Moore Is Better
I like houses that look like their owners. (Is it any wonder my house is made of cracking stucco?) Those who knew architect Charles Moore — a writer and teacher who reacted against 1950s modernism — say he resembled his Austin home, both in appearance and spirit. After touring the Tarrytown compound, all I can…
Music Recommended
Friday: Black Family, 81/2 Souvenirs, Continental Club; Pamela Hart, Elephant Room Saturday: Kermit Ruffins, Stubb’s; Miss Lavelle White, Top of the Marc; Don Walser, Broken Spoke Sunday: Black Crowes, City Coliseum; Capital City Men’s Chorus, St. Martin’s Lutheran Church Monday: Jesse Taylor, Roadhouse Cafe Tuesday: Let’s Get Big, Blazing Bows, Cactus Cafe Wednesday: El Flaco,…
Benefits
Holiday Swing Fundraiser to benefit Project Transitions (AIDS organization), at Ben Hur Shrine Temple Hall, 8pm-12:30am. 454-8646. Home for the Holidays featuring Shawn Colvin, Kelly Willis, Kris McKay, Sara Hickman, and Jack Ingram to benefit Community Partnership for the Homeless, at La Zona Rosa, 7:30pm. 469-9130. Pets with Santa Photos to benefit the Humane Society,…
Roadkill
Electric Lounge Tuesday, December 10 Much like the jet lag that affects intercontinental travelers, Low’s reworking of musical pace is a bit disconcerting when you first step into their zone. By slowing their already sparse songs to a creep, the Duluth, Minnesota trio allows the tension of every single note to seep in at full…
Coach’s Corner
against a blue-gray October sky….” Oh, yeah, that line has been used before. And the Thanksgiving weekend did indeed replicate the nasty weather conditions Grantland Rice described so nicely 60 years ago. To normal people, cold, rainy, gray conditions might signal the onset of severe depression, a change for the worse, indisposition at least. For…
The Final Frontier
illustration by Jason Stout Proclaiming the dawning of a new musical era is as smart and easy as nailing jelly to your forehead. Despite the chronologist’s dire need for some sort of working definition, creative energy isn’t kind enough to stand still for a snapshot. It’s like a virus that re-invents itself just when you…
Day Trips
It was on the slopes of Nebraska that I first tried skiing. It was on a hill in a little town where all the kids went sledding. I don’t remember much about the experience. I remember thinking, “I can do this.” Little did I know I would eat those words. Twenty-five years later, my first…
The Fight of His Life
Mayoral Candidate Kirk Watsonphotograph by John Anderson It was a blustery October afternoon when Kirk Watson announced his mayoral candidacy on the bandstand at Wooldridge Park in downtown Austin. Some blamed the wind on the autumnal weather. Others swore it was the rhetoric. The short but thunderous Watson, 38, delivered a standard candidate’s kick-off speech…
Page Two
The next two issues after this one, Dec. 13 and 20, will, as always, be distributed on Thursday and dated Friday, and all deadlines are normal. For the first time since the Chronicle went weekly about eight years ago, we will publish issues on both Christmas week and New Year’s week. Here’s the schedule, as…
Ronney Reynolds
* In 1995, Reynolds initiated an audit of the Drain-age Utility. Millions of dollars in excess funds were discovered. So for the 1995-1996 budget, Reynolds used $2.2 million of the excess monies to lower Drainage Utility fees, a charge assessed on your water and wastewater bill. For residents, the fee was reduced from $3.82 a…
Public Notice
Sister Helen Prejean, author of the stirring account of one woman’s odyssey through the legal system, Dead Man Walking, will keynote this year’s annual Bill of Rights Dinner, Wed, Dec 11, 7:30pm at the Sheraton. The dinner is the main fundraiser for the Texas Civil Rights Project, the scrappy guard dogs of our rights as…
Piercing Unreality
Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them. Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into a new life.” Those lines by Karl Marx flitted across my mind as I read the latest — and apparently last — issue of (sub)TEX, a radical newspaper sporadically published by a collective of the…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
You can purchase a live armadillo for about 30 pesos in the Yucatan. More than half of the U.S. population is within an hour’s drive of the Atlantic coastline. Only six percent of the coastline is open to the public. Peanut oil has been proposed to be used in breast implants. The first coffeehouse in…
Off the Desk:
Let’s see… there are splashy anti-depressant ads running in the Statesman, and direct-mail campaigns being waged by the Real Estate Council of Austin (RECA). So that puts us somewhere between the holidays and next spring’s City Council elections. On the latter, the RECA PAC has unleashed its second cost-of-living study to households across town. Readers…
Music To Know America By
illustration by A.J. Garces It’s hard for me to take seriously any vision of America that doesn’t include its music. For our music is where our paradoxes exist with the least self-consciousness. Here, then, is a short, arbitrary list of our most basic energies, our best and worst secrets. Carl Sandburg Sings Folk Songs. The…
Bubba Likes It
photograph by Rita Debellis South Austin, Texas, 78704.” A separate place. So says the sign above the new Threadgill’s “World Headquarters,” at the obtuse southern corner of Barton Springs Road and Riverside Drive. And we all know the piquant symbolism there, in Eddie Wilson’s planting his new digs in that very spot, shadowed by the…
Food-o-file
Boggy Creek farmers Larry Butler and Carol Sayle returned on November 24 from a speaking engagement at the Southern Agriculture Work Group Convention in Griffin, Georgia to find snow falling on their East Austin farm. Farmers, employees, and friends raced around in a tag-team, row-covering frenzy, determined to protect everybody’s favorite winter salad greens from…
Scan Lines
D: Roland Emmerich; with Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn, Harvey Fierstein. VHS Home Video Independence Day Either you love it, or you hate it; there’s no middle ground in the great Independence Day debate of 1996. But regardless of where you end…
Growing Pains
Scene from ATY’s production of The Reluctant Dragon Once upon a time, in the enchanted land of Austin, theatre companies believed that all they needed to do to ensure their success and long life was produce plays about which they were passionate. It didn’t matter if the plays were revisionist Shakespeare or unabridged O’Neill or…
Eating in Faith
illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick “Jewish” describes my palate as much as it identifies my faith. Perhaps it’s just the dehydrating Austin heat that leaves me craving salt in its many forms, but it’s also a sure sign of my affinity with many traditional Jewish foods. Were I to continually nourish my nostalgia for childhood brunches,…
Shortcuts
by Jen Scoville Film news this time of year usually revolves around Park City, Utah, as the line-up for the January Sundance Film Festival is finalized and then discussed and debated at great length. While last year a number of films with Texas ties were represented, out of the 127 features selected, only one film…
Articulations
Two weeks before it was to leave its longtime home on Fourth Street, six days before the final performance of its last production in that space, Capitol City Playhouse was closed by the Internal Revenue Service. Upon arriving at the theatre on the morning of December 2, Playhouse Artistic Director Richard Brown discovered that IRS…
Shopping Kosher
Before the arrival of larger, ethnically sophisticated grocery stores in Austin such as Fiesta and Central Market, finding a substantial supply of kosher products, even around the Jewish holidays, required a sharp detective’s eye. Occasionally, the shelves in Phoenicia deli promised some showing of kosher food among its few Israeli imports. Interestingly enough, while the…
Postcards From the Web
illustration by A.J. Garces Last year, Southwest Airlines asked its customers “Why Surf the Internet When You Can Fly It?” As advertising slogans go, it’s not a bad one. In fact, with the recent glut of travel-related sites on the Web piling up like LaGuardia on Christmas Eve, the idea of using the Internet to…
Local Palette
E. Vedrine 503 Coffee Bar through mid-January Study of a Human Face, by E. Vedrine You might be surprised to know that paintings by a four-year student of Paris’ Beaux Arts Academy are currently on display at a South Austin coffee shop. It’s an odd venue for an artist with such credentials, kind of like…
The Hyatt’s Glatt Kosher Kitchen
The new Glatt Kosher Kitchen at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Town Lake stands as the latest advancement in Austin kosher cuisine. The label “glatt” means that this kitchen meets the strictest requirements of kosher cooking, under the supervision of a local Rabbi, Rabbi Levertov. The Hyatt converted its old Foothills dining space into a…
Postscripts
by Lee Nichols & Margaret Moser * THU, DEC 5: Neale Donald Walsch will speak about and autograph copies of his Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, at Book People at 7pm. * FRI, DEC 6: Barnes & Noble (Arboretum) will bring James Ellroy to town for a question-and-answer session and booksigning of My Dark…
Austin Music Network Schedule
F RIDAY 6 9am Choice Cuts 51: Come Again 9:30 Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Studio Sessions 10am Choice Cuts 55: People’s Picks Rev. 10:30 Laurie Freelove, Studio Sessions 11am Choice Cuts 52: Talk Tv 11:30 Ray Wylie Hubbard & Terry Ware Noon Billboard 12:30 Tex Mix #84: TX Grammy Nominees 95 1pm Kamran Hooshmand & Erin…
Please Kill Me and other ROCK & ROLL BOOKS of 1996
To your average American, even if he is an aficionado, one for whom the beat and the noise and fury was All, punk rock has remained merely a minority musical taste. Hence, the above-named may find themselves puzzled by punk’s insatiable thirst for documentation. What these people are neglecting was that, in actual practice, punk…
Dancing About Architecture
As always, rumors are swirling about K-NACK, and as always they concern the popular Georgetown “alternative” radio station being sold. This time, it seems some folks got ahold of the news that owner Richard Rees and his partners sold their other “alternative” station in Salt Lake City, KENZ, and assumed the local couldn’t be far…
Quien es Mas Noir: James Crumley and James Ellroy are Coming to Town
The stars in tough-guy heaven will shine on Austin, Texas on Friday, December 6. Not one but two of the toughest, most important writers of hardboiled crime fiction will be in Austin to meet their fans and sign their new books. Former Texan James Crumley (The Wrong Case, Mexican Tree Duck) will be in town…
Turn the Beat Around
illustration by Roy Tompkins “For years, I’ve taken [industrial music] to be the sole province of elevator musicians (Front 242, Front Line Assembly) and vivisection candidates (Skinny Puppy) who pretend to conjure a `grim mood,’ primarily by draining all the life and surprise out of post-Kraftwerk umlaut-disco. Too rigid for dancing, too emaciated for catharsis,…
About AIDS
There are many, many things that you can do to serve as a volunteer with AIDS Services of Austin. The varied volunteer opportunities can easily be matched with your special interests, skills, or areas of expertise. From data entry, stuffing envelopes, working on the info line, or food bank to being a buddy, helper, or…
Live Shots
Cornell Hurd at the Hideaway Lounge, November 29photograph by John Carrico FURRY THINGS, THE AMERICAN ANALOG SET, COMET, PRIMADONNAS Liberty Lunch, November 23 It’s a funny feeling you get when you’re watching a band or a bunch of bands and suddenly you get the inkling that you’re seeing into the future. You just know that…
