Click here to read my review of Nacogdoches-based author Joe R. Lansdale's most recent novel Vanilla Ride. Having grown up in East Texas—behind the Pine Curtain, as they say—the Texas Observer has had me cover the region several times. It's interesting to reevaluate the place of my birth after not living there for 15 years. East Texas is beautiful. Black bear and white heron congregate around murky lakes under dense pine forests. The region is also financially poor since the dwindling of oil jobs, leaving plenty of angry rednecks and mean old ladies.

But you can find that anywhere.

East Texas is a strange place. Part Deep South and part Texas. It's kind of hard to pinpoint. Although I don't think his writing is always top-notch, Lansdale captures the region well as a native son. His sci-fi, western, or noir stories are most notable for their sharp and often hilarious dialogue.

Michael Dougan—a Seattle-based cartoonist who had a short-lived MTV series—also nails the Piney Woods in his graphic novel memoir East Texas: Tales From Behind the Pine Curtain. Dougan should do more graphic novels. His work is great.

 The media often portrays East Texas incorrectly. A melting pot of race, the region is more pragmatically egalitarian than conflict-ridden. It's a humid sleepy place where folks work hard, drink beer on Saturday night, (Baptists usually do this behind closed doors,) and then go to church on Sunday morning. I can't say that I'd now choose to live behind the Pine Curtain, but I'm glad to be from there.

My wife and I recently attended the Texas Bigfoot Conference in Tyler. As published in the Texas Observer, the story may be read here. I now carry a flashlight at night...

Texas Parks and Wildlife published my article on the Great Plains' lesser prairie chicken. It's a beautiful bird—grouse to be exact—with an unfortunate name. You may read it here. 

My friend Jerod Foster took the pictures. They and the magazine look fantastic. It's one of the best aesthetic presentations of anything I've worked on to date.

The story's Goodnight/Loving aspect was a lucky fluke. I was put in touch with Jeff Haley during research and interviewed him over the phone. Jerod then drove to his house outside Pampa for the photo shoot and noticed all these books by historian J. Evetts Haley in his library.

"That's my granddad," Jeff said. 

As it turned out, I was reading J. Evetts Haley's biography of Charles Goodnight at the time. Upon learning of the link, I saw a parallel between Goodnight's buffalo herd and the nearly endangered lesser prairie chicken and incorporated it into the story. It made the whole thing come together. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Jerod and I are currently working on another TPWD story about catch-and-release shark fishing along the Gulf Coast. I'll be watching from the boat as he takes the underwater shots.

I enjoy shopping at Central Market or Whole Foods as much as the next guy. The sepia tones, the hip music, (much better than the Cheap Trick muzak playing at HEB,) and the free samples. Yes, definitely the free samples. How many mango salsas have been bought on a spur-of-the-moment whim?

The food tastes great. But those trips are more for the experience. If you put me to a blind taste test between organic and non-organic vegetables, I'd be guessing.

In his recent Time magazine article Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food, Bryan Walsh writes that cheap, (i.e. mass-produced,) food is "increasingly bad for us" and the "principal cause of America's obesity epidemic".

I don't argue with Mr. Walsh that there's an obesity epidemic. Read Elizabeth Kolbert's well-written New Yorker piece XXXL. But I do find fault with his logic. Cheap food doesn't make people fat. Nobody's making you eat that Quarter-Pounder, (although Ronald McDonald does have a creepily hypnotic hold on worldwide youth. Maybe it's the red fro.) Saying that cheap food causes obesity is like attributing paranoia to 24-hour news channels. If you watch shootings and celebrity reality shows all day, then you might never leave the house. Or you might get Botox. But you don't have to watch TV in the first place. (Except for The Simpsons reruns.)

Walsh then goes on to describe the practices necessary to produce large amounts of cheap food. It ain't pretty. Pigs are crammed into feedlots. Antibiotics are administered like warm beers at a frat party. This is a far cry from the Jeffersonian pastoral vision. Pumping animals with antibiotics may result in bugs that eventually resist those antibiotics. This is done in the name of efficiency. It's how you pay less for that saran-wrapped pork at the supermarket. 

Walsh compares the large-scale food production industry with a utopian vision of organics. Bill Niman's cattle eat "all natural, non-corn diet" on green fields overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco. Walsh believes that this method "gets it right". Uh-huh. How many farmers can afford property overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco? The costs involved with maintaining that level of organic food production is not "sustainable" for a country of this size.

There is a place for organics within this country as there is a place for non-organic food. Walsh should have focused on a more realistic organic farm situation than the million dollar Pacific Ocean view. I like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. These were necessary whistle-blowers for corrupt systems. But commercial food production is not corrupt. It's necessary for keeping this country supplied with reliable cheap food. Have you ever tried gardening? It's hard work. I sure don't want to come home and fool with it.

In a radio interview with "Agritalk", Walsh states that the Time article was an "opinion" piece. But nowhere was it stated that this was a writer's opinion. Most people will, (a) never listen to the "Agritalk" interview and (b) think that the article was objective truth.

This is more scary than Ronald McDonald's pied-piper routine, (well, almost.) As our society becomes increasingly more urban, we are farther removed from the realities of agriculture.

Like keytar, mustaches, and moped stunts in your movies? How about I throw in a soundtrack featuring Europe? That simmering bouillabaisse, my friend, is the tasty 2007 movie Hot Rod. I saw it a couple years ago and just caught a re-run. Like Caddyshack, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or The Big Lebowski, this one may get better with repeated viewings.

Hot Rod is basically an 80s teenage movie meeting the Zucker Brothers. Think Rad or BMX with jokes from Airplane. It features SNL regulars and comedians like Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, Will Arnett and Danny McBride alongside veteran actors like Ian McShane and Sissy Spacek. Samberg tries to perform Evil Knievel stunts in an attempt to raise money for his ailing stepfather. Obviously, the plot doesn't matter. It's basically endless SNL type set-pieces with a hair-metal soundtrack. It spoofs the 80s movies while simultaneously paying homage. Like Rad or Airplane, this one will grow a cult audience.

The moral of your typical 80s teenage movie always appealed to me. If you perform incredibly dangerous stunts in front of roaring crowds and rock music, the chicks will dig it. A simple truth that can't be argued.

Larry McMurtry recently released Rhino Ranch, the fifth book in his Thalia series. Duane is the recurring character. We first met him as a teenager in The Last Picture Show. That was a great book. It's sequel, Texasville, was so bad I couldn't finish it. The third book, Duane's Depressed, is often overlooked. It's the best of the series and one of the best of McMurtry's career, (alongside his non-fiction mediation on family and Tahiti entitled Paradise.) When the Light Goes, the fourth installment, was better than critics claimed but not that memorable. So it follows that, in the rollercoaster trajectory of this series, the new book Rhino Ranch should be great. I need to pick up a copy and find out.

Fans may buy a signed first edition of the book from my friends Cody and Julie Ressell at Three Dog Books. In 2006, we worked with McMurtry on a chapbook entitled The Bookman. Speaking on the future of his antiquarian bookdealing trade, he was cautious:

  "We don't have many young people buying books... I'm not saying that young people are less literate, I'm saying that the manner of their literacy is different now. They have all the digital media."

Nicholson Baker recently test-drove a Kindle for The New Yorker in a piece entitled "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?" Baker didn't care much for the Kindle but he acknowledges that the digital medium seems to be displacing old glue and bindings. I personally like the feel of a book but see the need for digital format literature. People are reading shorter segments, the visual equivalent of a sound-bite, but more people are reading. Period. And that's a good thing.

Which begs the question. Would Proust have Tweeted?

In the current  24-hour-media world, epidemics are updated like Facebook posts. I recently spoke with a friend's elderly parent. Channels make money by keeping viewers tuned in with omnipresent catastrophies. Swine flu. North Korean nuclear testing. Tony Romo dumping Jessica Simpson. 24 hour news channels employ vaudeville techniques of titillation to retain audiences. But they don't have to pay performers or write scripts. All they need to do is press "record".

This spring, I visited Plainview, a small town halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo. Its peanut plant made international headlines in January for producing product with salmonella. The health violations uncovered would make Upton Sinclair nauseous. You may read it here.

This story was all over the news in January. Peanut butter sales dropped. Congress and the president proposed overhauling food regulations. But who remembers it now? We're so inundated with crises that they've lost impact.

When Sinclair wrote The Jungle, an indictment of the U.S. meat packing industry that led to the passage of 1906's Meat Inspection Act, it shocked readers. The same goes for Rachel Carson' s Silent Spring. The book's exposure of DDT's environmental effects led to Congress banning use of the pesticide in 1972. Sure, we get Fast Food Nations, Supersize Mes, and a host of other muckraking documentaries. But they've lost their impact in an oversaturated media. 

Speaking of Plainview...What would Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of There Will Be Blood, (which was loosely based on Sinclair's Oil!,), say about the glut of cable news? Are we all drinking from each other's milkshakes?

But I've lost my train of thought...the octuplets are on.

Texas Monthly senior editor John Spong interviewed five songwriters for the August issue. Read it here. Despite our differing opinions over the merits of 70s Jimmy Buffett, (Living & Dying in 3/4 Time more than makes up for the Alan Jackson duets,) Spong and I are friends. He knows his music and the collected songwriters are solid— Patty Griffin, Robert Earl Keen, Jack Ingram, Sonny Throckmorton, and Guy Clark.

Songwriting is a tough business. I once traveled from Nashville publishing house to publishing house with a guitar case of tunes. A business exec in a suit would sit behind a large wooden desk and listen as I played my stuff. It was awkward, to say the least. I was advised to listen to Mongtomery Gentry and write stuff "that made ordinary folks feel better about their crappy lives". I left Nashville.

These guys (and gal) stuck it out. Their insight into the process and business of writing songs is interesting.

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan cited Guy Clark as one of his favorite songwriters alongside Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, John Prine, and, ahem, Jimmy Buffett. The ragged voiced seer also gives a shout-out to Texas songwriters on his latest record Together Through Life with the track 9 line, "I've been listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce." Trying to understand a Dylan live show is like trying to read Finnegan's Wake. It rarely makes sense but you know what he means.

I'm getting in touch with my inner Bruno at the Austin Fashion Week.  My wife Catherine Keeney is a lovely and talented jewelry designer.  I am a sloppy writer with the pallor of one who stares at his computer screen all day.  Cocktails have fortified me with fashion confidence through the week's events, which culminate this Sunday in the Austin Fashion Awards.  Vote for Catherine Keeney as best new designer here.  These are shots from her reception at Wyatt Brand.