Texas Monthly articles from April 2007

Texas Monthly archives from April 2007

More power to him? Unless the Legislature fights back--and it should--Rick Perry may make this a strong-governor state after all.(Behind the Lines)
April 1, 2007... The most interesting--and far-reaching--issue of this legislative session is one that few foresaw: What is the balance of power between the governor and the Legislature? The emergence of this question came as a complete surprise to the...

Motor mouths.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... Thank you, Michael Hall, for opening your "football-loving soul" to the NASCAR way ["EEEEEEAAAAOOOOWWW!!!," February 2007]. Most of the time, NASCAR fans get looked down upon, but you came, saw, and felt what millions of others love-one hell of...

A town divided.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... Your article "The Beating of Billy Ray Johnson" gives Linden a bad reputation [February 2007]. The situation did happen here and happens in almost any town at one time or another, but don't blame the whole town. The majority of the residents...

Check plus.(Roar of the Crowd)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... Thanks for the story on the two chess prodigies ["Check Mates," February 2007]. Back in the early nineties, we at Schanen Estates Elementary, in Corpus Christi, started a chess club. We met J. J. Guajardo in Brownsville, and he inspired us to...

Patients are a virtue.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... Through the courtesy of a friend, I was able to read Dr. Abraham Verghese's essay on teaching medicine by the bedside ["Bedside Manners," February 2007]. He highlights an important retrogressive trend that came into prominence with the...

Degrees of separation.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... I am writing in response to Sarah Bird's February article "Tour de Farce," in which she reveals her bias by inferring that parents whose children attend a community college are giant losers in the competition to enroll in "good colleges" and...

The profanity defense.
April 1, 2007... My mother wasn't a longshoreman. My father wasn't a mob boss. They weren't church choir directors either, but they certainly didn't raise me to drop the F-bomb in conversation as liberally as you might sprinkle salt on french fries....

Topic a: power keg: the TXU buyout ignites a frenzy of speculation.(Reporter)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... In a spring of acronym soup--HPV, TYC--so far one set of letters has topped them all: TXU. The proposed $32 billion sale of the North Texas electric giant--the largest corporate buyout in the history of the universe--raises the most questions...

Photographing a war.(The Horse's Mouth: EVERYTHING I COULD EVER TELL YOU ABOUT ...)(Lucian Read)(Interview)
April 1, 2007... NAME: Lucian Read AGE: 32 HOMETOWN: Austin QUALIFICATIONS: Freelance photographer in Iraq since 2004/Has been published in Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and Paris Match, among others/Winner of a 2006 World Press Photo Award...

Are you ready for some ... Basketball? It may just be the new national sport of Texas.(The Sports Authorities: STACY HOLLISTER CALLS IN THE EXPERTS)(Interview)
April 1, 2007... PANELISTS: NORM HITZGES Sports talk show host, KTCK-AM, Dallas JOHN P. LOPEZ Sports columnist, Houston Chronicle; talk show host, KBME-AM, Houston Hollister: I'm expecting to see pigs fly any day now, because Texas A&M can call...

The land is yellow.(Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: Part IX: STORIES FROM SOUTH TEXAS BY TONNYRE THOMAS JOE )(Short story)
April 1, 2007... And also red, and purple. Almost every clearing is covered in wildflowers. There are a few bluebonnets, but in this part of South Texas, we have mostly sunflowery-looking blooms. The drought last year meant our spring was not nearly as pretty,...

Our savior Lutheran Church: McAllen / January 28, 2007.(Faith Bases)
April 1, 2007... Well, it must have been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and Pastor Inqvist must have faced an empty sanctuary, because the license plates in the parking lot of Our Savior Lutheran Church, in McAllen, made it seem that most of Minnesota had moved...

Hot shot.(Minister of Health)
April 1, 2007... No sooner had the ink dried on Governor Rick Perry's executive order to require all sixth-grade girls in Texas to be vaccinated for human papillomavirus (HPV)--the cause of deadly cervical cancer--by next school year than a firestorm erupted in...

The Lost Boys: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's self-destructive friendship.(Hollywood, TX)
April 1, 2007... Quentin Tarantino: "One of the things that's really nice about [our friendship] is we're great audience members for each other's movies." Robert Rodriguez: "I almost just make movies now so I can see them at Quentin's house." --from...

Diamonds To Dust.
April 1, 2007... Having built a solid career as a sideman's sideman and an A-list roots-rock producer hasn't made Austin's GURF MORLIX any more marketable. Not that that's an easy task. Morlix is a serious musician with matchless taste, but his name says it...

Life.
April 1, 2007... At 74, DAVID "FATHEAD" NEWMAN may no longer raise the hair on the hack of your neck when he tears off a tenor sex solo, but the force of his tone--comfortable, assured, sturdy, Texan--remains undiminished. LIFE (HighNote) is of a piece with the...

Dial T For This.(Sound recording review)
April 1, 2007... As has proved popular in rock and roll, if you're going to pretend you don't really care about your music, the stage is the place to act this out. Bands like the Replacements carried this to extremes; their drunken train wrecks in the eighties...

Robert Harrison.(Interview)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... The former front man of the long-running, traditional Austin pop combo Cotton Mather has brought together a sprawling and ambitious ensemble with a self-titled new project, Future Clouds and Radar (The Star Apple Kingdom). Why this...

The King Of Colored Town.
April 1, 2007... In his provocatively titled THE KING OF COLORED TOWN, longtime Austinite DARRYL WIMBERLEY offers an impassioned and eloquent piece of storytelling set in the last days of the Jim Crow South. The tone is somber from the outset: Cilia Handsom, a...

The Men's Guide to the Women's Bathroom.(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2007... THE MEN'S GUIDE TO THE WOMEN'S BATHROOM is a spunky debut novel from JO BARRETT that aspires, with mixed results, to break through the glass bookshelf of the chick-lit ghetto. Readers will recognize the likes of Claire St. John, a...

Berkeley Breathed.
April 1, 2007... Having nabbed a 1987 editorial cartooning Pulitzer for his satirical strip Bloom County, the onetime Austinite went on to write and illustrate kids' books as well as the widely syndicated Sunday funny Opus. His new book, Mars Needs Moms!, is...

Gimme shelter.(Buy This Now)
April 1, 2007... Samuel Mirelez is the unofficial Saint Francis of San Antonio. For the past 35 years he has carved and riveted elaborate aluminum birdhouses for the annual migration of purple martins, which jet in every spring from South America, seeking...

Sixth Street and Lamar Boulevard, Austin: where business is fiercely independent.(Street Smarts: A QUICKIE GUIDE TO ...)
April 1, 2007... [1] Located just a few blocks from where the first WHOLE FOODS MARKET opened, in 1980, the company's largest store radiates inviting smells that make even a junk food devotee crave such wholesome fodder as local handmade cheese and organic tea....

Ted Nugent: "Political correctness really is a mental disorder. If I have to bring my crowbar to this wrecked axle and straighten it out, I shall. Anybody who gets in my way is going to have to eat my vapor trail.".(Texas Monthly Talks)
April 1, 2007... Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. I know you get a lot of requests. Why not? When you have the word "Texas" in your magazine's name, you deserve me. And I'm here to decide whether it's the real Texas or if you brought that New York dog...

How we blew it: remember all that talk about Texans changing the world?
April 1, 2007... Picture this: American soldiers are welcomed to Iraq with garlands and return home within months. Democracy spreads through the Middle East with the viral ferocity of the Snakes on a Plane marketing campaign. A Congress led by a feisty Texas...

Standard bearer: Ray Price's recordings of the classic love songs are as good as Frank Sinatra's. So why don't more people know it?
April 1, 2007... On the night in December 2000 when Ray Price was scheduled to appear at the River Palace, in Johnson City, he was a bit late making his entrance. The crowd was patient, but as soon as the instruments began to be set up, a movement started...

The damage done: Texas is the only state in the country that won't allow needle-exchange programs for drug addicts. It's time for that to change.(Letter From Dallas)
April 1, 2007... "Hey, Ted!" No answer. "Hey, Ted!" No answer. The lack of response didn't surprise me, since the modest house appeared to be unoccupied. The shades were drawn and there were no obvious signs of life, but my guide kept walking along the...

Law of the land in 1823: no institution in the state is as iconic, and for more than a century none has been as resistant to change. But the Texas Rangers have finally made peace with the modern world: they're more diverse, they're more high-tech, and they're more ... diplomatic. Whatever it takes to battle the bad guys in the twenty-first century.(Cover story)
April 1, 2007... Stephen F. Austin hired ten men "to act as rangers for the common defense" in protecting his colonists from Indian raids. Nearly two centuries later, that group--known as the Texas Rangers--is alive and well, having adapted from being frontier...

The punch line: in death, as in life, Anna Nicole Smith is a joke. Which is less than she deserves--but not that much less.
April 1, 2007... MY FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD CALLED ME from school to tell me that Anna Nicole Smith had died, and he was laughing. I happened to be at Universal Studios in Burbank, working on a story, when I got the news; once it ricocheted from multiple BlackBerrys...

The gang's all here: when a beloved brother died last summer, more than four hundred bikers thundered into San Antonio for his funeral. As they swapped stories about the old days and guzzled beer, one message could be heard over the roar of their Harleys: Bandidos forever.
April 1, 2007... THEY BEGAN ARRIVING AT THE MISSION PARK FUNERAL Home in San Antonio early on a Friday afternoon. They came in packs, riding two, sometimes three abreast, their motorcycles roaring loudly enough to rattle all the funeral home's windows....

Bob Perry needs a hug: the biggest campaign contributor in the country is a reclusive Houston homebuilder who doesn't cooperate with the press (until now), never poses for photographs (until now), and keeps his personal life top secret (until now) may be it's because so many people blame him for dragging American politics into the gutter.
April 1, 2007... LIKE MANY ELECTION CAMPAIGNS LAST FALL,138 the race in Colorado's Seventh Congressional District between Democrat Ed Perlmutter and Republican Rick O'Donnell was a bruising affair. Personal attacks and negative advertising were the order of the...

He was a camera: Russell Lee is best known for his enduring images of American life during the Great Depression, but his rarely seen later photographs--many of them from Texas--show an artist whose powers of observation only sharpened with time.
April 1, 2007... A YEAR AFTER HE BOUGHT HIS FIRST CAMERA, Russell Lee commenced the assignment that has ensured his immortality, working alongside fellow icons Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to create the Farm Security Administration's gritty photographic...

N9NE Steakhouse.(PAT'S PICK)(Restaurant review)
April 1, 2007... Dallas HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I said, "Darn! Why doesn't Texas have more steakhouses with deejays?" How olden have I groused, "Where the hell are the steakhouses with mirrored columns and silver-leafed domes?" And most important, "Where are...

New + noteworthy: heart-healthy in Dallas; a green mind-set in San Antonio.(The Filter: Dining: OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANTS, BISTROS, CAFES, AND JOINTS )(Directory)
April 1, 2007... The Filter: Dining POLICIES AND DEFINITIONS The Filter. Dining is a service to our readers. The magazine accepts no advertising or other consideration in exchange for a listing. Reviews are written by resident critics in the cities...

Mesquite Championship Rodeo: Mesquite.(JORDAN'S PICK)
April 1, 2007... SO YOU MISSED THE BIG-to-do rodeos in Fort Worth and Houston this year. It's okay to admit it. But, lest your Texas citizenship soon be revoked, you've still got a chance to hop in the saddle (in a manner of speaking): The Mesquite Championship...

Birds of a feather.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... LAKE JACKSON It's April in Texas: Do you know where your birding enthusiastis? Any avian aficionado worth her Leica binoculars will be heading to the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail--a six-hundred-mile strip that starts near Beaumont and arcs...

Rhythm city.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... AUSTIN It's been two years since Midtown Live, the city's premier African American-owned nightclub, burned to the ground. Bystanders at the scene noticed a message on a computer screen in a police officer's patrol car that read "Burn, baby,...

The Soprano's new clothes.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... HOUSTON In 1966 the Houston Grand Opera celebrated the opening of its new home, Jones Hall, with a performance of "Aida," Giuseppe Verdi's Egyptian epic of love and betrayal. Twenty-one years later, in 1987, the HGO celebrated the opening of...

Girls just wanna have fun.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... DALLAS Back in January, a group of cheerleaders at McKinney North High School, near Dallas, earned a national reputation as mean girls run amok. "Boozing, bikinis, and bullying," read one headline. "Texas cheerleaders terrorize town," blared...

Changing of the Baton.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... AMARILLO As the Amarillo Symphony's eighty-second season comes to a close this month, so too does James Setapen's nineteen-year run as music director. When the New York native came to Amarillo in 1988 byway of Denver, his first...

Come sail away.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... GALVESTON "When people think of sailboat racing, they picture a stodgy yacht club, but we're just a bunch of middle-class guys out having fun," says Kevin Box, the principal race officer of this month's Texas Race Week, a three-day excuse for...

The Right Angle.(The Filter: Events: WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO, WHO TO SEE)
April 1, 2007... HOUSTON, AUSTIN For those of you who haven't realized that Latin American art goes beyond Frida Kahlo, there are two extremely well-edited exhibits on display that will correct this misconception. Though the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston gets...

The price is rite; in Collie Mac's house, bargain hunting was a holy calling. It is in mine too.
April 1, 2007... At a party last night I received two lovely compliments--one on a new pair of glasses, another on my raincoat. To the first I replied, breathless as Ron Popeil touting the Veg-O-Matic, "Can you believe I got these off the Internet?! With...