The Art World
LEAVING THE COUNTRY THIS SUMMER? You can still get your fill of Houston artists. Sculptor Joseph Havel will be taking his solo exhibition of shirts and shirt fragments to Kiev’s Soros Center for...
View ArticleTrash Talk
THE SCENE IS DECEPTIVELY bucolic: At the end of a dirt road a few miles west of downtown Alvin, a pair of snowy egrets wade in a muddy pond at the city’s dormant landfill. But the peaceful setting...
View ArticleIn the Red
WHEN JAMES SURLS moves, the Texas art scene invariably shakes. In founding the Lawndale Art and Performance Center in Houston seventeen years ago, the internationally acclaimed sculptor launched the...
View ArticleFormidabull
A DOZEN ATTRACTIVE young women on the arena floor shimmy to an impromptu number that announcer Boyd Polhamus calls a Himalayan tribal dance, while a beer-blitzed Bubba joins in. Under the plank-board...
View ArticleGrander Tour
REFINING THE LIMITS OF THE HILL COUNTRY [“The Ultimate Hill Country Tour,” April 1996] is touchy business, and just when you draw a line on the map, someone is sure to challenge. Well, here you have...
View ArticleThe Rites of Swing
IN THE PANTHEON OF PROFESSIONAL GOLF instruction, the Harmon family is as renowned as the Kennedy family is in politics. Claude Harmon, Sr., its late patriarch, was the head pro at Seminole Golf Club...
View ArticleBeef Choice
PITY THE POOR COWMAN. all his life he has been told to raise bigger and better cattle. More meat on the hoof meant more dollars in his pocket—which is why Texas ranchers have turned away from smaller...
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Roasted Spring Chicken With Garden Vegetables
Recipe from Chef Lance Young, The Roaring Fork, Dallas. Spring Chicken 1/2 cup lemon juice 1/8 cup honey 2 tablespoons fresh thyme 2 tablespoons fresh chives 1/4 cup olive oil 1 tablespoon garlic,...
View ArticleState Fare
Underscoring the “comfort” in comfort food, the Roaring Fork in Dallas (14866 Montfort) has brought classic roasted chicken into the nineties with a dish that’s a breeze to fix and soul-satisfying to...
View ArticleThe Lawsuit from Hell
FEW PLACES IN TEXAS ARE more humble than Daingerfield, a town of 2,655 residents hidden away in the rolling hills of Northeast Texas. Many of the downtown storefronts are abandoned. The parking lot at...
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Lost in Space
On April 12, NASA commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of the inaugural flight of the space shuttle with a party at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Agency administrators made speeches....
View ArticleAround the State
THE MAIN EVENT Shtick Shift These days, stand-up stalwarts like Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres get rich off genial, self-deprecating, politically correct routines, but comedy has not always been so...
View ArticleMerchant of Death
WHEN ROBERT L. WALTRIP’S TIME COMES, he will likely get the same treatment accorded any of his customers at Houston’s Service Corporation International (SCI). Two men will pick him up, place him in a...
View ArticleTruckin’
IN THE AGE OF OUTSIDER POLITICS, metaphors come cheap. No one knows this better than senatorial candidate Victor Morales, the 46-year-old high school government teacher who will face the formidable...
View ArticleMarcia Gay Harden
I REMEMBER ONE SUMMER when there were snakes galore on Lake LBJ near Kingsland. We have five kids in our family, and we’d all go swimming in the lake, but when we’d see something in the water—and...
View ArticleThe Last Refuge
THE CABIN, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN these parts, is out in the middle of nowhere. Getting there requires so many crisscrosses on so many primitive unmapped roads that the visitor’s expectations are...
View ArticleThe Big Chill-Out
HERE AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH century, stress is reaching epidemic levels. In a time when paychecks are stretched thinner than Kate Moss’s waistline, when the message is be-wired-or-be-fired, stress...
View ArticleSwartz and All
We didn’t know it at the time, but there was something karmically appropriate about asking senior editor Mimi Swartz to write about riding around the state with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Victor...
View ArticleUp and Atom
WHILE YOU MIGHT STILL FIND a few tattered bumperstickers claiming otherwise, Waxahachie is no longer “Collider Country.” This past winter, the sad saga of the superconducting supercollider—a high-tech...
View ArticleHe Takes the Cake
Wally Mejía designed his first wedding cake for a friend in 1989. It was a five-tiered butter-pecan-creme-filled extravaganza adorned with intricate scrollwork that imitated the architectural...
View ArticleThe Tort Tax
IN 1990 A UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS at Austin finance professor named Stephen Magee made headlines when he tried to put a dollar figure on the damage that lawyers and lawsuits inflict on the U.S. economy. He...
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Junior Achievement
Photographs by Michael O’Brien IT’S ALMOST TWO ON A MONDAY morning and a who’s who of Austin roots rockers, mainstream and alternative hillbillies, punks, and graybeards are crammed into the...
View ArticleCheril Santini
MAKING A SPLASH—so to speak—is what Cheril Santini does best. As a member of Southern Methodist University’s diving team in the early nineties, the Dallas native made All-American ten times, was a...
View ArticleThe Hole Story
“I USED TO SAY that as soon as we have a gold record, that’s certainly one of the signs of the Apocalypse that David Koresh was looking for.” King Coffey, the drummer for Austin’s Butthole Surfers, is...
View ArticleGov, American Style
WOULD YOU WATCH AN L.A. Law–style drama about the staff of a female governor from Texas? Fred Ellis and Monte Williams hope so—and so does Steven Spielberg. Ellis, who was Ann Richards’ appointments...
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