The Dreamlife of Angels
This gritty film won the French Cesar award as well as Best Actress awards at Cannes for its two leads.
eXistenZ
An elaborate cat-and-mouse game between human reality and game reality from David Cronenberg.
William Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream 1999, PG-13, 115 min. Directed by Michael Hoffman, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring David Straithairn, Sophie Marceau, Stanley Tucci, Dominic A. West, Christian Bale, Anna Friel, Calista Flockhart, Kevin Kline, Rupert Everett, Michelle Pfeiffer. For my money the most gloriously, enchantingly trivial play in the Shakespearean canon,…
Tea With Mussolini
Tea With Mussolini 1999, PG, 116 min. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Paolo Seganti, Massimo Ghini, Baird Wallace, Charlie Lucas, Judi Dench, Lily Tomlin, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Cher. Tea With Mussolini sounds like an elegant affair, but its pinky is barely extended. Franco Zeffirelli’s contrived autobiographical film about…
Coach’s Corner
“So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” ‘Tis a barren and lonely landscape indeed that an old fan gazes out upon. It wasn’t long ago that this room was the scene of annual quests for a grail as holy as any Lancelot and his…
The Students Vanish: Following The Class Of 1998
Critics of the Texas Education Agency’s dropout reporting system present as Exhibit A the Enrollment Gap. On average, Texas high schools produce only two seniors for every three freshmen who enter. For minorities, the attrition is even higher — nearly 50% for Hispanic students. Below are the enrollment histories for the 1998 senior class, divided…
The Thing Unspoken
A feeling stirs in the deepest chambers of your heart. You recognize it by the absence it describes: It is a profound longing for something you had once but have no longer; it is a kind of grief. Inside you, you shape words around the feeling that you might declare it, and yet when the…
Day Trips
A creek runs through it. photograph by Gerald E. McLeod At Government Canyon State Park, the historic stagecoach station that was the first stop after leaving San Antonio keeps a faithful vigil over the fading remains of the military road that once led to the frontier forts in West Texas. Behind the crumbling limestone structure,…
AISD: The Real Story?
AISD’s own dropout reports, published up until 1994, when the district discontinued them, showed that through the late Eighties and early Nineties the district was losing nearly one-third of its minority students over four years of high school, and about one-quarter of its overall enrollment. That’s a rate more than twice as high as TEA…
Articulations
The Austin theatre community is a little bit bigger this week, owing to the birth of Kaitlin Elizabeth Polgar. The latest production from Michelle and Robi Polgar, founders of The Public Domain Theatre, made her debut at 1:11am Tuesday, May 11, at Seton Northwest Hospital after a couple of false alarm trips to the doc,…
Page Two
The office is again being transformed. Desks being moved, new work spaces created. I don’t recognize all the staff anymore. I’m ready for the slow, hot, sticky days of summer. The days of heat on top of heat till the heat seeps through the bricks, overwhelms the air conditioning, and permeates the building. Features editor…
Hitting the Wall: Students Failing Ninth Grade
Every year, one in six ninth-graders statewide fail to become sophomores — a rate of failure twice as high as at any other grade level. Minority students are hit the hardest, repeating ninth grade over twice as often as whites. Not surprisingly, the dropout rate for ninth-graders is also far higher than for other grades:…
Exhibitionism
Hyde Park Theatre, through May 22 Running Time: 1 hr, 15 min “We shall die alone,” observed the French philosopher Pascal, but he might have added, “surrounded by family and loved ones.” Indeed, the dying do go on their own, and the sadness of it is that the ones who surround the dearly departing will…
Public Notice
Hey, who doesn’t? This weekend is Austin’s first-ever Girl Day, an all-girl, girl-only event, Sat, May 15, 11am-midnight at Pueblos Unidos, on Hidalgo St., just east of Robert T. Martinez. The event will feature sessions about bike and car repair, video production, self defense, homophobia, racism, women in music, women in construction, body image, and…
Where Are They? T.e.a. Doesn’t Know
Total Dropouts are calculated not from enrollment figures, but from the number of students whom schools report have discontinued their education without graduating. Those students are then subtracted from the total 7th-12th grade enrollment to determine the Annual Dropout Rate. The Longitudinal Rate is a mathematical estimate of the numbers of students who drop out…
Postscripts
Am�rico Paredes died Wednesday, May 5 at the age of 83. A remembrance of the founder of UT’s Center for Mexican American Studies appears in this week’s Chronicle in “TV Eye” by Belinda Acosta. See page 57. Memorial contributions can be made to: Mexican American Studies Scholarship Fund, West Mall Bldg. 5.102, UT Austin, Austin,…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
In the original pilot for Lost in Space, there was no Dr. Smith. Plus, the name of the Robinsons’ spaceship was the Gemini 12. The Duke of Cumberland brought 140 tons of personal baggage from England while on campaign in Flanders in 1745. Similarly, French King Louis XV made war with a vast retinue that…
Changing the Landscape
Under the city’s current neighborhoods-first disposition, it’s unlikely that anyone with a reputation to protect will argue. What probably will be argued is whether this power should reside solely on the Eastside. The Rust Belt is one of very few places in the city where industrial development is mixed with residential (the area around Airport…
Writer-at-Large
photograph by Brett Brookshire In America, or at least in Texas, an eight-year-old boy who tells adults that he wants to be a writer when he grows up has already, by that rather innocent act of self-definition, styled several epithets for himself. Chief among them are “precocious,” “intellectual,” and “gifted and talented.” Robert Draper, who…
Kosovo’s Danse Macabre
illustration by Jason Stout It has been a bloody, telling season, this final spring of the century and millennium. Each headline forces the surrender of another illusion. We don’t know where to turn, so we turn in circles, as though in a macabre waltz. The record of realizations reads like a casualty list — which,…
The ‘conditional’ Lineup
With the adoption of the East Austin Overlay Combining District in 1997, the following uses became conditional in the CS, CS-1, and LI tracts in the district (and were already prohibited in GR): Agricultural sales and services Basic industry Building maintenance services Construction sales and services Equipment repair services Equipment sales General warehousing and distribution…
Hadrian’s Walls: A Novel
by Robert Draper Knopf, $23 hard Hawthorne wrote somewhere that all utopias were doomed to failure because early on, the citizenry found that they had to build a prison (for sin) and a cemetery (for the wages of sin). Hadrian’s Walls plays around with the idea of a little town in East Texas named Shepherdsville…
Food-o-File
Suppose Air Force One is the first plane to officially land at the (almost complete) Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and you’re entertaining President Clinton afterward with a fundraiser in your lovely West Austin home. Which local caterer would you call to assure creativity, quality, and professionalism? Longtime Clinton friend Roy Spence called Word of Mouth Catering…
On the Lege
After five days of arm-twisting and late-night bargaining sessions, the delayed for a third time a vote to untie the hate crimes legislation that has been pending there since late last week. The earliest the committee can meet under Senate rules is Thursday afternoon, and senators’ final deadline to consider bills in committee is Friday.…
Good Beer Hunting
A little bad news for all the page skimmers who just screeched to a halt: No. Michael Jackson, the all-singing, all-dancing pop star and plastic surgery poster child is not coming to town. No Thriller, no Tito, no Bubbles the chimp. So if you’re looking for news on Lisa Marie reunions, hit the supermarket tabloid…
Naked City
Rumblings on the street have it that the Downtown Austin Alliance and the Real Estate Council of Austin are fixing to do battle with green space huggers in the Palmer Auditorium/Town Lake Park planning process. Seems the business groups aren’t happy over the prospect of replacing Riverside Drive with green space, and they don’t relish…
Internet Food Sites:
I’m an avid fan of ethnic foods of the world and a collector of cookbooks, the weirder and more obscure the better. While researching recipes for a cookbook project, I’ve stumbled across a widely varied assortment of sites on the Web that offer an incredible amount of free information, from recipes for just about anything…
Don’t Pop That Top
Why the apparent change of heart? This time around, legislators are having to seriously consider an open container law, or else risk giving up millions in federal highway construction funds. In 1998, the federal government passed the “Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century,” which penalizes states that do not pass an open container and…
A Matter of Voice
by Michele Anna Jordan Broadway Books, $25 hard What would prompt a food writer to spend several years preparing a book about the two most ubiquitous components of our everyday diet? Californian Michele Anna Jordan recalls that she always preferred “salty flourishes” to sweet ones and that she chafed at the pontifications of the “salt…
The People’s Porch
Fast forward to April 1999, and the city is still facing many of the same kinds of growth and planning challenges it faced in 1988 — only now the hot phrase is “Smart Growth” instead of “Compact City.” On this evening in April, City Council Member Daryl Slusher is on Pi�a’s porch making his re-election…
Living in a Dream
The 1990-91 Austin Music Awards photograph by John Carrico Layton: After we signed to Geffen, we immediately started putting together material and playing as often as we could. From the beginning, we were packing clubs and making money, so that gave us time for Charlie and Doyle to sort though their material and see what…
Mediatruck Makes Software That Makes Sense
These are the moments when I wish I hadn’t failed calculus due to behavioral problems. I also wish I’d gone to law school to learn logic so I’d intrinsically understand this is not my home language, therefore I shouldn’t waste time trying to learn it. But HTML is easy, you say. But that’s because you…
Dancing About Architecture
Last week I reported that Dav�d Garza and his band were excited about going to Beijing, China, this coming weekend to perform at the Heineken Summer Music Festival, a huge cultural exchange program featuring numerous American and Chinese musical acts. That date has since fallen through, but not necessarily for the exact reasons you might…
Scanlines
D: George Lucas (1977) with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, voice of James Earl Jones. The Empire Strikes Back D: Irvin Kershner (1980) with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz, Alec Guinness, voice of James Earl Jones.…
Record Reviews
A Prince Among Thieves (Tommy Boy) DR. DOOM First Come, First Served (Funky Ass) If Prince Paul’s dramatic new album had its own movie trailer, it might go something like this: “From the legendary producer of De La Soul and the Gravediggaz; from the experimental pioneer who created and perfected hip-hop’s love affair with skits…
Short Cuts
Everything old is new again … or maybe it’s just that pesky ol’ time warp. Believe it or not, The Rocky Horror Picture Show marks its 23rd continuous year of midnight screenings here in Austin — and you can bet your bottom dollar that the congregation will be celebrating. Generations of local fans have been…
Off the Bookshelf
by Anita Brookner Random House, $24 hard If it weren’t for Anita Brookner’s smart, precise writing, a couple of things could impede your enjoyment of Falling Slowly. First: If, like me, you’re not familiar with London, reading about characters living in Lower Sloane Street or Bryanston Square makes you wonder if you’re missing helpful details.…
Who’s Watching the Police?
Austin Police Association President Mike Sheffield said that the association had agreed to support the oversight commission (as long as its recommendations were subjected to the meet-and-confer collective bargaining process). However, he said that an Opinion Analysts poll recently determined that with “less than 450 complaints out of three quarters of a million citizen contacts,…
Groovin’ on Gellar
At least Monica Lewinsky’s guest shot on last week’s Saturday Night Live was entertaining, as opposed to that interminable, self-indulgent interview between Lewsinsky and Barbara Walters not that long ago. In the opening skit she played Mrs. Lewinsky-Clinton in the year 2001, tired from a day of letter-turning at work (presumably, as the replacement for…
Texas Writers Month Events
photograph by Andrea Martin The Texas Writers Month Kick-Off Gala, sponsored by Barnes & Noble and GSD&M, held last Tuesday, May 4 at GSD&M, was touted as a way for local readers to meet local, and state, writers. It didn’t seem as if those readers attended the event; Robert Earl Keen, who was slated to…
School of Hard Knocks
But schools are under increasing pressure to prepare students for college, not wage-earning jobs, and they cannot control the social breakdown and hardship that alienates poor kids from the education system. This year, the state Legislature is tightening TEA accountability standards for public schools by raising the minimum TAAS passing rate and requiring schools to…
Undercover on High School’s Ritziest Glitziest Night It All Goes Down at Prom
story by Sarah Hepola, photos by Mary Sledd This is a different high school story than the one you’re used to reading about these days. The story I have to share with you is less about the brutality in the heart of some than the longing in the heart of us all. This story is…
About AIDS
Two weeks ago, we noted that adolescents want their parents to talk more with them about sex, as revealed in a Kaiser Family Foundation study, and that television is a primary alternative source of sexual information. A major problem with that is revealed in another Kaiser study done earlier this year: TV typically shows sexual…
Second Chances
Vicki Baldwin, pricipal, Gonzalo Garza Independence High School photograph by John Anderson Mindi Maldonado is a precocious teenager whose poise and vocabulary are already on par with many adults. But at school she was bored and got into fights, eventually dropping out of the LBJ Science Academy at age 16. Marisol Gauna struggled with math…
Planet Prom
Where I grew up, the prom wasn’t that big of a deal. We just showed up, looked at each other for a few hours, and then went out and got drunk. Some guys wasted their lunch money renting limousines in hopes of improving their chances of getting laid, but it was pretty much your generic…
