We love the fair, and we’ve been to a fair number of rodeos, but we’d never been to one in Texas.  Texas seems tailor made for rodeos (if not, say, history book learnin’), so we were pretty excited to experience a real live rodeo here in Texas.  Ponies!  Livestock!  Funnelcakes!  HEE HAW!  Come on, people — LET’S F-IN’ RODEO!!!

The first thing we encountered was a huge line to get in. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and if you were wearing green (I was, but AEJ, curiously, doesn’t own any green), your admission was free. This wrinkle in the normal admissions policy was taking a lot of brain power for the people working the gate (is that green, or more of a chartreuse?), and the line to get in was excessively long. Once we were in, though, RODEO!!! WOOO!!!! Hold on a sec while I get a shot of these tractors!

Our first stop was to see the Okie the SUPER HORSE! The show started with a roping warm-up act.

Is that him?! Is that actually OKIE the SUPER HORSE?!?! Yes, kids. It is.

Okie’s owner was quite the showman! He started by telling us about his two previous horses, named “In His Glory 1” and “In His Glory 2.” Praisalujiah, kids! (Do you think I’m kidding? Because I’m not.) Anyway, he loved those horses, but he had to put them down because they got sick. Awesome! Thanks for getting the crowd all excited for the show by telling us about your beloved but now-dead horses! (Don’t worry, kids — Okie isn’t dying here. This is a trick! Look at that — he trained the horse to bow! This is f-ing amazing.)

For Okie’s next pre-glue-factory trick (sorry, Okie, but clearly there’s a pattern with this guy), they put a hula skirt on the horse and had Okie rock back and forth — like HE WAS DOING THE HULA! OMG, it was incredible!!! This horse and trainer truly were SUPER. It didn’t for a moment seem like some lame-ass yokel who simply owned a horse and was willing to subject his horse to a humiliating 15 minutes of lameness under the label of “magic,” no sir. HEE HAW!!!

Okay, let’s get a snack! I love fair food. Shall we start with the deep-fried sandwiches?

Nah, let’s get pizza. But not just ANY pizza — let’s get the super-awesome version of pizza that you can only get at the fair: Pizza on a STICK!

Two pizzas-on-a-stick and a single soda only cost $17. That’s totally reasonable!

Here, let me pay with this cash… What? What’s that, you say? You don’t accept cash? You only accept tokens? So I have to take my $20 bill, which is (slightly) more than I need to spend on this lunch, and I need to break it over there at the Change Booth, where there’s a full-time person sitting just for this very reason, and then I need to take my $17 over to that token machine, where I’ll feed each dollar into the machine, getting a $1 token in exchange, and then I can use the $1 token as if it were a dollar bill? Okay! That doesn’t sound even remotely retarded!

Okay, so after I ate half of my Pizza-on-a-Stick (stopping only when, after one bite, hot pepperoni grease poured down my hand), we thought — hey, let’s have some REAL fun now! You know what sounds super fun? Watching a machine make pet ID tags!  Really?  Can I watch?  Really?

Or, we could go see the two-headed cat! I’m sure we wouldn’t have been horrified by that at all!

No, let’s go to the petting zoo. AEJ likes petting the animals. I think they’re dirty and nasty, so I just took pictures.

Here’s Wonky the Wonky-Eared Goat. (Not sure if that’s his real name.)

And here are some deer. You know what deer really love? They love to be chased around a pen by little children! Oh wait — they f-ing HATE that. (This is at least one thing I have in common with the deer. That, and our similar levels of intelligence and general skittishness.)

That’s okay, because the kids get what’s coming to them at our next stop: Mutton Busting!

This is where we watch as kids are forced to put on protective gear…

… and ride sheep…

… holding on as long as they can…

… if not longer…

… until the inevitable, satisfying (for the crowd, at least) spill.

That was fun. Let’s have a sweet treat!

There was some livestock, but not much. Just a bunch of cows.

They looked sad, and made me want to become a vegetarian.

Okay, so this is all super fun, right?! Next, let’s go to the carnival part of the rodeo! When we’re there, we can… I don’t know, try to win a fish. You can’t keep the crowds away from stuff like this!

All we really wanted to do was play Skee Ball. We LOVE Skee Ball! What’s that you say? The Austin Rodeo DOESN’T HAVE SKEE BALL? In fact, the Austin Rodeo has the lamest carnival I’ve ever seen? Are you sure? But doesn’t this look FUN AS HELL???

Okay, so there’s no Skee Ball. But this is Austin, right, so there must be a KICK ASS CONCERT series at the fair, right? RIGHT! SEE? (Seriously. There’s a band on the stage, and they’re playing.) The crowd goes wild!!!

Okay, so the concerts are lame, the food is bad and overpriced and requires tokens, the super horse does nothing more than rock back and forth in nervous anticipation of being put down by its owner, but come on. There must be something really cool. WAIT! There it is! What’s cooler than CHEWING TOBACCO?! I’m sure the Dip Station is really, really nice inside. I think I’ve found my new habit, ladies!

And when I’m not chewing my tobacco, I really want to smoke it. I’m all about cigarettes, so I was of course really interested in this spittoon. Cigarette’s only WHAT? I have to know!

HEE-HAW! It’s the Austin Rodeo! WOO! I hope I’ve effectively conveyed how super fun it was. If nothing else, I hope that you consider naming one of your children after that guy’s horse: “In His Glory 2 (Electric Boogaloo).”

Christ.

An old friend of AEJ’s family is a writer named Richard Ford.  The Guardian (UK) recently asked a bunch of writers for their “rules” for writing fiction.  The rules below are Mr. Ford’s, and I think if you substitute “composer” for “writer,” the rules are just as sound.  (This is quoted completely without permission, but hopefully AEJ can prevent Mr. Ford from suing me.)

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.

—
Lots of great writers gave their lists, and there were so many excellent (and, not surprisingly, wordy on occasion) responses that they split the results into two stories. Here is part one (which includes rule #8 from Jonathan Franzen : “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”), and here is part two (which includes the gem from Hilary Mantel, “Are you serious about this?  Then get an accountant.”).  It’s a great read, whether or not you substitute “composer” for “writer” (but you should).

Yesterday afternoon, I received a recording of the premiere performance of my new Harvest: Concerto for Trombone. I won’t be posting the complete piece yet because we made a “studio” (actually, in a hall) recording before the premiere, and I’ll eventually be releasing that studio recording as a free download here on the website.

That recording isn’t coming until summer, but Joe Alessi gave me the go-ahead to post the middle movement of the concerto now. This is live, so it isn’t perfect, but damn, it ain’t bad.  (Just wait until you hear the studio recording… Woot.)

This is the four minute central movement of the concerto, and this immediately follows the brutal sacrifice of Dionysus (the trombone soloist). The idea with this middle movement is to represent Dionysus in death, or the stillness of winter after the pruning of the vines. (In case you’re just joining, Dionysus was the Greek god of the vine.)

The sound quality is weirdly hissy, as if this had been recorded using my old Radio Shack cassette recorder and then played through my childhood Realistic stereo system, but again, this is just a little preview of what’s to come this summer when I post the whole piece. You can find the audio through the “Audio & Score” button on this page.

Speaking of sneak previews…  The other day, AEJ and I visited the Austin Rodeo.  I took nearly 300 pictures, and I’ll have a blog entry up about that soon, but in the meantime, here’s a taste of what’s to come.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you…