Alli en Laredo (Rene y Rene)

Recently, I spent the better half of an afternoon going over my father's LP records. His eclectic tastes range from your standard Tin Tan and Pedro Infante material to The Platters, Los Hooligans and Ray Coniff.

When I was a child, I always knew when he had drank one too many cold Shlitz's because he would get home and slam his vintage records on our Sears brand turntable and crank the volume up loud enough to scare away his buzz. On nights when he was really loaded, "Smoke gets in your Eyes" by the Platters, was his song of choice.

On other nights, especially on payday Fridays, he would spin  Los Apson Records and drink Miller HighLife, leaving behind Schltiz for days of despair. My dad was an elitist. I especially liked Los Apson because they played some sweet rock and roll covers, my favorite being their take of "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones.

But it was on mellow nights, after coming home from a Texas Ranger's win, that he would play Rene y Rene. He spoke endlessly about them so much, that I used to think he was traveling with them as a groupie or something.  That was sometime in the late 80s, in days so far and long ago that my mother still made flour tortillas by hand (damn you Sandy's!).

So it was, several days ago that I came across an old LP of Rene y Rene and spun it on my Technics turntable and heard that music from long ago, that music from cold,rainy Dallas winters, when my childhood home smelled of freshly made flour tortillas and my half-finished homework was spread across the table.

It's strange how a simple song can take you traveling through time, like a musical Marty McFly DeLorean, complete with enough nostalgic images to fulfill a Ken Burns documentary.

So I leave you with this song off a classic Rene y Rene record. I transferred it from LP to Mp3 myself, so pardon me for the bad quality. I dedicate this one for the good times, the un-finished homework from my 5th grade year, the sweetness of 1989 and my father's  warm, un-drank Schlitz beer still sitting upon that old Sears turntable lost somewhere in time.

1989 sucked horror movie cotton balls.

Zeigenbock Beer can make you have some loud discussions. And if the topic is good, people can get a bit riled up. Case in point is a discussion I had with some dude the other day on horror movies of 1989. Besides Pet Cemetary, the whole year sucked fat chocolate cake in a dismal sequel-filled cesspool of crap-ola. You have terrible sequels like the Fly 2 (ouch), Halloween 5 (barf) and Friday the 13 pt. 8 (stay away at all costs). Morover, crappy sequels continued like Nightmare on Elm St 5, Silent Night Deadly Night 5, and the totally innane Sleepaway Camp 3. I like cheessy-campy, over the top, what the hell-horror movies, but 1989 was just freakning bad (bad bad, not bad good). Plot and logic were never strenghts of these films, but in 1989, they threw all that out the window.

I tried to talk some sense with this person that I was having this discussion, but after a while I could sense he was getting personally offended so I dropped it and we started to talk about VHS collections and video stores. Then and there I realized that we no longer have any locally-owned-mom and pop videos stores left in Laredo. The only stores left are large corporations and conglomorates: soul-less stores with terrible selections. I think the only store left is West Coast Video over on Guadalupe, but other that that, the chains have taken over.

1989 did suck. No, wait a minute, it freaking ruled, but the horror movies did bite. In the end, the lesson learned was that life's difficult mysterious can be unraveled after a couple of Ziegenbocks. You can quote me on that, too.