So much issue, so little time, so little space … The pull-out section this week is a guide to live music venues in Austin that I think is pretty cool. I haven’t really gotten a chance to read much of it yet, but Raoul assures me that his writers all really came through for him big-time, and I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product. Over the last 18 months or so, we’ve done a series of area guides, covering the major sections of central Austin: Downtown, the UT Area, the Eastside, South Central (that’s 78701, 78705, 78702, and 78704, for you number people), but this is the first one that covers a subject, rather than an area of town, in this kind of depth. We purport to cover — with maps and annotations and all — every place in Austin that has live music on any kind of regular basis. Sure, prove us wrong: Direct additions, corrections, comments, and insults care of this page, or to the e-mail link on the Web edition, which will be updated about as often as we get around to it…
Also in the pull-out is the first printed schedule of this year’s SXSW Music Festival — hot off the database, always a pleasure to wrestle into its first print edition, and, of course, special guests still to be announced. SXSW Film Fest is represented, too, with a listing of about half the movies that are on the full schedule…
In the Politics section, as if we didn’t have enough on our plate at the moment, we have the big honkin’ Mueller Airport redevelopment — potentially a brand-new city of 30,000 people, preparing to plop down into the middle of East Austin… And across town, because making a decision on one big development that’s trying to skirt S.O.S. isn’t challenging enough, the council has decided to look at revamping the whole ordinance itself. Stories by Mike Clark-Madison and Jenny Staff, respectively…
And there’s more, so much more; those are just the stories that were still being worked on when I started writing this. So, what’s my point here, you have a right to ask? I mean, a column is supposed to have a subject, right? A thesis, argument, and closing? But hey, I’m sorry, it’s late, that’s just not going to happen right now. What you see is what you get — just a bubbling swelter of Austin-ness that has apparently coalesced, at whatever time it is after midnight, into another issue of The Austin Chronicle.
As this issue was beingput together, we received word that our friend and colleague, Dewey Winburne, had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend; in Postmarks is a letter that was written in his memory by some of his friends in the interactive/multimedia community.
This article appears in February 19 • 1999 and February 19 • 1999 (Cover).