“We’ll Always Have 807 Congress”
There are some days when it feels like PD operates en plein air: an Eden one day, tornado alley the next. That inspires the following elemental discourse. The Heat With the Austin sun baking the roof for over 300 days a year, the warming glow of the various light fixtures during a performance, not to…
Un Dios
Like a summer storm, the piano playing of Jesus “Chucho” Vald�s comes in waves. Amidst a thundering, sometimes furious hail of conga, batia, and trap drums — locomotive Afro-Cuban rhythms — Vald�s pours down in thick, cascading sheets of ivory rain, unleashing gale force amounts of natural energy in an awe-inspiring display. Just as this…
Exhibitionism
State Theater, through June 27 Running time: 2 hrs On any playground in the world, you’ll see them: kids squabbling. And no matter where it is, you’ll see them all squabbling pretty much the same way: making faces, calling each other names, stamping their feet, insulting each other’s mothers, sticking out their tongues — in…
Water Pipe
Current evidence of this, Bunch says, is LCRA’s plan to build a 14-mile water line to Dripping Springs from an LCRA water station near the Village of Bee Cave. That infrastructure, Bunch insists, will spur undesirable growth in these environmentally crucial areas. Bunch is angry that the city would choose to line Rose’s pockets, “Especially…
Postscripts
You can bemoan the state of the publishing industry all you want; you can lament the recent news that Rupert Murdoch, who already owns HarperCollins, wants to buy up William Morrow and Avon now that the Hearst Corporation has decided to divest itself of those two imprints. Yes, it’s a tough world for authors of…
The Electoral Collage
Single-member districts have been the great white whale of modern Austin politics. On three different occasions, most recently in 1994, Austin voters have been asked to adopt a single-member system and have said no, though by progressively narrower margins. To many progressives, the failure of single-member districts was symptomatic of the Bad Guys’ hold on…
And Then Some
edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison Houghton Mifflin, $28 hard Great short stories must, to borrow from Tim O’Brien’s masterpiece, carry “all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” For a short story to resonate with a terrible power capable of leaving…
Voting Systems: A Primer
Austin: Places At Large What Austin has now is a place system — wherein all the candidates are running for specific seats, decided by a simple majority vote, but all the races are decided by the city at large. Austin is the largest city in America, and the only major city in Texas, that elects…
About AIDS
Condoms, already a generally high-quality product when tested in 1995, have gotten even better, according to the June issue of Consumer Reports. That’s especially good news from our perspective, as correct and consistent use of latex condoms is a major factor in HIV prevention among sexually active people. For many years, the FDA has had…
Voter Turnout Timeline
In the Beginning… This timeline shows voter turnout, by percentage, in every Austin City Council election since 1926. Each point on this graph is an election; this includes both general and runoff elections as well as special elections to fill vacancies. The Swing Era Before 1953, Austin elected its councils through a proportional system –…
Coach’s Corner
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the pets in our house. Roxy, small by boxer standards, is smart, cunning, and psychotically aggressive toward other dogs … except her young brother Floyd. He’s as big as Roxy is small, with a fierce appearance but an almost bovine hesitancy toward all things, animate or not.…
How America’s 40 Largest Cities Elect Their Council Members
All politics is local because every city is different; when you ask “How do America’s 40 largest cities elect their council members?” you get 40 different answers. This chart describes some key differences. Government System M: Under the Strong Mayor system in place in 26 of the cities, the mayor and council are separate, equal,…
Day Trips
Antique Machinery Exhibition in Stonewall is more than just old tractors, but includes games, demonstrations, and local peaches, June 25-27. 830/997-3012. Watermelon Thump in Luling honors the local crop with games and food booths as well as a carnival, June 24-27. 830/875-3214. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, a film by Les Blank, will be…
Short Cuts
One of the nation’s most phenomenal indie film success stories of the past year has happened right here in Austin. The documentary, Hands on a Hard Body — Bob Bindler’s hilarious, insightful, and life-affirming slice of Texas life — is closing in on its one-year anniversary of continuous play at the Dobie Theatre, where it…
Page Two
This issue we debut a new regular Chronicle feature. Each week in the Food section, there will be about a half-page devoted to short capsule reviews of about 10 restaurants. Between our food features, this listings section, and our restaurant advertisers, we should provide a pretty wide range of options for those looking to eat…
The Man With Susan’s Plan
Since his directorial debut with the displaced ape-man comedy Schlock! (which featured the director in the title role), John Landis has been a singular American filmmaker, deftly mixing his love of the fantastic with outright comedy and the occasional touch of genuine pathos. His characters and stories tend to exist in a nearly surreal state…
Public Notice
We received the word a bit too late to include this info in our “Divorce Special” last week: The Parents & Children’s Educational (PACE) Project encourages healthy relationships between fathers and their children. They offer a weekly Fathers’ Group, weekly pro bono legal services, and parenting classes. Their specialty is helping dads who are having…
Landmark Change
New Dobie Manager Holden Payne photograph by Todd V. Wolfson On May l5, Holden Payne became the Dobie Theatre’s new general manager. The change followed the unexpected announcement from Scott Dinger, then manager, programmer, and owner of the campus arthouse, that he was selling the Dobie to Landmark Theatres, a national arthouse chain that boasts…
Automat
Little Thailand 4315 Caldwell, Garfield, 247-3855 Mon-Sat, 11am-2pm, 6-9pm Little Thailand is a cozy family joint located east of the new airport, where owners Dick Simcoe and his Thai wife, Surin, offer spectacular authentic Thai food in a funky, relaxed setting. Enjoy Dick’s killer Thai Bloody Marys in the attached lounge while waiting for cooked-to-order…
Scanlines
D: Edward Cline (1932) with W.C. Fields, Jack Oakie, Susan Fleming, Lyda Roberti, Andy Clyde, Ben Turpin, Dickie Moore, Billy Gilbert, Hugh Herbert. When I first really began watching movies seriously, in my mid-teens, W.C. Fields, though a comedy titan, did little for me. I accepted him as one of the great comic talents of…
Food-o-File
Readers have sent tips about some reportedly great but relatively obscure rural barbecue joints for us to check out and as soon as we’re hungry for barbecue again, we’ll go find ’em. Until then, we need to let you know that we printed the wrong phone number for BBQ World Headquarters (6701 Burnet). Call them…
TV Eye
Cooking Live, Primetime (7/5, 9pm). A second helping of the first and only call-in cooking show hosted by the gracious and amiable Sara Moulton. Lifestyle, entertainment, and on-location features expand the show. Extreme Cuisine (7/6, 8pm). “Wild recipes, culinary inventions, eccentric chefs, and unknown food factoids” are the focus of this series, which scours the…
Holy Smoke!
by Steven Reichlen Workman Publishing, $18.95 papera Live fire cooking is the world’s first cooking method; it’s the easiest and most forgiving, and definitely the most popular way to cook throughout the world. Barbecuing is no slouch in the U.S. either. Eighty-four percent of Americans own grills, and last year they fired them up almost…
The Last Great Politician
The first time I met Bob Bullock, who died June 18, he was sighting down a rifle at my then-skinny frame. “You ever seen one of these beauties?” he gruffed, showing off a Civil War relic. It was summer 1980, and I was a fresh-faced reporter in The Beaumont Enterprise’s Austin bureau. Bullock, then 50,…
Dancing About Architecture
With a little over a month left before Liberty Lunch becomes history, other venerable nightspots are also making their final farewells. Notable among those departures, Sixth Street mainstay Wylie’s has faded into the sunset as of this week. The popular belief is that Bob Popular plans to expand into the space, but BP’s Mark Shaeberg…
Off The Bookshelf
by Wally Lamb ReganBooks, $16 paper Six years after his first novel, She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb has given us a daunting but enticing 900-page tome called I Know This Much Is True. The seal of Oprah’s Book Club on the cover promises a plethora of modern problems to inflame our fashionably collective outrage –…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The first 7-Eleven was located in the East Oak Cliff section of Dallas, Texas. The OSS tried to break German morale during World War II by printing and distributing forged German postage stamps that included the message “Futsches Reich” meaning “Ruined Empire.” To get them into the German mail system, they bombed German postal trains,…
Rhythm is King
Dario y Su Combo Rican at Miguel’s La Bodega photograph by John Carrico It’s Saturday night and the joint is jumping — all rhythm, brass, and swiveling hips. Things are usually a bit quieter at Borinquen, the cozy south-side cocina known for Puerto Rican home cooking: pernil asado, tostones, arroz con gandules. Come Saturday night,…
Forever in Chimayo
illustration by Jason Stout The priest is a very small man, almost dwarfish, with an unusually large head — a head that would seem large even on a tall man. He’s in his seventies, I should guess; his hair is thick; he’s bowlegged, and walks with small decisive steps; his hands are agile in their…
Reissues
Grow Fins: Rarities 1965-1982 (Revenant) The past sure is tense. Thinking back amid the knotted exposed-nerve gratings, atonal mewlings, bent cranial psychedelics, unspooled lyricism, and farcical aliases; among all the silly accouterments that gush forth when the name Beefheart is evoked, it’s easy to forget one thing: For nearly two decades, Captain Beefheart & His…
Articulations
If you go up to most people in Austin (especially theatre people) and say “Austin Circle of Theatres,” they’ll think “Ann Ciccolella.” That’s because for the past eight and a half years, Ciccolella has been the point person for the longtime arts umbrella, and she’s taken the job seriously. If there was a meeting, a…
Naked City
Is the curtain finally coming down on the Cinema West Adult Theatre saga? Well, the red-and-white Cinema West marquee is (comingdown, that is) at 9am today, June 24. The former porno house’s sign — a symbol of two decades of frustration for South Congress neighbors — will be auctioned off by the Austin Police Dept.,…
