Dallas, Austin, and Me

Oh Dallas, what is one to make of your charms? Your one-trick-pony skyscrapers that mimic fireworks frozen in mid explosion or are simply outlined in neon green, your downtown revival that consists mainly of gaudy nightclubs full of patrons chauffeured in stretched armored limousines, your three-hundred pound women in blue spandex dresses so short Ms. Spears herself would blush walking down the street in such an outfit when its only 30 degrees outside (I think Botero is becoming a theme here), your free shots of a mysterious glowing blue liqueur for the entire bar when the Cowboys won the play-offs, your hip underground-yet-fashionable lesbian art-shows of yarn sewn canvases depicting female porn-stars in mid-orgasm, oh Dallas, with your sprawl is so sprawling, how then is your drawl so drawing?

We played at the City Tavern, in the heart of Downtown Dallas. With the height of the buildings on the street, provided enough alcohol I could have been convinced I was in New York. The bar was two stories, the first floor was an up-scale sports bar, and the second floor was for live music. The Cowboys were in the playoffs and the place was packed. Fortunately for us, they won, leaving everyone at the bar in a good mood that evening. The highlight of the night happened after Zeb's set. As we were packing up the stage a man with a dark mustache and coke-bottle glasses walked up to Dan, the drummer, and asked if he could have his drumsticks. Dan, assuming it was the drummer of the following local band, obliged, figuring he would be able to get his only pair of drumsticks for the tour back after their set. Another man entirely started setting up drums and we learned from this drummer that the man who asks for the sticks collected sticks from every drummer that plays the club, that he would greatly appreciate it if Dan would sign the sticks, and that the "stick" man would soon show the sticks to his brothers, all of whom would be very excited by these drum sticks played by an unknown drummer from Portland, OR. Later in the evening, while at the urinal, I overheard the stick-man loudly explaining to another patron that he made his living on betting, and that he had bet on the Cowboys to win that night and done very well for himself.

That night I stayed with Kyle at his mom's house in a self-described white-flight suburb named Flowermound. We drove through another crazy town/suburb just north of Dallas that was the home to a number of multi-national headquarters. The tall, squat glass office buildings surrounded a lake had a tram that traveled between them, sometimes in tunnels through the buildings themselves. It was the closest thing to that modernist 1950s ideal of futuristic cities that I had ever seen, almost like Disney's Epcot Center. Terrifying yet fascinating. The highway we were driving on was as wide as it possibly could have been.

Kyle's suburb of Flowermound had a recently built retro-cum-simulacra new urbanist old town, the most complete I've ever seen. Again, provided with enough alcohol, I could have been convinced it was the real thing, an old Texas small town with four or five square blocks of two story brick storefronts. But I could begin to perceive, even as we quickly drove past on the 6 lane suburban road, that the three-windows-wide buildings of varying heights touching each other were really all one building, built at the same time. One of my pet peeves with all these new urbanist nostalgic street facades is their mawkish trompe l'oeil of multiple buildings where really there is just one. The public is not that dense, please stop lying to me, I am insulted Mr. Architect, if you want more than one building please build more than one building, or figure out how to make one attractive building, thank you very much.

Even though this recreated old downtown is arguably more aesthetically successful than many of its ilk, without sufficient dense housing attached to it to support the commercial spaces, and without a transit connection to downtown Dallas, it is no surprise that most of the little shops that first moved in have now closed and it is primarily offices now, and that it has the vibrant feel of any America downtown office district, by which I mean that of a corpse except for the hours of 9, noon, and 5. Oh, Mr. New Urbanist, when will you learn that without creating a development that is for the entire community, no space can sustain a vibrant community; that if you do not provide affordable housing for everyone who may work and shop in the development all within walking distance, than people will not be walking around; that even if you hide that parking lots behind the old town facade, the people are still going to drive there and drive home and not walk anywhere except from their cars to their cubicles.

After Dallas we had two days off in Austin, which have been just what the doctor ordered. I've been able to catch up with my old friends Pace and Laura, I went for a three and a half hour bike ride, I listened to NPR. On Sunday night we saw a young performer Danny Malone, who if a bit death obsessed, did perform with much gusto, and ended the set of songs for guitar, harmonica and voice, with an unexpected solo dance performance. He created a new genre that was a combination of pop-and-lock with ballet set to 4-track instrumental indie-post-rock, and the motherfucker pulled it off. Last night, Monday, we saw Dale Watson, a purveyor of Texas Swing, play at the Continental Club. The musicians were the cream of the crop, as were the Texas two-step dancers who came out in droves to see him play. It made me realize how much of a rich musical tradition there is in Texas. Tonight we play an all-ages punk pizza place with notoriously bad pizza, at least according to my east-coast friends. We may not have the rich musical tradition but we did grow up with our tradition of good pies.