Day Trips
Dinosaurs roam the state again. photograph by Gerald E. McLeod Dinosaur Valley State Park outside of Glen Rose provides rock-solid proof that the prehistoric monsters were the original Texans. Frozen in the white limestone, the footprints make it look like the dinosaurs recently walked across the river bed. Scientists have identified the three-foot-long footprints of…
A Pattern of Intimidation? or Just Business?
A citizen’s complaint against a Dallas funeral home more than a year ago has erupted into what may be the biggest influence-buying scandal in recent state history. The battle between the Texas Funeral Service Commission (TFSC) and Houston-based SCI has since grown to include several other major players — most notably Gov. George W. Bush,…
Page Two
Robert Bryce’s cover story on attempts to regulate the funeral industry raises disturbing, though not surprising, questions about the way the government works in the state of Texas. It is a story of how power, money, and relationships can impact the ordinary workings of a state agency. A legitimate inquiry into whether an industry was…
A Profitable Undertaker
Robert Waltrip is the world’s highest-paid undertaker. According to the October 1998 issue of Texas Monthly, Waltrip was paid $20.3 million in 1997. The study of Texas CEO compensation was done by Graef Crystal, the corporate pay analyst who summarized Waltrip’s pay package by saying he was “not worth it.” In 1996, Crystal assailed Waltrip,…
Public Notice
… and Shout� out those peanut-butter-and-banana stains, bay-beh, it’s time again for Viva Las Vegas! the annual star-studded, Elvis-encrusted, casino-style fundraiser for AIDS Services of Austin (ASA) (not Project Transitions, as we erroneously stated last week, sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry!) and its award-winning legal program, the Capital Area AIDS Legal Project. This year’s hunk of burning love event…
From Sharpstown to Funeralgate
By many accounts, Funeralgate threatens to become the biggest influence-buying scandal since Sharpstown, the banking controversy that rocked Texas in the early 1970s. How do the two scandals compare to one another? “I can’t think of anything where there’s such a clear connection between political contributions and lobbying,” observes Sam Kinch, the venerable statehouse reporter…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
A subbush is a small bush. Onna-zumo, or female sumo wrestling, was once practiced by prostitutes in the 1700s in Japan. The women sumos were paired either with other women or with blind men. Flies see everything in slow motion. According to one source, if you are having a heart attack and begin to feel…
Defending the Profits of Death
SCI and its law firm, Locke Liddell, have tried to suppress the company’s critics in the past. The firm represented Waltrip and SCI when they sued author Darryl J. Roberts for defamation in 1997. Roberts, a former funeral home owner, wrote a consumer guide to the funeral business titled, Profits of Death: An Insider Exposes…
Dylan Plays Vegas
illustration by Jason Stout Drive Lake Mead Boulevard east out of Vegas toward the jagged mountain range. Just before you crest the pass there’s a pull-out on the right where you can park and read a plaque that describes what geologists call “The Great Unconformity.” It tells how, deep in the earth, a quarter of…
Tarnished Legends
“To attack football is to attack the major exhibit of the masculine view of the world; it would be much more strongly resisted than an attack on the church or most other American institutions.” –Gary Shaw, Meat on the Hoof About 10 years ago, I saw Gary Shaw walking in front of a Dallas video…
Automat
Satay, the Asian Cookery 3202 W. Anderson, 467-6731 Mon-Thu, 11am-2:30pm, 5-10pm; Fri, 11am-2:30pm, 5-11pm; Sat, 5-11pm; Sun, noon-3:30pm, 5-10pm Satay is indeed an Asian cookery, blending culinary influences from Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Phillippines. But as a Thai-owned operation, Foo Swasdee’s Satay is both a popular restaurant and a successful line of Thai condiments…
Far and Away the Best
Dolores Quezada photograph by John Anderson Dolores Quezada doesn’t have time to go to class. Even though she’s back at school for pre-law at UT, the “collegiate” experience of lounging around with a bunch of hungover coeds on the West Mall has no appeal anymore. She is 29 years old, and a full-time career at…
Food-o-File
Frequent visitors to New Orleans know that no visit is complete without a pilgrimage to one of the city’s coffeehouses to enjoy strong chicory coffee and beignets. Since the Civil War years, the fabled Cafe du Monde has been serving up the signature cafe au lait and deep-fried square pastries liberally dusted with powdered sugar.…
�game Gamexpo
Wed, Jun 30 Barton Creek Square Mall photograph by Kate X. Messer A line of pimple-faced teenagers stood sentry over a row of high-resolution monitors like soldiers enraptured by war game simulations. With intent eyes, and mouths hung agape, their fingers shifted rapidly over multicolored, six-button control pads. Around the young squad, white noise drowned…
Oh, Oh, Those Summer Bites
With the onset of summer, I feel oddly displaced. Disorienting heat aside, summer prescribes for me a potent dose of nostalgia which rattles my sense of the present. I ache for specific things: misty mountain air dusted with campfire smoke, toasted marshmallows. The memories of childhood and my first taste of freedom. It was at…
Scanlines
D: Edward Dmytryk (1944) with Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki. Director Edward Dmytryk died Thursday, July 1, at his home in Encino, Calif. He was 90. Which means he was in his early 70s when we met him after he came to teach in the RTF department at UT. Dmytryk…
Dancing About Architecture
There were already a good half-dozen copies of the same message, sent by everyone from Travis Higdon to Mike Watt, waiting on my e-mail when I came in Monday morning, all starting with the same bummer introduction: “Hello all, this is Lee [Ranaldo] from Sonic Youth here, we have had a fucked up situation come…
Short Cuts
Film director Edward Dmytryk died last week. During the years in the late Seventies when Dmytryk taught filmmaking at the University of Texas he crossed paths with a great many Austinites. It is unfortunate that he is not better remembered for some of his great early films, such as Crossfire and Cornered, and is best…
Articulations
Last week saw the closing of a very special arts space, The Public Domain Theatre. On Wednesday night, June 30, members of the Public Domain Theatre Company — which carries on, let us not forget — and friends of the PD gathered to pay their respects. The next day, this unsolicited account of that party…
Funeralgate Hits Texas
Waltrip has given two different versions of what happened during his visit to Bush’s office on Tax Day 1998. Both are documented in the whistleblower lawsuit. In one document, issued on June 11, Waltrip’s lawyers said Waltrip talked with Bush on April 15, 1998 about a letter he had written that day. The six-page letter…
TV Eye
After months of delay, the WB is finally launching Movie Stars (7/11, 8pm, WB), a half-hour comedy staring Harry Hamlin (L.A. Law) and Jennifer Grant (Beverly Hills, 90210). The pair star as Reese Hardin, the star of blockbuster action movies, and Jacey Wyatt, a respected, Academy Award-winning actress, trying to be good parents while living…
Exhibitionism
Mary Moody Northen Theatre, through July 18 Running time: 1 hr, 30 min When mankind looks back upon the 20th century, will it see 100 years of wars? One hundred years of continuing imperialism and subjugation? Or, as playwright Steve Martin suggests through his buoyant, if slightly off-center characters, a century where creativity and the…
Music of the Spheres
The kingdom of Morocco achieved independence from French and Spanish rule in 1956. The current reigning monarch is His Majesty Hassan II, both political regent and religious leader of Morocco. King Hassan is a dynamic ruler, narrowly escaping at least two coup attempts, and his image is everywhere; some Americans in Morocco secretly refer to…
A Bald-Faced Lie?
Bald men, listen up, and all you women too: 70 million men in the United States are either bald like me or experiencing some degree of male pattern baldness. That’s a lot of us, isn’t it? I’d like to know what women really think about us bald guys. Recently I was at a costume party…
Working Vacations
Ice Factory, New York City, NY When Ice Factory ’99, Soho Think Tank’s festival of fringe theatre, rocks the City That Never Sleeps this summer, three Austin companies will be in the thick of the action. Theaterless Theater Corps (Golem, Night of the Werewolf), Rude Mechanicals (don b.’s Snow White, Salivation), and KAIROS! Co. (No…
Record Reviews
Havana Cafe (Havana Caliente/Atlantic) PEDRO LUIS FERRER (Havana Caliente/Atlantic) ADALBERTO ALVAREZ Y SU SON Jugando Con Candela (Havana Caliente/Atlantic) Just because it’s Cuban doesn’t mean it’s the Buena Vista Social Cloob. Destined to become one of the few musical legacies from the Nineties, BVSC is an endearing Cinderella story in which journeyman guitarist Ry Cooder…
Country of Exiles?
by William Leach Pantheon Books, $24 hard If, as Gertrude Stein once said about her hometown — “there is no there there,” she quipped — then where did the there go? And, more juicily, who took it? In this book, William Leach sets himself the task of updating these questions for the Nineties. Leach sees…
Off The Bookshelf
by Tom Franklin William Morrow and Company, $22 hard The anthropologically minded reader, the student of white trash, will relish Poachers for its encompassing declension of mean misfits from deep south Alabama, though approaching this alternately hilarious and mournful collection of nine short stories and one novella just to find out how the poaching set…
La Guitarra de Callajera
Bel�n Oliva A lone dancer swirls her skirt in waves of brightly colored fabric, swinging her hips and head from side to side, while stamping out the rhythm with her feet and staring intently at the audience. Another young lady, dressed similarly but sitting knees akimbo on a wooden box (also known as el caj�n),…
Postscripts
Asylum Books, the used bookstore on South Lamar, (sort of) closed its doors on July 5. For over three years, says Asylum co-owner Bob Wolfkill, the used bookstore has been doing 40-60% of its business through the Internet via sites like Bibliocity and Bibliofind, where customers can find links to any number of used bookstores…
Schoolyard Scuffle
Another quick council approval was the St. John’s Multipurpose Center, the multimillion-dollar joint venture between the city and AISD approved by voters in the November bond package. Although the combination of the new J.J. Pickle Elementary School and the adjacent community center (which will house divisions of the city’s health and human services, police, and…
About AIDS
Remember the optimism when the USSR opened to the free world? Who foresaw the misery ahead — degrading poverty, desperate insecurity, and rampant disease? Yet HIV is spreading rapidly in Moscow due to ballooning needle-drug use, prostitution, public ignorance, and an almost total absence of prevention efforts. The Health Ministry announced last week that there…
Embalming for Dollars
Despite the huge profits, SCI does not tell its customers that it is using embalmers like Ooten. Nor does it tell clients how much it is paying Ooten or other contract embalmers. The company says it is not required to do so, but the TFSC disagrees. Federal Trade Commission rules require funeral homes to tell…
Coach’s Corner
Two remaining thoughts looking toward future NBA seasons. A few weeks ago you were introduced to my old friend Dunn as he carped and groused his way to the best round of his life at Pebble Beach. Adding to his numerous personality ticks is this: Aside from turning from a hippie to a John Wayne…
Naked City
Oh sure, he’s the odds-on favorite to be the next president of the United States, has raised an ungodly sum of money in an unprecedented amount of time, and is the son of a former president, but Gov. George W. Bush officially hit the big time this week when he starred in his very own…
