Leaving Las Vegas
Leaving Las Vegas 1995, R, 111 min. Directed by Mike Figgis, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue, Julian Sands. Leaving Las Vegas hits you like a breath of fresh air coupled with a 100-proof chaser. The movie is an amazing, bracing, funny, audacious, tender, and sobering piece of filmmaking. Few…
Casino
Stone jumps into the deep end with Scorsese made guys, De Niro and Pesci, as the action moves from New York to Vegas, with uneven results.
Ancient Impulse
Holly Moe, Bettie Ward, Sydney Yeager at Helm Fine Arts Center Showing through January 7 Mark L. Smith has done it again. The director of the Helm Fine Arts Center at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School has asked artists to experiment in public. Smith commissioned three women to draw and paint directly on the walls of…
Acting on Impulse
by Patrick Taggart It wasn’t so many years ago that the debut of an Eddie Murphy movie was an Event, much as a movie starring Brad Pitt or Demi Moore is now. I’m sure you remember Eddie Murphy; he’s the lead actor in Vampire in Brooklyn, the Wes Craven horror comedy that arrived with virtually…
Something for Everyone… Jack’s Back… and It’s Hell
by Martin Wagner From Hell (Vol.s 1-8) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell Kitchen Sink Press/Mad Love Publishing, $4.95 each, paper Tis murderous crime, crime, the nemesis of neglect!” So ran the caption beneath a spine-chilling cartoon — depicting a wide-eyed, knife-wielding apparition floating past shadowy doorways — in the September 29, 1888 issue of…
The Truth Is Right Here
“The Truth,” as they say in the opening of each episode of The X-Files, “Is Out There.” Now, just where out there it is they don’t say, but we know: It’s at the Stouffer. Yeah, the big hotel up at The Arboretum right here in Austin. What’s more, it will be available for you to…
I’m engaged in a
metaphysical, rhetorical, Hasidic-like discussion on the ability of the human heart to withstand pain and torture. For members of the aging, baby-boomer generation, it’s a germane subject: a thousand stories for a thousand hearts. No question, this generation is the first to deal with wide-scale divorce and the peculiar segue into adult dating, decreased marriage…
You Can’t Go Home Again, Thank God
by Marion Winik My 20-year high school class reunion was held in the ballroom of a hotel in suburban New Jersey. Everyone talked during the speeches. Nobody ate their green beans. And in most cases, the girls had to ask the boys to dance. What we graduates have learned of the secrets of life was…
Austin Acoustic Music Festival ’95
Last year, a staggering 1,650 people turned out over three days to see a hefty cross section of Austin’s radically diverse music community do it unplugged at the Electric Lounge. And despite slightly shorter hours this year (Friday 17, 7pm-2am; Saturday 18, 3pm-2am; Sunday 3pm-1am), organizers are expecting another big turn-out for year five of…
Day Trips
Small-town general stores once served as the center of commerce for communities around Texas, and those that remain are works of American art. The tarnished pressed-tin walls and ceilings took years to stain, while only time could create the oily plank floors patched with coffee cans and license plates. Mom ran the cash register and…
Patroling the CMT Highway
by Chris Gray It’s easy to skewer country video as being nothing but a mirror image of the industry’s moribund radio scene. Too easy; both media have more than their share of vacant-eyed hat acts doing their best George Strait/Garth Brooks impressions and Reba divas recycling those piano-drenched quasi-pop ballads that would make both Karen…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Tides vary as much as 30 to 50 feet in Nova Scotia. Mathematician Karl Gauss had six fingers on one hand. Ricoh is developing a machine that removes toner from laserprints and photo copies so that people can recycle paper themselves. In 1913, socialite Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish threw a party at which the high society…
Dancing About Architecture
If you see some unpacking going on around town while Kelly Willis is packing, the fella you spotted moving his stuff into Austin just may be David Rice, who’s relocating from California. Don’t worry, though, he’s actually a Texan. Hailing from Houston, the young singer put out a couple of albums on that city’s Justice…
Page Two
Polls is polls. We do three major polls each year: the restaurant poll, the results of which you hold in your hand; the Best of Austin, which appears in August; and, of course, The Austin Chronicle Readers Music Poll, the ballots of which will run in January this year instead of starting in December. Nonscientific,…
Steering Urban Renewal
by Alex de Marban As administrator of what many are calling the city’s latest urban renewal proposal, Bill Cook is facing one of Austin’s most crucial tasks at hand: the betterment of Central East Austin. An immense challenge in the best of times; and now, with Cook embroiled in a politically charged battle over control…
Steamroller
(Redwood) If you ever need to borrow a Soulhat record, Steamroller’s the source — clearly they’ve got several to spare. But to their credit, Steamroller’s songwriting shows a surprisingly mature knack for lazy grooves and jangly guitar dynamics. And although the pacing and phrasing may scream Soulhat, it’s the band’s reliance on spare arrangements that…
Confessions and Misinformation
by Tim Stegall Ask Lee Ving why he, his wife, and his family moved to Austin six years ago, and he’ll tell you: “We had friends here, so we were gonna move here, anyway.” Ask any of the usual civic-pride-type questions a mag like the Chronicle asks a noted rock musician who moves here –…
Fear
Have Another Beer With Fear (Sector 2) After years of dormancy, vocalist Lee Ving has reignited Fear with new personnel playing the exact same brand of militant, gob-inspiring hardcore John Belushi once slam-danced to. However, today’s unit plays with more clarity and urgency than the Fear of old, probably due in part to the addition…
The X-Files’ Invisible Ink
by Michael Ventura “The Truth Is Out There — Somewhere” was originally published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on September 10,1995, prior to the start of the X-Files fall season. It is excerpted here in an abbreviated form. The hardest thing is, the truth is out there — but you don’t know what it…
Music Reviews
JO CAROL PIERCE Bad Girls Upset by the Truth (Monkey Hill) If you’ve ever had the courage to fall in love with a bad girl, you’ve likely left a good girl somewhere bitter, hurt, and angry. In that case, you fall into that category of men who bother Jo Carol Pierce even more than the…
Film Reviews
PUBLIC ACCESSD: Bryan Singer; with Ron Mar quette, Dina Brooks, Burt Williams, Larry Maxwell, Charles Cavanaugh, Brandon Bo yce. (NR, 92 min.) Before there existed The Usual Suspects – directo r Bryan Singer’s scintillating thriller that’s been blasting audiences nationwid e to attention over the last few months with its intoxicating blend of visual fl…
Recommended
edited by Raoul Hernandez TERENCE TRENT D’ARBY Liberty Lunch, Sunday 19 If Terence behaves, this one will be great. At a New York City show this past summer, D’Arby plowed through a two-hour set with remarkable flair — high kicking and ivory tinkling just as convincingly as he sang his ass off. That night, D’Arby…
Lloyd Cole
Liberty Lunch Monday, November 20 Lloyd Cole, sinister Scotsman of the sullen album covers and lovely, spiteful lyrics, has released an album entitled — get this — Love Story. And though he hasn’t exactly penned “House on Pooh Corner” for his second Rykodisc effort, Cole is singing that his “tradmark frown has grown into the…
Useful numbers
For further information, call: The Austin Symphony Orchestra — 476-6064 The Austin Lyric Opera — 472-5992 Noonday Concert Series — 472-2445 UT Performing Arts Center — 471-1444 Austin Civic Chorus — 451-8863 The International Festival-Institute at Round Top — 409/249-3129 The Capital City Men’s Chorus — 477-SING UT School of Music — 471-5401 The New…
KAZI’s True Colors
by Louisa C. Brinsmade KAZI 88.7 FM has a PR problem — he is the Reverend Frank Garrett, Jr., host of the morning talk show Wake Up Call. The Reverend has been accused of misusing KAZI’s airwaves by making racist and homophobic remarks, and preaching divisiveness to one of the city’s most disadvantaged communities. As…
Aisd
For some, it’s too soon to ask voters to shoulder a tax increase for school bonds; for others, the election should have been held months ago. In the meantime, whether a bond election is held on the tentative date of April 13 or not, AISD is going to address problems of crowding at some of…
T. J. Gaudette
Shortly after midnight on October 31, local theatre artist T. J. Gaudette died. Gaudette had been battling AIDS for some time. Gaudette had ties throughout the theatre community but was most closely identified with VORTEX Repertory Company, for whom he worked as an actor (Nightsweat), a stage manager (The Baltimore Waltz), and a scene designer…
Urban Removal?
by Alex de Marban On October 13, Patti Burditt, a legally disabled tenant of a slightly run-down house in Central East Austin, got a phone call that would terrify some of her neighbors. The person on the other end of the line, who identified herself as a city official named Kathy Meyers, informed Burditt that…
Little Odessa
D:James Gray; with Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, Moira Kelly. VHS Home Video Live Entertainment Set in the Russian �migr� community of Brighton Beach, Little Odessa tells the story of a prodigal hit man, Joshua Shapira (Roth), whose mother (Redgrave) is dying of a brain tumor and brother (Furlong) skips school to…
Austin’s Classical Music Preview ‘Tis the Season
Austin classical music scene for almost 10 years now, and I can’t remember a season more star-studded and thrilling. After all, any season that starts out with Itzhak Perlman, Leontyne Price (a living national treasure) and a new Philip Glass opera (La Belle et la Bete) simply has to be spectacular. Others scheduled to appear…
Revitalization: Risking Good Cents?
While city housing officials have no local model for their proposed commercial revitalization effort — called the Austin Redevelopment Authority (ARA) — one near-complete Eastside project may offer insight into how they will manage the ARA. Namely, the East Austin Development Corporation’s (EADC) construction of a two-story office building at 1007 East 11th Street. Like…
Public Access
Public Access 1993, NR, 92 min. Directed by Bryan Singer, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Ron Marquette, Dina Brooks, Burt Williams, Larry Maxwell, Charles Cavanaugh, Brandon Boyce. Before there existed The Usual Suspects — director Bryan Singer’s scintillating thriller that’s been blasting audiences nationwide to attention over the last few months with its…
The 1995 Harvest
Friday, 8pm Presentation of the 1995 Harvest Festival Awards * The Housewives of Manheim, by Alan Brody. Directed by Michael Hankin. With Amber DuPuy, Mary Furse, Kara Galbraith, Karen Kuykendall. Saturday, 4pm * Desert Crossing, by Lisa Shipley Directed by Ann Ciccolella. With Janelle Buchanan and Annie Suite; and A Room at the Sheraton, by…
Scooter Finally Goes to Press
by Robert Bryce Before the trek, we gathered in the small, two-room schoolhouse in Candelaria. Scooter Cheatham, the leader of the adventure, told us that he always models his wilderness treks after ancient cultures. For our five-day excursion in the West Texas desert, we would re-trace the footsteps of the Jumano Indians, a nomadic tribe…
The Taming of the Shrew
Fight fire with fire. If that isn’t Petruchio’s motto, it might as well be, for it is one of his most basic approaches in performing the title task in this Shakespearean comedy. Confronted with a woman of blistering temper, whose tongue scorches all those who cross her (and some who don’t), this wily rogue turns…
Naked City
Edited by Audrey Duff, with contributions this week by Roseana Auten, Nelson England and Chris Walters OFF THE DESK: Becky Motal, a financial planner for the Lower Colorado River Authority, announced her bid for Jackie Goodman’s Place 3 seat on the council. Liquor store clerk Eric Silvernale, also threw his hat in the ring Tuesday…
Austin Theatres Harvest New Dramas Bumper Crop of Plays
by Robert Faires A play is not Athena. It does not spring full-grown from the brow of its creator as the Greek goddess of wisdom did from the head of Zeus. No, when a play emerges from the cranium of its author, it is more likely to creep, to come forth slowly, and only after…
Skinnerview
by Chris Gray As enigmatic, tight- -lipped FBI Assistant Director Walter S. Skinner on the Fox network’s hit TV show The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi never reveals more than he has to. Of course, considering that the show raises understatement to an art, that often the most important communication — especially between the two leads, FBI…
