Cover Story
Still Burnin’ Down the House
Salvage Vanguard Theater and the Rude Mechs party on
Zouzou
Zouzou 1934, NR, 92 min. Directed by Marc Allégret, Starring Josephine Baker, Jean Gabin. In the tradition of backstage musicals, this French film features Baker as a laundress who gets her chance to perform onstage and becomes an overnight sensation. But will she also be able to get the man she loves?
After a Fashion
Your Style Avatar goes back to his youth and gets all horny (and toady)
Phases and Stages
Yeah Yeah YeahsShow Your Bones (Interscope) What’s music without spine? Looser? Free from convention? In the case of Brooklyn’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs and their sophomore LP, Show Your Bones, it’s just lifeless. This isn’t the Karen O we’ve come to love. Remember O balancing riot grrrl and glam queen? This ain’t her, babe. Opening with…
Austin High Student’s Teenaged Killer Found Guilty
It took less than two hours Friday for a jury to find Manuel Cortez guilty of the murder of Woody Briseño, and another hour to sentence him to 99 years in prison
Tales That Must Be Told
RositaD: Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater Recalling aspects of the horridly exploitative media orgy surrounding Terri Schiavo’s passing, Rosita is proof that the United States isn’t the only country that tolerates the manipulation of individual suffering for political and religious talking points. In 2002, a 9-year-old Nicaraguan girl was allegedly raped by a neighbor on…
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
Based on the allegedly autobiographical short stories of alleged teen author J.T. Leroy, Asia Argento’s film describes a Gothic maelstrom of psychic and physical abuse.
TCB
TCB scales the Wall of Sound festival at Fort Worth’s Ridglea Theater
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
We have mo bananas today
Phases and Stages
Ghostface KillahFishscale (Def Jam) Street for Peruvian flake, Fishscale won’t freeze your face like a cocaine ice flow, but its fast, cheap high proves worth a snort or two. GFK’s fifth solo drop outside the Wu-Tang shogunate crystallizes fast disappearing lines – tight tracks, verses, production – plus skits, of which “Bad Mouth Kid” is…
Web-Washing at the HHS
U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services appears once again to be removing material from its Web site that doesn’t agree with conservatives
Tales That Must Be Told
APAGA Y VÁMONOS (SWITCH OFF and Go)D: Manel Mayol The Mapuche people of South America survived conquest by the Incas and the Spanish, as well as assimilation by the state of Chile. But will they survive construction of the Ralco hydroelectric power station? When ENDESA, a multinational company with roots in Spain, of all places,…
Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That!
A Beastie Boys concert as filmed by 50 giddy fans.
To Your Health
Burning tongue syndrome (glossopyrosis) discussed
Phases and Stages
T.I. King (Atlantic) “Respected from East to West like he was running the Mob,” T.I. ascends the throne of rap regality on his fourth LP. Consistent as it is tenacious, King’s effortless flow over top-grade beats comes courtesy of Mannie Fresh, Just Blaze, and DJ Toomp, and as the synth-laden “What You Know” has already…
Raich Still Fighting for Medi-Pot Rights
Medical marijuana patient – not to mention its fiercest advocate – Angel Raich, back in federal court
Tales That Must Be Told
Noticias Lejanas (News From Afar)D: Ricardo Benet; with David Aarón Estrada, Mayahuel del Monte, Martín Palomares, Gina Niret, Lucía Muñoz, Fernando Pérez Castro In this 2004 film, Mexico’s struggle between its urban and rural instincts is writ large in the lives of its protagonists. The plot is spare and ambling, yet colored with implications boundless…
Don’t Come Knocking
With its wonderful veteran cast, its heart on its sleeve, and a love for the landscape that suffuses its technique, Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders’ movie is a peculiar but rewarding escape.
Payback as Comeback
The Rude Mechs boost a resurgence with ‘REVENGE!’
Day Trips
Kayakers of all experience levels will enjoy a pleasant float down the Luling Zedler Mill Paddling Trail
Phases and Stages
Anouar Brahem Le Voyage de Sahar (ECM) Charles Lloyd Sangam (ECM) ECM has no use for ethnic categories, national boundaries, et cetera. Contrasting the new millennium’s prevailing political winds, different social elements can not only live together, they can thrive together. Spain’s Al-Åndalus era from 1,000 years ago is a perfect example. Different faiths lived…
Michael Clark Autopsy Update
Taser effects expert and former San Diego Co., Calif., EMS medical director concludes Clark was killed as a result of intravascular sickling caused by overexertion tied to drug use – a conclusion that closely mirrors that of Travis Co. Deputy Medical Examiner Elizabeth Peacock.
Tales That Must Be Told
En la cama (In Bed)D: Matías Bize; with Blanca Lewin, Gonzalo Valenzuela A simple-minded viewer might call En la Cama soft-core porn, but it’s not. The film opens with blurred humping bodies and no dialogue, save for moans and heavy breathing. Minutes into the opening credits, we begin to see breasts and thighs and a…
Music From the Inside Out
Documentary filmmaker Daniel Anker spent five years with the Philadelphia Orchestra as they toured, rehearsed, and waxed poetic about the purpose of music in their lives.
Drive, He Said
In its 13th year, Jason Neulander shifts Salvage Vanguard Theater into overdrive
Soccer Watch
The U.S. Men tie Jamaica, will announce their WC roster on May 2, and more
Phases and Stages
Piano albums are as perennial as 68-year-old ivory harvester Andrew Hill. Returning to Blue Note with another personal landmark, Time Lines, Hill possesses a unique musical vision that at this stage in his career remains unmatched. Both his compositional finesse and playing are masterfully idiosyncratic and highly sophisticated. Rejoining Hill is veteran trumpeter Charles Tolliver,…
Immigration Storm Reaches Hurricane Strength
10,000 protesters crowd Austin’s streets in support of immigrant rights
Tales That Must Be Told
A CIDADE DAS MULHERES (city of women)D: Lázaro Faria This terrifically engaging documentary begins with Ruth Landes’ anthropological case study of the Candomblé religion in Afro-Brazilian society, published in 1947’s City of Women. Landes seems to have fallen in love with the Candomblé sect, whose matrilinear, egalitarian culture is quite like no other place on…
Summer Storm
German film is a trite tale of youthful angst and closeted sexual confusion about what really happens at those wild and crazy rowing camps that keep all of Bavaria abuzz.
The Floating Chair
‘The Floating Chair,’ an exhibit at Design Within Reach, shows how the area’s finest industrial designers bring so much to the table
The Common Law
Car rentals – Do I need the extra auto insurance?
Phases and Stages
Betty LaVette’s long-orphaned Child of the Seventies frolics where last year’s tepid comeback I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise varnished. Rhino Handmade’s precious Internet edition should be in every record store iPod from here to Oz, but such has been the 60-year-old Michigan native’s unpaved yellow brick road. Martha, Aretha, Tina – LaVette aches,…
Carole to the Rescue? Yeah, Right
Carole Keeton Strayhorn’s campaign is floating a promise of quick cash, albeit only for the next month.
Tales That Must Be Told
Everyone Their Grain of Sand D: Beth Bird Maclovio Rojas is a destitute Mexican border town threatened by the absence of running water, a state-funded school system, and leadership. Not that the townspeople aren’t trying to rectify these shortcomings; they’re just running into a wall of apathetic bureaucracy and greed. Over three years, Bird chronicled…
Arts and the Economy
A new study shows that Austin’s cultural sector contributes over $2.2 billion to the local economy and is responsible for close to 44,000 permanent jobs
Simple, Straightforward, and Satisfying
A legendary restaurateur’s latest venture is another success
Clouded Prospects
Lege special session opens with glowing rhetoric, uncertain goals
Naked City
TCEQ can’t agree on punishing profitable polluters
Tales That Must Be Told
De Nadie (No One)D: Tin Dirdamal With the problems associated with America’s southern borders grabbing an inordinate amount of headline acreage as of late, the plight of immigrants from such Central American countries as Honduras traveling north through Mexico to reach America has been almost completely overlooked here in the States and elsewhere, to devastating…
Zachary Scott Theatre Center
The National Endowment for the Arts is giving the Zachary Scott Theatre Center $40,000 toward a production of ‘Porgy and Bess’ to be staged in 2007
Food-o-File
At the Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival
The Perry-Sharp Plan
Smokers and businesses will bear the tax brunt
Prosecutor Owns Up to Going After Innocent Man
Former San Antonio DA acknowledges he sent innocent man to death chamber
‘State vs. Reed’ Gaining Steam: Pair’s First Doc Becoming the Story
Local pair’s first doc becoming the story
Blanton Museum of Art
The Blanton Museum of Art’s new education and visitors pavilion has just acquired a name, thanks to a $4.5 million gift from Houston businessman Edgar A. Smith
Mini-Review
Nice and wholesome never tasted so good
Run-off Roundup
Democrats and Republicans finalize their November slates
Point Austin: Low Expectations
Not much reason to believe that the Lege will do right by Texas students
Questions, Prepares to Launch
Paramount screening, April 18
Arts Review
The Salvage Vanguard Theater world premiere of Ryan Pavelchik’s ‘Static’ seats 12 viewers in a hotel room with a man desperately seeking to find himself
Mini-Review
A cookbook couple who has mastered the form doesn’t disappoint with their tour of the subcontinent
Run-off Roundup
In round one of the Democratic primary, the race to choose a likely sacrificial lamb to Republican incumbent Michael McCaul was a rural vs. urban battle – former NASA bureaucrat Ted Ankrum of Cypress took Travis and Harris Counties, and Austin poet and publisher Paul Foreman dominated five of the district’s six rural counties. In…
Beside The Point
Mueller neighbors aren’t against a new water tower, they just want a better-looking one.
TV Eye
Stealing ideas
Arts Review
Director Don Toner serves his Austin Playhouse revival of The Odd Couple well by turning its wonderful characters over to wonderful character actors
Crackin’ Up
The Arm muscles up to ‘Call You Out’
Run-off Roundup
Freshman Democratic Rep. Mark Strama had right-wing millionaire James Leininger on his mind Wednesday morning, the day after drawing Republican Jeff Fleece as his November challenger for the HD 50 seat. Fleece, a rookie candidate with little history in the Republican Party, knocked GOP rival Don Zimmerman out of the running in Tuesday’s run-off election,…
The Hightower Report
Stealing Local Democratic Authority; and Grounding Our High-Flying Congress
In Space
The meme machine
Arts Review
Learning From Local Artists Texas French Bread Bakery, 1700 S. Congress, through April 28 Benné Rockett’s art class at the Dougherty Art School Creativity Club is gifted with an instructor who has an unusual degree of knowledge and connectedness in her field. The artist and Chronicle contributor and two other artists, Lance Letscher and this…
The Arm Reviewed
The ArmCall You Out (Indierect) Eighties post-punk revivalism is now in the process of eating itself, but the Arm’s second album skirts that stylistic straitjacket with the darting determinism of an apocalyptic cockroach. The band’s kinetic call-and-response instrumentation connects the dots between 1979 Manchester and 1989 Washington, D.C., while singing organist Sean O’Neal rails against…
Run-off Roundup
The female factor may be Bill Welch’s biggest headache as the newly tapped Republican nominee enters the final round for the House District 47 seat. He’s been down this road before, without much luck. Welch handily beat GOP run-off rival Alex Castano Tuesday with 55% of the vote, while his new opponent – Democrat Valinda…
Tales That Must Be Told
Previewing the ninth Cine Las Americas
DVD Watch
The Best Thief in the World Showtime Entertainment, $26.99 The thefts Izzy (Michael Silverman) commits when he breaks into his neighbors’ apartments are hardly worth speaking of – when he bothers to steal anything at all. “What’s the most disturbing thing you could ever come home to?” he asks a friend as they peruse his…
Readings
Family and Other Accidentsby Shari Goldhagen Doubleday, 272 pp., $23.95 (simultaneous paper release: $14) Shari Goldhagen’s Family and Other Accidents is a book about people who don’t share their feelings, and while there’s something depressingly realistic about them in that regard, they still never quite feel real. The story begins two years after the deaths…
Phases and Stages
Elvis Costello & the Austin Symphony OrchestraBass Concert Hall, April 11 Rock & roll, the currency of eternal youth, queues up fashionably late by design. It can’t and won’t be held in check. Which is why UT’s grand sitting room of classical acoustics was still half-empty at 8:02pm when Elvis Costello strode briskly onstage to…
Run-off Roundup
With just under 2% voter turnout statewide, incumbent Judge Charles Holcomb seized a solid majority, edging out challenger Terry Keel to win the Republican run-off for Place 6 on the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal appellate court. If Holcomb, 72, wins a second term in November he’ll have to vacate his seat…
Tales That Must Be Told
Hasta El Último Trago … Corazón! (Until the Last Drink … Heart!)D: Beto Gómez In celebrating the labyrinthine identity of Mexican women and their music, Gómez lovingly interviews the singers Chayito Valdez, Chavela Vargas, Lila Downs, Eugenia León, Astrid Hadad, La Negra Graciana, and Iraida Noriega. Representing widely ranging backgrounds, generations, and musical styles, each…
The Benchwarmers
Another comedy from ex-SNLers, along with Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Heder and baseball’s Reggie Jackson.
Readings
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monsterby Bobby Henderson Villard, 165 pp., $13.95 (paper) You’ve heard the one about the Kansas City School Board deciding whether to teach intelligent design alongside evolution in their science classes, right? It was no joke: This actually happened, last year. Where the joke came in was when Bobby Henderson,…
Phases and Stages
Drive-by TruckersA Blessing and a Curse (New West) After three albums that brought Faulknerian depth and America Undercover realism to hardscrabble Southern rock, the Drive-by Truckers downshift somewhat on this seventh effort. Blessing lodges in the mold-ridden nooks and crannies between the broad strokes of Southern Rock Opera, Decoration Day, and The Dirty South. After…
Run-off Roundup
The Christian jihadists have solidified their control of the State Board of Education, led by their financial leader, San Antonio millionaire James Leininger. Conservative incumbent Dan Montgomery just wasn’t conservative enough for District 5, which comprises southern Travis Co., northern San Antonio, a good chunk of the Hill Country, and most of Bell Co. Former…
Tales That Must Be Told
WhiskyD: Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll; with Andrés Pazos, Mirella Pascual, Jorge Bolani The co-writers and directors of the well-received Uruguayan comedy 25 Watts are back with their sophomore effort, a slyly droll film that’s best served straight with no chaser. In a manner that owes no small debt to the films of Jim Jarmusch…
Phat Girlz
Comedian Mo’Nique’s first starring film vehicle, Phat Girlz, suffers from a bad case of undernourishment.
Page Two: The Politics of Distraction
In the face of failure at home and abroad, the right turns on immigrants
Phases and Stages
Calexico Garden Ruin (Quarterstick) Calexico’s most political album is also their most populist. The seventh release from this Tucson-based collective, guided by multi-instrumentalists Joey Burns and John Convertino, pulls back on the twangy mariachi and Southwest gypsy of 2004’s Convict Pool EP in favor of more pop, more rock, and more major keys. While Calexico…
Run-off Roundup
(Races of Austin-area interest) DEMOCRAT Statewide Turnout (based on Senate race): 207,450 (1.63% of registered voters) STATEWIDE TRAVIS CO. U.S. Senator Gene Kelly 83,398 40.20% 640 7.84% Barbara Ann Radnofsky 124,052 59.80% 7,520 92.16% U.S. Representative District 10 Ted Ankrum 2,607 70.80% 1,779 68.61% Paul Foreman 1,075 29.20% 814 31.39% Lieutenant Governor Maria Luisa Alvarado…
Tales That Must Be Told
Muxes: Auténticas, intrépidas y buscadoras de peligro (MuXes: Authentic, Intrepid Seekers of Danger)D: Alejandra Islas Perhaps mistitled to sound like a documentary on extreme sports, Muxes swings in a different direction. In the region near Oaxaca in Southern Mexico, muxe is a term to describe a “third gender”: those who are or were men but…
The Wild
Despite its title, Disney’s new animated film, The Wild, is about as pedestrian as you can get.
Letters at 3AM: Effete!
It’s never too late to see yourself as you are
Phases and Stages
the Fiery FurnacesBitter Tea (Fat Possum) The Fiery Furnaces have changed, and it’s not you, it’s them. So prepare yourself, because Bitter Tea isn’t – deep breath now – Blueberry Boat, and we can most likely just stop hoping for another one. Instead, the Brooklyn-based sibling duo continues its experimentation with electronics; anyone turned off…
Naked City
Quote of the Week”Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos” – Rallying cry of Monday’s pro-immigration protesters. (“Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”) Headlines Millions of people marched, demonstrated, and rallied across the country over the weekend and on Monday, April 10, in support of immigrants and in opposition to the draconian anti-immigrant legislation recently passed by the…
La Mujer de Mi Hermano
Soap melodramatics masquerade as high art in this south-of-the-border drama about a love triangle and marital infidelity.
Luv Doc Recommends: 13th Annual Austin Reggae Festival
Easter: The Sybil of holidays. Do you celebrate the pastel color-schemed ode to the ovum, the fuzzy chicked, furry bunnied festival of rebirth? Or, do you observe the more macabre offering of the resurrection of Christ, which happily though it may end, is a gauntlet so bloody and violent that it just barely makes eternal…
