1997 Austin Jewish Book Fair
Thursday, November 6, 7:30pm Rabbi Joseph Telushkin The Driskill Hotel, 604 Brazos $10 per person, reservations required Sunday, November 9 Eric Kimmel Congregation Agudas Achim, 9:15am, free Congregation Beth Israel, 10:30am, free Tuesday, November 11, 7:30pm Elliott Abrams Congregation Agudas Achim, $5 per person Wednesday, November 12, 11:30am Norma Rosen, luncheon Congregation Beth Israel $10…
Roadshows
NOVEMBER FRI 7 Jackopierce, La Zona Rosa FRI 7 Steve Winwood, Austin Music Hall FRI 7 Paladins, Continental Club FRI 7 Clandestine, Cactus Cafe FRI 7 David “Fathead” Newman, St. James Episcopal Church FRI 7 Big Back Forty, Honeydogs, Slobberbone, Stubb’s FRI 7 Bobgoblin, Electric Lounge FRI 7 House of Large Sizes, Hole in the…
Starship Troopers
In this spectacle, lethal insects from outer space do battle with student soldiers. When in Austin recently, Oliver Stone called Starship Troopers “One of the best war films in recent years.”
Postscripts
Two UT alumni will be returning to Austin this week to read from their works, but two more thematically divergent works it would be hard to imagine. Christian McLaughlin, a Los Angeles-based television writer formerly of Married… With Children, will be reading from Sex Toys of the Gods, his second work of gay fiction following…
Unlikely Allies
illustration by Doug Potter They only had one thing in common, but apparently that was enough. Anti-annexation protesters and Eastside activists didn’t let differences of economic status, race, or geography stop them from tag-teaming against their mutual enemy — the city council — at last week’s meeting. Everywhere evidence of budding friendships abounded. While the…
Telling Lies in America
Telling Lies in America 1997, PG-13, 101 min. Directed by Guy Ferland, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Kevin Bacon, Brad Renfro, Maximilian Schell, Calista Flockhart. The arrival of this subtle, endearing, emotionally nuanced film is a blessing for movie fans but a loss for the American slang lexicon. No longer can we say,…
Sawdust
Sawdust is seldom revered. Typically, we stuff it in horse stalls and hamster cages or, at best, sprinkle it on dance hall floors. There is no Sawdust Museum, nor Society for the Protection and Preservation of Sawdust. No sawdust website or poems or songs in tribute to sawdust. But things may be about to change.…
Football Behind Bars
Giddings coach Hester Ward talks to his players during a time out. photograph by Robert Bryce There were no cheerleaders, pep squads, marching bands, or letter jackets. The teenagers in attendance weren’t wearing baggy pants, fancy sneakers, or beepers. Instead, the teens — all of them boys, all dressed in identical jeans, shirts, and plain…
Washington Square
Washington Square 1997, PG, 115 min. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Maggie Smith, Albert Finney, Ben Chaplin. One reason Henry James is such a hot movie property these days is the relevance of one of his dominant themes — money’s ability to mock and compromise our…
Benefits
FRI 7 Eclectic Performances by three local musical groups & a silent auction to benefit Sri Atmananda Memorial School, at Sri Atmananda, 4100 Red River, 7pm. Cost is $10 adults/$5 children. 451-7044. SAT 8 Annual Witches Ball to benefit Wildlife Rescue, at Saengerrunde Hall, 1607 San Jacinto, 7pm. Cost is $13. 327-0175. Hands Across the…
Acting Right, Not White
photograph by John Anderson Just for being a black female who has lived under the roofs of family members other than her parents, Andrea is at a statistical disadvantage for passing all sections of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). She knows this because her Dobie Middle School principal, Patrick Patterson, presented the majority…
Bean
Bean 1997, PG-13, 87 min. Directed by Mel Smith, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Rowan Atkinson, Peter Macnicol, Andrew Leary, Pamela Reed, Harris Yulan, Burt Reynolds. Mr. Bean, perhaps the most annoying British import yet, has arrived amidst much hullabaloo, though one hopes that Beanmania will be relegated rather quickly to passing fad…
Coach’s Corner
An open letter to everyone with Gary Barnettitis: Gary Barnett’s a God. He’ll lead Texas back to the football promised land, because he’s the genius who resurrected Northwestern, a perennial football doormat. The sum of the local press, from print to electronic to the newsletter mavens, have (so typical of the Pavlovian, knee jerk Texas…
Ray of Light… and Dark
Do we really need to see Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) or is it just an excuse for a photo? It’s just an excuse! Much discussion going on at my couch about The X-Files season premiere (FOX; Sun, 8pm). Weezer enjoyed it, and demanded a second viewing. I wasn’t any happier after the…
Year of the Horse
Year of the Horse 1997, R, 107 min. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Neil Young, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro, Ralph Molina. It’s been nearly three decades since Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s first album, Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere, came out, and that quintessentially American, purebred rock & roll…
Day Trips
photograph by Gerald E. McLeod The Kreische Brewery in La Grange may not have been the first or largest brewery in Texas, but it was one of the most unusual and historical. Now preserved in Monument Hill/Kreische Brewery State Historical Park, the ruins of the brewery speak volumes of the builder’s ingenuity and imagination. The…
Roam Sweet Home
photograph by Shannon McIntyre When I telephoned filmmaker Ellen Spiro to set up the interview for this article, she invited me to her place on the shores of Lake Travis, 30 minutes outside of town. “Be here around five o’clock — that’s when the sun begins to set,” she said. “If you’re going to come…
Page Two
Welcome to our annual Restaurant Poll issue in which our readers and our critics check in to give their opinions on current Austin restaurants. Even with the hundreds of restaurants included, think of the poll as an index to the even greater map of all Austin restaurants. (If we’ve missed something, write in and tell…
Like a Hurricane
Jim Jarmusch (l) and Neil Young Two months have passed since this interview with Jim Jarmusch took place in Toronto. Year of the Horse was the first film I saw after arriving in Canada for the film festival in September and Jarmusch’s movie about the music of Neil Young & Crazy Horse set the perfect…
Public Notice
Save Our Springs’ Bill Bunch will introduce the Events for East Timorese Self-Determination, Mon, Nov 10, 7pm, at Garrison Hall on the UT Campus. Bunch’s comments, the Austin-Indonesia Connection, will precede presentations by the main speakers, Nina Maria Da Costa, President, Timorese Association, Australia (“Human Rights in Occupied East Timor”) and Nico Warouw, International Rep,…
Scanlines
(“Scanlines” wishes to thank Encore Movies & Music, I [Heart] Video, and Vulcan Video for their help in providing videos and laser discs.) The many faces of Van Damme Pensive Angry Melancholy Happy Hard Target D: John Woo (1993) with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Kasi Lemmons, Wilford Brimley Maximum Risk D: Ringo…
Mister Smarty Pants Knows
U.N.C.L.E., as in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., stands for “United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.” The royal cards in the average deck of cards of today look very much like cards during the time of King Henry VIII. By the way, King Henry VIII outlawed playing cards in 1526. According to one source, Canadians…
Short Cuts
Funhouse Cinema, programmer Bill Daniel’s eclectic Monday night underground film and video series at the Ritz Lounge (showtimes 8 & 10:30pm), has a fun-sounding program called Pixel Visions scheduled for Nov. 10. The program is a “best of” compilation from the first seven years of the PXL This Festival, which showcases short video works made…
Articulations
City arts funding has a way of bringing out the worst in some people. Maybe it’s all the hoops through which the Cultural Contracts process requires applicants to jump; maybe it’s the competition for so few bucks; maybe it’s having one’s work lined up and judged. Whatever it is, it routinely pushes some locals to…
A Revolutionary Letter on Education II
illustration by Jason Stout Last spring, in an Oakland public high school, there were only 16 graduates in a class of more than 150. Such numbers are not uncommon in our urban schools. And what of the graduates, in any of our schools? From community colleges to the Ivy League, we know the freshman year…
Habitat for Humanity Builds More Than Houses Foundation of Faith
It’s 1:40 in the afternoon, Sunday, October 19, and all around town people are thigh-deep in the diversions of the moment — a hike on the Greenbelt, say, or the second quarter of the Cowboys-Jaguars futility scramble, or for the late risers among us (you know who you are), a plate of migas and a…
Ready for My Close Up
Don’t expect to see sweet little dances if you go see Kathy Dunn-Hamrick’s Close Ups. Just because they’re in the informal studio space of Cafe Dance doesn’t mean that her dances are at all intimate or quaint. They’re big and breathy, executed by some fine dancers. The only thing it does mean is that you’ll…
Dancing About Architecture
The Sixth Street sound ordinance situation has ESSCA-lated yet again, with 11 members of the East Sixth Street Community Association banding together to file suit against the city. ESSCA rep Angela Tharp of the Flamingo Cantina says, “We’re basically fed up with the city,” noting that the sound ordinance is “extremely vague” and that “the…
Spin Dr. Mom
illustration by Tom King Yesterday morning, the Winik family overslept. I mean, seriously overslept. Just 15 minutes before the late bell at the elementary school, which rings at 7:45, my nine-year-old Hayes appeared at the door of my room, barking at me in an eerily familiar way. “Get up and get up now!” “It’s only…
In Like Flynn
photographs by Jana Birchum “Oh, I’m sorry,” Charlotte Flynn trills sweetly. “I keep getting off the subject. Now, where were we?” The hard-to-harness subject here is Charlotte Flynn, the woman who keeps steering the conversation away from herself to talk about her passion. Make that passions, plural. And that right there pretty much sums up…
¿Quieres Chanclar?
photograph by Minh Omar’s belt buckle is the size of small land mine. It reads “Mexico” so I figure there’s a good chance he didn’t buy it at La Dillard’s in Barton Creek Mall. It’s the kind of buckle you could only wear without bruising your gut if you had a 29-inch waste. Make that…
Bonus Tracks
FLESH Melt (Relish) This local trio’s debut has bits that are reminiscent of those truly transcendental moments on Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish. Vocals need some polishing, but here’s to hoping Flesh’s next album isn’t bloated and banal like Siamese Dream. — Michael Bertin SOUL CIRCUS Seen Boogie Nights yet? Get a hold of this tape and…
Ovid’s Myths: the Roman Nose in Exile: Merry Metamorphosis
Zachary Scott Theatre Center, November 1 When the poet Ovid was banned from Rome in 8 A.D., he set a rather unfortunate vocational precedent. Empires have crumbled, centuries passed, but poets � with all their ornate language, dense metaphor, and singular vision � often seem in universal exile, forever misunderstood. Project InterAct, Zachary Scott Theatre…
Comunidad
Maldonado’s first in-store featuring Ramon Ayala y Norte, 1967. Henry and Beverly are fifth and sixth from left. In 1967, Henry and Beverly Maldonado opened Maldonado’s Music Shop in a small East Sixth street storefront. Making Spanish language music their store’s niche, the Maldonados didn’t just make a point of getting to know their customers…
Switchback
Switchback 1997, R, 120 min. Directed by Jeb Stuart, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Dennis Quaid, Danny Glover, Jared Leto, F. Lee Ermey. Funny what a difference 17 years can make. In 1980, novice screenwriter Jeb Stuart drafted a script about a serial killer, entitled Going West in America, that got Hollywood all…
I Wanna Be a Paperback Writer
Over a two-day period last weekend, the Texas Book Festival sponsored some 21 panels whose topics spanned from the mildly titillating (Footnotes) to the wildly exciting (American Class Wars). In a South by Southwest-like blitz of the Festival, Chronicle reviewers cover seven of the panels below; next week we’ll run their treatments of the fest’s…
Recommended
Friday: Steve Winwood, Austin Music Hall; House of Large Sizes, Hole in the Wall; Big Back Forty, Honeydogs, Slobberbone, Stubb’s Saturday: Polk, Barton & Towhead, Artz Rib House; Ursa Major, Wookie, Shindigs, Bates Motel; Reba McEntire, Brooks & Dunn, Erwin Center Sunday: Imperial Golden Crown Harmonizers, Flipnotics; Guy Forsyth, Antone’s Monday: Velour 100, Bicycle Pilot,…
La Promesse
La Promesse 1996, R, 97 min. Directed by Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmané Ouedraogo. Which of our traits are socially ingrained and which are genetically imbued? And what about morality, that most personal of all characteristics? How is it acquired, adapted, shed,…
Naked City
Foes of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas plan to hold their largest protest ever at the school on Nov.16. Local activists are planning a trek to Georgia to join the civil disobedience event. The tax-funded school has trained Latin American leaders and soldiers now held responsible for various human rights abuses. Grassroots activists…
Texas Platters
STIMULUS Obsessive Personality (Celestial) Strange, I don’t remember doing any acid in the Eighties. Still, Obsessive Personality feels like a horrific flashback to the nauseating “underground” party circa 1985. Every wimpy-ass electronic dance noise ever to come out of a synthesizer or a sequencer or a computer (think background music for health club commercials) can…
Fire
Fire 1996, NR, 104 min. Directed by Deepa Mehta, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Ranjit Chowdhry, Kulbushan Kharbanda, Jaaved Jaaferi, Kushal Rekhi. Fire is a hothouse family melodrama with radical social underpinnings. Set in a New Delhi middle-class home, this film by Canadian-Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta is spoken in…
It Came From Corsicana
photograph by Shannon McIntyre The phone rings. It’s Austin’s newest resident novelist, Carol Dawson, whom I’ve been getting to know since she moved to town. “Can I read you something?” she says in a throaty Texas twang which, through occasional crisp consonants and fastidious vowels, conveys — what is it? prep school? time spent abroad?…
Roadkill
David “Fathead” Newman St. James Episcopal Church Friday, November 7 “I’m on tour about six months a year, but I don’t keep a rigid touring schedule these days — I try to stay out of the nightclubs as much as possible. I don’t drink anymore and I don’t smoke — the smoke mostly is what…
Mad City
Mad City 1997, PG-13, 110 min. Directed by Costa-Gavras, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Alan Alda, Mia Kirshner, Ted Levine, Robert Prosky, Blythe Danner. It’s easy to imagine the pitch meeting for Mad City: Oh, it’s a cross between Dog Day Afternoon and Network. The only thing the pitchers…
