Lite + Brite: 33 Yuletide Austin Events 12/20

Hello, what’s up, and welcome to the Lite + Brite newsletter.

We’re taking next week off, so this here is a special double edition of the newsletter, full of two weeks of holiday events, from staged readings of Christmas plays to staged radiocasts of Christmas movies; from Viking Christmas to naughty Christmas; from site-specific reinterpretations of The Nutcracker to canine reinterpretations of The Nutcracker.

And of course New Years Eve! Below we’ve included a few NYE happenings that have already caught our eye, and we’ll be updating our website with more New Years events over the coming days, so please check back on that page. 

If you’ve got shopping left to do, check out our updated holiday markets calendar here. Though the bulk of the markets are behind us, there are a few good ones still coming up. If you want to give something thoughtful to a local friend, obviously we recommend the gift of a Lite + Brite Patreon subscription.

And if you want to give something thoughtful to your (potentially, hopefully) favorite Austin newsletter, then it would mean the world to us if you were to forward L+B on to a friend or even mention it on your social media. We do this newsletter because we love connecting local creatives with audiences who will appreciate their work. By sharing this newsletter with friends, you help to build more and more of these connections.

Our belief is that there should never be a site-specific Babysitters Club-themed puppet show struggling to find an audience in this town, and equally that there should never be an Austinite who wants to have a novel experience and doesn’t know how to find it. That belief guides everything we do. We don’t charge anyone to list their events in this newsletter, and we don’t charge anyone to read it. If you get value out of what we do—either because you’ve attended an event that we’ve listed, or you got an audience member who discovered your work through L+B, or you just love reading long newsletter intros—then we’ve what we came here to do. Thank you for being part of this community.

If you’re not already a subscriber to this newsletter and you want to be, click here. We do one newsletter a week, usually on Fridays, plus a bonus edition around the start of each month. If you enjoy this newsletter, please support us by contributing to our Patreon and by forwarding this email to your friends who enjoy things like listening to music and leaving the house sometimes.

Let’s do fun stuff!

—Leila + Brian
liteandbriteatx.com

OUR STUFF

The year is almost over, and both No Lights No Lycra and No Humans Allowed are done until 2025, so it’ll be a moment until we have something new to tell you about. In the meantime we’re feverishly working on our end of year best-of playlists for January’s monthly newsletter (spoiler: Fontaines d.c. made it into both of ours).

No Humans Allowed’s last 2024 show happened on Tuesday. For that edition Brian compiled all of his favorite OLD records he discovered in 2024, as he’s been doing the last few years. Stream Discoveries 2024 from the Kpiss archives for an hour of Mexican italo, new age hold music, deep madchester, cheeseball balearic, dance-crazed new beat, + sax-studded synthpop.

EVENTS WE’RE EYEING

Friday 12/20

  • Krampusnacht at Tiny Minotaur
    An evening mixing Germans, holidays, violence, quests, + potlucks
  • Wizard People, Dear Reader at Hyperreal Film Club
    Harry Potter w/ ridiculous overdubbed narration + live score
  • A Christmas Memory at Studio A
    Staged reading of a Truman Capote Xmas play
  • Movies, Bikes, and Art at Plaza Saltillo + Cloud Tree
    Ride bikes with a big group to a bike-themed movie screening
  • Shock Therapy at Elysium
    Elysium’s new shocking drag troupe takes on school book fairs
  • Night Cutss at 417 Robert Martinez
    DJs spinning italo, freestyle, hi-NRG, + other underground 80s subgenres
  • A Not So Silent Night at Jackalope
    A Christmas-themed variety show by Pride in Black ATX
  • The Watchmaker’s Song at the Neill-Cochran House Museum
    Immersive site-specific reinterpretation of the Nutcracker
  • Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue at the McCullough Theatre
    The Golden Girls somehow survived into 2024 so they could be in this comedic play
  • Viking Yuletide Celebration at Valkyrie Ranch
    Skalds sing the song of the Texas viking reenactment, mead, + vendors
  • The Muttcracker (Sweet!) at the Vortex
    An all-dog not-at-all-ballet production of the holiday favorite

Saturday 12/21

Sunday 12/22

Monday 12/23

Tuesday 12/24

  • Cookies and Cocoa at the Tigress
    Cookies-only potluck, boozy eggnog, + hot chocolate “o’plenty” 
  • Mazel Ball at Kitty Cohen’s
    Celebrate the start of Hanukkah w/DJ + free drink

Thursday 12/26

Friday 12/27

Saturday 12/28

Sunday 12/29

Tuesday 12/31

  • Le French Disko at Hotel San Jose (free)
    DJ spinning French synthpop + disco for nouveau year’s eve
  • New Years Eve Ball at Elysium ($25)
    Ring in the new year w/80s/90s/goth DJs, drag + burlesque
  • 1990s New Years Eve at Hotel Vegas ($40)
    Local musicians covering music by 90s indie + alt acts
  • Indigo All of Us at Indra’s Awarehouse ($55)
    Aerialists, UV body painting, photo booth, + plant elixirs
  • How Soon Is Now at the Equipment Room ($150)
    Mark NYE with 80s sounds on a sublime sound system
  • The Most Cake: Misfits Prom at Justine’s ($150)
    DJs, school photo booth, “Haute Cafeteria” dinner, + corsages

Thursday 1/2

No Humans Allowed 217
Discoveries 2024

This week on NHA we review some of our favorite records we “discovered” in 2024, meaning old records that were new to us. Full year in review of new stuff coming up later, but this is for all those old synth records we heard for the first time in the course of 2024 and wished we’d known for years.

Stream Discoveries 2024

Tracklist
Tim Carleton – Opus No. 1
The Farm – Groovy Train (club mix)
Facts & Fiction – Give Me the Night
Bonnie Tyler – Married Man (Lauren Murada Edit)
Mental Cube – So This Is Love
Techno 90 – Everybody Dancing (Smooth Compacto Edit)
Level 2 – Cool Boy (YPS Edit)
Muriel Dacq – Tropique (remix)
Intelligence Dept – Sleeping City
Blancmange – Lose Your Love
Emmanuel – Es Mi Mujer (Orion Agassi Edit)

No Humans Allowed is Brian Blackout’s award-winning, dodgy European news coverage receiving, weekly robots-themed radio show on internet station KPISS.fm. Machine vibes 4 machines. Songs for robots, androids, mandroids, cyborgs, AIs, cylons, skinjobs, roombas, wifi routers, smart devices, anything colored Bondi blue, and virtual assistants. Humans not required. Broadcasts live every Wednesday at 6pm CT on kpiss.fm, with over 200 episodes now streamable in the archives on topics like and Beach Simulations, Roomba dance parties, undersea adventures + Cyber Texas.

No Lights No Lycra ATX 176
w/Brian Blackout

Recorded live in the dark at 3rd Eye Meditation Lounge on December 11, 2024

Listen to NLNL ATX 176 on Mixcloud

Tracklist
Blue Gas – Shadows from Nowhere
Risqué – Starlight
Paladin – Third World
Sia – Cloud (Plastic Plates Remix)
White Town – Your Woman
Wild Nothing – Headlights on
Mayer Hawthorne – Designer Drug
Rod Stewart – Do Ya Think I’m Sexy
Crystal Water – 100% Pure Love
Duke Dumont – I Need U (100%) (Skreamix)
Sky Ferreira – Everything Is Embarrassing (Krystal Klear Remix)
Luke Million – Ice Ice Arnie (Cool Party)
Deee-Lite – Groove Is in the Heart
Confidence Man – Control
Miami Sound Machine – Rhythm Is Gonna Get You
Emmanuel – Es Mi Mujer (Orion Agassi Edit)
Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere (Psychedmagik Edit)
De Lux – Act of Defiance
Holy Ghost! – Hold on
LCD Soundsystem – Yeah (Crass Version)
The Dare – Perfume
The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers
Hot Hot Heat – Talk to Me, Dance with Me
MGMT – Kids
Eugene Tambourine – Blue Lagoon
Acos CoolKAs – Free Flight

PATREON THANKS

A huge thank-you to our Patreon subscribers Gino Scaramuzza, Qiu, Erica Speegle, Mitch Rudea, Jarrett Holtz, Thomas Refferson, Dale Markowitz, Jason & Luciana, Bones Malones, Amy Hayes, Katie Green, Christina Jue, Colleen MB, Lilly Ettinger, Lena Long, Amalia Litsa, Alexander Freed, Kristen Backor, Timon A., Kate Murray, and Amy Wilde. We’re deeply grateful for your support, which allows us to do things like “pay our Mailchimp fee” and “spend hours researching Austin events when technically we should be working.”

If you’d like to support us on Patreon and get access to exclusive member-only benefits, you may do so here.

SOCIALS

Recent weeks found us visiting the Sherwood Forest Zine Library, admiring the site-specific art at Creek Show, and exploring the city on Austin Studio Tour. Follow Lite + Brite on Instagram to keep up with our adventures. And come chat with us and the rest of the L+B community on our Discord server!

ABOUT US

How do we choose which events to feature?

Honestly, it’s pretty random. We might include anything in Austin that we, personally, would conceivably want to go to, generally excluding normal concerts, comedy shows, and movie showtimes because there are many other good resources for finding those. (We especially recommend Showlist for live music, The Darker Side of Austin for goth and metal stuff, Concept Animals’ ATX Art for You for gallery openings + artist talks, and the 60+ Weirdest Things in Austin for exactly what it sounds like). This list is by no means exhaustive; it’s just stuff that caught our eye this week. If you have an event that you want us to consider including, send it over.

Who are we?

We are Leila + Brian. We make this newsletter. We do our own events, most often No Lights No Lycra (which is on hiatus but will resume), + also BYOT, a party where we share very good YouTubes (here’s a playlist from the last one). We go very hard seeing bands at SxSW (here are playlists of our favorites from 2024). We once got called “local Austin couple” by KXAN. We do some other stuff here and there. We love going out to creative events in Austin, and we want you to join us. Visit us at liteandbriteatx.com, and support us on Patreon if you like what we do.

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK, CHAMPIONS

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