Good Kurds, Bad Kurds
Good Kurds, Bad Kurds 2000, NR, 72 min. Directed by Kevin McKiernan. Photojournalist McKiernan examines the plight of Kurds in Turkey and Iraq and the effect American policy has on the treatment of Kurds in each of these countries.
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
To reduce greenhouse gasses, some well-intentioned, ecologically oriented citizens are heating their homes with special corn-burning stoves instead of using natural gas or oil. However, critics contend that more gasoline is spent to grow the corn than the energy delivered to heat the houses.Richard Dawson, of Hogan’s Heroes and Family Feud fame, once recorded a…
Phases and Stages
The Bad PlusThese Are the Vistas (Columbia) Like a shot out of the blue, this debut from a trio of unknown Midwesterners has caused the jazz community to sit up and take note. Working within the confines of a traditional piano trio, the Bad Plus plies a refreshingly playful, forcefully dynamic, and knowingly irreverent sensibility…
Naked City
Whenever David Hilgers talks to community groups about the need for a health care district, he begins by asking for a show of hands on three questions: How many believe our health care system is broken? How many know someone without health insurance? And how many have used Brackenridge Hospital? Hilgers typically sees a lot…
Short Cuts
Where to find the news the mainstream media doesn’t see fit to print
After a Fashion
MY BOLOGNA HAS A FIRST NAME … Last year the Oscars were held six months after 9/11. This year, they were held four days into a major war. The results? Just like last year: a relatively somber presentation, with a few surprises and some really dull outfits. Speaking of dull, we’ll start with the gentlemen:…
Phases and Stages
McCoy TynerOne World Theatre, March 22 It didn’t take McCoy Tyner long to get down to business. As soon as he struck the first notes of “Mellow Minor,” he and his top-shelf rhythm section — bassist Charnet Moffett and drummer Al Foster — were off and running, playing at a level most groups never dream…
Naked City
Here’s a brief selection of this week’s events related to the war and war protests:Thursday, March 27 Bitta Mostofi from Voices in the Wilderness discusses her experiences working with that group and the direct effects of sanctions on the daily lives of Iraqi people. She will also speak about effects that the current war will…
TV Eye
War, basketball, and the Oscars: Reality programming faces new challenges.
Day Trips
Wildflower season moves like a wave of a paintbrush across Texas beginning in early March in the Big Bend and moving toward Texarkana. It seems like almost overnight the fields of brown winter weeds turn a vibrant green with spots of color and then into fields of flowers which mimic the blue sky. To find…
Picking Up the TAB
The Travis Co. DA and the courts consider Texas Association of Business money spent during the fall campaign.
Naked City
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright — defining the right of fair and equal treatment under the law — a coalition of indigent defense advocates gathered at the Capitol March 20 to denounce two House bills they say would weaken provisions of the…
Piglet’s Big Movie
Piglet’s Big Movie 2003, G, 75 min. Directed by Francis Glebas, Narrated by , Voices by John Fiedler, Jim Cummings, Ken Sansom, Nikita Hopkins, Tom Wheatley, Kath Soucie, Starring . Disney’s timing in releasing Piglet’s Big Movie last Friday could not have been more serendipitous had it been National Hug a Pig for Peace Week.…
To Your Health
I would like to try SAMe for depression. What is good and what is bad about it, and is it safe?
Who’s Suing Whom
The battle over the Texas Association of Business political ad campaign is also being fought in the courts
Naked City
The House Criminal Jurisprudence committee on March 18 considered HB 1734 by Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, which would strengthen competency requirements for attorneys appointed to state habeas appeals. In such proceedings, a defendant can raise new issues not based solely on trial proceedings, including claims of prosecutorial misconduct. The appeal is integral to securing an…
Boat Trip
Boat Trip 2003, R, 93 min. Directed by Mort Nathan, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Horatio Sanz, Will Ferrell, Vivica A. Fox, Artie Lange, Thomas Lennon, Roger Moore, Richard Roundtree, Roselyn Sanchez, Lin Shaye. There are bad movies, and there’s Boat Trip, a puerile comedy so appalling and unfunny, it’s…
About AIDS
Supportive Housing Options Expanded New housing options are now available for persons living with HIV/AIDS in Austin, Travis County, and the nine surrounding counties through Project Transitions’ newest program of scattered site housing. Although Project Transitions provides housing in Austin at two apartment complexes that they own, the need for different varieties of housing remained.…
Campaign Finance Glossary
Here’s a handy guide to the major questions concerning campaign-finance law in Texas
Austin @ Large: Marc His Words
He’s gotta tell ya — Marc Katz karez about Austin (enough to be mayor).
View From the Top
View From the Top 2003, PG-13, 87 min. Directed by Bruno Barreto, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Christina Applegate, Mark Ruffalo, Candice Bergen, Joshua Malina, Kelly Preston, Rob Lowe, Mike Myers, Jon Polito, Marc Blucas. No doubt it gets stuffy winning Oscars and wooing onscreen suitors with a stiff British accent,…
Second Helpings: Thai
Thai goes to the eater, in this week’s “Second Helpings.”
City of Spirits
Austin is a town for the liquor-store sophisticate.
The T.A.B. Timeline
Reviewing the major events in the ongoing controversy of T.A.B. expenditures during last fall’s campaigns
Fiddling While Texas Burns
The fight over “tort-reform” is masking a bigger battle over state priorities.
Till Human Voices Wake Us
Till Human Voices Wake Us 2003, R, 101 min. Directed by Michael Petroni, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Guy Pearce, Helena Bonham Carter, Frank Gallacher, Lindley Joyner, Brooke Harman, Peter Curtin. The past casts shadows that threaten to envelop the present and consume the future in this debut feature from the writer of…
TCB
Austin soldiers on beyond SXSW with hot rods, SPAM, and puking
Alton Brown Is Coming to Town
Food TV addicts know Alton Brown as the perfect merging of Bart Simpson and Stephen Hawking. His show, Good Eats, provides a shrewd mix of slapstick, subtle cultural humor, and hard-edged science. Times are good for Alton. I’m Just Here for the Food (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $32.50), his first book, was just nominated for…
The Home Front
Various dispatches from the anti-war movement around Austin.
The Hightower Report
The Gardener’s Friend; Operation Pipe Dreams
The Core
The Core 2003, PG-13, 135 min. Directed by Jon Amiel, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Hillary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Delroy Lindo, DJ Qualls, Stanley Tucci, Alfre Woodard, Bruce Greenwood, Terry O’Quinn. How much you enjoy The Core is going to be based on how much you enjoy reading either Popular Science or Weird…
Looking Over His Shoulder
Intimacy is an interesting subject for a representational painter active in the late 20th century, and not one I usually associate with Alex Katz, who is best known for outsized portraits that looked so timely in the 1960s and 1970s and which continue to convey that era. Those huge works use a spare vocabulary and…
Alton Brown’s Austin Schedule
Friday, April 4 4:30-5:30pm — Brown is teaching a class at UT in the Department of Human Ecology — not open to the public 7:30-9:30pm — Booksigning at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar Saturday, April 5 6:30-9pm — Central Market cooking class, 4001 N. Lamar 9-10pm — Booksigning at Central Market, Austin Sunday, April 6…
APD ‘Documents the Instigators’
The behavior of APD’s undercover cops raises questions about First Amendment rights.
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
New on DVD: Style Wars, Cinema Paradiso, The Complete Musketeers, and more.
Basic
Basic 2003, R, 98 min. Directed by John McTiernan, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Giovanni Ribisi, Brian Van Holt, Taye Diggs, Cristián de la Fuente, Dash Mihok, Tim Daly, Harry Connick Jr., Roselyn Sanchez. It begins in a muddle and ends in confusion. In between, Basic…
His Shadow in the Frame
The Austin Museum of Art exhibition “Robert Frank Photographs” provides an excellent introduction to Frank’s career from his early social documentary work to his introspective images of later decades, and shows him always striving in his images to reflect his deeply personal response to the world around him.
Food-o-File
Virginia B. Wood digs up all of the good dirt on the farmers’ market projects going on in Austin, in this week’s “Food-o-File.”
May 3 Election News
Wynn Promises Layoffs City Council member and mayoral candidate Will Wynn says he “wasn’t pleased” to read, “Wynn proposes an end to development inspections,” in a headline of the online newsletter In Fact Daily. During a forum sponsored last week by the Construction Industry Alliance and the Building Owners and Managers Association, Wynn told the…
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
The Wim Wenders Collection: The American Friend Lightning Over Water Notebook on Cities and ClothesAnchor Bay Entertainment, $24.98 (each) Previously unavailable on Region 1 (U.S.- and Canada-friendly) DVD, these three seminal films by Wim Wenders make up some of the director’s most exhilarating work in his pre-Wings of Desire era. The American Friend, from the…
Irréversible
Irréversible 2002, NR, 95 min. Directed by Gaspar Noé, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel. The polarizing notoriety of this controversial French import has largely obscured a more reasoned and subdued analysis of the movie’s worth. Any review of Irréversible must be prefaced with a caveat emptor: It…
Piece of Work
Catherine McMillan’s series “Luminarias” consists of paired photographs of a dress and a monarch butterfly, and while they appear to share no connection, the light in these photographs transports the viewer to another realm, a realm of memory filled with loss, instability, and unfilled desires.
Magnum Opus
Iceland comes to Austin.
Tort Deform at the House
Tort reform climbs the mountain — and then gets pushed back down.
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
Cinema Paradiso: The New VersionBuena Vista Home Video, $29.99 I’m loath to admit it, but sometimes the director doesn’t know best. The 1989 original cut won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and was a sweetheart of a film to boot, about a young Sicilian boy named…
Articulations
Twelve more friends of the arts have been named to the Austin Arts Hall of Fame, and Austin Lyric Opera loses Managing Director Michael Murphy to a performing arts organization in San Diego, from whence he came.
No Fie Low!
When Sigur Rós released ( ) last October, they enclosed no lyrics, instead encouraging fans to send in their own interpretation of singer Jón Thor Birgisson’s self-invented Hopelandish tongue. On sigurros.com, the band has gathered common lyrical interpretations and mashed them together using a computer program that constantly scrolls new stanzas while the music streams…
Naked City
Breaking news briefs from Austin and elsewhere
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
The Complete Musketeers (The Three Musketeers/ The Four Musketeers) Anchor Bay Entertainment, $34.98 It’s telling that among the first titles on DVD were Richard Lester’s other two masterworks, The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). Though cinematic history counts at least a dozen interpretations of Alexandre Dumas’ historical reimagining — according to Memoirs…
Exhibitionism
The State Theater Company’s scintillating revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession moves George Bernard Shaw’s characters beyond the politics for which they serve as mouthpieces and fills them with the breaths and gestures and expressions of people who live.
Phases and Stages
I Am Trying to Break Your HeartA Film About Wilco by Sam Jones (Plexifilm) Sam Jones is a heartbreaker. The black-and-white cinematography matting his feature-length debut underscores the filmmaker’s belief that said archaic medium lends a certain “out of time” quality to its subject matter. Shooting film as opposed to “running” digital video, Jones, a…
Naked City
On March 20, in a powerful and peaceful display of civil disobedience, an estimated 1,500 people locked down at the intersection of 24th and the Drag in opposition to the U.S. government’s war on Iraq. Many in the crowd were students from UT, ACC, and even Austin ISD schools, who had walked out of their…
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
Okie NoodlingLittle League Pictures, $28 Still one of the best documentaries to ever come out of South by Southwest, sometime Flaming Lips-videographer and one-time Oklahoman Bradley Beesley (now an Austinite) has crafted a genuinely unique and affectionate portrait of what must surely be the world’s most obscure sport. Noodling is the term for the practice…
Exhibitionism
You may love musicals, and you may love ABBA, but Mamma Mia, the hit musical that features dozens of hits by the Swedish pop band, is so treacly and so utterly invasive in its attempts to win over its audience that you may feel like you’ve been violated with a candy cane.
Phases and Stages
The American Song-Poem AnthologyDo You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush (Bar-None) Of all the scams spewed forth by the music industry, none is more endearing than the “song-poem.” Although the scam originated with sheet music publishing, song-poems were written by aspiring songwriters of the Sixties and Seventies who responded to tabloid ads…
Naked City
Both the Senate and House Committees on Criminal Jurisprudence heard testimony March 25 on a slew of death penalty reform bills — including one mandating the creation of an “innocence commission” and crime lab oversight board and another abolishing the death penalty. Among the lengthy list of witnesses: Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, Josiah…
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
Styles WarsPlexifilm, $27.95 Groundbreaking and nearly perfect, Tony Silver’s 1982 documentary on New York City’s graffiti artists and b-boy subculture is a heady, sexy slice of Americana that, in its own way, is a close companion to Okie Noodling. Both films celebrate the outsiders among us, and while Style Wars’ “bombers” redesigned the city’s subway…
Exhibitionism
In Pantalone’s War, a new satire presented by the Austin Commedia Society, a heavy-handed commentary on current events drowns out the nonsensical anarchy that the company was born to perform.
Phases and Stages
Fischerspooner#1 (Capitol) What to make of NYC’s burgeoning electroclash movement? It’s fitting that a dance-oriented musical Zeitgeist, which makes much of synthetic beats and cool, sotto voce murmurs, would arrive hot on the heels of 9/11, when artists and civilians alike still aren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner make…
Naked City
Young feminists from five states will meet March 29 and 30 at UT for a College Feminist Conference sponsored by Alliance for a Feminist Option — UT’s only openly feminist sorority. There’ll be workshops on birth control, women and globalization, race and feminism, men and feminism, and other topics. Feminist author Inga Muscio will deliver…
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
Texas: 30 Odd Foot of GruntsBuena Vista Home Video, $29.99 It’s fitting that Russell Crowe’s band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts (the name comes from a sound effects notation in Crowe’s 1995 film Virtuosity) should have recorded this exhaustive document of their time in Austin recording new material and playing out at Stubb’s in the…
In Person
Disregarding any traces of overstatement, it was hard to not think of Jean Genet while studying the work of Floyd Bell, whose studio is the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Ore. …
Phases and Stages
50 CentGet Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) Telling the same tired tale of street hustler turned MC superstar, 50 Cent’s formulaic Get Rich or Die Tryin’ adds another chapter to the novel of tough times/Top 40 hip-pop. Unlike unscathed storytellers, 50 is the real-deal product of crack peddling — a true menace to society, complete…
Naked City
Since Naked City last toured superduplexes, the specimen at the corner of 35th and Duval — begun mere weeks ago — has been just about finished. The imposing beige structure symbolizes the grand consternation of many a central city homeowner obsessed with “neighborhood integrity” — a concern that leads to today’s (Thursday) City Council hearing…
Style! Cine! Swashbuckling!
Who Framed Roger RabbitWalt Disney Home Video, $29.99 The newly released Vista Series DVD of Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit sets out to make the case that the film is a true masterpiece. The 2-DVD is loaded with special features, which mostly focus on how the team of filmmakers created the most realistic blend…
Page Two
As horrifying as the war in Iraq is, the wages of peace could be worse, and for longer.
Phases and Stages
The White StripesElephant (V2) Blind parasites buzz and crawl over the living-earth hide of this Elephant, feeling the back-end millennia’s worth of evolution that became this beast: Flat Duo Jets, Doo Rag, JSBX, Fat Possum Records. Simple, primal: bass — yes, bass — guitar, and drums. A couple of circus clowns named Jack and Meg.…
Naked City
Killing and torturing local tribal members around the Grasberg mine in West Papua was one thing. But the legendary brutality of the Indonesian military has gotten out of hand: Two Americans are dead — killed, it appears, by Indonesian soldiers. And Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, the operator of the mine, has admitted it was making…
These American Lives
Documentarians Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price root out characters in the Mississippi Delta, the streets of Milwaukee, and, soon, summer camp in Michigan.
