Bass-O-Matic
How a fish called Ethel (seventeen pounds, ten ounces) caught by a fishing guide named Mark (Stevenson, in 1986, on Lake Fork) revolutionized a once-sleepy sport.
August 2008 Issue
Features
State of Play
You may think you know how the Obama-McCain battle in Texas is going to turn out. You may even be right. But the more important outcome is down-ballot, where two dozen or so races—and the future of politics and policy here—will be affected by what happens at the top of
Out of Sight
For the 140 full-time, residential students lucky enough to be enrolled there, the Texas School for the Blind is “heaven,” “home,” and “the first place I had friends.”
The Killing Field
Before they clubbed two deer to death in their tiny West Texas town, the four high school football stars were treated like royalty. Afterward, when news of their exploits hit the Internet, they were celebrities of a very different sort.
Columns
Sarah Bird
Lactation Nation
Putting the fun in fun bags! The mommy in mommy muffins! (I could go on.)
Reporter
Music Review
Two Men With the Blues
“Overexposed” doesn’t begin to cover it. After innumerable recent releases, not to mention all the seventy-fifth birthday hoopla, Willie Nelson again? You’d think no one else made records in Texas. Actually, Two Men With the Blues (Blue Note) was recorded in New York City. What distinguishes it from
The Texanist
The Texanist: How Do Male Friends Help Each Other Apply Sunscreen?
Can you ask your buddy to put sunscreen on your back?
Luci Baines Johnson
“‘LBJ’s war’ was not a war he had sought. It was a war he had inherited. It was a war he was trying desperately to get out of.”
Jana Faulk, Long-Haul Truck Driver
Faulk was born in Missouri and raised in Corpus Christi. Before becoming a truck driver with her husband, Tony, she lived in the West Texas town of Terlingua (population: 267), where she worked as a horseback wilderness guide and owned a popular, though now defunct, liquor store. Tony was a
Author Interview
Nick Flynn
The play Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins represents a chance for the award-winning poet and memoirist (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) to “work a muscle [he] hadn’t before.” He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.Is Alice your first play?In my memoir
Book Review
Why I Came West
Over the course of two decades living in Montana’s remote Yaak Valley, Houston-bred Rick Bass has produced 21 books—largely about the wilderness that surrounds him—and acquired a reputation as a zealous, not to say rabid, environmental activist. Why I Came West is his attempt to redefine himself as
Book Review
Leather Maiden
Life is kicking Pulitzer-nominated journalist Cason Statler squarely in the pants at the outset of Joe R. Lansdale’s potent seriocomic thriller Leather Maiden. Fired by his editor at a Houston paper for personal reasons (“I was banging his wife. And his stepdaughter”), Statler retreats to his hometown of
Music Review
She Ain’t Me
Austin violinist-turned-fiddler-turned-singer Carrie Rodriguez capped her multiyear tutelage with songwriter Chip Taylor in her 2006 debut, Seven Angels on a Bicycle. While the album featured several Taylor compositions, it was a folksy and soulful stunner that was clearly a step up for the theretofore reserved Rodriguez. Now She
Music Review
Rook
Menacing, grandiose, romantic, apocalyptic: The music of Shearwater is no summertime fling. The four-piece band is the brainchild of ornithologist and Austin transplant Jonathan Meiburg, who delivers his strange, arresting imagery in a voice—part crooning, part ghostly falsetto—that evokes an anguished Bryan Ferry. Shearwater’s music is typified by a
Artist Interview
Carl Finch
Since 1979 the guitarist, key-boardist, and accordionist (center) has led Denton’s famed “nuclear polka” outfit Brave Combo, whose latest project has been to score the sound track for As the Wrench Turns, a PBS animated series based on the NPR program Car Talk. The show debuted July 9. How
Web
The Filter: Dining
New and Noteworthy
Café ZolHouston This charming spot offers an intriguing selection of what it calls “Scandinavian tapas.” The lobster chowder with crawfish and the Exotic House Salad of greens, grapes, and kiwi whetted our appetite for an amalgam of flavors and textures. Give serious consideration to the shrimp in phyllo with
Pat's Pick
Screen Door
Poor June Cleaver would be so confused. The pretty, proper dining room at Screen Door—the two-month-old restaurant at Dallas’s One Arts Plaza—looks as if it could be the Cleavers’ living room. But June would never have served iced tea in a milk bottle. And if there had been daughters in
Miscellany
Roar of the Crowd
Second Helpings
I enjoyed your barbecue story and am planning my summer trips so that they include stops at some from the top five on your list. [“BBQ08,” June 2008]. But I must say that y’all missed a great one: Martin’s Place in Bryan.Matt WiedersteinBryan. . . Angelo’s Bar-B-Que in Fort
Editor's Letter
A Patriot Act
As I type these words, it is July 4— a day filled with bunting, parades, hot dogs, and political candidates slyly impugning one another’s patriotism. It is also a day to contemplate what this country of ours owes us, and what we owe it. The former has been the subject
Contributors
August 2008 Contributors
Sarah Wilson, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Charlie Llewellin.
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