Gods and Monsters
The final days of the man behind Hollywood’s Frankenstein
Permanent Visitors?
photograph by Jana Birchum In a climate incredibly doubtful of the public school system’s effectiveness, the Visiting Teachers have been able to maintain a unique and surprisingly hopeful perspective, providing a necessary bridge between the district and the maze of community and privately based social services outside the classroom. With the combination of prior teaching…
Popular Search Engines
“Where do you want to go today?” ask the Microsoft commercials, but really that’s the big question on the Net. Search engines are what make it possible to find what you want. Search.Com (http://www.search.com) is a good starting search because it also links you to the other main engines. HotBot http://www.hotbot.com A personal favorite, HotBot…
Dancing About Architecture
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt U, I only want U 2 have some fun.” So opens Prince’s well-known party anthem “1999,” a song born to a destiny far beyond the post-disco dance floors of 1982, the year it was first released. In fact, its new incarnation in CD single reissue form recently arrived at the…
Scanlines
D. Fredric Hobbs (1973) with Karen Ingenthron, Richard Marion, E. Kerrigan Prescott Alabama’s Ghost is another installment in the triptych of films from the inept genius Fredric Hobbs (the third film is 1977’s Roseland). Little is known about the Hobbs-man, except that he was (is?) an artist, sculptor, and writer, outside of doing the three…
Shooting Star
The Meat Puppets: Derrick Bostrom, Curt Kirkwood, and Cris Kirkwood photograph by Joseph Cultice The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood’s.Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and…
You’re a Terrific Audience!
photograph by Bruce Dye Wednesday night: 8:45. Contest night at the Common Interest, but almost nobody was there at this early hour. No sign of Dick Sharpe — a regular who has a fondness for singing Frank Sinatra — unless he was among the the regulars in the back room playing a watered-down, legal version…
The Truth Will Set You Free
The failure of the mainstream music press to unglamourize drug use — and in particular, heroin — has never been as clear as it is than upon finishing “Shooting Star.” Originally published November 12 in The Phoenix New Times, Tempe, Arizona’s free newsweekly, David Holthouse’s in-depth account of heroin’s toll on brothers Curt and Cris…
We Are the Stars
Karaoke is a great equalizer, a chance to be a star, if only for three minutes. Karaoke gets punk kids, war vets, and rich golfer-types to make idiots of themselves … together. Groups who begin the evening on opposite sides of the bar are soon one big conga-lining, stage-diving, dueting melee. It’s a beautiful thing.…
That Was the Year That Was
It was his impatience to act that got new plans adopted (Smart Growth, CSC, Cedar Avenue accord), old plans dusted off and, after years of gridlock and inaction, implemented (the Town Lake Comprehensive Plan, Bike Plan, Barton Springs Road redesign). It was his clout with both the business and environmental communities that built a bridge…
Karaoke Kwik Tips!
Don’t try to get your song bumped up in rotation. This creates resentment. Duets and even well-choreographed trios are OK, but don’t sing in big groups. Groups are stupid and annoying. You don’t need a good voice or stage presence to get love from your audience, but a lot of the former goes a long…
Tribute Records
(Asylum) Give Nashville credit for a tiny bit of balls: Tammy Wynette Remembered opens with Elton John covering “Stand by Your Man.” A clever idea, if not a new one, except that John’s cover is damn near unpalatable: meant to be wry, it comes off instead as all cheek and bombast. Rosanne Cash, for her…
Karaoke on the Web
Karaoke World Order http://www.jaguarsystems.com/mrxpres/page2.htm Radio program of karaoke singing broadcast on the Internet. Karaoke Scene Magazine http://www.karaokescene.com Contains the definitive history of karaoke. http://hometown.aol.com/karaokecrl/private/index.htm Sections on etiquette and the “Karaoke Prime Directive”: frequently asked questions about rotation. Karaoke Krazy http://www.karaokekrazy.com/ Las Vegas-based public-access, karaoke version of Star Search. Computer Karaoke http://www.teleport.com/~labrat/karaoke.shtml Sing along with MIDI…
Naked City
Austin-area agencies that provide shelter, housing and job assistance, and help for those suffering from mental illness or drug abuse received a bit of good news for Christmas: Several local assistance programs will receive more than $3 million in federal funds. U.S. Rep Lloyd Doggett and Mayor Kirk Watsonannounced last week that the money, issued…
Short Cuts
The South by Southwest ’99 Festivals are falling into place, and announcements about the March events are starting to come in at a steady pace. The SXSW Interactive Festival (March 13-16) has announced not one, but three keynote speakers, one per day. First up is Mark Cuban, who founded broadcast.com (formerly AudioNet) in 1995. Broadcast.com…
A Clash Over Gas
On the local level, pipeline opponents have taken the high ground. “How do you spin an explosion?” consultant Heckler asks rhetorically. “I think that what happened in Houston is worth a thousand words. Just on a PR level they have done a miserable job,” Heckler says. Seen through Longhorn’s lenses, however, “There are two economic…
Articulations
With all the Presidential impeachment hoohah monopolizing the dispatches from our nation’s capital of late, one cheerful bit of cultural news might have slipped by without your notice. The story is that five of the city’s arts organizations are going to get handed some green by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in fiscal…
Mandatory Talk
On a related note, resources like Gomez’s program might provide a different slant on stories such as the one that appeared on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman’s business section on Dec. 10, titled “Prison labor is making a comeback.” The story, a combination of Associated Press wire service material and the work of…
Exhibitionism
THE NUTZY NUTCRACKER: SPICE OVER SUGAR Bass Concert Hall, December 23 Sugar shutdown. It’s an underrated hazard of the holidays. Everywhere you go, there are goodies, tempting you with their sweetness. And everywhere you go, you give in to them — a nibble of fudge here, a few lemon bars there — and on it…
The 50+ Books
Adventures With a Texas Naturalist, Roy Bedichek And Other Dirty Stories, Larry L. King Aransas, Stephen Harrigan Armadillo in the Grass, Shelby Hearon Blessed McGill, Bud Shrake Blood and Money, Tommy Thompson The Bone Pickers, Al Dewlen The Butterfield Overland Mail, Waterman Ormsby Charles Goodnight, J. Evetts Haley The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement,…
Frankenstein’s Dad
Some of the best films seem to come out of nowhere, unexpected, unheralded little gems that arrive full-born and catch everyone off-guard with their striking originality and refreshing vitality. Bill Condon’s new film, Gods and Monsters, is the perfect example, a modestly budgeted adaptation of novelist Christopher Bram’s Father of Frankenstein. Set in 1957 Hollywood,…
Y Ask X and Y?
Chad Salvata Oh. My. God. About as pleasant as a car wreck and just as compelling, VORTEX Repertory Company’s TheX and Y Trilogy seemed to elicit the same gape-mouthed response from each of its audience members. Coined a “cybernetic opera,” this trio of trance-music musical dramas — The Black Blood, Panoptikon, and Triskelion — staged…
Day Trips
Fort Concho photograph by Gerald E. McLeod Happy New Year. It’s time once again to do a little bit of housekeeping and clean of off my desk some of those tidbits of travel information that I have been saving. More frontier forts were built in Texas than in any other state between 1848 and 1900…
Page Two
Here we are, quite to our astonishment, offering you the first issue of 1999, 12 months away from the year 2000. So long a landmark date in the science fiction I grew up reading, 2000 always seemed like it was so far in the future that it defined the future. When we got there, the…
Postscripts
You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, has been doing more than just making lots of money. It’s recently been the bone of contention between two parties for whom the independent vs. chain issue really, really matters. In one corner is feisty columnist Pat Holt, the former book…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Half the world’s population has never made a telephone call. “A Streetcar Named Desire” actually existed in New Orleans in the earlier part of this century. Tennessee Williams created a clever double entendre using the name of the trolley line that ran east of the French Quarter to Desire (pronounced de-zi-ray) Street. The area is…
In Memory
“You know the one thing we did right. Was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.” — civil rights freedom song Last month, a documen-tary film producer in Boston died. He wasn’t a celebrity or someone famous, but…
Making Lists
“Yeeee-hooo!” Bruno yelled back. “I’m a Texan!” — Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith “Texas has no serious writers. I am the first serious writer Texas has produced.” — Katherine Anne Porter to Winston Bode in The Texas Observer, October 31, 1958. “Every man has a village in his heart, whether he comes from…
Public Notice
Now It’s Our Turn The beginning of the end is as good a vestibule as any to stop and contemplate our place in this race of rats and humanity. Our money’s on humanity, frankly, despite some of the silly goings-on on the national and international fronts. Shake your head globally and thank the deities that…
The Net
Understanding the Internet is the first step toward nerd enlightenment. So what is it, anyway? It all started with a post-Sputnik government project. That’s right, the Internet of today is a product of Cold War paranoia. Not only that, but it would never have worked as intended and still wouldn’t. In 1962, ARPA (the Advanced…
About AIDS
When a disease strikes as many people as HIV/AIDS, someone needs to be in charge of the response effort. In Central Texas, that task falls to the volunteer members of the Austin Area Comprehensive HIV Planning Council. “The mission of the HIV Planning Council is to develop and coordinate an effective and comprehensive community-wide response…
Food-O-File
This past year was a great one for culinary travel. Central Texas cooking teachers Linda Fox and Cameron Graham hosted several successful cooking classes at a swanky oceanside villa in Ziahuatanejo, Mexico, while chef Harvey Harris spent six months in castles and restaurants in Piedmonte and Tuscany studying regional Italian cooking. Gilligan’s owner Stan Adams…
Quick Tips for New Users
Don’t download and install software you don’t really need. Unnecessary extra software will only slow down your system and eat up hard drive space. Monitor children carefully. The Net is like a big city. There’s all sorts of great stuff for kids, but you don’t want them wandering all over town on their own. Programs…
Toasting Hogmany
In my book, New Year’s Eve celebrations always seem like forced affairs. Partygoers get all gussied up to fete the flip of the calendar, and hosts and hostesses feel obliged to create a spread that tops the one served the previous year. Expectations run high. It’s New Year’s Eve, after all; it has to be…
Common Internet Terms and Protocols
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, used for Web pages. HTML Hypertext Markup Language, the code Web pages are written in. FTP File Transfer Protocol, a method of file transfer over the Net. IRC Internet Relay Chat, a collection of live chat rooms. IP Internet Protocol, the unique address of every online computer. SMTP Simple mail transfer…
Cooking Black-eyed Peas
Salting the cooking liquid for dried black-eyed peas slows the cooking time and toughens the peas; add it later or don’t use salt at all (I use rich chicken stock to cook mine). Simmer, don’t boil. Boiling makes the pot overflow, makes the peas fall apart, and causes the skins to separate from the peas.…
Software
Netscape Communicator http://www.netscape.com Make sure you choose the strong encryption option for maximum security for shopping or sending sensitive data. NoNags http://www.nonags.com A great archive of software you can download free. You’ll find both mIRC and CuteFTP at NoNags, along with hundreds of other apps. Net Nanny http://www.netnanny.com/ Net Nanny blocks access to a good…
