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Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

Elka

Like sadistic teenagers who introduce fire ants into an otherwise docile ant farm, the producers of MTV’s voyeuristic soap opera The Real World make casting decisions based not on avoiding conflict but on encouraging it. This season’s stereotypes are a jock, a poet, a comely lesbian, a city girl, a

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Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

Barbara Barrie

I enrolled at the University of Texas in 1950 during a post-war period that produced many talented individuals. Harvey Schmidt, Tom Jones, Liz Smith, Robert Benton, Pat Hingle, Word Baker, Kathryn Grant (later Mrs. Bing Crosby), and I all graduated with degrees in drama. We did lots of dance concerts

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Film & TV|
July 31, 1997

Heeeeeere’s Gary!

After years of laboring in virtual anonymity as Mr. Amy Grant, Texan Gary Chapman has his own talk show on The Nashville Network and is known by a vastly more flattering moniker: the David Letterman of country.

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Sports|
July 31, 1997

Major Minor

Jimmie Lee Solomon went from working a small Texas ranch to running big league baseball’s farm system. Now he may be up for one of the game’s top jobs.

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Arts & Entertainment|
July 31, 1997

Fond Farewell

GARY CARTWRIGHT’S STORY COVERING the last months of the life of his son Mark [“Nothing to It,” June 1997] was extremely moving. Most impressive of all was the dignity with which he and his son approached the inevitable. The communication shared during this time was inherently more intimate, and this

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Music|
July 31, 1997

Royal Blue

For decades, Bobby Bland has personified the definitive post–T-Bone Walker Texas R&B style. Even at 67, no one can dethrone him.

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Sports|
July 31, 1997

Turn Out the Lights

The Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion is over, but for one evening it was possible to remember when pro football was fun, players were loyal, and even a sportswriter could fall in love with his team.

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Art|
July 31, 1997

Folks

The boom in “outsider” art that began in New York, Chicago, and Atlanta has finally come to Texas, driven by true visionaries whose images conjure worlds that may have never existed but are invariably inhabitedby penetrating psychological truths.

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Books|
July 31, 1997

J. C. Herz

Growing up in Houston, J. C. Herz spent much of her time defending the city from incoming ballistic missiles. She accomplished this while sitting in front of her family’s television and playing Missile Command—just one of the many video games lovingly described in her second book, Joystick Nation (Little, Brown;

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Arts & Entertainment|
July 31, 1997

Terrence McNally

One day when I was in the seventh grade at Christ the King School in Dallas, the Ursuline nun who taught our class dragged in a phonograph with 78 rpm records from the convent. She put on an album of Puccini love duets sung by Licia Albanese and James Milton.

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Art|
June 30, 1997

Hail, Mary Ellen

For thirty years Mary Ellen Mark has made her name as a documentary photographer by not shying away from tough assignments, whether that means traveling for six months in India to shoot circus folk or infiltrating the world of runaway kids in Seattle. Chronicling life at Abilene’s House of Yahweh

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Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

Stick a Rourke in It—It’s Done.

Most nights it’s an ordinary shopping center, but during the months of May and June, Fort Worth’s Town Center Mall became a war zone. That was the principal location where Mickey Rourke, the brawl-prone star of 9 1/2 Weeks and Diner, knocked out the indie feature Recoil. Rourke plays a

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Arts & Entertainment|
June 30, 1997

Quiz Show

What in the world can make learning fun? Would you believe—the National Geographic Society? When the staid Washington, D.C., institution wanted to turn the database of questions from its National Geography Bee into a computer game that would appeal to parents and kids alike, it turned to Austin’s Human Code,

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Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

F. Murray Abraham

I arrived in El Paso as a small child and grew up within sight of the Rio Grande. Juárez was part of our lives, and it was comfortable and easy to cross the border. My friends and I were part of rat packs: We had jackets, and zip guns were

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Music|
May 31, 1997

Punkytonk

The state prison name game; Dallas alternative-country band the Old 97’s is feeling no depression.

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Music|
May 31, 1997

Satisfaction

That’s what Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall got on their recent trip to West Texas. West Texas retailers got it too.

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Music|
May 31, 1997

Triumph of the Williams

After five years ex-Austinite Lucinda Williams’ follow-up to her 1992 CD Sweet Old World is finally kicking up dust. The album’s title, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (American Recordings), refers not to the sound of the Grammy award winner’s voice but to the cross-country travels that inspired such

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Art|
May 31, 1997

Captions and Comments

Left: Untitled, 1993. Right: Beware, 1994. The old stereotypes have only been repackaged, Charles says. Right: Clockwise from top left, four paintings from the Liberty Bros. Permanent Daily Circus series: Blue Period, 1995, Oop’s, 1995, Desperados Leap for Life, 1996, and Smiles, 1996. “I’m trying to be as honest

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Art|
May 31, 1997

Shock Therapy

By employing stereotypes like Sambo and Aunt Jemima, Austin painter Michael Ray Charles hopes to master the art of racial healing.

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Arts & Entertainment|
May 31, 1997

Uma Pemmaraju

While she was still in high school, Uma Pemmaraju persuaded the editors of the San Antonio Express-News to let her write the weekly fishing report—even though she was, so to speak, out to sea on the subject. “I knew nothing about fishing,” she says. “I was basically calling around different

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Film & TV|
May 31, 1997

Jack Valenti

When I got out of high school at three o’clock each day, I went to work giving away movie passes and hanging up posters in barbershops and drugstores for coming attractions at the Iris or the Texan or the Ritz theaters in downtown Houston. Unfortunately, when I graduated I didn’t

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Books|
May 31, 1997

The Doctor Is In

For El Paso physician Abraham Verghese, writing about life and death in the age of AIDS is a prescription for literary success.

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 30, 1997

Mission Accomplished

The newest game from Dallas’ Digifx Entertainment is ready for prime time. In Mission to Nexus Prime, whose storyline has been crafted by Star Wars author Timothy Zahn, you command your troops through a series of battles to gain control of planet Nexus Prime and its complex network of wormholes

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Music|
April 30, 1997

Jaci Velasquez

“Sure, I miss having a locker and going to the prom,” says gospel-singing sensation Jaci Velasquez. True enough, the seventeen-year-old Houston native has not had what you would call a normal adolescence. At age ten she began traveling around the U.S. and Latin America with her family’s music ministry. Four

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 30, 1997

Liz Smith

I entered the University of Texas before World War II ended; I was fresh out of divorce court. I didn’t know a soul in Austin, and there were only very young men—prodigies—or very old men on campus. American guys were still at war! So I spent my time swinging between

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Sports|
April 1, 1997

Hardball

Whether playing for the luckless Houston Astros, running the world-champion New York Yankees, or confronting racism, Bob Watson has always stepped up to the plate.

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Books|
April 1, 1997

Teen Idol

The career of Austin young-adult writer Rob Thomas is going through a growth spurt.

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Music|
April 1, 1997

Milligan’s Island

With his resounding voice and striking appearance, Austin’s Malford Milligan stands out in a sea of Texas soul singers.

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Art|
April 1, 1997

Marathon Man

In 1988, when James H. Evans was in his mid-thirties, he left behind a successful photography studio in Austin and moved to remote Marathon, where he took a job as a cook at the Gage Hotel and shot pictures on the side. “Everyone thought I was nuts,” he says. “I

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Arts & Entertainment|
April 1, 1997

Game Daze

IF FILLING OUT YOUR TAX forms this month wasn’t complicated enough for you, Richardson’s 7th Level has a new computer game that may be right up your alley. In G-Nome, you can pilot a lumbering craft that looks like one of the Imperial walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. But

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Books|
April 1, 1997

Let Them Read Shrake

It would be wrong to say that Bud Shrake has finished writing one third of a new novel; it’s actually an old novel, one he has been writing off and on for the past fifteen years. “It’s about love, violence, sex, and murder,” the 65-year-old Austinite explains, and is set

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Art|
April 1, 1997

Range Rover

After fifty years of traveling the Southwest, ranch photographer Frank Reeves left behind a vast body of work and unforgettable portraits of the cowboy’s way of life.

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Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Sundance Across Texas

Breezeway, Suburbia, and Words of Our Ancients may have been our only pure-pedigree entries in Park City, but other films boasted Lone Star connections. Most notable was director-screenwriter Morgan J. Freeman’s sweet but hard-hitting teenage street drama Hurricane, which won three awards. As they did for Bottle Rocket, fellow Dallas

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Music|
March 1, 1997

Tenor of the Times

Dallas sax player Marchel Ivery has impressed jazz greats like Red Garland and Art Blakey. So why isn’t he more famous? For one thing, he won’t blow his own horn.

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Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Pair of Aces

Last January, when senior editor Gary Cartwright flew to the Hawaiian island of Maui to see Kris Kristofferson, it wasn’t just to interview a movie star and hit songwriter—it was also to visit an old acquaintance (see “A Star Is Reborn”). The two met in 1984 through author Bud

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