Twangtown
[Field Notes, 2005, exact date unknown]
The absolute most godawful thing happened when I moved to Twangtown, Tejas. All, or at least some, of the fevered Brisket dreams - brought on by almost a full year of drop-ins and expensive recon forays into the sweaty, river bent burg in the cleavage of the continental divide between North & South Americas - dissolved into a foot-weary, bug-bit near fatal personal cataclysm that revealed the ugly underbelly of the Republic of T’s vaunted big-tooth/hair blonde Bethann and big bicep/10 gallon Bobby Ray hey’yall friendliness. No Yeehah welcomes for this Road dusty traveler. Just artsy bluster and nobody-bigwigs pretending there’s an art market here, a cultural haven, a reason other than window-dressing that even one decent gallery exists here (showing – what else – cowboy art).
It’s a bizarre thing to scope the 2004 Presidential Campaigns through a Twangtown lens, embedded in Halliburton Holler. We all can agree that our Prez Bush, Elf 2, is the Golden Boy product of a few generations of selective breeding. His handlers and he were formulated from Yankee DNA in vats of crude ole, grabbed at taxpayer-hired gunpoint 70-80 years ago. Like some ice-crazed orphan of a mad whitecoat experiment gone awry, our all-American, misunderestimated hero has stumbled into the role of point-man for the greediest, least scrupled band of shadow robber barons this country has seen since the War Between the States spawned the first generation of genocidal megalomaniacs, those Fausts whose gore spattered names adorn University t-shirts stretched taut over the nubile teenage breasts of our best and brightest Girls Gone Wild on Springbreak 05. Speaking of wilding, Twangtown’s where the new Robber Barons bring their oil-royalty partners from the sandy kingdoms across the great pond to whore and get fucked up & get a taste of world class nobody-or-somebody-who-gives-a-shit bleary, authentic alt.country. Anyhoo. The Roves and Swift Boat Vets for Sale and the Bakers and the DeLays, all the horned and hoof-footed players in 04 PC cycle through Twangtown on their way to Houston, Dallas-FW, San Antonio, Indonesia, Kuwait, China, Columbia, Russia, London, etc. This is where the first palms get greased. It’s a deal-maker’s town, a country club town, a town of who you know and what you got. No bones about it. It’s a cultural thing here to define the boundary of your pack’s territory by skinning a patsy, as publicly as possible. The definitive moment, the signifier for the bully-king meanness, a signifier for the local proclivity for lynching, you may recall, branded Dallas, the year before I was born. That’s the steak side of town and the taco side of town, both. I’ll get to UT, and its tight-lipped “academic” stench-of-beer stranglehold on Twangtown, later, balanced by an ode to the finest Brisket God ever made. First, an aside. In and around Twangtown, people drive trucks up your ass so hard, you think you’re eating your mattress in one of the State’s privatized hellhole Pens, where they fry or dose to death black, brown and white murderous bastards daily. It’s only when you’ve had this happen 40 or 50 times (the tailgate horror, I mean) that you begin to notice a pattern. The fierce road warrior you thought was reaming you is a scrawny or blob-bellied yuppy pussy or a bob-haired fish-on-the SUV’s backdoor skeleton-faced soccer mom, most of the time. The other times it’s a heat-hardened and sun-blasted middle-class contractor on his way to his night job, cursing the Ken Lays and praying for his three kids’ college education. On the other side of the tracks, or MOPAC, it’s a steak and taco town, decorated with the dreams of nice dreamers and lovers, who cover, cower, entertain, satisfy, suffer and service the Reapers of the Republic. It’s a flea-centipede-spider-tick-scorpion-fly-mosquito-cockroach-wasp-infested sticker bush of a place, with more gorgeous girls per capita than anyplace I’ve seen outside of Manhattan or Israel. Then again, I haven’t been to Paris or Scandinavia, so what the fuck do I know. Never enough, I suppose. One thing I do know. I’m a Texan, now. & Texas, aside from being the proudest, most powerful Republic on Earth, is the best, most juicy place an artist could hope to find himself in, on the spinning orb today. For the next five years at least, she’s going to be the home of Art for Humans, The Journeyman Project, The 4D Media Program, 01, and DDDD, and yours truly. Sorry, Big Apple. No matter how much I love you (and you know I do), if you can’t make it in Twangtown, you can’t make it anywhere.
