Public Notice
A Cornerstone Is Exactly That Bottom line? Cornerstone Gay & Lesbian Community Center needs help. They have issued an Open Letter to the Community which details (in some cases a little too detailed) fundraising shortfalls over the two years of their existence. For whatever reason, they are in critical need of $60,000 by mid-November. They…
Short Cuts
Think about including movies in your Halloween plans. Beginning this week and continuing on through the Halloween weekend, the scary movie opportunities are plentiful and, moreover, unique. For a warm-up, try this week’s Funhouse Cinema presentation, Demon Lover Diary, a cult movie about two guys making a documentary about two guys making a horror movie.…
Kismet Cafe
24th and San Antonio, 236-1811 Daily, 11am-9pm Austin is fond of Mediterranean cuisine, as evidenced by the “Texas-izing” of certain specialty foods (turbo hot falafel, jalape�o hummus) and by the fashionable pita bread “wraps” of local deli and fast food acclaim. Really, the popularity of Mediterranean food here is no surprise; items like hummus, dolmas,…
A Conservative Coup?
But other points in their respective platforms show that Clayton and Baxter have staked out clearly differentiated constituencies and philosophies. Baxter, for instance, has argued that the Legislature provides adequate environmental regulation and has spoken out against Austin’s more stringent controls on development. He has promised to make county government a voice for residents who…
Food-O-File
The fiber-optic cable upgrade finally arrived in near south Austin, which means unlimited access to the Television Food Network (TVFN). Concerns about TVFN addiction proved unfounded when Emeril Legasse’s wild-eyed, high-octane exuberance prompted a channel switch after only one segment of Emeril Live! Another evening, I opted for the much more sedate Molto Mario only…
TV Rocks
Dale Watson on Bravo this week: Pam Tillis gave him a “Nashville Rash.” The singer onstage looked too good to be real. She looked like Melrose Place’s idea of a female vocalist, all dimples and cover-girl looks. She wasMelrose Place’s idea of a female vocalist. Kyle (Rob Estes) and Amanda (Heather Locklear) were auditioning singers…
Real Seoul Food
12196 N. MoPac, 835-8888 Mon-Fri, 11am-2pm, 5-10pm; Sat-Sun, 5-10pm As Austin sprawl crawls further and further north and car dealerships, superstores, and strip malls litter the landscape, I am continually surprised to find new reasons to venture out of the city’s centralized bubble of civilization. The latest of these is Koreana. Koreana Korean Grill and…
TV Rocks
Dale Watson on Bravo this week: Pam Tillis gave him a “Nashville Rash.” The singer onstage looked too good to be real. She looked like Melrose Place’s idea of a female vocalist, all dimples and cover-girl looks. She wasMelrose Place’s idea of a female vocalist. Kyle (Rob Estes) and Amanda (Heather Locklear) were auditioning singers…
Outside Regular Channels
Dave Sanger, Chris Wall, and Matt Eskey photograph by Todd V. Wolfson In Music Biz 101, they teach that distribution is almost everything. All the airplay, press, and promotion in the world won’t help an act if their album isn’t readily available to consumers. Yet, with approximately 30,000 albums hitting the streets every year, shelf…
Sleazy Listening
Remember back to about l972 or so … two burly men came to your mom and dad’s (or uncle’s, or aunt’s, or a friend’s parents’) house and rang the doorbell. Sweating and puffing, they hauled in a Spanish-provincial-style AM/FM/phono/TV/8-track/cassette home entertainment center (carefully color-coordinated to match the walnut paneling) and deposited it on the avocado-green…
Articulations
On Sunday, October 18, painter Gustav Likan passed away. Likan was an artist of international reputation, whose career took him from his native Yugoslavia to the Argentina of Eva Peron, for whom he painted murals, to Chicago, where he taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and where his lushly colored canvases earned him…
Going Back to “Lake Charles”
Clyde Woodward (left) playing rock star circa 1985 with The Trough, a fake heavy metal band. Embarrassingly, Margaret Moser sings “Don’t Slander Me” (right). photograph by Martha Grenon He had a reason to get back to Lake Charles He used to talk about it He’d just go on and on He always said Louisiana Was…
Scanlines
D. Linda Lautrec/Johnny Legend (1983) with Andy Kaufman, Freddie Blassie The Ploughman’s Lunch D. Richard Eyre (1983) with Jonathan Pryce, Charlie Dore, Tim Curry, Rosemary Harris, Frank Finlay Dinner at Eight D. George Cukor (1933) with Marie Dressler, John and Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Billie Burke Andy Kaufman and Freddie Blassie ftom My Dinner with…
The Visit at Black Mountain
It’s a typical Tuesday night in South Austin at the end of September. Except for the regular crowd at the Continental, it’s mostly quiet. Thermometers read 90 degrees at 7pm, and the humidity is so thick you can cut it with a cake knife. Down South First Street, lonely cars careen into the darkness past…
Dancing About Architecture
I know, I know, you haven’t even carved your Hallowe’en pumpkin yet, but it’s a fact: South by Southwest ’99 is already gearing up for next March. Their first big announcement comes this week with the confirmation of Lucinda Williams as keynote speaker for the music conference. Those hoping to see Williams before next March…
Frontier Television
“Silence” by Cesare Battista This week welcomes the seasonal return of The Territory, the annual short film and video showcase that is beamed weekly into homes throughout the state of Texas. The television series is a co-production of the Austin Museum of Art, Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), and KUHT-TV (Houston), and is broadcast in…
A Mysteriously Happy Atmosphere
Clockwise from bottom: Dana Younger, Chris Lavack, Kevin Collins, and Steve Balgooyen photograph by Kenny Braun Most folks in town who aren’t too grown up to go looking for a party on a Saturday night have probably at least caught a buzz at the Black Mountain estate in near South Austin. The two acres of…
Live Shots
The Red Elvises at the Continental Club, October 18 photograph by John Carrico ST. ELIAS MEDITERRANEAN FESTIVAL 11th & Trinity, October 9-10 Church festivals aren’t uncommon, but it’s unique when one of them features garbanzo falafel sandwiches and belly dancing. But as the name implies, the St. Elias Mediterranean Festival is anything but another run-of-the-mill…
Revolution in Cuba
illustration by Michael Sibeen When the revolution begins in Cuba, I am sitting in a shiny Volvo tourist bus in the back streets of a city whose name translates into “One Hundred Fires.” Here to play softball with Cuban journalists, we are a rag-tag group of American writers and adventurers, mostly middle-aged radical hippies still…
Day Trips
Xeric and native plants from the nursery in the hills west of New Braunfels are well-suited for landscaping experiments. photograph by Gerald E. McLeod Schumacher’s Hill Country Gardens west of New Braunfels has one of the most unique collections of plants and the largest array of xeriscaping plants you are likely to find anywhere. From…
Moon-Shaped Panties & the Saint of White Trash
The morning starts normally for Lucinda. Well, maybe not normal, since she’s in Nashville and in these days of skyrocketing fame and all the right moves, she’s more often on the road. Puttering happily around the warm wood-cabinet kitchen in the morning is becoming a rare event. This particular respite is sandwiched between her Lilith…
Bond Election Cliffs Notes
Propositions 1-5 authorize the city to sell GO bonds, which are paid back out of the city’s property tax collections (just under half of which goes to debt service). Prop. 1: Transportation Price tag: $152 million plus interest Projects: Most prominent are a number of roadwork projects. Streets currently mentioned by name include (going clockwise…
Coach’s Corner
So many things I don’t understand: the concept of the electric light, or how a picture appears on a piece of glass when a chunk of plastic is pointed at it. So much confusion. So many things to confuse me. Add to this vast list the Heisman Trophy. No, sports fans, I don’t get the…
Commissioners Court: Precincts 1, 2, and 4
Ron Davis Gregory Parker Never say Ron Davis takes anything for granted. The popular view may be that he won the race for Precinct 1 County Commissioner months ago when he emerged the victor in a three-way Democratic primary battle against Stacy Dukes-Rhone and incumbent commissioner Darwin McKee, but don’t tell that to Davis. The…
Endorsements
Propositions 1-5 (G.O. Bonds): YES We have little patience for the persistent argument that Austin can’t afford these bonds, or that Austin does not need substantial investments in infrastructure. But we do have misgivings about the general-obligation bond proposals in Props. 1-5. We think the process for selecting these bonds could have been handled better…
Exhibitionism
John Henry Faulk Living Theatre,through November 7 Running Time: 2 hrs The worst thing you can say about Austin playwright Clay Nichols’ O.T. is that its title (short for overtime) in no way does justice to the play’s moving treatment of the prickly racial, emotional, and mental dilemmas with which its protagonist Tres (Jim Elliott,…
Changing of the Guard
Sam Biscoe Retiring Country Judge, Bill Aleshire Hank Davis Gonzalez It’s the end of an era,” County Attorney Ken Oden declared on the phone the other day. The twang in his voice carried a tinge of sadness as he pondered the future of county government without Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire — his old friend…
In With the Old, In With the New
The latest pile of poetry to hit the Chronicle reflects a current trend in line with what you’re supposed to have at a wedding: something old and something new. Old comes in the form of reissues from the first third of the century already committed to cultural memory; new comes in the form of a…
Utility Player
“There are some things I want to say in private… not information I would want to lay out in open session,” insisted a seething City Manager Jesus Garza at last Wednesday’s council work session. The city’s top-ranking bureaucrat insisted on a private airing of the reasons he took the city’s electric utility into his own…
Postscripts
Lizbeth, of Lars Eighner’s Travels With Lizbeth, died on September 25, at the age of 13 years and seven months. In a local Usenet posting on austin.general, Eighner responded to a fan’s commisseration with Eighner and his loss by reporting that although Lizbeth “had been feeble for several months, she was alert and comfortable until…
Austin Tomorrow
The winding, rutted road that brought us the November bonds runs along the border between different cities: Austin Tomorrow, the paradisiacal product of future Smart Growth, and Austin Today, the overburdened product of past dumb growth. Different parts of the bond package lie within these different cities, and the 10 ballot propositions themselves obscure the…
About AIDS
The Centers for Disease Control recently announced that AIDS deaths per year had fallen by 47%, thanks to advances in HIV disease management through new drugs to fight the virus and to control the often-fatal infections and cancers which accompany an HIV-damaged immune system. Then last week, the Guttmacher Institute released CDC figures indicating that…
Election November 3
City Propostions Props 1-5: General Obligation Bonds Props 6-10: Revenue Bonds Props 11-12: Civic Center/Palmer Aud. Travis County Commissioners Court COUNTY JUDGE Hank Davis Gonzalez (R) Sam Biscoe (D) COMMISSIONER PCT. 1 Greg Parker (R) Ron Davis (D) COMMISSIONER PCT. 2 Jim Shaw (R) Karen Sonleitner* (D) COMMISSIONER PCT. 3 Todd Baxter (R) Nan Clayton…
Page Two
Lucinda Williams was a star in Austin long before most anyone else had even heard of her. Over the years, of course, that has changed, as her album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road gained nearly unanimous rave reviews across the country. Williams and Austin Chronicle senior editor Margaret Moser have known each other a…
The Arts-Park Plan
A little history: Palmer Auditorium, and the attendant development (or lack thereof) of the south shore of Town Lake, have been controversial since the barn was built more than 30 years ago. In the mid-Eighties, opposition to that era’s Convention Center plan — slated for the Palmer site — led to a grassroots campaign that…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer is the Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan. According to MSNBC, in 20 cultures of Southeast Asia, men ritually insert objects like bells, balls, pins, rings, or marbles under the skin of the penis to enhance their sex appeal. If you measure the length of an elephant’s footprint and multiply by six…
Naked City
AISD schools are hosting a series of community meetings through Oct. 28 to discuss issues related to proposed school boundary changes. The meetings, led by school principals and Campus Advisory Council co-chairs, are designed to gather input from parents, teachers, and others interested in aiding the Board of Trustees in the process of re-drawing school…
