Cover Story
The Dropout Problem
Not students, but teachers – AISD struggles to retain qualified educators
My Date With Drew
Filmmaker Brian Herzlinger documents his quest to win a date with Drew Barrymore.
Derailroaded
Derailroaded 2005, NR, 86 min. Directed by Josh Rubin, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . Josh Rubin’s fascinating documentary dissects the life of Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, juggling the question: lunatic or musical genius? Fischer grew up in the mid-Fifties and went undiagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. After attacking his mother with a…
Flicker Film Festival #23
Flicker Film Festival #23 This quarterly film festival showcases short films by local and national filmmakers who submit works via mail. Flicker guarantees an array of projects and intriguing juxtapositions at every screening, with linear narratives butting up against radical experiments, polished productions followed by earnest first efforts. All films are under 15 minutes in…
Fantastic Planet
Fantastic Planet 1973, PG, 72 min. Directed by René Laloux, Voices by Jennifer Drake, Sylvie Lenoir, Jean Topart, Jean Valmont. This beautifully animated and allegorical science fiction story is a true classic.
Fears of a Clown
Austin’s newest theatre company serves up the musical tale of a very famous French clown suffering an existential crisis
Oops!
A “Naked City” item in the last issue, “Reflections on the Liberation of Monkeys, and Other Animals, Too,” incorrectly referred to Anthony J. Nocella II’s professor as “former teacher John Burke.” The correct name is John Burdick, and he is still Nocella’s professor. On second and third reference, feature sidebar “Monkey Law” incorrectly referred to…
Texas Platters
ManikinStill (Super Secret) If they added any more reverb to guitarist Alfie Rabago’s voice, he’d be across the street holding a tin can up to his mouth as sound waves traveled a piece of string. Fortunately for Manikin, sophomore LP Still carefully toes the line between complete distortion and mind-bending transience. Now with ex-Winks drummer…
By Example
The TFPF panelist screenings
BA2BA
The last several seasons have seen Stephen Mills and Ballet Austin really getting around: performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and at cultural festivals in Europe, choreographic competitions in Montreal and Chicago. Well, with their reputation for excellence growing by leaps and bounds, you knew their travels eventually had to bring them to…
Bringing It All Back Home
Super Suppers, Dream Dinners, and the new family meal
Texas Platters
1986 Packaged in a plain cardboard wrapper, 1986’s well-oiled take on Rust Belt indie rock & droll blows up like a burning bag of microwave popcorn. The debut’s rough-hewed production captures the raw vibe of a rehearsal-room tape, but the local band’s music is more sharply articulated than that aesthetic would normally indicate. You can…
Festival Express
Summer’s almost gone, which – with apologies to South by Southwest and Cine Las Americas – means Austin’s film-festival season is about to get going
Culture Flash!
The Heroes of Comedy boldly go to the ‘Star Trek’ Las Vegas Convention 2005, and Arthouse says, “We are family”
Locations and Menus
DREAM DINNERS AREA LOCATIONSMesa Dream Dinners8127 Mesa Dr. Ste. 205B, 342-6860 austintx@dreamdinners.com Tx Dream Dinners 12129 RR 620 N. #447, 401-2800 nwaustintx@dreamdinners.com DREAM DINNERS AUGUST MENULemon Chicken Piccata Crispy Coconut Chicken Southwest Grilled Chicken With Seasoned Rice Herb-Crusted Flank Steak Texas Barbecue Beef Brisket Honey Pecan Pork Roast Apricot-Glazed Boneless Pork Chops Blackened Tilapia Over…
Texas Platters
Craig RossThe Greater Good (Wild Abandon Ltd) Craig Ross is one musical operative whose identity needs revealing. The Austin guitarist/producer/singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist vanished after his 1996 MCA debut, Dead Spy Report, which still sounds like a mid-Seventies John Lennon album, pop mind games. With its unreleased follow-up cannibalized for The Greater Good, an album that feels lovingly…
Reigning Cat and Dog
John Kricfalusi, in town this weekend, on ‘Ren & Stimpy’s staying power.
Arts Review
A review of Roho Productions’ “junk melodrama.”
Food-o-File
Big changes for two local favorites; plus, Bistro le Marseillais, feeling and eating the heat, and more.
Big ‘EW’ for the Alamo
Where does the theatre rank in ‘EW’s best of the best?
Arts Review
Review of F8 Gallery’s Retro Show
The 14th Floor
Austin’s (and Corpus Christi’s) other psych-era survivors
All Aboard for the Death Penalty Express
Republicans aim to kill federal appeals law
DVD Watch
In making its big move, the French New Wave was never about polarizing class, but that hasn’t stopped some critics and contemporaries from all but labeling Claude Chabrol’s work as bourgeois, processed, and better suited to the small screen
Arts Review
Review of Tina Medina’s ‘Pochismas’ at Women & Their Work
Zakary Thaks
“We weren’t bad for a band that was only around for two years.” Chris Gerniottis recalls his early days in Zakary Thaks with a mixture of incredulity and pride. There they were: five young men from Corpus Christi in 1966-67, riding the musical wave from surf to psych with a rough-and-tumble, bluesy, Texas edge. Gerniottis,…
City Takes on Walgreens in National Birth-Control Battle
McCracken leads charge against ‘moral objections’ prescription refusals
Readings
A love of baseball draws author and musician John Albert back after years of drug abuse and a few close calls with rock stardom
Todd Potter
More than two decades after leaving the Austin music scene behind to raise a family, guitarist Todd Potter is diving back in with his solo debut, The Bell. Once upon a time, Potter was the whiz-kid guitarist for Bubble Puppy, the Austin-based psychedelic hard rock quartet that gave Houston’s International Artists label their biggest commercial…
Weed Watch
Sensenbrenner aide gives bad, bullying legal advice … and then vanishes
Last Days
Gus Van Sant concocts an abstruse film “loosely inspired” by the end of Kurt Cobain’s life.
Readings
In Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Girl in the Glass’, reality is a con, at least according to illegal Mexican immigrant Diego, his foster father Thomas Schell, and ex-circus strongman Antony Cleopatra
Todd Potter Reviewed
Todd PotterThe Bell (White Wing) Whatever you were expecting from Todd Potter, The Bell will be a surprise. He’s hardly been fallow since departing Bubble Puppy in the early Seventies, not with notable stints accompanying Rusty Wier and recording with Puppy littermate Rod Prince in Sirius in the late Seventies. Yet it’s been some time…
Naked City
Headlines and happenings from Austin and beyond
Saraband
Ingmar Bergman’s final film continues his exploration into mankind’s willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.
Page Two: Page Break
“Page Two” is taking a break
Shiva’s Headband Experience
“Above my typewriter is a framed 45 single that is the most important recording in Austin. … The single was ‘Kaleidoscopic’/’Song for Peace,’ [by Shiva’s Headband].” – Chet Flippo Those words by rock critic emeritus Chet Flippo mean little today, but in the high and far-off times of the late Sixties, they were engraved in…
Naked City
Sparks fly over property tax rate
Four Brothers
A scrappy Seventies throwback about vigilante justice in the corrupt urban jungle.
After a Fashion
Your Style Avatar weighs in on Daisy Duke, life’s rich (Republican???) pageant(s), and the passing of a style great. Read on!
George Kinney & The Golden Dawn
As George Kinney peered into the crowd that August night at Room 710, he couldn’t see the room full of bodies, because most of them didn’t exist. There was the odd graybeard who was there the last time the Golden Dawn graced the Austin scene 35 years ago, but the rest were unborn spirits in…
Naked City
Moving treatment plant draws both applause and scrutiny from enviros
The Skeleton Key
A top-notch cast is mostly wasted in this atmospheric but prosaic hoodoo spooker.
About AIDS
Since 1989, Project Transitions has operated a small residential hospice for those dying of AIDS, brimming with TLC and support rather than the rejection and need that is so common in this epidemic. Today, that facility is called Doug’s House, named for Doug Key, an early leader in the struggle against the disease that would…
13 Sixties Texas Bands You Don’t Remember
1) The Sparkles 2) Virgill Foxx 3) Electric Rubayyat 4) The Outcasts 5) Sweet Smoke 6) Lemon Rhinestone 7) Water Brothers 8) Midnight Riders 9) Knight’s Bridge 10) Endle St. Cloud 11) Lost & Found 12) Fever Tree 13) Liberty Bell
Naked City
Local energy experts gather to discuss the peak oil theory
The Great Raid
The single dullest war film of the past decade from the once promising director John Dahl.
To Your Health
If the mineral gallium is good for lame horses, as I have heard, is it also good for humans with joint problems?
13 Mid-Sixties Texas 45s
1) “I Fought the Law,” Bobby Fuller 4 2) “The Rains Came,” Sir Douglas Quintet 3) “Woolly Bully,” Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs 4) “Western Union,” Five Americans 5) “Hot Smoke & Sassafras,” Bubble Puppy 6) “Splash 1,” the Clique 7) “Bottle of Wine,” the Fireballs 8) “I Have Thoughts of You,” Neal Ford…
Naked City
Teachers union and Forgione spar over raises
Broken Flowers
Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray meditate on middle age and the world of possibilities.
The Common Law
Pro se divorce in Texas
Texas Platters
Eliza GilkysonParadise Hotel (Red House) Neither life nor love has spared Eliza Gilkyson its sharp edges, even if the muses have blessed her bountifully. She bore her wounds with style and grace on 2000’s Hard Times in Babylon, tour de force “The Beauty Way,” and the acclaimed Lost and Found (2002). Last year’s Grammy-nominated Land…
Naked City
A national magazine ranks us tops, but some local leaders say it could still be better
TCB
The Applicators apply themselves, inside the Bubble Empire, and more
Day Trips
Reimers Ranch in southwestern Travis County is about to go the way of the Armadillo (World Headquarters)
Texas Platters
The SapphiresHole in the Wall, Aug. 4 “If you’re gonna play in Texas …” The Sapphires took a hint from Alabama Thursday, temporarily trading in injured banjo player Paul Schroeder for recent transplant Monica Lee on fiddle. The local quintet, led by Billy Brent Malkus (Nathan Hamilton) and Rebecca Lucille Cannon (Sincola), spread sawdust on…
Lege or Circus?
A lack of democracy turns education ‘reform’ into an unfunny joke
TV Eye
There’s nothing like contemporary television to remind us how miserable we are
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The first annual Auto Glass Industry Technician Olympics will be held Oct. 17-18, 2005, at the Rio All Suites Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas
Texas Platters
Attack FormationSomebody as Anybody (Australian Cattle God) From the opening notes of “Station ID,” you can tell Austin’s Attack Formation was running long before the gate sprung open. A pulp-noirish sample plays as “formation” is repeated over and over; this dive-bombs into the choppy “Pearl Snaps,” which punctures the eardrum with singer Ben Webster’s ferocious…
Lege Notes
Odds and ends – mostly odds – from under the pink granite dome
Return to Clod-Cuckold-Land
Director David Yeakle revisits ‘The Three Cuckolds,’ the commedia classic that got his Tongue in Groove
Soccer Watch
The fall soccer season is already under way
Texas Platters
CometFeathers From the Wing EP (Spune) Their hiatus wasn’t quite as long as the locals in Halley, but it’s good to have Dallas’ Comet return. One of the shining beacons of the mid-Nineties Texas scene, they disappeared just as dandy 1996 full-length Chandelier Musings gained steam, thereby relegating the missing link between Bedhead and vintage…
The Hightower Report
Bushites squelch negative Central American labor conditions report; and sustainable food program teaches students more than they’ll ever learn in a sterile classroom
Luv Doc Recommends: The Monster Big Band
It goes without saying that if you like to swing, you’re reading the right section of the paper. If you don’t mind swapping partners on occasion or just really appreciate people who can blow, you might want to drop by Ruta Maya International Headquarters Sunday night for the Monster Big Band, a brassy, heavy, hard…
