Food-o-File
by Virginia B. Wood The best meal to be had in Austin on Sunday, November 10 was served in a restaurant but was not available to the public. That night, 16 Italian food-loving Austin cooks got together at Coyote Cafe to recreate the banquet menu from this fall’s popular independent film, Big Night. Producers Rysher…
Dancing Dads
When my wife and I first came to Austin I first came to Austin, we used to go out to country bars and admire the older couples gliding effortlessly around the dance floor. They looked so comfortable in each others’ arms, so content. Who cared if they had big hair, large bellies, and wrinkles? Who…
Soup’s On
photograph by John Anderson In cooler climes, where the onset of fall and winter means the changing of colors, the donning of sweaters, and the lighting of chimney fires, another seasonal rite of passage exists — the transition from light, summery meals to dishes blanketed in warm sauces. Fall and winter mark the return of…
Dancing About Architecture
Whoosh! What a year! Bands failed, clubowners found their existence increasingly difficult, and the music scene in general had a good choke on its own vomit. Oh, there were a few signs of Christmas spirit, from pseudo-raves at the neighborhood of lights around Guadalupe and 35th to people like the drummer from the Onlys, who…
Also Playing
Thursday: Stop the Truck, Broken Spoke Friday: Dale Watson, Susanna Van Tassel, Continental Club Saturday: Guttermouth, Assorted Jellybeans, Shoegazer, Emo’s Sunday: Junior Brown, Continental Club Monday: Malford Milligan, Derek O’Brien,Holy Moellers, Antone’s Tuesday: Quatropaw, Stubb’s Wednesday: Peglegasus, Knievels, Hole in the Wall Thursday: Loose Diamonds, Stubb’s
Record Reviews
SCREECHING WEASEL Bark Like a Dog (Fat Wreck Chords) Just why Chicago melodicore vets Screeching Weasel’s back-from-the-dead platter is such a good one is a puzzler. Perhaps it’s the in-depth study three of these guys put into Ramones LPs one through four as members of the Riverdales. That’s doubtful, though. Why? ‘Cuz all of the…
Articulations
As we wind up 1996, it’s nice to be able to share some thank-yous handed out to a number of local arts enthusiasts who made a difference in the arts in Austin this past year. The City of Austin’s 1996 Partners in the Arts & Humanities Awards have honored the following for their significant support…
Road Shows
JANUARY THU 2 Marilyn Manson, Austin Music Hall FRI 3 El Vez, Liberty Lunch MON 6 The Swans, Emo’s SAT 11 Mazinga Phazer, Maxine’s Radiator, Electric Lounge SUN 12 Danzig, Austin Music Hall SUN 12 Koko Taylor, Stubb’s SAT 18 Corrosion of Conformity, Back Room SUN 19 The Iguanas, Continental Club TUE 21 NY Loose,…
New Territories
illustration by Robert Faires Something in America America loves a frontier. Chalk it up to all those years in which our forebears had a mighty expanse of largely unsettled land sprawling beyond the horizon to the west. The feverish desire to push into it, to explore it, to test themselves against it, seeped into our…
Perpetuating Preservation
photograph by John Carrico A funny thing happened to me the other night on my way to the Victory Grill. Nothing. Nothing at all. I parked my car on a side street, got out, and walked to the entrance on East 11th. I was approached by a black man in his early 30s wearing an…
Local Palette
Mojo’s through December Through sleepy, half-open eyes, I ordered a coffee from the cute, scruffy guy behind the counter. I ambled over to a table and took a seat. After a moment of gathering my thoughts, I looked up, surprised to see an eight-foot tall steel sunflower towering over me. Matthew Feiner’s Jack and the…
Schools in Session
Now that the chips have fallen where they may, it’s time to pick a few of them back up again. The Texas Education Code was revamped, streamlined, and (most folks agree) improved during the previous legislative session in 1995. But a few rough spots in the law still remain, so this time out, lawmakers will…
Perfect Gardening Weather
The thermometer is plunging and I suddenly have the urge to garden. Rather than putter around outside on the tundra and risk losing a couple of digits to frostbite, I think I’ll get my fix here where it’s nice and warm in the Cyber Garden. The (no) Problem Garden http://www.netusa1.net/~lindley/ According to the author of…
Mediocre Media ’96
1996 may go down as the year when the gathering energies of the new century finally reached unstoppable momentum, leaving no embraceable verities in its wake other than the assurance that nothing will ever be as it was. Like stage managers in the midst of a hurricane, the news media acted the part of victims…
Benefits
Dec. 31: New Year`s 2 Party & Breakfast to benefit Christopher House, at Four Seasons Hotel, 98 San Jacinto, 9pm. $75 per person. 473-8566. Happy Banana New Year! Carmen Miranda/Orville Glockmeyer party to benefit KOOP radio, at Cafe Armageddon, 2015 Manor, 9pm. $5-7per person. 479-6960. The Chronicle benefits database extends a year or more into…
Naked City
Northeast Austin retiree Willie Lewis was spotted at City Hall late last month picking up paperwork he says he intends to file in order to secure a place on the ballot as a Place 6 candidate for city council. Lewis, who says he’s shopping around for a consultant and a treasurer, would join restaurant owner…
Coach’s Corner
No space for idle chit-chat, dating tips, or selective rose-shaded parables from the past. I love playoff columns! Dallas-Carolina: Oh Boy! A fervent pet peeve I’ve somehow never publicly bitched about, the most over-rated, over-talked subject in professional sports: The vaunted “home-field advantage.” Flashback: The place? Soldier Field. The event? The ’88 NFC title game.…
Mayfield Fights Back
Any neighborhood that stands in the way of development is a nest of radicals, troublemakers, nay-sayers. So we are told. Yeah, right. You couldn’t ask for better irony than this: The builder/developer who gave us Westover Hills — the subdivision covering most of the ground around Anderson High School, up along Mesa Drive — was…
Day Trips
Guadalupe River Ranch continues to be a working ranch in the Hill Country north of Boerne despite having a reputation as one of the finest resorts in Central Texas. Hidden on the banks of the Guadalupe River is a 47-room, world-class resort with an excellent dining room. During the week, the majority of guests are…
Anti-sex Crusader
photograph by Bruce Dye It’s lunch hour on a Friday, and Wyatt Roberts steps out into the golden clatter of sunlight and midday traffic on Brazos Street and immediately spies Bill Crocker, vice chairman of administration for the Travis County Republican Party. Crocker greets Roberts warmly and introduces him to two other 50ish men in…
Page Two
Coming up on the New Year like this, I should have some thoughtful observations on the 12 months just passed, or some wisdom, some insight, by which to begin to make sense of the 12 months ahead. Instead, I think I’ll talk about letters. “Postmarks” is perhaps the most widely read section in the Chronicle;…
Shortcuts
by Jen Scoville “Global Community” is a term owing its birth to the Internet, a simple compound phrase which sums up one of the biggest areas of potential for the medium — the almost instantaneous means to get in touch with people and places all over the world. In fact, the Internet sprang from a…
Public Notice
Whhhooooooo Hoooooooooooooo! It’s time to get naked and… oops… sorry! That was last year. Heh-heh. No, the theme for this year is moderation… and sensible celebration. Yeah, right. As we have said many times in this column: If you’re going to get stinky, get stinky for a good cause. Look right over there to your…
Scanlines
D: Paul Jackson and Geoff Posner; with Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Adrian Edmondson, Christopher Ryan, Alexei Sayle. VHS Home Video Waterloo Video, 1016 W. Sixth The Young Ones (clockwise from top): Neil, Vyvyan, Mike and Rik Eighties nostalgia aside, these veterans of MTV programming (and cousins in scatology to the subsequent Beavis and Butt-head) are…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows…
One form of capital punishment in ancient Israel was death by fire, which involved pouring molten lead into the body. Some believe the reason why microwave meals don’t taste as good as those cooked by more conventional means is because of an insufficient number of Maillard reactions, which involve complex interactions between sugar molecules and…
Silent Days and Nights
Director Herbert Brenon during the production of Peter Pan (1924) I don’t know about you, but I sometimes suffer movie overload. A spotted train here, an animatronic pig there, then after a while every movie is… another movie. I begin to yearn for something different in movies. I need my cinematic assumptions jolted. That’s when…
Missive to the Ending Year
illustration by Jason Stout Dear Sir-or-Madam 1996: Like every year, you began as half promise, half threat. We wanted to believe the promise, but these days a sense of threat is always in the air, unforgettable and unavoidable. Quickly, you took on a personality, the way storms or crowds seem to take on personalities. You…
Boxed In
illustration by Kelly Edwards These are divisive times. Virtually everywhere you turn, you are confronted with controversial issues that separate one group from another; each convinced of the superiority of its position, and not only the error, but often the evil, of the other’s. In all of the bluster and babble about political and social…
