March 2010 Issue
Features
Alex Jones Is About To Explode
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
Three Chords and A Station Wagon
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.
Reporter
Author Interview
A Q&A with Robert Perkinson
The author of Texas Tough on the state's criminal justice system.
Book Review
Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic
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:
Book Review
Next
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
Andrew R. Espinosa Jr., Process Server
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
Augie Meyers
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
Music Review
Bare Knuckle
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,
Music Review
Be Brave
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
How to Tie a Texas Rig
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
Web
Psychic Friends Network
A prayer for trust in God’s timing (and the occasional fortune teller).
Read It and Weep
The closings of bookstores in San Antonio and Laredo leave a void that can’t be filled with a Kindle.
Runway or Another
From her hometown of Lake Jackson to the Big Apple, Kalyn Hemphill, the winner of Models of the Runway, takes it all in stride.
Recipe
Mussels Steamed in Riesling With Grilled Country Bread
Recipe from David Grossman, Branch Water Tavern, Houston
Miscellany
Roar of the Crowd
DeLayed Reaction
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.”
Editor's Letter
Cover Me
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:
Columns
Out and About
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.
Center of Gravity
Who can challenge Republicans on the State Board of Education? A different kind of Republican.
The Texanist
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.
John Phillip Santos
Two Burials
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.
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