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College Grads More Likely to Maintain Religious Beliefs

Secular professors be damned. A new study out of the University of Texas shows that college graduates are more likely to maintain their religious beliefs than those who never attended college. Fundamentalists once condemned higher education as the enemy of Christian faith, but assistant professor Mark Regnerus says the opposite is true. Regnerus surmises that…

by Kimberly Reeves

The Boys of Summer, Cowboys That Is

Isn’t summer grand? Fireworks, barbecue, flyin’ kites at Zilker Park. And training camp. Ah, training camp. NFL teams must report in just a few short weeks to build and sculpt their squads and prepare for the power and glory that I just know will be the NFL ’07-‘08 season. Now, we all have many questions…

by Timothy Braun

Hooks, Owls, and Dynamo to Be Televised

There’s some regional flavor in the air tonight as the Corpus Christi Hooks (the Astros’ AA affiliate), Houston Dynamo, and Rice Owls games are being broadcast live on the boob tube. The Hooks’ game is only being shown regionally, but the Owls and Dynamo games are being televised nationally. Aww yeah. Here’s the schedule: Frisco…

by Mark Fagan

Lonestar Rollergirls’ Calvello Cup Championship Going Down This Saturday

“Stinging, red streak across buttocks and/or legs resulting from too-short-skirts/pants/shorts and exposed skin hitting the banked track. Accompanied by painful skin-sticking-to-Masonite board sound.” This, of course, is the definition for “Track Rash or Masonite Burn,” defined in the glossary of Roller Derby slang on the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls website. For those not on the up-and-up…

by Sofia Resnick

Lightning, Gold Cup Previews, and More

Hard-luck weekend for the Austin Lightning:a stadium power failure Friday night (game with Laredo postponed, to be rescheduled) and a loss Saturday to Baton Rouge, 2-0, despite outshooting the visitors 16-8. The Lightning’s youngsters got some good experience midweek: an exhibition game Wednesday against the Houston Dynamo reserves. This week they take on the Mississippi…

by Nick Barbaro

We Always Knew Lalas Smoked the Good Stuff, Didn’t We?

U.S. soccer icon, L.A. Galaxy president, and Major League Soccer booster Alexi Lalas told the British press last week that the MLS is on a par with the English Premiership – which he called “an inferior product.” The Mirror responded with a review of Sunday’s Galaxy-Salt Lake game: “[S]ome of the defending from both sides…

by Nick Barbaro

Nothing Like a Day at the Park

The Astros lost in extra innings to the visiting Oakland A’s. Shortstop extraordinaire Adam Everett broke his leg and will be out four to eight weeks. Jason Jennings was pulled after four innings and 74 pitches with the game tied 3-3. Seemingly every child under the age of 11 in Houston was in attendance at…

by Mark Fagan

Free Cyndi

Watch this blog for upcoming information regarding how you can win a two-night stay this weekend at the Houston Hyatt for Pride Houston and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Tour. The trip is this weekend, and the turnaround is quick. So stay tuned. Courtesy of your pals here at Gay Place and Live Nation tickets.

by Kate X Messer

Outlaws End Season 5-3, Fail to Make Playoffs

The Austin Outlaws full-contact women’s football team accepted a forfeit victory from the Dallas Rage this weekend but needed the Pensacola Power to beat the New Orleans Blaze by at least 59 points for the Outlaws to be eligible for the National Women’s Football Association’s postseason. Pensacola won but not by enough and ended the…

by Mark Fagan

Lance Armstrong Bikeway Finally Under Way

The Lance Armstrong Bikeway, proposed in 1999 by local bike crusader Eric Anderson to create a dedicated east-to-west bicycle route across Downtown, is finally under way. After years of delays, even after the project was fully funded, many people were beginning to believe it may have to be dedicated to Armstrong posthumously by the time…

by Daniel Mottola

Readings

Austin novelist Ben Rehder writes about the Texas Hill Country with such insightful appreciation that he’s come to own the territory

by Virginia B. Wood

Reissues

Leonard CohenSongs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia/Legacy) Leonard CohenSongs From a Room (Columbia/Legacy) Leonard CohenSongs of Love and Hate (Columbia/Legacy) 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen may not have mirrored the gauzy Summer of Love, but these reissues of his first three albums, repackaged in appropriately muted tones, reveal his own trinity: the holy, lustful, and…

by Audra Schroeder

Phases & Stages

DungenTio Bitar (Kemado) Dungen never became “the new Zeppelin,” but they’ve got a sense of humor about it. On fourth album Tio Bitar (“10 Pieces”), the Swedes ignite right from the “Intro,” when we hear a siren and then smell the fire. And the flute. Singing in Swedish, as on 2005’s excellent Ta Det Lugnt,…

by Audra Schroeder

Reissues

Dolly PartonCoat of Many Colors (RCA Nashville/Legacy) Dolly PartonMy Tennessee Mountain Home (RCA Nashville/Legacy) Dolly PartonJolene (RCA Nashville/Legacy) 1971’s Coat of Many Colors gave Dolly Parton the hit she’d been looking for since leaving her longtime duet partner, Porter Wagoner. The autobiographical title track exuded a tender folksiness with its unabashed sentimentality, Parton finding her…

by Margaret Moser

Phases & Stages

DanielsonA Family Movie (or, Make a Joyful Noise Here) (Homevision) What began as outsider-art practitioner Daniel Smith’s senior thesis at Rutgers turned into an underground indie-music phenomenon and respected DIY label, Sounds Familyre. Smith’s Danielson Famile soon found itself playing packed houses in and around their native New Jersey and beyond. This rock doc follows…

by Melanie Haupt

TCB

Flashing back to the origins of Emo’s, peering inside the Broken Clock Cabaret, and celebrating Juneteenth with a heapin’ helpin’ of blues

by Christopher Gray

Reissues

Betty Davis(Light in the Attic) Betty DavisThey Say I’m Different (Light in the Attic) Hell yes she was different. She couldn’t help it. Thankfully, Seattle-based Light in the Attic Records has had the good sense to re-release soul sister Betty Mabry Davis’ first two albums. An accidental feminist, her frank, unrestrained lyrics capture the zeitgeist,…

by Audra Schroeder

Red Road

This subtle psychological thriller from Scotland holds its cards close to the vest while keeping viewers intrigued but perplexed.

by Marjorie Baumgarten

Day Trips

Gus Engeling Wildlife Management Area has so many animals that they give you a scorecard at the front gate to keep track

by Gerald E. McLeod

Reissues

Run-DMC Live at Montreux 2001 (Eagle Rock ) From Hollis, Queens, N.Y., to Switzerland, Run-DMC rocked the house party eight days a week until Jam Master Jay’s murder in 2002. This hourlong Montreux Jazz Festival performance – sold separately on both CD and DVD – packs extra poignancy as a result of the DJ’s violent…

by Greg Beets

Nancy Drew

Historically, Nancy Drew may be the best teen detective around, but in this new screen incarnation, she is definitely no spy kid.

by Marjorie Baumgarten

Reissues

Warren ZevonPreludes (New West) Fans of Warren Zevon are no doubt feeling barraged of late. Rhino reissued three of his albums earlier this year. Then there’s his biography, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, an oral history drawing raves from both music and literary critics. Now comes Preludes, a 2-CD collection of early home recordings and…

by Jim Caligiuri

Crazy Love

Documentary portrait of a mutually obsessive, interdependent, tabloid-fodder marriage going on 30 years.

by Marrit Ingman

Reissues

The Complete Motown SinglesVolume 7: 1967 (Hip-OSelect.com) The B-sides have it. This being The Complete Motown Singles, 1-9-6-7, Gladys Knight & the Pips’ percolating “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a vinyl 45 of which resides in the front cover to Hip-O Select’s Internet-only scrapbook No. 7, represents only one platinum-toed best foot forward. Four…

by Raoul Hernandez

Day Watch

The second in a Russian science-fiction trilogy is a fantastic sight to behold, but don’t try explaining the plot.

by Marjorie Baumgarten

Reissues

Wild Man FischerPronounced Normal (Collectors’ Choice) Between his highly unorthodox singing and the emotional heft of celebrating art so clearly tied to mental illness, Larry “Wild Man” Fischer is anything but easy listening. Once championed by Solomon Burke and Frank Zappa, Fischer’s vocal approach centers on ear-splitting, high-pitched ululations (often sung a cappella) that would’ve…

by Greg Beets

Arts Review

Salvage Vanguard Theater’s staging of Maria Irene Fornes’ Mud has plenty to compel our attention, most of it coming from the three gifted actors in the cast

by Robert Faires

Reissues

Monty PythonThe Monty Python Matching Tie & Handkerchief (Arista/Legacy) Monty PythonThe Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Arista/Legacy) Monty PythonMonty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album (Arista/Legacy) Almost 40 years after the BBC tapped five well-educated Brits (Cambridge, Oxford) and one gifted American animator for a…

by Christopher Gray

Naked City

Quote of the Week “What Las Manitas has given to Austin over the last 25 years is worth much, much more than $100 million.” – Jim Walker, Liveable City (see “Point Austin”) Headlines• Former City Council member (1971-’74) and Mayor (1975-’77) Jeff Friedman, credited with bringing contemporary city politics to Austin, died June 7 at…

by Chronicle Staff

Arts Review

Gobotrick Theatre Company’s Intermission isn’t a musical but kind of a live concert with real musicians pretending to be characters in front of a pretend audience in front of a real audience

by Patti Hadad

Reissues

Genesis1976-1982 (Rhino) The saga of Genesis breaks down into three distinct eras, beginning with Peter Gabriel’s epic and theatrical grandeur and concluding with Phil Collins’ successful conversion into pop-chart Svengali. This compactly massive 6-CD/6-DVD box set – five albums in CD/DVD double-disc sets and an extra tracks bonus CD/DVD – documents the recently regrouped UK…

by Austin Powell

DVD Watch

LongfordHBO Home Video, $26.98 In the name of expediency, let’s say movies can be lumped into three broad categories as they relate to actors: First, you’ve got your blockbusters, wherein action and bombast trump everything else and individual actors are about as significant as ants in a farm. Then you have movies like The Sting…

by Josh Rosenblatt

Arts Review

With Ruddigore, the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin has provided a welcome opportunity to experience one of the less seen works of the G&S canon performed with aplomb

by Iris Brooks

Reissues

Depeche ModeConstruction Time Again (Rhino/Reprise/Sire/Mute) Depeche ModeBlack Celebration (Rhino/Reprise/Sire/Mute) Rhino’s bizarrely out-of-sequence Depeche Mode campaign concludes here with these two albums separated by 1984’s Some Great Reward and, thanks to “People Are People,” a sea change in the Basildon, England, quartet’s popularity. For third album Construction Time Again, the group welcomed Alan Wilder into the…

by Christopher Gray

Reissues

PretendersLearning to Crawl (Sire/Real/Rhino) PretendersGet Close (Sire/Real/Rhino) Impossibly, after half her band died of drug overdoses – she’d had intimate relationships with both guitarists – Chrissie Hynde cut the only other album that ever mattered in the Pretenders’ catalog. 1984’s Learning to Crawl bounces back from the sophomore slump of Pretenders II, and with only…

by Raoul Hernandez

Phases & Stages

In one of their earliest collaborations, two Japanese noise specialists, Boris and Merzbow, launched “Texas Spaceship,” an 18-minute magnetic disturbance of feedback and fuzz. Their latest effort to reach stateside audiences, Walrus/Groon (Hydra Head) is yet another extraterrestrial affair. Originally released on Fangs Anal Satan in 2004, “Walrus” uses the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”…

by Austin Powell

Reissues

Chase your rock & roll summer reading with the Traveling Wilburys, Love, Leonard Cohen, Betty Davis, Run-DMC, Warren Zevon, and more.

by Chronicle Staff

Phases & Stages

Rufus WainwrightRelease the Stars (Geffen) Ren and Stimpy would’ve had a field day with the CD booklet pictures of Rufus Wainwright in lederhosen; Judy Garland, by contrast, a fit over the arrangements on the piano man’s fifth album. Overwrought in Berlin, Release the Stars continues dispensing cigarettes and chocolate milk – Wainwright’s ever-ripe vexations –…

by Raoul Hernandez

Reissues

Traveling WilburysThe Traveling Wilburys Collection (Wilbury/Rhino) It’s been nearly 20 years since the Traveling Wilburys proved what a true supergroup could accomplish when there are no egos involved, just friendship. The Wilburys were George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne. Though they managed only two albums, impishly titled…

by Jim Caligiuri

Phases & Stages

Ibrahim FerrerMi Sueño (Nonesuch) This dream begins with “Dos Almas” – two souls – and a voice thick with age. Ages of colonial romanticism. Cuba’s Ibrahim Ferrer, who died August 2005 at the age of 78, mustered centuries of courtyard serenades in every promise and regret pledged in a song. Unfinished at the time of…

by Raoul Hernandez

Reissues

LoveThe Blue Thumb Recordings (Hip-OSelect.com) This little red book may be short on Hip-O Select’s Internet-only boutique filigree, but its content tri-folds a 3-CD Love supreme. By 1969, Love was losing the war of greater social unrest despite the small matter that matchmaker Arthur Lee’s voice remains the voice of the Sixties, both black and…

by Raoul Hernandez

Phases & Stages

The Dynamites featuring Charles WalkerKaboom! (Outta Sight) Kaboom! is right. Dynamites soul shouter supreme, Charles Walker, was once top draw at Music City’s New Era Club – his “No Fool No More” appears on 2005’s Night Train to Nashville, Vol. 2 – before moving on to the Apollo Theater, Europe, and finally, back home. Walker…

by Christopher Gray

Luv Doc Recommends: Keep Austin Weird Festival

Remember how jacked you were when you could finally buy authentic Seattle grungewear in the Dillards casuals section? You ran over to the mall and picked up a “distressed” flannel vest with t-shirt sleeves sewn into it so it looked like you were layering to fend off the dank, cold, cloudy Austin weather. Good choice.…

by The Luv Doc

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