lightning bulb

earache in my eye: 999 eyes & that damned band

mbartnett@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:14:32 +0100

earache in my eye: phranchyze and zeale

mbartnett@gmail.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:42:26 +0100

city hall hustle: the abominable inaugural

mbartnett@gmail.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:41:49 +0100

city hall high tea: place 4 run-off

mbartnett@gmail.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:24:00 +0100

earache in my eye: charles potts magic windmill band

mbartnett@gmail.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:17:50 +0100

The Austin Chronicle's new music video blog, "Earache in My Eye" (Episode 1), showcases Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band, including a performance at the Mohawk and outtakes from a fireside chat with the group.

the talented alan metoskie (or, diary of a front desk girl)

mbartnett@gmail.com — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:03:16 +0100

beauty bar blog, day 10

oceanchile@gmail.com — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:00:13 +0100

     She is riding bareback on a zebra along the side of his house, peeping in long after sundown. Herman, sitting oblivious by the fire, broods ever more ecstatic for another day gone by in static un-changeliness. The cars racing by and spaceships blasting off and there sits Herman, reading books about poverty and ecology from hundreds of years ago. Her zebra starts and stands up on her hind legs, throwing you nearly off her and onto the cold, damp earth. And bareback zebra riding is said and done. The stripes do help one to maintain a rigid and perpendicular posture. Content with idling and clean out of booze Herman makes his way to his bedroom and lays down to sleep. Visions of many a fantastic catastrophe plaguing his sleep and she comes slowly through the window. Naked and moist, noiseless and screeching. Herman is sweating quite a lot and the window left open has invited a breeze to tremble his bones. He is sort of whispering or whimpering or screaming or laughing, it's hard to tell, but he is repeating someone's name and for a moment she believes it is her name he is murmuring.

"Is it me you're calling for?" rousing him from chaotic slumber. "Is it my name you are whimpering restlessly? Cacophonously?

     Opening his eyes he has never seen her before and reaches for the butterfly knife he keeps in his nightstand for this very type of occasion. Our gentle rider and her zebra escape through the window and take to their rainbow flight. Waking to a despised alarm, alas Herman remembers nothing more than a sleepless night. He hums his way into the shower, a lingering dissonance of orchestral shots and chopped up, slowed down screw samples. Our beloved protagonist gallops to the coffee shop, unshowered and unshaven, remembering his promise to not think bad thoughts and enter the world of the living and of the dying every day. The coffee shop presents it's own epic dilemma for our tragic hero. Waiting in line, avoiding eye contact and conversation, ordering from the counter with a clear and audible voice. Trying hard not to use an improper tone for fear of upsetting the workers. These workers, who hold the key to his morning consciousness and a not insignificant portion of his social dyslexia.

"I don't know what it is, I just keep ordering improperly and getting cheese martini's and olive sandwiches."

"I draw you all the time. I keep having a lot of trouble with you shoulders, though. They look quite broad today but other days I'd say you look exceptionally wimpy."

All that said, he ordered a biscuit with sugar and a coffee full of margarine.

"Do you think it's something I can work on?"

"I really wouldn't know much about curing social diseases."

"Right, well I expected as much and really prefer not to talk about it in public anyways."

     Making his way out the door he spills coffee on his hand and licks if off before it runs onto his sleeve or onto his pants or his shoes. She on her horse, high in the sky strokes the fire and takes the boiling water off the rack.

beauty bar blog, day 3

oceanchile@gmail.com — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:36:47 +0100

I told her she's so cute and wouldn't she like to come home with me and she said no and I said wouldn't she like to give me her number and she said no she'd really just prefer to dance or whatever.

I told her to give me a kiss and she did and I told her to give me another and she did and I told her to use her tongue and she said she has a boyfriend and I said what the fuck do I care about love?

poppin' e (election reception round-up)

mbartnett@gmail.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:32:53 +0100

From partying with Will Wynn to chillin' with Allen Demling, City Hall Hustle bum-rushes the election night parties in a politico-packed election special you (and our elected officials) won't soon forget.

Peep "Poppin' E: Election Reception Roundup," featuring Wynn, Lee Leffingwell, Randi Shade, Laura Morrison, Cid Galindo, and many, many others, hosted by the City Hall Hustler himself, Wells Dunbar.

Do it vloggy-style, only at austinchronicle.com/hustle.

wells dunbar freak out!!! (nsfw)

mbartnett@gmail.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:31:38 +0100

mindstorms mania: robothriller for kids

mbartnett@gmail.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:29:50 +0100

if you are like me

oceanchile@gmail.com — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:44:31 +0100

If you are like me, you run to the sea seeking to be free,
Sputtering, spatter, stroking, sinking you're a soulful shellfish.
But you are not like me for you are the sea.

Tattooing myself for you, pounding and throbbing.
Cutting myself for death, our withering beautiful love.
Your canvas hashed haphazardly smearing blood on my fingers.
The silence resonating through your form is unbearable.

I hold my breath for days inside you, diving deeper to your treasure chest, bashing open the lock. Flooding your flesh. You who understand suffering, who I have loved forever.

I place my soul in a bowl on a pole on my nose.
Hopping one-legged 'cross a tightrope-
My image of you soaking on a rock in the ocean
With the other creatures of the deep sleep-
Slipping on a dolphin tail my balance fails, my soul flails and is carried into the sky.
Millions of years later I am reborn and flying and
swoop down to the ocean with my pterodactyl claws.
Setting my jaw on your fleshy neck I carry you with me high into the sky, away from the mammals to a distant planet, where it is only you and I.
Placing my soul in a bowl on a pole on my nose.

city hall hustle: campaign ad hominem

mbartnett@gmail.com — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:44:39 +0100

grandfathers of foodies

brenner@austinchronicle.com — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:32:06 +0100

"I'm stuffed," said Desmond, pushing his plate away.

"Me, too," said Tomas, "to the fucking gills, man." He tossed a final pork rib, the meat half chewed off, to the pile of bones already adding a chaos of thick white lines to his plate's dark circle.

Sylvia looked up from the roasted quail breast she was happily deconstructing. "My grandfather was so fucking corny," she said, licking her fingers. "He'd never say he was stuffed to the gills. He'd always say 'McGillicuddies.' He'd be, like, 'I am stuffed to the McGillicuddies!'"

"Your grandfather would've gotten along great with my grandfather," said Tomas, smiling.

"My grandfather," said Desmond, reaching for his wine glass, "always told me to never eat until you're full, that you should always stop short."

"Always leave 'em wanting more," said Tomas.

"No," said Desmond, "because it takes your sense of fullness a few minutes to catch up with what's actually going on in your stomach. Seriously. You're probably already full before you can feel that you're full."

"My grandfather," said Tomas, "always said you should go for the extreme, that life was too short to follow that 'everything in moderation' crap." He raised his own wine toward Desmond; they clinked glasses. "Of course," continued Tomas, "my grandfather also told me that he was the unacknowledged father of M.F.K. Fisher's daughter Anne."

"M.F.K. Fisher?" said Sylvia. "The Art of Eating M.F.K. Fisher?"

Tomas nodded, took another swig of Cabernet Sauvignon. "That's what he told me."

"Damn," said Sylvia, frowning. "I wonder if that's true."

when we vouchsafed

brenner@austinchronicle.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:45:13 +0100

     I never saw the bronze man that night outside the warehouse, but Sal always swore he did.
     This was years before you were born, sweetie ~ decades before. It was another world, another time.
     We shouldn't have been there in the first place, Sal and I. In those days Red Hook wasn't the kind of place to be snooping around at one in the morning, especially if you were a couple of green kids like us, but Sal was going to journalism school at Columbia and he liked to think of himself as an intrepid reporter, like Stanley hunting Dr. Livingstone, some wild notion like that. Fools rush in ~ like they say, right? And there I was, rushing in with him, because ... well, because I was his best friend and he could always talk me into anything. We were maybe the slightest bit tipsy from a few beers at Muldoon's, too, although Sal'd had little trouble steering his father's car to where we'd parked beneath a Royal Crown Cola sign a few blocks away.
     This was just a minor reconnoitering expedition, he told me, a little look-see at someplace bound to be more interesting than our usual haunts.
     Besides, he said, it was no big deal, he was familiar with the neighborhood.
     "Since when are you familiar with this neighborhood?" I asked him. I buttoned my coat tighter and took a glance down the deserted streets. Enormous buildings of brick and wood spilled shadows in a black flood across the cobblestones. A few streetlamps struggled against the night. I had this feeling of dirt, that all the surfaces around us were covered with a film of grime. "Since when do you come anywhere near Brooklyn at all?"
     "Since August, dummy," he said. The chill of mid-October danced in little breezes around us, bringing a smell of the Atlantic from piers a few blocks away. "When LaGuardia cut the ribbon for that new Rec Center? That big swimming pool the whole city had conniptions over? Who do you think covered that for the Spectator, huh?" He jabbed a thumb into his chest, grinning. "Yours truly, Salvatore Adorno."
     "Truly a force to be reckoned with," I said, "here in your home away from home."
     "Hey, when in Rome," he said, shrugging.
     "Since when are you familiar with Rome?"
     He gave me a look like I'd just asked if he'd mind kissing Jean Harlow.
     "Sal-va-to-re A-dor-no," he repeated. "What am I, a Chink?"
     "What you are ~ " I began, but Sal slapped a hand over my mouth.

[to be continued]

fault lines

brenner@austinchronicle.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:51:01 +0100

Twitch, and you twitch alone.
Dance, and the world
will nail a better mousetrap to your door.

These are the words by which we live,
gleaned from maps our mothers made
on the other side of cross-stitch samplers,
turned always towards the walls of home.

These are the words, my missing one,
whereby the futures open wide their mouths and grin.

It is better to have loved and lost
than to have removed one's own kidney
with a short sharp stick
in the back of a speeding taxi
on a rainy night in Valdosta.

These are the words by which we live,
the lingua franca issued us with the A, the C, the G, the T,
the deoxyribonucleic assiduousness of which
we remain powerless to resist.

These are the words, sweet absentine,
that put the primrose in your prisoned past.

Cataclysm. Cataclysm. Cataclysm.

This is my heart for want of you.

(Listen: Beneath our feet, the small talk of tectonic plates.)

you, the pencil

oceanchile@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:58:50 +0100

You will be the pencil rapidly recording thoughts and passing dialogues,
I, the child finding your poem online after coming home drunk, feeling
The joy of a future untold and unrestrained.
And you, in your infinite selfishness, write alone.
Screaming for you to glue me back together-
Silent stares, brimming with sadness, forcing me to remember all the smiles I had given you.
This and every letter I fantasize of sending you but never will.
The gap that bridges two intersecting lives-

Jumping from the precipice of our unbounded love, you who bade me climb ever higher, escape me.

wake up remembering

oceanchile@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:58:02 +0100

Wake up remembering not to jump across the track slitting my neck
for you who I don't really know at all.
God, who alerts I to the wolves' deceptive costuming.
The hidden meaning between your lines is brilliant and throbbing
it's light through the cracks in your walls tonight.
Your gentle river becoming a rapid I am happy to hear of your departure.
Absolved from the pretension I make my way into my head and watch
you all from a safe distance, laughing.

your smell of broken flowers

oceanchile@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:55:56 +0100

Your smell of broken flowers
Sowing your summer garden, falling into you winter.
My bones are strong from you, swimming my
Clarity comes in monsoons, human affections raging,
Protected, I sleep inside you, your rough bark skin,
The nectar of your childhood, swaying in the wind growing
old and massive and beautiful.

This shattered city
Torn, our divine ecstasy,
Love, coddled in the dark.

I dreamt forever sleeping the days away,
My solace in fantasy, a world I could affect,
Symbols for my passion, hysteria,
Sleepless, restless, becoming the sun.
The ocean your intuition my relief swept broad

Stroking incessantly abreast the waves I find you exhausted
Exhaling seawater, counting the ebbs that must wash you ashore
To me-

Your rolling features
Frothing over
Pounding blood beating out
Our only rhythm

In the moonlight your eyes ravaging the horizon
Seeking out your fantastic shoreline, my promised harbour,
The coalescence, water finds land, you're flying in the ocean
running through the moonlight swimming through my flaming heart
converging.

city hall hustle (part 3)

mbartnett@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:16:32 +0100