In Person
Raw Deal at Fringeware Ken Smith signed my copy of his new book Raw Deal with the phrase, “Sometimes life just sucks.” The author of Ken’s Guide to the Bible and co-author of Roadside America thus succinctly provided the theme of his new book. Raw Deal: Horrible and Ironic Stories of Forgotten Americans (Blast Books,…
Foul Pay
UT Head Football Coach Mack Brown draws dollar signs as well as Xs and Os. There is no question that football drives the UT sports machine. The school collects over $9 million a year in revenue from the football program. Of that amount, about $3.6 million is annually transferred into the women’s athletic department. That…
Shopping for Fangs
Shopping for Fangs NR, 87 min. Directed by Quentin Lee, Justin Lee, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Radmar Jao, Jeanne Chin, Clint Jung, Lela Lee, John Cho. Not reviewed at press time. This Asian-American dark comedy of pop culture features a frigid wife, an acerbic waitress, and a werewolf disguised as a payroll…
Postscripts
by Claiborne Smith In the Works Nothing is set in stone yet, but it seems highly likely that by November, a radio series called Bookmark, which will feature authors reading for about three minutes from their own works, will be on the listening horizon with production headquarters here in Austin. KUT, at least, has agreed…
Pay Disparity in Women’s Athletics
Coaching Disparity at NCAA Division I Schools Average Salaries for Head Coaches Men’s Women’s Disparity Niagara Univ. $159,829 $38,300 317.3% UT Austin $291,587 $88,219 230.5% Univ. of Fla. $286,274 $88,325 224.1% St. Louis Univ. $ 88,901 $28,525 211.7% U. of Houston $128,570 $43,973 192.4% Overall average $ 54,800 $39,400 39.1% (all 306 Div. I Schools)…
About AIDS
When sexual risk reduction messages are put out for the public, does the audience understand? A new study from the University of California at San Francisco suggests that more often than we would have expected, they do not understand even basic sex terminology when “politely” worded. In a very large national survey, one in 20…
Eastside Discontent
In other council business, the theme this week was closure, as a couple of long-hovering issues were finally resolved. “We built bridges in World War II that weren’t fought over as much as this,” noted one observer as the council approved the “double helix” version of a bridge that will cross Town Lake roughly at…
Coach’s Corner
Last week, business found me at a turkey processing plant. Why? For one, the plant’s in the foothills of the Rockies. It’s cool up there. Then, there was golf. I made certain the turkey guys understood that playing golf was part of the deal. I fantasized about an exclusive Denver country club. Plus, I figured…
West Lake Hills Under Siege
Then, on August 20, opponents set up a tent and dispersed campaign materials at the annual Westlake High School football scrimmage and Meet the Team barbecue. They distributed signs, banners, posters, bumper stickers, and buttons to curious onlookers. A brouhaha ensued. School officials, including Athletics Director Ebbie Neptune and Interim Superintendent Jerry Molinoski, asked the…
Day Trips
Leo came to the Texas Exotic Feline Foundation without a lion’s signature mane after he had been neutered and declawed. He weighed more than 800 pounds. photograph by Gerald E. McLeod At the Texas Exotic Feline Foundation (TEFF) outside of Boyd in North Texas, one of the first things our guide told us was: “We…
Love of Labor
The last edition of “Media Clips” called on the local mainstream media to recognize the importance of Labor Day and give us coverage of actual labor stories, rather than just coverage of hot dogs and swimming at the lake. So how did they do? The Austin American-Statesman wasn’t half bad. Their best coverage was actually…
Page Two
Used to be if I was up at 7am, it meant I had to catch a plane, had a very rare early morning appointment, or, most likely, had been up all night. Now, it’s 7:38am, pouring rain, and we’re running a little late for third grade. The traffic in the neighborhood is heavy, parents taking…
Naked City
No sleeping late this Saturday: A half-day brainstorming session to hammer out a community vision for the 54-acre Town Lake Parkstarts at 9am at the Austin Convention Center, Room 6. Citizens will work in groups to develop a plan for the tract where Auditorium Shores, Palmer Auditorium, and the City Coliseum sit. There’s a city…
Public Notice
In two weeks, Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins, and Austin is so packed with events that we couldn’t wait ’til the first of October to begin them. Coming Together to Conquer Cancer March in Austin takes place Sat, Sep 26, noon-1pm on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol. The event is a rally for…
Six-String Reverb
Justin McGuire and Jeffrey Falcon in Six-String Samurai The soft-spoken Mungia readily admits to having entered the Loyola Marymount University film program with the intention of using it as a springboard to direct his first feature. The question was: What kind of feature would it be? A longtime fan of Hong Kong actioners and directors…
Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The King of Greece in 1920 died from an infected monkey bite. Sept. 23, 1998 will mark the 10th anniversary of the “Mr. Smarty Pants Knows” column. Thanks to all you readers and honorary Smarty Pants out there who have sent in factoids — it’s been a great trip. Alexander Graham Bell first proposed the…
Unstrung But Not Unsung
Six-String Samurai… what can I say? There are certain moments in life when you know, right then, that you were meant to be in a place at a time with certain people to experience that which lies before you. I was meant to see Six-String Samurai at its last showing at SXSW this past March.…
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
Now and again in history there comes a mark in time, a point of no return, a day when the horrors that will determine our future assemble all at once in a gruesomely grinning chorus line and everything becomes too obvious to ignore but too overwhelming to control. Historians may look at The New York…
“For the Fat Girls”
The Emmy Awards blah blah blah. Let’s get straight to the point. Looking at a fall TV season that seems overly dependent on testosterone, there was one bright spot in the Emmy wins, and I don’t just mean The Larry Sanders Show. One for the fat girls! Camryn Mannheim of ABC’s The Practice celebrates her…
Articulations
After the marathon presentation of the 23rd annual B. Iden Payne Awards — at nearly four hours, it outlasted your average production of G�tterd�mmerung — the city’s stagehounds were more than unusually anxious approaching this year’s ceremony. As it ended up, however, the 24th Payne Awards finished in record time. By 9:30pm Monday night, September…
Food-O-File
The revised and updated edition of the national dining guide titledWhere the Locals Eat (Magellan Press, $19.95 paper) arrived this week. The guide claims to offer reliable restaurant listings in both large and small cities in every state in the nation. The publishers aver that the information in every area was generated by local researches…
Scanlines
D: James Frawley, 1979 Frank Oz, Charles Durning, Austin Pendleton Battle for the Planet of the Apes D: J. Lee Thompson, 1973 Roddy McDowall, Claude Akins Phantom of the Paradise D: Brian De Palma, 1974 Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper Happy belated birthday to Paul Williams! Yes, the same Paul Williams who’s best remembered…
Exhibitionism
Hyde Park Theatre, through October 10 Running Time: 2 hrs, 25 min So if the thesis of Judith Rich Harris’ buzz-heavy new book The Nurture Assumption is correct and parents exert almost no influence on the development of their children, then why are they all that our country’s playwrights write about? The looming legacy of…
Roscoe’s Italian Kitchen
1809 Manor Rd., 457-0006 Mon-Sat, 11am-11pm Roscoe’s Italian Kitchen at the Lake 13825 FM 2769 (aka Volente Road), 257-7192 “Due to nonpayment of tabs, there will be no more tabs” — sign on Roscoe’s counter Roscoe’s Italian Kitchen at the Lake is the kind of place that people who care about atmosphere — and I…
Short Cuts
The 23rd Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing. The 10-day-long event is one of the world’s top festivals, hosting an impressive collection of movies from around the world which, in turn, attract an incredible number of industry professionals and journalists from all over. This year, a total of 311 films from 53 countries…
Young Guns and Typewriters
by Robi Polgar Kirk Lynn photograph by Brett Brookshire Austin bursts at the seams with writers. At any given moment, someone is writing a song or penning a screenplay; poetry and prose litter Austin’s diverse literary circles; papers shuffle and flit in academia; a robust appetite for information keeps the presses rolling for daily, weekly,…
Dancing About Architecture
You already knew that Lucinda Williams is a perfectionist, so it wasn’t all that surprising that after taping an Austin City Limits appearance in July, Williams decided she wasn’t happy with the performance. A bit more surprising, however, is ACL’s announcement that, what the hey, they’re going to re-shoot the whole magoo in December. As…
We Survived Booger Lake
We didn’t take much food on purpose, these couple of weeks we survived on Booger Lake,” I told her. “But my cousin had this black powder gun he built from a kit and we were able to bag ourselves a real nice armadillo. Or was it a possum? I can’t remember.” “You’re full of it,…
Graphics
from Too Much Coffee Man’s Guide For The Perplexed What’s really perp-lexing is why Wheeler and Ol’ Coffee Head have managed to stay so far underground all these years. Despite the chatty forward by local transplant Mike Judge and a brief afterward by Wheeler in which he smilingly bemoans the fate of cell phones and…
Live Shots
Alamodome, San Antonio, September 5 It was like a Martin Scorsese movie — hyperreal. Twenty thousand Texans jumping up and down, shouting at the top of their voices, rattling San Antonio’s Alamodome like a rice-paper aviary. The moment the Beastie Brothers’ DJ Mixmaster Mike stepped into the ring — the stage an island in the…
Dead Car on My Daughter’s Birthday
The engine block of my Toyota cracks as I’m driving south on I-35. I’m on my way to pick my daughter up from school so I can take her to her birthday party at McDonald’s. Having just passed the Oltorf exit, the strange clicketa-clicketa-click that I’ve noticed coming from the front of the car since…
The Lost Cause
by Michael Ventura Jack Jackson’s Lost Cause: The TrueStory of Famed Gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is what they call a “graphic novel.” Well, it’s graphic enough � without pictures, the 148-page story would shrink to maybe 25 pages, if that. But is it a novel? Or has Jackson abducted the word just because he has…
Forsaking the Spotlight
Responsibility and attention: None of the Panhandlers seem to be courting it, with the possible exception of Bonta, a prodigiously talented pianoman who is the only ‘handler currently leading his own group. While they all have a lot of respect for the frontmen and women they play for, individually, the Panhandlers have no desire to…
Short of the Bend
Lakeway Drive, west off Hwy 620 S., 261-6600 Daily, 7am-2pm, 6-10pm When the Chronicle food writers toured the lake area for a roundup of dining opportunities in the summer of 1997, they began their day with breakfast in the Travis Room. It appeared to be a perfectly respectable example of a resort hotel restaurant, one…
Graphics
from The Story Of The Jews Stan Mack’s “Real LifeFunnies” was one of the best things about The Village Voice from 1975-95. Unlike most comic strips it got better with time as Mack seemed to become a more compassionate and politically aware person. His series about the Tompkins Square riots in the late 1980s ranks…
West Coast Meets South of Texas
\ illustration by Nathan Jensen At the most basic level,Los Super Seven is a Mexican-American all-star band made up of Tex-Mex legends Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez, David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos, Austin-based country star Rick Trevino, local Tejano superstar Ruben Ramos, and Texas icon and rocker Joe Ely. However, the story…
Funny Games
Austrian moralist Haneke fashions a tense drama from the sadistic games people play.
The Wrong Cause
by Jesse Sublett John Wesley Hardin was an asshole. That’s just my opinion. To some people he is a hero. Indeed, clouds of ambiguity, ambivalence, and controversy swirl about the legend of Texas’ premier gunfighter like the clouds of gunsmoke that fatally enveloped the 40-odd men he killed. With a body count like that, you’d…
Los Super Seven
(RCA) Freddy Fender, Flaco Jimenez, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Rick Trevino, Ruben Ramos, and Joe Ely: The real Latin Playboys. Unlike that Los Lobos side project, however, Los Super Seven aren’t avant-garde, but rather the other end of the spectrum: traditional. More in line with that little ol’ band from East L.A.’s back-to-roots album, La…
Six-String Samurai
Six-String Samurai 1998, PG-13, 91 min. Directed by Lance Mungia, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Jeffrey Falcon, Justin Mcquire, Stephane Gauger. The whole Road Warrior/Death Race 2000 post-apocalyptic hero genre is stone-cold dead, and no amount of clammy-lipped CPR from Kevin Costner is going to bring it back. But with the feral genius…
