Together with Colin Brooks, they make up the triumvirate of songwriters who front Austin’s Band of Heathens. What began as a loose collaboration of jam buddies has led to two live releases, Best New Band honors at the 2007 Austin Music Awards, and finally, a self-titled debut studio album.How
Texas receives more federal funding for abstinence education than any other state. But is teaching kids not to have sex the same as sex education?
In case you haven’t been paying much attention, psychedelic rock is once again coming on like an acid flashback. Most new bands mining this bygone era do so with a painful degree of transparency and come off sounding silly. Not Austin’s Black Angels. This coed outfit’s 2006 debut album,
Word is that Ben Rehder might drop the curtain on his snarky Blanco County mystery series with Holy Moly, the sixth novel featuring square-jawed Johnson City game warden John Marlin. If so, the Austinite goes out on a high note with this screwball tale about “pastorpreneur” Peter Boothe,
In The Big Sort, the Austin political blogger and Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing addresses America’s tendency to segment itself into tiny, like-minded groups (a phenomenon he calls “clustering”).How did the “big sort” notion come to be, and what does it signify?[Sociologist] Robert Cushing and I began exploring
Karl Gebhardt and Gary Hill, two astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin, are racing to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science: What is dark energy? How does it work? Can it explain the origins of the universe? There’s only one problem. Dark energy may not actually
Hope Rodriguez, Michael O’Brien, and Gary Cartwright
He writes their songs, records their music, and gets the fifty-plus kids from Austin’s Palm School Choir onto high-profile stages such as NBC’s Today show and the South by Southwest music festival. Needless to say, this is not your typical school choir. The group has just released its sixth album,
The title track may lament the fact that even arrested adolescents grow old, but, if anything, James McMurtry sounds more energized than ever. On Just Us Kids (Lightning Rod), he and his longtime rhythm section—Daren Hess, Ronnie Johnson—have solidified their sound into a low, tribal rock growl, with
There’s a short roster of rock and roll performers (Jagger, Springsteen) who can rivet your attention every time they step onstage. If you grew up in Texas, here’s a name on that list: Joe Ely. Those who have seen Ely give his all, particularly with his early Jesse Taylor/Ponty
My Petco encounter with a shampoo celebrity.
Evan Smith: Senator Clinton, good morning.Hillary Rodham Clinton: Good morning.ES: Thank you very much for being here.HRC: I’m happy to be here.ES: Let me begin by asking you something about last night’s debate and the very eloquent and emotional comments you made at the end when you
An interview with Cliff Redd—executive director of the Long Center
The Long Center performs; FotoFest flashes; Diboll gets husk-y.
It’s the only election that matters.
Thomas Turner stands at a keyboard flanked by a stack of knobs and buttons resembling a cheesy set from TV’s Lost in Space. Donning a high-collared sequined cape, he produces a numbing series of New Wave drum machine beats and electronics. Aaron Behrens, alongside in tight jeans and long pigtails,
Guitar muscle, ferocious drumming, commanding vocals, and hook-laden tunes: no sophomore slump here. Austin’s What Made Milwaukee Famous took its time with the follow-up to its 2004 debut, and it was a wise move. The hardworking foursome has sculpted its sound on the road. What Doesn’t Kill Us
Meet Sonny Bravo, the sweet but surly almost-sixteen-year-old who shrugs his way through The Flowers, Austinite Dagoberto Gilb’s first novel since 1994’s The Last Known Residence of Micky Acuña. At Los Flores— the East L.A. apartment building where Sonny lives with his mother, Silvia, and her redneck husband,
Christian, who grew up in Waco and majored in English at Baylor University, is the senior vice president and general manager of Kolar Advertising and Marketing, in Austin, whose clients include Dell, 3M, and Subway.All during college, I thought I would graduate and go to seminary or something like that.
The digital natives are restless, and traditional journalism just won’t cut it.
UT and A&M Form Second Football TeamsAfter the top fifty NCAA programs were privatized, record revenues and stock splits made the IPO spin-offs inevitable. An antitrust lawsuit filed by Texas Tech and UTEP, whose teams remain not-for-profit university entities, was dismissed in federal court.¡Viva Los Cowboys!Dallas Cowboys head coach and
Who’s the next Willie? The new Selena?
Geeks from Austin will destroy American cinema.
Café CentralEl Paso What’s new at venerable Café Central? The decor, for one thing. The border stalwart has shed its animal-print upholstery and New York–bistro look in favor of a classic redo, with sleek chocolate-brown chairs, chrome sculptures, unusual art, and floor-to-ceiling beveled mirrors along the back wall. Given
The future according to third-graders.
“She’s the biggest no-brainer I can think of for your February issue. She’s literally the most accomplished female semiconductor designer in the world,” says John Thornton, a general partner at the venture capital firm Austin Ventures, who has put his money where his mouth is by backing Paul’s Black Sand
If you were the guy who shepherded the largest leveraged buyout in history, you’d be on this list too. It was early in 2007 when we became aware of the Austin-bred honors graduate of both UT and Harvard Business School who now inhabits the off-the-radar-screen world of private equity; he
Let’s get the groaner of a pun out of the way: These slacker marrieds, the co-founders of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, are in a league of their own. Then again, there’s something to the idea that the natives of Berkeley, California, and Owensboro, Kentucky, respectively, have revolutionized the moviegoing
She’s the avatar of cool for the inn crowd’s in crowd. Thirteen years ago the native Odessan, a UT and UT Law grad, purchased a seedy motel on South Congress Avenue, in Austin, and transformed it, with the help of San Antonio’s Lake/Flato architects and designer pals from California, into
He didn’t invent the outdoor music festival—perhaps you’ve heard of Woodstock?—but he’s as responsible as anyone for its resurgence as a twenty-first- century form, and he’s just now getting started. As one of three principals at Capital Sports and Entertainment, the College Station native and onetime club booker was the
Here’s a convenient truth for you: All those greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere—the result of burning and combusting oil and gas and coal—can simply go back where they came from, and the environment, not to mention the world, will be better and cleaner for it. That’s the theory behind the
Gaming has come a long way since the days of Pong and Asteroids. At the vanguard of the latest wave of interactive, multiplayer video games is this native of Bowling Green, Ohio, one of the few women in the industry to crack the ranks of upper management. As the studio
Long before concepts like “green building” and “sustainability” were fashionable, this husband-and-wife team envisioned a future in which architectural design and renewable resources worked together. The nonprofit Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, which they co-direct, has collaborated on projects as wide-ranging as the eco-friendly renovation of the Pentagon to
To the extent that the fabled Third Coast exists, it’s a bit of a patriarchy: of men and by men, including, most prominently, the indie visionary Rick Linklater and the boyish wonder Robert Rodriguez. But then there’s Avellán, Rodriguez’s ex, who continues to move mountains to make movies happen in
Somewhere out there is a sourpuss (there’s always one) who’ll ask, after picking up this special issue, what the fuss is all about. And he’ll have a point, sort of. Thirty-five years? Lots of publications have been around that long or longer. Just last year, one of the most iconic
Andy Friedman, Eileen Smith, and Platon.
The perils of prediction.
The Brownsville native and longtime Austinite has spent most of his adult life contemplating the future: A progenitor of the scruffy cyberpunk fiction movement (he edited the short-story anthology Mirrorshades and co-authored The Difference Engine with William Gibson), he has penned ten sci-fi novels and several works of nonfiction, including
After the Texas Youth Commission imploded last year, one of the state’s fiercest advocates for criminal justice reform was tapped to help rebuild. Inside his yet-to-be-completed slog.
Bear with me—I’m trying to remember the olden days when a restaurant with more than two locations was by definition terrible. Nope, chains have changed. Sure, we’ll always have mass feeders like Chili’s and the Black-eyed Pea, but upscale chains are a different proposition altogether. And as much as I
Strait talk; Fort Worth takes stock; MLK in S.A.
There should be no mystery about the latest artifact of “history.”
C. F. Payne, Cecilia Ballí, and Gregory Curtis
Now on DVD: Ghostland ObservatoryMaybe you love sequencers and robotic electronic dance beats. Maybe you don’t. Yet how you feel about this Austin electro-rock duo, a budding national phenomenon whose ferocious energy explodes on Live From Austin TX (New West)—originally a July 2007 Austin City Limits taping—really comes down
There’s a quality—an easygoing, lyrical storytelling manner that eschews stridency or pretension—that all folksingers strive for and few attain. But Danny Schmidt has it in abundance: With seductive simplicity, his music demands your attention. Schmidt is a native Austinite who honed his craft amid the music scene in Charlottesville,
The best music has always been made by those who defy easy categorization, as exemplified by not one but two posthumous releases from Texas jazz giants. Fort Worth’s Dewey Redman was a glass-half-empty kind of guy who saw his career accomplishments as merely wins in a long battle—so the
Is it really time to pronounce the body?
Austinite Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay became a poster boy for the learning potential of autistic children with his first book, The Mind Tree, a collection of stories and poems he wrote between the ages of eight and eleven. In How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move: inside
One year (okay, two days) of livin’ la vida locavore.
Laurens Fish III was born and raised in Austin. A fourth-generation funeral director, he is following in the tradition of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He is the managing partner of Fish Funeral Services, which handles more than one thousand funerals each year and has buried many notable Texans.I’m not
