“Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer”
“Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer” 2003, NR, 53 min. Directed by Nancy Schiesari. This compact film (by UT cinematography professor Nancy Schiesari) documents the life and career of photojournalist Hansel Mieth, whose widely disseminated photographs make her one of the most prominent lensers about whom you’ve never heard. A plucky refugee from Germany, Mieth arrived in…
The Lost Weekend
The Lost Weekend 1945, NR, 101 min. Directed by Billy Wilder, Starring Ray Milland, Jane Wyman. This multi-Oscar winner, with its realistic story about an alcoholic (played stunningly by Ray Milland), is a landmark film in terms of Hollywood’s treatment of adult subject matter as fair game.
To Your Health
I sometimes feel calmer after drinking green tea despite its caffeine content. Could it be the theanine in the tea?
The Roots of the Left
The South Texas (Nuclear) Project isn’t quite lost — too bad.
Naked City
The Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas started the week preparing for the next big fight — same-sex marriage — but last Thursday, fighting was the last thing on the minds of hundreds of gays and lesbians gathered at Republic Square Park. “The Religious Right is pissed off!” shouted a gleeful Randall Ellis, LGRL executive director.…
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas 2003, PG, 83 min. Directed by Tim Johnson, Patrick Gilmore, Narrated by , Voices by Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michelle Pfeiffer, Joseph Fiennes, Dennis Haysbert, Starring . It’s never a good sign when the intended audience for a comedy sits stone-solid and unlaughing through the preview premiere, and when…
About AIDS
Thrift Shopping for HIV One avenue to support people living with HIV/AIDS is shopping at (and donating to) Project Transitions’ Top Drawer Thrift. Project Transitions, known for its hospice and housing programs, also works to support the HIV community through its vintage and thrift store, located at 49th and Burnet Road. Open since 1993, the…
The Roots of the Left
Janes and Slusher’s newsletter kept a Weird eye on City Hall.
Capitol Chronicle
Last week, the House Redistricting Committee held six “field hearings” around the state, ostensibly to gather testimony on the proposed congressional re-redistricting that is the subject of the special legislative session that opened Monday, June 30. The 15-member committee was split into subcommittees for three all-day hearings on Thursday (Brownsville, San Antonio, Lubbock) and three…
Jimmie and Georgia
At their Southern Dinette, family-style soul food took on a whole new meaning.
Austin @ Large: Austin at Large
Smart Growth wouldn’t be dead if it had stayed in touch with reality
From Scratch
Though their recollections vary slightly as to exactly when and where they decided to call their new venture “Sweetish Hill Bakery,” longtime friends Patricia Bauer-Slate and Tom Neuhaus are sure about a couple of things: They considered calling the new business Neuhaus-Bauer but decided that sounded too much like a funeral parlor or a law…
The Gavel Comes Down on Redistricting A-Go-Go
The Lege returns, and the gentlemen start their engines.
Austin @ Large: Smart Growth: The Good, the Bad, and the %$@!-ing Ugly
GOOD SMART GROWTH! Fifteen projects, some already built (like the Nokonah and the West Avenue Lofts), some under construction (like the Convention Center Hotel and the Pedernales Live/Work project), and some vaporware (like Sixth + Lamar and the Triangle), were granted approximately $5 million in fee waivers and other noncash incentives under the Smart Growth…
Food-o-File
Virginia B. Wood invites you to a BookPeople celebration of Chronicle Food writers, asks for your help on a story, and tells you to look for Austin on the TV Food Network in this week’s “Food-o-File.”
Killer D Update
Since June 4, in response to Democratic requests, the U.S. Dept. of Justice has been investigating the possible misuse of DOJ personnel — federal marshals and the FBI — in the May search for the House Democrats who fled to Oklahoma. Naked City would have reported that news earlier, but the DOJ didn’t bother to…
The Hightower Lowdown
John Ashcroft snuffs out medical marijuana; corporate execs get slapped on the wrist.
Up for Grabs
It is entirely not an accident that photographer Steve Martin, along with Wendel White and Walter Griffin, set out to capture — catalog, even — East Austin right about the time Sixties-style urban renewal was seguing into an Eighties real estate boom. Developers (for-profit and non-) had turned their collective, acquisitive gaze to the area,…
El Diablo
Digging down into the depths of history (segregation) for the story of Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Austin black baseball.
Dumb and Dapper
The former AG lands in solitary in Lockhart after trying to buy two fancy cars while claiming to be indigent.
Lights Out
The Seventies represented the heyday for film programming at the University of Texas. Marjorie Baumgarten recollects the days of CinemaTexas and the Texas Union Theater.
Features Strung
Capitol Town Center A mall, a movie theatre, office space, and a hotel by both the interstate and downtown on a hilltop offering a postcard view of the city … That was the Austin development dream of a California company in the late Eighties. Right now, that very plot of land looks much the same…
A Short History of Professional Baseball in Austin
1839: The city of Austin is established as the capital of the Republic of Texas. 1845: Alexander Joy Cartwright implements the first game of modern baseball at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. 1869: Baseball debuts in Austin on June 29, when the U.S. 15th Infantry’s team defeats a group of locals known as the…
Merchants Talk, City Listens
The city postpones plans to tear up Lamar Boulevard during the holiday season
Have You Ever Been to Carrascolendas?
The Bilingual Education Act in 1968 sparked an unprecedented number of bilingual television programs for children, and the Austin-produced children’s series Carrascolendas, which premiered in 1970, was among the first.
Get It While You Can
All is not lost. Certainly, it might seem so. Every other day or thereabouts, there is another mournful newspaper headline, another vacant storefront, another piece of what we treasure about this town slipping into the realm of “Lost Austin.” And as this city has transformed over the last decade — or two, or three –…
Play Ball!
WHAT: From Reconstruction to the Round Rock Express, baseball has been a key part of the social fabric of Texas. The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum honors this tradition with “Play Ball! Texas Baseball,” colorfully representing nearly 140 years of Texas baseball. Peppered with information about the Astros, Rangers, and today’s minor-league teams (Henry…
Naked City
Quote of the Week: “Adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their own homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons.”– Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the U.S. Supreme Court opinion striking down §21.06 of the Texas Penal Code and its ban on “homosexual conduct.”…
Where Are They Now?
Harry Porter (Agapito) now lives in Mexico City, where he’s appeared in several telenovelas (Acapulco, Cuerpo y Alma) and appeared in Spanish-language films with Javier Bardem and James Gandolfini. He also does translation work and teaches business Spanish to executives. Every Diez y Seis de Septiembre (Mexican Independence Day), Porter can be found “in Tepoztlán,…
TCB
Willie, ghosts, and the White Stripes … all in all, a good week
The Living Library
I have always longed to visit Pompeii. The humans whose lives were caught under a blanket of lava and ash were not posing. They were not wealthy royals, and they had not just cleaned the house. Culture was vibrant and vital, and the great fabric of social strata was as in motion in AD79 as…
Naked City
It was business as usual Monday for the Texas Association of Business — court appearance, jail, bail, appeal, just like last week and the week before that. This time, T.A.B. President Bill Hammond was ordered to jail for refusing to turn over documents to a Travis Co. grand jury investigating the corporate financing of the…
Short Cuts
“That’s not art, and I hate it”: Things get heated at the Cinemaker Co-op party at Gallery Lombardi.
Articulations
The city is hot to find “a creative, energetic, and innovative leader” to head its revamped Cultural Arts Program, now located in the city’s Economic Growth and Redevelopment Office, where it will coordinate support and advocacy for Austin’s performing arts, visual arts, music, film, and interactive communities.
The Project in Interpreting the Texas Past
In Stonewall, Texas, you drive down a long straight road and turn right into the dusty scrub of LBJ State Park. The vast Johnson ranch is also the home of the Sauer-Beckmann Farmstead, a small living history museum. Piglets with sunburnt backsides clamor in the wooden pen, while inside the old stone farmhouse, Parks and…
Naked City
Legislators were given 28 new ways to make mischief on Tuesday, as Gov. Rick Perry expanded the call for the special session to include other “emergencies” facing the state. Many of the new items had been part of HB 2, the massive government-reorganization bill that promised to greatly expand Perry’s powers, which cratered when the…
DVD Watch
Akira Kurosawa and longtime lead Toshiro Mifune together interpreted Macbeth to legendary effect.
Exhibitionism
Zachary Scott Theatre Center’s production of the comedy Fully Committed is a thrill ride for an audience, with Becky Mode’s script and Dave Steakley’s choice direction wittily capturing the mania of restaurant life, while Martin Burke’s chameleonlike star turn — playing 40 characters — imbues the central character with heart and soul in the midst…
Writing Austin’s Lives
I got connected to Writing Austin’s Lives without even meaning to, by taking Carton’s class on 19th-century poetics. WAL was getting off the ground and needed volunteers to brainstorm its implementation. Intoxicated by a semester of Whitman’s verses, I eagerly jumped on the train. Simone Biow of LBJ High School, 78705: You have officially slipped…
Naked City
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the National Council of La Raza’s annual conference, and for the first time ever it will take place in Austin — at the Austin Convention Center, July 12-15. In addition to conferences, workshops, a five-kilometer “diabetes dash” to raise awareness, and the like, the conference features a star-studded…
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines 2003, R, 109 min. D: Jonathan Mostow; with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes. In the 12 years since Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released both the sci-fi/action genre and the art of computer-generated special effects (which that film’s director James Cameron helped revolutionize) have morphed, like Robert Patrick’s…
Salon of the West
They may not notice us every time we go to Barton Springs — after all, they are thinking, passionate men, deep in conversation. But we sure notice them: the men at Philosophers’ Rock. Who are they? And why does Austin owe them such a debt of gratitude?
Bright Lights, Inner City
When Austin’s Eastside music scene was lit up like Broadway
Naked City
With all the headline blood being spilled on congressional redistricting, you can be forgiven for not noticing it, but the House Select Committee on Public School Finance began holding interim hearings last week, in preparation for a special session on the subject next fall or spring. In theory, the committee will create a plan to…
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde 2003, PG-13, 94 min. Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, Regina King, Jennifer Coolidge, Bruce McGill, Bob Newhart, Luke Wilson. There was something rather rousing in the way Legally Blonde, an unassuming comedy made two years ago for $18…
Page Two
I’m making an Austin-music tape for an old friend I recently re-encountered. I don’t say a “compilation tape” because I’m the anti-deejay. I can put two great songs together in such a way as to make them both sound awful. This, coupled with a tin ear that leads to distortion and aggressively inconsistent noise levels,…
Eastside MVPs
Singers and musicians who made their mark in East Austin before the Seventies. Martin Banks T.D. Bell Erbie Bowser Major Burkes Wimp Caldwell Bill Campbell W.C. Clark Mel Davis Ural Dewitty Weldon Gentry Hosea Hargrove Duck Jennings A.J. Manor Jean Manor Pat Murphy Pat Patterson L.P. Pearson James Polk Gene Ramey Matthew Robinson Robert Shaw…
Naked City
As of press time there was still no word from Austin Police Chief Stan Knee on whether he intends to follow the Office of the Police Monitor citizen review panel’s request that he review APD’s internal probe into charges that veteran Detective Howard Staha forced Lucy Neyens to perform oral sex on him a decade…
Winged Migration
Aviary rapture.
After a Fashion
A “northern stream” of high fashion comes to Austin… And what celebrity was sighted among the frat daddies on the Drag? Where did she go, and what did she buy?
The Roots of the Left
From, oh, about the Republic era until, oh, about last week, Austin citizens have made a habit of getting in the way of the local and state powers-that-be. But what we think of today as “Austin politics” — that is, the Anglo progressive left — dates most clearly back to the 1950s liberal heyday at…
Naked City
Planned Parenthood doesn’t use public funding to provide abortion services — after all, that’s against the law. But that hasn’t stopped the state from trying to cut the women’s health services provider from its family-planning program, an effort that could affect 33 clinics and at least 115,000 women. Last week, several Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates…
The Trip
The Trip 2002, NR, 95 min. Directed by Miles Swain, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Larry Sullivan, Steve Braun, Sirena Irwin, Alexis Arquette, Jill St. John, Ray Baker. The Trip begins with a police car zipping dramatically along a desert highway. A scorpion skitters along a rock in extreme close-up, and the soundtrack…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The five chief weapons of the Spanish Inquisition were fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms.Safflower seeds attract cardinals. Peanuts attract nesting woodpeckers, titmice, and blue jays.United States Secret Service workers really love Diane’s chicken and dumplings at the Coffee Station in Crawford, Texas.No German dinner party…
The Roots of the Left
Scholz Garden recalls a storied political and cultural past.
Naked City
With the Legislature’s special session less than a day old, state Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, refiled on June 30 two criminal-justice bills that proved highly divisive during the regular session. With HB 17, Keel is again offering his version of how the state should determine whether a capital-crime defendant is mentally retarded. The U.S. Supreme…
Day Trips
Smitty’s Market in Lockhart is the newest barbecue stand in a town legendary for its fine smoked meats. You might think that being the fourth joint in the barbecue capital of Texas would be too much of an obstacle to overcome, but somehow the proprietors managed to perfect the seasoning and smoking that some places…
The Roots of the Left
Sixties Austin took a deep whiff of revolution.
Naked City
The good news is: The federal government is dangling 1,000 well-paying jobs in front of Panhandle residents. The bad news is: It may lead to thermonuclear war. At a four-hour public hearing last Thursday at Amarillo College, a live studio audience of some 200, most sporting “Pantex Yes” lapel stickers, turned out to hear and…
