I am in Austin, Texas, where Britt Daniel used to live. I look for signs of him, but I don’t really know what to look for. It is pretty cool here, also kind of hot. Like hot for February. Also really clear and clean. I can’t write too much because I have to go meet my Sigur Ros buddy David from Palm Springs. We are going to see Sigur Ros tonight. Sigur fucking Ros! I am so totally and completely stoked.

Up until last night I was at the Airport Hilton here, so I’m just now getting into the rhythm of downtown. I ate tacos at Guero’s today and fried gulf shrimp and macaroni and cheese at Threadgills last night. All up and down my street there is music. But, it always takes me a few hours to really sink my heels in.

Other than that, well, I sort of had a nervous breakdown the other night thinking about sex slavery. This is a whole ‘nother story that I will save for another day. Also, I met the coolest guy on the plane over here. He works on oil rigs for two months then travels for two months. He goes to places like Romania and Bali on a whim, but he looks like some dude you’d see drinking beer in a dive bar on a Sunday afternoon. Two days later I am still thinking about him but, a) got off the plane with a “take it easy,” b) I can’t kid myself, age-wise, anymore, even though I try hard, and often and c) he didn’t have fuschia hair.

Whatever. I gotta go drink red wine in the sun in this crazy city of the young and get ready to listen to perfection.

A little Britt business first, before I get into some random thoughts and images of Missouri, and home.

There is someone out there who is even more obsessed with Britt than me – Kelly from Louisiana, who has graced us with a travelogue of last week’s Texas shows in her blog. She found my blog and now I’ve found hers. If you like reading crazed Britt material (of course you do, otherwise why do you read Poptarticus?) then check out Kelly’s blog for some killer stories from the road.

Also, the be-all end-all of my Monday, and for many Mondays, other days, months and years to come, as long as it may last: a a stream of Spoon’s February 2nd Austin show. Mi Dio! It’s like, totally the best thing to ever happen. At least today. Killer.

OK, that’s it for Britt stuff for awhile, I promise. Onward. Here are some images of Missouri.

This starkly beautiful scene is an hour and a half from St. Louis, near the town of Hermann. The house is crying for love, and I saw ghosts all around it. Time travel is possible with an overactive imagination.

In the little town of Hermann, I woke up to snow.

A visit to St. Louis for an old movie junkie like me would not be complete without a visit to Judy Garland’s address in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” 5135 Kensington Avenue (and 5133) is now in the ghetto. Both houses are gone. This is the lot where they once were.

Another shot of what was 5135 Kensington Avenue.

One of the weird things about St. Louis is, there are these ghettos but then two blocks away, there are streets with huge, opulent houses.

Chop Suey restaurants are all over the place in the bad areas of town. I kept asking, what up with all these Chop Suey places? What IS Chop Suey?

The sale cart at the best market in the U.S., if not the world: Global Foods in Kirkwood, Missouri. Get ready for my soon-to-be-completed essay and photo journal of this place. I LOVED it.

Hard to argue with that, isn’t it?

But now I am home, and it is beautiful here. Last night my brother helped throw a birthday party for Sooty Hendricks at Winstons, and his band played, and some other bands, and everyone was there. I sometimes think about leaving OB but then a night like last night comes around and I realize I can’t leave, not for a while. It was a wild and colorful party, and the Mudsharks were awesome.

What a life.

Even though I don’t have much experience with it, I have always had a fascination with the American heartland. Could be the reading material of my youth, could be my overactive imagination, or a combination of both; I have the past in my mind’s eye. Clay-like, life-giving soil under thick leather workboots by the river’s edge. The plaintive wail of a an unnoticed diva emitting from a dive bar in a shitty town. The smell of burnt sugar. The feel of a hot penny in a child’s dirty hand.

Whatever. I’ve spent a week in Missouri and it’s made an impression on me. There haven’t exactly been any divas and certainly no Addie Pray type kiddies that I might have envisioned in my crazy dreams. But this is a cool place, and a trippy place, commonplace and enigmatic at the same time. And in the country, driving through a fresh snow, it is unbelievably beautiful. I can’t believe how much empty space there is here, even just outside St. Louis.

In St. Louis, I have been lucky enough to have two incredible guides, my friend Deborah from the slowtalk message board, and Jonathan Parker who owns a food and wine shop here. Between them, they’ve taken me to streets of gothic opulence, ghettos of no return, killer art deco penthouses, the church with more mosaics than anywhere in the world, a supermarket of ethnic foods that has no rival anywhere, the bar where Chuck Berry plays once a month, a Harrah’s casino where I lost fifty bucks, an Italian restaurant with a $10 plate of risotto as good as I could eat in Venice, a massive park where, in the summer, they have Broadway shows at an outdoor theater.

St. Louis is hella fucking cool, and it doesn’t even know it. St. Louis could be a world class city. St. Louis has all this riverfront on the Mississippi that is not even developed. All around the downtown, is this crazy ghetto where there are all these killer houses in various states of fucked-upped-ness. It’s already a cool town – it could be a KILLER town. I’m not a developer or an opportunist, but man oh man, is this place awesome-waiting-to-happen.

Of course, I haven’t been here in the summer yet. The summer, that screams promise.

Driving up a two-lane highway into the hills, I had a hard time keeping my eyes on the road. I wanted to look at everything. Just off the road there isn’t much to see; a beat up shack in the woods, a closed-up-for-winter bait shop. But the sun was setting, hazy and orange, a yolk that broke and spilled down the side of a hill covered with barren brown trees. So far, I like winter in the hills of Missouri.

The two-lane road changed into four lanes and lead me to the resort I’ll be staying in for the next few days. The stark, sepia beauty of the lonely road up changed into a half-shut wasteland for the summer BBQ and JetSki crowd. The road must be insane in the summer, but now, in winter, I can drive less than the speed limit with no one riding my ass. I looked at everything. Conoco, gas $2.18 a gallon. Miniature Golf. Grog ‘n’ Grub, Steak ‘n’ Ale.

My first night here, I was sick. My energy is still pretty low and I fear I won’t ever have enough on this trip to walk around this resort, which is vast. I have visions of sweaty, hormone-fueled boys trying to get just-as-horny girls to go up into the woods with them. Parents shouldn’t be scared of myspace.com, they should be scared of those woods. Summer here must scream promise. I could come back here and write a twisted young adult novel. Maybe could get Oprah to hate me. Maybe not.

Yesterday, I drove into town with a mission. Ray had told me he heard a radio spot advertising marriage vow renewal at a Walmart drive-thru. The renew-ees will be presented with a rose and frame-able proof that, they did indeed get their vows renewed at Walmart. I had to go and see if this insanity was true.

I’ve only been to Walmart once, to buy a phone for my grandmother, and it was a small Walmart, no bigger than a Target or a K-Mart. The Osage Beach, Missouri Walmart, however, is like the mother of all Walmarts. Like a small city that threatened to swallow me whole. It reminded me of Auchan or Panorama in Italy. I love those places, because they sell a thousand different pastas and wine out of the barrel along with their Barbies and barbeques. I must admit, I was almost as fascinated by this uber-Walmart. For one thing, they sold mini-muffins. You’d think in Walmart, the muffins would be really big, right? No, straight from the bakery, a eight-piece pack of bite sized muffins. I looked for regular sized muffins, but all I could find were donuts. Maybe they were in between the bicycle tires and the laundry detergent. I got grapes and oranges and made my move.

My cashier looked exactly like what I thought a Walmart cashier in the Ozarks would look like. Scraggly hair, missing teeth, a large, protruding wart-like item on her chin. Maybe Walmart, as a concept, is bad for America, but they are definitely giving people jobs. “Ahem,” I said to the cashier. “Do you, uh, know anything about this thing on Valentine’s Day where you can get your marriage vows renewed?”

“I dunno anything about that,” she said. I told her about the radio spot. “Really?” she said. “WILMA! DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT GETTIN’ MARRIED HERE ON VALENTINE’S?” I felt my face go five shades of red. Wilma came over. “I dunno,” she said. “We did that last year though.” Then Wilma hollers “DEBBIE! ARE WE DOING THAT DRIVE THROUGH VOW RENEWAL TENT IN THE PARKING LOT AGAIN THIS YEAR?” The line is backing up as Debbie comes over. “Yep, we had to order extra roses for it,” she says and walks away. “Debbie is a manager,” Wilma says. “You can probably get more info over in customer service,” the cashier says.

Well now, after all that, I gotta. So I go to customer service, and ask the woman behind the counter if she knows anything. She doesn’t but calls over a guy who is either gay, or merely acts and looks gay. I’m not sure – a gay Walmart manager in the Ozarks? I feel like this guy is for sure going to know that I’m not married and that even if I was I would probably not be into renewing my vows in a Walmart parking lot. Sheepishly, I cover my left hand with my right as he tells me, yes, indeed: on Valentine’s Day, there will be a tent in the parking lot, and you and your other half can drive through and, without leaving the comfort of your car, renew your marriage vows, and get a certificate of renewal and a single red rose. I thanked him, stifling a “wow, that’s SO romantic,” and walked away, out of the Twilight Zone and into the winter dusk.

I think I need to have more dreams so I have something to write about. Working on the road? Boring beyond belief, especially in the winter. It’s too quiet up here in the middle of wine-country-nowhere. I’m getting so used to noise that I can’t sleep with silence. When it is silent, my ears ring. Is that normal? I almost wish I was sleeping to the sound of trucks downshifting on Interstate 5.

I am picking up my Britt portrait soon… maybe that will get the ball rolling. And I am choosing my prize soon. Someday, soon I will have something to write about. I’d write about my prize, but I don’t want to jinx it. Not yet.

Dublin Berkeley San Lorenzo Cupertino San Jose. The first person who can tell me why this list of cities, listed in this order, is part of Bay Area culture, will also get a prize. See how bored I am?

How do I explain this weekend? It was fun, also kind of insane. The slowtrav drawing was on Saturday, and I was blessed with a good pull. You can read the transcript of the craziness here. If you want to. I warn you, it is only for slowtrav freaks, or really bored people, or the people who were on there screaming.

The weekend was trippy in other ways. The ocean is going crazy, making an insane amount of noise. It’s like a wild animal on steroids, in heat. And I find myself smiling for no reason. I feel like something big is going to happen. And not just a villa in Tuscany or a free cell phone! Something bigger. I love when I feel this way – even if nothing comes of it, it propels me.

I’m heading north and following the ocean. Onward.

This is the good news. The fantastic looking man above is my six-week old nephew Ryan. He rocks!

I caught a little cold on Monday, otherwise I would have written about my New Year’s Day party sooner, and now it is kind of too late. Let’s just say it was really fun and towards the end there was KARAOKE here. I’m not sure if I should be proud or embarrassed, but it was really fun. I’ve got some pictures but my friends might hate me if I post them.

On another note, I am kind of bummed by something that happened today. My next door neighbor got evicted. People get evicted all the time, and sometimes they deserve it, but this guy has two children, twin girls that are about nine or so. They have lived there for a couple of years now and the guy was working before and everything was fine, but in the past few months he got laid off and started his own business. From what he tells me, he only owes the landlady $800. Whatever, I can understand someone wanting to get rid of a tenant who always pays late or short. What I can’t understand is coming around with the sheriff and locking a tenant and his two children out of their home. I actually watched (yes, they were very close, and I couldn’t look away) as the landlady told my neighbor and one of his girls they couldn’t go in, where all their stuff is, and shut the door and locked it.

I read somewhere recently that most people are only one paycheck away from homelessness. I don’t want those girls to be homeless. The apartments next door are so crappy that they are only one step away from homelessness, but at least there is a roof, a toilet, and a stove. It makes me really, really sad and I wish that landlady could have been a little more compassionate, maybe given him a bit more time to catch up on his rent. That guy is good to his kids, and they are really well behaved, nice children. They don’t deserve this. It sucks.

Well, here it is almost midnight on New Year’s Eve. I started out writing about my Top five records of the year, and the best shows of the year (it turned out to be eight because I couldn’t narrow it down to five) but then I figured that would be boring, to anyone but me. Plus I already wrote about all those shows and records. I’ve been at The Vine all evening, and it was fun. Hannah came with Baby Emma and it was all regulars at the bar. I had every intention of getting home really early, but of course that didn’t happen. It doesn’t really feel like New Year’s Eve, just like it didn’t feel like Christmas this year. Almost everyone I’ve talked to feels the same way.

I am sitting here listening to Wilco, their show at Madison Square Garden last New Years Eve. During this show, recorded exacly one year ago, I go from elated to blown away to fighting tears. And that, in a nutshell, has been 2005 for me.

I love listening to live recordings where you can hear an audience so full of pure joy. I think it would be impossible to listen to this crowd last New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden yelling and singing along and not be happy, yourself. That abandon is infectuous. I wish there was a way I could explain the gut of me. It all comes down to music, and how music affects my gut. I can’t explain! Elation. Comfort. Fuck me, I can’t explain it. I am happy, and crying at the same time.

This was such a crazy tripped out year. I lost one friend, Nancy, suddenly. But I have the memory of me and her watching the Golden Globes at the Santa Anita Inn after a day of betting on the ponies, last January. It seems a million years ago, but I can clearly taste that boxed Trebbiano. And I have the memory of her puttering around that giant, dusty villa in Taormina, and sitting across from me at lunch in Trastevere, in early Spring. Der Pabst e Morte! I kept saying, just to hear her laugh at my California accent speaking German and Italian in the same sentence. I miss her.

This was, in the long run, a year of music. Obsessions and concerts. A thousand two hour drives, a million Absolute Mandarin and Sodas. A gazillion smiles, a few tender heartbreaks. Well, yes, I am exaggerating.

I am happy tonight. I pray that the world is on an upswing. For one night, let’s all be optimists. The music is killing me, but at the same time it’s keeping me alive. I’m not going outside.

Major Strasser: What nationality are you?
Rick: I’m a drunkard.
Captain Renault: That makes him a citizen of the world.

From Casablanca

Ah, the holidays. They are so exhausting! I am worn to a nub. Sunday was pretty crazy, and yesterday I spent all day on the couch recovering. So that was my Christmas – partying, then recovering. Not so different than my day-to-day life, really, except for the pound of See’s candy I added to the mix.

I had Christmas dinner at Eric and Christine’s. Eric’s Ukrainian pastries were the inspiration for the name of my blog. So, of course, he sent me home with a big bag of Ukrainian Poptarts. It was an incredible meal and a fun afternoon, and the fun didn’t stop there. I went to an all-out Christmas party on Christmas night, a big annual thing thrown by bartendress extraordinaire Sooty. It was there that I noticed I was starting to, well, get kind of hammered. I guess waiting until 4:00 P.M. to eat wasn’t such a good idea, not when there was so much good wine being opened everywhere. At Sooty’s, I ran into this guy E.T., a local OB dude, in the kitchen. He told me he had a bunch of good wine in his car and he wanted me to try some. He told me I have a reputation in Ocean Beach – as a WINE AFICIONADO. People want to go out to their cars and get wine for me to try, even if I haven’t seen them in two years and even if I never even spoke to them about wine before, ever. Whoo hoo! A reputation that isn’t in the gray zone or colored black (or red) is fine by me. I am so happy I have this reputation.

Anyway it sort of got me into trouble in the end, as wine sometimes can. It wasn’t like I was hammered at the party, but I knew I was on my way. One nice thing that comes with age is the knowing that you are on your way to hammered, instead of just arriving at hammered. My brother was with me, and also Lil’ D. Eventually we took off and went to the Lamplighter bar but it was so insanely packed that we left right away. So we ended up back in OB, at Cheswick’s Bar because it was the only place open on Newport Street. I drank a vodka and soda and gave my brother a lecture on how the Beatles could be considered the first punk rock band, because what is punk rock, really? How can Blondie be considered punk rock, or the New York Dolls, but not the Beatles? In my state, my brain was rushing way too fast for me, but I had a rapt audience and it was fun in there. Nothing like a dive bar at midnight on Christmas, to get you into the holiday spirit. I am serious. It was hella fun. Plus having my brother there kept me from getting into any scrapes. He’s very effective at that. It’s almost like having a parent there or something.

But I paid for the excess of it all in a big way. Yesterday I laid on the couch and watched TV for twelve straight hours. After a bit of time (and some food, and more wine) I started to feel better, at any rate I could move my head around a little. It was a fine day for nothing but watching movies, and here is what I watched:

A Philadelphia Story. This is the BEST film to start with when nursing a hangover, because all they do in this movie is get drunk, wake up really hungover, and then start drinking again to cure the hangover.

It Happened One Night. This was the first time I have ever seen this film. Clark Gable is unbelievably young and hot in it. Claudette Colbert’s eyebrows are kind of freaky, but the film is a classic and towards the end I was sipping on a glass of Pinot Blanc, and this was a good sign.

Casablanca. I love this film. It’s one of those movies that you can watch over and over and you’ll always notice something different in it. And the script! I love Captain Renault… he’s so totally corrupt but so lovable at the same time. There are so many brilliant moments in this film – the singing “duel” in Rick’s bar between the German officers and everyone else; Ilsa’s face, shining with pride and love, when her husband leads the French side in this duel; Rick rigging the roulette table so the Bulgarian couple can go to America without the young wife having to sleep with Captain Renault in exchange for exit papers… the entire film is made up of stellar moments like these.

I caught the very end of Sign “O” the Times, the Prince concert film. Why hasn’t this been officially released on DVD yet? This is one of the best concert films ever made. It’s a strange film, very colorful, and with some trippy effects in it. And Prince is a genius. I need to break out that CD again.

Then… Chilly Scenes of Winter. I love the Ann Beattie novel this film is based on, though I don’t really know why I still have my original paperback when I’ve unloaded so many other books over the years. The film has a cult following, and it is a decent film with some real weirdness in it, like Gloria Graham as a crazy mother, and Mary Beth Hurt’s horrible permed hair. I mean, it is truly horrible, that hair. But it definitely brings one back to 1980 again. Also, I love Peter Riegert, especially when he was young. That guy was hot back in the day!

At this point, I started to watch The Country Girl with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, but Bing Crosby bugs. I can’t take that guy. So I switched over the The Group, based on that risque Mary McCarthy novel. I’ve seen pieces of this film over the years but have never watched it all the way through. Yesterday was no exception – I watched the last half or so. Then I watched the last part of High Society even though I hate that film. Bing Crosby. Yuck. Then I watched the last part of a really weird film about a woman who has an insane Ally Sheedy living in the apartment above her, playing her music really loud and screwing lots of guys. Ally Sheedy isn’t looking too chipper these days.

So, it was a long day, but I got some rest and today I went to the mall and spent it all. The rest, I mean. You can spend rest. So I have to save the rest of my rest this week, because Sunday is my annual New Year’s Day hangover relief party and I will need it then. So my exciting tales of adventure (yeah) are done, for a couple of days at least.

It was a hard day, but a fun night. I am lucky – magic, in the form of friends, and music, swirls around me, not only when I need it, but always. Not to be new age or anything, but that’s the way it is. I am so fucking lucky. I walked home through a thick mist, reveling in the heaviness of it. I may be a fuck up and a polemic, but I can still turn my palm to the heavens just to feel fog making a puddle in the bottom of it. As long as I can feel that, my life will be worth living. And if I thrust my palm in your face, screaming FEELTHIS, please don’t take it as an affront. If I splash the accumulated fog on your parched face, just know that I merely want you to understand that rushing undercurrent that flows just under my skin, and that I want to share it with you. I realize that feeling a fog puddle in one’s palm may not be the be all end all, but whatever. It works for me. No I am not talking about a dude here. It’s all just a generalization, really. Kind of. Also I am not talking TO a dude. Unless, maybe, the nerd/geek who has been flirting with me. Where is this going? I don’t know. And to all, A Good Night.