Animated Films by Jan Svankmajer
Animated Films by Jan Svankmajer NR. Directed by Jan Svankmajer, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . Animated Films by Jan Svankmajer includes video screenings of Dimensions of Dialogue (1982, 12 min.) and Food (1992, 14 min). The animated films of this Czechoslovakian filmmaker are world-renowned for their surrealist bent and dark imagery.
Red Desert
Antonioni’s first film in color uses the element to externalize interior feelings. The film is set in industrial northern Italy, and stars beautiful Monica Vitti as a dysfunctional woman suffering from anomie. But is it the woman or her environment that’s really out of whack?
The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story
The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story 2000, NR, 90 min. Directed by Craig Foster, Damon Foster, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . This documentary shows the lives of the bushpeople of the African Kalahari Desert and focuses on the tribal hunters who track game as their forefathers have done for thousands of years.…
2001: A Monster Pansy Ball
2001: A Monster Pansy Ball NR. Directed by Various, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring . Performative Queer Film and Video includes screenings of “Lesbianage IV” by Sarah Marcus and Kirsten Kuppenbender (6 min.); “Pandamonium” by Deb Norris (3 min.); “Object/Subject of Desire” by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (5 min.); “Fuck This, Ginger”…
Articulations
Austin native Starla Benford brings The Vagina Monologues to town, Kerthy Fix takes Heaving Shadows at the Skin Show to Chicago, and where does rm 120 theatre go?
Off the Bookshelf
On the Plains by Peter Brown DoubleTakeBooks/Norton, 131 pp., $39.95 It is possible to drive from Fort Stockton, Texas, to South Dakota without passing through a town of more than a few thousand people — that is the territory that is captured in this very fine and subtle book. On the Plains is a visual…
Better Than Nothing
Documentarian Ken Burns’ takes on Jazz — and loses.
Naked City
Against all odds, the design for the new City Hall does everything its architects promised it would do, from providing public spaces, to integrating natural elements, to simply looking good.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In this Depression-era Coen brothers film, a trio of chain-gang escapees seek a (possibly mythical) treasure while on the lam from a diabolical sheriff.
Writing in Tongues
Concepts exist in some cultures but not in others, Chronicle writer Belinda Acosta writes in an article about the art of translation. Sorting them out is left to translators, who must act the part of cultural guides, diplomats, and social chameleons.
Off the Bookshelf
The Faeries’ Oracle: Working With the Faeries to Find Wisdom, Insight, and Joy by Brian Froud and Jessica Macbeth Simon & Schuster, $25 Faery artist Brian Froud, with the help of writer Jessica Macbeth, has put together his own set of divining cards, using images of all manner of faeries, from knobby trolls to graceful…
Jazz: By the Episode
Monday, Jan. 8, “Gumbo” (Beginnings to 1917): The origins of jazz. References slavery, minstrel shows, ragtime, and the New Orleans music scene, including early marching bands and early jazz bands including the one led by Buddy Bolden, the first celebrated jazz musician.Tuesday, Jan. 9, “The Gift” (1917-24): Concentrates on the early development of New Orleans…
Naked City
CSC now plans to sublet office space at new downtown headquarters
Save the Last Dance
Save the Last Dance 2001, PG-13, 113 min. Directed by Thomas Carter, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Kerry Washington, Bianca Lawson, Fredro Starr, Terry Kinney, Sean Patrick Thomas, Julia Stiles. A surprisingly ambitious teen film, Save the Last Dance uses the marriage of hip-hop and ballet as the backdrop for its story of…
Crossing Cultures
In 1978, Dallas residents Rainer Schulte, who translates from French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and A. Leslie Willson (who now lives in Austin), felt that the international literary scene was not well-represented in the U.S. With some help from the University of Texas at Dallas (which also houses the Center for Translation Studies), they put…
Off the Bookshelf
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 82 pp., $10 (paper) Originally released in 1983, At the Bottom of the River is a lyrical collection of some of Jamaica Kincaid’s most provocative writing. It begins innocently enough with one of Kincaid’s most impacting writings, Girl. Tattooed in my memory…
Cubana Be Cubana Bop
Field guide to Cuba’s second-biggest export after cigars
Naked City
Amy Smith handicaps the probable upcoming mayoral race.
Thirteen Days
Thirteen Days 2001, PG-13, 145 min. Directed by Roger Donaldson, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Ed Lauter, Bill Smitrovich, Len Cariou, Frank Wood, Henry Strozier, Dylan Baker, Steven Culp, Bruce Greenwood, Kevin Costner. As a critic who spent the better part of this past year grousing about the dearth of “intelligent” storylines in…
Postscripts
Neal Barrett Jr. and Bill Crawford both win the Busiest Texas Writer of 2000 Award.
Off the Bookshelf
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 162 pp., $10 (paper) For those whose appetite for the written word has them reading the backs of shampoo bottles and cereal boxes for a fix, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a humorous field guide to the culture and…
Dancing About Architecture
A New Year and those who didn’t and almost didn’t make it
The Hightower Lowdown
A Little Help From My Friends; The Buddy System
State and Main
Mamet’s story about a big-budget Hollywood production that steamrolls into a little Vermont town is told with a gentle smirk.
Readings
An American Outrage: A Novel of Quillifarkeag, Maine by G.K. Wuori Algonquin Books, 274 pp., $22.95 The troubles in Quillifarkeag, Maine, begin on an otherwise uneventful day when Joe DeLay drives his pickup truck out of his driveway at a high rate of speed. In his hasty departure, he accidentally traps his wife Ellen in…
Local Bestsellers
Local bestsellers are based on recent sales at Austin bookstores selected to reflect varied reading interests.
Live Shots
Snoop DoggAustin Music Hall, December 29 Aww yeah. “Santa brought y’all a big Snoop Dogg for Christmas,” announced the erstwhile Calvin Broadus. It was about time: When Snoop’s debut Doggystyle dropped in 1993, the odds of Austin pulling down a major hip-hop name like him were about the same as Jodeci passing up a backstage…
Capitol Chronicle
The TNRCC reports that the Voluntary Emissions Reduction program has produced zero reductions in air pollution
Readings
Zeitgeist: A Novel of Metamorphosis by Bruce Sterling Bantam Spectra, 293 pp., $24.95 You’d never take Bruce Sterling, Austin’s homegrown futurist, for a fan of the Spice Girls, but just in case you had, his latest lobs an irony-grenade amidst the Spices and their ilk and renders pre-fab pop defects like Boyzone et al. null…
Page Two
Make sure we get the details right for the 2000 Austin Chronicle Music Poll by voting. Also, an introduction to the Politics staff and memories of watching 2001 for the first time.
Live Shots
Tosca/Alberto & YasminThe Ritz/El Sol y la Luna, January 4 At 7pm on a Thursday evening, the night Austin’s weekend begins, Sixth Street is still a sleeping giant: lights out, doors closed, a slice of Roppolo’s because Hoek’s is just coming to life. Upstairs at the Ritz, it’s even sleepier, the stage empty and Tosca…
Defying Gravity
With Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee took one of the most maligned of cinematic genres — the kung fu film — and created an epic many critics (this one included) are calling the year’s best movie. We spoke with him about the film’s grueling shoot, the refinement it makes to the martial arts genre,…
Readings
Mistletoe Man: A China Bales Mystery by Susan Wittig Albert Berkeley, 296 pp., $21.95 We all know that good fences make good neighbors, but judging from Mistletoe Man, the latest herbal whodunit in local writer Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bales series, sloppy fences make good lawsuits. The recently married China is a recovering lawyer who…
Public Notice
From race riots in South Florida to the MLK Day March in Austin, “Public Notice” reflects on how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go.
Live Shots
Fred Eaglesmith, Joe West & the SinnersContinental Club, January 5 He started out as a folk singer of sorts and still retains a bit of folksy charm to his live performance, but Fred Eaglesmith has a very different view of folk music than your average singer-songwriter. Eaglesmith, in fact, possesses the same appeal and similar…
A Man of Character
State and Main star William H. Macy talks about his iconic position as America’s indie darling, the state of indie filmmaking today, and what on earth Gus Van Sant was thinking.
Off the Bookshelf
Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story edited by Adrienne Brodeur and Samantha Schnee Harcourt, 356 pp., $14 (paper) If, as Francis Ford Coppola’s three-year-old quarterly asserts in its masthead, Zoetrope: All Story were truly “all story,” and not Zoetrope: Mostly Stories and a Few Self-Aggrandizing Essays on Crafting/Peddling Our Screenplays in These Terrible Times, this debut…
After a Fashion
Your Style Avatar presents the first in a series of profiles of local high-profile fashion photogs!
Live Shots
Pop Culture Press Release PartyRed Eyed Fly, January 7 2000 was quite a year for Austin institutions celebrating birthdays, from Sound Exchange to KGSR, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Pop Culture Press has finally earned said distinction. Though its focus is national, PCP’s evolution over 50 issues from plexidisc-yielding free rag…
A Walk on the Dark Side
An interview with Karen Bernstein, producer of Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart (playing at the Alamo Drafthouse on Wednesday, Jan. 10), a breathless, soundtrack-shaped romp through Reed’s career so far
Off the Bookshelf
Tulsa by Larry Clark Grove Press, 64 pp., $24.95 (paper) Diary by Corinne Day Kruse Verlag, 112 pp., $50 Twenty-nine years after it went out of print, Tulsa, recently reissued, still has the power to make you wince. Clark, who would later go on to direct the equally cringe-worthy film Kids, grew up in the…
Mr. Smarty Pants
Data snacks for your brain’s buffet.
Sterling Lands’ New Mission
Sterling Lands II and the Eastside Social Action Coalition fight for equity in Austin’s public schools.
Short Cuts
South by Southwest announces 2001 call for festival volunteer workers, and other news and events of interest to the local film community.
Off the Bookshelf
Apocalypse Culture II edited by Adam Parfrey Feral House, 468 pp., $18.95 (paper) Parfrey has been obsessed with “far-reaching and extreme societal tendrils” for years now. Apocalypse Culture II is his roundup of sociopathology for the new millennium. It’s all in here: Ted Kaczynski’s rambling myth-laden manifesto, tales from the Real Doll factory where they…
Day Trips
The geologic magnificence of Palo Duro Canyon.
“Still Separate and Still Unequal”
October 30, 2000 To: Ms. Kathy Rider President, Board of Trustees Austin Independent School District Subject: Emergency: Reverse AISD Failure to Educate Our Children Dear Ms. Rider and AISD Board of Trustees, Austin is a great place to live and raise children. Our schools are failing to educate our children. 46 years after Brown our…
Video Reviews
Why the hell has it taken so long for anyone to discover this Seventies crime film gem?
Off the Bookshelf
Gil Elvgren: All His Glamorous American Pin-Ups edited by Charles G. Martignette & Louis K. Meisel Taschen, 272 pp., $39.99 This thorough collection of Elvgren’s work goes well beyond his cheesecake work, detailing how an arousing nude could later be painted over to become merely a cutie hawking Coke. However, the emphasis certainly is on…
About AIDS
HIV-testing Docs: A Cautionary Note.
Big City Blues
Although it has three of the 10 largest cities in the United States, Texas is still largely a state of home-rule cities. A brief look at the prospects for a real urban policy in Texas.
Video Reviews
Carrie 2 is a very bad teen horror effort that might appeal to true horror hounds.
Off the Bookshelf
Adam Sandler: America’s Comedian by Bill Crawford St. Martin’s Griffin, 173pp., $11.95 (paper) Adam Sandler: America’s Comedian is a great work of literature … for me to poop on! Author Bill Crawford, who co-wrote the gripping Stevie Ray Vaughan biography Caught in the Crossfire, seems like a perfect choice to tackle America’s favorite coprophiliac (and…
Coach’s Corner
A glacial pace and overzealous refs are killing college basketball. Who’s in charge here?
Two Ways About It
Okay, we’ve established that Texas has no strategy for using the state’s power and wealth to help its cities grow, thrive, or be reborn — that is, an urban policy. So what could we do instead? There are basically two routes to take. One would be to empower the cities, particularly the urban regions, to…
Video Reviews
Roger Corman took a break from cheapo horror and sci-fi flicks to make this cheapo gangster work (starring the late Jason Robards as Al Capone), but it’s still a Corman quickie from beginning to end.
Off the Bookshelf
The Map of Love: A Novel by Ahdaf Soueif Anchor, 516 pp., $14 (paper) Isabel Parkman opens a trunk, and that is how Ahdaf Soueif’s glorious novel, The Map of Love, begins. The trunk had belonged to Isabel’s great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne, and while Isabel sifts through its contents, exclaiming “over the daintiness of the smocking…
New Kid on the Block
ASTI is the perfect addition to Hyde Park’s busiest corner
Big and Getting Bigger
Five of the 20 most populous cities in the U.S. are in Texas: 1. New York, NY 7,428,162 2. Los Angeles, CA 3,633,591 3. Chicago, IL 2,799,050 4. Houston, TX 1,845,967 5. Philadelphia, PA 1,417,601 6. San Diego, CA 1,238,974 7. Phoenix, AZ 1,211,466 8. San Antonio, TX 1,147,213 9. Dallas, TX 1,076,214 10. Detroit,…
TV Eye
Will MTV’s new “Fight for Your Rights” campaign against hate crimes call into question their longstanding promotion of rapper Eminem? Also, seats for sale on Politically Incorrect and fallout from this year’s television top 10s.
Second Helpings: Water’s Edge
Austin’s Pacific Rim and Caribbean restaurants in this week’s Second Helpings.
Off the Bookshelf
Louse: A Novel by David Grand Harvest Books, 272 pp., $13 (paper) And you think your job sucks. Meet Herman Q. Louse, personal valet and indentured servant to a drug-addicted, hyperphobic loon named Poppy who more than slightly resembles Howard Hughes. Poppy commands a kingdom of casinos; those who lose to the house usually end…
Food-o-File
Virginia B. Wood remembers two talented and hardworking women in Austin’s culinary life who have recently died and also reveals some of her recent dining discoveries.
Naked City
Opening day of the Lege, redistricting rumors, and Mike Levy vs. Kirk Watson
Antitrust
Antitrust 2001, PG-13, 120 min. Directed by Peter Howitt, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Ryan Phillippe, Tim Robbins, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tygh Runyan, Claire Forlani, Ned Bellamy, Douglas Mcferran, Zahf Haji. Antitrust has it all — duplicitous schemers, killer sesame seeds, dead code poets societies, laughably bad CGI mansions — and then some.…
Final Flowering
With Cold Sassy Tree, distinguished composer Carlisle Floyd crafts an opera to crown his lengthy career.
Off the Bookshelf
Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900-1950 edited by Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg University of California Press, 224 pp., $29.95 (paper) They should have called it Behind the Art: The Making of the Whitney Museum. Frames of Reference is divided into three sections: a charming biography of Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who…
Will Travel for Food
Dublin Ireland is not at the top of most lists of culinary bliss. When my wife and I travel, we mostly choose places with great food and impressive local wines. When I told our friends we were heading for Ireland, most were pretty surprised. “No wine and terrible food,” they said. Truth be known, I…
Naked City
Report on Jan. 9 meeting of Eastside Social Action Coalition and the AISD Board of Trustees
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
This martial arts film succeeds as a great pulp yarn, a historical drama, an epic love story, a humorous action tale, and a modern feminist fable.
How Robin Got His Groove Back
Musicologist Gillian Anderson has come to the rescue of Robin Hood, taking the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks film Robin Hood and restoring its original score. It’s one of two dozen films from the earliest era of motion pictures for which Anderson has recovered, restored, or reconstructed the scores.
Off the Bookshelf
The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington Atlantic Monthly Press, 352 pp., $24 Treading on ground that readers of Tom Tryon’s Night Magic may find familiar, The Spirit Cabinet looks at the division separating stage magic — the art of conjuring and illusion — from the deepest primal real magic. The Spirit Cabinet of the title…
Co-op in Smoke
The fire that destroyed the Arrakis Co-op left more than embers in its wake.
Naked City
Strike one for the Austin Independent School District’s high-profile campaign to keep struggling teens from tumbling onto the district’s lengthy dropout rolls. The man hired last August as AISD’s Dropout Prevention Coordinator, Dr. Alfred C. Maldonado, has already tendered his resignation, saying he believes the district made it impossible for his work to succeed. Maldonado’s…
Double Take
Double Take 2001, PG-13, 88 min. Directed by George Gallo, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Orlando Jones, Eddie Griffin, Vivica A. Fox, Gary Grubbs, Edward Herrmann, Shawn Elliott, Brent Briscoe, Daniel Roebuck. Touchstone Pictures calls Double Take “a Trading Places for the new millennium.” Sure, it’s got a scene on a train, a…
