Little Shop of Horrors
A house plant with an appetite for flesh says, “Feed me.”
End-Of-the-semester Student Films
End-Of-the-semester Student Films NR. Directed by Various, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . End-of-the-Semester Student Films presents the final projects from this semester’s Production One and Production Two classes at Steve Mims’ Austin FilmWorks. Production One is a 14-week introduction to 16mm film and digital video pre-production, production, and postproduction. Projects are shot…
Can I Do it ’till I Need Glasses?
Can I Do it ’till I Need Glasses? 1974, R, 72 min. Directed by I. Robert Levy, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Victor Dunlap, Moose Carlson, Walter Olkewicz, Joey Camen, Ann Kellogg, Robin Williams. Smutty sex skits aim for comedy. Material featuring Robin Williams was added after he hit the big time with…
Readings
Casual Rex A Novel by Eric Garcia Villard, 352 pp., $23.95 Casual Rex, the charming and absorbing tale of a dinosaur-inhabited, modern-day universe, delivers practically everything a comic/ noir/magical realism/mystery novel could be expected to provide. Los Angeles P.I. and velociraptor Vincent Rubio, who first apppeared in Anonymous Rex, Garcia’s first installment in the series,…
Paul Newman Review
Paul NewmanRe-issue (My Pal God) For the Paul Newman fan who has been less than diligent in collecting the former Austin foursome’s prodigious and scattered output, My Pal God has assembled various singles, compilation tunes, and selected EP tracks dating back to 1996 into Re-issue, a 10-song collection nearly as powerful and coherent as any…
Naked City
What Price, Justice? Downtown residents turned out in force last fall to protest the City Council vote that moved city jail facilities into the county’s Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center on West 10th Street. They pointed out the CJC’s proximity to Pease Elementary School and the central campus of Austin Community College. They fretted about the…
Readings
Turning on the Girls by Cheryl Benard Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pp., $23 In Turning on the Girls, Cheryl Benard asks us to suspend our disbelief about how and when the Revolution to a futuristic, Amazonian culture of women deities and presidents occurred, but using artistic license and a superior imagination, she gets away…
Afrodisiac
Femi Kuti carries on his father’s legacy
Naked City
The Hyde Park Baptist Church is certainly aware of the advantages of having Friends in High Places. No, not Heaven — the Texas Legislature. The church, embroiled in an ongoing controversy over its plans for a new parking garage, prevailed on Pampa Republican Warren Chisum to sponsor a bill tailor-made on the church’s behalf. House…
The Taste of Others
Tremendously popular French film tosses together members of different social and aesthetic circles and watches as they circle each other, sniffing out sensibilities and impressions for cracks in the veneers.
Local Bestsellers
Local bestsellers are based on recent sales at Austin bookstores selected to reflect varied reading interests.
Dancing About Architecture
Joey Ramone still dead, bands still touring, Dick Price getting bigger than Bob Schneider
The Hightower Lowdown
Bush Talks Tough; Mad Cows, Beautiful Lips
The Dish
The Dish 2000, PG-13, 101 min. Directed by Rob Sitch, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Sam Neill, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, Patrick Warburton, Roy Billing, Genevieve Mody, Taylor Kane, Bille Brown, Lenka Kripac. Sometimes the footnotes to great historical events are more interesting than the events themselves. To say this is the case…
Page Two
Louis Black shares his thoughts on the new Christian cinema: “I’ve seen only two of the new Christian movies, but I’m enthralled.”
Record Reviews
Marcia BallPresumed Innocent (Alligator) Marcia Ball is such a class act that the plea of innocence on her latest album might be believable if she weren’t so damn guilty of instigating such a good time. Presumed Innocent is Ball’s ninth album since she began pounding the ivories professionally in the Seventies, and her first for…
Capitol Chronicle
An Update on Work in Progress at the Lege
Public Notice
Hey, what’s going on this week in Austin, public service-wise? Just read this!
Record Reviews
Alejandro EscovedoA Man Under the Influence (Bloodshot) Five long years after his big shot at international acclaim, 1996’s handsome With These Hands on Rykodisc, Austin’s high priest of velvet rock is back to the masterful form that produced his first two local releases, ’92’s rapturous Gravity and its bookend, Thirteen Years. Whereas the old cow-punk’s…
Jesus Is Coming
The video mailed across the state, the Christian film that found an audience in Austin, and other stories of evangelicals using film to spread the word
Second Helpings: Taquerias
Taquerias in this week’s Second Helpings.
Letters at 3AM
McGuffey’s Readers helped establish American education as we know it (or knew it).
Record Reviews
Nick Cave & the Bad SeedsNo More Shall We Part (Reprise) For Nick Cave, no day would be complete without raising a fist and cursing the heavens for their failure to send him into the world as a member of the Bronte family. The goth-poet of choice for those who find Leonard Cohen too damn…
Traditions in Transition
The latter half of the 20th century has brought rapid change, sometimes extinction, to cultures which once seemed almost frozen in time. UT’s Ethnographic Film Festival, April 27-29, shows how cultures all over the globe are handling that change.
They’re History
The Blue Genie boys — those whimsical artists responsible for the armadillo-festooned entrance to Threadgill’s World Headquarters, the guitar gal atop Fran’s Hamburgers, and other mini-landmarks around Austin — have been fun for the people who see them and fun for the people who made them. Making giant panels for the new Texas State History…
Mr. Smarty Pants
Little flecks of factoid flavor for the coded oatmeal of your mind.
Record Reviews
The Okros EnsembleI Left My Sweet Homeland (Rounder) The Okros Ensemble, along with fellow Hungarians Taraf de Haidouks, have made a career from mining Hungarian, Romanian, and gypsy folk legends — music so full of sorrowful tales that it would make Bram Stoker blush. Usually, revivalists who dedicate themselves to playing a style of music…
Festival Schedule
All screenings are at the Texas Union and are free of charge. Fri, April 27 “Quand Les Hommes Pleurent” Every year, 30,000 Moroccans float across the Straits of Gibraltar in boats and on rafts trying to get into Spain. While 1,000 drown and 14,000 are arrested and sent back, half of them take up difficult…
Articulations
An era ends: After 10 years, Vicky Boone resigns as artistic director of Frontera Productions.
Day Trips
Earl Abel’s Coffee Shop in San Antonio has that vintage advantage.
Record Reviews
Dolly PartonLittle Sparrow (Sugar Hill) Last year’s The Grass Is Blue found Dolly Parton going back to her roots in the Tennessee hills and immersing herself in bluegrass, with delightful results. This follow-up is in much the same vein, and if anything, is a better and more well-rounded effort. Recruiting many of the same crack…
Short Cuts
A Slacker reunion and a Waking Life sale top Linklater’s agenda; entry deadlines announced for Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund grants, Austin Film Festival and Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference submissions, and new Cinemaker Co-op fest; and Jon Favreau comes to Austin.
Exhibitionism
The smallish stage of the Mary Moody Northern Theatre is effectively transformed into the downright bloody, intense and exciting emergency room at a Chicago hospital when the Organic Theatre Company’s E / R Emergency Room is brought to life at St. Edward’s University under the tourniquet-tight direction of Ev Lunning.
After a Fashion
Local fashion steps out at the Designers’ Guild of Austin second showing.
Record Reviews
John Lewis Evolution 2 (Atlantic) With the passing of John Lewis at the end of March, the third and final part of the Evolution trilogy is in question. Yet if this second installment of the series is to be the Modern Jazz Quartet musical director’s swan song, it’s a gem. Here Lewis, at 80 years…
Video Reviews
Available on video as a double bill, these two all-black features — one from 1938, the other from 1947 — make a brilliant pairing.
Exhibitionism
With the Austin Symphony Orchestra in street clothes and everyone sporting bright yellow Symph-o-Vision glasses that turned even the dullest brown wall at the Bass into a rainbow of light, the kid-packed audience was taken on a colorful family musical journey.
About AIDS
HIV considered as a deadly weapon
Beat Box
Hip-hop summer’s gonna be hot, so we’ll roll the slow beats first. King Britt’s sophomore Sylk 130 project, Re-Members Only, on primo Bay Area indie Six Degrees, follows up ’97’s sylkier When the Funk Hits the Fan with not-so-Princely nu soul, featuring the unfunky sounds of Grover Washington Jr. and Alison Moyet. Mark Bell and…
Video Reviews
Any film that has a story co-written by Bruce Campbell and features Sam Raimi in an acting role should pique the interest of a certain type of trash-movie maven.
Exhibitionism
In the Zachary Scott Theatre Center production of playwright John Walch’s The Circumference of a Squirrel, the story of a son struggling with the burden of his father — a tale of rebellion and acceptance that belongs to every family and every generation — is rendered so personally, in details both uncommon and illuminating, that…
To Your Health
Every time I eat peanuts or peanut butter, I get a scratchy throat. About a year ago, I had some allergy testing and peanuts were not a problem. What’s going on?
Soda Jerks
The AISD Vending Machine Scandal and the World of Snacks and Sodas
TV Eye
Talk about your stakes through the heart — Buffy the Vampire Slayer moves to the UPN and with that, moves out of Austin
Virgin Fiction
First-time publication is like a cotillion for writers, Martin Wilson writes as he reviews five new first novels. And debut novelists are the gussied-up belles at the ball, with butterflies in their stomachs, dreaming of the glorious future that awaits them.
Coach’s Corner
Every Joe Fan thinks he could run a sports franchise — and maybe he’s right. After all, there are plenty of examples of how easy it is to run one badly.
Purging and Courting
The following transcripts are excerpted from two conversations recorded by Robert Liva. According to Liva, the first conversation took place in November 2000, between Liva and Bernard Burkhardt, owner of BMS Vending of San Antonio. In the exchange below, Liva asks Burkhardt about how he reports school commissions from sales from his vending machines in…
Driven
Driven 2001, PG-13, 109 min. Directed by Renny Harlin, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Sylvester Stallone, Kip Pardue, Stacy Edwards, Estella Warren, Gina Gershon, Burt Reynolds, Til Schweiger, Robert Sean Leonard, Cristian De La Fuente. For a film focusing on the fast, faster, fastest world of professional open-seat race car driving, Driven crawls…
The Hard Sell
If, as writer David Gates says, “there is an expectation now that the writer’s first effort must be their best or at least spectacular … that you must cash in while you can,” there’s also an expectation that writers can no longer leave the business side of publishing to the business people. Stories are always…
Food for Thought
Several years ago, when Ken Rubin went to a small working-class neighborhood in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca whose name, Colonia Ampliación Dolores, means “Growing Pains,” he knew what he needed to accomplish but not exactly how to accomplish it. He had already taken a graduate anthropology course at UT in research methodology, and…
Feeling the Heat
A profile of the new Texas ACLU and Executive Director Will Harrell
One Night at McCool’s
One Night at McCool’s 2001, R, 93 min. Directed by Harald Zwart, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, John Goodman, Michael Douglas, Paul Reiser, Reba McEntire, Andrew “Dice Clay” Silverstein, Richard Jenkins. McCool’s is a pleasant enough spot to while away the hours but it’s not exactly the rollicking comedy…
Postscripts
The eighth annual Texas Writers Month begins in a few days.
Food-o-File
Cuisines Editor Virginia B. Wood mentions the good news and the bad about local restaurants.
Naked City
The Greater Chamber of Commerce wants AMD to build its next mega chip facility in Austin; Gary Bradley is calling on his friends at the Lege for help; the city’s libraries have been hit with a budget crunch; Molly Ivins is glad she’s left the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Austin police spokeswoman Sally Muir has moved…
Cut
Cut 2000, R, 82 min. Directed by Kimble Rendall, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Kylie Minogue, Geoff Revell, Sarah Kants, Simon Bossell, Jessica Napier, Molly Ringwald. Beyond the rubbernecking factor, there’s very little to recommend Cut, an Australian-made slasher flick that would surely have languished in direct-to-video purgatory but for the presence of…
Readings
Fort Benning Blues A Novel by Mark Busby TCU Press, 207 pp., $24.50 Desertion In the Time of Vietnam by Jack Todd Houghton Mifflin, 397 pp., $24 Vietnam is a place-name steeped in the brine of loss and sorrow, evocative of thousands of stories, and the designation for an unsettling (and still unsettled) time in…
The New Rites of Spring
The Last Word in Instrumental Rock
Naked City
Texas House passes Hate Crimes bill; mesasure goes to Senate.
Readings
Crawling at Night A Novel by Nani Power Atlantic Monthly Press, 240 pp., $24 What if life were a list, its daily accomplishments scribbled on a page as items on a menu? The idea sounds bizarre, but Crawling at Night, for all its weaknesses, fulfills this very conceit with surprising strength. Power’s debut novel begins…
Tortoise Review
TortoiseStandards (Thrill Jockey) With their latest full-length offering, Chicago’s principal instrumental rock collective have once again proved themselves well beyond the reach of their legions of imitators. Theirs is an uncanny technical proficiency and studio standard that’s as obsessive as it is inspired and leads, again and again, to the cleanest, most exact sound imaginable.…
Naked City
Jury selection continues in Robert Springsteen’s murder trial.
