Fifty years ago, a plane carrying Buddy Holly crashed in a remote Iowa cornfield. This month, hundreds of fans will gather at the ballroom where he played his final show to sing, dance, and mourn the greatest rock star ever to come out of Texas.
After his son died of a drug overdose in his fraternity house at SMU, Tom Stiles began asking questions that campus authorities preferred not to answer. Two years later, he is still learning the truth about what happened—and why.
How perfect is this: The best new restaurant to open during the Year of Financial Meltdown is located in the lobby of an old Houston bank. What better place to invest your money than in the soul-nourishing flavor combos of chef Michael Kramer’s beautifully composed plates?
The looming clash between Republican gubernatorial candidates Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison may not be as fearsome as the storied Ali-Frazier bout, but it’s the heavyweight showdown every Texas political junkie has been waiting for.
BECKER VINEYARDS 464 Becker Farms Road Stonewall 830-644-2681 http://www.beckervineyards.com Valentine’s Dinner Chefs At Large of Fredericksburg will create a tantalizing menu, and wines will be paired with each course. Prepayment and reservations required. Dress attire is business. February 14: 6:30 p.m.
The acclaimed Austin guitarist and producer (Blaze Foley, Lucinda Williams, Slaid Cleaves, Ray Wylie Hubbard) is also fast becoming known—on the basis of his 2007 album, Diamonds to Dust (Blue Corn), and this month’s Last Exit to Happyland (Rootball)—as a songwriter. So how are things going? I haven’t had…
Timothy Cole finally gets his day in court, but doesn′t live to see his name cleared of a crime he didn′t commit.
Spoon front man Britt Daniel, taking his sweet time on a new album.
So Raising Sand, the collaborative album between Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, produced by Fort Worth native T Bone Burnett, cleaned house with five trophies at Sunday night’s Grammys. Was anyone besides me not surprised? I guess it could have been a disaster, with all the egos involved, but anything…
How a high-profile member of Austin′s radical progressive community became an FBI informant.
When T. Boone Pickens launched his Pickens Plan last summer, crude oil was at $136 a barrel. Now, with crude at or below $40, does anyone care anymore about what Pickens has to say?
The two-thirds majority rule has been the foundation of parliamentary procedure in the Texas Senate for centuries. Is all that about to change?
I’m closing in on 100 “friends” on Facebook. That benchmark forces me to confront a terrible truth. I don’t really have 100 friends.
Every once in a while, it all seems to bite me in the you-know-what.
An extended interview with the author of Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.
On January 13, the girls’ basketball team for the Covenant School of Dallas, an elite private Christian school in upscale North Dallas, demolished its opponents from the Dallas Academy, a lesser known East Dallas school that focuses on students who face a variety of learning problems.
Everyone wanted to be here to touch a piece of history, and they were there the day the world changed.
Recipe from Dough Pizzeria Napoletana, San Antonio Pizza Dough 1 cup Caputo OO Pizzeria Flour or blend 50/50 King Arthur Bread and all-purpose 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon filtered water 1/2 teaspoon sea salt 3/4 teaspoon dry active yeast (fresh yeast cake is preferable but hard to…
Recipe from Charlie Palmer at the Joule, Dallas Corn Dog Batter 3 cups cornmeal 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 1/2 cups buttermilk 1 1/4 cups water Combine dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.
3 large butternut squash 1 cup chopped white onions 3/4 cup honey 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom 3 tablespoons ground ginger 4 1/2 cups water, heated coarse salt and freshly ground white pepper Peel, halve,…
1 tablespoon red curry paste 2 pounds butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and chopped 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock 1 1/2 cups coconut milk 1 large red chile, seeded and finely sliced cilantro for garnish In a large saucepan over medium heat, add the curry…
. . . With Spinach-Speck Salad, Brown Butter, and Pine Nut Crema. Recipe from Bolla, Dallas 1/4 cup brown butter 12 sea scallops 2 cups spinach salad 1 cup red-wine vinaigrette (warm) 1 cup pine nut crema Seared Sea Scallops 1 tablespoon olive oil 1…
. . . With Wild Mushrooms and Rutabaga Purée. Recipe from Oloroso, San Antonio. 6 slices prosciutto, sliced as thin as possible 8 ounces wild mushrooms, such as chanterelles, hedgehogs, or trumpets 4 to 5 baby purple kohlrabi, stems and leaves removed 1 medium rutabaga 2…
If the crash that followed the boom hasn’t exactly been our fault, the result has been that same sad sense that maybe we’ll never have fun again.
On Inauguration Day, Midland, Texas was like a parallel universe to the rest of the country.
On Tuesday of the week that this issue arrives on the newsstand, President George W. Bush will rise from his bed on the second floor of the White House for the last time. According to custom, he will receive President-elect Barack Obama for coffee sometime later that morning. The…
Before Mark Seliger talks to me about photography [Reporter, Texas Monthly Talks, December 2008], he needs to study the terrific cover of the December issue. Dick Mitchell Austin You failed to mention the best hidden cafe and beer joint in Texas: the Back Door Cafe, in Roosevelt…
In light of the American military’s increasing dependence on corporate entities, Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War questions our government’s ability to oversee massively profitable armed forces contracts. The author, who lives in Oakland, California, is the managing editor of the investigative…
In the twenty-first century, when the American consumer can choose from among hundreds of flat-screen TVs, David Eagleman’s pocket-size work of philosofiction, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, is nothing if not culturally consistent: With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the…
In a sense, Marion Stone, the narrator of Abraham Verghese’s sparkling first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a dramatically enhanced doppelgänger of his creator. Like Verghese, he is born in Ethiopia to Indian parents, becomes a physician, and relocates to America (Verghese moved in the eighties to Tennessee,…
Watching couples coast around at the honky-tonk may intimidate the double-left-footed, but heck, if a cowboy can dance, how tough is it, really? “Two-stepping is just walking to a beat,” says Austin-based Rowdy DuFrene, a two-time United Country Western Dance Council World Champion. “While many variations exist, the true…
The acclaimed Austin guitarist and producer (Blaze Foley, Lucinda Williams, Slaid Cleaves, Ray Wylie Hubbard) is also fast becoming known—on the basis of his 2007 album, Diamonds to Dust (Blue Corn), and this month’s LAST EXIT TO HAPPYLAND (Rootball)—as a songwriter. You spent eleven years playing with and producing for…
Hearing Ben Kweller cite Garth Brooks as a childhood influence may not be welcome news to his fans, who have already followed the young songwriter through one abrupt stylistic shift. His Greenville grunge band, Radish, was as well-known for being at the center of a Nirvana-fueled major-label bidding war…
Bailey, who has been a nurse since 1991, grew up in Liberty. She has worked at Hospice Austin for fourteen years and spends each week visiting with patients like Irma Lagunas. I became a nurse after a friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was in New Orleans…
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys took the fiddle-country-cawing influences of Wills’s Kosse youth and infused them with the popular music of the time—swing—for a combination that would inspire generations. Despite the band’s numerous albums over the years, it’s The Tiffany Transcriptions (Collectors’ Choice), a loose set of…
NAME: Gaylord Armstrong | AGE: 69 | HOMETOWN: Austin | QUALIFICATIONS: Senior partner at McGinnis, Lochridge & Kilgore / Has been a lobbyist for forty years / Clients include Exxon Mobil, the Texas Film Industry Group, GE Capital Corporation, and the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas • I started lobbying…
It took a few tries, but Ruthie Foster’s 2007 The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster was a stone- soul triumph for the Austin singer, with an unprecedented laser focus on her strengths. To a large degree, The Truth According to Ruthie Foster (Blue Corn) follows suit. Working at Memphis’s famed…
“Here’s the thing: I was born and raised in eastern Kentucky. I wasn’t born in downtown Paris. What do I love? I love Southern food. I love soul food. I love barbecue. I learned about food in dives. ”
