University of Florida journalism student provokes John Kerry, gets Tasered by campus cops. A 10-year-old boy has woken up with a posh English accent after undergoing life-saving brain surgery. Betty Perry is charged with resisting arrest and failing to maintain her landscaping, both misdemeanors. Fed up with the threats, tired of natural disasters, Nebraska's longest-serving state senator is using his legal muscle against who he says is the culprit - God. State Sen. Ernie......

What happens when you throw music, dance, poetry, photography, visual art, theatre, film, and -- why not? -- opera into a great big blue box and shake? You get an explosion of proportions that only the creative geniuses at Refraction Arts can contain. This year's Fuse Box Festival, featuring artists from Brooklyn to Portland and places in between, showcases works you've never seen before and aren't likely to see hence. Things start gearing up this......

SXSW 2007's music portion kicks off three weeks from today. We hope you are keeping hydrated, getting extra sleep, and listening to every MP3 you can find in order to plan your schedules. In an effort to help you, the festival goer, here are some great recent developments in the SX world: - Saturday brought the reveal of the SXSW showcase schedule and band bio pages. After a delayed start with the band list,......

Welcome back kiddos, the year is kicking off with a shotgun bang. Head over to Waterloo or End of an Ear and ask for these albums: as far as we can tell, it's hard to go wrong this week. The Shins Wincing the Night Away (Sub Pop) Well, they're definitely stretching, and they're definitely getting more and more familiar with the studio, as "Phantom Limb" demonstrates: James Mercer is still having trouble falling asleep,......

If you've never heard Jolie Holland, here are some things you should know. Tom Waits thinks she's fantastic, and nominated her first album for the Shortlist prize. AllMusic puts her sound somewhere between Nina Nastasia and Andrew Bird. And along with Waits, she's recording on the Anti- label along with Neko Case and Daniel Lanois. Now that we have your attention, perhaps you'll download some free MP3's from her site and see why it......

katrina remembered IV; "Not as seen on TV" Originally uploaded by notnA. Used with permission. [The following is editorial content by contributor Kristina Barnett and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors] Last year at this time, actual dust was settling in Austin as well as the proverbial sort after a somber September in which the term "relief effort" was on the tip of everyone's tongue all the time.......

[The following is editorial content by contributor Kristina Barnett and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors] Austinist has covered the burgeoning improv scene before, but this edition of Audio Austinist is a story about how doing something like improv changes people's perspectives. Improv is about taking risks and learning to fail. It's about overcoming your fears and just plain old having a good time. Know anyone who needs a......

Last night’s Tapes ‘n Tapes show was pretty boss, even though Bruce Springsteen never showed, which wasn’t a surprise, really, since he was never even rumored to show up, anyway. Is it wrong to secretly wish that The Boss might drop by for a song or two at some random venue? No, it’s not. [Ed. Note -- where are we going with this?] Regardless, the show was great. All three bands -- Cold War......

DCist is screwed in the event of an oil crisis. Not that we're not all screwed in the event of an oil crisis, just D.C. is more screwed. Don't sell your car yet, District resident, a cabbie can kick you to the curb if he doesn't like your address. Not even Metro can save you now. Londonist experiences the London of the future through the wonders of 3D modeling, but while the 3D guys are......

Dear Alicia, What were you thinking?! Fucking Ben in the next room while I was sick w/ mono. UR A DIRTY BITCH and I rebuke you!!! I thought we had something special, but clearly you didn't. I hope you enjoy "tramping it up" and fucking half of Austin. Please die Sincerely, Roger Hilarious? Yes. Sad? Sure. Familiar? Probably. This is just one of the hundreds of pieces collected in the new book FOUND II, the......

In case you've missed it, there's a comedy revolution brewing in New York right now. Comics like Todd Barry, Demitri Martin, and Aziz Ansari have been drawing huge audiences of hipsters and regular folk alike with satire that owes far more to the silliness and irony of Steve Martin and Eddie Izzard than to the lowbrow Comedy Central/Def Comedy Jam nonsense that's infested comedy clubs for a decade. Among the brightest lights of the......

Favorite posts for this last week of April: Mick Fleetwood likes Austin and golf, we learn from Out & About. And on that note (get it? We crack ourselves up), Prentiss Riddle posts about his sister's band's comeback video: an ad for a garage opener company. Tomithey attempts to save his co-worker's plant from what reads like a slow, pitiful death. Is the captain of the Serenity appearing at a local Austin theatre? Not......

In his first-feature film Brick, director Rian Johnson set own to make a noir detective film. But he was tired of seeing the same old characters playing out similar storylines. He wanted to bend the genre, so it would still look and feel like a noir pic, but with a different sensibility. Enter, high school. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has just received a disturbing call from his distressed ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). She's......

In case you were not one of the lucky folks to get in to see Jenny Lewis last night at The Parish, fret not. We have your alt-folk/country singer-songwriter fix. Eclectone Records is having a showcase tonight at Room 710, featuring Big Ditch Road, Charlie Parr, Mike Nicolai and Martin Devaney. The night is sure to provide a great setting for sipping some Lone Star and conjuring the perfect mental landscape for all of......

[Austinist is thrilled to present you with the first installment in our new, ongoing podcast series, Audio Austinist. For this inaugural edition, podcast editor Kristina Barnett focuses on the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, during which she interviewed two of America's most prominent political bloggers, Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos). Check it out below, and send us your feedback! In the coming months, we'll be covering a host of issues pertaining to Austinites --......

Here's just a small sampling of the artists playing our day party next Wednesday at Red 7: [mp3] Ghostland Observatory - "Candy Rider" [mp3] Asobi Seksu - "I'm Happy But You Don't Like Me " [mp3] Asobi Seksu - "Sooner" [mp3] Asobi Seksu - "Walk On the Moon" [mp3] Asobi Seksu - "Let Them Wait" [mp3] The Ark - "Rock City Wankers" (From Aurgasm) [mp3] Levy - "On the Dance Floor" [mp3] Levy - "Rotten......

Ah the amazing things technology has ushered into our lives over the past five years: The increase in medical technologies leading to early treatment of disease; mobile technology that allows people to work from home while raising families; ten different ESPNs; the ability to have child pornography on a handheld MP3 player that you can take to other degenerates houses and watch said smut on their computer. Um, nix that last one. Here's where......

*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole.* -The Editors Three weeks. Three measly weeks remain. Come March 16th, the streets of downtown Austin will be overrun with blizzards of cigarette butts and the remnants of thousands of out-of-towner’s sense of pride. Brutalized by the infinite lines, pro-payola door help, probable over-consumption, and potential police mistreatment. It’ll be like Vice City, but without the......

[mp3] The Hold Steady - "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" [mp3] The Hold Steady - "The Swish" [link] The Plastic Constellations - "Iron City Jungles" [mp3] Baby Dee - "Endless Night" [mp3] Baby Dee - "Love's Small Song" [mp3] Baby Dee - "Lilacs" [mp3] Shearwater - "I Can't Wait" [mp3] Shearwater - "Whipping Boy" [full EP] Weird Weeds - "This Is Not What You Want (EP)" [mov] Nina Simone - "I Want A Little Sugar In......

Rags-to-riches success stories are few and far between these days, particularly the sort punctuated with "dot com" and "latest buzz" - two phrases that cropped up seemingly everywhere you turned only a few years ago. Which is why we're thrilled to announce that our former editor, one-time publishing mogul, general tech impresario and self-proclaimed Internet Rock Star has accomplished what none of us dared to imagine. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Brown sold out to......

We've a pair of tickets to give away to see Laura Cantrell at the Cactus Cafe tonight! Simply answer the following question in the subject line of an email. We'll randomly draw one lucky reader before 1pm. Update: Congrats, Clay! Q: What's the name of the unreleased MP3 posted to this site on 10/06? And, for those of you with a short attention span, we're reposting a few downloads: Laura Cantrell 14th Street I'll......

Last week we finally acquiesced to peer pressure and signed up for one of them MySpace accounts, something which our friends had long promised would bring us untold fortune, prestige, and - on a not infrequent occasion - direct access to a cornucopian bounty of slutty hipsters. The redundancy of that last term aside, we did find ourselves, nary an hour into our grand new social experiment, face to cathode-ray-tube with a bevy of:Internet......

[In which we use the word fuck no less than three times. Well, four.] A few months ago, at a house party in Hyde Park thrown by local label Christmas Mountain Records, we found ourselves lounging idly with our mates on a plushly upholstered sofa, near the stage setup of a living room so sardine-packed with Austin hipsters that, in the dimmed lighting and from our low vantage point, all one could make out......

Well, it looks like it’s another busy weekend for music around town. Saturday night has several great options and one of those is to head over to Beerland and catch the kick-ass local (and regional) lineup of The Black, AM Syndicate, Bring Back the Guns, and The Interest Kills. Make sure to not be too fashionably late as all the bands are worth seeing. We recently sat down (in front of our computers) and......

We haven't gotten around to the weekend IST list - we're still hungover after last night's Le Tigre show at Emo's. Check back tomorrow. F R I D A Y in-store · Knife Party and Assacre at End of an Ear. 6pm [mp3: Assacre - I Feel That Gay Marriage Should] music · David Garza at Stubb's [mp3: David Garza - Eleven is Real] music · The Chapters, Vacation Gold, King Tears Duo, and Sumner......

So A Flock of Seagulls won't be playing Elysium tonight, but there are a few great shows happening around town that are bound to tickle your fancy...pants. IF YOU LIKE ... The Rapture, The Faint, or tight pink jeans: Rock out with electroclash wizards Ghostland Observatory at Karma Lounge @ 10pm. They're fresh off a hugely successful East Coast tour, so come and give 'em a warm Austin welcome back! Jack Johnson: Nashville singer-songwriter......

The Bill Jerram Band will rock the Saxon Pub this Saturday night at 9PM for the release of their new self-titled cd. For the uninitiated, singer-songwriter Jerram and his band meld a raucous mixture of country, roots-pop, Americana rock and soul. Jerram’s guitar playing and powerhouse vocals are supported excellently by keyboardist Will Cornforth, bassist Marty Hobratschk and drummer Slade Crabtree. The band’s solid sound reminds Austinist of an amalgam of The Band, The......

We have no idea how to do anything like save the bits of a streaming MP3 so that you can download it and play it whenever you want without having to, we don't know, stream it again. But some people do, and those people have web sites. We were lucky enough to attend a listening party for the Gorillaz new album at Red Fez during SXSW, and were upset that we'd have to wait a......