Public Notice
The end of the year always presents great opportunities for pulling the tails and/or chiffon out of the mothballs. Even slackertown has its nights of finery, and here are two: * Some of you should start scrubbing now, if you plan on getting the grit out in time for this year’s Holiday Swing formal, Project…
A Holy Cause
Two things you should know about this Smart Growth business: A) It’s everywhere; and B) Lots of people are doing it. Ray Suarez, host of NPR�s Talk of the Nation Peter Calthorpe, creator of the New Triangle Square Jim Chaffin, chairman of the Urban Land Institute Yup, despite what you may hear from the talk-radio…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The 1960 Lincoln Mark V convertible was the largest American car ever built. Actress Jane Seymour, who starred in Universal’s 1973 film, Frankenstein: The True Story, had a great great-grandmother whose original surname was Frankenstein. New Orleans is the fattest city (average pounds per person) in the United States. The north Texas town of Wink…
The Smart Growth Lineup
The Partners for Smart Growth Conference runs from Tuesday through Thursday, Dec. 15-17 at our beloved Austin Convention Center. Tuesday: Invited opening speakers include successful new-model South Carolina developer Jim Chaffin, chairman of the Urban Land Institute; our mayor, Kirk Watson; our governor, George W. Bush; and New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who has…
Belated Replies
illustration by Jason Stout The letters pile up unanswered, the phone messages go without reply — civility crumbles before desperation, the desperate inner demand to sacrifice everything necessary to the time it takes to write the novel. And e-mail is out of the question; too much distraction. How could the novel ever get done if…
Football and Parades
Lucy Lawless: �Oh say, can you see?� The weekend came, quite unexpectedly, in black & white. Various shows invoked images and memories from childhood, and reminded me that this was the first event in history that galvanized the television-watching world: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whether or not we lived through it — and…
Whisks Up
by Julia Child (Knopf $35, paper) Even though I’ve been obsessed with food all my life and cooking for years, I’m always on the lookout for good “beginner’s” cookbooks. Part of the attraction is purely selfish; as a “learn on the job” cook, there’s always some basic technique that I could stand to learn (or…
Cruise Central
Speed Levitch (l) in The Cruise. In digerati circles, Bennett Miller’s new documentary The Cruise is being hailed as proof positive that the public is ready and willing to accept feature-length films shot on digital video. That’s big news to industry purists who have long resisted the slow tide of digital filmmaking, but it’s only…
Food-O-File
Missing in Action Did anyone but me notice which Texas authors were missing from the otherwise stellar lineup of the recent Texas Book Festival? The Lone Star State’s many talented cookbook authors were nowhere to be seen, and why is a mystery to me. In the past 12 months, one nationally known Texas chef, Stephan…
Speed Levitch Explains It All
ON CREATIVITY: “Creativity I think of as the pursuit for the original exuberance that we all came into this world with, the exuberance that we all had until it was taken off to an abandoned dock somewhere and shot in a gangster assassination by the outside world. With that said, I’ve always thought of myself…
Film Listings:
�Film Reviews �Showtimes Related Features �Short Cuts �Screens Features Now Showing THE ALARMIST AMERICAN HISTORY X ANTZ BABE: PIG IN THE CITY BELOVED A BUG�S LIFE THE CELEBRATION CELEBRITY THE CRUISE ELIZABETH ENEMY OF THE STATE HANDS ON A HARD BODY HOME FRIES I�LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST…
Beautiful Songs and Good, Heavy Sounds
photograph by John Carrico There are people who remember when Sixth Street was Mexican. Before the calle ancho (I-35) appeared, and even some time after, the Sixth Street that was Mexican didn’t end at San Marcos street. It continued west through Sabine, Red River, Neches, Trinity and San Jacinto, ending at Brazos street. Today’s Sixth…
Too Much Monkey Business?
photograph by TODD V. WOLFSON Richard M. Lewis is somewhat surprised to be describing himself as a high-concept documentary filmmaker. Make that an “animal” high-concept documentarian or — to put an even finer point on it — a “primate” high-concept documentarian. Two of the University of Texas’ film production prof’s monkey docs, “The Snow Monkeys…
Articulations
Letter From the Big City You’ve seen them go, those artists who have grown restless on the stages of our town and feel the need to test themselves in the Big City. They pack off to Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, and you never hear from them again. You’re left to wonder how…
Dancing About Architecture
That elusive position of Austin Music Liaison is open once again, thanks to the resignation of longtime scenester Gavin Lance Garcia. The former Chronicle and American-Statesman columnist credits his departure to the fact that he’s getting married to former Statesman senior exec Donya Ginest in the spring, while admitting that the job simply wasn’t what…
Coming to America
illustration by Jason Stout The cultural caricature is a ubiquitous, but often erroneous animal � a media-perpetuated stylisation of lands and people we may never meet conspiring to fool us into thinking we actually have. As we can all attest, Frenchman wear berets, Englishmen sip afternoon tea with the Queen, Scotsmen wear kilts, and Italians…
Downtown Austin Is Getting a Fresh Coat of Museums
illustration by Robert Faries In January of this year, the Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) officially scrapped its plans for a new museum in downtown Austin that was to be built by the renowned architect Robert Venturi. What had started in 1984 as an exciting, though somewhat solitary, prospect for the visual arts community in…
Roots, Reckonings, and Resolutions
Hosea Hargrove photograph by John Carrico “It’s a long story, me and my guitar playing,” says Hargrove. “I just came up playing.” The place he came up in, Crafts Prairie, didn’t hold more than about 50 families, but it was a hotbed of blues players in the Thirties and Forties, producing not only Chase, Williams,…
Rocky Schenck
Clockwise from top left: London Dress Shop, Hollywood Party, Three Trees, Restoration, Shack and Tulips, and Dresden … Back in the deep thick of what was the punk/new wave scene in late-Seventies Austin, when our home was Raul’s, we first came across Rocky Schenck. Most folks had multiple roles — they played in a band…
Downtown Visual Arts
1.Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (proposed site), Speedway & Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 2.Austin Museum of Art — Downtown (temporary galleries), 823 Congress 3.Jones Center for Contemporary Art (Texas Fine Arts Association), 700 Congress 4.Mexic-Arte Museum, 419 Congress 5.Austin Children’s Museum @Dell Discovery Center, 200 Colorado Austin Museum of Art — Downtown (proposed…
Scanlines
(“Scanlines” wishes to thank Encore Movies & Music, I Love Video, Vulcan Video, and Waterloo Video for their help in providing videos, laser discs, and DVDs.) The incredible Harry Dean Stanton is shown here in Repo Man, but don’t miss his cheesy performance in Rebel Rousers, either. Repo Man D: Alex Cox (1984) Emilio Estevez,…
Bill Wittliff
Clockwise from top left: Angelita, Cactus, Atotonilco, Stone Angel , and Loggerhead If Bill Wittliff were only a photographer, he would deserve our attention and praise because of the quality of his work and the breadth of his imagination. If Wittliff were only a director (Red Headed Stranger), simply a screenwriter (Black Stallion, Legends of…
Exhibitionism
GENDER BOXES: VIGNETTES WITH ATTITUDE Mendez Middle School, through November 29 With mischievous delight, the performers scramble around the two huge boxes, frantically hovering and grabbing for whatever is inside. To their amazement, out comes unidentifiable objects. After a brief inquisitive pause, a pair of ballet slippers is proudly donned as bunny ears, a tampon…
Record Reviews
BECK Mutations (DGC/Bong Load) God bless Beck. A scant four years removed from couch-surfing and painting thrift-store signs, Mr. Hansen is now at a phase in his career where he can do whatever the hell he wants with complete impunity. Leaving behind the flashdance ass pants of Odelay (for now), he’s investigating the outrageous musical…
Books of a Lifetime
by Tim Page Henry Holt and Company, $30 hard “Who really makes the jokes that Dorothy Parker gets the credit for?” asked the critic Diana Trilling in a 1942 review in The Nation. According to many of the New York literati of the Thirties and Forties, it was Dawn Powell, a writer Ernest Hemingway claimed…
In Person
Matthew Sharpe at Book People Matthew Sharpe is one writer who hasn’t turned his back on television. After landing his fiction in Zoetrope and Harper’s, he has produced a crackling debut collection, Stories From the Tube. Each of the 10 tales borrows one slice-of-life snippet from an actual TV commercial, and then takes it from…
Forum Fracas
Nonetheless, some councilmembers fretted about the consequences of allowing intense retail development in the watershed. Will the intensity of the development ultimately stimulate other developments, resulting in an “aquifer death spiral,” as Councilmember Bill Spelman put it? The precedent of Austin’s own Arboretum area — where retail developments overrun the Research/Loop 360 triangle of Northwest…
Wrapped and Ready
If this holiday season were a song it might be sung to the following refrain: “Have yourself a bloody little Christmas.” Oh, there’s plenty of the regular old drama standards and entertainment for the kids and family alike. But one of the most notable things about this year’s holiday offerings is the amount of horror,…
Postscripts
Congratulations to Louis Sachar, author of Holes, which won the 1998 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. And congratulations, for now at least, to Bradley Denton, who just signed a one-year, film-option contract to have his romantic fantasy novel Lunatics, set in Austin, made into a movie. “It’s only a one-year option, though, so…
What Price Labor?
Although this story may seem more the exception than the rule, it illustrates a problem that workers and union leaders say happens virtually every day in the construction business. In this line of work, they say, fly-by-night schemes are common and cheating is seldom discouraged by laws riddled with loopholes big enough to drive a…
About AIDS
Pediatric HIV infection and AIDS has changed dramatically in the U.S. in recent years. Specifically, fewer infants are becoming infected at birth and more HIV-infected children are living longer. In the last 3 years, the University of California/San Francisco Pediatric AIDS Program has not lost a single child to AIDS, they announced recently at the…
Cox Guarding the Henhouse
One of the main complaints of the Garry Mauro campaign was that the media continually dwelled on his position in the pre-election polls rather than on his proposals for better ways to govern Texas or on whatever failings George W. Bush may have had over the past four years of governing Texas. As it turned…
Coach’s Corner
In the dark, cold, gray hours of a late November false dawn, most sports fans in Austin are still peacefully asleep. Some dream happily of a football season which exceeded expectations. Others are dreaming of a Heisman Trophy for a hometown hero. And for sure, it’s time for football fans to sleep. A fun season…
The Numbers
Comparing November 3 election percentages with the widely publicized results of a Sept. 1 Texas Poll. Poll Vote Governor Bush 67 69 Mauro 20 31 Turlington 1 1 Undecided 10 — Lt. Governor Perry 36 50 Sharp 30 48 Garcia 7 2 Undecided 26 — Attorney General Mattox 48 44 Cornyn 29 55 Angwin 3…
Day Trips
Hill Country Christmas Lighting Trail turns on millions of colorful lights to sparkle across water, shine from the hills, and beckon to travelers in Blanco, Burnet, Dripping Springs, Goldthwaite, Fredericksburg, Johnson City, Llano, Marble Falls, and Round Mountain through Jan. 1. For a detailed brochure, call 830/997-8515. Thanksgiving Arts & Crafts Fair at the Bastrop…
Metropolis Melodrama
Hilton’s role in the convoluted Metropolis project grew out of his association with the site’s former property owner, Lloyd Latham, a local businessman with a rocky history of property management. In late 1996, the Metropolis site was then the Latham-owned Austin Plantation Oaks Apartments, a dilapidated eyesore which had been partially condemned in the late…
Page Two
I’ve refrained from lauding the Austin Film Society’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder series at the Alamo because, quite honestly, many Fassbinder films are hard to take. Few directors exploit monotony in the same way as Fassbinder. Ozu and Ray celebrated it; Antonioni denied it (there is nothing boring about nothing), Fassbinder uses it as a weapon.…
Naked City
The Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee voted unanimously on Nov. 14 to oppose the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).The Texas Democrats are reportedly one of the first political parties to oppose the agreement, which has been under discussion for the past two years by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group…
