Matthew Jasso dropped by and we headed over to La Tuna for lunch.  As usual, he has half a dozen projects in various stages of completion.  The guy's got way too much energy.  The sun was out, so we sat outside.  La Tuna wasn't my first choice — the food's great, but it's a bit pricey for me.  However, try to find a parking place at noon on a weekday on S. Alamo.  It's a bitch.  La Tuna has scads of parking.  A drowsy cat sunned himself my feet, no doubt stuffed from handouts of tilapia tacos and torta milanesa.  I waved to my neighbor Jerry who was breaking for lunch in the beer garden with one of his geologist colleagues.  In fact, I had a great view of the back of Jerry's house  just across the San Antonio river.  There are times when I really love my neighborhood.

I'm helping Matthew edit a project, and he was kind enough to provide me with a hefty hard drive.  This is just what I need.  Not only for his piece, but some of the jobs that have been languishing because I've run out of storage space.  For instance, there's this traveling film project looking for filmmakers to take their work on the road.  It pays well, and is the sort of thing I have been thinking of for sometime.  Take films out to the people.  I need to capture ninety minutes or so of some of my better stuff, burn a DVD, send it off to the organization, and hope for the best.  But until now, I lacked the hard drive space.  I'll be able to make the deadline.

I did have some problems installing the drive.  Matthew had loaded it up with a bunch of footage he had already captured.  But I'm thinking that when he set up the drive on his computer, it became formatted to his newer version of the mac operating system.  I'm working with O/S B.C., the Cretaceous edition.  But, with Matthew's aid over the phone, I was able to reformat it.

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Alston joined me for the Methane Sisters' show, As Filthy As It Gets, at the Jump-Start.  We walked over about twenty minutes early.  I was expecting a long line because they made the cover of the Current (the San Antonio free weekly tabloid).  Inside, I only saw about half the seats occupied.  However, they all quickly filled up.

If you like Absolutely Fabulous and Hedwig, you'll enjoy it.  The piece is about half stage performance and half video.

The show opened with the girls in their punk period, hitting the stage like Jane County (formerly Wayne County) who has inexplicably received a blood transfusion from Johnny Thunders.  They were floundering around, singing about cocks and asses, as a guy on drums and another guy on a guitar, played noisily, but with bored indifference.  May Joon (Monessa Esquivel) was feeling up her microphone and grabbing her crotch, as Ann July (Annele Spector) staggered around obliviously, necessitating a roadie (Daniel Jackson, of Babycakes fame) to herd her back towards her microphone.  The cigarette butt tangled in Ann July's tall blue wig was a nice touch. 

There's a bit of video when Monessa's character is being interviewed for a documentary, and an incidental element of fetishistic infantilism and adult diapers is used quite, um, effectively.  I about lost it — and I know Alston was shaking with laughter as well.

The evening dredged up sweet recolletions of my miss-spent youth.  It seems like only yesterday that, I too, was snorting lines of coke off a cross-dressing friend's Judy Garland album.  Sometime even the most outrageous comedic cliche will have a big fat kernel of truth.

Seeing Monessa Esquivel screaming into a microphone wearing clunky black boots, ripped fishnet stockings, and a red bustier, brought back memories of seeing Frightwig, circa 1983, at San Francisco's Vis Club.  In fact, I currently have their first LP, Cat Farm Faboo, spinning on my turntable.  Brilliant.  Imagine the frenetic sludge of Flipper played by foul-mouthed women in shabby vintage dresses singing songs with titles like “Hot Papa,” and “My Crotch Does Not Say Go,” and all this while the members of Bratmobile and Bikini Kill were still trying to figure how to bite the heads off their Barbie dolls without damaging their retainers.  Deep history's what I'm talking about, baby.

Ah, can there be anything sweeter than those moments in popular culture where Trash and Glamour intersect?