Time Travel Weekend Party

In many ways this past weekend in Austin has felt like a stop on the time travel train.

I'm convinced that sometime in the future, time travel is a functional thing, much the way air travel is today. However, in this future, all time travel trips must be meticulously planned: your clothing, money and vocabulary must all be perfectly synced to the time you are visiting. (You wouldn't want the people in the past to know that you were a time traveler, as then everyone would want stock tips and investment advice and other such self-serving nonsense.)

An exception to this planning rule is that there are a few "free" stops on the time-travel train. These are places where it doesn't matter much what you do, say, or wear. There is nothing you can get wrong, because there are no right or wrong answers. One of these free stops on your time travel tour package is the annual rite of spring, known as Eeyore's Birthday in Austin, Texas.

The backstory behind the party indicates that the event grew out of an attempt by the English department at the nearby University of Texas at Austin to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, and give the students a chance to blow off some steam before finals. It has turned into something much more than that.

So, when you see someone at Eeyore's birthday in an outfit that seems far better suited to hunting elk in 19th century Germany--what you've probably found is a time-traveler returning home from a 19th century elk-hunting trip. Same with the Viking priestess you saw at Eeyore's, or the person with the perfect 80s hair. They were all on their way to/from their time-travel destination--they just decided to pop into Eeyore's birthday because they know a good party when they see one.

Cronocrimenes at Fantastic Fest (2007)

Tim League of the Alamo and Nacho Vigalondo during the Cronocrimenes Question and Answer session following one of the first screenings of the movie in the states (2007).

Growing up in the small working-class refinery town of Deer Park, Texas in the eighties, I tried very hard to escape the place without actually leaving.

Being hard-up for a time travel or teleportation device, I used the very best substitute I had: homemade cassette tapes of the 70’s punk and new wave bands that I loved—like the Ramones and Blondie. Closing my eyes with the stereo on, I could nearly always escape the depressing industrial area.

So, when I went to watch the world-premiere of the Spanish time travel movie Cronocrimenes  aka Timecrimes on opening night of Austin’s science-fiction and horror movie festival Fantastic Fest, I was surprised and delighted to bump into an old friend. My pal: the song “Picture This” from Blondie’s 1978 multi-platinum selling “Parallel Lines” album, featured as an integral piece of sonic set dressing in the movie.

With the film’s poster reading “A trip back in time……from present to crime”  it isn’t exactly a spoiler to reveal that a key character keeps going back in time, trying to fix what’s gone wrong at one particular moment.

When the character returns to that moment the song “Picture This” is playing.

 Not familiar with the song? Not surprising. Even though it hit number 12 in the UK in ‘78, it wasn’t exactly a bit hit here. If my friends hadn’t fired up their ‘80’s record players, I’d never have heard it.


The idea that music has a transformative power isn’t exactly a new concept. Otherwise, why would I have been surrounded by so many people who surely remembered the 60’s when Bob Dylan played ACL?


For the premiere of the innovative Spanish-language/English subtitled “Cronocrimenes” writer/director/actor Nacho Vigalondo was in attendance answering questions. So I asked him about the use of the song.

It turns out the tune ended up in the film partly because the crew was playing the song a lot while they were making the movie. Thus when it came time to pick a song to clarify that the hero was back in the same place at the same time, the lyrics of the song seemed to fit the film.


“The lyrics for “Picture This” are so close to the movie” Vigalondo said quoting the lyrics: “Picture this - a sky full of thunder.” Indeed, a clap of thunder is a plot point in the film.


 I suspect that if I’d grown up in big city surroundings, that I might not have held on so tightly to the music of another time and another place—trying by sheer will to get myself to New York’s mythical CBCB’s club in the 70’s.


All in all, the film’s surprising use of the song shows the influence of our friends, coworkers and neighbors on our lives, perhaps especially on what we’re listening to.

No matter how global our world and economy gets, sometimes it matters most what the people closest to us are listening to.  If we love them, sometimes we’ll end up loving what they love as well.


(This column was slated for the  Statesman in 2007 but  didn't have space to run before the second time this film showed during Fantastic Fest. These pictures were taken with a borrowed point-and-shoot. I'm a slightly better photographer now.) 

Al Franken in Austin: A Broadcast from Out of the Past (2005)

Cameraphone pic of Al Franken and Paul Sicard!

    
When my husband was the only person in town to win tickets* to the live broadcast of the Al Franken Show, I was so excited. I would get to hear, and see, the latest advances in talk radio!

Air America has gotten acres of ink for their “progressive views.” Yet, in his first live Air America broadcast from Austin the Al Franken Show seemed hopelessly mired in the past, much like the unwitting victims on the TV show What Not to Wear.

The broadcast exposed outdated and outmoded concepts lurking in our collective ideological closet. Perhaps it was a show from a time when muckraking journalism attempted to shine light on standard business practices. Maybe it was a broadcast from the days when unions were gaining strength to protect the common worker. The show could have even been from the Roosevelt era, which brought dignity in retirement with Social Security. Everyone knows that those concerns are now passé.

Broadcasting with co-host Katherine Lanpher from the depression-era State Theater, Franken might have as well have been getting his news from teletype machines and carrier pigeons.

From the funeral-home-style paper fans advertising Air America to a faux advertisement from the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau—asserting that Dallas has now been assassination free for 30, no 40 (!) years-- and imploring people to “put the top down and drive thru Dealey Plaza,” it seemed like a transmission from long before the Internet.