A night of surreal sights and sounds

/ Austin, movies, music

The Alamo Drafthouse was having a “stag night” downtown. Gwen and I thought this sounded like fun, so we hied ourselves on down. There were a couple layers of difference between what I was expecting and what we saw. I was expecting, you know, stag movies. Grainy black-and-white porno shorts where the guy’s eyes had black bars across them. In fact, what they had planned to show was a more conventional porno movie, Fantasex Island (not even in the IMDB, but hey, look, it is in the Adult Film Database, mysteriously listing Holly Near in the credits!).

Well, it turns out that, according to the jackbooted thugs at the TABC, establishments that serve alcohol cannot show porno. So the people putting on the stag show edited it down to the non-pornographic parts–about five minutes (which, frankly, was enough)–and ran that.

For the main feature, they showed something much stranger: Sinful Dwarf, AKA “The Abducted Bride.” This was an English-language Danish horror movie, where a depraved dwarf and his hideous, washed-up showbiz mother lure young women into their attic, get them hooked on heroin, and use them as sex slaves for hire. Part of the schtick was that the sound was turned off, and a crew of four (?) live performers in the room took over all the voices, sound effects, and music. As near as I could tell, they stuck pretty closely to the original dialog, adding in a few of their own zingers along the way.

[Later] It turns out that none of the people in this movie have a Bacon number higher than 4. Amazing.

So, okay, that was weird. Watching it, we wondered two things: 1. What ever made anyone think that the movie had any artistic or commercial merit? and 2. How in the hell did somebody in Austin ever find this stinker and decide it would be fit to show in public?

After that was done, we then headed over to the Ritz for a night of ukulele music. The opening act was Sonic Uke (a great name that unfortunately appears to have been taken already). The three members all work at Cafe Mundi, so they were more or less familiar to me. The guy singing was doing a Bill-Murray-Lounge-Singer routine, and the chick had on a bizarre wig (as did Carl, on the uke). Most of their material was pretty weird, but not unpleasant–they do have musical talent, and they weren’t going out of their way to conceal it.

They were followed by Shorty Long, which always puts on a good show. The Ritz was filling up at this point, and not a lot of people really seemed to be into them, for some reason.

The third act was probably what most people came for: Petty Booka. A couple of Japanese chicks who cover a wide range of pop and country numbers in their quasi-Hawaiian style (along with some original numbers). I’d heard their stuff before, and appreciated it for the novelty value (which is high), but seeing them live, I realized that they really had serious musical talent, singing in harmony that reminded me a little of David Seville and a lot of a 60s girl-group like the Ronettes. I expected to see just the two of them–in fact they were backed up by a standup bass, guitar, and a very young-looking but talented Mexican guy on a slide reverb guitar. They covered everyone from the Ramones to Patsy Cline. Great show.

There was a fourth act on the bill, the Meat Purveyors, but I’ve heard them and it was already pretty late, so we left.

Jennifer Government

/ books

Just finished reading Jennifer Government by Max Barry, a blackly satirical story that answers the musical question “what would happen if Ayn Rand had her way?” The book has inspired an online game and is evidently being adapted to the screen.

It would actually make a good comic book, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s a fast read, and suggests visuals that would be a lot of fun.

The story is fun but improbable, the characters are a bit sketchy, the plot moves quickly. Joe Bob says “check it out.”

CSS rant

/ net stuff

CSS is great, but it’s too hard. When even the guy who wrote the books on CSS admits that it has “made the veins in my forehead throb”, you know there’s a problem.

All the stuff I’ve done on the web for the past year or so has been in CSS, and I’ve been gradually re-working older stuff to bring it into the new millennium. So I’ve drunk the kool-aid.

One thing that would make it at least a little easier would be a hierarchy to stylesheet documents. I’m not talking about the cascade effect (which is really neat). I’m talking about a way to organize a single stylesheet document.

As it is, there’s no enforced, preferred, suggested, inherent, or obvious way to structure a CSS document. You’ve just got “selector soup.” This makes a complicated stylesheet hard to read and hard to write. CSS offers contextual selectors, which would be an obvious candidate for hierarchical organization. Rather than having

div#main {margin:2px;}
div#main h2 {color:red;}
div#main h3 {color:blue;}

It would seem eminently sensible to have

div#main {margin:2px;} [
    h2 {color:red;}
    h3 {color:blue;}
    ]

or something like that.

With a structure like this, it would be possible to distill an HTML document down to its tags, and generate a structured list of selectors, to create a stylesheet skeleton.

The other bear, for me, is the layout of major page elements. The whole box model is pretty powerful, but it is unintuitive and there are some things it just can’t do. Imagine a page laid out like this:

header:left header:right
main content navbar
footer:left footer:right

Near as I can tell, this is almost impossible using straight CSS. It might be possible if the header and footer areas are fixed height, probably meaning they contain mostly graphics. It would probably require a lot of extraneous DIV tags. DIV tags are fine up to a point, but nesting a bunch of DIV tags just to get a page to lay out correctly goes against the spirit of structured HTML. Might as well use a table-hack layout after all.

It seems like something that was cooked up to be elegant on a theoretical level without much regard for the kinds of layouts people might actually want to achieve. The layout of this page was achieved through some code that I consider inelegant and brittle.

Wisteria

/ Austin

Had lunch with Gwen at Saltillo Plaza, the train station to nowhere on East 5th St. The place is going crazy with wisteria.


Microsoft’s slogan

/ tidbit

Heard on NPR: “Your potential inspires us to create the software to help you reach it.” Or something like that. Microsoft’s bloatware philosophy applies to advertising, too.

The bidding to rebuild Iraq has already begun

/ current events

This New York Times article suggests that Gulf War II isn’t about oil as an end–it’s just a means to an end: to enrich American construction firms like, oh, Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s employer (note that I intentionally left out the word “former”)).

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. We (for the purposes of this entry, “we” means “they”) declare war on a country and bomb it back to the Stone Age. In a vast ($25 bn+) humanitarian undertaking, we rebuild the country, using Iraq’s oil money to pay for it. Sort of a roundabout way to transfer Iraqi wealth to corporate America.

Some thoughts:

  • Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves. I can imagine a scenario where the USA keeps the forthcoming client regime on a short leash, forcing it to keep oil prices low. That will depress oil prices throughout the world (Good for SUV drivers!), and keep Iraq in debt to the USA (or more accurately, corporate American interests) indefinitely, since it won’t be able to pay down its boggling debt quickly.
  • It would have been nice if we could have just concentrated on rebuilding (or building) Afghanistan instead, but they don’t have the oil reserves
  • I sure am glad the bidding process has received all the public scrutiny it deserves.
Scroll to Top