Cookie’s Fortune
This honeysuckle-flavored comedy scripted by Anne Rapp is as sweet and refreshing as anything Altman’s ever done.
Dancemaker
Dancemaker 1998, NR, 98 min. Directed by Matthew Diamond, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . At once a testimony to the necessity of modern dance and a love letter to the men and women who make it, Diamond’s absorbing documentary about choreographer Paul Taylor is, most importantly, an intricate and delicately hued portrait…
Goodbye Lover
Goodbye Lover 1999, R, 104 min. Directed by Roland Joffé, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Ellen DeGeneres, Don Johnson, Mary-Louise Parker, Ray McKinnon, Alex Rocco, Andre Gregory. From a story by Austin Heart of Film Festival winner Ron Peer (the final film is credited to Peer, Joel Cohen, and…
Life
Life 1999, R, 108 min. Directed by Ted Demme, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Anthony Anderson, Rick James, Bokeem Woodbine, Clarence Williams III, Miguel A. Nunez Jr., Bernie Mac, Ned Beatty, Nick Cassavetes, Obba Babatundé, Michael “Bear” Taliferro, Lisa Nicole Carson. This odd mixture of comedy and prison drama…
The Mirror
The Mirror 1997, NR, 95 min. Directed by Jafar Panahi, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring T. Samadpour, N. Omoumi, M. Shirad, R. Mojhedi, Mina Mohammad-Khani. A young Iranian girl, who has one arm in a cast and the other toting a bulky book bag, waits outside her school for her mother to come…
Six Ways to Sunday
Six Ways to Sunday 1999, R, 96 min. Directed by Adam Bernstein, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Isaac Hayes, Jerry Adler, Elina Lowehsohn, Peter Appel, Adrien Brody, Deborah Harry, Norman Reedus. A coming-of-age mob tale with a uniquely warped take on the traditions of the genre, Six Ways to Sunday (which played Austin…
Twin Dragons
Twin Dragons 1992, PG-13, 89 min. Directed by Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Maggie Cheung, Jackie Chan. Twin Dragons, made seven years ago to raise money for the Hong Kong Director’s Guild, is now being hustled onto the revival circuit to catch the tail-draft of last year’s mega-successful Rush…
Personal Effects
illustration by Jason Stout Grab a New York TimesBook Review and you may notice it regularly features at least three or four reviews of personal memoirs. Talk to your favorite aspiring writer and, instead of a screenplay, she’ll probably tell you she’s working on a memoir. Within the last 10 years, personal memoirs have evolved…
All About Guitars
(l-r): Julian Capps, James Adkisson, Mike Sherrill, and Reese Beeman photograph by Bruce Dye Listen to the black birds in your front yard this morning. There are two of them in the tree, calling and responding to each other and to distant, unseen birds. They buzz and build tension, puffing themselves up then letting out…
Cine las Am�ricas Schedule
All screenings are at the Dobie Theatre. All feature films are screened in English, Spanish, or Portuguese with English subtitles. Advance tickets may be purchased in blocks of 10 for $50. Festival passes, good for 10 films, are also $50. General admission is $5.50. For more information, call 416-0986. FRI, APR 16 4:30pmStudent Shorts–I (VHS)…
Off The Bookshelf
The Things We Do to Make It Home by Beverly Gologorksy Random House, $22.95 hard How often do we hear the accounts of wives, sisters, and daughters of Vietnam veterans? In The Things We Do To Make It Home: A Novel, Beverly Gologorsky explores the endurance of a handful of women who attempt to reconstruct…
Dancing About Architecture
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. So once sang Joan Jett, no stranger to the Electric Lounge and 1,000 other clubs like it, each a dirty, noisy hole carved out of a corner somewhere for people who liked dirty, noisy music. There they would assemble and forget the boring school, job, or…
Great Scott!
When you look back over your life to date, and arrive back at the present, you think of all the decisions you made, the impulses you followed, the advice you did or did not take, and maybe most importantly, all the many people along the way you worked with, collaborating in whatever way while the…
Austin International Poetry Festival
Seven years. In entertainment terms, especially in Austin, anything reaching that milestone should move into the institution category. The seventh annual Austin International Poetry Festival, which takes place this week, follows a deceptively simple formula: Get as many poets into town as possible and let them read. Over the years, the formula’s been streamlined and…
Spontaneous Composition
(l-r): Craig Chin, Monte McCarter, Travis Hartnett photograph by John Davis At best, a band’s first gig can be a little shaky. Given that there are innumerable factors at work — personalities, timing, performance anxiety — plenty of things can go wrong. For some, an inaugural gig can be much worse: a comedy-of-errors marriage between…
Scanlines
aka Code Name: Trixie D: George Romero (1973) with Lane Carroll, Harold Wayne Jones, W.G. MacMillan, Lynn Lowry. Accidentally, the Army releases the product of its ongoing biological warfare experiments on a small Pennsylvania town. Soon, much of the community is affected by a virulent hallucinogen; in effect, three-quarters of the town is tripping, only…
Postscripts
At the Texas Institute of Letters’ 63rd Annual Awards Banquet last Saturday night, Don Graham, off-the-cuff scholar, TIL president, UT professor, and emcee, said, “I like the sound of ‘president'” in his opening remarks. He also saidthat he likes the “trappings of power” associated with his position. Anytime Don Graham makes remarks like these, he’s…
Live Shots
Guy Clark brought his “Old Blue Shirt” and Jerry Douglas for good measure to the Old Settler’s Music Festival, April 10 photograph by John Carrico JEFF BECK The Backyard, April 9 In addition to classic rockers, fusion freaks, and guitarheads, Jeff Beck’s audience teemed with local music illuminati, such as Eric Johnson, David Grissom, and…
Short Cuts
Robert Altman’s new film Cookie’s Fortune has been opening around the country to some of the most universally positive reviews received by any of his films in quite some time. (See this week’s “Film Listings” section for one more.) Gone, note most of the reviewers, is Altman’s usually dyspeptic stance toward his characters as they…
About AIDS
If your rich uncle offered to add $2 to your investment portfolio for each $1 that you put in, don’t you think it would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity? Yet that’s what the Texas Legislature is about to do. They’re walking away from $14 million in federal Ryan White Act funds…
Sleep Walk
Bill Elm photograph by John Carrico Maybe it was the mirror ball hanging from the Continental Club ceiling, and the way the light reflected off of it — glittering, sparkling, turning the already mood-lit South Congress nightspot into an undersea grotto. The tables in the front half of the club were full, the seats along…
Country Variety
This Sunday’s All-Star Tribute to Johnny Cash brings the music legend back in black. Remember the scene inCity Slickers in which Phil (Daniel Stern) reminisces with his buddies (Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby) about his dad? In that scene, he says he and his dad could never talk without butting heads, but once they started…
Coach’s Corner
The prosperous local attorney and best man instructed me to be at a popular local eatery at eight. I consumed an old cheese-burger before I left home, figuring the bachelor party would form up and quickly move on to … it never occurred to me that two hours later we’d still be sitting at the…
Friends of Dean Martinez
Atardecer (Knitting Factory) We humans are small and insignificant. To experience the sickening thrill of this knowledge, take a drive through Arizona’s Painted Desert, exiting between Winslow and Two Guns down the six-mile stretch that ends at Barringer Meteorite Crater. As if you need to feel any tinier in the achingly vast, lonely desert, here’s…
Build It, They Will Run
all photographs by John Anderson Track & field, at its best, is like a big three-ring circus. Down on the track, races are going on. In another part of the stadium, someone is jumping, and in the middle of the field, other athletes are throwing. It can make you dizzy trying to keep up. However,…
Day Trips
Come for the view, stay for the tranquility. photograph by Gerald E. McLoud Among the 123 state parks scattered across Texas, Blanco State Park has a mystic feeling all its own. Fifty miles southwest of downtown Austin, the park is on the Blanco River four blocks south of the historic courthouse square. “What makes Blanco…
On The Lege
Owners of industrial facilities operating under old air quality laws are breathing a little easier after a vote in the Senate that allows those plants to reduce the amount of pollution they generate — voluntarily, and only to decade-old standards. According to figures compiled by Public Citizen, industrial plants in Texas emit some 2.48 million…
Shagadelic, Baby!
No, no, no, wrong guy. The man for whom Mike A. Myers Stadium & Soccer Field is named is no International Man of Mystery. He’s just a typical UT donor — some old white guy with a lot of bucks. This Mike Myers lives in Dallas, is 62 years old, and a developer of swank…
Page Two
Austin has an amazing film community, as impressive in ways as its legendary music community. One of the differences is the history: Looking back two decades or more, Austin had a great music scene. Yet as little as 10 years ago, Austin’s film scene (apart from its screenwriting community) was hardly of note. What changed…
Benign Growth?
Speaking of grandfathering, the political times couldn’t be more right for a project like the Forum, as the city is eager to present itself to the Legislature as a cooperative player in the management of inevitable population growth and development. At stake is the content of the legislation that will be written to replace the…
Futura
Live 3.11.99 (Stereosonic) Like a strobelight, the oscillating trip-hop beat programmed throughout this four-song, 54-minute live set provides a rhythmic backdrop against which Futura’s improvised soundscaping contrasts even as it falls into perfect sync. Pulsing wave after wave after wave of shimmering, chiming, otherworldly Robert Frippian guitar, Travis Hartnett’s six-string sorcery weaves in and around…
Public Notice
Also on tap for Earth Day is the Earth Day Celebration proper at Waterloo Park, Sat, Apr 17, 10am-7pm. Clean AiRewards is a sneaky incentive program to get you to buy eco-friendly junk — oh, excuse us, we mean Green Products. The program is working with local eco-friendly merchants to offer eco-friendly discount coupons for…
Endorsements
Place 1: Daryl Slusher Place 3: Jackie Goodman Place 4: Beverly Griffith Vote. At its heart, that is our simple endorsement. It is your right and your responsibility. Every election we have determines our future. There is no time off for consistent behavior. Vote. We are going into a City Council election that seems a…
Articulations
When John Bustin died last April following a battle with cancer, the friends and colleagues of this longtime arts writer and critic made much of the astonishing span of his career. Stretching across a half-century, it took Bustin from writing about jazz and the big bands in the post-war pages of The Daily Texan and…
Apocalypse Now and Again
illustration by Jason Stout In a time of war, all words are wet with blood, even the commonest greetings, even “Please pass the salt.” Because our wages paid for the weapons, our votes elected the leaders, our needs are being interpreted as “the national interest,” our morality is being invoked as a reason to kill.…
Radio Waves
The San Antonio Current, the Alamo City’s alternative weekly, recently reprinted the March 19 “Media Clips” segment on the white supremacist programming at KJFK. Our colleagues to the south were interested in it because the Current was recently purchased by the same company that owns KJFK — Times-Shamrock of Scranton, Pennsylvania. I wonder what that…
Mr Smartypants
Arkansas is the toothpick state. According to one insider, the ashes of the late Justice Harry Blackmun made their way to his funeral service in a blue VW bug. Police initially tried to remove the vehicle from the procession. Big band leader Sammy Kaye was originally a civil engineer. The neolithic tombs/temples/ritual structures at Bru…
Food-o-File
The local food and wine community has spread out around the globe in the past few weeks. Satay owner Foo Swasdee just returned from a culinary research expedition to her native Thailand with her potential co-author, former Chronicle food editor Robb Walsh … A large contingent of Austinites attended the Vinitaly International Wine Expo, which…
Naked City
What if they gave a charrette, and nobody knew about it? … If you missed Tuesday and Wednesday’s little-publicized design workshops on the future of Town Lake Park, there’s still time to catch today’s sessions, noon-5pm and 6:30-8:30pm at Palmer Auditorium. Parks advocates say they’re trying to prevent an asphalt and granite-laden Convention Center South…
Those Crazy Kids Will Do Anything …
One Hit Wonder photograph by John Anderson KING OF THE HILL Paramount Theatre, Monday, April 5 Austin was probably the first city to really get this Mike Judge/Greg Daniels show — certainly Fox was wondering what their viewers outside the Lone Star State would think. Now, more than two years later, Hank Hill and his…
Down-Home for His Hometown
photograph by John Anderson Hoover Alexander is a man who counts his blessings. When the busy chef/restaurateur has time to stop and think about the things he’s thankful for, he counts his mother Dorothy’s quality home cooking, the good friendships that he’s nurtured over more than 25 years of cooking in local restaurants, and his…
No Green Acres
Texas is known for its historical landmarks, yet many of the treasures are in danger of turning to dust before our eyes. The limestone facade of the towering obelisk at the San Jacinto Battlefield was crumbling in the coastal air outside of Houston until the Legislature provided the department with $10 million in emergency funding…
Best Excuse for Missing a Gig: a True Story
In the Chronicle’s BS4 preview, I wrote of Only Ninety Percent Effective (ONPE): “A lot of troupes call themselves edgy, these guys leap right into the abyss.” Little did I know how far they would take these words. ‘Twas the night before the festival, and the ONPE kids decided to take a break from their…
Hoover’s Cooking
2002 Manor Rd., 479-5006 Mon-Fri, 11am-10pm; Sat &Sun, 9am-10pm Once upon a time, I couldn’t fathom ordering chicken-fried steak. My Yankee folks raised me on oatmeal, not migas. I never knew okra, and I grew timid around refried beans. My mom never fried chicken; she breaded it. We ate Canadian bacon, not Cajun ham. So…
Park Acquistion By Decade
Here’s a breakdown of 121 state park facilities, grouped by the decade in which the land was first acquired by the parks department. (Source: TPWD Website). Although the foundation of the State Park and Historical Park system was laid down by the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, over half of the current state parks (65 of…
Exhibitionism
Club DeVille Through April 25 Running time: 3 hrs “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot Fortunately, Beckett’s bleak assessment of the human condition illustrated in the above quote is far removed from my own assessment of the Shirk Workers Onion production of his play, a surprisingly faithful…
Oasis Mediterranean Cafe and Pizza
14735 Bratton, Ste. 105, 251-5777 Mon-Thu, 5-10pm; Fri-Sat, 11am-11pm; Sun, 11am-10pm In all my time eating, I’ve never run across a restaurant with an Iranian menu before, and certainly not one that also serves a pizza called the “Mega Roni.” Iran, which used to have the velvety, exotic name of Persia, happens to be a…
Total Funding Sources
(actual dollars) In 1983, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department spent $63 million on 116 parks. With 123 state parks in 1998, the agency had just $51 million to spend on parks. The rest of the agency’s $150 million budget went to other programs.
I Drive Dean Haglund
Mueller Airport, Wednesday, April 7 photograph by Bruce Dye Dutifully donating the can of tuna that was my invitation to the BS4 “Media Mixer” at the Paramount Theatre, I searched furtively for actor-comic Dean Haglund. I was pretending to look for my pal Weezer, who hadn’t arrived, but was really trying to see if Haglund,…
Wine X: Oenology for Twentysomethings
So you couldn’t spring for tickets to the Texas Wine and Food Festival’s hullabaloo at the Four Seasons, and quite frankly, you think wine (at least the kind that comes in a “small” bottle as opposed to a jug or box) is out of your league? Well, the folks at Wine X magazine consider it…
Shaped By The Past
The paucity of public land in Texas has its roots in the days of the Republic. When Texas became a state in 1845, it retained control all of its public lands rather than submitting the unsettled western part of the state to the federal government. But most of the vast frontier was sold at fire-sale…
Interview with Dean Haglund
Along with the nebbishy, hormonal riot known as Frohike and the studied, bearded, nonchalant Byers, Dean Haglund’s Langley is one third of the goofball, paranoid, “everything’s-a-conspiracy” trio known as the Lone Gunmen on Fox’s increasingly comedic pop-culture tsunami The X-Files. It has not always been thus. Haglund got his start in the fertile fields of…
Guitars
In a town teaming with axeslingers and marauding guitar bands, sometimes the most notable six-string shredders are those that don’t sound like they have an axe to grind. Case in point are the three local groups corralled into this week’s Music section: “Guitar’s Outer Limits.” While Seven Percent Solution, Futura, and the Friends of Dean…
Festival of Personal Journeys
Luminarias Call Austin “festival city.” Music, comedy, film, chili, jalape�os, Eeyore, and even the gelatinous potted meat otherwise known as Spam each has a celebratory festival. Just when you’re thinking, “Whoa, I really need to wash some underwear, eat more meals at home, or find out what that funny smell in the kitchen is” –…
