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Our next guest is Austinite James Brush, the author of the novel A Place Without a Postcard. James is hard at work on his second novel and he tells me that it captures a lot of what makes Austin special.
If you're a supporter of the local arts scene, I'd encourage you to buy James' first novel, just so we can then ensure that his second novel will be added to our pantheon of local literature. (Novel writing can be a lonely thing, so send James some Paypal encouragement!)
According to his website, James' first novel, A Place without a Postcard, is:
"...an unusual story about a man who gets lost. That's about as simple as it can be put. It's about more than that, though. It's about friendship, redemption, belief, and self-discovery. It is part science fiction and part murder mystery and part myth. It takes place in west Texas. Not so much the western part of Texas, but the mythical West Texas where one might run into a coyote named Mercury or a man who dreams of invisibility."
Here's the first paragraph of the book:
"On a dry and empty expanse of desert highway, two cars sat close to one another beneath a weather-beaten billboard. One of the large vertical panels had fallen in a freak windstorm that howled out of Mexico several years earlier, and no one ever cared enough, or found the billboard profitable enough, to replace the panel, just another forgotten scheme in the dilapidated west. Though a phone number stretched across the remaining panels and whispered in faded red letters, '55-3872', a passing motorist in search of lonely ad space would have to stop his car, get out and walk under the sign in order to read the '5' that the wind had blown down."
If you'd like to read more, James has posted several sample chapters here. Or directly purchase your own copy of the book from his publisher, iUniverse.
And please come back later to hear our podcast interview with James.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and everyone will gather together with friends and family to collectively eat our way into a turkey coma. Hopefully while we're loading up on L-tryptophan and consuming carbohydrates we'll all pause the feast long enough to remember that being thankful is purportedly still the reason for the season.
All of my clients are taking off early this afternoon, so it's a slow day at work. Boredom often begats a great idea just as often as it births a silly one, so I came thought I'd call around Austin and see who is actually working today and ask them what they are most thankful for.
While I dial around and then edit these stories for the podcast, here's The Armadillo Podcast's Top Ten Reasons We are Thankful.
We are thankful because:
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and as Kinky would say, "May the god of your choice bless you."
UPDATE: Guess what? I called around and couldn't find a single soul at work Wednesday afternoon.
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Our next guest, in typical Austin fashion, is a hyphenated man. James Brush is a film-maker--turned high school English teacher--turned novelist. His first book, A Place Without a Postcard, is about man who gets lost. Unlike our previous guest, Yossi Ghinsberg, who got lost in the Amazon, James' character gets lost in the wilds of West Texas. Must be something going around.
About A Place Without a Postcard: (See review)
Paul Reynolds, a photographer who creates fake photos for tabloid
magazines, wakes up with no idea where he is or how he got there. He can't
even recall his name. A strange man lurks nearby, breathing heavily and slowly
flipping through a book. Paul hears the man's breath, but he cannot see him.
He realizes with mounting panic that his eyes no longer function.He remembers racing down a desolate West Texas highway. He remembers
a cop who pulled him over for speeding. He remembers a shotgun-
brandishing cook chasing him out of a diner. And he remembers a life
abandoned, but he cannot put together the jigsaw puzzle that brought him
where he is: blind, wanted by the law, and in the company of this invisible
stranger.In the backcountry town of Armbister, Texas, where temperatures hover
around a hellish 110 degrees, Paul's memory, intangible as a heat mirage,
lies just beyond his reach, and God may be a coyote.
James Brush's blog and Coyote Mercury, his web site
Our next guest comes with a fairly sizable following. So I teased his appearance on our program several times to help boost our audience. In fact, I couldn't stop myself. I teased it and teased it, like a Dallas socialite teases her hair, I reached for the blogging equivalent to Aqua Net again and again.
So without any further delay, here is Ben Brown, editor of Austinist.com and a founder of Consumating.com a dating site for hipsters, geeks and bloggers.
Click here to Download ArmadilloPodcast11.mp3
I really miss the tech boom. I had so much fun and the future was so bright that is was just possible to ignore that nagging feeling that it wasn't real and it couldn't last.
In today's New York Times, John Battelle
penned an editorial on "Building a Better Boom," and he suggests that even though Internet companies like Google are shining like mirrored disco balls while the VC boys are putting on their dancing shoes, we're not really partying like it's 1999.
The infrastructure is there now, says Battelle, to possibly do the thing we set out to do in the first place: We're going to change the world.
Writes Battelle:
"Start-ups are leveraging nearly a decade's worth of work on technologies that are now not only proven, but also free, or very nearly so. Open-source software can now do nearly everything that Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft specialized in back in the 90's. And the cost of computing and bandwidth? You can now lease a platform that can handle millions of customers for less than $500 a month. In the 90's, such a platform would have run tens of thousands of dollars or more a month."
I always knew that tech was here to stay. Geeks invented the microchip and the Internet and even during the darkest night of the bust I knew that somewhere out there, there was a pasty, socially awkward young man or woman who was hiding in the basement from the neighborhood bully, while inventing the killer app that will fuel the next surge in the economy.
This week I had the good fortune to meet one of these neo-geeks. His name is Ben Brown and he's a founder of Consumating.com and editor of Austinist.com. And this time, to quote Battelle some more, "the financiers aren't driving. Instead, the entrepreneurs and geeks - often one and the same - are."
Come back on Monday to hear Ben's story on The Armadillo Podcast. (Originally, I had intended to post Ben's interview today but we're experiencing a minor technical difficulty. I'm so sorry to dissapoint Ben's fans--and the stat counter confirms there are many--but these are the perils of DIY media. Do please check back with us on Monday.)
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You do realize, or course, that the word "podcast" did not exist 16 months ago?
Here's my prediction on another new word: I predict that in 12 short months the word "consumating" with one "m" will out rank the correct spelling of consummating.
Why? Never underestimate the compulsive super powers of the geeks, my friend.
My next guest, Ben Brown, is one of the founders of Consumating.com, a dating site for hipsters, geeks and bloggers that employs user-created tags for better matching.
And if Ben and company can help get a geek a date, they'll soon figure out how to turn lead into gold.
I keed, I keed--keep from sending those angry emails, please.
I actually have enough geek cred that it's OK for me to poke fun--in-group prejudice, as it where.
According to Janet Kornblum at USA Today, "Steven Phenix, an admittedly pasty, unathletic, socially awkward geek -- and proud of it -- was tired of sitting on the sidelines as he watched People bestow its Sexiest Man Alive title on icons of the screen. So Phenix helped start what is becoming a runaway hit on the Net: a contest for the Sexiest Geek Alive."
For extra geek bonus points, you can find this quote on Chase Masterson's website and she played "Leeta" on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Sorry ladies, I'm a happily married man. 8-) There's only one of me, but there are thousands of equally geeky folks on Consumating.com.
Tomorrow, please come back for our interview with Ben Brown and he'll let you in how to find the goth-gaming, computer-hacking, mobblogging man or woman of your dreams. (Click here to see why Ben is so Web 2.0)
Oh, and for other new words like Consumating, go to Double-Tongued Word Wrester or PseudoDictionary where you can pick up other lingo that can help you navigate the brave, new world of online dating. Should things not work out, you'll need phrases like "body spam" and "Evoid."
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I just stumbled upon a cached version of December 2004 column that Kinky Friedman wrote entitled, "Keep Gomorrah Weird: The rest of Texas vilifies Austin as a breeding ground for long-haired hell-raisers. To me, it's an open-minded, open-hearted, magical little town--and always will be."
(Shhh! Don't tell Texas Monthly but Google will let you behind TM's subscriber firewall to read archived stories.)
The subtitle of this confirms that Austin is a blue city surrounded by a red state--a fact that I've been trying to convince my friend Galia, lo these many months.
Kinky writes about how Austin first came to national prominence via the hempy coattails of Willie Nelson, when "everybody wanted to come to Austin to have his hip card punched."
In this article two facts about Kinky surfaced that I wasn't aware of:
Interestingly, that makes two SDS members we've interviewed now on The Armadillo Podcast. Jeff Nightbyrd was our first back in Episode Three.
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