The Taste of Parkside
Food Blogger happy hour at parkside
Express and Alamo Drafthouse to Screen Baseball Films
Beer, baseball, and a movie … what else could a person want?
Hits Keep Coming for “Killer” Keller
Public invited to speak Monday in favor of impeaching presiding judge
Pickett v. Riddle: House Floor Smackdown!
Lawmakers tussle over bill that would help state employees that volunteer with foster kids
Dukes, Perry and the Other Troublemakers
Big boost for film incentives, and great news for fans of Friday Night Lights and Grindhouse
Leaky Pipes
Rapid Ric readies a new album
Wheatsville Bags BookPeople
Wheatsville’s alternative softballers top the BookPeople Filthy Animals
Solider of Fortune
Thin Lizzy’s “Still Dangerous,” just ask its anchoring guitarist Scott Gorham.
The Hustle for Mayor: Lee Leffingwell
The Place 1 pol and mayoral candidate opens up to the Hustle
What Is the Hustle for Mayor?
Everything you wanted to know about our new video-interview series – but were afraid to ask
Aztex Draw Two; Host Cleveland Saturday
After a couple of draws in their inaugural games, the Austin Aztex host the Cleveland City Stars on Saturday.
The Cost of Guns on Campus Pt. 2
Texas lawmakers and law enforcement speak against concealed handguns on campus
The Cost of Guns on Campus Pt. 1
Footage from last week’s tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre
No Tip for You
The scene at the bar during Tuesday’s “Hustle for Mayor” showdown
Another Earth Day Pick
Career Counseling
Happy Earth Day!
A field trip to Hornsby Bend
Defying Gravity
Wilco burns across America
The Sound of a Warped Cassette
My Bloody Valentine’s Tuesday night tinnitus special
The Hustle For Mayor: Brewster McCracken
Catching up with the Mayor Pro Tem
Stonehouse Vineyard Luncheon
Stonehouse Vineyard Luncheon at the Texas Hill Country Food and WIne Festival
Rehabbing the Fourth Amendment
Supremes draw a line on warrantless searches
Winning Outside the Box
Film columnist Joe O’Connell’s novel Evacuation Plan nabs North Texas Book Festival Award
Queenie Pie
A slice of UT’s Duke Ellington opera “Queenie Pie”
So Gonna Dip My Balls in It
The State is coming out on DVD! The State is coming out on DVD!
T. Don Under the Dome
State reps sponsor special screening of SXSW/Cine Las Americas doc The Least of These
Come Home to Grey Gardens
HBO premieres Grey Gardens, featuring Drew Barrymore.
Supremes to Consider School Strip Search Case
Was it unreasonable to check a 13-year-old student’s bra for ibuprofen?
Opposite Marriage Day!
No offense!
Bipartisanship in the Budget
Isett, Anchia show that budget agreement don’t just mean concessions
Powerhouses Begin to Emerge in the ASL
Waterloo, Wheatsville, and C3 Presents remain undefeated
‘The Blind Side’ Follows the Life of a Top NFL Prospect
Michael Lewis’ book chronicles the life first-round NFL draft prospect Michael Oher
Sharp: Thanks for the Ammo, Rick
Dem Senate candidate uses gubernatorial gaffe
Jazz Hands
Burton Greene and Perry Robinson raise the roof(s)
Forums This Week
Spend an hour or two getting to know the candidates
Your City, Your Vision, Your … Grackle?
McCracken ad contest winner named … but it’s not this guy
End Prohibition Now
NORML marks 4-20 with new ad campaign they hope will catch Obama’s attention
Ligne Roset Opens on West Second
Ligne Roset store opening
House Passes Budget
Reps unanimously approve $178 billion proposal for 2010-11 a bit before dawn
Give ’em the Old Razzle Dazzleglass!
MAC Dazzleglass is awesome.
Dunnam: “No Substitute for Being a Proud American”
Video of House Democratic caucus leader’s response to governor’s secession speech
Off the Record – 33 RPM
Freddie’s Place pulls the plug on live music, My Bloody Valentine and the Arc Angels deal with the past, and gearing up for Record Store Day
The Lineup
Recommended music for the week of April 17-23
Dukes Smiles for the Camera
Film incentive reform passes: Austin rep breathes big sigh of relief
Check Out the Jugs for a Good Cause
Showing of campy 1970s movie will help Austin’s EMS raise money for community education programs
The Hustle For Mayor
Two words: Rhyme Off
Turfcats Player Profile of Robert Quiroga
An interview with a former Baylor Bear and current Turfcat
24 and Counting
A plethora of foodie events at the 24th annual Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival
Cine las Americas Previews
La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) New Releases, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain D: Lucrecia Martel; with Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, César Bordón Although the title makes this thoughtful Argentine movie sound like a bloody slasher film, Veró (Onetto) manages to keep her head attached to her body at all times. It’s her wits that seem to be…
Texas Platters
The Story Of Until the Autumn The history behind Until the Autumn reads like a script for a made-for-TV movie: five friends from Athens, Ohio, relocate to Austin, then, after 2007’s The World’s Affair, write and record their fourth album on the banks of the Colorado River – in a cabin owned by Maryann Price…
Page Two: Long Days of Journeys Into Nights
In quest of a simple metaphor
Carole’s Greatest Hits
When Strayhorn was Rylander on the LRB, she screwed Travis County
After a Fashion
Your Style Avatar’s Lindsay Lohan connection. You knew there had to be one.
Arts Review
Getalong Gang’s heavy metal opera rocks Camelot with badass-itude and lots of hair
Texas Platters
UGK UGK 4 Life (Jive) Anyone familiar with the Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous Duets: The Final Chapter or Tupac’s parallel Better Dayz can understand how laudable the move is by rapper Bun B, UGK’s surviving member, in pulling out UGK 4 Life. Faced with the opportunity to turn the Port Arthur duo’s seventh and final album…
Playing Through
Brian Davies looks to stoke the local urban cyclo-cross scene
Targeting Wrongful Convictions
Bills attempt to right the wrongs that put Texas at the forefront of wrongful convictions
Words Are Bonds
Worlds intersect at the 17th annual Austin International Poetry Festival
Arts Review
Rubber Repertory’s revival is a marriage of depravity and delight, of filth and fantasy
Texas Platters
Fastball Little White Lies More than a decade has passed since Fastball’s platinum breakthrough, 1998’s All the Pain Money Can Buy. The local trio’s fifth studio LP, Little White Lies, doesn’t signal a comeback but rather a coming of age. Frontmen Tony Scalzo and Miles Zuniga are at their most engaging and affecting, perfectly complementing…
Chile on the Menu
Cine las Americas screens Chilean Cinema of the Post-dictatorship era
Pocket Parks Popping Up All Over Town
Miniparks stake out green space in a crowded city
The Hightower Report
Reactivating the CCC for National Recovery; and Pothole Advertising
Arts Review
Austin Art Space offers happy art rainbows hidden in a strip mall
Texas Platters
Tee Double Bio-Music (Kinetic Global) Young guns take heed: This is how you make an album in the post-sampling age. Local mainstay Tee Double’s latest LP is a study in fluidity, a self-composed lo-fi set of 11 tracks that gels in musical consistency and again through the album’s message. At 36 and having run his…
Chapter One: A Team Is Born
A season preview for the Austin Aztex and the United Soccer Leagues
Reefer Madness: Saint or Salvia?
One man’s medicine is another man’s monster
God Save the Queenie
Duke Ellington’s almost lost opera of a Harlem beautician gets rescued and a makeover
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Twittering terrorists, ‘Facial Expressions of Chicken,’ and more
Texas Platters
Seth Walker Leap of Faith (Hyena) The warm swell of bluesy organ and Seth Walker’s soulful vocals are a match made in heaven and maybe a few other places. His sixth full-length, Leap of Faith, isn’t so much a jump as it is a jumping-off place for Walker’s broad-based love of blues in its many…
Point Austin: Astroturf and Grass
More than one way to spark a demonstration
To the Cyber-Barricades!
Time Warner wants to meter broadband, and the techno-peasants are revolting
Bluegrass Up in Her Head
On another Old Settler’s weekend, festival perennial Sarah Jarosz is out of braces and into big-time bluegrass
Cathy Cochran-Lewis
Cathy Cochran-Lewis has been instrumental in putting Austin on the global culinary map
Texas Platters
Wayne Hancock Viper of Melody (Bloodshot) “What kind of crazy notes are these?” jousts Wayne Hancock at Huckleberry Johnson’s upright bass breakdown on “Throwin’ Away My Money,” a valid question circa 2009 for Hancock’s incomparable neo-traditionalism. As the title of the Austinite’s sixth studio album suggests, Hancock cuts his classic honky-tonk and A-Town blues with…
City Hall Hustle: Behind the Numbers: Who’s Still Got Cash?
A look at who’s financing the candidates
USL First Division 2009 Forecast
Predicted order of finish, last season’s record, and more
Event Menu
Local food events for April 16-22
Texas Platters
Willie Nelson Naked Willie (RCA/Legacy) With the near-constant stream of Willie Nelson releases, it’s difficult to justify Naked Willie, a pet experiment by the man’s harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael, who stripped away the countrypolitan polish from Nelson’s 1960s RCA output. Unfortunately, though perhaps admirable in theory, the revisionism is as unaffecting as it is unnecessary.…
Headlines
The week’s biggest little news blips
Record Reviews
BoDeans Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams (Slash/Warner Bros./Rhino) Riding high from last year’s reteaming with T Bone Burnett on Still, Sammy Llanas and Kurt Neumann’s original collaboration with the Texan superproducer on the Wisconsin institution’s 1986 debut gets the deluxe treatment. The original disc, featuring hit “Fadeaway,” is augmented with six demos, but…
Food-o-File
Wheatsville starts a ‘Gro-op,’ and the Alamo Drafthouse premieres its namesake beer
Texas Platters
Uncle Lucius Pick Your Head Up (BooClap) 2009 was a slow year until Uncle Lucius came along. Pick Your Head Up is the local quartet’s second album, and, even though few may have heard the first one, the 11-track disc is likely to be remembered for quite some time. There’s nothing new about what these…
Naked City
News briefs from Austin, the region, and elsewhere
Dragonball: Evolution
Live-action versions of animé/manga hits are notoriously hard to pull off, and Dragonball: Evolution proves no exception.
Record Reviews
Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women (Yep Roc) Getting closer to his sensitive side, L.A. roots godfather Dave Alvin chose for this May release to record with an all-female band, including Austinites Cindy Cashdollar, Sarah Brown, and Lisa Pankratz, on material featuring Ana Egge’s “River Under the Road” and Amy Farris’ “Anyway.” All that talent…
TV Eye
This week, a rundown of some notable TV events: HBO Films’ Grey Gardens (unscreened at press time): If there is a work that has inspired as many iterations as Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, I’m hard-pressed to name it. The 1975 documentary followed six weeks in the lives of mother and daughter Big Edie…
Texas Platters
Del Castillo (Smilin’ Castle) Percussive rolls like the one opening Del Castillo seemingly stamp every Latin rock LP since a certain guitarist from Tijuana made his name at Woodstock. In that same genus, when Del Castillo frontman Alex Ruiz keeps coming back to a “rumba that kills” on leadoff cut “Boricua del Cielo,” he’s not…
Res Publica
Thursday16 ANIMAL SHELTER MEETING Learn about the city’s plans for the new Levander Loop animal shelter, and give ’em your two cents. 6:30-8:30pm. Rosewood-Zaragosa Neighborhood Center, 2800 Webberville Rd. www.cityofaustin.org/health. WORKERS DEFENSE PROJECT PROTEST Help WDP convince Cobalt Co. to pay the $20,000 in unpaid wages it owes to 11 workers who helped build the…
Hannah Montana: The Movie
“Pop it, lock it, polka dot it,” sings Miley, while also learning worthy messages about responsibility to family, community, and Mother Earth.
Record Reviews
Stonehoney Songs From a Hillside Living Room In 1974, these recently relocated Los Angelenos would have fit nicely between the Eagles and Poco. Four songwriters and honeyed harmonies give Stonehoney’s local debut plenty of promise, but its brand of country tilts closer to Nashville’s contemporary rock sound and is therefore too formulaic to bear repeat…
Gay Place
Ahh, the bear necessities!
Texas Platters
Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm (Vanguard) The outpouring of love and emotion spilling from every single track of this sterling tribute to the father of Americana is superseded only by the sheer genius of talent within. Beyond its significance honoring the inimitable Doug Sahm, whose death in 1999 left a hole the…
Budget Uses Stimulus to Hide Flaws
Why solve today what you can suffer in 2011?
17 Again
Tween idol Zac Efron graduates into a nonsinging and nondancing world in this body-switch movie, and the result should keep ’em coming back for more.
Record Reviews
Beausoleil Alligator Purse (Yep Roc) Louisiana’s leading purveyors of Cajun music keep things interesting by stirring up blues (a reimagining of Dylan’s “Rollin’ & Tumblin,” “Rouler et Tourner”) and country (a rollicking take of Julie Miller’s “Little Darlin'”) into a jazzy stew that’s both uplifting and danceable. Fiddler and figurehead Michael Doucet and band are…
Day Trips
South Shore Park on Lake Bastrop preserves a corner of the Lost Pines for all to enjoy
Two Years Gone – How Many Left to Save the Planet?
This Earth Day, urgent evidence of global warming should kick the Austin Climate Protection Plan into higher gear
Fighting the Green Fight
A roundup of this session’s environmental legislation
State of Play
Starring Russell Crowe, this American redo of a great BBC miniseries about investigative journalism and nefarious institutions neither embarrasses the original nor is superior to it in any way.
Record Reviews
The Belleville Outfit Time to Stand Topping a stunning debut like last year’s Wanderin’ might be difficult for most young acts, but nothing this local Outfit does is surprising. Time to Stand finds the sextet expanding into country and singer-songwriter ballads, but it remains one of Austin’s best at gypsy swing and jazz, especially on…
Texas Platters
The Flatlanders Hills and Valleys (New West) Technically speaking, the Flatlanders’ millennial reboot, 2002’s bonhomous Now Again, constitutes Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock’s sophomore slump. After all, the three musketeers’ original sessions from 1971 and 1972, bronzed for posterity decades later by Rounder Records’ More a Legend Than a Band, produced West…
Securing Climate Protection
Ten things Wynn could do now
Betty’s ‘Icky Poo’ Boo-Boo
Betty Brown’s ignorance catches media attention far and wide
Everlasting Moments
Swedish master Jan Troell’s period drama tells the story of a woman who learns new ways to see herself and her life as she discovers the art of photography.
Record Reviews
The Greencards Fascination (Sugar Hill) On disc No. 4, this once-local, now Nashville-based trio takes its fusion of folk and bluegrass to another level, working for the first time with a producer, Jay Joyce (Patty Griffin, Jack Ingram). The ‘Cards introduce even more intricate interplay (“Little Siam”) and worldly rhythms (“Chico Calling”) to the comely…
Texas Platters
Bill Callahan Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (Drag City) Horses, trees, and birds surround Bill Callahan on his 14th LP. The adopted Texan’s gone on a vision quest, and on opener “Jim Cain,” he sums it up: “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again.” 2007’s stellar…
Off the Record
Freddie’s Place unplugs, crate digging for Record Store Day, the second coming of Arc Angels, and sitting stage left at Austin City Limits
What’s in the Capitol Bins?
Legislators are recycling more than ever
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
Even if you’re familiar with the details of this legendary game, this suspenseful cultural documentary draws you to the edge of your seat and beyond, back into 1968 itself.
The Common Law
Tax Deadline Hangovers
Record Reviews
Blackie & the Rodeo Kings Swinging From the Chains of Love (True North) Less well-known here than they are at home in Canada, the trio of Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, and Tom Wilson, each a successful solo artist on his own, offers a best-of with many tracks gaining their first exposure in the U.S. It’s…
Texas Platters
Elvis Heavily Decorated There’s a mystique to Elvis. The local quintet has little in the way of Web presence and no liner notes accompany its proper debut, Heavily Decorated, but the band’s cryptic allure befits its post-punk confrontationalism, a combination of Joy Division, the incessant dissonance of Suicide, and early Butthole Surfers. “Do you ever…
Testperformancetest
A new multiyear program will ensure that Austin sees what’s on the cutting edge
LegeLines
What kept your lawmakers busy this week
Skills Like This
Winner of the SXSW Audience Award in 2007, Skills Like This is the story of a would-be writer and his impulsive, overnight career as a bank robber.
Roof-Riding to an Uncertain Fate
First-time feature filmmaker Cary Fukunaga captures the immigrant experience in Sin Nombre
Lights, Camera, Latin!
The 12th annual Cine las Americas International Film Festival
Texas Platters
Black Cock Robot Child With a God Complex (Australian Cattle God) Stripped to bass and drums, Black Cock could be mistaken for another Jesus Lizard knockoff. Like Black Flag’s Damaged, however, Robot Child derives its power from a stark, terrifying musical vision that subsumes and transforms an otherwise unremarkable rhythm section. Bandleader Chico Jones treats…
‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’
Soprano Virginia Zeani recalls working with Francis Poulenc as a beautiful dream
Single-Stream Recycling
Why is Austin losing money from recycling when Dallas and San Antonio are making money?
Sin Nombre
Winner of dual awards for directing and cinematography at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, this immigrant drama is suffused with gritty realism, poetic imagery, and melodramatic hokiness.
Gold for Green
Laura Dunn’s environmental doc wins UT award
Ecuador v. Big Oil
Joe Berlinger documents the case against Chevron in Crude
Texas Platters
Johnny Goudie & the Little Champions El Payaso (Sea Change) There’s at least a dozen bands from the Nineties and Aughties easily referenced by Johnny Goudie’s friendly, retro-glam sound, but let’s just cut out Oasis and the other middlemen and reach back to the golden Britpop era, the Beatles to T. Rex. That’s the most…
‘Boy Returning Water to the Sea’
Poet Andrea Selch saw so much in Kelly Fearing’s artwork, she had to write about it
Thirty Days Away: What the C&Es Tell
Who’s paying the big bucks to see their candidate win?
Luv Doc Recommends: ArtErotica 2009
Question is: Who isn’t throwing a festival this weekend? You got your winos (Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival), your stoners (Austin Reggae Festival), your hillbillies (Old Settler’s Music Festival), and your rockabillies (Lonestar Rod & Kustom Round Up). Reckless Kelly is even throwing a celebrity softball game and concert out at the Dell…
