Austin Journal (part 6)

How I Spent My Austin Vacation

by Steve Barr, AFF newbie

Part The Sixth


Thursday, October 20, 2005 (Evening)

Danny and I met Brian Anderson --

(sorry to keep using his last name; there were a lot of Brians (and Bryans) there, and I don't want to get them confused. Nothing's worse than a confused Brian (or Bryan))

-- in the Driskill lobby, and he walked us to his van.

Dude has a VAN. Not some soccer-mom wimpy minivan, neither - an honest to gods VAN. Turns out he's not 24 like he looks, but closer to 42, with a passel of kids to drive around in his big-ass van.

Yikes. I don't know what it is about Austin, but apparently it makes the men look half their age and the women look like Playboy models (back when Playboy models looked like "the girl next door," and not like "this month's nearly-identical iteration of a stripper with Daddy-issues and hair so blonde it's almost white").

Maybe there's something in the water. All I know is, there's gotta be *something* that counteracts the effects of all the meat.

Ah, the meat. The pounds and pounds of delicious, artery-clogging, love-handle-producing flame-broiled animal flesh...

Which brings us to: The County Line. The County Line is a restaurant, situated on the banks of a river that constitutes, I would guess, some sort of county line. A low, shambling wooden building with rusted tin roofs, it looks like something we in California would *design* to look like the stereotypical down-home Southern rib joint.

(Have you ever been to the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard? You know that artfully-distressed look they spent so much money to achieve? The County Line looks a lot like that, but they got the distressed look the old-fashioned way ... they *earned* it.)

The back of the restaurant is an open patio on the river, and where many restaurants on rivers would have a gaggle of geese or a paddling of ducks, this restaurant sports an impressive bale of wild turtles.

Yes, turtles. Little green amphibian fellas in shells, maybe 50 of 'em, ranging in size from a silver dollar to a dinner plate. This was quite a sight for a cityboy like me, who until that time had never seen a turtle in anything other than an aquarium. There was also a duck, and we got a few glimpses of a big-ass catfish underneath the turtles, but ... damn! Turtles! How fucking cool is that?

Oh, but I was going to talk about the meat. Our party (me, Danny, Brian Anderson, Brady Sylvester, Aaron de Orive, Aaron's lovely wife Blythe and their adorable anklebiter Elena) was seated, and I was told that they din't have none of that pansy-ass "salad" stuff here. If I was gonna eat, I was gonna eat meat.

Now, I'm no vegetarian. I loves me some cooked muscle tissue. But the branches of my family tree tend to sag from the weight of my forebears, who were gifted with the ability to process calories very efficiently, saving most of them in our chipmunk cheeks and multiple chins. I have daguerreotypes of my ancestors, all of whom look like Winston Churchill on a particularly bloated day. And those are the women.

So, for that reason, I tend toward green stuff and chicken.

Neither of which they have in Texas.

I ordered the smallest dinner platter they had (I think they called it the "Girlyboy California Purty-Mouth Plate" or something like that), and a few minutes later they plunked down in front of me a plate the size of a hubcap, loaded with most of a cow. And lots and lots of yummy yummy sauce.

I think Texans have evolved an extra enzyme or something in their stomachs, which can break down meat and turn it into, I dunno, a Cobb salad or something. Unfortunately, I don't have that enzyme. The only fiber they provided was the little sprig of parsley on the side of the plate, so, needless to say, I had some gastronomic adventures over the next week or so. I think I still have about 9 pounds of semidigested meat impacted in my bowels.

I'll leave you with that pleasant visual, to say two words about my dinner companions. Aaron is a big Hispanic guy with a beard and a constant cherubic smile. If Santa Claus was Mexican, he would look a lot like Aaron de Orive. Brady describes himself as a gap-toothed doofus, and he's not far wrong. He's just as funny in person as he is in his WP posts. Plus, while I struggled to finish my little girly meal, he packed away most of a herd of buffalo. Quite impressive. Poor Blythe had to sit patiently as we talked about writerly things for several hours over meat and beer and meat, with a side of meat, and for dessert some meat.

After that pleasant repast, Brian drove us back to the Driskill, where we hung out in the bar for a while. That night, I think I met:

-- Cargill (not sure if that's his first name or his last name), a reviewer for Ain't It Cool News. He's an intense guy, with a scruffy beard and long blond hair under a backward baseball cap. He has a lot of theories about filmmaking, and tends to zero in on one person and expound on his theories in detail. That could be annoying, except what he has to say is pretty damned interesting and well-thought-out, so you tend to forgive the laser-like stare.*

-- Chris White, who runs a humor website called Top Five. Funny guy, friendly but kinda quiet, seemed to know almost everyone at the festival.

...and maybe a half-dozen other people who I don't remember. Sorry, other people.

Our core group hung out in the bar for a few hours, shooting the shit, until finally I staggered up to my room to get a few hours of sleep before the 9:00 AM panel the next day.

Next: The 9:00 AM panel the next day. (Didn't I just say that?)

* Cargill asked for a copy of Who's On First? and said he'd watch it and (if he liked it) review it for Ain't It Cool. I thought that was cool of him to offer, so I got a copy from my room and gave it to him. I have it from a reliable source that he almost immediately gave it away to someone else, and never bothered to watch it. Huh.

SoCal Film Group Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Digital Filmmaking Steve Barr