Culinary Contradictions
by Tom Philpott Mustang Diner 400 Lavaca, 472-2363 Lunch, 7 days a week, 11-2; dinner, Sun.-Thurs, 5-10; Fri. & Sat., 5-11. Like a collage, the Mustang Diner brims with mixed messages and disparate elements. The name conjures images of budget-priced American standards like ham and eggs and fried hamburgers, to be washed down with iced…
Two From Texas
Of the approximately 500 films submitted to the Sundance Film Festival for consideration in the 1996 dramatic competition, only 18 made the final cut. This year, two of the films chosen for competition have roots in the Lone Star state. The Whole Wide World, directed by Los Angeles native Dan Ireland, is set in 1930s…
Spoon It On
After – gosh, how long has it been now? – Spoon have finally caved in and made a choice between all the record companies that have been sniffing the band’s butts. And the winner is (Tah-dah!) Matador Records, the indie label distributed by Atlantic Records, who’ve been wining and dining the band for more than…
The Not-So-Happy Birthdays of Middle Age Surprise!
39 yesterday, amid a celebration that took up most of a week by the time she’d sufficiently rejoiced with her kids, her co-workers, her girlfriends, and her significant other. Late last night, when the party was over, she slipped down to the basement alone and started going through boxes of old photographs and mementos. There…
Live Shots
ROSIE FLORES Antone’s, November 22 While Flores’ latest LP, Rockabilly Filly, is flat and lifeless, her live show reveals a performer with substantial stage presence, excellent guitar skills, and a venerable voice that animates material with personality equal to or lesser than that of a pet rock. Flores’ performance this night gave me the feeling…
Coach’s Corner
The big news is my acquisition of one of those pizza-sized satellite dishes. I’d been debating this matter for quite some time. The colorful displays in stores would find me, more and more, drifting by. I’d ask a few questions, get frustrated with its complexity, exacerbated by the salesclerk’s insistence on how “user friendly” it…
Recommended
Emo’s, Saturday 9 The Gomez and Morticia of rock & roll tango, cheek to cheek, back into Austin. Clutched in their teeth like a thorny rose, is an angry, edgy set of “punk you” blues – very Pussy Galore once upon a time, very Blues Explosion! now. What a lovely couple that dominatrix Cristina Martinez…
Day Trips
To found Hill Country Christmas Trees, Mark and Carol Mitchell traded careers in the semiconductor industry for the life of farmers outside of Wimberley. As one of seven choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms in the Austin area, they are part of a growing industry in Texas. Local tree farms offer a fresher product than imported trees,…
Record Reviews: Reissues
ANGRY SAMOANS The Unboxed Set (Triple X) SOCIAL DISTORTION Mommy’s Little Monster (Time Bomb) Mainliner (Time Bomb) Say what you will about the biz-generated texture of punk’s recent commercial ascendance. True, it’s unleashed a rash of identikit “punk” bands as faceless and plastic as every Sunset Strip metal band who suddenly bought flannel shirts and…
Page Two
After this one that you hold in your hands, there will be two more issues of The Austin Chronicle published in 1995. Both of these issues will be dated Friday (December 15 and December 22) and distributed on Thursday, as usual. The issue of the 22nd, however, will be finished on Tuesday night instead of…
Film Reviews
RECO V15/#15 (, min.) (12/8/95) (M.B.) New Review FATHER OF THE BRIDE PART IID: Charles Shyer; with Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Martin Short, Kimberly Williams, George Newbern, Kieran Culkin. (PG, 106 min.) George Banks� life is swell. He�s survived the defection and subsequent, lavish marriage of his daughter to an irritatingly successful and singularly unobjectionable…
Toy Story
by Andy Langer I just can’t sing songs or write lyrics about my dick anymore,” says Jason McMaster of Dangerous Toys. Clearly, this Jason McMaster is a more mature model than the one who penned “Sport’n a Woody” back in 1989 and explained the song, with a straight face no less, to the national glossy…
Food-O-File
The edibles at Fabulous Cheesecakes are still fabulous but they are no longer Lore-tta’s. Cheesecake-maker Loretta Bates has sold her popular local operation to the father-son team of Charles Shields and Tracen Gardner, who plan to maintain the quality of the product while expanding sales and distribution. Bates says she is “thrilled about the sale.…
Film: Showtimes
Film listings are updated Friday mornings. Showtimes listed below start Friday, December 8 and cover the week ending Thursday, December 14. An asterisk (*) before a title means that no passes or special admission discounts (apart from matinee discounts) will be accepted for any screening. Parentheses indicate weekend showtimes for Saturdays and Sundays only, unless…
Beer-Fueled, Fence Humping Music
by Greg Beets The name of the new album says it all: seven years into their domestic beer-fueled run, the Wannabes are still just suckers for a pop song. Popsucker is the purest expression to date of the Wannabes’ bar-friendly brand of pop/punk fence-humping. It’s an unaffected, no-frills compendium of two and a half-minute bursts…
Acapulco Video Taqueria
2009 East Seventh, 482-0215 Tue.-Thu. 10am-10pm; Fri.-Mon. 9am-11pm Let’s say you just bought an old warehouse and decided to renovate. Your business, a Spanish language video store, only occupies about a third of the available space, so you decide to open a Tejano record store next to the tape racks. When that’s done you still…
Palmer Redo Rebuffed
The renovation of Palmer Auditorium into a city performing arts center — the dream of choice of many local arts groups lately — was dealt a hard blow last week in a report on the idea by a company of real estate analysts out of Chicago. Stein & Co. were hired by city council to…
When It’s Time to Turn the Rules Inside Out
by Suzy Banks My friend Mary Leigh DeJernett has dreamed of building unique accommodations for weary but well-heeled travelers to Austin. After months and months spent chasing what turned out to be a dead-end proposition on a piece of property on Town Lake, she finally hooked up with Kati Killam, who owns two and a…
Nick’s Great Pizza
11302 FM 2222, 331-4471 Fri. 2-9pm; Sat. & Sun. 11:30am-9pm There are two reasons to love Nick’s Great Pizza. First, Nick’s is an authentic pizza joint — no designer pizzas are pulled out of his oven, and no frivolous decor dots the restaurant’s walls. The story goes that Nick, a diminutive New York Italian who…
Theatre’s Great Historian The Essential Oscar
by Suzanne Hassler Austin theatre has many heroes who are diligent and accomplished but seldom seen by the audience. One is a man who has influenced thousands of theatre artists worldwide, whose work sits on your shelf (right next to the Bible), but whom you have never met — and might not recognize if you…
As the Council Turns
by Alex de Marban While Brigid Shea is doing her best to get the city’s ethical rulebook thrown at Eric Mitchell, Ronney Reynolds confirms reports that he intends a run at the mayoral seat in 1997, and Bruce Todd denies incessant rumors that he’s leaving office early to seek a job in D.C. Those affairs…
White Egret Farm
15704 Webberville Road, 276-7408 or 276-7505 Hours vary; visitors encouraged to call A drive into the hills surrounding town should be proof enough for anyone that goats have come to Texas to stay and sent the cattle off to graze on the “back 40.” You say you’re not crazy about cabrito? Nevermind. At White Egret…
Whither Grunge? Seattle Rocks
by Phil West by Charles Peterson HarperCollins West/SubPop $35, hard Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story by Clark Humphrey Feral House, $16.95, paper Charles Peterson’sScreaming Life or Clark Humphrey’s Loser would both look great on a coffee table. They’re big, glossy, immensely attractive, enjoyable, easy browses — which is sort of ironic, because they’re also…
Three True Tales of Urban Infill
by Suzy Banks As one who is charmed almost totally by the serendipitous, a designed city sounds as appealing as military barracks. Or Lakeway. The utopian designs for garden cities of the turn of the century, the megastructure concepts where the entire city is one huge building, or the rhetoric of inner city renewal doesn’t…
John Cale
Paramount Theatre Friday, December 8 John Cale was the classical side of the Velvet Underground, who laid groundwork for every generation of rock & roll since the late Sixties. In almost every musical capacity — from A&R at Warner Bros., to producer for Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Jonathan Richman, to collaborative efforts with Brian…
Postscripts
* Congratulations to the winners of the 1995 Violet Crown Books Awards! On December 1, the Austin Writers’ League honored eight Austin-based writers. Tina Juarez was the winner in the fiction category for Call No Man Master. Nancylee Novell’s The Underground Stream won the Nonfiction Award, and Debra Monroe’s A Wild, Cold State won the…
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
by Alex de Marban John Castellanos finally had enough money to incarnate his dream, or so he thought. With help from a benefactor, the 36-year-old pastor planned to purchase and renovate an abandoned tract in the southern, gang-infested reaches of Austin. In the largest and most prominent of three derelict buildings overrun by underbrush, Castellanos…
HIV-Negative Gay & Bisexual MenWeekend Retreat
HIV-negative gay and bisexual men have a very special set of concerns within the AIDS epidemic that, unfortunately, often go unrecognized. For almost a year, AIDS Services of Austin has been providing support services for non-infected gay and bisexual men through our Staying Negative program. The Staying Negative program offers a safe, confidential, and supportive…
The CPC: Developing Change
While the Citizens’ Planning Committee (CPC) doesn’t expect to realize changes to the Land Development Code until next summer, the members have presented specific recommendations to begin the “overhaul” of the city’s land development process. At a work session on November 29, representatives of the 22-member committee suggested that changes to the Land Development Code…
Who Needs Brain Cells, Anyway?
Dear Suzy, We have seemingly miles of whitewashed cabinets in the kitchen. The only problem is that they have yellowed, and there are also a couple of chips knocked off the edges. What would be the best way to repaint them? They don’t necessarily have to remain whitewashed. — Lynne K. Dear Lynne, I once…
KVUE Gets Meat
by Hugh Forrest How refreshing to see our local daily finally put a little pressure on Jim Bob Moffett, the Freeport-McMoRan CEO whose name will apparently grace the University of Texas’ newest academic building. Not restricted solely to the news department, the spotlight on Moffett has also made its way to the op-ed pages. In…
Goodwill to All…
Cold penetrates in more than just physical ways. Sure, many of us have been cold. But, have you ever gone cold? A climate that allows children in modern America to go cold, unfed, unhoused, is a chilling strain of evil that individual attention and warmth can only begin to counter. How is it possible in…
Off the Desk
Texas Attorney General Dan Morales’ first assistant, Jorge Vega, is one step closer to a possible public reprimand or disbarment for his role in firing utilities specialist W. Scott McCollough. The Associated Press reported that on Monday, the State Bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline accused Vega of “neglecting state agencies’ interests in a utilities case…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows…
John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, loved to skinny-dip in the Potomac River. By his own admission, Sylvester Stallone once dressed up a la Julie Newmar portraying Catwoman to impress a nearly blind carpenter and get a free cabinet installation. In Egypt, the professional bellydancer ratio is one for every 5,000…
Heal Thyself
by Daryl Slusher You really have to give the folks down at City Hall credit. They live in their own little world, and they’re not going to let anything blast them out of it. No unwanted message or analysis can pierce their cocoon. Consider two of the latest developments — a consultant proposal to nearly…
Revolutionary Bits and Pieces
having to do with revolution, this series has gotten a little out of hand. This is the sixth. Tonight I’ve realized, A) that it could go on forever, and B) that a 1500-word column is not the place to write a book in installments. Over the weeks, I’ve made many notes that I refer to,…
Touring the Technology Factory
by Spike Gillespie I have seen the future and you might be interested to know it’s located right here in town, directly across the street from the Caswell House, at 15th and West. The name of the joint is Human Code and, if pushed to give a metaphorical overview of what it’s like inside, I…
