Mujer Aguila
Our deepest sympathies go out to the friends and family of Alma de Mujer Executive Director Marsha G�mez, who left this life last week. And truly, condolences should go out to all of us in Austin. We have lost a beautiful friend. Writer Mary Jane Garza offers words about G�mez’s life and love in this…
Downsizing Dell
By all accounts, the ultimate dealbreaker was an issue of timing. By original design and the City Council’s decision that DJCC construction must be completed in phases, the first buildings on the campus will be the Jewish Community Center and Jewish Federation of Austin (JFA) facilities, followed by a second phase to include the construction…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
Cleopatra wrote a book on cosmetics. One of the ingredients was burnt mice. According to noted toy inventor Reyn Guyer, who was responsible for Twister and the Nerf ball, Twister started off as a shoe polish promotion and Nerf started off as a toy rock for an ill-fated game called Caveman. 17,000 Smarties candies are…
Naked City
Friends of Yellow Bike Project volunteer Ben Clouth will hold a memorial march in his honor Friday, Oct. 9, at 4:30pm. The 25-year-old cyclist was killed last Friday night when he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle near the intersection of Lavaca and Martin Luther King Blvd. Police say the accident is…
Food-o-File
Growth in the Austin restaurant market is one sign of a fertile climate, and so is the baby boom in the local food community. In February, chef Larry Perdido (Brio Vista) and his wife Annabelle welcomed daughter Camaron to their family and now they hope to have Saba Blue Water Cafe open in the Warehouse…
Austin Film Festival 1998 Award Winners
Screenplays Adult Category Winner: Who Would You Rather Sleep With? by Kate Hawley Runners-Up: Anna Blue by David L. Hudachek Happy Hour by Richard Levine and Mike Bien Civenga Family Category Winner: The Queen’s Mark by John Culton Films Feature Films Winner: La Cucaracha, written by James McManus, directed by Jack Perez 1st Runner-Up: Show…
Hill Country Food and Wine Guide Update
As soon as we published our “Guide to Food and Wine in the Hill Country” (Vol. 17, No. 30, April 3, 1998), we began to hear from readers about restaurants that we’d overlooked and places that opened after we went to press. In creating our first update to the guide, I revisited the western Hill…
From Script to Screen
The fifth annual Austin Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference and Festival winds to a close following eight eventful days and nights between October 1-8. Presented here are reviews of some of the collected 80 shorts and features that screened during the festival, reports from the weekend panels, and a list of the film and screenplay…
A Commercial Venture
In the early Nineties, AMN became the pet project of a handful of Austin music lovers and avid access television users, Kent Benjamin and Hank Sinatra chief among them. At that time, there was so much music-based material being put together for ACTV (now ACAC) that it only seemed natural to give Austin music its…
International Competition
Documentary Human Remains, dir. Jay Rosenblatt ($500 check from GSD&M) Animation Wieder Holung, dir. Nana Swiczinsky ($500 check from B. Nowlin) Narrative Denial, dir. Phillip Crawford ($500 check from Turner Ent Net) tie: Meine Familie und Ich, dir. S. Bosssieu and F. Westermeyer Experimental 1st: The Amateurist, dir. Miranda July ($500 check from Austin Film…
Election Coverage 1998
Dates Early voting for the Nov. 3 General Election and City of Austin special bond election begins Saturday, Oct. 17 and runs through Friday, Oct. 30.The registration deadline is Monday, Oct. 5. Polling Location and Voter Information Information for City of Austin such as polling locations and sites is available on line for residents who…
A Cultural Phenomenon
Several years ago, Rykodisc/Hannibal founder Joe Boyd met Sierra Maestra’s star trumpeter Jesus Alemany in London. Because Boyd had long been disgusted with U.S. policy towards Alemany’s homeland, Cuba, naturally the discussion turned to the trade embargo, which at that time was still keeping the island’s highly developed and sophisticated folk, pop, and jazz from…
Shining Lighthouse
Heron Neck Light, Green Island in Penobscot Bay These are tiresome subjects for many of you, how I watch more reruns than new shows but love Melrose Place, prefer old b&w films more than the latest action blockbuster, think Hanna-Barbera are the anti-Christ, and got hooked on Law & Order because of a letter from…
Articulations
Now that the marathon broil commonly known as this past summer has finally yielded to sub-swelter levels, most of us will be able to stop throwing ourselves into the pool on a regular basis. But there are a trio of Austinites who only just started jumping into a certain pool — a Pool with a…
Dancing About Architecture
Things got ugly last week on Austin’s ever-changing radio dial when one of this country’s biggest, richest, and most powerful radio networks, Capstar, based here in the capital, took a bite out of that big local dog known as “The LBJ group” (101X, KGSR, KLBJ, and their new country station, “Lone Star 93”). After moonlighting…
Dialogues With Allie Light
Allie Light during the making of Dialogues With Madwomen I mentioned to a friend, who happens to be a breast cancer survivor, that I was going to interview documentary filmmaker Allie Light about her latest film, Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer. Here’s the question you have to ask her, said my…
Exhibitionism
THE WINTER’S TALE: LONG AND WINDING ROAD Beverly S. Sheffield Zilker Hillside Theatre, through October 11 Running time: 3 hrs Perhaps you’ve found yourself on a journey, one that you knew would take you over many miles and into unfamiliar territory, and after traveling for some time and being on the road much longer than…
Joni’s Jazz
Joni Mitchell recentlyread in a book of birthdays that she was born on the day of the discoverer in the week of depth, and her more than 30 years’ worth of songs and paintings certainly prove the astrologers right. During an hour-long interview conducted last month at Los Angeles’ plush Bel Air Hotel for a…
Scanlines
D: Jack Green (1996) with Bill Paxton, Julianna Margulies, Mark Wahlberg Traveller opens with Bokky (Paxton) spraying the driveway of two genial homeowners with “sealant” for a couple hundred bucks. As rain begins to fall, he speeds away, leaving the suckers to watch as their new blacktop, actually just used crankcase oil, dribbles away. The…
The Man Who Loved Little Girls
We live in paranoid times. Maybe it’s the millennium, maybe it’s political correctness, maybe it’s the bleak techno-industrial landscape, but motives are forever suspect, conspiracies forever assumed. Lewis Carroll, an unmarried and eccentric man from the Victorian era whose life revolved around the entertainment and portrayal of little girls tends, therefore, to make people nervous.…
Record Reviews
AMY RIGBY MIDDLESENCE (KOCH) Amy Rigby’s debut as a solo artist, 1996’s Diary of a Mod Housewife, was such a compelling tour de force that it seems impossible that a follow-up would not be as gripping. It’s sad to report, then, that with Middlesence, Rigby seems to have hit the proverbial sophomore slump. What seemed…
Short Cuts
Sorry, Vincent Ward … Xena: Warrior Princess has it all over you this week. In the first of her two-part season premiere this week, Xena goes back to hell and beyond to retrieve her dear Gabrielle and what she endures makes your vision of hell in What Dreams May Come look like a walk in…
Connected Events
Thu, Oct 8, 5pm: “Reflections on Lewis Carroll’s Life” Morton Cohen, Carroll scholar and Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York and author of Carroll’s authoritative biography, will speak on Carroll’s life. Reception to follow. Sun, Oct 11, 2-5pm: “A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party” In conjunction with Museum Day, a tea party will…
Razing the Roof
Century House is one of 12 women’s co-ops in danger of losing its lease with the university. photograph by Jana Birchum In the scheme of things, many universities are uncertain about how to deal with on-campus cooperatives, according to Jim Jones, executive director of the Intercooperative Council at the University of Michigan. “What makes problems…
Eagle Woman
Wambade Wiyan Niula Bedit Mujer Aguila Eagle Woman G�mez at Alma de Mujer with “Madre del Mundo.” photo by Alan Pogue Austin suffered a great loss last week with the death of Marsha A. G�mez, artist, activist, teacher, and community leader. On Tuesday, September 29, Marsha was killed on the front patio of her home…
In Person
Henry Rollins at Liberty Lunch “Spoken word” is the taglineused to get rock music fans to listen to literature. It sounds a little less streamlined and hip to call what Henry Rollins does storytelling, but that’s exactly what he does. Go ahead and embellish it with adjectives, like “urban” or “punk,” but essentially, it’s one…
Connecting the Dots
Six years ago, Steven W. Smith, the attorney who threatened to sue to end the use of all-female co-ops at UT, found several plaintiffs who were eager to sue the university law school over the fact that they were not admitted while minority students with equal or lesser credentials got in. One of those plaintiffs…
We Can Be Heroes
If you are an ordinary little turtle, and you plan to grow up to be an ordinary big turtle, you have no trouble finding role models. They are all around you. However, if you are an ordinary little turtle with hopes of becoming an extraordinary turtle, a turtle unlike any the world has ever known,…
Postscripts
Re-joining the ranks of Austin authors is mystery novelist Steven Saylor, who just closed on a home-away-from-home in Travis Heights. Shortly after graduating from UT in 1978, Saylor moved to San Francisco, but he has always maintained close ties to Austin. (He agented his friend Lars Eighner’s Travels With Lizbeth, for example.) Known for his…
Mobile Home Motif
The chamber was briefly host to a discussion of corporate responsibility for use of the public airwaves, as the council passed a resolution asking Time Warner Cable to drop its plans to move the AISD channel from 8 to 22. In case any Time Warner executives were home watching Channel 6, the council made its…
Coach’s Corner
I was going to a post-season baseball game. My first one. My dad had an extra ticket to game four in Chicago. The Cubs only needed to win just one measly game to make a game four happen. In addition, I was working on credentials for game five in Houston. I was one excited sports…
Point of Sale
Tracey Tarlton and Peggy Hailey, Book People’s book buyers photograph by John Anderson Kirk Lynn and Kerrie Loyd sell books for a living, but they don’t ring up customers’ purchases. They don’t direct customers to any particular section of a bookstore, although they’re paid to know exactly where those sections are and why they’re there.…
The Alfaro Case
Doggett with Erin Hall and Jeanne Starzel of the Texas Chapter of the American Cancer Society photograph by Charles Steck Answer No. 3: Dow Chemical and Shell Oil Company jointly manufacture a pesticide called DBCP, which has the noteworthy side effect of rendering sterile the men and women who are exposed to it. Banned in…
About AIDS
A long-awaited development is apparently just around the corner: a quick HIV test that would be available for broad use. One of the challenges for testing programs is getting people to come back to the clinic for their test results, which may be up to two weeks later, and perhaps a third never return. A…
From Leftist to Left-ish
U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, 1998 photograph by Charles Steck Answer #1: The “real” garbage can — i.e., the place where you put “wet waste” — is almost impossible to find in Room 126 of the Cannon House Office Building. Receptacles for recyclable discards, on the other hand, are everywhere.”He is fanatical about recycling,” says one…
Day Trips
Port A Beach Lodge in Port Aransas photograph by Gerald E. McLeod Port A Beach Lodge looks like a beach shack or maybe a rundown honky-tonk from the beach. Looks can be deceiving, but in this case, not by much. What the Lodge lacks in haughty ambiance it more than makes up with authentic character.…
“The Most Wonderful Life”
photograph by Alan Pogue Riding shotgun through Lloyd Doggett’s 30-year wild journey in politics has been Elizabeth Belk (that’s Libby to you) Doggett, who famously first met Lloyd when he was running for UT student body president, and she was assigned by her sorority to evaluate the candidates. He got all their votes, and she…
Page Two
Spent the weekend, or at least certain late night chunks of it, watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, in honor of the premiere of their recut of their classic debut Blood Simple at the Austin Heart of Film Conference and Festival. Lebowski is one of the great cinematic non-sequiturs, a kind of mobius…
U.S. House Members
and their November challengers , by district Democrats currently hold 17 of 30 Texas seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Though the incumbents are currently favored to win reelection in all 30 districts, six Democrats are in close races, compared to only two Republicans. REPUBLICANS SAFE SEATS 3 Samuel R. ‘Sam’ Johnson (R-Dallas) Ken…
