Cover Story
Running to Daylight
Blind runner and teacher determined to see what he can do
Deconstructing ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’
… the day after Christmas
The AggreGAYtor: December 26
What happened today in gay? Here’s your QILTBAG recap of queer news.
UPDATED: Too Close for Comfort
Gay Victoria couple gets kicked out of club for two-stepping
East Side King on S. Lamar Opens Today
Brick-and-mortar outlet of popular chain makes debut
Becoming Johellen, Part 3
A young queen dives wig-first into the pool of Austin drag divas
Becoming Johellen, Part 2
A young queen dives wig-first into the pool of Austin drag divas
For the Kids
The UIL and school districts can do better work curtailing concussions
Last Christmas
How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
Becoming Johellen, Part 1
A young queen dives wig-first into the pool of Austin drag divas
Bobcats Having Balls
Drag queens, Bobcats, and Lambdas… oh my!
The AggreGAYtor: December 23
What happened today in gay? Here’s your QILTBAG recap of queer news.
A Chilling Time at the Drafthouse
The BBC’s classic ghost stories haunt the screen
The Most Fun You Can Have at Christmas With Your Pants On
Rebecca Havemeyer and Stanley Roy channel the spirit of some season…
5 Days of Dragmas!
We’re celebrating drag in the city all holiday week long
Meet J Wagner
‘Californication’ fan: ‘Keep writing, keep touring, be thankful’
Avant Glam Breaks Out the Mistletoe
What’s Christmas without a little unwrapping?
Utah: Mormonism, Sundance… and Gay Marriage?
The state’s same-sex marriage ban has been overturned
‘Duck Dynasty’ Din Goes Über-Meta
AGLCC president’s comment creates its own “controversy”
Obama Proclaims Halloween Floods Federal Disaster
Funds to be available for public assistance
Kickstart Your Weekend With Nonprofit Warmth
Reel Change Film Frenzy wants you to be a producer
Brooklyn, Bourgeois, and Bow Ties
By way of introduction, welcome new GP blogger Lawrence Everett Forbes
AISD Struggling With Capacity
Redrawing all school boundaries inevitable, but not imminent
The AggreGAYtor: December 20
What happened today in gay? Here’s your QILTBAG recap of queer news.
The Farmers’ Market Report: Dec. 21-22, 2013
Heirloom tomatoes, Meyer lemons, and perhaps a Christmas ham
10 Minutes with Robert Earl Keen
‘Jesus, can we stop with the songwriting for just a second?’
AGLCC Awards Make Season Bright
The AGLCC celebrates the holidays and its year
Hill Country Whiskey Maker Nabs Top Honors
Small batch of speciality Cowboy Bourbon highlights Texas distillery
A Dozen Choice Champagnes and Sparkling Wines For Your Holiday Cheer
Each is an incredible performer, just pick your price.
A House DVD’d
The Devil’s Backbone Criterion Collection; $39.95 (Blu-ray), $29.95 (DVD) Guillermo del Toro is fascinated with the Gothic, and his 2001 supernatural melodrama about ghosts and gold in 1930s Spain may be the most perfect expression of that fascination. War orphan Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is the innocent abandoned at an isolated Spanish school, where a dark…
Aging With Grace
Hyde Park Bar & Grill, feeding a city across three decades
The Boxing Lesson
The Grateful Dead Sunshine Daydream (Veneta, Oregon, 8/27/72) (Rhino) Nearly two decades after Jerry Garcia’s death, Dead Heads still live to compare shows and rate performances. This Pacific Northwest date from 1972 has long been considered among the band’s best, boasting definitive versions of “Dark Star,” “Bertha,” and “Playing in the Band,” among others. Hot…
The Boxing Lesson
A half-dozen other recent sets were reviewed in our Sept. 20 edition: austinchronicle.com/issues/2013-09-20 The Beach Boys Made in California (Capitol) The Clash Sound System (Sony Legacy) Bob Dylan Another Self Portrait: The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 (1969-1971) (Columbia) Harry Nilsson The RCA Albums Collection (Sony Legacy) Nirvana In Utero 20th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Sly &…
Saving Mr. Banks
Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson star in this story about how Walt Disney convinced the prickly author of Mary Poppins to sell her creation to Hollywood.
A House DVD’d
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project Criterion Collection, $124.95 (Blu-ray + DVD) We know you’re anxiously anticipating Martin Scorsese’s latest offering, The Wolf of Wall Street, which opens on Christmas Day. As you’re giving thanks for a new Scorsese movie, however, don’t forget about the other important work this great filmmaker performs as an archivist and…
You Want Fries With That?
The Hyde Park Bar & Grill has a few pleasant surprises
Council: Work Done and Happy Holidays!
After 2013 arose such a clatter, Council is settling their brains for a long winter’s nap
The Hightower Report
NSA and DHS defend us from LibertyManiacs.com
American Hustle
It’s all about the hair, the performances, and the grift and graft in this unpredictable new offering from David O. Russell.
A House DVD’d
RWBY Volume 1 New Video Group, $24.95 (Blu-ray) How strong is the cult of local machinima geniuses Rooster Teeth? Their latest creation, Americanized anime RWBY, was already inspiring fan art and cosplay when just the trailers were released. It’s a simple story, inspired by fairy tales, of four girls training with distinctive hybrid weapons to…
Fancy Salt, We Exalt
Finishing salts by Confituras
The Boxing Lesson
Lee Hazlewood There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving: Lee Hazlewood Industries 1966-1971 (Light in the Attic) In his Sixties salad days, Lee Hazlewood wrote and produced hits for Duane Eddy and Nancy Sinatra while pursuing a psychedelic cowboy/MOR-surrealist sensibility on his own iconoclastic recordings. His early successes spawned maverick label LHI (Lee Hazlewood Industries), which…
Day Trips
Goodnight Historical Center opens cowboy palace to visitors
Inside Llewyn Davis
The latest from the Coen Brothers nails the Sixties folk-music scene, and delivers another of their memorably flawed heroes.
A House DVD’d
Tokyo Story Criterion Collection, $39.95 (Blu-ray + DVD) Gifting a Criterion release to a lover of cinema can be filed under “no-brainer.” But this Blu-ray re-release of the Yasujiro Ozu classic is a must-have. Exactly how classic is Tokyo Story? Well, in the latest Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time,…
Food-O-File
Foodie innovators land grants and La Corsha rep replies to Wonderland backlash
Carstarphen Report Card: B for Bland
AISD head receives lukewarm review
Gay Place
Holiday apparel ain’t the only thing gay in the gAyTX: Check out some annual traditions.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
This story of a milquetoast with a wild imagination stars Ben Stiller and is as pretty as it is busy. Opens 12/25.
A House DVD’d
Nashville Criterion Collection, $39.95 (Blu-ray + DVD) So many of Robert Altman’s films have the sensation of a circus: the sprawling casts, the overlapping sounds that confuse and tickle the ear, the audience’s held breath at a high-wire act. (There were plummets to Earth, certainly; is there another great American director with so many zeros…
Food Events
› Sherry Tasting Local wine distributors will pour samples of their sherry portfolios accompanied by light appetizers for $5. Guests can also opt to stay for a prix fixe menu dinner with sherry pairings after the tasting for $65. Reservations can be made by phone for the dinner but are not necessary for the tasting.…
The Boxing Lesson
ZZ Top The Complete Studio Albums 1970-1990 (Warner Bros.) Here’s three Texans ram-rodding blues through Marshall amplifiers, then becoming mega-pop stars by wiring their expertise to MTV-era dance floor rhythms. Ten CDs restore and remaster vinyl mixes of the Houstonians’ initial run for mini-LP-style discs inside a clamshell box. The sound’s solidified by ZZ Top’s…
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
Idris Elba is spellbinding in this biopic that reveres the man but slights the movement.
Father Time
Claude van Lingen’s conceptual artwork counts down from 1,000
The Talented Mr. Isaac
Scenes from an interview with the star of the Coen Brothers’ ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’
Rivalry Revs Up for Pct. 2
Three Dems vie to replace Sarah Eckhardt
Soccer Watch
The Austin Aztex won the PDL championship back in August, but the awards keep rolling in. The Aztex were named PDL Organization of the Year Friday at the annual United Soccer Leagues Hall of Fame & Awards Dinner – along with Orlando City (USL PRO), and the Dayton Dutch Lions (W-League) – and were also…
Grudge Match
This boxing riff stars Stallone and De Niro, but it’s hardly the stuff of Rocky vs. the Raging Bull.
Exhibitionism
Martin Burke’s solo performance of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a tour de force, but also an act of faith
The Good Eye
Rekh & Datta’s ‘slow clothing’ line takes its time going from Texas to Rajasthan and back again
The Boxing Lesson
The Band Live at the Academy of Music 1971 (Capitol/UMe) A glance at the back of this hardback volume whets appetites for Last Waltz-style visuals, but the latter portion of this 4-CD/1-DVD set houses a 5.1 Surround Sound mix and only two brief video snippets. Of course, witnessing the Band over the shoulder of Southern…
Quote of the Week
“Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!” – the Chronicle Newsdesk, with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore
The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s latest take on the American hoodlum is a relentlessly wild ride.
Exhibitionism
Poison Apple’s latest, about a friendship affected by social media, provides little to engage with
The Boxing Lesson
Paradox: box sets bloat up as physical CD sales plummet
The Boxing Lesson
Big “D” Jamboree: Live Recordings From the Stage of the Sportatorium in Dallas, Texas, 1950-1958 (Bear Family) It was October 5, 1957, and, as emcee Johnny Hicks noted, “It’s kind of hard these days to draw a line between country style and rock & roll; they’ve kindly gotten all mixed up together.” The place was…
Headlines
› Entering the holidays, there’s no formal City Council meeting again until Jan. 23, but last Thursday (Dec. 12) they decided on – at least temporarily – the next phase of urban rail and the work plan for Auditorium Shores. See “Work Done and Happy Holidays!” › With a Dec. 9 kickoff Commissioners Court campaign…
Exhibitionism
The new set and costume designs for Ballet Austin’s annual production add warmth and candy-colored magic
Oops!
In the Dec. 13 News story, “Urban Rail: Which Way to Connect?” the last sentence in the first paragraph should have read: “According to Montgomery, AURA, the transit advocacy group, strongly prefers ‘a fair comparison’ of the Highland route with the Lamar/Guadalupe sub-corridor in Phase 2 of Project Connect, but Montgomery’s motion to amend the…
Third-Party Candidates Lining Up Again
It’s still busy at the bottom of the ticket
Point Austin: Making Sense of Newtown
A year later, small steps toward changing the gun violence paradigm
Give ‘Til It Helps 2013, Part 1
We each hold the key: Let’s show these nonprofits how much they are appreciated
Get Booked
Big names and newcomers delight in this collection of recent releases
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The first telegraphs came in the form of optical telegraphs, including the use of smoke signals, beacons, or reflected light. A semaphore network invented by Claude Chappe operated in France from 1792 through 1846 and was widely imitated throughout Europe and the U.S. The last commercial semaphore link ended in Sweden in 1880. According to…
The Boxing Lesson
Creedence Clearwater Revival (Fantasy) Face it, you know these chooglers by heart. Flick the radio dial and you’ll likely hear three of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s multitudinous hit singles. In fact, after 45 years, “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Fortunate Son” practically come encoded in newborns’ DNA. This 6-CD box, containing all seven studio albums,…
Then There’s This: The Big C Stands for Corruption
Even after reforms at CPRIT, Rick Perry still remains in charge
Get Booked
S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams Little, Brown, and Company, 472 pp., $35 Doug Dorst wrote this book because J.J. Abrams had an idea. Dorst you may know because you’ve read or heard of his first novel, Alive in Necropolis, or his excellent collection of short stories, The Surf Guru. Abrams you know because…
The Boxing Lesson
I Heard the Angels Singing: Electrifying Black Gospel From the Nashboro Label, 1951-1983 (Tompkins Square) No corner of American roots music remains as overlooked as postwar gospel. Vast amounts of music on the Chess, Savoy, Jewel, and Songbird labels lie in vaults awaiting rediscovery, but at least Nashboro finally gets a 4-CD overview from the…
The Boxing Lesson
The Animals The Mickie Most Years and More (ABKCO/Real Gone) Like Sixties contemporaries the Rolling Stones, the Animals channeled a love of American R&B into raw, seething rock & roll that ranked with the era’s most explosive music. Unlike the former band, the latter act never developed as songwriters, but its early work with pop-savvy…
Get Booked
The Facades by Eric Lundgren Overlook Duckworth, 272 pp., $25.95 Sven Norberg, the narrator of The Facades, St. Louis citizen Eric Lundgren’s first novel, is one sullen fellow. So sullen, in fact, that, for about three-quarters of the book’s pages, it’s pretty much all you know about him. Said sullenness comes with good reason: His wife, Molly, a decorated opera…
The Boxing Lesson
ECM Selected Signs III – VIII (ECM) Musical backdrop to “ECM: A Cultural Archeology,” a recently-concluded, yearlong exhibit in Munich, this lovingly curated 6-CD set provides a primer to recent Grammy-nominee Manfred Eicher’s extraordinary label of international tastes and pristine aesthetics. While the German imprint, founded 1969, remains a stronghold of avant-garde jazz, its classical…
2013 Politics Gift Guide Part III
Last-minute ideas from yesterday’s news
Hornography
Breaking up is hard to do, even if you’re calling it a “mutual decision,” as Mack Brown has been so eloquent to do last weekend about ending his relationship with Texas football. The team’s head coach announced Sunday that he will step down after Dec. 30’s Alamo Bowl in San Antonio against No. 10 Oregon,…
Get Booked
The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron Knopf, 576 pp., $35 Essayist. Humorist. Screenwriter. Filmmaker. Journalist. Blogger. It took four paragraphs for her New York Times obituary to run through all the hats Nora Ephron wore before arriving at “Novelist.” The delayed credit was certainly no slight to her bestselling novel, Heartburn – only…
Playback
Christmas wishes for the local set
The Boxing Lesson
The Who Tommy: Super Deluxe Edition (Geffen/UMe) Even in its heart-of-the-atom demo, “Amazing Journey” zips through the British Invasion’s primordial chaos to ground zero of rock & roll’s original sin: the concept album. The Beatles’ revolutionary lurch into modernity, 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, turned the era Technicolor by illustrating the power of…
The Luv Doc: Thoughtfulness
Dear Luv Doc, I can never think of what to buy my wife for Christmas, and when I ask her, she says she has everything she needs. It’s true. When she needs something, she buys it. What do you get for someone who has everything? – Thoughtless That’s easy, Thoughtless, just get her what she…
Get Booked
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan Picador, 304 pp., $15 (paper) It’s amazing what we’ll do for something we believe in: travel to the other side of the continent, commit theft, organize hundreds of the world’s most powerful engineers and programmers …. In Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Clay Jannon does all this and more…
The Boxing Lesson
Cannibal Corpse Dead Human Collection: 25 Years of Death Metal (Metal Blade) Cannibal Corpse remains the gold standard of death metal. Buffalo’s gore kings have amassed a dozen studio spatters since 1990, all housed in the 14-CD Dead Human Collection, which includes a live set from 2010 Tampa on both digital and vinyl formats. Skulking…
The Boxing Lesson
Eric Clapton Give Me Strength: The ’74/’75 Recordings (Polydor/UMe) Beyond the Singer sewing machine needle stitching together this 5-CD/1-Blu-ray family-album-sized keepsake – Eric Clapton’s piercing guitar – Give Me Strength: The ’74/’75 Recordings ultimately underscores the singular genius of its archival overseer Bill Levenson. Compiler of Clapton’s Crossroads, Crossroads 2, both Layla and Other Assorted…
Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas
The auteur from Atlanta dons his Madea drag once more to spread holiday cheer.
Get Booked
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Little, Brown, and Company, 784 pp., $30 One of the supreme pleasures for the fiction enthusiast is the immersive power of a novel to enthrall the reader so successfully that when the reverie finally breaks, the coffee’s gone cold and the lengthy shadows of twilight approach. So it is with…
The Boxing Lesson
Woody Guthrie American Radical Patriot (Rounder) Capping the centennial commemoration of America’s folksinging godfather, American Radical Patriot assembles a coffeetable collection of six CDs, a DVD, and a heavy vinyl 78 uncovering Woody Guthrie’s government labors. Bill Nowlin contextualizes the commissions: Library of Congress sessions, songs for the Bonneville Power Administration, war ballads, and a…
The Boxing Lesson
Van Morrison Moondance: Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) Expanded album classics can test the patience of all but the most fanatical devotees, but Van Morrison’s 1970 breakthrough justifies such an approach. Dreamy yet earthy, accessible yet impenetrable, Moondance offers some of the most romantic and resonant music of the Belfast belter’s career, introducing standards “And It…
Walking With Dinosaurs
This visually ambitious animated film looks promising until its corny plot gets going.
A House DVD’d
Criterion and Rooster Teeth give you something worth wishing for
Colony Park: Finding a Middle Way
City planners struggle to find the ‘just right’ in a new mixed-use development
The Boxing Lesson
Donny Hathaway Never My Love: The Anthology (Atco/Rhino) If his plane crashed or he’d been shot, would Donny Hathaway be as lionized today as Otis Redding or Sam Cooke? Morbid speculation aside, don’t let Donny Hathaway’s 1979 suicide discount his soul supernova. On this ’bout-time 4-CD career summary, sequencing’s everything: Disc 1 has the lushly…
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
Ron Burgundy is back – and the legend continues, at least in his own mind.
