If you prefer your Marlon Brando with a little more leather and a little less cotton balls-in-the-mouth, you’re in luck, friend. The ultimate filmic bad boy and his Black Rebels Motorcycle Club (really!) take over the streets of a small town to your eyes’ delight when the Ransom Center screens The Wild One tonight, as part one of the Rebel Classics Film Series....

Saturday marks the opening of Wheelchair Epidemic, a group show featuring exclusive black and white photos taken at Antone’s, 80s Austin punk scene photos by documentary photog Bill Daniel, and various music-inspired drawings, paintings and mixed media collages....

Image from MySpace The English Beat with Eleven Fingered CharlieFriday, Nov. 30Antones (213 W 5th St)Doors at 8, $17[info] | [tickets]Known simply as The Beat in their native UK, The English Beat were possibly the predominant 2-tone ska revival bands in the early 80s. Although some would argue The Specials were more influential, The English Beat defined the 2-tone movement with their potent blend of mod soul, Jamaican dancehall and reggae, and a staunchly leftist,......

This fall, you may begin noticing our local law enforcement looking a bit more, well, stylish. Austin Police Department is revamping its uniforms and vehicles, in the hopes of "creating a new version" of the organization, says Police Chief Art Acevedo. Part of the changes include larger badges, which will feature the Star of Texas above the Capitol. Gone are any traces of red on the uniforms themselves—in some cases, they'll be replaced with a......

Here's your chance! In conjunction with Maker Faire, HEYA (Toyota's collaborative youth program) is hosting an interactive art car build with Harrod Blank, art-car artist extraordinaire. Blank is the dude behind the Camera Van, which will be cruising through central Austin tomorrow—so get out your, uh, cameras. The build will run throughout the weekend, and anyone attending Maker Faire can participate. The goal is to transform a Toyota Matrix into a "music-themed piece of art......

The Austin Film Festival is right around the corner, and this year's Marquee programming is some of the best in the festival's history. With a wide variety of stellar comedies, dramas, and documentaries (not to mention several strong Oscar contenders) announced, there's something for everyone in the 2007 Marquee category. To help you plan out your festival schedule, we've put together a list of best bets for this year's program. The whole program looks excellent......

Tomorrow night, Cine Las Americas presents Víctimas del Pecado (Victims of Sin), an over-the-top slice of Mexican melodrama from 1951 and the second installment in Cine's Sin, Scandal and Song series. There's sin aplenty here (and also really great outfits and hairstyles), courtesy of its setting in postwar Mexico City's red-light district (romanticized in lush black and white cinematography by the legendary Gabriel Figueroa). Amidst all the picturesque seaminess, beautiful cabaret dancer Violeta (Ninón Sevilla)......

It's tough to believe that Spoon have been playing in Austin for almost thirteen years. Few who saw them gig during their early, Pixies-inspired days would've predicted that in 2007, Spoon would have one of the most bulletproof catalogs in indie rock. Their entire tenure with Merge Records has been stellar, showcasing a band who found confidence in independence and the concept of a slow but deliberate artistic and commercial build. Britt Daniel hasn't......

Slide, slide, slippity-slide, hittin' switches on the block in a '65... oh, sorry, wrong kind of voyage. Anyway, this Cosmic Voyage promises to be pretty much as rad as anything Coolio's ever done. Based on early space travel theorist Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky's novel Beyond the Earth, Cosmic Voyage (Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella) portrays humans in space 25 years before Yuri Gagarin's historical journey. It's presented as part of the Austin Film Society's Other Minds, Other......

Strawberries and chocolate. California and Schwarzenegger. Spiderman 3 and Xanax. All classic pairings that destiny and the Austin Museum of Art have been working to outstrip this week, with the presentation of two new exhibits: The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures and 24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek. Both shows open this Saturday. A Century in Pictures presents nearly ninety photographs taken by men and women......

More than twenty years after its release, Spike Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It still shines as a benchmark of cinema verité filmmaking and a killer stylistic archive of box-fresh Brooklyn, circa 1986. Shot on a guerilla budget, largely filmed in black and white, and featuring an original jazz score by Lee's father, the comedy/drama stars the bodacious Tracy Camilla Johns as Nola Darling, an independent 'round-the-way-girl who prefers the pursuit of pleasure and......

Tonight, the Austin Film Festival presents Military Intelligence and You!, a cleverly comical World War II parody starring Patrick Muldoon and Elizabeth Bennett. The film combines actual historic footage with new black and white narrative bits to tell the story of a military analyst’s desperate attempt to locate a hidden Nazi fighter base. Mackenzie Astin, John Rixey Moore and Eric Jungmann round out the cast. AFF Presents: Military Intelligence and You! Thursday, April 5th Alamo......

An eastside institution that once played host to blues legends like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, W. C. Handy and B. B. King, the Victory Grill was recently named an official historic landmark by the City of Austin. It's already listed among the National Registry of Historic Places, among other recognitions. Next month, the hallowed halls of Austin's oldest existing blues joint—opened back in 1945 to cater to black and white soldiers returning from WWII—will undergo a......

Land, ho! Peter and the Wolf, that great ghost ship of a band both ephemeral and ceaselessly transient, is coming ashore tonight at the Mohawk. There has been much chatter in the musical grapevine regarding lead singer Red Hunter's penchant for choosing odd locales where he can present his music; luckily, for those of you afraid of cemeteries and canoe-less, a show at the Mohawk presents a chance to catch our most prominent bard......

If you vote for Rick Perry, and you’re not a Christian, you’re going to hell. At least according to the coiffed Governor of Texas. Not that we figured there to be a lot of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, agnostics or Sikhs voting for Perry, but, you know...just in case. Following a fire and brimstone sermon Sunday in San Antonio, Perry made it clear that iffin you aren’t saved, it’s H-E-double hockey sticks for you. "In my......

aGLIFF, or the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, tonight hosts the latest in its 2006 Filmmaker Series, which presents works by up-and-coming queer filmmakers and donates any proceeds from ticket sales to support their future projects. Austin-based auteur Alpha's first effort, a documentary short piece entitled What Can 2 Girls Do Together?, debunked common misconceptions that straight males hold about lesbians and earned her a reputation as a guerrilla filmmaker. Since then, she's......

Austinist would generally claim you, dear readers, to be lucky ducks, though today we'll crown you as fortunate as the swans of Town Lake. Here's why: we're loading you up with tons of artdata. People, get ready. The first order of business is this weekend's Austin Fine Arts Festival, or TAFAF, which is fifty years old 'n strong. It was originally conceived in the 1950s by one Miss Peggy Frary, an art lover and......

[The following is an editorial column by contributor Alison Coffey and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors] By accident I flipped to #1 Single, the new E show featuring songstress Lisa Loeb, who's dating her way through New York City's available hip men, lookin' for love. I was instantly hooked. It's funny that the tagline calls her the real-life Carrie Bradshaw. She's cute and sassy and creative, but......

Satyajit Ray was a prolific Indian filmmaker, whose works - all spoken in Bengali - were paragons of humanistic storytelling. Akira Kurosawa said of his films, "It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river. Without the least effort and without any sudden jerks, Ray paints his picture, but its effect on the audience is to stir up deep passions. How does he achieve this? There......

Back in May, Alamo Drafthouse and DJ Nick Nack teamed up to bring us a screening of Fritz Lang's magnificent Metropolis, set to a live turntable score by the vinyl maestro. This Saturday, they're bringing it back with back-to-back showings of the black and white sci-fi masterpiece at the Downtown Drafthouse, at 7pm and 9pm. The screening we attended last time sold out, so we had to settle for seats at the very front;......

While visiting the d berman gallery this weekend to check out their current black and white photography exhibits - George Krause's Sfumato Nudes and Sean Perry's Transitory Series - we got ahold of a copy of Mr. Perry's limited-edition book of the same works being shown, "Transitory". In "Transitory", Sean Perry - who last year was among the Austin Chronicle's Top Ten Artists of 2004, and rightfully so - explores the geometrical subtleties inherent......

There's just too much stuff happening tonight to keep track of, so we're reposting the IST list for your convenience. See you out there. ( F I R S T ) T H U R S D A Y art · In House Gallery presents “Barnyard”, with paintings by Ethan Azarian, Felice House, Rachel Koper & Rainey Navaro. 5-10pm. Thanks, Austinist newbie Craig! [map] music · Hurts to Purr, Maneja Beto, and La La Land......

Robert Horry has done the truly amazing once again. No, we are not talking about his unbelievable second half/overtime performance of last night. It is much greater than that. The Fresh Prince of the NBA has somehow made us feel that the last 12 years are all happening simultaneously. Every June we turn on the NBA Playoffs and see Big Shot Bob doing the unthinkable, yet somehow expected, extricating his teams from the jaws......

Growing up, Austinist loved playing with toys. On stormy weekends we'd barricade ourselves in our room and enact gargantuan, epic battles that always ended with cataclysmic destruction. We'd divide our motley collection of action figures, Lego pieces and crazy Japanese metal machinations into Good Guys and Bad Guys: more often than not the former would be championed by the heroic and uber-creatined He-Man; his nemesis was invariably the nefarious Mr. Sinister (with light-up laser......

Tonight, the Austin Film Society's Summer Essential Cinema Series kicks off with Jean Luc Godard's Breathless, which we told you about last week. If you haven't purchased your tickets online yet, there should be some available at the door. Tickets are only $4. Show starts at 7pm. But if French dialogue and gorgeous black and white cinematography aren't your thing, there's always the screening of American Graffiti at the Paramount Theatre. See what genius......