WONKETTE Visits Austin

Ana Marie Cox is in Austin this week to give the keynote address (actually an interview) for the 2005 South By Southwest Film/Music Festival taking place all over Austin this week. She gave a fast-paced, 45 minute interview with Evan Smith, dipshit editor of TEXAS MONTHLY and host of arguably the most tedious locally-produced PBS interview program ever. The photo below is one I snapped just before she took her seat onstage:

Wonkette

In case anyone asks: there isn't a single photo of Ana Marie online that does justice to her beauty. A redhead with very pale skin (photos of her I've seen online make her look like a grownup Billy Mumy), she's short (I passed her in the hallway on my way to the interview and mistook her for just another pretty 22 year old Texas girl) and (apologizing in advance) has a killer body.

Here's a sampling of the audience:

Waiting for Wonkette

You can't tell from the pictures but there were a lot of guys standing in the back in raincoats nervously waiting for Wonkette to discuss ass-fucking, a pasttime referred to with alacrity on her website.

Cherchez La Femme

Hey, who let Jeff Gannon in here? Man, that guy's nervy!

One of the most startling pieces of info to come out of this interview is Wonkette's revelation that she attended the University of Texas in Austin for a year in the 1990's; and since her father once was a professor there also, she's not new to the area. She briefly flashed the UT "Hook 'em!" hand thing--which, in case you're reading this in Kazakhstan, means that you fold in your middle and ring fingers and hold them down with your opposeable thumb and flash the remaining two fingers--which my camera caught, sort of:

Trying to shake off her ring

TEXAS MONTHLY editor Evan Smith, as I mentioned earlier, appears regularly on KLRU, Austin's PBS franchise with his own interview show. Evidently his questions to Ana Marie were designed not to shed new light on blogging or Ana Marie or ass fucking or blogs vs journalism (see my next post); instead he asked questions everyone in attendance already pretty much knew the answers to. In short, why the fuck was this guy allowed to waste our time?

Evan Smith can't stare me down

She did speak pretty fast; so fast that I thought she was just nervous. Evan Smith was in a rush himself, for that matter. She was articulate, though.

Ana Marie says her own persona is not the same as Wonkette's: Wonkette's is a lot meaner, for one thing. And ass-fucking is not a big part of her life; "Just ask my husband," she told us before leaving.

She admitted to voting for Kerry in 2004; for Nader in 2000. Responding to a chorus of groans from the audience, she added defensively, "I voted in Washington, D.C.! A vote for Nader there didn't mean a thing!" (I'm paraphrasing.)

Smith told the assembled (twice) that there was very little biographical material on her on the internet; she added that she hoped to keep it that way. He said her husband wrote for New York Magazine, a fact most of us had long since googled for our personal stalker profiles.

I asked one of the last two questions so I could get her to turn around in her chair for a change. She listened very closely to me with a big smile; and except for Evan Smith's immediate recap of my question so the rest of the assembled could hear my brilliant query--during which she momentarily turned away from me--she looked right into my lovesick eyes and answered me. I'm so glad I hadn't spoiled the moment with some useless and crippling question about ass-fucking.

As you can see from the photo below, I was seated in the second row--near the bathrooms, for God's sake! People with laptops were fucking everywhere--the whole convention center was like a prison riot for Dell employees. When Ana Marie described her day as beginning with her rolling over to the edge of her bed and opening her Apple laptop with its 12-inch screen, the woman in front of me (pictured with her own Apple laptop below) turned and smiled prettily to her "mate" (I forgot to look for a ring), as if to say "Like me, honey!" It was a missed Kodak moment.

But an as yet unidentified minority female and I did catch her reading today's Wonkette online while Ana Marie was talking, though. That was an opportunity for ironic photojournalism I couldn't afford to waste.

What googling "ass-fucking" gets you