Anyhow, it seems to me that Europe is generally more interested in feeling futuristic. Being much older, it dialogs with its past but in a much different way than we do. Everything screams about the future.

Take music, for instance. Rock and roll is here to stay in America but Europe is saturated with electronic music. Walk into any high street store and you are bound to hear the airwaves pumping techno or house, hip-hop and often some more adventurous electronic stuff. Of course clubbing is everywhere, but the music in the air is full of knobs, tweaks, computers, and digital imagery. Graphic design follows--pushing boundaries and asking future questions through technology and design.

Every November, there is a festival in Brussels called Cimatics AV, an unusual combination of VJing, electronic performance, designers, musicians--generally avant-garde stuff--but trying to create this dialog in the electronic realm about design. It's asking those questions about the future.

Seems as if between copyright laws, record label foldings and other general music industry red tape, these albums were totally impossible to find for a decade. And today, while searching on iTunes for something, I was shocked to come across this long-awaited release of a Traveling Wilbury's compilation. I didn't hesitate to download the whole $20 extravaganza of video and song.

This was a real supergroup. They just don't make 'em like they used to--this is for all the road lovers out there, the circus people, the dreamers... we'll see each other... maybe down the road a ways, at the end of the line.

Once: a great film, and not great in a macroscopic acting or cinema variety but in the way that film helps you to enter the real lives of people. We saw it a month before the Oscars, having never really heard of it before, and Derek wrote a long poem and song afterward. Having lived with Czechs, and also identifying strongly with the Irish way of lament and laughter all rolled up into one song, we just got it. It's not about music, the way of music IS the content. And people want to see something real now--authentic, emotionally real, tender, hopeful. Authenticity still speaks volumes.

We've been in this habit lately of renting a bunch of films by the same director, just to get a view of the whole of their work/subjects/style.

The Coen Brothers: We started with the Coens--we got as far as O Brother, Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski, and I'm about to rent The Hudsucker Proxy. I've seen all these before, along with Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, The Ladykillers, Fargo and Intolerable Cruelty when they all came out. I'll save a whole essay for them, but I have to say, I still think that O Brother, Where Art Thou is their best (and I'll say why later). My history with their films is that I either walk out or stop the film near the end. It seems like there is always a turning point where the films lose their soul or focus.

Wes Anderson: In one week we watched Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Team Zissou, and Darjeeling Limited (just as it came out). I've seen The Royal Tennenbaums and Bottle Rocket before. I'm still loving The Darjeeling Limited.

Fellini: We started one film, the famous one. I didn't like the way he viewed women.

Wim Wenders: I really love his films and his way of looking at the world. Most recent one we saw was a documentary, Notes on Cities and Fashion, which is specifically about Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, but generally about the way film and fashion dance with each other. Also watched Paris, Texas and Don't Come Knocking. There are so many more, I'm not sure where to start.

Latest attempt at a new movie:
Dan in Real Life: cute film but seriously missing character development. Felt like it came out of New England therapy culture. I hoped it would be more than it was, since I love Juliet Binoche.

Every year thousands of kids and families and every kind of Austinite and ethnicity--suburbanites, urbanites, old young, college students, grandmothers--come down our street in droves walking and dragging in their cars to balk at about 15 houses which turn their yards and just about every visible surface into a virtual gallery of light. It's become more than than just Christmas lights, but an expression of life that's authentic and imaginative, which Austin loves.

A manger display nestled into the insides of an abanded 50s kitchen stove was displayed on the front lawn of one house, and I listened to two grandmothers say, "What's that about'?" "Well, it's about whatever your imagination can come up with."

I love this about Austin, this assumption that not you have to imagine your own Christmas, but share it with others and make a community performance out of it. I live in Austin because I love her imagination but I also see this city as a classic artist personality, an artist who'll keep singing her song but also who at times is afraid of being used for her imagination. As I hinted, Austin's creative population is very much afraid of being commercialized. Hence the monopoly board that decked the front sidewalk of one house:

(Tarrytown is a gentrifying urban neighborhood, The Domain is a Dallas-like glittering complex of luxury stores and condos that feels terrifyingly like the world of Edward Scissorhands, and The Drag is the once-local-business street of cool stores and coffeeshops around the university but was completely overturned in the last two years by doubling rents.)

The reason why the light thing "took" is I think people want something authentic to be a part of... not just a city or business-sponsored Christmas tradition but one that artists imagine, pay for, and do on their own. Here's to Austin, keepin' it real, and to my neighborhood, who in spite of an ever growing and transient student population is still remembering the joy of who it once was and will be... a community of imaginers!

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hannukah!

Case in point, here is the lengthy answer:

I have about 4 different websites for different things, and have been writing a web journal since 1998, before the days of blog software. There was never an option for comments in those days. (Blogger didn't offer them till a couple years ago.) And when they were an option, I never added them partly out of habit but mostly because I didn't like having a public dialog on my website, which was really all about my writing. Despite the fact that you can now comment on every major newspaper article, blog, picture, video and the internet is now built on this ability to have public discourse, I still like the idea that one can read some kind of writing without having to encounter a community's commentary about the writing. I think it would be weird if a novel had a page for comments that everyone instantly read as soon as they were written.

Reason #1. The conventions of blog-dom are becoming too rigid.
Yes, comments and blogs build community. But before blog was Blogging, a thing with its own conventions and expectations, it was actually a creatively free space where a person or group of people made a website or a web-journal out of a labor of love (and it was labor, hand-coding every single page, as I remember all too well!) There were no "templates" back then. You had to make it up yourself.

As an artist, I like to play with forms. Like any other form, the form of "blog" is not a static thing to me. Most people seem to accept its conventions; you set up a blog, you have a number of entries on the first page, with dates, and titles and comments and a sidebar for all the other blogs you like. This is now a well-recognized form that was started by Blogger and Movable Type. But as any artistic-minded person likes to ask, what else can you do with it? What if you had no front page? What if there was no sidebar? How can you deconstruct it, change it, play with it? No form is so static, especially virtual forms, that they it can't be completely and creatively changed.

You can do whatever you want with a canvas. It's not math. Poets are still playing with the sonnet form after 500 years and doing new things with it. The blog is a much more fluid form on an already fluid media, the internet, so why are its conventions so entrenched after such a short decade-and-a-half of the internet's life? (Blogging software, however, is only about 8 years old.) So, my reason #1 for no comments is, "Why not? Just because that's what you do with blogs?" I have no interest in being a part of the "blogosphere". I am interested in being an artist and using virtual media, challenging it, creating with it, playing with it, rather than follow the same form that is now getting kind of rigid.

Another convention of blogdom, aside from its form, is the kind of fractured identities it presents. There are "celebrity baby bloggers", cooking bloggers, gardening bloggers. There are hundreds of blogs now just about shoes. You get the point. Blogs seem to have this tribal affiliation; you find your niche and blog away. While the internet has allowed us to connect, it's vast option anxiety has kind of forced people into these little cosy corners of personal authority. There are blogs about everything in particulars but not particular blogs that are about everything. I want to write about shoes, but can I do that on a blog that is about gardening? Not to mention that these specific-subject blogs have unleashed a fury of advertising-driven blogs about those particular arenas of commerce, but I'll get to that later in "Reason #3".

For the most part, the internet is still full of "representation" of art, rather than original art. Blogs have become about 'representing' your life. Personal websites are about 'representing' your ministry, art, business, whatever. Very little of it is actually generating its own art and becoming a space that is a part of you, rather than something that merely represents what you "do".

There are exceptions to this phenomena, of course. My friend Andrew Jones has one example of a blog that is not representational. His blog is highly driven by comments and daily blog entries, but his blog is actually a part of him. He thinks in this media; it is the ideal "form" for him. In actual conversation, Andrew is a fast thinker. (He's also the fastest walker on the planet--no one can keep up with him!) He synthesizes ideas very quickly and is able to funnel them down and connect them in dynamic ways. He doesn't think in long essays. Many of his friends, me included, have been trying to get him to write a book, because he is such a good, funny, smart and succinct writer. But I still wonder what his writing would look like on static pages in a book; his brain works like a blog. It is almost as if this media, this form of blog, was made for him. It scrolls off the screen quickly and dynamically converses with multiple things at once. It archives for future reference and connects quickly to its own archives. It is truly an authentic form for him and he uses it to its fullest potential.

(Andrew, I hope you don't mind me using you as an example!)

(And see, dear readers, there is an example of the meta-conversation that happens in blogs. This may be read within hours, commented on, and cross-referenced by someone else's blog about Andrew Jones. It becomes a part of the entire conversation. It is a very public and puzzle-piece medium. Someone may read this to find out information about Andrew rather than read this writing because it is a piece Amy wrote. Thankfully, "trackbacks" (the ability to publish what other blogs are saying about your blog instantaneously) are becoming a thing of the past, since spamming curtailed them.)

In my case, I am a much slower, more languorous thinker. Because I have writing on the internet that is not published in print, my blogs do not "represent" the writer, Amy. They are, I hope, extensions of my writing. But like I said, the conventions of a blog and the form as it is often used are not really ideal to the kind of writer that I am. I don't like thoughts quickly scrolling off the page. I ramble endlessly and I like each piece to be separate and not always connected to 5 other pieces on the page. Sometimes, I don't write for a few months on my blog, which is really a 'no-no' in the blog world. That's ok with me, because I am using it for different reasons and I don't like to publish things until I feel like they are "done". I have classic writers' perfectionism, and I also don't write every day.

And this brings me to reason #2, which I hinted at above. I don't blog to create a public discourse.
Of course many writers find this instantaneous community discourse fascinating and truly postmodern: meaning is truly interactive, it is not so much defined by an author as much as it is defined by the community (and in the case of advertising blogs, by the commercial possibilities). And artistically, the comments become a part of the whole piece. I'm still not so sure about this for myself. I'm hopelessly stuck somewhere in an age before the modernists or postmodernists came along, where the artist's vision was singular and offered to the public with his own personal meaning intact. Where his or her writing wasn't a "thing" that needed instant modification, commentary and (as if often the case with contemporary literary criticism) made to fit the theory of the reader.

I have a philosophical problem with comments, unless I created a site that was specifically about community discourse and sharing things with friends. I want people to consider what I have written, just as I have considered while writing it; I don't like instant reactions. The internet as a whole is still such a youthful medium, it is a world full of instant opinions, and instant reactions. People's reputations are built and destroyed in a day by the internet media. There is just no room for consideration in this fast-moving, instant opinion-ating addiction we have to information.

Reason #3 digs into a deeper concern I have with the fact the form of blog has largely been reduced by the mainstream and very commercial internet to a prostitutional "it" that can cheaply and easily be referenced and marketed.
In most of the internet, blog is now synonymous with promotionalism, product placement, and, even worse, "content-buying". That is how businesses talk about the information that is in blogs: it is "content". People now buy blogs and websites, and "content" is seen as a marketable, saleable thing that can drive your business or be used to sell other things.

Take the purchase of gardenguides.com, for example. Two years ago, this site was a space where I could purchase seeds and read articles by different gardeners. It was authentic. I could tell it came from a place, like a magazine, and there were real people who sold the seeds and who loved gardening. The difference between sites like this and ehow, ivillage or experts.com was that the site was driven by the people who loved gardening, and the writers were not just anyone who could provide knowledgable content but gardeners who were in some kind of relationship with the site.

All that changed, however, when a company bought gardenguides--one of those media companies which "buys content" and then uses the content as advertisement. You notice this now in all sorts of websites, where double-underlined words in articles randomly pop up as javascript advertising windows. (These are called "context links"; and they fill a page with advertising links to random websites that have sometimes nothing to do with the linked words themselves. In fact, people can now buy words that give them license over who gets to link those words!) It's all so random and unfortunate. Ultimately, this stole the authenticity from the web site, and it now looks like an advertising site and the information in it is full of abstract sources culled from previously published books or information which you can buy elsewhere if you want to read more about it, of course. And, sadly, they no longer sell seeds, but send you to advertisers where you can buy seeds.

To say the least, I am very opposed to this trend of "buying content", as I feel it views art, writing, image and anything remotely human as a mere vehicle for commercial purposes. The ultimate goal of "buying content" is not to financially support the communities or the authentic spaces of information, but to make a storefront out of information. "Information" becomes vacuous, saleable "content". Stuff. As an artist, I notice that this puts the form in front of the content, and it reduces content to a mere thing to fill space. A real newspaper doesn't just fill its pages with "content"; it is filled with writing and photography, which have meaning. (Read about a famous newspaper controversy with "context links" here: Forbes.com Removes Paid Links From News Stories.)

But don't get me going on the god of commerce. Those who created the blog as a medium are now completely focused on its commercial uses, and it is up to the artists to take it back for its creative potential, if it has any left. I started using Movable Type in 2000. At the time it was free blogging software and completely used, supportive of and offered to personal bloggers (mostly thinkers, writers, artists and techy people.) Slowly, MT kept changing its language until now it is offered strictly to the business community, as business software and content management. I still like MT more than all the other blog systems, but it now alienates (seemingly on purpose) any personal users by setting itself up for corporate users only. (For awhile, MT's personal users were told that Typepad was better for their purposes. Now Typepad is "the premier blogging service for professionals, hosting many of the world’s most popular blogs and small business websites". Users are now directed toward another product they've created for personal websites, as if personal bloggers want to just press a button and get hooked in without any control over their medium.)

What does this have to do with comments on blogs? A lot, to me. By neglecting the conventions of blog commenting I'm leaving out one possibility that could turn my thoughts into hype or a "thing" that can be owned by anyone other than myself. I am not content. I am an original thought. I am not writing personal thoughts in order to sell or represent some ephemeral idea of who I am, what I do. So, I feel that to be the most authentic to my own writing, I need to have a blog that is 1. advertisement-free and 2. free of public discourse. My writing is not interactive nor is it a product, and what others have to say about my writing or opinions are great but they are also a separate piece of art.

In conclusion, I want to challenge us to keep stewarding how the internet is used. It is not in charge of us, but we are in charge of it.
We have the freedom to recreate and use it or not as we wish. I want to add graciously that many of my friends use blogs primarily to communicate with friends, and I am glad they do. The internet is, after all, one big metaphor for communication. There has never been a technology that has so symbolized our need to communicate and feel connected the way the internet has.

But it is not communication itself. It facilitates it, yes, but it can even get in the way of communicating because it is just a system with no human being behind the wires. Who actually owns the internet? If we could answer this question, we could surely hold someone accountable for all the rampant child pornography, terrorist networks and other vast evil communications that go on every day on the internet. You can search Google for these things, too, and find them, but Google of course would not take responsibility because it is merely serving the abstract system of connectedness and not actually sorting through it. (And I do think that people are going to have to take some responsibility at some point, although many will cry censorship, but too many companies driving internet communications just believe they have no responsibility to facilitate, only facilitate the discovery.)

WE created the internet and we have to learn how to steward it; it cannot hold itself responsible. Man created the idea of oven, an amazing idea, but Hitler used it to bake people. The internet can be used for such evil ends, and so it is not capable of being good and wise in and of itself. (If you want to explore this idea, I highly recommend reading Martin Luther King's autobiography, who searched and searched for the best "method" in which to fight for the ideas of civil equality, and who ultimately said that even just systems can be used for evil ends. He hinted that it was possible that nonviolence and the "civil rights movement" would be capable of wrongdoing if in the hands of injust men. We cannot leave it up to systems to do what is our important and very human work of stewarding systems and even changing them radically, if need be, to closer represent the truth.)

I digress. My point is, we are connected with or without the internet, and the internet is still merely an incarnational symbol of how deeply connected things really are. It will not tell us "how" to communicate, or "how" things are actually connected. That is up to us. Just because I can communicate doesn't mean I should. Where once you might have written letters a few times a month, or made phone calls to distant friends once a week, we now make it our daily obligation to respond to all incoming communications.

I think we are all amazed how much this has helped us to communicate but when I sit down and think about it, with the help of the internet, I communicate with others about 10 times more than I used to even 5 years ago. When I sit down and do the math, I no longer feel guilty for not writing personal blogs or responding back to the 50 emails I got this week.

We are at times overcommunicated.

So, there is my lengthy and hopefully not too verbose reason why I don't use comments. (I like emails from friends about my blogs, however.) I perfectly understand why others like them, and am all for it if that is authentic to them. Don't let my thoughts take away from your comments. But just keep thinking, what else can I do with this? There is more to be done and played with... keep challenging the internet. It changes faster than any other medium so we should play with it!

For the record, I drew her. (Only colored it in later in the computer.) I took a line-drawing class a year and a half ago, in which we spent a lot of time doing blind contour drawings. This is not gesture drawing, although it is similar in that one learns how to look and see quickly the thing they are drawing. Blind contour is all about lines. For months I saw the entire world in lines, thanks to this class. I kept noticing the outlines of people's noses, the outlines of my dog's paws. Not the shapes, but the lines.

But in the middle of this class, one of the nudes we drew was a woman whose sense of self and freedom were so fun to capture. The outlines of her body were not like all the other skinny models. It was fun to capture her. So she became my favorite. My green girl.

http://www.saltpublishing.com/info/submissions.htm

Chris Emery is editor of a progressive independent publisher in the UK. They have published some of the most respected 'new frontier' (as I call it) poetry. So I am thankful that someone who has seen it all has taken the time to write such a kindly, thought-out and frank article on what it takes to get past the rejection and take yourself seriously as a writer.

In every season, it's something new. These days I try to be inspired by anything other than writing about writing. I'll even read art criticism over literary criticism. The languages of each world are so interior and self-referential that sometimes they need to hear each other out. In particular, I like to read the Bible a lot. Both for its spiritual and creative life. Since I'm a Christian, everything I write or think about writing is affected by the Bible.

Some writers are inspired by other writing. The discourse of poems with poems.

But, and exactly because they know so much about poetry, the critical culture is rarely surprised. And there is something nice about being surprised, about coming to something with the feeling that you have discovered it outside of anyone telling you it has been discovered. This is why I worried about going to grad school to study writing. I don't regret it for a minute, and loved having for the first time a real community of writers who argued about poems as if the end of the world depended on their opinion.

I have gone now five years without a single poet friend, not a person to read poems with, share poems with, except my husband (who knows when I'm cheating or not being myself). I have not been writing poetry very much, nor have I been reading and writing a lot of creative literature. It has been a season of different things. So here are some of the things I've been thinking about... or doing, which will probably find their way into poems:

1. Fathers. I had a dream with my father last night. I laid my head on his chest and told him how much I loved him. I felt like a little girl. Like many women of my generation I grew up with an absent father, and then struggled through many hurtful relationships to find my place as a woman. I never knew the meaning of trust. I have been thinking a lot for these four years about how fathers figure so indifferently in art. And how much we live without this big strong chest of love and acceptance. And artists, especially of my generation, reflect this: we throw words and images out into the world like little children, groping to find their boundaries, lacking trust, meaning, order, safety.

2. The emotional language of art. My husband, an art therapist and dancer, brought to me this whole world of thinking about art physically and spiritually. He can approach something physically and know if its boundaries have been violated, if the person who made art is angry or sad. And so I started to look at things with feeling, and judge it based on motivation. It is a very tangled thing to look at art and judge it on its interior motivations--it may be good on the outside but irresponsible on the inside. This is how, for example, I understand Quentin Tarantino films--slick and clever on the outside, but superficial on the inside.

3. Gardening. For the past year, it was not writing or exercising that got me up in the morning, it was my garden. A year ago, I had no idea how to plant anything, I'd never even owned house plants. But nearly every day for a year, I've obsessively labored in my garden, planting, digging, tearing up everything from grass seed, to trees, bushes, wildflowers, bulbs. A year ago i couldn't tell you what lavender looked like. Now I've watched the coming and going of 3 different types of rose bushes and know the success rate of bluebonnets. There are strange spiritual joys in chopping something down only to watch it spread itself further in a few months.

4. Travel. Since I left Cincinnati 5 years ago, I have visited almost every nation in Europe, and travelled back and forth on the American continent several times. I lived in Prague, and Antwerp. I've struggled to communicate, not just in language but in cultural differences. I arrived in Europe just weeks after 9/11, and watched the slow change of war and world opinion shift in Europe. I felt the sting of being American and then suddenly had this insatiable love for America. I used to hate patriots, but then suddenly I saw personalities in these places we call nations--they're like people, they have their good days and bad days. They don't always know how to talk to each other. But there is a great joy in seeing something being proud to be "Polish" or "German" or "English". I literally cried when I saw Germans waving their flags on the final day of the World Cup (I was in Berlin during the WC). They have been scared to do so since you-know-who. I am happy that they are happy to be German. I am happy to be American. The world is not borderless, no matter what they tell you. There are borders between you and me, and they are good. We are not all one blob, and that is the foundation of my theology.

5. I can tell you more about Alexander McQueen's Fall 2005 runway show than I can about the latest Pulitzer Prize. I bought my first designer dress two years ago (no, I won't tell you how much I paid for it!). I love the language of fashion. Shape, color, texture, expression, proportion--fashion IS the language of personal identity.

Both in catalogs and in stores, it sells a particular lifestyle. And like all lifestyle shops, offers everything from fashion to home goods--but all in a particular aesthetic; in this case that aesthetic is a sort of new bohemian/yoga/'expensive flea market' victoriana look. Shabby chic. Which, as you may or may not know, is the type of popular home design that aims at making new things look intentionally old, or European... perfectly vintage romantic looking but perfectly new.

Now a new one has opened in Austin a few weeks ago, so I decided to drive down and take a look. I wandered through all the sections, paying attention to the layout, the clothes, the salespeople, the quiet (very quiet) music humming in the background somewhere, and suddenly I felt very... cold. There is something about it that is cold inside.

The lifestyle it sells is not just an aesthetic but an atmosphere of "you travel, you go about the world and find fascinating things that no one else can find." But there is something about this way of marketing lifestyles that feels cold and sterile, especially here. In part because it is not exactly a treasure hunt. You didn't find that Flemish-looking duvet in a flea market in Brugges--you bought it in a well-marketed, well-positioned store that sells hundreds of these.

Now I am not knocking lifestyle stores. I enjoy a visit now and then to Urban Outfitters and things like that, but even then sometimes I feel like I am being told who I am and that what I should buy from that culture to be a part of it. I took one visit to a business site that profiled Antrhopologie's "customer market" and was told basically it is aimed at a 30-something, fit, well-travelled, educated woman who is creative and may or may not have children and who wants to feel like she is a global nomad with a hip loft in Soho. The J. Peterman catalogs have been attracting the poet-nomad in us for a couple of decades and I think much more successfully because the poet who runs the store still tells the story of his origins, and of each piece he finds.

In some ways I embarrassingly fit the statistic. But I am not a market. I live the life I live out of who I am and do buy unique things everywhere I go.... but I want them to be authentic. Now this brings us to a whole other discussion--what is authentic? My personal definition of authenticity comes down to: relationship. I can sniff when something comes out of an ideal or when it comes out of a real relationship or genuine expression. Two different people can be wearing the same things or listening to the same music, but one does it out of an ideal and one does it because it is an authentic extension of who they are and their truest self.

There is lots of talk about authenticity, especially in my generation of anti-institutionalism--authentic vintage, authentic business models, authentic spirituality, etc. and has now become a sort of catch-word to attract people our age. But the heart of "authentic" authenticity is RELATIONSHIP. Things birthed out of a real relationship to each other. This is a whole other essay for a whole other time, but in the case of Anthropologie, I felt it had no relationship to me, or to the city.

Firstly, it planted itself in the heart of a district that was formerly all local businesses (and Austin is known for its local-ness). Surrounding it are with one or two exceptions many local boutiques that are one of a kind and are Austin-based. So to me it is not authentic not just because it's not local but because it's not local in a place that has long been an "Austin-y Austin". I'm not sure who made the call to rent this former warehouse to both Anthropologie and R.E.I. (the sports store)... but these stores would have been welcome in Austin up in the more suburban shopping areas where other big chains thrive--gap, Saks, Barnes & Nobles--etc. I am not sure it will survive for long in this place because it doesn't seem to respect or honor the identity of the area.

Secondly, the reception of the salespeople was if anything rather abstract and overtly salesgirl-like. I appreciate when salesgirls at boutiques are being themselves--and even if they have a quota to live up to--they are more interested in relationships than in the things their boss told them to do. Now granted, this coldness might be just the newness of the place and the unfamiliar relationships of the staff. Maybe they will grow.

But everything about it is an idea. An idea of beauty, an idea of customer service, and idea of creativity. I am not sure this idea came from a woman, either. Although it's difficult, even chain stores can still be connected to the dna and personality of their creator. But there is not very much soul underneath this store. Its a statue of womanhood, not a living woman. Which is unfortunate, because the clothes are indeed nice. But I can buy all the same brands at the boutique across the street.

Unlike many other bands which use these secrets as kind of kitsch or irony, there was something quite serious running underneath this music, and when I finally got to see them live, I knew it was very very serious. The way the band labored under their instruments, especially as Edwards seemed like he was lifting weights, pushing and pulling his squeezebox as if he was praying with all his might. And his voice is something to hear--always haunting, always minor chord, but for those who like it, very very powerful.

They are one of few bands that have traveled seasons with me. Most of the bands I was fond of in those days I either threw away or listen to nostalgically now and then, but not this band. But as I grew into my spiritual roots, I recognized in Edwards a kindred spirit--not just playing with Jesus in an ironic fashion but actually speaking to Him through His music. And it spoke volumes to me.

And thankfully I've seen them play in several distinct seasons, each one becoming more meaningful. 16 Horsepower is no longer together; several years ago they disbanded and Edwards reformed his own project under the name Woven Hand. This music takes his passion for telling the truth in even more tapestry-like poetry to greater heights. But you must see him live. We got to see him perform, solo, a few weeks ago at Emo's here in Austin--the place where all indie/punk/garage, anything street-indie cred goes... and it has all the usual smoke stains on the walls, the tales of rock in its most formative, pungent places. But there he was alone on the stage--like he was speaking to the ghosts, to all the crustiness--a very intense, bleeding reply.

Edwards is not a performer in the entertainment sense. He does not take a stage in order to take an audience with him. He is theatrical though, but it is more like private theater. You have the privilege of watching him perform his internal relationship with the unseen. For those who have "eyes to see", this man is a warrior. His sword is long and he is beating down some long-deadened doors. He's a "truth-teller", as evidenced not only by the fact that "truth" appears repeatedly in his lyrics, but that he isn't asking people to consider anything, he is just telling it: this is how it is. Usually something like, who am I? nothing but some flesh and bones. I stand on a rock... the truth divine. And so on. His music is all about our silliness in proclaiming ourselves, our desperate state of being and of the state of grace.

I'm so glad he's continuing to push his art and going on with music and taking it deeper and deeper. It may push some people's buttons, but there's no denying that he is the real deal. He's not trying on forms, he IS the form of the secret south, broken, Jesus and all.

Music is just in the air here. Our neighbor is in a one-man banjo outfit. Another neighbor has bluegrass parties every month. Another college kid down the street used to sit outside partying with his friends and strumming country music on his guitar. (Country music never made sense where I grew up in the midwest, unless it was done ironically, but here it is served straight. And my southern husband reminds me often that they didn't call it 'country' music where he was from.) You can hear Stubb's loudspeakers all the way from downtown every time a big band is around. You just always hear music in the air.

So festivals of course are great for a city like Austin, because they usually have a tribal feeling where there's no one top-dog, more like a bunch of chieftains gathering for a multi-clan gathering. And some may be chief over a big land, and there are smaller clans, but everyone is together for the same happy purpose.

And everyone knows good music, regardless of its package or age. This year we had Tom Petty, and after a day lounging around to The Green Cards, Jose Gonzalez, Matisyahu, Muse, The Flaming Lips, Neko Case's new band (who have a cheap name but they are a good band).... every soul, young and old, hippie, indie, whatever have you... wandered down in slow, gathering crowds to fill a several-football-fields-length audience for Tom Petty. And from the first song, nearly everyone was singing every song, word for word. It was this big, unifying cultural thing.

Now, of course, people like guitars here, whatever sound they put out, and Tom Petty's band reminds one of everything that's good about a straight up rock guitar sound. It's also mature. We didn't make it through the whole show, because the sound was horrible, sadly enough. We inched as close as we could but it still sounded like the whole band was playing through a muffle, giving you that feeling you have when your stereo is played annoyingly high enough so that you can hear it, but not high enough that you can make out the voices.

However, seeing Tom Petty made me appreciate certain things about experienced bands. In the last two years I've seen U2 and Bruce Springsteen for the first time and had the same feeling. These guys are not too young or too proud to step away and let the songs hold themselves. They know how to be subtle and how to serve the music, not make it serve them. And when it comes time to flex or to rock, it's about taking the whole crowd somewhere, not just themselves. So you have guys like the Edge and Mike Campbell and Little Stephen who get their moments to shine, but most of the time they are being so subtle with their guitars you don't notice them so much. Tom Petty is definitely like this. His show is tight, so tight that it is seamless, every sound, every word, every movement between the sounds focused and going forward. When you get in an experience like this, the music takes you somewhere.

I can maybe count on both hands the times I've left a show and felt totally fulfilled--not just entertained, because I've been entertained a lot--but fulfilled. As if I was a part of something. U2, Bruce Springsteen, surprisingly Love and Rockets had this, too. R.E.M. Now granted, these are all folks that can hold a stadium, and not every band is made to take stadiums, but I've had a few smaller club experiences where I feel like I'm on stage swimming with the band. Music is transcendent. It should respect you, capture you, ennoble you, inspire, sometimes stir you up, make you feel like fighting the right battles. Yeah, I love music.

And I love that Austin has taught me to just be with music, and discover things by accident or friends, and wait for songs to fill the air.

I hope the ACL fest keeps going. It's a nice antidote for South By Southwest, which seems to be taking over Austin by inviting the monstrous, entertainment star-seeking tribes of the music industry but forgetting the local identity altogether. I have more to say on this later...

From the very beginning of Marie Antoinette, the graphics and music scream 1980s pop punk. The opening graphics are punchy hot pink and capital letters and so from the start this is not necessarily a movie about the life of an 18th century princess and queen. It is about a certain style. And I found myself less interested in the history, or even in a story, and rather in the filmmaking itself. You will either love it or hate it.

Sofia Coppola is an artist and not just batting out Hollywood films. She is still young and has only done 3 films, so we can’t expect something like Stanley Kubrick out of her, but she has certainly developed a particular style and resonates on the same themes in her films—and we will see more of her work in the future, and it will mature, so why not get to know it?

She is truly a postmodern filmmaker in the sense that you are aware of her as an artist throughout the film—you are aware of your own participation in interpretation, as well as aware of the filmmakers in the room. Modernist films tend to make a construct in which you suspend your disbelief for a few hours—you enter the fantasy and forget you are watching actors, the camera lens, even yourself. Truly postmodern works end up making equals of all the parts, including you as participant. This “way” of making film is certainly becoming more stylish due to the increase of documentary filmmaking and the thirst for feeling one’s “insiderness” within art. And it may or may not be successful. Some postmodern artists often deconstruct to the point of drawing attention to their own clever awareness, without ever risking how they actually feel or think about their subjects. But in Coppola’s films the “insider” awareness is not only successful but also has a respect for the viewer in a quiet way, and wants the viewers to come close and make up their own casual relationship with the characters. Perhaps this technique is too intimate or too loose for some, especially when it comes to tackling a story that historians and even Europeans feel passionate about. Some reviewers pointed out, and rightfully so, that making art movies about her own fiction was one thing but tackling history is asking for trouble. I can only guess that she is herself interested in Marie Antoinette and is trying her best to find they might have in common.

So on to the movie. The Austrian princess was married to the upcoming French king at 13 years old (and he only 14) and this becomes the fodder for a Coppola’s teenage look at the life of royalty. We are taken into the court of Versailles during a time of high decadence, loads of parties with shimmering champagne and exotic hair, silky shoes, feigned acquaintances and endless formalities. We are shown her youth, for the most part, and her consequent frustration and even sadness at the expectations made of her. We feel the young king and his teenagerish fascination with making locks. Neither of them know what to do when it comes to making a family. Instead they just go on with their royal parties and hunts. But for some reason it never feels decadent, nor does it feel fake. It feels like a particular time and place, and within Coppola’s vision you come to think that people actually have some feelings of their own in spite of all their social constructs. The feelings she brings out may or may not be the feelings these characters had; that is not the point.

Yes, of course, things were different, and children got married and had babies themselves and we can’t possibly think they had the same teenage ambitions we do. But she is not pretending to assume any of that. The setting of 18th century France is more like a backdrop to her own style and personal interests, but what makes this film nice is that she is not really using it for her own cleverness—nor is it an arbitrary choice of settings. It is honest in the sense that, yes we really can’t attempt to represent this fairly, so let’s go ahead and find some moments of essential humanness in them. And let’s go ahead and say what we NOW find beautiful or sad about it. The film brings awareness of the now-ness of our own experience without being solipsistic.

This film makes no excuses for being a very personal adaptation; in fact one feels as if it is (as with the tone of her other movies) somewhat autobiographical: here we have a little bit of what it might look like to be a Southern California teenager from the 80s displaced in the 18th century. Hence the scene (which is similar to Lost in Translation’s) of young people staying up all night drinking, running around town (or forest), playing games and even smoking some kind of weed—except this time in 18th century costumes—and all to a background soundtrack of 80s new wave music. It’s not surreal, it’s just a way of making her own experiences present. (Admittedly, I could understand why another generation might find this somewhat outside of their tastes, but for me the film was easy to enter. I’m the same age as Coppola, and I definitely resonate with all the songs in the film and the things we did as high school kids listening to those songs.) I think the tension between the past and the present is actually very useful for this film, so we are focused less on what actually happened to this woman than in essential human moments of joy, sadness, confusion, wonder.

In spite of the fact that Marie Antoinette was an actual woman with a complicated history about her, this film is still about the same young girl, in a way, that we encountered in Lost in Translation. A girl who must grow up fast, who encounters mysteries that are deeper than her age. And she must explore who she is through arbitrary frames quite foreign to her own—in that case, Japanese society, in this case French royalty.

Not to say there isn’t some truth in there. One imagines, for example, how awkward it might have been to teach young young teenage married couples how to be intimate sexually. And the relationships are never dramatized, never make you feel as if it was all so awful for them to handle so much responsibility. You imagine they accepted it as their duty, and so do her characters.

As a result, individual moments have beauty and sincerity—and you are brought in close to these moments. And this is why I liked it. I like watching sunrises, and hearing the rustle of silk. For example, during a scene in which Marie Antoinette visits an opera, the camera lingers on an Italian opera singer alone on a stage. There is nothing in the room but this singer for that moment. You are quite aware of Coppola as a filmmaker in the room, consciously listening to this singer; you forget Marie Antoinette, the audience, the stage, and there is just this voice… and like her other films you suddenly are aware that this woman is living and acting a part in a film but she has a marvelous voice!

Coppola had similar moments in Lost in Translation, such as the scene in which Scarlet Johannesen is watching cherry blossoms fall to the ground… or where we watch the slow, silent ceremonial march of the Japanese bride and groom. They are moments which exist outside of space and time.

Her particular style is obviously very image-based—she seems less interested in narrative and more in photography, going from one divine moment to the next. So I wasn’t expecting a well-thought-out script, nor clever dialog. There are a lot of long, awkward pauses in scenes which seem to be about nothing in particular, and I kind of liked that. I really enjoy films that aren’t trying to keep your attention from one second to the next. I have a lot of patience. It seems as if there was a large amount of improvisation. “Stand here, wait until the curtains open, see what kind of image we capture through the window”—that sort of thing. In Marie Antoinette we are brought into the absolute otherness of Versailles and all its ceremony, and yet we watch moments which seem universal—the delight in tasting jasmine tea from China, the touch of sunshine on strawberries.

I imagine the film would be perceived differently in Europe than the U.S. Americans tend to be fascinated with royalty because we really have no frame of reference for it. The life of decadent days-long royal feasts and courtiers and endless formalities of class and rank are just a few of the parts of European history that both fascinate and disgust.

After all, we threw the tea in the harbor. Yet a large part of what brings Americans to Europe is the curiosity and admiration for the ‘Old Europe’ much more than the new. We want to see the grandiosity, the elegance—the torn history of it—it feels so much older than us. But frankly, we just can’t really comprehend the weight of it, so as a result most of Hollywood period dramas are a bit overcast and overdone and oversimplified in their emotions. I like that Coppola makes no claims to interpret this very axial moment of history, when it seemed the courts of Europe were falling apart, and this film admits it’s a bit over her head, and offers more of a post card: here, here is something interesting to look at, despite all its complications. (No doubt it will inspire someone to do a ‘proper’ historical film, and then we will have both.)

No moment said this better during a stylized rock-video-like scene where the ladies of Versailles were indulging in exotic French glazed cakes with the 80s song “I Want Candy!” screaming in the background. There is something absolutely fun and youthful about the candiness of royal candies!

Not that it’s weightless. If anything it is a very feminine film and done by someone who seems a bit like a mystic, who is less interested in political statements (thankfully) and more in wonder. By the end, I found myself wondering where she would go next. I would be interested in seeing how her work matures. So far her films have been punctuated by a nostalgia for something in her past—a place where the teenager still doesn’t quite know what it is to be a grown up woman. It is a very true place, but it would be nice to see hopeful meditations on adulthood. Then maybe we’ll stop wishing Bill Murray was one of us, a grown up version of our own confusion. Perhaps she’ll have children, or some other life experience that brings deeper emotional subjects to her lens. Perhaps then she could treat a subject like this with more emotional complexity, but at the moment I am not expecting that of her.