about AIDS Can Vampires Get AIDS?
The holidays are upon us, the time of “trick or treats” is in the air and the world of pleasure and lust may be reflected in our feastive spirits. This is all the more reason to be aware of the ways we place ourselves at risk. Granted we cannot always control whether or not we…
At Close Range
by Dave Cook, photos by Jana Birchum My whole life is squeezed into this trigger. I can feel it there, my whole worrisome, tentative life, all of the rage and uncertainty and weight of it balanced behind my finger as I try to keep the barrel of the semi-automatic, Colt AR-15 assault rifle level in…
Mister Smarty Pants Knows…
Lou Reed recorded his album Berlin without ever having visited there. Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, gave his invention to the State of Texas. The government never responded to the gift and Morse took it back in disgust. One of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language is “misspell.” Zenith Electronics was…
The Hearings: Waco and Ruby Ridge
The week before last July’s congressional hearings on ATF wrongdoing during the initial raid of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (whose department oversees the ATF) denounced the hearings on ABC’s This Week With David Brinkley, claiming that extremist groups would seize the opportunity to “distort Waco” and “undermine law enforcement.”…
Public Notice
S. Emerson Moffat filled some mighty honkin’ go-go boots in 1990 when she took the “Public Notice” helm from Kathleen Maher, who had developed the column in the early Eighties and given it a voice. Moffat debuted in “PN” on November 16, 1990 and pummeled the Austin activist community with her dry wit and snappy…
Bucking the System
by Robert Bryce The disbarment pro- ceedings against Austin lawyer Erik Moebius should make even the proudest barrister blush. Accusations of fraud, corruption, and insanity have been thrown around like rice after a wedding. Moebius is accused by the State Bar of Texas of malpractice and numerous counts of filing frivilous pleadings. Meanwhile, Moebius says…
hearth & soul
by Suzy Banks Insulation in Grey and Blue Dear Suzy, Now that summer is over and coolness is no longer an abstract concept, perhaps you could speak on the subject of insulation. In my homeland in The Great White North we insulated the hell out of everything: the dog didn’t go outside without 6″ of…
How to Get an Education in Film
by Marjorie Baumgarten Certain things we take for granted — like movies and their perpetual motion. But filmmaking has existed as a business, a science, an art, and an alternate reality, for a scant 100 years. And as people around the world prepare centennial celebrations of the invention of cinema, here in Austin, another milestone…
Revolution: The Power to Begin
by Michael Ventura IMAGINE. You can’t have a revolution if you can’t imagine one. Or if you won’t imagine one. We are force- fed a million trivial dreams on big and small screens so that we won’t discover in ourselves a great dream, a dream of justice and community. The odds are always lousy, the…
Fall
Oct. 31 (Hogg Aud.) Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger Nov. 7 (Hogg Aud.) The Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky Nov. 14 (Hogg Aud.) My Name Is Ivan, Andrei Tarkovsky Nov. 21 Landscape Suicide, James Benning Nov. 28 Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich Dec. 5 (Hogg Aud.) Satan’s Brew, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Spring Jan. 16 In a Year of…
Food-O-File
Years ago when I was working as a pantry/pastry cook at a small, charming restaurant on Kerbey Lane, it happened that both the chef and I were scheduled off on the same day and we showed up at the restaurant toward the end of a lunch shift to pick up our respective paychecks. When the…
Scanlines
PAPER MOON D: Peter Bogdanovich; with Tatum O’Neal, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn Paramount Home Video/laserdisc It’s difficult now to imagine that when Paper Moon was released in 1973, Peter Bogdanovich was one of Hollywood’s most promising directors. His first film, Targets with Boris Karloff (based loosely on Charles Whitman’s horrific shooting spree) had become a…
A Little Ribbing
by Robb Walsh Pok-e-Jo’s Smokehouse 1603 W. Fifth St., 320-1541 11am-9pm dailyclosed Sunday s it the concept, or is it the location that makes an enterprise successful? As the former owner of a retail business that went South, I have faced this question in a very personal way. So when the first two restaurants at…
Short Cuts
A frequent host to Hollywood film shoots and home to numerous film festivals and promising independent filmmakers, it’s no surprise Austin has become a hotbed of the movie industry. Equally important as a city on the cutting edge in multimedia, Austin’s community — a number of highly creative computer game companies, CD-ROM developers, and Internet…
Nuevo Leon
1209 E. Seventh St., 479-0097 M-Th 11am-10pm, Fri 11am-11pm; Sat 9am-11pm, Sun til 10pm As Austin’s restaurant scene expands to include more interior and coastal Mexican options, our stomachs remember our regional roots. On any given Friday night, we still crave TexMex — cheese enchiladas floating in spicy sauce with rice and beans (preferably refried),…
Horror Is As Horror Does
by Julie Weaver There are many activities and haunted abodes to choose from this year, so get out there and scare someone — even if that someone happens to be yourself. There are even some out-of-town choices for those of you who don’t wish to brave the annual Sixth Street debacle. Anyway, don’t forget your…
Taqueria Arandas
4619 S. Congress, 448-4771 3518 E. Seventh, 389-3834 834 E. Rundberg, 835-4369 2448 S. First, new location Taqueria Guadalajara 6534 Burnet, 452-9886 Odds are that if you’re looking for a sandwich, the last place you’ll look is a taqueria. That is, unless you’ve spent some time down in Guadalajara, where you can pick up tasty…
day trips
by Geral E McLeod The Old Coupland Inn barbecue restaurant has been reborn, reopened, and renewed. Once legendary among barbecue lovers, the landmark closed its doors over four years ago — much to the dismay of the big appetites who filled the two-story, former country drugstore every weekend for the all-you-can-eat carnivore feast. Barbara and…
Film Reviews
THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEYD: Steven M. Martin. (PG-13, 85 min.) Some stories just write themselves. This fascinating documentary about the life of Leon Theremin is wilder than anything a storyteller might have imagined. The Russian-born Theremin was an electronics genius who invented the strange contraption that became the world’s first electronic musical instrument. Named after…
The Reverse Crossover of La Mafia
by Abel Salas Until Tejano superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez was slain last spring, few people outside of the Latin music industry really knew who the young artist was. Her audience was undeniably Latino. Long popular among Mexican-Americans, or Chicanos, her fame had already crossed over into the larger landscape of Mexico, the Caribbean, and South…
Coach’s Corner
I’m strolling down Congress Avenue, rationalizing this as my exercise for the day. Covering every square inch of downtown, like so many pigeons, are small children. The public school kids are precipitously close to totally out-of-control. In little groups — bright tykes from Montessori schools — teachers patiently explaining exactly why it’s not nice to…
Film: Showtimes
Film listings are updated Friday mornings. Showtimes listed below start Friday, October 27 and cover the week ending Thursday, November 2. An asterisk (*) before a title means that no passes or special admission discounts (apart from matinee discounts) will be accepted for any screening. Parentheses indicate weekend showtimes for Saturdays and Sundays only, unless…
Postage Decrease?
by Andy Langer There are those that would argue some laws are made to be broken, or at least go unenforced. Until recently, both musicians and law enforcement officials had been turning a blind eye to sign regulations in the Austin Land Development Code that prohibits the posting of flyers “on or over any public…
Page Two
You hold in your hands the redesigned Austin Chronicle. Graphically, we’ve sharpened the paper — changing fonts and headings, as well as some overall graphic/typographic concepts. But there are a few editorial changes as well, plus an internal rethinking of the paper’s structure. The philosophical motivation behind the changes was to increase the amount of…
Articulations
Welcome. New column. News. Increased arts coverage. Welcome input… Aw, geez, you’ve heard all this before. As much as I wish I had a new take on it, I don’t, so let me just try to zip through it as swiftly as I can. This column is about the arts, which for us includes the…
Music Recommended
edited by Raoul Hernandez ANTONE’S 20TH ANNIVERSARY WEEKEND II Antone’s, Friday 27- Sunday 29 If it wasn’t enough that Kim Wilson and Doug Sahm are both doing two nights at Antone’s (Friday and Saturday) with folks like The West Side Horns, Derek O’Brien and Rocky Morales, you’ve also got openers like Houston’s Roy Head (Friday)…
Bonus Tracks
QUATROPAW All Night Living (Chet Productions) Marooned somewhere between Poi Dog Pond-ering and Mazzy Star, Quatropaw makes music to take the edge off. Beth Frydman and Jason Richard`s vocal interplay gives the record enough bite to stifle any lingering yawns, while the band maintains enough unbearable liteness of being to make this record a fine…
Local Palette
Photographs of India and Nepal Mary Pat Waldron at Apple Annie’s Gourmet Cafe Showing through October There’s nothing like a downtown high-rise bank building to suck the soul from an art hanging. It’s that same sterile, stultifying professional property management aura that somehow renders food from the eateries in those buildings utterly tasteless. Fortunately, Apple…
AISD Notebook
by Roseana Auten Bruce Banner’s job as a teacher’s aide at AISD’s Alternative Learning Center (ALC) is a lot harder these days; he’s been assaulted by students three times so far this year. The ALC is a facility for secondary school students who have been ejected from their home campuses because of serious or consistent…
Tejano Music on the Austin Airwaves
I remember being a child and discovering the window to the world: radio. I’d occasionally just scan down the dial, as I often still do, and make cursory investigations of every signal to see what treasures I could turn up. My stops at the Tejano stations were always brief — no point, I figured, in…
Into the “Not Done”
by Dave Cook Jean Fogel Zee wants to show you glimpses of God. The Austin artist wants each member of her audience to feel the glow of God, not only in her but, through their response to her performance, in each of themselves. To do this, she does not elevate you with ethereal dancing, polite…
General Gus Garcia
by Alex de Marban With the globetrot- ting mayor reportedly helping Muscovites employ an Austin-like emergency medical system, Gus Garcia’s deputy leadership took center stage last Thursday, permitting an altogether unusual set of circumstances at the council chambers. To wit, the attendant hoi polloi were granted a right to gripe to an unheard-of degree, a…
Bonus Tracks
QUATROPAW All Night Living (Chet Productions) Marooned somewhere between Poi Dog Pond-ering and Mazzy Star, Quatropaw makes music to take the edge off. Beth Frydman and Jason Richard`s vocal interplay gives the record enough bite to stifle any lingering yawns, while the band maintains enough unbearable liteness of being to make this record a fine…
Empathy for the Devil
by Raoul Hernandez Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice Knopf, $25 hard Evil’s Back,” read The New York Times Magazine cover copy — in yellow letters that fade through orange to red. Underneath: “A theological journey into the dark heart of America, wherein Susan Smith gets a presentation from Satan… Quentin Tarantino challenges the ironies…
State Constitutional Amendment Election
Election Day: Tuesday, November 7 Early voting continues through November 3 There are 14 proposed state constitutional amendments up for public vote on November 7. Following is a list with the ballot language and the Chronicle’s endorsements. By the way, have we mentioned since the last constitutional amendment election that it’s tough to support any…
Postscripts
* FRI, OCT 27: Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, will be at Southwestern University campus in Georgetown for a lecture at the Alma Thomas Fine Arts Theatre. A 7pm booksigning follows… Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin will read from his works at Jessen Audtorium,…
Crossing Channels
by Hugh Forrest Is a television news- cast that doesn’t insult the intelligence of Austin viewers really too terribly much to ask for? We’re a sophisticated city; our populous is one of the highest educated in the country, we maintain a keen awareness of current social and political issues and pride ourselves on our independent…
