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
For decades, Bobby Bland has personified the definitive post–T-Bone Walker Texas R&B style. Even at 67, no one can dethrone him.
Why everyone’s dazed and confused about Richard Linklater’s age.
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,
A little-known financial institution could be the future of the war on poverty in Texas.
GEORGE W. BUSH may have the most power in the Capitol, but when it comes to power over the Capitol, he’s just number two. In one of the strangest rivalries of a contentious legislative session, the Texas Film Commission, an arm of the governor’s office, squared off against the State
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
By employing stereotypes like Sambo and Aunt Jemima, Austin painter Michael Ray Charles hopes to master the art of racial healing.
The career of Austin young-adult writer Rob Thomas is going through a growth spurt.
With his resounding voice and striking appearance, Austin’s Malford Milligan stands out in a sea of Texas soul singers.
The Texas Observer could be on its last legs (again).
Thought the competition between Texas cities was over? Until my daughter was born in Dallas and a friend’s was born in Austin, so did I.
In the youth-oriented world of Web page designers, calling someone young is really saying something—but these guys are young. Before any of them is old enough to drink, in fact, the cyberwunderkinder who run two-year-old Zero Factor Interactive (ZFI) have garnered an impressive roster of clients, including Who bassist John
An Austin filmmaker hopes to be the next Sundance kid.
Poetry about a 161-year-old battle is hardly what you’d expect from a high-minded political writer, but fifth-generation Texan Michael Lind has always been a maverick.
Mike Judge plays King of the Hill .
Private prisons lock out the press.
Few Austin musicians have been as close to stardom, and unable to reach it, as Alejandro Escovedo. But for him, fame has never really been the point.
Even when they’re not winning games, minor league hockey teams like Austin’s are winning fans by the thousands. Who’d have thought skaters would score in Texas?
It started as a hippie sandwich shop in Austin. Now, more than two decades later, Schlotzsky’s is finally kicking the competition in the buns.
Sowing the seeds of the hemp craze.
Feeling a little subpar? Stuck in a mental bunker? The Ben Crenshaw Golf Screen Saver (ProTour Productions, $19.95) will drive away the blues. This lively program contains more than 25 images of important moments in Crenshaw�s life that pop up on your computer whenever it is idle; select your favorite
Panhandling, digging through dumpsters for food, roaming the streets near the University of Texas campus: This is the life of Austin’s “gutter punks,” homeless kids with little money and even less hope.
I went to the University of Texas at Austin to play baseball. In high school I wanted to be a pro baseball player, and I never really thought about movies outside of taking dates to them and stuff like that. And when I tried to walk on to the UT
Dick Morris’ other other woman.
The University of Houston thinks Frank Stella is frankly stellar.
Austin’s most independent-minded director.
Music|
September 30, 1996
So what if consistency is the hallmark of the record business? As the chameleonlike career of Darden Smith suggests, you can go your own way.
The naked truth about Matthew McConaughey.
Origin Systems founder Richard Garriott has sometimes lived his life like a computer game, but now that the multimedia industry is changing, he can’t play around anymore.
Thirty years later, the legacy of Charles Whitman’s shooting spree at the University of Texas still towers above us.
Since the late eighties, dozens of big churches in Texas have put rapid growth ahead of financial health. Austin’s Great Hills Baptist is only the latest to pay the price.
What is Darrell Royal’s code name, and what does his middle initial stand for?
Sins of admission.
Ace in the Whole.
The Barton Springs salamander goes to court.
San Antonio poet, essayist, and anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye is completing work on her first novel. The protagonist of Habibi (Simon and Schuster) is an Arab American teenage girl in present-day Jerusalem. The book is based, Nye says, on her own “travels and travails before coming to Texas” and explores
Bob Ragan’s nationally renowned, intricately detailed stone carvings have a distinctly European look. Is it any wonder he lives in a place called Florence?
Austin’s Butthole Surfers have always been very strange. But these days, the strangest thing about them is their mainstream respectability.
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.
Will UT get affirmative action on affirmative action? Plus: A runoff rundown.
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
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.
Wyatt Roberts says he’s simply crusading against sin, but critics contend that the Christian activist is trying to usher in a new era in Texas: the anti-gay nineties.
“I always liked Western buckles,” says Robert Brandes, “and then one day it dawned on me to ask, ‘Hey—who makes these things?’” The Austin collector-investor set out to learn more about the silversmiths and engravers who made their mark on cowboy adornment in the form of weighty, elaborately decorated rodeo-style
Here’s a World Wide Web page to die for. The Texas State Cemetery in Austin goes online (www.cemetery.statetx.us) late this month, thanks to the General Services Commission. You can scan a list of the more than two thousand luminaries buried there, from father of Texas Stephen F.
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.
Inside a state-of-the-art semiconductor factory, a day’s work is never done, as technicians race to build smaller, faster, and more-powerful computer chips.
Growing up in Austin in the fifties and sixties, I couldn’t play baseball in certain places. In Clarksville, a mostly black area where there were no paved streets, I could usually find a pickup game. In West Lynn, which was whiter, I kind of had to push myself into one.