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(COOLLIST) Jennifer Trynin & Austin Top 10


Hey, (CL)ers.  Two items for your perusal tonight:

First, last Wednesday, I went to a music bar called the Electric Lounge
to see Jennifer Trynin in concert.  If the name isn't familiar, maybe
her current single, "Better Than Nothing", with its starting line "Maybe
we could talk in the shower, we'd be gone in an hour" and its chorus
of "I'm feeling good, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling good for now" will
remind you.  Anyway, I have her album, _Cockamamie_, and its pretty 
cool.

My friend from work, John, and I got there around 8:45 and caught the
last half of a local act called Wheel.  They weren't too shabby in a
R.E.M./Live/Weezer type of way (and coincidentally, I saw a newsgroup
post in austin.music from their front man complaining about how they
weren't listed in the ads for the show).  I noticed a medium-short
female standing over at the side of the room who looked a little
familiar, but I just wrote it off at the time.  Well, after a break
where the techs reconfigured instruments and equipment, the woman
I saw took stage, announced herself as Jennifer, and proceeded to play
a 50 minute set of most of the songs off the album and a few new ones.
The music was very loud, but very good too.  By the time the show
started, the club was rather full, with all the tables taken up and the
area between the tables and the stage occupied by a mass of bodies.

After she finished, I debated staying around to hear the Asylum Street
Spankers, but instead I walked back to the green room area, waited
a few minutes for things to clear out some, and entered the back room to
say a few words to Miss Trynin.  She was pretty cool, answering a couple
of questions, asking me a few, and then, signing my CD front insert I
brought with me.

If she plays Atlanta soon, try to go to the show.  It really was a lot
of fun, and it probably won't be too expensive (here, it was $3).

*****

Second item: Top 10 Reasons To Live in Austin

10) Town Lake Hike and Bike Trail - three miles on the trail from my
    apartment to Zilker Park and back, with a stop at Flipnotics for
    an Italian Soda for good measure

 9) The Dobie - a private mega-dorm by UTexas on top of a mall that has
    a tres cool movie theater.  I just saw _Party Girl_, a great movie
    starring Parker Posey of _Dazed and Confused_ fame, at the Dobie.  Wow.

 8) Book People - think Oxford at Pharr but three stories high with a 
    better coffeehouse and a natural foods store (Whole Foods Market)
    next door.

 7) ACTV - Austin Community Television, the public access authority that
    runs three channels on the cable system.  Where else can you see shows
    like "Trippin' in Austin" where three hippie-posers sit around in front
    of a blue screen showing psychedelic patterns and act like they've been
    using drugs.  Also, on ACTV: Jewish fundamentalist preaching, lots
    of Libertarians, Australian nudist travelogues, and the Hondo Show!

 6) Barton Springs - a swimming pool at big as two football fields fed
    by spring water that stays 68 degrees year-round

 5) Flipnotics and all the other coffee houses - I never got around to
    going out much back when I was at Tech, so I've not been spoiled
    by the likes of Cafe Intermezzo.  Flipnotics is simple, has some
    neat props, and is a nice walk from my place.

 4) The commute - sure, Austin's traffic sucks, but if I lived anywhere
    else, it would take me even longer to get to and from work

 3) EFF Austin - a bunch of computer people sitting around, once a month,
    taking about society, ethics, and politics, rather than Windows 95 vs.
    OS/2 vs. Linux

 2) KOOP/KVRX - they share 91.7 MHz, KOOP plays Pacifica Radio (yeh!) while
    KVRX is as adventuresome as WREK.  KUT (NPR/eclectic) is pretty good
    too.

 1) The music scene - I've only gone out once so far to see live music
    here, but I know that if I wanted, I could go to almost 100 shows
    a night, bridging all genres.  That flexibility is just too cool.


Enough for one (CL) message.  More later.
-- 
Benjamin L. Combee           | "What we've got is a blue light special on
combee@techwood.org          | truth, it's the hottest thing with the youth."
http://www.eden.com/~combee/ | -- Information Society, "Peace & Love, Inc."
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