Thursday, August 06, 2009

Mid-Mod? WTF Is That?!?

Since the passing of Martha (Molly) Ivins, Texas has needed a smart-mouth woman writer. Now, we have Sarah Bird: a real gone chick that we can dig the most. If this is (fair & balanced) boomer nostalgia, so be it.

[x TX Monthly]
Ranch Blessing
By Sarah Bird

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Two words—three, depending on how you feel about hyphens—have changed my life and net financial worth: “mid-century modern.” If you’re a fan of Mad Men or martinis, you probably already know about mid-mod, the rekindling of love for all things fifties: sunburst wall clocks, dinette sets, tail fins, Tang, and, most significantly, the suburban ranch house. This infatuation with the brawny, ebullient time following World War II, when America was in love with space travel and clam dip, was not in play when we were house hunting twenty years ago.

I was pregnant and therefore in the thrall of intractable cravings for salty food and real estate. Two seconds after the stick turned pink, the walls of our once cozy eight-hundred-square-foot bungalow began closing in on me. Far worse, the formerly charming elementary school down the street morphed into a scene out of "Deliverance." The second I imagined my offspring enrolled there, all the children devolved into six-fingered throwbacks picking head lice off one another. Desperate to save my only begotten from marrying his cousin, I hit the Multiple Listing Service with a vengeance.

Fortunately, my mental implosion coincided with the late-eighties collapse of the Austin real estate market. This allowed a couple of sorry subprimers like us to obey the realtor’s credo—“Worst House, Best Neighborhood”—and weasel our way into a topflight school district. The house itself, a suburban Ranchburger of dun-colored brick, was almost beside the point. Two distinguishing features barely saved her low-slung anonymity from total invisibility: She had been built by a Melville scholar who’d equipped her with nearly 150 linear feet of built-in bookshelves, and she was in our price range (i.e., insanely cheap). This helped us ignore the gold-flecked Formica counters, the ancient venetian blinds, and the Sputnik-inspired light fixtures.

Once our son was born and the house hormones had been flushed out of my system, I realized that I should have been paying a lot more attention to potty training than TAAS scores, since he was five years away from having to worry about schools of any quality. I also noticed that I had exiled us to the kind of neighborhood that looked as if it had been hit by one of those bombs that kill the people but leave property values intact. The only humans I ever saw were operating leaf blowers. This was in vivid contrast to Bungalow Land, where we always knew when the bars had closed from the sounds of alfresco fighting and retching.

On our first night in Ranchburger, I discovered that, even with all the I Love Lucy—era venetian blinds shut tight, our house still glowed like a bad nuclear rod. I turned to El Hubbo and asked, “What’s that?”

“I don’t know. The midnight sun?”

We peeked out. Crime lights blazed from tall poles beside our nervous neighbors’ houses, lighting the block up like a prison yard (this, in spite of the fact that the only crime that ever occurred on the street was when our Clinton, then Gore, then Kerry signs got stolen).

Ranchburger came to seem like a mistake. Behind her back, we started to see other houses. It’s not as if we didn’t try to make it work; we ripped up the speckled linoleum and put down tile the exact color of the fawns that capered through our yard. We battered down a wall, and the galley kitchen—named for the galley slaves who’d died in similar cramped conditions—opened into a space large enough for a counter that a grown man could lie down and make snow angels on. But the paint we slapped up was always in the neutral tones that realtors advise for maximum resale value, and the tile we covered the mammoth counter with came from the low end of the spectrum. Still, faithful Ranchburger never complained or even asked us to go into counseling with her.

Gradually, though, something changed. As the original owners on our block left, they were replaced by groovy young couples: designers, architects, music producers. Stylish individuals who had been to Italy, they immediately ripped out the déclassé Saint Augustine and replaced it with the sorts of grasses and ground covers that my old neighbors would have treated with Round-up. They painted the brick siding of their ranch houses goulash brown and Army-jeep-olive drab with kicky splashes of battleship gray. They chipped out Saltillo tile, stained and buffed the exposed concrete floors, threw in fiberglass and vinyl furniture, and invited us over for a highball. If only they’d added a Ping-Pong table and a meat freezer, they would have duplicated exactly the look my mother was going for with our garage when I was in high school. At any moment, I expected them to import a hi-fi, some swag lamps, and Chex Mix and have Hugh Hefner’s ultimate, cool daddy-o bachelor pad.

Overnight, property values began to skyrocket. Realtors specializing in mid-mod asked if we were interested in selling. Secret suitors were eyeing Ranchburger? Like the straying husband who finds out that the little missus is getting some on the side, I took a whole new look at our domicile. For the first time, I saw that Ranchburger, asking nothing in return, had given us everything. I needed to not feel trapped in a suburban neighborhood, and she gave us patio doors across the entire back side of the house that faced a greenbelt where squirrels, raccoons, armadillos, foxes, doves, blue jays, cardinals, waxwings, owls, and whip-poor-wills cavorted among cedars fuzzy with shaggy bark and towering live oaks twisted into exquisite bonsai shapes. Our son and his friends needed a house that wasn’t cherished, that they could colonize and slosh Big Red on, and Ranchburger offered herself without reservation. My husband needed to never eat a weed, and Ranchburger supplied an untendable thicket of scrub oak and herds of deer that would have gobbled AstroTurf.

Most of all, we needed to be lazy slobs, and Ranchburger has ended up enabling that too. All those Sputnik-inspired light fixtures and ancient venetian blinds—the stuff we were too out of it to update? They’re no longer signs of neglect. They’ve been transformed into highly sought-after “original architectural elements.” Magically, we’re no longer slipshod. We’re mid-mod!

Since we owe it all to you, Ranchburger, let me put it in terms you’ll understand: You’re a real gone chick, and we dig you the most. Ω

[Sarah Bird received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1973 and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. Bird was an editor and contributor for the no-longer-active Austin magazine Third Coast. She authored five romance novels under the name Tory Cates before publishing her 1986 comic novel Alamo House, set on frat row at a Texas university. Bird is the author of four other novels: Virgin of the Rodeo, The Boyfriend School, The Mommy Club, and most recently, How Perfect Is That (2008).

Copyright © 2009 Emmis Publishing

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Round Two In The Box

To read Skip Hollandsworth's original story on dogfighting in Texas, click here. During these dog days, the dogfighting story won't go away. Not only is White Boy Rob in the slammer, but the fugitive William David Townsend is in custody. The whereabouts of Townsend's dog, Bisexual: still unknown. If this is a (fair & balanced) assault on the genitalia, so be it.

[x TM]
Fight Club
By Skip Hollandsworth

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Since my story on the unprecedented Department of Public Safety’s undercover investigation into South Texas dogfighting was published in the magazine [Texas Monthly] this month (“Bringing Down the Dogmen”), there’s already been another major raid by federal authorities of dogfighters in five states, including Texas. You would think that, finally, law enforcement is getting control of the dogfighting subculture.

Not quite.

John Goodwin, the deputy manager of animal-fighting issues for the Humane Society of the United States, says that organized dogfighting is still increasing—he goes so far as to say that it’s reaching “epidemic proportions nationwide”—and he adds that it shows no sign of slowing down in Texas, which “has historically been a hub of organized dogfighting.”

The major problem is that most police agencies still ignore dogfighting largely because they have to go to a lot of work to get dogfighters arrested and convicted. And even when they do go to all that trouble, the dogfighters only go to prison for, at most, two years. I’ve already gotten letters from readers who are outraged that “White Boy Rob” Rogers, one of Texas’s top dogfighters, only got a one-year sentence. Actually, that wasn’t bad. It wasn’t until September 2007 that the Texas Legislature decided to make dogfighting a felony, instead of a misdemeanor where a dogfighter could get away with only paying a fine.

Belinda Smith, who supervised the DPS investigation, is chief of the animal cruelty section of the Harris County District Attorney’s office, the only DA’s office in Texas with an animal cruelty division. She’s got another felony prosecutor who works on animal cases and a full-time investigator. She’s also helped put together a Harris County “Pit Bull Task Force,” which teaches county law enforcement agencies how to spot pit bull dogfighters and what to do to get them arrested. She travels the state giving speeches about dogfighting. “We’re pushing officers to go look for cases,” Smith says. “We have a trainer who trains officers what to look for on a pit bull to see if he or she is a fighting pit bull, how to spot the kind of cars dogfighters use, and so on. And I lecture long and loud that even getting these guys behind bars for a year or two is noble thing to do.”

Other cities need to hear that lecture. Nili Asgharian, a member of the private, non-profit Dallas Animal Cruelty Alliance, says she has informed officials with the City of Dallas about a number of animal cruelty or dogfighting cases over the years, only to see little response. Her members watched a pit bull breeder in West Dallas for several months cruelly mistreating his dogs, no doubt getting them ready for fights. Despite the alliance’s complaints, all that the city did was advise the owner to put up a privacy fence. Smith admits that she would like to see the state make the felony dogfighting law tougher so she could put away dogfighters for ten years. (Predictably, a lot of letters I received from dog lovers suggested they get the death sentence.) “I’m going to do everything I can to push the legislature when it meets again to toughen our dogfighting statutes,” says Smith.

For now, however, Smith continues to fight the lonely fight, and it seems to be a losing one. There are still plenty of Texas pit bull Web sites selling pit bull training gear and advertising fighting dogs. Dogfighting continues to lure all sorts of men: the poor and the very rich, the prominent and the obscure, rural residents and urban dwellers.

By the way, if you read the magazine story, then you’ll remember the section about the attempts of the DPS agents to bring down William David Townsend, a dogman who is the lead suspect in the 2006 murder of another dogman, who had slipped away to Mexico with his top dogs to hide from law enforcement. Well, recently, after my story went to press, some bounty hunters caught up with Townsend and brought him back to Texas, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.

So far, he’s saying nothing about his dogfighting life—or about the murder of the other dogman. And he’s certainly not telling anyone where his famous fighting pit bull Bisexual is now living. “Whatever happens to Townsend, I have no doubt Bisexual will some day show up again on the dogfighting circuit,” one of the DPS officers told me. “Too many dogmen around Texas are willing to pay money just to get a look at her fight. That’s how rabid they are about this whole thing. I promise you, our investigation was just the tip of the iceberg.” Ω

[Skip Hollandsworth was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas and graduated with a B.A. in English from Texas Christian University. He has worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas, and he also has worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker. Since joining Texas Monthly in 1989, Hollandsworth has received several journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award, the national John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism, the City and Regional Magazine gold award for feature writing, the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry award for magazine writing, and the Charles Green award for outstanding magazine writing in Texas, given by the Headliners club of Austin. He has been a finalist four times for the National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and his work has been been included in such publications as Best American Crime Writing and Best American Magazine Writing.]

Copyright © 2009 Emmis Publishing

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