Archive for February, 2007
February 27, 2007
I’m a Neal Pollack fan. He recently wrote a book called Alternadad, a sort of memoir / rock n roll coming of age tale of a cool kid turned parent. The book discusses everything from early morning baby alarms to pot smoking parenting and just about everything in between. Neal is a former Austinite and is so cool, he found out about Rock N Romp and asked me if he could do a show with us. He’ll be reading and rocking out during SXSW at our party at the Mohawk on March 11. But to the point …
In no small way, books like this (and articles about hipster or Grup parenting) are relevant even to those who haven’t yet plunged into parenthood, since at some point they’ll either take it on or know someone who does, and these issues will start to arise. For the moderately cool, it seems as though being a part of a community (whether it be yoga class, craft mafias or music scenes) is extremely important. More than anything else, it seems as though the so-called “hipster” parents that Pollack touches on and others nod to just want to remain social beings, aware of culture’s trends and involved in things like their city and their … well … identity.
For most of us in this category, having kids didn’t mean we had to grow up and wear khakis, it meant that our priorities shifted and our sleep patterns changed, but it didn’t change who we were. To me, the hipster parenting trend is simply a sign that our baby booming parents raised individuals who are smart enough to have kids and still be who we are. There’s no extreme indie sub-culture that is recruiting new parents and making them wear iPods on the subway with their baby slings, and there’s no radical movement to breed counter-culture activists: we’re just living our lives with children. Why is that so shocking?
As Pollack points out in recent retort to a New York Times piece about hipster parenting: “We ‘hipster parents’ are middle class, and we want the same things that our middle-class parents had: A decent school for our kids, a decent house in a good neighborhood, and decent health care. The rest of it is just window dressing, though, admittedly, it’s fun window dressing.”
So don’t judge the book by the cover, see? Just because you see a tattooed parent with a faux-hawk sporting toddler doesn’t mean you’ve spotted an alien life form. That parent wants safe schools, health insurance, no cavities and reasonable bed times, too. They just look different than traditional (television) parents. On the one hand, the major media’s notice of cool parents is exciting, because it means there’s a large group of people raising kids that are bright, independent and devoted to their kids, not to the dissolution of themselves, but on the other hand, the attention they (well, we, as I was just interviewed by a local paper on the same subject) get based mostly on their appearance is disheartening: haven’t we grown up enough to know that making assumptions based on how people look and who they associate with isn’t always actually informative or fruitful? Is it really that shocking that I have a toddler in preschool who loves Thomas the Train and Charlie & Lola but on Wednesday night I’ll be watching Isis at Emo’s? Is it that outrageous that I’d rather my kid listen to Andrew Bird than Barney?
The article that Pollack responds to can be found here.
February 27, 2007
I recently re-did the layout here, and though I’d like to make a few more changes, this is basically what to expect. In this shift, I re-deployed the Del.icio.us links (scroll down, y’all) as “Asides”. I usually add my own commentary to the link or give you a taste of what it’s about, but yeah, it’s down there.
So I reformatted the feed for this site, so that when you subscribe, you get my main posts as well as a short summary of links at the end of the day. Pretty neat. Follow that link right there to subscribe, it will work in any feed reader.
That is all.
February 26, 2007
Graphic designer Nicholas Feltron created a 13 page graphic “report” on his life in 2006, and the results are stunning.
In a sort of designer joke on the corporate year-end report, the unbelievably slick and information-rich pages catalog such facts as “Beverages consumed by type” and “Beverages by Brand”, digital vs. analog photo ratio (37:1), and “Animals eaten, in the ‘legs’ subcategory”. Other areas of interest are “Best Meal”, air miles traveled and days on jury duty vs. criminals convicted.
The report is funny, brilliantly assembled and I just don’t get tired of looking at it.
February 26, 2007
DOWNLOAD: Make Me Love You (.rar)
It’s about time for a new mix, so I put some songs together over the weekend. The mix is mostly straight up rock n roll, with a few moments here and there of frilly pop goodness. It’s almost entirely full of songs released so far (or songs that will be released) this year, so sample an Andrew Bird, Feist or Thee More Shallows song and let me know what you think. As usual, this mix is best in iTunes, but it won’t explode if you use Winamp or something else.
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February 22, 2007
Last night, we launched our SXSW Interactive Guide over at the Austinist. This project has been a baby of Allen and I’s for weeks, after a really exciting conversation with the nice folks at Eventful got us motivated to try and tackle the problem of organization and planning during SXSW.
We thought that there needed to be a way to filter information easily instead of being forced to pour through list after list of crud. The amount of information and the sheer magnitude of things to do that week is brutal if you don’t have a meaningful way of organizing it, and we wanted to figure out a way to not only give people an easy way to find out what is happening when, but locate it and schedule it all in the same place.
Here’s what you can do so far:
* View what parties we’re excited about, arranged by day. Our database includes bands performing, times, whether the party is open to the public or requires an RSVP, and more.
* Quickly and easily see what parties are close to one another, and where everything will be in general. It’s important to know if a party or showcase is within stumbling distance of another, if you ask us.
* Get text reminders by adding an event to your Google Calendar. Simply click on the button, and the rest is taken care of! We strongly advise that you set up a Google Calendar if you haven’t already.
* Take a closer look at all of the nifty flyer artwork, by clicking on the button where available
* Catch up on recent and past coverage that Austinist has done on SXSW. We want it to be super easy for you to access our profiles and interviews with showcasing bands like Architecture in Helsinki, Sondre Lerche, YACHT and more.
In the next week or so, we’ll be adding these features and more:
* SXSW showcase information. Thanks to the lovely folks over at Eventful.com, we’ll be able to point out a dozen or two of the really good showcases going on each night that we think you oughta check out.
* Breakfast Taco and BBQ indicators, so you can quickly spot where to get your next brisket and/or eggs-and-chorizo fix.
I highly encourage you to take a look at it if you’re planning to be in town that week, and bookmark it, since we’ll be updating it regularly as more information becomes available.
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