The Longhorns may have lost the BCS National Championship on the hallowed field of the Rose Bowl, but they gained something almost as important: a long-lost fan.
Does the country’s most popular conspiracy talk radio host really believe that 9/11 was an inside job? That global warming is a plot cooked up by the World Bank? That an elite cabal wants to kill most of the people on the planet (including you)? Two million listeners think so—and
In the years before anyone had heard of Woodstock or Altamont, teenagers across Texas started bands in their parents’ garages, banging out earnest rock songs on cheap equipment and hoping to hit it big at the local skating rink or VFW post. For some, those dreams won’t fade away.
The 69-year-old San Antonio keyboardist used his Vox organ to bridge the gap between sixties psychedelia and Tex-Mex and gave the Sir Douglas Quintet its signature sound. In 1990 he and his Quintet bandmate Doug Sahm joined Freddy Fender and Flaco Jiménez to launch the Texas Tornados, a band that
Contemporary blues is a bit of a wasteland, yet those chanting the “blues is dead” mantra should check out Guitar Shorty. Though his time in the state was brief, the seventy-year-old Houston-born, Florida-raised guitarist and singer (real name: David Kearney) was an early proponent of the kind of explosive,
Their 2009 debut album was the ultimate in hipster fodder, but Austin’s the Strange Boys instantly stood out from the garage-rock-revivalist hordes. Sure, they and their peers all dug the same sixties records and vintage gear, but The Strange Boys and Girls Club wasn’t slavishly derivative. It aspired to
In 1929 Dallas teenager Virginia Thompson fell into a fevered sleep for 180 days. Eighty years later that familial legend helped inspire granddaughter Molly Caldwell Crosby’s book Asleep, an investigation into the baffling disease known as sleeping sickness (technically, encephalitis lethargica). The affliction’s symptoms are unnerving to contemplate:
James Hynes’s unsettling fifth novel, Next, captures eight hours in the life of “melancholy middle-aged” Kevin Quinn as he sneaks away from Ann Arbor to Austin for a clandestine job interview. Quinn is a bundle of neuroses—he’s worried about a recent spate of terrorist bombings, stalled in his
Espinosa, a lifetime Houstonian, has been serving legal papers—summonses, subpoenas, complaints, writs—to people facing court action for the past sixteen years. He is an owner and the director of civil process at Court Record Research.I kind of fell into this. Around 1989, I had picked up a job with a
Modern-day bass fishing owes its enormous popularity to two game-changing events. First, in 1949, Nick Creme rocked the angler community with the creation of the plastic bait worm. Roughly ten years later a fisherman on Lake Tyler, weary of snagging his hooks on submerged timber and vegetation, speared a plastic
After picking up the mail and happily opening Christmas cards, I looked down and saw Tom DeLay on the cover of texas monthly [January 2010]. I almost threw up. But as I read that it was time for the Bum Steer Awards, I just thought, “What a great choice.”
Willie’s done it seven times. So has George W. Bush. Ross Perot and Troy Aikman have each done it four times. Kinky Friedman has done it three times (twice dressed as a woman). Lance Armstrong, Ann Richards, Rick Perry, and Selena have also done it three times (and pssst:
Annise Parker, the newly elected mayor of Houston, is ready to discuss any of the challenges facing her city. That will happen as soon as everyone else is ready to stop talking about her sexuality.
The trouble with black beans, an unnatural attachment to Texas license plates, the perils of striking up a conversation in the restroom, and the discomfort of two men riding together on the same Harley.
Today my grandfather is buried in a family plot in Laredo. But to understand who he was and what his family was like, you have to know the story of his first burial, seventy miles away and nearly twenty years earlier.
