diabetes, but when they're perfectly crisp and greaseless but redolent of fine Spanish olive oil -- as these and many I was offered at bars were -- they put Lay's and the like to shame.

The next morning I woke early, had a decent breakfast downstairs in the hotel and grabbed a cab to the airport. Barcelona to Paris Charles de Gaulle (the hellish Terminal 2) to Atlanta to Austin. I was lucky: not only had I bought economy plus fare (recommended for large or tall people and/or people with legs, not to mention those of us who've experienced lower vein thrombosis or a pulmonary embolism as the result of a long flight), but it was a Tuesday, so not that many people were travelling, and I had no seatmate. Air France has a fairly crappy selection of films (unless you've always wanted to see The Angry Birds Movie with Arabic subtitles), so I had lots of time to read and think.

Something that's always annoyed me about the menu at the Nou has been the silly errors in the English translation, in particular "backed" for "baked." If I lived in Barcelona, I'd offer to edit their menu in exchange for a bottle of wine or something. (They've also confused "cherries" with "cherry tomatoes," the former of which one doesn't really hope to see in the Caesar salad -- and doesn't) But something Miguel had said in Madrid clicked in my head. He'd noted that Franco had suppressed the teaching of languages during his reign. I knew he'd suppressed Catalán and Basque and Valencian because he rightly feared that allowing them would lead to nationalism, but apparently all foreign languages were ignored until the university level, when it's arguably harder to learn a new tongue. So unlike Germany or France, elementary school kids didn't start adding languages until after Franco was gone.

Of course, this was just the end-point of the story I'd been living in for the past couple of weeks: in 1492, Spain expelled its mathematicians, physicians, philosophers, navigators, businessmen, bankers and intellectuals -- ie, its Arabs and Jews -- turning the country into a land of peasants under the mighty heel of an autocratic church and its Inquisition and a bloated and not very intelligent class of aristocrats, up to and including the royal family.

King Fernando VII, by Goya (detail). Does this look like a reasonable man? An intelligent one? Right on both counts, and obviously Goya detested him.

By the time Spain revolted and threw out the Inquisition in the early 19th century, it had missed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and had to import British and German workers to ramp up their technology. Fortunately, those workers did a great job -- and the Germans taught the Spaniards how to make good beer and sausages. To this day, a Frankfurt is a Spanish joint featuring beer and sausages! But the progress was halted again with the appearance of Fascism in the 20th century: it wasn't until 1974 that the transition to democracy -- and cultural freedom -- began, which is why the vibe of post-Communist Berlin is still noticeable in the air.

Spanish design of the '60s and '70s: a collection of SEAT automobiles in the Valencia train station. 

I think this explains a lot about Spain, and why it appeals to me: the process of discovery of new possibilities is still in the air, the Catalan secession movement may not succeed, but, like the Scottish one, may force some interesting and needed change, and the arts and the young people who make them, are still charging ahead.

* * *

Meanwhile, I was on an Air France flight back to a country where, for the first time in its history, it was being challenged by an overtly Fascist candidate in a Presidential election. And, on a more personal level, I was returning to a house that was unlivable and many possessions that had been destroyed, including materials I'd need for my next book. To soften the blow, I rented two nights in the most reasonable hotel I could find, actually a big B&B in Travis Heights that I found on the Hotel Tonight app. The first night, I just crashed, destroyed by 20 hours of flying and changing planes, including two hellish airports, CDG Terminal 2 and Atlanta, where CNN is blaring at an unreasonable volume out of the sound system. The next day, a friend and I went to see what was left of my house. 

It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. 

Looking from the living room into the office: the toilet that exploded was in the bathroom whose entry is seen on the left. 

These giant honking dehumidifying fans were everywhere. The electric bill will be stupendous, but I do believe the damage will be far less because of them.

Not a great picture, but a lot of stuff was saved. 

My landlord was great: he sprung into action and got a company involved that specializes in this kind of rescue. Despite my lack of renters insurance, his insurance covers the packing and storage of the contents of the house until it can be rebuilt. (Presumably they also bring the stuff back, too). The company gave me the weekend to take what I wanted for the period ahead, which, jetlagged and just a bit traumatized, I sort of did. I checked into the Extended Stay America on the corner of W. 6th and Guadelupe for a week, and arranged for a Facebook friend's airbnb to be my home for a month after that. Heaven knows if the renovation will be done by then; the landlord says the construction folks say it'll be ready by Thanksgiving, but he thinks mid-December is more likely. Whatever. All I can do is take it a day at a time, passively waiting for word.

Eventually, there'll be dealing with Austin Water and the electric company. On November 6, I'll be on a panel at the Texas Book Festival with Joe Nick Patoski and David Dunton, my agent, talking about writing about music from two viewpoints: biographical (Joe Nick's specialty) and historical (mine) and how the two approaches do in the marketplace. It's free, and I'll be signing some early copies of both the rock and roll history and the Michael Bloomfield book. If you're in town, drop by. If you can't make it then, there'll be a rock and roll history release party at Book People on the 19th.

* * *

This hotel I'm writing this in is a circle of hell, and I'll be glad to be shut of it in a couple of days (the parent corporation has been pestering me with e-mails for my thoughts, and boy are they going to get them!), but when I moved in, I decided to try an experiment. Downtown Austin, in the 20 years I spent in Europe, changed utterly and completely. It's like aliens dropped an entire new city onto a few square miles, but I decided to try a little experiment while I'm here and spend as much time walking and looking at the new city as I could. There are primitive cooking facilities in the hotel, and there's the Whole Foods corporate mothership within walking distance, again making it my neighborhood supermarket like it was 30 years ago (except in a different location and with about a dozen times the floor-space). Waterloo Records and Book People are also at 6th and Lamar, and there are loads of new high-rises and boutiques and restaurants scattered all through the west downtown and what the property developers call the "warehouse district," which, yes, it used to be. 

There's been much talk during the development of this of a "revitalized downtown" and a "walkable city" and how much revenue the property taxes will bring the city. I had lunch with a lifelong Austinite who used to live downtown yesterday, and his views were very interesting. "When I was down here," which was in the '70s and '80s, "the residential population of downtown was between 1000 and 2000. Now it's more like 20,000," although another friend had noted that many of the new buildings are 30% empty because they're used as second residences or "investments." I mentioned to my friend that as I'd walked the streets -- something not too many other people seemed to be doing -- I'd noticed that not only the people I'd seen, but the whole way the residences were marketed, were young, rich, and white. The boutiques also slanted that way, and certainly the restaurants did. (Many are parts of luxury chains with branches in upscale parts of California, Arizona, and elsewhere in Texas, and there's a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse not far from my hotel). 

"Yeah," he said, "there was a lot of talk about rentals and a certain percentage of affordable housing, but in practice the way that plays out is that the renters of the affordable spaces live there for a while and then get offered enticing buy-outs so the developers can up the prices or condominiumize the place. As for the places that are already condos, they're hit and miss." He pointed out a couple that are pretty full, and indeed there's one particularly hideous one near me that's all lit up at night with just about every unit seeming to be full. Others, though, especially some of the more expensive ones, don't seem to be much occupied at night. Still, they keep building them and advertising luxury. Certainly West 6th, which is the thoroughfare I'm on and which I walk daily, is lined by very upscale bars (and a few corpses of failed ones), in contrast to East 6th, which has been party central for ages, and attracts frat boys and sorority girls to bars where the aim is to get blotto. West 6th isn't much different, but I sense that the bars are more expensive here. Offering valet parking for $6 to $10, which you won't see on the other side of Congress Avenue, they seem tonier, the patrons better-dressed and maybe more seniors and MBA candidates or law-school types than on the other side. It's comforting that UT's jeunesse dorée has its own blotto-toria. 

As for the restaurants, I've found very few I'd want to return to. An exception is Lambert's, which has made a workable gimmick out of very good barbeque served in a fine dining context. But even there, the sheet listing the day's specials included a $27 shot of bourbon. As I remarked to a friend last night, for three times that you could probably buy an entire bottle of it. And Manuel's is doing a good job with upscale Mexican food, which needn't be as expensive as you'd think. The service bordered on servile when I was there, but it's usually a good bet. 

It's a cliché for old Austinites to lament what's passed, but to me, there's change and there's change. I'd be a lot more in favor of the new downtown if it were more racially, economically, and culturally inclusive. It's not. I love the idea of waking up what was a wasteland of auto parts shops, printing supplies, and derelict spaces, but it looks like greed had far more to do with it than I'm comfortable with. Imagine that. 

And yet, and yet... One of my favorite memories of West 6th was the spring day I had lunch at Hut's Hamburgers (still there! -- although now paired with an inedible pizza joint) and was walking back to my car, crossing the small bridge over Shoal Creek, and saw a mother turtle plodding down the creekside, with five or six youngsters following her. The other day, I was walking back from Whole Foods on the other side of the street and saw something by the creek. I stopped and held my breath: a heron, four feet tall, was stalking down the creek. It was a really magnificent bird, and I edged closer to the side of the sidewalk to look at it. A Type 1 jogger, togged out in expensive sportswear with some sort of phone/music player strapped to his bicep, swooshed past, hissing "Thanks" as he went by. I didn't do it for you, man. But I'd do it for a few seconds more with that bird. Anytime. 

On Returning

I'm usually pretty good about this: marking anniversaries of milestones in my life. August 12: I moved to Germany. Late October: I moved to France. October 23: I moved back to Texas. So why didn't I jump on this first anniversary of that last event to put up a blog post?

Several reasons. Mostly, I've been way too busy to do it. That's the good news. But in small part, because I'm ambivalent about having done it. Let's see if I can explain.

The daily vista

Shortly after I moved into this place, I set up a work area that hasn't changed noticeably since then. I bought and built a desk, which had a defective drawer, so I can't use that helpful aspect of it. And I set it up by a window, which is what I've pretty much always done, everywhere I've lived. The outdoors isn't a distraction so much as it's something to look at while I'm gathering my thoughts. More than once I've been absorbed in writing something, then gotten up to get a drink or just to stretch my legs and suddenly notice that it's rained. Didn't even notice.

But I'm under no illusion about how lucky I am. I arrived in the US minus a credit rating, due to the fact that for twenty years I'd lived in places where that information was between you and your bank (and the police, who have access to most, but not all, of your data), and that's all. "He's a ghost," one prospective landlord told my realtor during my search for a house. "It's like he doesn't exist." By a miracle, a friend of a friend (who was my realtor's husband) with whom I'd almost gone into business (said business proposed by the same realtor's husband) had outgrown his house and was renting it out. He was plenty sceptical, because of the no credit rating, but he took a chance.

Which made me scared. I'd been trying to sell a book that, it seemed to me, was a natural. I was sure my agent could do it, but I was hoping he could do it soon. It was the reason I'd moved back here, or one of them: I wanted access to UT's arts library, which I'd used before. There were other reasons, too. I tried, but couldn't seem to master Catalan, which I needed if I were going to move to Barcelona, which was Plan A. The hard disc was full. Oh, I might have been able to do it if I'd just moved there and taken a class, and I'd seen classes that encompassed both Catalan and Spanish. I might, just might, have been able to do it. I didn't actually know anyone there, but I could probably have made a few friends. And I did like the place. But...with no language, not a good idea.

The days passed, and the book didn't sell. Soon, I was in debt to my landlord. That was not a good thing. I was going to have to live like I could become homeless at any moment, because that's the reality in America, particularly in Texas. I still had no credit rating, and if I lost this place, I would have to live in my car. I wasn't much looking forward to that, and eked out day to day. Fortunately, my "broke, not poor" habits made it possible to feed myself fairly well, but they put a damper on having a social life. But I was living from day to day, and that's not what I'd hoped would happen.

My stuff arrived from France, and I started slapping it onto shelves. Unfortunately, there weren't enough shelves. There still aren't.

90º shot from the previous. More (but not much) in the garage.

It's the same way with the CDs: I desperately need to get them shelved and sorted. So far, though, I haven't gotten the shelves or advertised for help:

And there are many more on the facing wall. 

But, a year after I moved in here (Nov. 8, as it turns out, so this post is actually only a couple of weeks late), I have probably got enough money to make it through the coming year. The feeling of being able to pay my bills, to pay my rent, on time, is entirely new to me. And I like it.

Yes, I sold the book, finally, as I've mentioned here. And now I'm writing it. Another reason not to blog: when I sit down and start working, I eat up all my writing energy, although the results, I have to say, have been pretty nice for a first draft. But that was in August, and the money didn't reach me immediately. When it did, I took off on a vacation, sorely needed: after returning, I couldn't wait to tear into the book.

But really, what that means is that my new life didn't actually start until early October. when I got back from the vacation. Just this week, I replaced the transmission in my car, the last major expense of the change. Now, it's just write and write, picking up some extra money on the side from radio work and teaching the informal class at UT, and hoping nothing else goes wrong.

So now that I've been back a year, how does it feel? People keep asking me that. Well, I'm ambivalent, like I said. Turns out I didn't actually need the UT library -- or not yet, not for a couple of years if everything goes right -- but somehow, my psyche gave a sigh of relief at not being illegal any more. France and Germany (and possibly Spain) are no more eager to have undocumented immigrants than the U.S. is, but it does help to be a middle-aged white guy so the racist immigration authorities don't notice you. But Obama's executive order doesn't affect me personally in the least.

Austin, as anyone will tell you, isn't Austin any more. It's a generic American city made unusual by its weather (we had a very mild summer, for which thanks), its live music scene (to which I am profoundly indifferent), and its youth (I was told that the median age here is 28). It is perhaps a tiny bit more cognizant of the issues facing America, but mostly the people who haven't been squeezed out (and who did the squeezing, along with the real estate developers) are as solipsistic and entitled as they are in other hip capitals. The other night I went out to dinner with friends, one of whom has a leg in some kind of cast and crutches, and while we waited to be seated, two men sprawled across a seat made for four, oblivious of the fact that there was a guy on crutches standing right next to them who could have used the seat. (Later, inside the restaurant, they were at the next table and I overheard enough of their talk to realize that they were in the tech sector: no huge surprise). Although Austin voted pretty liberally in the midterms, it's still in a state with a Neanderthal for governor, another on the way, and represented in Washington largely by the kind of people who make people in other countries fear the United States. And I live in a nation that is preparing to sell off its national parks to extractive industries, further our endless war in the Mideast, make sure children aren't educated or taught critical thinking, and all but ban science. And I can't do anything about that because too many of my fellow citizens are too engaged with entertaining themselves to look up from their devices and see what's happening.

All things considered, I guess I'd rather not be here, "here" being both the U.S. and Austin. But I do have work to do, and this is where I am, doing it. I don't want to move again any time soon, either next door or across a continent, so for today, here I am. As for where I'd rather be, I can't answer that. There are days when I miss France fiercely, even knowing I'm not welcome to live there. There are days (admittedly rare) when I even miss Berlin. I miss being able to get on a train and (if I've planned right) for very little money going to somewhere quite different from where I started. I miss efficient public transportation, something Austin will never have, in part to the Koch Brothers "investing" in defeating proposals to build it. I miss the outdoor market at the Arceaux in Montpellier, and the seasonal changes in the produce -- and the fact that, unlike at Austin's "farmers markets," that produce is priced within reach of the average person. (This summer, tomatoes cost literally twice what they did in France). I miss affordable wine that actually tastes good, and I miss a good variety in things like juice and yogurt at breakfast. I miss being in a place with a deep sense of history.

Is there anything that's gotten better? Yes: besides the physical plant of my house with its gleaming and useful kitchen, which has enabled me to cook better than ever, there's Central Market, the enlightened grocery store where I buy the majority of what I do cook there. I don't have to wonder about meats and vegetables and what would be a good replacement: what you see is what you get, and last night, it being stormy, I cooked up my very first pot roast and it was amazing. I also have access to books in English when I need to buy them, in a browsable bricks-and-mortar bookstore with another browsable books-and-mortar record store right across the street. The Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants aren't "Asia" restaurants, and so I patronize them when I can and recognize what I get. There's the inestimable joy of getting bills and notices in a language I understand thoroughly, not just pretty well, so that, for instance, I can easily make out that the $20 hike in my monthly Internet bill is due to a decision to adopt a new deal from my provider that I supposedly made on Nov. 11, even though it was a holiday. And I can protest it in my own language, too, for all the good it'll do me. (Although I have to say the English help line at France Telecom Orange has some brilliant folks working for it). I'm a lot closer to a lot of my friends, even if I do have to fly (which I abhorred even before they shrunk the plane interiors so that I fear an embolism every time I get in one) to see them; it's too bad I'll probably not live long enough to see decent train service in this country. Of course, your grandkids may not, either.

I'm choosing to keep my hopes small and my energy high, and work hard at what's before me without the need to seek out anything more (while still being open to other things, just not with the aching sense of need I once had). Like the alcoholics, I'm taking it a day at a time in my new old place (and, unlike them, enjoying a craft beer after dinner), looking to make it newer with a modest screen to show movies on and maybe a couple more chairs for the dining table (I still only have two), and confident that change will come when it's supposed to. Meanwhile, I do give thanks that I've got work and a decent place to live. Tune in tomorrow, but with luck, it'll be the same, if not better.

Pardon The Gap

You know, you're not supposed to go months at a time without posting when you have a blog. But since February, I've been reluctant to post because I wasn't sure what, exactly, to write about. SXSW gave me an excuse last month, but it's been touch and go since then. Let's just say there are people who can't be trusted out there, and they promised help and money and didn't deliver. If you need to know who I'm talking about, you already know. If not, not. I'm still desperately in need of paying off some of this back rent, but the day-to-day bills seem to get covered for the most part by Social Security.

There's also my Amazon store, which seems to come and go, where I'm selling books from my days as a book critic, many of them with collectable stuff like press releases, press photos, and reviewers' slips, all of which collectors are looking for. And some day I hope to have the time to sell about 100 t-shirts from the '70s and '80s, which are just the kind of vintage stuff people pay big bucks for on Etsy. But that means photographing them from several angles, entering them in a database, doing some light ironing and packing them in plastic bags. I had a friend who was going to help, but she vanished right around the time I was ready to start.

There have been health issues: I desperately need to get my teeth fixed, and even went to a dentist for an estimate, which turned out to be far less than I thought, but far more than I had. So now I'm going to see what AARP can do about that. I had thought that my voice wasn't going to work on the radio, but apparently some stuff has shifted around, so I'm doing a trial run this week. Let's hope it works: I can definitely use the income.

The main thing is, I don't want to lose this house. It's hardly a mansion, but it's the first place I've felt at home since the place on Borsigstr. in Berlin where I lived for 11 years. It's hardly perfect -- my pet peeve at the moment is this ridiculous touch-to-start faucet in the kitchen that starts spontaneously -- sometimes when I'm not even in the room -- and then won't turn off. But the location is nice, it's quiet, and for the first time in 20 years, I can play records without getting raided by the cops. I sit here in my office and look out the window at the back yard, which is visited by lots of birds, some of which I can even identify -- well, it's hard to get a cardinal wrong. I was worrying about the grass back there the other day, but a guy showed up and offered to mow it, and the result is that now the birds can see the bugs in the grass better than ever, so they hop around dining and hanging out on the fence. I have a deck, but no furniture for it to speak of, so I've decided to grow some stuff in pots there and a friend in New Mexico sent some chile seeds. Two weeks on, they still haven't sprouted, but then, I don't have the pots yet, either.

One thing I really like about the house is that, late at night, trains come through. Now, people in Austin know all about this, because they're forever getting trapped at the railroad crossings while gigantic long trains pass. But the train whistle at the crossing near my house (seen here) is one of those stirring sounds that go way back in American history. (Actually, it reminds me of the time I interviewed Merle Haggard and he told me that the sound of the trains near where he grew up in California made him anxious to leave, and I told him that I'd heard trucks downshifting on the highway near where I grew up and had the same feeling. He replied that I couldn't have understood because he was poor and I, at least relative to him, wasn't. We then got into an argument that got so loud that his bus-driver came with his hand on his gun to see if the boss needed assistance. "Hell no," Haggard said. "I'm havin' fun!" And he was: after all, I never even mentioned "Okie From Muskogee" or any of that other standard stuff.)

Things like that, and the ease of cooking on a real stove and finding ingredients that just didn't exist in Europe and being far enough from downtown that it's quiet, but near enough that I can go there when I have to, and the way that now that it's gotten warmer the air smells like barbeque brisket on weekends (no single source, just a pervasive perfuming) make me hope that I don't lose this place, but it's far from certain at the moment because my book still hasn't sold, and other projects are just hanging fire day after day after day. It's the waiting, the constant treading of water to keep from going under, that gets to me worse than anything.

I'm hoping this turns around before long, but there's no way to tell. I learned a skill when I was 16, got good at it, and watched it slowly become less and less in demand, at least in any way that pays. (I'm outraged that Arianna Huffington's appearing at my favorite indie bookstore here autographing copies of a book she's listed as having written called Thrive. Who can thrive when her whole business model is based on appropriating others' work without paying for it?) Meanwhile, I'm taking every opportunity I can to get myself out there and make contacts: the workshop I did for the Writers' League of Texas, this four-session course I'm doing for the University of Texas (which has been a gas: I'm sorry this'll be the last class on Wednesday, and have asked to do it again), and things like that, although none of them pay a whole lot.

I'm pretty sure by now that moving back when I did might not have been a good idea. I'm not altogether sure that moving back at all was a good idea. But there's nothing I can do about it now, and so I wake up each day, put one foot in front of the other, and walk on, hoping I'm headed in the right direction and that there'll be some good news soon.

And then maybe I can get some more shelves and continue to unpack!

* * *

I should also add that Blogger's gone a bit wonky, and the other day I wanted to revise the blog-list over on the right there, because of a couple of blogs that've come up that you should know about. A friend in Montpellier has one in French that's pretty good, but I forgot to bookmark it the last time I read it, so that's that for the moment. Chris Frantz of Tom-Tom Club (and Talking Heads) fame has a good one, and, on the other end of the superstar spectrum, so does my pal Joe, who finally found gainful employment as a long-haul truckdriver and writes eloquently (and a little crankily) about it on his blog.  I just spent a whole day trying to add them, though, and it didn't work. Be the first kid on your block to read 'em, and I'll keep trying to figure it out. 

First Migas of 2014

Odd Sign of the Year (so far): A church I pass frequently is displaying on their sign the message "Attend a local church in 2014." Now, the general tenor of this message is one I basically support, what with my efforts to patronize independent businesses, local enterprises, and all. But...is there anyone in Austin who gets the family up on Sunday morning, gets them all dressed and into the car to attend services in Wimberley? San Antonio? Waco? Even Taylor? I'd tell this pastor that if nobody's showing up on Sunday, it's not because their churchgoing isn't local.

* * *

Sticker Shock: For years, I've been getting blood-pressure medication, the same basic mix of pills. This started in Berlin, continued in France, and, last week, I ran out of my French pills. Thus began an adventure. 

First off, I needed to find a doctor. Having become officially old in November, I qualified for Medicare, which was something to take into consideration when choosing one. I did what any sane person would do: I asked the Austintites on Facebook. I then followed up all the suggestions that weren't too surrealistic and made an interesting discovery: every single one of them said they would only take Medicare from "established patients." In other words, sign up before you're 65. But I hadn't had that option, having arrived back in the country a few days before my birthday. Or, rather, I had, but it didn't seem like the most important thing at the moment. 

Foolish me. Not only was it very important, I also missed the deadline for signing up for the program that would pay for prescription drugs, unfortunately. (I'll get another chance much later this year). So suddenly it was January, and I needed a doctor and prescriptions. 

But social media to the rescue  once again! I mentioned that nobody at all would accept me, and someone mentioned that if a current patient made a recommendation, perhaps someone would bend the rules. So that's the route I took: I asked someone to ask their doctor, a guy whose setup looked particularly nice, and next thing I knew I had a same-day appointment with a guy who seems very well informed, smart, and maybe not so inclined to overprescribe and suggest unnecessary procedures as I hear American doctors tend to do. (I actually had an encounter with one of these a few years back, but that's another story). 

A few days later, my French pills ran out. I picked up my prescription slip and headed out to one of the many pharmacies that dot the landscape around here, choosing a Walgreen's which seemed to be the closest. I walked in, handed the slip over and was told to come back in an hour and a half. Which, given the labor at hand, seemed excessive. In France, that only happened when they were out of something: they'd go to the back, open drawers, pull out boxes, and that was it. Then I'd get stuck for something like €27 for four kinds of pills. This was only three, but I knew it wasn't going to cost me any $36.85. 

Probably more like $60, I told myself as I headed back to Walgreen's. As if: the damage was a whopping $110 -- $109.97, to be exact. Good thing these pills work, or my blood pressure would be through the roof. And yes, they're all generic and so on. 

America seems to be a rather expensive country to live in!

* * *

There's also a food angle to this story: the doctor's office turns out to be approximately in the same complex as Austin's Trader Joe's. Disparaging Trader Joe's, as I recently did, provoked a storm of complaints from readers and friends. (One told me they had real good, cheap tortilla chips, and I had to remind him that if there's one thing that's not scarce in Austin, it's real good, cheap tortilla chips). Thus, after the doctor's I walked over and took a look at the place again, which was useful because there were things I needed and I had the list right with me. So here's what I found. 

* Wine: there were inexpensive wines I recognized, wines for under $10 a bottle. This is worth remembering. Also the famous Two-Buck Chuck, their house brand, which is now Three-Buck Chuck, at least in Texas. I picked up a bottle of pinot grigio to cook with. 

* Juice: there were several flavors other than orange. I don't get this: in France, we had one-liter containers of juice from Tropicana that came in a bunch of different flavors -- at least a dozen. Here, the smallest size seems to be 1.75 liters, and the only thing available is orange in your choice of a dozen different varieties of how much pulp is included (why is this a problem?) and whether or not you want calcium or not in it. 1.75 liters takes a long time for a single guy to go through, but so far that's what I've been doing. Trader Joe's had a liter of tangerine juice, so I picked it up. Unfortunately I hadn't looked at the expiration date, and the next morning it was swollen up and fizzy. Dang. 

Other than that, there was a lot of packaging: I noted plastic boxes with jalapenos in them, which I thought was odd because any old supermarket has plastic bags and piles of peppers to choose from, which I, certainly, prefer to do. But all the fruit and vegetables were packaged. 

And there were a lot of prepared dishes. This is the deal, as I've been noticing when I go shopping: Americans don't cook any more, preferring to buy frozen and packaged items they can just heat up. (And before anyone jumps on me, this is just as true in France, from what I could tell). And Trader Joe's has much more creative and interesting items in this category than most places, so that, I believe, is what the foofaraw is about. 

I have another doctor's appointment on the 27th, so I'm still on the case

* * *

That, however, is the only food-related item this time. Sometime just after Christmas, my nose shut down again. I'm not really anxious to return to France, but if I could fax myself to my nose doc in Montpellier long enough to get a prescription and pick it up, I would. On the other hand, maybe not: I've had problems with my kitchen sink since I moved in here, and the landlord's been over to fix it several times, on the last of which there was also a plumber along. But the thing still doesn't work right and the other night it flooded the kitchen again. It's the drain, the same drain the dishwasher uses, so I can't use that and I can't wash the dishes by hand in the sink, so they've piled up and probably stink. And my poor landlord came down with the flu, which then turned into pneumonia, after which he tripped and fell down stairs. He's a young guy, so he'll likely be fine eventually, but every single dish in the house is now dirty, so I guess I'm going to have to clean the bathtub out and wash some of them there so I can cook more meals I can't taste. The silver lining is that it's not quite cockroach season yet. 

* * *

And while I'm waiting on my book proposal to sell, I've got some work around here that probably pays. I had a great meeting with a woman from the Writers' League of Texas, and I'm going to be giving a workshop with them in February, which you'll all want to sign up for, I'm sure! Then, two months later, in April, I'll be taking over a very popular class at the University of Texas' Informal Classes, and this one should be fun for all concerned. I'm already scheming to bring in some unsuspecting types to pump them for info about what they've seen and done. 

These two projects are just the start, I hope. I have other schemes in mind, while, of course, being available to other writers' groups and schools for lectures. What I really need is a lecture agent, and they're impossible to score without a recent book publication. Which puts me back where I began. But watch this space for more announcements, and meanwhile remember that I get a piece of the action from the e-books and cookbooks advertised in the Amazon widgets in the right margin, and am constantly adding to my Amazon store of odd and interesting first editions, art documents, and cookbooks. Every little bit helps me get adjusted in this expensive, bewildering new country I've settled myself in. 

Opening King Tut's Tomb

I've spent most of the past couple of weeks hauling a couple of boxes of books in from the garage each day, going through them, discarding the ones most eaten by rodents and insects (not nearly as many as you might think, but some), then going through the ones I clearly don't want but kept out of inertia, and looking up their ISBN numbers to see if they're special in any way. If so, they get listed on my Amazon store.  I'm selling about one book a day, and had to de-list some because of interest from a rare book dealer.

But oh, that gets tiresome. There are these other boxes, boxes with, well, stuff. I do accumulate stuff. Stuff tends to be the documentation of memories. Which is a good thing: I didn't remember getting a large poster for the Residents' album Third Reich and Roll with a letter from them on the back. I do remember going to a San Francisco art party with my pal Hudson in the mid-'70s and us wandering around looking for someone interesting, and Hudson spying four guys standing together and saying "Those guys are the Residents," only to have all four say in unison "No we're not!" So I've seen them without their eyeballs. I bet that poster would bring something on eBay. If I could only figure out how to use eBay, that is.

But like I said, this is documentation of memory. For instance, I think I was on assignment, probably for Creem, at Willie Nelson's horror-filled 4th of July extravaganza at College Station in 1974 when Charlyn Zlotnik caught me and some other low-lifes backstage.

L to R: Himself, Joe Nick Patoski, unknown, Patrick Carr

Now, I have some memories of this three-day error in judgement left. It was terribly hot, and Jim Franklin, the artist-in-residence at Armadillo World Headquarters, had distributed salt tablets to one and all, most likely keeping us from dying. If you could get into the Lone Star Beer bus, Jerry Retzloff would give you a beer. That was all the nutrition available until some brave students drove an old station wagon through the fence, opened its tailgate, and started selling barbeque brisket sandwiches for a buck apiece. Words cannot convey how good they were, and, their tuition for the next two years in hand, they zoomed off as quickly as they'd come. Just as the thing got started, a catalytic converter on a car set the field of grass in which it was parked on fire, and people watched helplessly as a dozen or two cars were turned into art. (One, I think, belonged to the poor bastard who was performing at the time). I have no idea where I slept, but on the last night it vanished (probably along with the record company person who was paying for it), and I wound up with the Mother Earth Band, most notably Toad Andrews and family, on the floor of a Holiday Inn. The record company person who'd driven me there having vanished, I was very, very grateful to hear a voice asking if anyone needed a ride back to Austin, and that's how I met the late, great Joe Gracey.

But wait, there are other pictures here. Dozens of me cooking gumbo, as if that were some kind of remarkable event. Hell, now that I'm back in Texas I'll probably do that again relatively soon: I'm out of the land of eight okra pods for €7.00 now. There are pictures of bands snapped during performance, but who are they? More than that, there are scads of posters, lots from a band I was going to produce called No Sisters, who really were four brothers (and one drummer), and who almost got signed to A&M right after I moved to Texas. (They went for D-Day instead, because their wealthy manager was absorbing the expenses). At some point I'm going to have to sort through these posters, because I'm certain some of them are worth money, and I have multiple copies of some of them, too. Ah, but here's another photo of me in my back yard in Sausalito taken by my long-vanished friend and colleague AJ Bernstein.

Gentleman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A year later I was in Texas. Probably saved my life. 

But there were other artifacts that were less disturbing.

Ashtray, candle

The way I used to cope with Texas summers when I worked at the newspaper was to save my money, and put in for my two weeks' vacation sometime in August, when I could be sure that I'd reached the limit of my endurance and very little would be happening to write about. I would fly to London and then make my way to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where I would be retrieved by a gent named Pete Frame, who would then convey me to his thatched-roofed former pub in the tiny village of North Marston, which didn't have a post office, store, or much of anything except sheep and cows.

And a pub. The Bell, it was called (like about 60% of the pubs in England). Mel the Bell was the landlord, and I was a novelty: no American had actually stayed more than a day in North Marston, and since I had Pete's imprimatur, and bought my rounds as a decent pub-drinker should, I was accepted. What I was drinking, at any rate, was ABC Bitter, a lovely drink with lunch and after dinner, and just the thing to dissipate any lingering tension from working for The Man. I met a lot of fine folk there, including Rob Gurney, Pete's running buddy, and a budding mariner at the time. He's a full-fledged captain now, and has places in Aruba and Belgium, but has held on to the family farm. Pete lives in Dingwall, in remote Scotland, and pretends he loves it. He was down visiting the captain recently and tells me that ABC Bitter is no longer made, that in fact that whole brewery complex in Burton-on-Trent has been eaten alive by The Man and the Aylesbury Duckling is no longer seen on glasses or ashtrays. Which is a shame, because I have a pint glass and it's chipped. That, too, was in storage.

The candle is a very wry piece of post-modern commentary, although it just looks like a bust of Lenin made out of mud. Waxy mud. But I had one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments in 1990, when I drove from Berlin to Prague what seemed like moments after the Velvet Revolution. At the time, the word was that it had been a bloodless revolution except for one student who'd been shot dead. Immediately a wall with a huge John Lennon graffito on it became a place of pilgrimage and hundreds of candles burned there in his memory. Now, it appears that some people knew the truth, because if Wikipedia is to be believed, this guy, Martin Smid, was fictional. In the spirit of punk -- or something -- a bunch of entrepreneurial students cleaned away the candle wax, melted it down, and, with some molds they'd found, cast candles of Marx, Lenin, and so on, and then sold them on the sidewalk. I bought one because although I didn't know all the story, the involution of the idea of recycling memorial candles into an ironic icon of the now-defeated enemy sold for profit appealed to me. And yes, that was an amazing trip.

But before I get sucked into that, what about this (sorry about the framing)?

The real action's on the back.

This is a souvenir of a story that never happened. A friend of mine was on the comedy beat at the paper, and invited me to go see this new guy, Bill Hicks, at one of the local clubs. He wasn't local: he was from Houston, where, he insisted, a wild comedy scene was happening. Being unemployed and freelancing, I sold Mother Jones magazine on the story, and thus it was that I found myself in Houston doing a story on the Texas Outlaw Comics which would culminate in an appearance at Rockefeller's. A day or so into hanging out with these guys made me realize that there was no way a magazine as politcally uptight as Mother Jones would even go near this material, but I stuck with it until the show, which was magnificent -- I particularly remember Bill Hicks' piece on Jesus returning and walking into a church and seeing, first thing, a crucifix -- and at the end of my stay in Houston, I was presented with the above artwork, signed by all the Outlaw Comics including Bill. I wish I could tell whose signature was whose.

Then there are other souvenirs of I know not what: the odd duo of a wind-up sushi chef who chops at a fish (which wriggles its way out of range of his knife) while reading what is presumably a how-to-cut-sushi book and an enamel advertisement for Casanova Cigaretten, showing a scarf-wearing Boston terrier smoking a cigarette and blowing a smoke ring. I must've gotten the latter at a flea market before moving to Germany, but the other is anyone's guess.

And then there are memories that go back much, much further.

Tammany? Los Angeles 1911? I swear I wasn't there. 

When I was in college, my friend Terry, even then a great photographer, became obsessed with the dying city of Springfield, Ohio, near where we were going to school. One of the great things about the poor side of town, where he went photo-hunting, was the antique shops, which were loaded with the most miscellaneous things. I've always loved advertising ephemera, and there was tons around. Buttons, too, matched my fashion sense as a kind of East Coast hippie. ("NO SALOON!") People collected cigarette cards, which came with every package of some kinds of cigarettes, and then didn't know what to do with them. I also found a copy of what is probably the first country music record, but no other recorded treasures (turns out they were still for sale in a strange old record store I only went to once). Anyway, Terry got some great pictures over the years. I got some of the odder corners of my own personal King Tut's tomb. I just hope there isn't a curse on this one.

Migas

Well, why not? When I did my Berlin blog, I called it BerlinBites, and when I discovered I had a bunch of little things for the blog that didn't cohere into a single post, I called them "crumbs." I got to France, and by the same principle, I called them "miettes." So here in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in Austin, "migas" seems appropriate. And yes, I realize it's an amazing egg dish that I'll probably never learn how to make properly: scrambled eggs with onions and salsa (or salsa ingredients) with bits of tortilla chips added at the very end. The secret is to present them at the table without sogging the chip migas at all. I do not know the secret, and, as long as Austin has dozens of places that know how to do this well, I may never.

* * *

Have I been here in this house a month already? Not quite; the rent due tomorrow is prorated for the difference. But I've done a lot of stuff in that time, most of it involving spending money. The last big outlay was this week, when I went to Alberto's Appliances, a place I just stumbled onto reading a Craigslist ad, and bought a washer and dryer: new, discontinued, pre-digital models. They were cheap enough, and Alberto's delivered and installed them. They also have an unbeatable guarantee and after-sale care program. Plus, they were local. Same with the stereo I got: it came from A&B TV on Anderson Lane, which has apparently been there forever. The salesman had been in a local band when I was at the newspaper and remembered me -- or said he did. 

These purchases, necessary outlays of money, made me feel good because I'm hemmed in by monstrous commercial spaces, the most hellish of which is South Park Meadows. Now, when I lived here last, South Park Meadows was a concert venue administered by a succession of local promoters, most famous for its profusion of insect and arachnid life. (Ticks are arachnids, right?) 

...six, seven, eight. Yup!

I attended one show there and never went back, because I hate anything that even smacks of a rock festival. I'm sure a number of colorful people made colorful real-estate deals, and in the end, South Park Meadows is the biggest shopping center I've ever seen, with all the big brands: a Walmart that people apparently take the bus up from Mexico to shop at, OfficeMax, Best Buy, Target...you get the picture. 

Now, South Park Meadows is just the worst example of this I've seen because it's big, so big that, on a trip to visit one of its stores, I roamed all over the place and still haven't seen all of it. Not that I need anything in any of the stores I haven't seen, but they're big enough stores that I wonder how much of the site I haven't located yet. And as I drive hither and yon, I see signs for stores that I suppose I'm supposed to be familiar with: Lowe's, Kohl. What do they sell? I really don't care: I have pretty much what I need at the moment, although I'm going to need to hit Ikea once more when the ship comes in (see below) for more shelving, although not before I check the Salvation Army again first. 

If I hadn't seen Austin as it was in November, 1973, I wouldn't know where it was underneath all of this generic commercialism. 

* * *

On the other hand, not far from me is a little strip mall that says all the right things about the new Austin. It's got a chain kolache shop (kolaches are Czech pastries that are big in Central Texas, although West, Texas, the town I most associate with them, blew up when its fertilizer factory went earlier this year), a taqueria, a place where I've gone with a friend for pho for many years, and, I discovered, on my way to get it there recently, a very well-stocked Indian grocery store. 

Kommercial Kolaches: You can do better than this. 

Nobody planned this, this isn't a theme park, and in fact there are other businesses there, including a large Goodyear tire shop, and a couple of empty storefronts (including a failed Indian restaurant). But it's also something you'd never find in Europe, where ethnic populations tend to huddle together in homogenous clusters: a place where you can have a couple of tacos for lunch while you're having your wheels balanced, then grab a kolache for dessert, after which you can pick up a bag of besan flour and some panch phoran seed mixture. 

There's also a gigantic supermarket across the street from it, posing no threat to the Indians, but selling sushi, fresh tortillas, and, to my surprise when I needed some the other night, diced pancetta, that bacon-like stuff Italians use. I haven't really dug into the neighborhood yet; lord only knows what other surprises await. 

* * *

I haven't really looked at that Indian place yet because my trip to the My Thanh Supermarket to restock my Chinese larder caused $75 damage to my pocket, although I'll admit some of that was due to my buying some dishes to help make Chinese food, but I'll also admit that I forgot some really basic stuff, for all I bought: I didn't get fermented black beans, ginger or rice. Really: imagine being in a gargantuan East Asian supermarket and forgetting to buy rice. I anticipate similar damage restocking the Indian end of things, but I'm trying to hold off. 

Which is not to say I haven't been cooking. Two weeks of going out to restaurants also put a dent into my finances, not to mention too much food into my belly, and it feels good to be able to cook again, albeit not with the equipment I'm used to, and control the portion size. Most of the equipment is on its way from France, and was supposed to arrive this coming Tuesday, but will now be a week later. 

Still, using what I have on hand (it was great to discover a perfectly-seasoned wok, two perfectly-seasoned cast iron frying pans, a top-notch pizza stone and a peel which I think I may have made in shop class in high school, given to my mother, and reclaimed when she admitted never using it) I managed to use the last tomatoes of the season from the local farmer's market to make a pizza that was one of the best ever (and would have been even better if I'd remembered to buy 00 flour, which you can actually get here), and I've twice made Chinese food in that wok. 

I'm quite surprised to discover that I am using the microwave that came with the place (perfect for heating up tamales, like the ones a little lady going house to house sold me the other morning) and the dishwasher, something I never thought I'd use. 

None of this will translate into anything more than bachelor cooking, though, until the ship comes in: another thing that's on it is a formidable antique German dining table with leaves, and that's much better than the rickety Ikea table I'm dining on right now. Then I can start inviting people over for dinner. Um, after I buy some more chairs.  

* * *

And that will mean that my social life may pick up. I've retreated pretty much into this house, getting it set up and livable for me, let alone making it a place others can visit. I've pretty much recovered from the revelation that I'd been romantically pursuing a were-Republican for 2 ½ years, but what with my avoiding live music, I don't really have many excuses to get out of the house. I'll have to remedy that. It's not like there's nothing happening in Austin, after all. 

At least Thanksgiving was a welcome chance to get out, visiting my friends down in Wimberley and seeing their invited guests, who were mostly people I've known forever. After dinner, some of us took a walk, and I managed to take one photo that was no good, and then accidentally triggered the video button on the phone's camera. 

Wimberley, late afternoon. There were better shots, but I missed 'em. 

There's no reason to be impatient, I keep reminding myself. I know why I feel that way, though: I've made a huge change and I want it to pay off right this minute! Ain't gonna happen. Shouldn't happen. And if I learned nothing else in the Sud de France, it was how to wait for things to take their natural course. 

* * *

And now for the commercial. Much of my time here has been spent going through the books that were in storage and carefully checking their condition, any reviewer's materials that may have been stored with them, and putting them up for sale on my Amazon store. There are a bunch of fairly scarce first-edition cookbooks, all gotten when I was a book reviewer, and some literary first-editions that are all souvenirs of my various stints as book-reviewer or books editor at publications like Oui (really) and of course the Austin Chronicle. There are too many books that have been dined on by silverfish in the inadequate storage they were put in (by someone else) years ago, but few of them are for sale, and the ones that are (like that extremely rare copy of Wolf Vostell's de/collage and happenings) are priced below market value. Surely you know a serious '60s art geek that needs that! And these make stupendous Christmas presents, too! 

Okay, better get back to cataloguing. Anyone know where I can get Chinese fermented black beans in South Austin?

The knee is not for sale. Um, on the other hand, make an offer.

Next Chapter

"You're like a ghost. You don't show up anywhere," said the real estate agent. He represented the landlord of a place I'd seen and really liked. There was a little stream in the back yard, named Turtle Creek, although I have no idea if there were really turtles in it.

What the agent was complaining about was that my credit report was coming up blank. That's hardly a surprise: for 20 years, I'd lived in a part of the world where there was, basically, no such thing as credit. Apparently one credit agency here in the U.S. had me down as owing Hertz $750 from 2010, but that's extremely unlikely, since I didn't rent a car from Hertz in that year. Couldn't have: I don't have a credit card. Other than that, though, nothing. Europeans generally don't have credit cards, because it's so easy to use a bank card tied to one or another of your bank accounts. I didn't have a bank account in France, so I used cash.

While the agent was trying to figure out if he needed an exorcist, it rained. I mean, it rained a lot. My cell phone, next to my head as I slept at my friends' house, screamed several times in the night with flash flood warnings. Apparently I now get emergency notifications. We were on a hill, so this was information I didn't need. But it was serious: my friend Lin, who'd been a reporter on the paper with me when I first arrived in Austin, now owns a horse ranch on Onion Creek in the southern reaches of Austin. Onion Creek flooded. Lin lost four mares, one of whom she'd had for 37 years. I had no idea horses lived that long. She was devastated, unsurprisingly.

I wondered if Turtle Creek had flooded, if the big living room at the place I'd like was now alive with turtles. I never found out. My own real-estate agent noted that a friend of her husband's, a guy I'd not only met but might have gone into business with if her husband had worked out a coherent business plan, had outgrown his house and was renting it out. I looked at it with her. It was even better than the Turtle Creek place. It had a nice kitchen. I mean, a nice one.

Oh, look! A gas stove!

There was a gigantic refrigerator whose freezer door gave forth ice cubes and filtered water (once it got going, at any rate) and a sink with a Disposall on an island. There was acres of prep space.

Still unpacking at this point. Painting by Dean Studeny. Coffee mug by Coffee of Doom

I needed a couch. I got on Craigslist. An hour later, a guy and his son were hauling the couch into the living room. I set up my old stereo speakers, attached to a new amplifier and found a box of CDs I didn't know I had in the boxes I'd (with help) unloaded from my storage area. There's $200 a month I no longer have to pay. There was a McCoy Tyner plays Ellington CD in there I don't remember ever having listened to. Although it was after 10 (neighbors call cops in Europe!) I put it on. It was enjoyable.

There was an office, wired to the teeth with outlets in case I ever need to set up a server farm. I spent a week putting together the desk in it and at one point crawled under an assembled one at my local OfficeMax to see how a couple of parts fit together. I still can't get the drawer in, but that's a detail. The guy from the cable company came and wired me up.

Note drawer to the right. Nice view of the back yard, too!

There's a whole room I call "the library" that, after I win the lottery, will be chockablock with CD shelves with alphabetized discs in them. Maybe a bed for visitors. It has a bathroom with a shower and everything next to it, too.

Room to think

There's a bedroom with a new futon waiting for its frame to arrive from France, a bathroom with a gigantic shower and two sinks just off of it.

No low-powered hose I have to hold myself!

And there's a two-car garage that, in the great American tradition, contains no car at all, but a buncha cardboard boxes. These are books from 20 years ago.

The ones out of boxes are, mostly, cookbooks, believe it or not. Book reviewing was a sweet gig. 

Over the next months, they'll be gone through meticulously and then start to show up on Amazon. Some are, apparently, worth a bit. But this is good: one of my goals is de-cluttering. The odds are against my making too much headway in this particular endeavor too quickly, because I've been told by the mover that the ship with my stuff will dock in Houston on Dec. 3, clear customs, and be here before long. There are books to get rid of in that shipment, too. And I'll be getting rid of them.

* * *

This has all been a radical change. I live in more than three times the area I was living in a month ago. I have a back yard with a redwood deck, bare but for a curious wood-burning stove and a plastic chair where, two days in a row, after I've finished work, I've gone out and sat, doing nothing, for close to an hour. I have access to a radically different spectrum of foods: a Chinese supermarket way uptown and an Indian market just down the street, a tortilleria a couple of blocks away, and some very impressive supermarkets -- not just Whole Foods and Central Market, which are also wonderful -- not far away. My cooking gear is on the boat, but I can't wait to get started. 

I have a car, which I kind of like. 

It's a Vibe, baby

I don't like having to drive everywhere, though, nor do I like Austin traffic. I try to stay home after 4 as much as possible to avoid dealing with it. I rarely succeed at this, but it's a resolve. 

For the past three days, since Sunday, I've had something of a routine, which I like. I've got some work, and I've been doing it, which I also like. Other work seems to be out there, too. I have time to read, I have time to write, and I have a bit of time to goof off. I've been out a couple of times, not always successfully (I misjudged traffic last night and got turned away at an event I wanted to see: who knew it would take two hours to get to the University?).

But the main improvement has been people. I know people here. Early on I went to an odd event at the Continental Club Gallery which combined art, music, and people reading from their work, and met a guy who was one of my many Facebook friends I don't actually know. He wound up helping me empty the storage areas, just out of the blue. There were other people I knew at that event, too, and at the gig I went to on Saturday night (I still have lots of trouble seeing live music, though, and I walked out before the headliner went on). Even this area, though, has had its other side. I began this year with what I can only characterize as a love letter from a woman with whom I'd been corresponding for a couple of years, and we'd gone out a lot in March when I was here for SXSW. I'd been looking forward to seeing more of her when I got here, but, well, no. Not going to work out, sorry. But...fish, sea. 

Don't try to do too much too fast. After all, I still need a washer and a dryer, an end table for that couch (maybe two, one for each end!), a doctor, a dentist, and maybe some day I'll hang a flat-screen from the rack that's currently supporting Dean's painting there in the living room and become an American. I haven't had anyone over for dinner yet, but then, I don't have my good cooking stuff, either. 

Live like the alcoholics, one day at a time. That goes for the good times as well as the bad times. Judging from the shadows in the back yard, it'll be dark soon enough and then there'll be another day tomorrow. We'll name it Wednesday.