THERE IS AN OBLIGATORY SCENE in every movie about the border between Texas and Mexico: A man draws a line in the dirt with his boot. The line means something different in each movie, and yet, there it is, a narrow little rut in the ground that the characters gesture
Listening to conjunto queen Eva Ybarra.
Those whispers about Melissa Etheridge are true: She will play Port Arthur–born Janis Joplin in a forthcoming feature film. Director Mark Rocco (Murder in the First) has secured the rights to Myra Friedman’s 1973 Joplin bio, Buried Alive, and the rights to Joplin’s songs, and he’s talking to Etheridge’s label,
AUSTINITE MARCIA BALL’s File Under Blues (Rounder), which she is co-producing with guitarist Derek O’Brien and saxophonist Mark “Kaz” Kazanoff, is in production at Austin’s Arlyn studios. The hardest-tinkling pianist in show business is recording songs like “The Right Tool for the Job” between her more than fifty touring dates
IF MULTIMEDIA were a competitive sport, Archimedia Interactive would have a shot at the gold. The Dallas company recently released 1996 U.S. Olympic Team ($29.95), the official CD-ROM of the summer games, which can be purchased in stores or on the World Wide Web (www.olympiccdrom.com). The disc features extensive profiles
Mr. Peppermint doffs his skimmer in a fond if bittersweet farewell to all the kids he entertained on TV for so many years.
It doesn’t matter that his most famous pupil was shark- bitten at the Masters. Butch Harmon is still Texas’ hottest golf pro since Harvey Penick.
The world’s top riders take the bull by the horns in Del Rio.
Texas artists versus Texas galleries.
LEAVING THE COUNTRY THIS SUMMER? You can still get your fill of Houston artists. Sculptor Joseph Havel will be taking his solo exhibition of shirts and shirt fragments to Kiev’s Soros Center for Contemporary Art, and possibly to the Herzliyya Museum of Art in Israel. This month Havel’s shirt fragments
Austin’s Butthole Surfers have always been very strange. But these days, the strangest thing about them is their mainstream respectability.
Ann Richards gets ready for prime time.
Hot CDsGrammy award aside, Flaco Jiménez’s last solo album was a big disappointment, for it showed how far Texas’ greatest accordionist had strayed. After all those studio sit-ins with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Dwight Yoakam and those trips around the globe as the ambassador of Tex-Mex, his
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker—and now Junior Brown? The former community college teacher is the latest outlaw to hijack Texas country music, and he may be the greatest.
MAKING A SPLASH—so to speak—is what Cheril Santini does best. As a member of Southern Methodist University’s diving team in the early nineties, the Dallas native made All-American ten times, was a finalist for NCAA woman of the year, and was named one of the nation’s top ten college women
I REMEMBER ONE SUMMER when there were snakes galore on Lake LBJ near Kingsland. We have five kids in our family, and we’d all go swimming in the lake, but when we’d see something in the water—and couldn’t tell if it was a turtle or a water moccasin—we’d jump out.
Dallas photographer Laura Wilson has made up for lost time. The 55-year-old Massachusetts native is a regular contributor to Texas Monthly, for whom she has shot portraits of Laredo debutantes and Mullin footballers, and she has also worked for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Sunday
The surprising sound of the Internet.
Houston’s new team player.
SMALL TIME HITS the big time in The Incredible Shrinking Character (Cyberdreams), a new CD-ROM written by Austin mystery novelist Jesse Sublett and designed by Go Go Studios of Austin. In this spoof of fifties B-movies, you play a private eye who’s been hired to find a girl kidnapped by
Oak Cliff native Roy Hargrove may not have the depth and seasoning of Wynton Marsalis, but the 26-year-old prodigy could still be one of the great jazz trumpeters of our day.
Molly Ivins and Bob Wade on TV.
Cesar Alejandro’s low-budget action movies aren’t exactly number one with a bullet, but the El Paso director is sure he’ll be hot in Hollywood—some day.
For the Wilsons of Dallas, taking pictures was a family affair. Today the mother is a successful photographer and her boys are hot Hollywood commodities. Here’s a look at Laura Wilson’s personal album.
When he left the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 with a broken ankle, a backpack, and a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, Arlo Eisenberg had no intention of becoming a big wheel—he just wanted to skate. Yet within three months, the Dallas native was performing with Team Rollerblade,
In 1980 I was doing defense contract work overseas for the government, but I was getting kind of tired of it, so I decided to move back to Austin and begin acting again. To pay the bills I did temp work and drove a cab for Roy’s Taxi, but then
The art of throwing punches, the science of skipping rope, and other reasons why boxing is a hit with me.
The big-screen bungling of Rosellen Brown’s Before and After.
Houston attorney-novelist Eric L. Harry flashed on the idea for his new technothriller while rafting on a river. In Society of the Mind (Harper Collins, $25), due out in June, a mad genius lures a young Harvard professor to his secret island compound to psychoanalyze an equally disturbed computer…New York
Austinite Lukas Haas is back on the big screen alongside Winona Ryder, Julia Roberts, and Jack Nicholson. For now, though, he isn’t letting Hollywood go to his head.
After twenty years as the reigning queen of the soaps, the essential truth about Morgan Fairchild remains: She’s not a bitch, but she plays one on TV.
Renée Zellweger’s acting résumé to date is a mixed bag of (mostly) generational posturing. The 26-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin had a nonspeaking role in Dazed and Confused, then took on heftier parts in films like Love and a .45 and Empire Records. But Zellweger, who
Dallas and Houston have done it; Beaumont and Corpus Christi have too. So why hasn’t Austin built a respectable art museum? It comes down to three things: money, management, and mission.
Steve Earle feels alright.
Beloved by bubbas and the Butthole Surfers alike, 350-pound yodeler Don Walser is country’s current cross-generational king of cool.
Texas writers go Hollywood.
Austin singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin is at Cedar Creek studios this month completing a new album, to be released by Columbia Records as early as this summer. Some songs will be produced by John Leventhal, who did Colvin’s Steady On, and others by Malcolm Burn, who has worked with the Neville
With high school basketball playoffs just around the bend, our thoughts turned to the mechanics of the game—and so we called head boys coach Robert Hughes of Dunbar High School in Fort Worth, whose lifetime record of 1,082-192 makes him the fourth-winningest coach in the country. A two-time All-American at
You know the real reason Texas Stadium has no roof? So Jerry Jones can get his head inside. (Or, how the Cowboys owner’s ego makes it hard to root for America’s Team.)
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; such is the case with the image-rich writing of Colum McCann, whose first novel, Songdogs (Metropolitan Books, $22.50), has won praise from both The New Yorker and the New York Times. A native of Ireland, the 31-year-old credits Texas with jump-starting his career.
I had my first dancing lesson in Amarillo with Constance Ferguson. Constance had been out in California studying ballet with Theodore Kosloff, one of Pavlova’s partners, but she came back to Amarillo and wanted to open a dancing school. Up on the very top floor of a great old hotel
The conventional wisdom is that the independents are good and the national chains are evil—but don’t judge a bookstore by its cover.
Long mocked for making unrecognizable pieces of junk, Texas Modernists strike back in a superb exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Snow business comes to Houston.
His recent performances in Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty have been simply divine, but for his most heavenly role yet, John Travolta heads to Texas—his first time back since Urban Cowboy. In Michael, co-written and directed by Nora Ephron, Travolta plays a real live angel, while William Hurt and Andie
The Internet gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “getting wired for Mardi Gras”—there are several helpful sites covering New Orleans’ bacchanalian Carnival, which ends with Fat Tuesday on February 20. One of the most festive and informative is the city’s official page (http://www.neosoft.com/citylink/ mardigr/default.html), which offers traditional music
As befits the creators of a movie called Bottle Rocket, the careers of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have taken off with a bang. The twentysomething filmmakers, who met at the University of Texas, first produced a thirteen-minute black and white short of the same name about three bumbling wannabe
Feasting our eyes on a blind team roper.
Gauging Barney’s Universal appeal.
The best books and CDs from Texas.
