When I went to see The Pipettes earlier this year, the opening act was the incomprable Nicole Atkins who channels the best of many things I love in singers.
Reverb: Why I love Neko Case ( and Brandi Carlile ) as well.
Mystery: Why I love Patsy Cline as well.
Girl Groups: Why I love Ronnie Spector / The Pipettes
And some associated words: Robert Johnson, Mississippi, San Francisco, rainswept streets, Nashville water, postcards, coney island baby, lou reed, cassocks and lace, revolvers, The Bible, motel rooms with suspicious stains, serial killers, crossroads, the lights on line-runner trucks.
At the end of it all, allow me to summarize: Nicole Atkins
I have eaten at La Madeline all my life as a Texan: brunches and High
School senior days at the Madeline on Champion’s Forest Drive in
Houston, at the Lamar location during my University days, and now at
the Arboretum location after years of missing their food whilst living
in California.
But yesterday, after seeing the thoroughly forgettable “The Other
Boleyn” girl, I thought nothing could lift my spirits like one of
their pasta dishes with extra bread slices to sop up their tasty
sauces. And there, where the tower of carbohydrates once stood was
nothing but empty space and condiment bottles.
Was the oven down, perhaps the yeast on strike. I admit, the bow-tie
pasta was good, but there was something missing when I couldn’t
augment my dish with jam and bread as a peasant’s desert.
I confirmed with the cook on duty that the practice had been done away
with.
The free bread and excellent French roast was one of the primary means
by which Madeline cooked its way into my heart and now some of that
nostalgia and warm doughy welcome is gone.
Can anyone tell me if this most inhospitable measure has been
undertaken at other locations about town? I may be willing to drive
down to Jefferson if this is a store-by-store decision.
I think it bodes ill when a restaurant makes you pay for something
that they’ve established in the customer’s mind is a free commodity
( case in point, Curra’s Long Bar on Parmer made one pay for chips and
salsa ( anathema! ) — and now it looks like they’re skipping on their
rent and are shut down ).
Any thoughts?
Letter to La Madeline corporate commentary ( horrible web site: table based, didn’t render in Safari or Firefox the “submit” button at the end, etc. )
I have loved La Madeline since I was a child in Houston, during my student years here in Austin, and missed it while living in Northern California. Now back in Austin, I had the pleasure of introducing my Californian girlfriend to your restaurant and the finer art of using the complimentary bread slices to soak up delicious sauces. At our preferred location, Arboretum Austin, these slices have now departed. I confirmed with the chef on site that this was so.
Why was this done? Is this a la Madeline-wide change?
If so I find this a very sad development. After the coffee went to pods the coffee suffered and now the complimentary bread is gone? Your site and mission statements reflect a commitment to hospitality, and the home-making power of simple food prepared well. I do not see how this change is compatible with your proclaimed identity.
If this was cost-based, a small surcharge to overall food should have been sufficient to offset your costs.
I’ve not really felt much like writing … mostly because being sick has taken the joy out of it for me.
This last week or so has not seen a marked improvement in my condition. Things were getting better after my visit to the Dr. on February 14th, but things stalled out rather around the following Tuesday ( when my steroid shot wore out ). Worried, I chose to book an appointment for this past Thursday figuring that I should see some improvement within a week. Basically the improvement process plateaued.
On Thursday morning I received a call and found out that my Dr. himself was sick and I would be seeing the nurse practitioner. I was lucky in that my practitioner was very good; or, at the very least, she prescribed me some really good drugs. After taking a breathing test to make sure that I didn’t have something in my lungs, I was was given a steroid inhaler and (another!) steroid injection in my keester. The office was short two doctors owing to illness and it was a right frenetic zoo.
I asked the nurse if it was just me, or did this year seem especially bad. She confirmed and said it was the worst winter illness season she’d seen in 25 years in Austin.
All around, it might have been a good bit of time to avoid the ATX.
On the good news front, SXSW is just around the corner and I’ll be doing the interactive festival. Hopefully I’ll find some of readers there too?
The only down side of the steroid is that 4 days after I get the injection i feel really disconsolate: hard to focus and a bit depressive. It’s weird.
For the mean time, the inhaler is very good. It really opens me up and I’ve not had any more croup cough since last Thursday. The only unpleasant side effect is uh, a more “productive” cough. And that’s gross…but necessary to getting better. It’s just ruined me for social company.
At several times in my life I have undertaken to learn this “dancing” thing with mixed results. Well, here I go, both feet first, jumping without testing the depth of the water. Lauren and I signed up for Four on the Floor, Austin’s Tuesday night classes at The Texas Federation of Women’s clubs in West Campus.
Last night we took the basic class (a bit below our familiarity, actually) and then took the intro Lindy Hop class ( Step 1: Basic Charleston ).
It’s going pretty well, Laur and I have been a-seen practicing our Charleston kicks on sidewalk, under eaves and even near my workplace. I’m determined to stick through with this one Big Nerd Ranch style, do it until it gets so into you it can’t get out, dammit.
I have my first latin II test tomorrow, so I’m studying and waiting for northbound MoPac traffic to lighten up.
We returned home from SNA on the evening of the 29th after having spent the morning sleeping in and heading out to Laguna Beach. Laguna is a special place for Lauren and I, it’s the first beach she ever took me to in her home-area and returning to that spot always feels like a ritual: we re-enact our walk, see the same immutable motley of beach-side attractions and linger across the sands with the roar of the Pacific to our right.
It was a slightly cloudy day and, thanks to the winds, it stayed a good bit cooler than we would generally like, but a cold day by the beach beats a bad day just about anywhere.
We also had a chance to take part in one of our most favorite guilty Californian pleasures: Carl’s Junior. We are both great fans of the Western Bacon Cheeseburger ( approximate ).
Owing to the early evening departure, we wound up getting back to a chilly Austin at about 10 in the evening after a very speedy (thank you, American Airlines!) flight that clocked just over 2 hours traveling time. After claiming bags and car, we headed for a late night breakfast taco at Whataburger and arrived home about midnight and promptly crashed out.
( I must be hungry as I'm writing this...)
Since that time it’s been more time recovering from my cold, a day of work, some movies, unpacking, and washing.
I’ve also been working on understanding an issue that’s bitten several people with respect to Rails Scaffolding, that lengthy post will appear shortly. I figure I could share my diagnostics and thought processes with other baffled Googlers.
On the way south we stopped by the fine Spec’s and picked up a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and some ice for among the many appellations appropriate to this event, ‘unlicensed’ was also a fitting attribute.
As we had so utterly procrastinated, we were unable to get dinner tickets for the Ararat event and were invited to come back at 10:30 for the dancing / toast event. For the 2nd year in a row, we punted and wound up having a wonderful dinner for two at Hyde Park Bar and Grill South.
It was great to have a quiet, connected dinner between just the two of us: it almost made you think you were out of the holiday season as there was no talk of travel, presents, family, trees, decorations, etc. It was almost like re-discovering one another yet again.
Thereafter we returned to the Mercury Hall to see a belly dancing performance based on “The 4 Elements”.
Thereafter we retired to the outdoors to watch the astounding Sangre del Sol group perform an arresting and exothermic display.
The dancing ended in time for champagne and wishing a happy 2008 and with this dancing and merriment was underway. It was a highlight to pop the VC and share it with some fine folks we met during the evening’s processions. We decided to head out before the clock tolled two and made it home without any surprises.
SXSW is coming up in March. Now would be the time to book hotels and get a cheaper pass if you’re thinking about it. Austin is very nice in March, breezy and sunny before the summer begins its slow torture of us locals.
The record will show that the defendant has always much been a fan of The Ronettes and similar ( I credit it to my mom playing the Oldies station in my early years ). Well, as ever, what is old is new again and, uh, English, as the Brighton-based 60’s girl group re-hash trio The Pipettes make their way to Austin and perform on the 7th at The Parish Room on 6th street.
I was looking for things to do in Austin related to Halloween and discovered the excellent site do512.com ( “512” being the Austin area code ). It’s clearly the best “what’s going on in Austin” site that I’ve found to date. Austinist isn’t bad, but it certainly doesn’t have the full breadth that I see at do512. While I find hoary old Citysearch to be a reliable source for a few reviews, the layout and the decidedly Web 1.0 interface make searching and comparing a bit, well, “old-feeling”. So, hooray for Do512.
In any case, there we read about some Halloween parties and, by chance, about two-step swing dancing classes held at Austin’s venerable Broken Spoke on South Lamar.
Now, growing up in Houston led me to reject all things C&W related because I wanted to be aligned to Houston: “The city where opera and theater and musea and coffee houses are” and not Houston: “15 minutes north of here there are pastures” ( not true anymore, there are strip malls ). As such, I never would have countenanced listening to KIKK or KILT ( the dominant C&W radio stations at that time ), much less considered it an worthwhile use of my time to visit a dance hall and try to figure out how to do a two-step. Over my college years, Austin’s brilliant KGSR and KVET softened my stance somewhat as I was introduced to Austin C&W ( Willie Nelson, Los Super 7, Doug Sahm , Hank I, Johnny, etc. ). But I must say, going down to an authentic Texas dancehall, having a Shiner, and mangling Lauren’s feet sounded like a good time to me, so we resolved to go Thursday after my classes.
The class is taught by members of the Solid Chrome Dancers and was made to be easy and non-threatening by the teaching staff.
In all, it was a great night out: heard some Doug Sahm (“Mendocino”) and wandered through the magical air where Willie and the Family have made more than a few boots stomp. Thereafter we returned home and watched Disc 3 of Season 1 of “Rome”
Lauren and I are still on this absurd schedule that ends around 3 in the morning and gets up around 11. I’m going to be forced to break out of that next week as I return to work. That said, when we got up around that hour today and took her car over to get a few things looked at. The A/C was flaking out and the passenger side window glass had slid into the door. When it rains, it pours.
Thereafter, we had lunch at the Whole Foods on 183 and Mopac before heading home.
Tonight was the much anticipated release of Apple’s newest operating system: Leopard. Being the ür-Apple-zealot I am, we headed over for the 18:00 release at the store at The Domain. Once the fateful hour was struck, the crowd moved quickly and efficiently through as I and a few hundred other people handed over their C-note for the latest iteration of the OS X system. The main reason I went today, was to get the free T-shirt, I honestly don’t think that I have sufficient time to do the install and get everything I have working working again.
Further, with some of those applications being essential to my work / school function, I don’t want to have to be under the gun trying to get something working as the early adoption bugs get worked out. So, I think I’ll hold on to the DVD and wait until a point release or two rolls past.
I have to worry a bit because interfriend Daniel Miessler surely was picking up the release too and yet his site hasn’t been updated. I hope he has not befallen some ill from the install process.
After the trip to the Apple store, Lauren and I got busy buying the products that we will use to make our Halloween costumes. Upon coming home Lauren had to make a plaster of Paris cast of my face. After the cast hardened she proceeded to start painting it. I’ll not tell who we’ll be masquerading as until I get the chance to put some pictures together. I helped on a part of her costume and thus here we are, again, at 2:30 about to go to bed.
Saturday we’re going to a Haunted Trail party. What’s scarier than being in a haunted house? Being in the middle of a haunted “forest”.
Today was the first day that I was out and about in town since my return from Australia. The weather had a decidedly cool bend to it and the Austin uniform of jeans and a t-shirt required an additional layer for comfort.
It was that rare sort of silent and cool fall. I know the same amount of bodies are in the same volume of space, but somehow the exuberant cacophony of voices seems to have vanished. I could hear only a few children at the playground across West Road and the rustle of the leaves in the trees.
I stood briefly in a patch of sun and listened for conversation, voices, yells, anything.
And fall answered in a bold assertion of its permanence: it said nothing.
I realized I had forgotten a book I needed at work and decided to run to get it. Literally. My work is about a mile away and is accessible, until the office park, by sidewalk, so I thought I’d take a jog in that direction.
As I left the facility I was nursing a nasty stitch so I decided to work on memorizing the opening 11 lines of Virgil’s Æneid, it’s an extra credit assignment.
As I walked around the road I could feel the warm sun on me, hear the sound of my words:
Arma virumque cano, Troiæ qui primus ab oris Italiam…
I marched slowly, with my eyes closed, slowly reciting and intoning these words until I got to the end of the section that I was memorizing. I stopped and looked up from my note paper and looked to the right into the wooded area that abuts the ring road around the complex.
To my surprise I was not alone.
I looked to the left and, started, for lo there was a doe next to me. For her part, she stopped eating and stared back at me, about slightly more than a meter away from one another.
I think we both shared the awkward sense of having walked into an occupied, but unlocked bathroom.
“Oh, ho, ho, uh, well, uhm, yes, here we are, heh, yes?”
I grimaced, waved, and walked slowly past. She eyed me for another half meter and then, without reserve, went back to the grassy thistles. I listened to my footfalls for another few meters and let my aural focus slide to the humming cicadas which are the sound of the Texas meadows in summer.
