Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The video for REM’s song “Everybody Hurts” was filmed on I-10 in San Antonio. Crayola Crayons produces enough crayons per day to make a statue 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. They have also produced enough crayons to go around the world 225 times. Yellowstone is home to 80% of the world’s geysers…
On the Lege
House Public Health Committee members who last week approved legislation that would establish a Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) covering all Texas children whose families earn up to twice the federal poverty level are predicting reconciliation, not a showdown, with senators who have already voted for a less generous program. Public Health Committee Chair Patricia…
Ah, Laughter’s Sweet Release!
Friday night is the Night of the Living Dead. For most working stiffs, it’s their first taste of freedom after five straight days of punching the clock, toiling in the salt mines, slaving for the Boss Man … and they are beat. All the physical and mental tension accumulated over 40 or more hours of…
Bow Ties With Asparagus and Scallops
1 lb bow tie pasta, cooked according to package instructions 1 lb asparagus, trimmed, cooked al dente and cut into 3/4 inch length 6 oz scallops, cleaned 1 tbs butter 1 tbs olive oil 2 garlic cloves, finely minced 1 cup Ferrari Carano Chardonnay 1 1/2 cups cream 1 tbs fresh basil, chopped julienne style…
Naked City
It’s 6pm Tuesday; do you know where your child is? If you are a supporter of 14-year-old Lacresha Murray, you know the answer all too well. Murray remains in Giddings, sentenced to 25 years for the 1996 death of two-year-old Jayla Belton. Questions have been raised about possible police and prosecutorial misconduct, but Murray is…
Articulations
If you still harbored doubts about those much-ballyhooed upgrades of the city’s performing arts scene, the flurry of activity the past few weeks ought to have you convinced that these changes are more than hot air from a bunch of culture vultures. The makeover for the Big Green Turtle of the Southern Shore got a…
The Chameleon of Wines
Chardonnay, with its chameleon-like character, enjoys international appeal. Burgundy produces the archetypical Chardonnay-based white — a stylish, toasty wine that can age for 10–15 years or more, becoming a nutty, oatmealy indulgence. Just north of Burgundy, in Chablis, Chardonnay is typically fermented and stored in steel rather than oak and produces a crisp, minerally white…
Separated at Birth?
Documentarian Michael Moore At first glance, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and filmmaker Michael Moore have nothing in common. Ventura is a hulky, former pro wrestler and actor in action films. Moore is a pudgy guy who has appeared on and off camera in films that inspire viewers to take action. Ventura has dressed in the…
BS4 Improv & Sketch Comedy Fest Schedule
5:30-7pm John Henry Faulk Living Theatre Spoo (Chicago, IL) Drunk Baby Collective (Minneapolis, MN) Maggie Mae’s Judo Intellectual (Chicago, IL) Improv Asylum (Boston, MA) Velveeta Room Gilligan Stump and the Perfesser (New York, NY) Kairos! Co. (Austin, TX) 8-9:30pm Capitol City Comedy Club MC: Laura House (Austin Stories) ComedySportz Austin ComedySportz Houston ComedySportz San Antonio…
A Cowboy in the Kitchen: Recipes from Reata and Texas West of the Pecos
by Grady Spears and Robb Walsh (Ten Speed Press, $29.95 hard) The aura of Edna Ferber’s epic Texas novel Giant loomed large over West Texas in the 1950s. Everyone had an opinion about her depiction of the struggle between the established ranching economy and the emerging oil industry personified in the clash of larger-than-life cattle…
Guerrilla Filmmaking
It’s lunchtime in Los Angeles and Nettie Wild has lost her wallet. Anyone else might be stressing out over this lunch-hour calamity, because a girl’s got to eat, but the Canadian filmmaker has more on her mind than a missing billfold. Wild is preparing for the L.A. opening of her documentary, A Place Called Chiapas.…
Exhibitionism
Brink Warehouse March 28 From all appearances, The Cyclical Night is a work of obsession for choreographer Jos� Luis Bustamante, who created this shadowy fantasiafrom ruminations about Jorge Luis Borges’ poem of the same name. The poem provides its own ruminations on how everything in nature and in man revolves in a cycle — or,…
Food-O-File
Food and wine lovers from around the state and the country converge in Austin this weekend for the annual Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival (THCWFF). The focus of this year’s festival is Chardonnay, and whether or not you have tickets to all the festival parties, there are plenty of mouth-watering events to savor.…
Mama’s Boys
Louis Alvarez and Andy Kolker make documentaries for people who, if given the choice, would pick root canal work over the doc experience. What they’ve managed to do is strip all of the medicinal earnestness and polemics from the traditional genre and add in something not usually associated with nonfiction films: entertainment value. You know…
Musings on 46 Minutes at the King of the Hill Day Barbecue
Me and the boy arrived at the King of the Hill Barbeque just in time to see “celebrity” Jen Garrison of 101X’s morning crew win her leg of the Lawnmower Drag Race. The lean, lanky self-proclaimed local lesbian legend was decked out in electric purple with white racing stripes to match her grass guzzling go-mower.…
The Highland Lakes
Hwy 71 W, Spicewood, 830/693-4563 The tradition at Sonny Contreras’ place is friendliness, even in the picture on his business card: He’s reaching out to shake your hand. That’s why longtime residents of the Briarcliff and Spicewood area make Sonny’s their neighborhood joint. They pay the nominal fee to join the obligatory “private club” (it’s…
Scanlines
D: Chris Marker (1963) with H�l�ne Chatelain, Davos Hanich. A young boy is taken for a Sunday visit to watch the planes take off from a jetty at the Paris Airport. He sees a man die. He never forgets it. Years later, after a devastating world war, the scientists of the future, using this anchoring…
ALO HQ Breaks Ground & Breaks Into Song
Leave it to a company that specializes in grand theatrical gestures to mark the start of construction for its new headquarters and music school with a flourish worthy of the stage. When Austin Lyric Opera broke ground for its new Mary Ann Heller Center at the corner of Barton Springs Road and Bouldin, it wasn’t…
Blood and Memories
There’s one memory of Stevie Ray Vaughan so powerful it comes to my mind whenever his name is evoked. A blues guitarist was onstage playing at the original Antone’s some forgotten night around 1975 — Albert Collins, maybe, Luther Allison? Buddy Guy, Fenton Robinson, whoever it was I don’t recall, not because it was insignificant,…
Short Cuts
Make a Film in a Weekend proclaims the Cinemaker Co-op. That’s this weekend, Friday, April 9 – Sunday, April 11. Participating filmmakers will have just two days to make a one-reel, in-camera-edited, Super-8 film. The catch? Each film must feature a mystery prop, the identity of which will be revealed at the “starting line” at…
Writes of Spring
Kafka’s Curse: A Novel by Achmat Dangor Pantheon Books, $22 hard Very early on in Achmat Dangor’s first novel, Kafka’s Curse, a middle-aged Muslim loses his life and mysteriously transforms into a “beautiful and sensitive” willow right in his own bedroom. The parts of his body that do remain are nothing but unidentifiable patterns of,…
Dancing About Architecture
Move It or Lose It The Lunch is dead! Long live the Lunch! Such an outcry wouldn’t have been unexpected following last Thursday’s City Council meeting, the one that finally made the long-awaited decision on the city’s proposed plans for a large section of downtown Austin. You’ve read about it before: It encompasses several blocks,…
Not With Their Money
Thad Crouch, Paula Rogge, and Susan Van Haitsma photograph by Gregory Selig “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to [it].” –Henry David Thoreau This can’t be the home of a 47-year-old practicing physician. It sits in the middle of a poor…
Off the Bookshelf
Local bestsellers are based on recent sales at area bookstores that have been selected to reflect varied reading interests. This week’s list of bestsellers is from Toad Hall Children’s Bookstore, 1206 W. 38th St. 1.Holes by Louis Sachar 2. Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt 3. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown 4. Captain Underpants…
What Is This?
What is this? What is this music? What kind of artistic vision gave birth to this miasma of sound, in which a clear sparkling brook of bluegrass and country is fouled by toxic chemicals spewing forth runoff waste from the gutters of punk rock? What is this creature rising out of the brown bog, a…
Fringe Feast
Last year’s Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) brought even more poetry than the usual super-sized gamut of selections, thanks to Austin Poets at Large’s Fringe Fest. Fringe Fest, run concurrently with last year’s AIPF, was intended, according to organizer Thom Woodruff, better known around town as Thom The World Poet, to accommodate the midnight-to-dawn readings…
Box Sets/Reissues
(Rhino) More book than box per se, The Disco Box, compiled by Billboard and A&R veteran Brian Chin, is a 4-CD, 60-page tribute to the dancing queen. According to its producer, it also purports to “illuminate and document disco’s other two elements: the music and the DJs.” Huh? The haphazard, non-linear liner notes attempt to…
Postscripts
When William B. Todd stepped up to the dais on March 25 at the Ransom Center to present the fifth annual Pforzheimer Lecture, there was no evidence that he dragged his impossibly stuffy title behind him: He’s the Mildred Caldwell and Baine Perkins Kerr Centennial Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. I…
Which Way Do We Go?
The AIM project (click here for more details on the process) is designed to let the citizens navigate, but Karen Rae is the woman in the driver’s seat. Capital Metro’s fourth general manager in 10 years has been on the job a little more than six months — it seems longer, after the lengthy, high-visibility…
About AIDS
On March 12, this column explored the tall tale spreading via the Internet, in which a coed is infected by a deliberately placed needle in a theatre seat. This urban myth continues to spread nationwide, despite the fact that it isn’t true. One Austin corporation even sent it as a “must read” message to all…
PR Machine in Motion
Since you’re all thinking it but won’t admit it: Yes, the AIM bus was on time. In fact, it was early to at least three of its six stops at the dog-and-pony … oops, we mean “community-outreach kickoff” on April 5 for Capital Metro’s campaign to harmonize its plans with the citizens’ wishes. We jest,…
Coach’s Corner
What’s so great about daylight savings time anyway? Another hour of daytime? Big deal. Why does everybody, and I mean everybody, love Daylight Savings Time? I dread this day. I brood over it weeks before its appearance. For starters, it announces the start of summer, a six-month survival school that in the end wears down…
Veering to the Right
John W. Johnson The leadership at the Texas Transportation Commission — made up of the board of three commissioners that oversees TxDOT — is shifting toward the political right, in a phenomenon that is taking place in all corners of the state. In Texas, where the governor’s authority is conspicuous mostly by its absence, power…
Day Trips
Bluebonnet Festival in Burnet includes the Confederate Air Force, classic cars, food, and entertainment, Apr. 9-11. 512/756-4297. Roughneck Chili and Barbecue Cookoff in Luling salutes the days of the oil boom with a day of fun, Apr. 10. 830/875-3214. Official Bluebonnet Festival of Texas brings the country fair to Chappell Hill, Apr. 10-11. 888/BRENHAM. Viva…
King of the Roads
When you think of Austin’s most important roads and highways, which ones come to mind? I-35, MoPac, US 290, Lamar and Airport boulevards, Martin Luther King? Despite their centrality to transportation in Austin, it’s the State of Texas, in the form of the Texas Department of Transportation, that has jurisdiction over part or all of…
Page Two
Certain politicians, consultants, and citizens argue that building out light rail will not make a perceptible difference in traffic congestion. This is a reasonable point. An equally reasonable question is: What will? Get in your car around 5:15pm. Drive out to I-35. Sit in your car as you crawl along in stop-and-go traffic. This is…
Capitol Metro Map
Original plans for light rail called for a buildout order of red, green, orange, purple, and blue. Now, Capital Metro officials prefer the “color-blind” approach, meaning we could end up with a hybrid line incorporating segments of each alignment.
Public Notice
A simple fact about cancer: Early detection makes a difference. One new option in the quest for detection might be genetic testing. This is a hot topic in the cancer treatment community and one which will no doubt pose questions of risk, privacy, and ethics as it develops. Our local Breast Cancer Resource Center of…
Done Deal
The what-ifs are important, by the way. Though they don’t have to lead to ditching the project, they can be used to make it better. And they have. Councilmember Beverly Griffith, a critic of the plan from the start and the only councilmember to vote against the initial resolution back in December authorizing the city…
