infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

The FCC is holding a public hearing in Austin tomorrow night to gather public input about media ownership policy. The FCC is reviewing its limits on how many media outlets a given corporation can own in a particular market city. Both of my readers will remember that the 1996 Communications Act loosened radio ownership rules and allowed organizations like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS) to dominate the airwaves. Further relaxation has only accelerated the ability of major corporations to shift away from serving local interests toward homogenized national programming.

The commissioner attending the hearing, Jonathan Adelstein, is one of the more liberal commissioners in a body that often rubber-stamps the desires of the major telco and media players, so speakers concerned about localism and corporate control will have a sympathetic audience. I’m not sure I’ll make any comments in person, but I’ll certainly attend out of scholarly and personal interest. If you’re interested in testifying, there are tips here.

The hearing will take place in Jester Auditorium on the UT-Austin campus. (Jester is the big, honkin’ dorm at 21st and Speedway; just take the bus to 21st and Guadalupe, rather than worry about parking.) There will be an “educational” presentation at 5:30, followed by the hearing at 6:30. I imagine it will go on for hours.

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I often walk past the UT police station on my way to the gym and see the rows and rows of impounded bicycles. I find it a sad sight to see all of these bikes going unused; it seems like a project like Bikes Across Borders or Austin Yellow Bike could make use of these bicycles. Most of these bikes are abandoned, but UT requires cyclists to register their bikes and the UTPD will impound unregistered bikes on campus. I imagine cyclists with nicer bikes pick up their missing rides, while students with junkier bikes don’t want to pay the fines to get their bikes out of impound, leading to the hundreds of bikes chained up in front of the Benson library.

It looks like some of these bikes may find homes after all. UT’s department of Parking and Transportation is holding its Fall bicycle auction tomorrow night starting at 5pm with silent bidding starting at 5:30. As you might expect, most of the bikes up for sale are junky Wal-Mart style bikes, but there are few bikes that have potential. Judging from the way they were stored and the amount of rust I see on the chains and gears, I suspect it will take some work to get these bikes back into working order. There’s no indication of whether all the bikes sell out or what happens to unsold bikes. I do hope they go to the Yellow Bike Project.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive used bike, but lack the skills or inclination to fix up a bike, Austin Yellow Bike may be a useful resource for you. Although they’re best known for the yellow community bikes which are supposed to be left around town unlocked, ony the junkiest bikes are turned into Yellow Bikes. The organization fixes up the nicer bikes and sells them at a low cost. You can also volunteer your time and build a bike from one of the available rides. Finally, Yellow Bike offers their tool library: if you need to overhaul your bottom bracket and don’t want to shell out for a bottom bracket tool, you can do it in their open shops.

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Last night’s free RJD2 show at Waterloo park was great. RJD2 is quite a talented DJ and sample artist, and it was fun to experience his music with an enthusiastic crowd. He said that the show was the biggest show he had ever played and expressed his appreciation for the Austin audience, which only elevated the mood.

What spoiled the mood however, was the fact that the entire perimeter of the public park was fenced in. I – and nearly everyone else – wandered around the city block looking for a way into the show. When I found the single entrance at 14th and Trinity, I called all of the people I was meeting because I was sure they would try to enter at Red River. The organizers really should have posted a few signs pointing to the entrance.

I can’t understand why a free show at a public park would be fenced in so completely. It couldn’t be to keep out drugs since the cops and bouncers did little more than check IDs and clouds of pot smoke wafted in and out all night long. The only reason I can see for the fence is to encourage concert-goers to buy four-dollar tallboys of Lone Star at the concession. (I’ve been to plenty of public events where alcohol was served that were not fenced in, so I’m not going to buy the underage drinking excuse.) The fence seem like an excessive measure for a little profit and destroyed whatever goodwill I might have felt toward AT&T and The Alamo Drafthouse for putting on a free show.

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The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) is conducting a survey online to gauge the sentiments of Austin area residents about future growth and transportation planning. After reading Mike Dahmus’s post on consensus and data collection, I don’t know how CAMPO uses this data, but I’d encourage Austin readers to fill out the survey. (Unless, of course, you’re in favor of more sprawl and banning bikes from the streets.) The survey has only eight questions, so it shouldn’t take up too much of your time.

Much of the survey asks about “mixed-use activity centers” or hot zones around the region where mixed development is taking place. While I support the idea in theory, the existing locations they cite are hardly green. In the comments, I wrote, “Many of these activity centers such as Tech Ridge and Round Rock are not bike- or bus-friendly. Although they centralize development, activity centers should emphasize non-automobile traffic and promote transportation via bicycle and bus.” As Nigel points out, the “post-Ballardian nightmare” Tech Ridge requires “a Tahoe to get from one end of the SuperTarget to the other.” It’s difficult to park at one store in that “mixed-use activity center” and walk to another, not only because of the scale of the store, but because of the reckless drivers in the parking lot and the architecture of the parking lot itself. It hardly seems like a “mixed-used” development if you need a car to go from one store to the next in the same shopping center. I certainly hope that Tech Ridge is not a model for future Austin development.

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Driving around Wednesday afternoon, I noticed a substantial uptick in auto and pedestrian traffic around the UT campus. I felt a sudden pang of anxiety – did I have the first day of class wrong? I teach on the first day of class this semester – I know students are automatically dropped if they don’t attend the first class meeting, but what happens if the instructor doesn’t show up? I assured myself that the first day of class is indeed this Wednesday, August 30th.

This semester my friend Olivier is teaching what could only be an awesome class, RTF 370 “The Cinemas of Sub-Saharan Africa.” It was added late, and Olivier is worried that not enough students will enroll for the class to make. It’s not often that the RTF department offers classes that address film from the Global South, so this may be your only chance to take a class dealing with movies from the developing world. If you’re a UT student have any interest in African cinema, post-colonial cinema, or critical race theory, I strongly encourage you to enroll.

In other College of Communication news, The Daily Texan has a story on the closure of the CoC’s home across the street from home. According to the story, the space now occupied by Little City will become a “Chinese food cafe” and serve coffee roasted by Little City. There was no word on where they plan to locate the roaster. Hopefully the new restaurant will be cheap and casual enough for communication students to colonize.

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My local food co-operative Wheatsville has a “Salsa of the Month.” As the name might suggest, it’s a home-made salsa they offer for a month before moving on to a different recipe. This month’s salsa is cucumber-lime, and it is, to quote “Lazy Sunday,” crazy delicious. Well, except that I like my salsa quite a bit spicier, so I’d swap out the poblano peppers for serrano peppers and add a little more cilantro.

Last summer, Wheatsville had a great ancho pepper salsa with roasted red (bell) peppers. I’d hoped they would release the recipe when the month ended, but my hopes were dashed when July rolled around. I assumed that they kept the recipe secret because they’d offer the ancho salsa again this summer, but again my hopes were dashed.

I’m pretty confident I could bust out the blender and develop my own cucumber-lime salsa, but I’m pretty clueless about the ancho salsa. So I’m proposing Wheatsville “open source” their salsa-of-the-month recipes so stakeholders can recreate their salsas at home or offer their own modifications and bug-fixes. This seems like it would be in the spirit of community good that Wheatsville espouses and could create superior, enterprise-grade salsas. Moreover, the copyright status of recipes is dubious at best. The Copyright Office says that lists of ingredients and proportions are not copyrightable. I don’t think this would threaten Wheatsville’s business: making salsa is kind of a hassle, so plenty of members would continue to buy salsa instead of spending the time to make their own.

If you look at Wheatsville’s web site, you’ll see they’re still catching up with Web 1.0, but a Wheatsville wiki could be a potentially fruitful project. In addition to sharing salsa-of-the-month recipes, members could use the wiki for sharing information on how to use products like quinoa whose application is not emminently obvious to newbies, the benefits of that yummy (trust me on this one) nutritional yeast, or the never-ending paper-vs-plastic debate.

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Since the Austin coffeeshop beat seems to pull in the most readers, I’ll break the news that Little City’s location on the Drag is closing in two weeks, according to the barista. Another tenant is taking over the space in September and plans to operate a counter-service restaurant. The Congress Ave. store will be staying open and the owners plan to keep roasting their own coffee. The roasting operation is currently located at the Guadalupe store (across from the mens room!) and will also be moving to an as-yet undetermined location. After scouting sites on Austin’s east side, the owners are looking north for a roast roost.

While this isn’t as disappointing as the closure of Mojo’s, Little City certainly played an important role in my life. Its location near UT’s College of Communications made it an unofficial office for much of the RTF department. Shoot, I held my official office hours at Little City all last semester. The loss of Little City means there’s only one locally-owned coffeeshop on the Drag, Metro, which leaves me cold. The inimitably funky Spiderhouse is also a short walk from the Communications complex, but in the past year it has made changes like adding a full bar and table service that make it a less than ideal place for working or taking a quick break between classes. Hopefully, the new business will accomodate a similar clientele.

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Epoch, a new coffeeshop owned by former Mojo’s employees, opened Saturday. Unlike Mojo’s, which occupied a grungy house near campus, Epoch is in a shopping center near the “hipster stripmall” on North Loop. It’s vibe is still funky, but more classy, decorated with darkly stained wood pieced into interesting shapes. Decorative elements from Mojo’s have found its way into Epoch. A detourned Starbucks banner hangs in the kitchen, and a metal relief of a coffee cup hangs near the register. The kitchen is pretty big for a coffeeshop; they were serving catered sandwiches, but it looks like they have the capacity for a broad menu.

I visited Epoch on Saturday and today, and the owners seem to be getting the store off the ground. The space has a shortage of tables – they’re waiting for the indoor tables to arrive – and I had difficulty connecting to the WiFi connection. Despite these hiccups early on, I’m happy to see Epoch carry on the spirit that made Mojo’s so great.

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Today on the bus, a middle-aged man got on at the St. David’s Hospital stop. He was carrying a blue pamphlet. I’m always curious about what people are reading, so I glanced at the cover. It read “Schizophrenics Anonymous.” Schizophrenia is a terrifying disease, and I hardly want make light of the suffering of others, but it gave me a little chuckle. If I could read the title from across the bus, the organizers of the support group are hardly doing a good job of maintaining anonymity. He was wearing work boots and work clothes, so I’m pretty sure he was a patient and not a social worker or therapist. I hope things work out for him.

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Living in the capital of Texas, I’m often annoyed by the misuse of the word “capitol.” Were the folks at Capitol Chevrolet absent that day in third grade when the teacher informed them that “capitol” refers to buildings while “capital” refers to cities and money? I’m not in the market to buy a car, but their poor word choice hardly makes me want to shop with them.

I guess this mistake is easy to make. A group of five designers honored this year in the National Design Awards declined an invitation to a White House breakfast in their honor. They cited the Bush adminstration’s use of design and language to distort facts as a reason to skip the event. They asked fellow designer Chip Kidd to join them in their protest, who refused. Although he shared the opinions of the designers, he said that the event was about design, not politics, adding “We were invited to recognize the National Design Awards, in our nation’s capitol, in an extraordinary building that is a cornerstone of our history.” After reading this, I tried to imagine the White House stuffed inside our nation’s capitol, but it’s clear that Kidd — whom I respect and admire — really meant “capital.”

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