Logo from Austin Jewish Book Fair Keynote Lecture: "Iraq, Al Qaeda, and the Future of Israel" with Jeffrey Goldberg and Lawrence WrightSunday, November 11Jewish Community Association of Austin (7300 Hart Lane)7:30pm, $12 Gen Ad, $10 Students/Seniors/JCC Members[info] | [tickets] Austin Graphics and Comics Night with Paul Benjamin and Terry and Patty LaBanThursday, November 8Barnes and Noble Westlake (701 S. Capital of Texas)7:30pm, Free[info]Less than four days are left in the 2007 Austin Jewish Book Fair,...
Results tagged “newyorker”
Highlights for this week: The Royal Family bids adieu to the east side with a giant Halloween bash, featuring DJ sets by Stay Gold, a costume contest, and a whopping 75% off the entire store inventory The Blanton Museum of Art opens up afterhours on Friday for its monthly B scene, with art from the American West and music by the Unfortunate Heads and DJ Spooky Texas Fun Fun Fun Fest takes over Waterloo Park...
Saturday and Sunday, October 6th and 7th Hey you, big-spender: if you missed FactoryPeople's last pop-up store (at their former 1325 South Congress location), take a look-sy at the jewelry by Crumley, designed by Austinite-turned-New Yorker Brian Crumley. Crumley pieces are favored by stylists for both national and international photo shoots and runway shows. Guests can chat up Brian from noon to 6 p.m. and sip Crumley Cosmos—a raspberry champagne cocktail—while grooving to some...
The Brave One Jodie Foster's pool-table (or was it pinball machine?) scene in The Accused was burned into our early middle-school brains, so will that make it harder or easier to watch her get brutalized again in this new movie? At least her character is totally different - this time she's an upscale New Yorker who gets beaten by unknown assailants in Central Park (and the movie is directed by Neil Jordan, of The...
New Yorker Leona ("Queen of Mean") Helmsley seals her fate as a heartless biatch by leaving $12 million, the majority of her will, to her dog. Lindsay Lohan checklist: Coke possession. Check. Arrested. Check. Sex Scene? Check! With his last official day of work approaching this Friday, Karl Rove's car got Saran Wrapped and slapped with an I Heart Obama sticker. Straight out of the 18th century--drug dealer gets tarred, feathered while holding a...
David Owen has an interesting article in last week's New Yorker (the Aug. 20 issue - only the abstract is online) discussing light pollution. The bottom line is that leaving the lights on all the time (mainly streetlights and building-exterior lights) not only brightens the night sky, but is also economically wasteful, environmentally damaging and probably causes cancer. It also doesn't decrease crime or have any other real benefits. Lights like the "glare bomb"...
Browse and contribute to the 2008 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker. Lifehacker: Mozilla preps Firefox Campus Edition, which is pre-bundled with student-centric extensions like Zotero, FoxyTunes and StumbleUpon. What extensions would you give to our young academics? The Department of Justice wants to come up with an official list of every porn star in America - and slap stiff penalties on producers who don't cooperate. What has better sound: vinyl, or a CD? Any record...
In a lot of ways, Trinidad, Colorado isn't so different from other small towns. They've got a population of 9,000, the local economy is transitioning away from once-prosperous mining and ranching, and Christ is Lord. But Trinidad, like many of its visitors, has a little something extra: Over the past forty years, six thousand people have traveled there to undergo sex-change operations. Dr. Stanley Biber secretly began performing genital-reassignment surgery, or GRS, in 1969, hiding...
The Writers' League of Texas will be honoring author Lawrence Wright on September 21st with the 3rd Annual Award of Literary Merit. The award seeks to recognize individuals who "embody the League's mission of promoting literacy and elevating the art of writing." The first two Awards of Literary Merit were bestowed upon Sarah Bird (2006) and Anne Patchett (2005). Currently a staff writer for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright has authored several books as well...
We're always trying to extol the value of having the Harry Ransom Center right here in town. They keep so many valuable treasures safe, yet make them readily available to the Austin community. Who else is going to keep your authentic Raging Bull boxing trunks so "just-off De Niro" fresh for an eternity? Well, it was only a matter of time before the HRC got mad props from New York's poshest periodical: The New Yorker....
Traffic this morning is as bad as it gets. Due to a fire at the Army testing lab, a bunch of escaped infected monkeys are roaming the expressway. Despite the sweltering heat, don't unroll your windows, 'cause those monkeys seem confused and irritable. In other news, Nick Paumgarten has an essay on commuting in this week's New Yorker. Some interesting stats: approximately one out of six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each...
It was announced today that Austin-based scribe Lawrence Wright was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. This is not the only award his book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has won, but it is one of the more illustrious honors it has received. Wright is currently a staff writer for the New York Times New Yorker, has written for Texas Monthly, and helped pen the screenplay for the Denzel...
In celebration of its 150th birthday,the American Institute of Architects (AIA) surveyed over 1,800 randomly selected Americans in late February to compile a list of the 150 Favorite Works of Architecture in the United States. The AIA created a panel that narrowed down the options to 248 structures, which included the Empire State Building, the White House and the Washington National Cathedral. The University of Texas' own Battle Hall rounded out the list at...
Three and a half minutes in, a middle-aged, slightly overweight man leans casually against the pedestrian barrier of the Golden Gate Bridge and, without hesitation, climbs over the boundary. And then he leaps. Only after the zoom lens has captured his face-first plummet and recorded the powerful splash as body collides against water do the opening credits roll, and only after that does the viewer fully appreciate that what they've just witnessed on screen wasn't...
Man, somewhere along the way we killed anthemic stadium rock, or at least ran it six feet into the ground with overexposure and under-talented hair ripoffs. But don't you wish we could resurrect Queen and T-Rex and and ask them to share (and fucking shread) an Austin stage for just one magical night of robust, raunchy riffs, reminding us rock fans what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it? And...
In 2002, Suzan-Lori Parks, one of America's most exciting modern playwrights, wrote a new play every single day. Sometimes a famous person would die, so she'd write a little play about them; then our country went to war, and Parks wrote some plays about that. "[It was] kind of like walking a pilgrimage on my knees," says Parks. Now those plays are being performed all over the country, with Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Denver,...
One of our favorite authors, and national treasure, Sarah Vowell returns to Austin Friday night for a performance at the Paramount Theatre. In addition to authoring several outstanding non-fiction books (Radio On, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Assassination Vacation), the dry-witted Planes Stater-by-birth, New Yorker-by-choice has applied her substantial intellect and rapier wit to work for This American Life, McSweeney’s, Believer Magazine, Esquire, GQ, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Spin and The New York...
The surprising thing about the new documentary Jesus Camp, opening tomorrow in Austin, is how, well, un-Michael Moore it is. Sure, there are a couple of scenes in Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's look at an evangelical kids' ministry that are already providing yet more fodder for leftist religion-haters, including this one of children praying to a large cardboard cutout of President Bush. But, on the whole, you will be amazed at the filmmakers' preternatural...
Starting at 9am this morning (yes, we know it's already started) the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at UT School of Law will be taking part in a national webcast on "Guantánamo: How Should We Respond". All day long, panelists (including released detainees, clergy, military officers and more) based in Seton Hall will be discussing the detentions at Guantánamo and litigation strategies. The webcast will allow 200 schools across the nation to...
Austin made an attempt at seducing another NYC writer. It’s hard not to say “I love you Austin” when the temps are in the mid-70’s, the patio’s not too crowded, and the booze is flowing like, um, a waterfall of booze. Austinist took full advantage of the conditions and sat down with Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook. He's also a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure. We took him...
Austin is such an NPR town. How else can one explain a sold-out house of 2,800+ at $35 per ticket for author David Sedaris? Austinist hadn't been to many readings before, let alone one at a venue hosting Elvis Costello this week, so we weren't sure what to expect. We found a fawning audience, a writer in command of what he does best, and a great number of laughs through the course of the...
You know, we just couldn't help ourselves. The Coffee Talk sketch is a permanent part of our psyche. Blame SNL and Mike Myers. Anyway, this is somewhat last minute, but we recently learned that Barbra Streisand impersonator Steven Brinberg will be in town tonight and tomorrow night only for two very special performances of Simply Barbra. Both are at 8:30pm in the Crystal Ballroom at Mansion at Judges Hill. A native New Yorker, Brinberg...
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DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi's tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city. LAist documented graf artist Banksy's most recent visit to LA in one two three posts. They also found the best possible use...
[The following is an editorial column by contributor Alison Coffey and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors] I know I've told you before of my daughterly love for Project Runway's Tim Gunn (if I had a gay fashion designing New Yorker for a father instead of a golfing, loafer wearing retired midwestern school superintendent), but he never ceases to impress me with his infinte wisdom and his stern...
As mentioned yesterday here on Austinist, Rude Mechanicals has mounted an upgraded version of last year's workshopped production, Get Your War On!. ( In case you haven't been reading Austinist, or didn't see the cover of this week's Austin Chronicle, we'll give you the lowdown on this unique work. Basically, shortly after 9/11/2001, a New Yorker named David Rees started writing, and publishing online, an acerbic, satirical comic strip called Get Your War On!....
-Lewis "Scooter" Libby evidently dabbled in a bit of fiction writing, his 1996 novel The Apprentice dubbed by The New Yorker as his "entry in the long and distinguished annals of the right-wing dirty novel." Consider the following tasty excerpt: "He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts...
George W. Bush: aka Dubya, President of the United States, dumbass Owen Wilson: aka The Butterscotch Stallion, screenwriter, asslicker, and Movie Star Wes Anderson: writer/director of the best films ever(Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, etc), wears cool glasses Sandra Bullock: aka Mrs. Jesse James, producer, movie star, nice gal Matthew McConaughey: bongo player, weed smoker, movie star, hunk Marcia Gay Harden: character actress, Oscar winner Benjamin McKenzie: stud, lead actor of the O.C. Molly Ivins: whip-smart...
Austinist imagines Parisian chanteuse Keren Ann to be the musical lovechild of Jacques Dutronc and Eva Cassidy, which is to say an intercontinental pairing of jazz and folk/country. On our iPod otherwise congested with frenetic, post-everything tunes, her songs strike a perfect, delicate balance: between nostalgia for a simpler time and place none of us will ever know, and a sensual promise of heated trysts within shrouded bedrooms.
The Traditional Path of the Sore Loser Leads Senate Republicans to the Brink of the "Nuclear Option"
On Friday afternoon, after the Senate spent more than 25 hours debating the appointment of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) filed for cloture. The immediate result of cloture is to bring about a relatively expedient end to debate; tomorrow, the Senate will vote whether to approve Owen's nomination. But if Republicans fail to get the 60 votes necessary to approve her, as...
