Feb. 11: At the old Rock Shop in Austin

Feb. 11: At the old Rock Shop in Austin

Pay attention, I’ll be at the old location …

4103 N IH-35 Service Road
Austin, TX 78722

Reading hours: 11 AM to 4 PM, old location, as an interim solution. Walk-ins welcome, appointments are encouraged.

Aquarius Pisces Thoth

For details? E-mail is best.

  • Aperture: ƒ/1.8
  • Camera: iPhone 7
  • Taken: 14 March, 2017
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 3.99mm
  • ISO: 40
  • Shutter speed: 1/20s

With Charity

With Charity

“Let all your things be done with charity.”

1 Corinthians 16:14

From The King James Version of the Bible

Sisyphus

Sisyphus

#Bible

Beautiful Ugly

Beautiful Ugly: a novel

British novels. Manners.

“Grief is a patient thief and steals far more than people who have never known it realize.” Page 23.

Billed as a thriller.

Beautiful Ugly: a novel

Does descend into some well-regulated horror. Novel gripped me, for sure. Murder and mayhem, carefully wrapped in UK manners.

Nice twist at the end — guess I didn’t see that coming.

The Talking Heads? “Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

Beautiful Ugly

  • Aperture: ƒ/1.5
  • Camera: iPhone 14 Plus
  • Taken: 7 October, 2024
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 5.7mm
  • ISO: 320
  • Shutter speed: 1/60s

The Bullet Swallower

The Bullet Swallower: a novel

Billed as magical realism, and or a history, it is a twisted tale drawn of (my) borderlands.

This is, in a way, personal for me. Two parts, one, where I’ve spent the better part of two or more decades bouncing between Central Texas and the borderlands themselves, mostly El Paso but other spots, as well. Then, too, is the suggestion that San Antonio is a border town, of sorts, merely a hundred miles from old Mexico. The other portion, the author is from “here,” but now lives in MA, according to the blurb. Ex-pat, and distance makes the heart miss what’s not there.

The Bullet Swallower: a novel

The author’s afterword suggested it was a true story built on family myth.

Engaging tale, weird, and to me, comforting in that family curses can be lifted, or, despite what current events suggest? Right might triumph yet.

Trenchant wit, high-class writing. Smooth, too. Like a really good Mole sauce, rich, thick, brown, and hides the heat until later. So very good.

The Bullet Swallower: a novel

“True story,” ask Bubba about that.

  • Aperture: ƒ/2.2
  • Camera: iPhone 6
  • Taken: 6 September, 2015
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 4.15mm
  • ISO: 32
  • Shutter speed: 1/4405s

One Other Influence

One Other Influence

Recently, I was asked about influences, music, authors, material that shaped my work.

See note to Elaine.

Let’s take a step back in time — I was marginally associated with a specialist motorcycle repair shop at the time, Quality Cycles in Dallas.

One Other Influence

Each morning, most mornings, some mornings? I’d roll into the shop, park at the empty gas station next door, backing the van up so motorcycles could be loaded in the back with no ramp required, and toying with various machines. Built a race bike. Got in trouble. Fell off a motorcycle. None of this is news.

What I did recall, a formative piece of what, and how, I work? There was a Dallas movie critic, well-known for scholarship, erudite, educated, and brilliant with words. Thoughtful pieces about meaningful art, limited release films, now so-called art-house films? With interpretations, explications, insightful, and most important? Deep. Meaningful. Steeped in language and literature.

Something happened, and he started, as an amusement, writing under the pen name, Joe Bob Briggs, with a weekly column dedicated to schlockiest of horror films. The last format I saw Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In movies in a real newspaper? It was full page, three-column and the first two-thirds of the article would be about whatever was going in his mythical world.

Pastiche, comedy, satire, or black humor, I’m not sure, and I don’t recall.

Maybe a decade later, I was exercising my own chops by reviewing movies because it paid a paltry fee, it was pure opinion, and I could write anything I wanted. The one movie I botched completely, was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (III), I think. I tried to write like Joe Bob, and it didn’t work. Plus: I was really repulsed by the film. Just horror, and some with no redeeming value. Not my genre. Not usually, there is Shakespeare’s Titus, got to hand it to him.

Joe Bob Briggs went on to become a big thing, the male equivalent of Elvira, maybe. Similar, if not the same, but that’s not the ‘include’ for me. It was those early columns, before getting canned by the one major outlet, which then launched a whole new career as occasionally offensive, dryly sexist, and narrow-minded in form, if not real life.

I can recall reading some of his books, but the part that I liked the most, the biggest influence would be those early columns in the paper. That was an influence, I just pieced together.

One Other Influence

I am unsure, thinking back, what to call it. Clearly it was satiric, but also inventive in way I’d never seen before. More along the lines of Mark Twain and Will Rodgers than anything else. But slick little jabs at everything. No cow was too sacred, which, if I recall, and I don’t, got him canned, and opened him up to the alt-syndicates. But like so much of what I love and hold dear, some of this just doesn’t translate well outside of Texas.

Jonathan Swift. Alexander Pope. Don’t recall the connection.

The column appeared in a newspaper, either Dallas Morning News or the (now defunct) Dallas Times Herald, I can’t recall. Got bounced — the first example of cancel culture?

It was throw-away tabloid entertainment. Serialized. Brings back another memory, Tales of the City — similar but very different.

Serial Mailing List

xenon
  • Aperture: ƒ/1.5
  • Camera: iPhone 14 Plus
  • Taken: 19 October, 2024
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 5.7mm
  • ISO: 40
  • Shutter speed: 1/120s

The Texas Murders

The Texas Murders

Another James Paterson collaboration. Title caught my attention. A year ago, I was in Arizona to watch some spring training, like, lots os baseball, good times. Between that, and my time spent working in El Paso, up and down the I-35 corridor, passing through Waco, rolling past the Texas Rangers’ Museum, and so forth?

The writing, the settings themselves, were authentic.

The Texas Murders

Apparently, Number three in trilogy. I like the settings.

astro motel

astrdosih.net/xenon

  • Aperture: ƒ/1
  • Camera: ION 230
  • Taken: 29 July, 2005
  • Exposure bias: +3.7EV
  • Flash fired: no
  • ISO: 54319
  • Shutter speed: 1/3765s

Horoscopes for 2-4-2025

Horoscopes for 2-4-2025

“My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.”

Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (II.ii.85-92)

Horoscopes for 2-4-2025

  • Venus into Aries 2/5
  • Full Moon 24°6’ Leo/Aqu. 2/12

Aquarius

Aquarius The Queen’s response to pontificating Polonius? “More matter with less art.” What we just got done hearing from Polonius is called “dramatic irony,” because he says he will be brief when he is anything but. Promise one thing, deliver another. Sets a tone, and gives you something to look forward to, as well. I’ve gone off sideways with the character of Polonius, as a supporting role, it can be played a number of different ways. He’s conniving, plotting his advancement by getting young prince Hamlet interested in Ophelia. Or playing off the apparent childhood friendship between Laertes and young Hamlet. Or, perhaps, this is innocent, and he’s just an elder, in his declining years. The text is open to interpretations. For Aquarius? The weeks ahead are open to interpretations. One distinct message from another tragic character in that play, the Queen herself, “More matter with less art.”

Pisces

Reading a book, the other evening, and I don’t know, this could wind up on the screen before too long, but in the book? One character explained that the other guy was playing chess while most of the characters were just playing checkers. I heard that. I felt that. Really was evocative. What it means for patient Pisces? You’re moving pieces around on a playing board, a game called life. Book was tightly, and I mean tightly plotted. Twisted, too. Three different arcs, and each one almost satisfactory. But the idea of someone playing chess while everyone else was just playing checkers?
[continue reading…]

  • Aperture: ƒ/1.8
  • Camera: iPad Pro (11-inch)
  • Taken: 29 November, 2022
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 3mm
  • ISO: 64
  • Shutter speed: 1/60s

From Under the Truck

From Under the Truck

From Under the Truck: a Memoir by Josh Brolin.

There was a publicity push, and capitalizing on both a famous parents, and his own infamous at times career?

The writing is dreamlike, and one I haven’t been able to find to compare recently, but one I recall? Jim Morrison’s notebooks. Lyrics, fragments, poetry, and journals.

To be fair, as revealed later in the memoir? Cormac McCarthy was a friend.

That’s a big clue.

From Under the Truck: a Memoir

Similar, but very different in texture and form, from Kathy Valentine’s.

  • Aperture: ƒ/1.5
  • Camera: iPhone 14 Plus
  • Taken: 7 October, 2024
  • Flash fired: no
  • Focal length: 5.7mm
  • ISO: 320
  • Shutter speed: 1/60s

Been about a Month of Sundays

Been about a Month of Sundays

Let me see…

  • First Sunday was San Antonio, monthly Pat Booker affair.
  • Second Sunday was a one-off, new year in SA.
  • Third Sunday was usual elite in SA.
  • Fourth Sunday was Nature’s Treasures grand opening.
  • First Sunday again, San Antonio…

Where does this lead?

Been about a Month of Sundays

Star Card

astrofish.net/travel

Alternative definition?