Culture

I like fiction delivered to a convenient and elegant place to read! So: Go to ifttt, log in/register/whatever Create a new task. Choose the Feed trigger. Choose New Feed Item. Use the Feed URL https://hilobrow.com/tag/world-shook/feed/, on the assumption that you want to read HiLoBrow’s H. Rider Haggard serialization. Feed it into Instapaper (or Readability if you like that). You can leave the default field values alone. If this is your first time using ifttt, you’ll need to register the channel first. Give it a description. Or just go ahead and use the recipe I made.

Cronenberg makes a movie without Viggo Mortensen. Note: violence aplenty in this trailer. Like, aplenty.

Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform. ...

I won an award! I am the 2012 Rose & Bay Best Patron, which is pretty cool. I think mostly this means that C. E. Murphy has a lot of fans who listened to her when she said to vote for me because I convinced her to try crowdfunding, but I guess that implies I deserve some kind of credit for something. It wouldn’t have gone far if she wasn’t an awesome writer, though.

It’s all very well that we’ll see a new iPad in a week or so. I’m holding onto my anticipation for two weeks, however: new Tim Powers!

Tuesday night plans: Sneak preview down at the Alamo. It’s a pretty Hong Kong week for me, yep.

In a hypothetical world, someone with a huge cache of Hong Kong flicks but without clearance to show them might ask attendees of a movie marathon to stay mum about the actual movies shown. In unrelated news, the Alamo Drafthouse Hongkongathon was way better than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a bunch of exploitation stuff and a good time, rather than great movies. In practice, Grady Hendrix showed us two serious classics, two pretty entertaining movies, and one bottomless pit of sleazy horror. I managed to stay awake for the whole thing by some minor miracle, given my advanced age. Grady’s effervescent introductions probably had a lot to do with that. We started at 10 PM and got out at 7:30; five movies and two trailer reels. One trailer reel was dedicated to Category 3 erotica, which perhaps saved us from having to watch an entire Cat 3 movie. Good call. The other one was trailers for 70s US releases of Shaw Brothers flicks, and highly entertaining. ...

Mike Doughty, acoustic guitar, around 150 people, “Country Roads.” So that’s a nice way to spend an evening with one’s beloved. If you didn’t know Doughty was touring solo to promote his new book, now you know. If you didn’t know you should go see him, you know now. If you don’t like music that’s so dry you might not realize you have to drill through the bedrock to get at the vast lake of pain underneath, that’s a fair objection and I won’t think the less of you for passing it up. He’s kind of an odd taste. I love what he does with sound and the way he uses his voice, but it’s a pretty idiosyncratic little corner of the musical universe. ...

So C. E. Murphy is up for a Rose & Bay Award for crowdfunded fiction. You should vote for whichever fiction you like best, but if you don’t know the others and you like Catie’s stuff, you can take my word on it: she’s the right choice. LJ membership not required. Also, if you want to continue voting in that vein, you can vote for me as crowdfunding patron of the year. I think Catie nominated me for this because I pestered her until she tried patron-funded writing, which is totally kind of her.

Noted for my own reference: 11/20: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at One World Theater 12/9: Dave Alvin at the Continental Club 2/4: Los Lobos at One World Theater (opposite OwlCon, hm) 2/29: Dropkick Murphys, Frank Turner at Emo’s East (on sale 11/18) 3/2: Solas at UT Performing Arts Center