PLUS: Austin Chronic & 4/20 Merch • Summer Camps

Shannon Leigh Tribute This Saturday

The Austin slam poetry community will gather to pay tribute to the recently passed, much-loved slam artist Shannon Leigh this Saturday at Ruta Maya. “They Call Me Warrior: A Tribute to Shannon Leigh” will serve as a benefit for Shannon’s family and as a sendoff for the team representing Austin at the National Poetry Slam,…

by Kimberley Jones

Wranglers Enter Playoffs on Two-Game Skid

Austin Wranglers fans, you can let out a big sigh of relief because your team is playoff bound! It’s only the second time in team history, but they didn’t do it the easy way. Two weeks ago, the Wranglers were 8-6, and had a clear view of first place. After playing their worst game of…

by Christopher Bond

Aztex Bid Farewell to Inaugural Campaign, and More

And so we bid farewell to the inaugural edition of the U-23 Austin Aztex – done in, in the Premier Development League Southern Conference final, by the defending national champion Laredo Heat, and more specifically by a couple of untimely ejections. The Aztex beat the Bradenton Academics, 2-1, in Friday night’s semifinal in Orlando, Fla.,…

by Nick Barbaro

Jon Dee Update

Jon Dee Graham underwent emergency surgery at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge to remove his ruptured spleen on Monday evening, after being involved in a single-car accident late Friday night. The treasured Austin singer-songwriter fell asleep at the wheel and struck a concrete embankment. He suffered two broken ribs, cracked vertebrae, and a concussion.…

by Austin Powell

Cocktail World Cup Winners!

A very special congratulations goes out to the winners of the Cocktail World Cup regional competition. It was a hard fought battle of mix-ology, and ultimately we have our winners. Cocktail World Cup Austin Judges Choice: Bee Sting by Bill Norris of FINO Austin Chronicle’s Fan Favorite: Twigs and Berries by Phil Vuong of Six…

by Logan Youree

Three-Card Monte

“I really had no desire to do a horror film,” Monte Hellman says re: Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, his one and only and very faux-serious contribution to the American slasher genre. Which makes sense, even if the movie doesn’t, always. “It was a film that I kind of backed into. I…

by Marc Savlov

All-Mid South Final Tomorrow

Actually, it was A.J. Godbolt with the first score, Carlos Vicens with the second. And then Bradenton grabbed one back, plus a man advantage on Beto Papandrea’s second yellow card of the game … And that’s how it ends: 2-1 Aztex, followed a little later by a 2-1 Laredo win over the Central Florida Kraze…

by Nick Barbaro

Goal Austin!

Carlos Vicens, early in the second half, to put the Aztex up, 1-0, in their first round playoff game against the Bradenton Academics. Watch it live until 7:45pm at http://ftslive.rbm.tv/.

by Chronicle Staff

My Clone Sleeps Alone

Pounding breakers open into the now classic rock funnel cresting on Top 40 radio a month prior to Ronald Reagan’s first presidential innauguration on Jan. 20, 1980. Your love is like a tidal wave Spinning over my head Drowning me in your promises Better left unsaid What a “Heartbreaker” – dream maker, love taker. A…

by Raoul Hernandez

Sci-fi Platters

Ennio Morricone The Thing (Varèse Sarabande) “It came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven’t discovered,” wrote John W. Campbell Jr. in the 1938 short story “Who Goes There?” Second-in-Command McReady, “a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked,” continues for the men of this…

by Raoul Hernandez

Arts Review

This one-act about a mad king and his jester is played at such a fast tempo that the audience is overwhelmed with information

by Barry Pineo

Sci-fi Platters

Radiohead OK Computer (Capitol) Radiohead’s 1997 cornerstone, OK Computer, isn’t really a work of science fiction but rather the first album to frame the digital disillusionment at the onset of the 21st century. Accomplishing through tone and texture what William Gibson’s Neuromancer did for literature, the seminal UK fivepiece explores the cubicle warfare and programmed…

by Austin Powell

Sci-Fi 2008

We pay tribute to avant-garde chefs by reviewing the molecular gastronomy trend, as well as pioneering Pop Rocks and pastry chefs

by Mick Vann

Quote of the week

“His middle name will not be Hussein. It will be Piñata.” – Green for All founder/President Van Jones, explaining how conservatives would go after would-be President Obama, during his remarks at Netroots Nation

by Chronicle Staff

Northeast Alliance Rejects Housing Project

The Northeast Austin Business and Community Alliance, a group said to represent 11 Northeast neighborhood associations and 10 nearby businesses, held a press conference Monday to request that council postpone its decision on rezoning 5908 Manor Rd. in Windsor Park. The Community Partnership for the Homeless has proposed the property be rezoned from higher-density single-family…

by Lydia Crafts

Arts Review

How much you enjoy this theatrical collection of Craigslist posts may depend on how you feel about carnivals and confessions

by Robert Faires

Sci-fi Platters

The Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.) About the time of choreographed 4-CD oddity Zaireeka, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne probably went a bit mad. How else to unpack his revelation that far more people would respond to rock music populated by wizards, robots, and nuclear scientists than to the psychedelic post-punk…

by Michael Bertin

Desserts at Uchi

Austin is not really a hotbed of the technologically fascinating and often expensive culinary manipulations currently known as molecular gastronomy, but that could be changing. For example, chef instructor Tim Kartiganer is adding a class entitled Molecular Gastronomy to the fall course schedule at the Culinary Academy of Austin because it is a subject that…

by Virginia B. Wood

Headlines

• While the folks in Corpus, Padre Island, and Brownsville prepped for wind and flooding from Hurricane Dolly, Central Texans were melting and praying for rain. • Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, and activist Rosa Clemente were nominated as the presidential and vice presidential candidates for the Green Party, making this presidential slate the…

by Chronicle Staff

Sci-fi Platters

Klaatu (Capitol) Copping their handle from the humanoid alien protagonist in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (a Keanu Reeves remake is due this December), Toronto sci-fi prog rock outfit Klaatu had a brief brush with stateside fame in 1977, after a journalist insinuated they were the Beatles in disguise. Klaatu refused to perform…

by Greg Beets

Magic Fruit

If you’ve ever wanted Tabasco to taste like doughnut glaze, stout ales to taste like chocolate milkshakes, or lemons and grapefruit to taste like candy, then your lucky day has arrived. A small berrylike fruit from Western Africa, now being grown in Florida, makes all of this taste reversal weirdness possible. Magic fruit, also known…

by Mick Vann

FCC Overruled on ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’ Fine

Invoking something resembling common sense, a federal appeals court Monday slapped down the Federal Communications Commission for imposing a $550,000 fine in the wake of Janet Jackson’s boob pop during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the FCC’s penalty, noting that the commission had “acted…

by Kevin Brass

Sci-fi Platters

Forbidden Zone: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Varèse Sarabande) I saw Forbidden Zone on Night Flight as a kid, and it deeply fucked with my Catholic-schooled head. A sci-fi musical? Animated art porn? Frog people? Only years later did I come to appreciate its low-budget genius and black humor, but it was the score to the…

by Audra Schroeder

Pop Rocks

Back in 1956, General Foods chemist William A. Mitchell came up with the original Pop Rocks candy, a carbonated candy made from assorted sugars and flavorings, heated to the melting point, exposed to carbon dioxide at a pressure of 600 pounds per square inch, and then cooled. The cooling process traps tiny bubbles of high…

by Mick Vann

Beyond City Limits

• According to the Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos, Catholic lay missionary Michael Marroquin has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, after a Bolivian court found him guilty of child molestation and human trafficking. Marroquin moved from Austin to Bolivia in 1997 to run the Round Rock-based Project Angels of Hope charity designed to provide…

by Chronicle Staff

A Conversation With John Dean

Former White House counsel John Dean sat down for an interview at Waterloo Ice House on July 17, before he spoke at the Netroots Nation Convention. Below is the full transcript. Austin Chronicle: The Republican Party has always sold itself as the party of the Constitution. Any time Second Amendment rights come up, they’re first…

by Richard Whittaker

Sci-fi Platters

Life Beyond Mars: Bowie Covered (Rapster) While smartly remaining mostly outside the familiar oeuvre, Rapster’s electronica-based David Bowie tribute adds nothing to the canon, while caustically condensing the revolutionary aspects of its subject’s transformations into stale beats and hack disco. The lilting lullaby harmonies of Au Revoir Simone’s take on Hunky Dory’s “Oh! You Pretty…

by Doug Freeman

Heston Blumenthal’s Popping-Candy Chocolate Cake

(borrowed from ChubbyHubby.net and converted to U.S. measurements) For the popping-candy base 3 ounces whole hazelnuts 1.5 ounces milk chocolate 2 teaspoons mixed spice to taste (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, pepper, etc.) 3.5 ounces popping candy For the chocolate mousse 12½ ounces dark chocolate 1¾ cups double cream Pinch of salt For the chocolate glaze…

by Chronicle Staff

TV Eye

The geeks shall inherit the earth? They’ll certainly rule San Diego this weekend.

by Belinda Acosta

Sci-fi Platters

Grateful Dead Grayfolded (Swell/Artifact) During their psychedelic heyday of the late 1960s, the Grateful Dead often centered their second set around a long, spacey, improvised jam they called “Dark Star.” Not only did the song provoke LSD-fueled audiences into the cerebral stratosphere, but its minimal, cryptic lyrics also infer the heavens: “Dark Star crashes, pouring…

by Jay Trachtenberg

Space Chimps

This animated, sci-fi romantic comedy starring anthropomorphized chimpanzees is a lot funnier than you might expect.

by Marc Savlov

Sci-fi Platters

Outkast ATLiens (La Face/Arista) 9:30pm, outdoors. It’s gotta be hot, summertime-in-Atlanta hot. If you aren’t cruising ATL’s Campbellton Road – drop top, seat back – it’s best you’ve got your Boone’s Farm. Real recognizes real, and on the realest beat, 1996’s ATLiens grooves back to the mother ship. As “Two Dope Boyz (in a Cadillac),”…

by Chronicle Staff

Day Trips

The spectacular Bright Leaf nature area is open for guided tours on the second Saturday and Sunday mornings of each month

by Gerald E. McLeod

Step Brothers

Will Ferrell’s newest is a lot like Will Ferrell’s oldest, which is to say it feels like an amped-up Saturday Night Live skit.

by Marc Savlov

Space Is the Place Soundtrack

Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra Soundtrack to the Film Space Is the Place (Evidence) Part music documentary, part science-fiction adventure, part blaxploitation epic, this obscure 1974 film finds keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra and his Arkestra arriving from outer space in a rocket ship to the ghetto in Oakland, Calif., to battle the evil overseer…

by Jay Trachtenberg

Oops!

Last week’s story “Will ‘SAFE-P’ and TDCJ Be Held Accountable?” contained two errors: incorrectly reporting that the term “Substance Abuse Felony Punishment” was coined after Gov. Ann Richards left office, when it was in fact in use during her administration, and incorrectly referring to Shirley Otto as Shirley Ott. The Chronicle regrets the errors.

by Chronicle Staff

Kabluey

Oddball tale of a directionless young man who moves in with his sister-in-law, whose husband is in Iraq with his National Guard unit, is quirky but unaffecting.

by Josh Rosenblatt

Sci-fi Platters

The Police Ghost in the Machine (A&M) Sting’s lyrics for the Police are best known for psychosexual drama (“Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” “Every Breath You Take”), but there’s another mode that produced dark songs concerned with war, death, spirituality, and technology. 1981’s Ghost in the Machine is the only Police album on which…

by Daniel Mee

The Wackness

An odd-couple pairing between a teenage pot dealer and the shrink with whom he trades weed for sessions anchors this story about coming of age in New York City during the Nineties.

by Kimberley Jones

Graham Reynolds Is Not of This Earth

“The immediate problem when you approach the scoring of a science-fiction film is that it’s set in the future or on an alien world or whatever the story demands of you musically,” explains Austin composer Graham Reynolds. Reynolds, who, amidst a seemingly infinite number of musical projects with Golden Arm Trio and its myriad offshoots,…

by Marc Savlov

Sci-fi Platters

Melt-Banana Cell-Scape (A-Zap) Melt-Banana cuts its teeth playing a dizzyingly fast, mildly comedic variant of grindcore often classified under the avant-garde catchall “Japanoise.” On 2003’s Cell-Scape, the band made a stylistic leap forward, recruiting veteran American drummer Dave Witte, then compressing his sound to within an inch of its life for a cyborglike pulse that…

by Daniel Mee

Happenings

For more details and events, see Community Listings. Thursday 24 FUNDAMENTALS OF FUNDRAISING Learn how to get money for your cause. 1-5pm. International Center of Austin, 201 E. Second, 974-7854. Free. www.cityofaustin.org/redevelopment/cad.htm. HISPANIC VOTER OUTREACH MEETING 6pm. Travis Co. Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign Office, 1107 N. I-35. www.traviscountydemocrats.org. SOUTHWEST AUSTIN DEMOCRATS MEETING 6:45pm. Hampton Library,…

by Chronicle Staff

Sci-fi Platters

Rush 2112 (Mercury) This is only 104 years away, people. And, seeing how it houses a future so dystopian that the simple discovery of a musical instrument threatens to destroy world order, there better be a Syrinx on the world map in the next 10 years and huge temples going up shortly thereafter. So maybe…

by Michael Bertin

‘Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey’

In 1994, after finishing a show at Lounge Ax in Chicago, I was taken by a friend to another club to check out Pere Ubu. As striking an experience as a Pere Ubu show can be, I was captivated by a guy standing toward the back of the stage motioning his hands in the air…

by Bill Elm

Sci-fi Platters

Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam) Public Enemy Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black (Def Jam/Columbia) “Welcome to the Terrordome,” America. With Bomb Squad Buzz swirling ‘cross full stereo, Chuck D smacks Fear of a Black Planet ‘cross 1990’s white-centric face with hard-bodied opener “Brothers Gonna Work It Out.” Their third…

by Chase Hoffberger

Moog: A Revolution in Sound

The organ as we know it dates from the 14th century, Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano in 1709, and Robert Moog developed his first synthesizer prototype in 1964. Each left music a completely different beast in its wake. The young Moog (born in 1934), armed with a physics degree from Queens College, an electrical engineering…

by Graham Reynolds

Off the Record

Examining the foreign exchange rate with Ocelot, White Denim, and Dizzee Rascal, while Suzanna Choffel promotes further tourism to Texas

by Austin Powell

Luv Doc Recommends: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

Say what you will about our shoeless neighbors to the north, you have to give them one thing: Their state song kicks our state song’s ass. Go ahead and piss and moan and beat your chest all you want, but deep, deep in your heart of Texas, you know it’s true. By comparison, Texas’ state…

by The Luv Doc

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