planet terror poster Tuesday morning I walked to my truck to drive to a meeting scheduled at 10:00 AM. Thanks to the mild freeze that had hit San Antonio during the night, my windshield was covered in frost. I used an old trick I had learned when I lived in Washington, DC. I reached into the flotsam behind my seat and pulled out a CD case to scrape the ice away. Looking at the disc, I noticed it was an early-nineties rave CD I had bought in a dollar bin a long time ago because I thought the artwork looked interesting. It had probably lived behind my seat without a rotation for the past three years.

This evening, I decided to reduce my truck’s clutter by bringing the disc in the house. That’s when I noticed the significance of the disc I had grabbed the day after Christmas. It was the LA Style’s self-titled album with their only chart hit as the first track on the disc- James Brown is Dead. How un-timely. Here’s a copy if you would like to reminisce the days when this song didn’t make sense. Maybe it could be used on the soundtrack of the biopic that Spike Lee’s going to direct…




Death Proof movie poster Over the past summer, Quentin Tarantino had been in Austin filming his half of the movie, Grindhouse, that he’s making with Robert Rodriquez. You would see them all over the place shooting scenes with Kurt Russell. I even happened upon a shoot near my house in the old airport where they had all these military vehicles arranged around the hangars. Finally, there’s a trailer for Grindhouse available online. The military trucks from the airport scene are visible in the trailer, but it’s hard to recognize any of the other Austin locations in these clips. Rose McGowan with a machine-gun leg almost makes me forget that this is Kurt Russell’s opportunity to recover his career from the horrible detour its taken since “Big Trouble in Little China.”