Page Two: Going to Bat

Right off, Hot Club of Cowtown is and has been an Austin band.

In last week's column, I wrote, "As I understand it, Hot Club of Cowtown ... [has] moved out of town." I had a source for that; I swear I did. After spending a number of hours looking through my papers both at the office and at home, I have yet to find it. I doubt that it popped fully formed on its own into my head, but even with a source, it is the kind of information that is easy to check, and I should have. I apologize to the band, to their supporters and fans, and to all our readers.

As a way of explanation (not justification or excuse): The process of writing is often a lot crazier and more intense than one would guess. When all is said and done, it ends up as words in sentences lined up neatly on a page. It reads as orderly; why would one suspect its creation to be anything and everything but? Instead, sometimes it is so far from orderly that describing it as "chaotic" is far more appropriate.

Writing often comes in bursts. Stopping to check or double-check something in the middle of such a burst stalls the whole process. Invariably, during the process of writing, I make numerous mental notes to myself to go back and check that fact, work on the wording of a sentence, or explain some point better.

Most of the time, over the course of drafts, these bases are covered. But sometimes there is a spectacular blind spot. Something that should be unavoidable gets overlooked.

In the very same column, I offered a partial index of Austin band coverage in four British music magazines. I wrote: "What follows is the most haphazard of indexes. It includes only four magazines and is limited to 2011 issues that I have on hand, which is about half of those that were published. Beyond arbitrary and not even close to comprehensive, this just seems like interesting information. ... The magazines I looked at were MOJO (four of seven issues), Q (three of seven), UNCUT (five of seven), and WORD (three of seven)."

Since I limited my list to issues published this year, a legitimate question would be: Since it is still the sixth month of 2011, how is that I had looked at seven issues of each of these monthly publications? Well, since for distribution reasons magazines often appear far ahead of their official publication dates, all the magazines had already published their July issues.

This all must seem relatively easy to organize, but because I kept rechecking each publication to make sure I hadn't missed anything, there were magazines everywhere. Given my general sloppiness, I kept putting 2010 issues into the 2011 stack only to sort them out again soon after I had put them back. In all of this, I missed that I did not have the July 2011 issue of Q. It says I looked at three of seven issues, while in actuality I looked at three of only six issues.

In that same column, I described "Finding Austin," a long piece by John Nova Lomax in the June 8 Houston Press, as a "full-body takedown on Austin."

Lomax responded in a blog post. It begins with a long description of what sounds like a fantastic and awe-inspiring visit to NASA's Mission Control in Houston.

It isn't until halfway through the post that his response to my response begins. There, he notes: "And Black's opening salvo on why Austin was, in fact, better than Houston, was a list of current Austin bands that have recently been mentioned in British music magazines."

First, I never did and never would claim that Austin is better than Houston; those kinds of comparisons seem meaningless. I was defending Austin, not championing it as king of the hill. In addition, the index of mentions of Austin bands in British music magazines was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with the timing of Lomax's article.

Smoothly but incredibly disingenuously, he continued, "I repeat – I come back from hanging out at Mission Control with freaking astronauts to a dick-swinging contest over trendy rock bands?"

While Lomax was taking in the marvels of the cosmos, in other words, appreciating the extraordinary genius of the human race at its finest, I apparently wanted to get into a spitting contest comparing one city to another. Get real. He had written 6,000-7,000 words comparing the cities, and I responded. I'm surprised he didn't go on to note how mundane my points were compared to the beauty of a sunrise or how the air smells after a spring rain.

In my early drafts of the column, the introduction to that section noted that I have spent varying amounts of time in different Texas cities and towns and had a pretty great time in all of them. Sure, I was always visiting friends, which I'm sure was a more important factor than the location, but, for example, I've had numerous adventures in Houston and am always up for going back there.

I love Austin, and given what I do for a living, I never even think about moving. Working on the Chronicle and South by Southwest while living in some other Texas city or some other state entirely is an idea not even worth entertaining. But that isn't because Austin is better than anywhere else. It is that, for me, Austin is the best and most logical place to be; I've had a great run here and enjoyed most of it. Actually, "enjoyed" is often an understatement. This is an autobiographical judgment, however, and by no means a qualitative one.

Different cities fit different people, and comparing them as though one is better than another is meaningless. It certainly was not my intention to claim any special status for Austin; I sought only to defend it against charges and accusations. Some of Lomax's complaints and points were right on target – this city is not nirvana, far from it – but I thought the way they were combined created an overall image of Austin and sense of the city that was way off.