Daily - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

In the realm of Austin publishing, the local, free-slick-profiling-advertisers genre has a new brother. And sister.

L Style G Style, a fun little flip rag (one side Lezzie, one side Gay boy) is on the racks in classier ZIP codes around town: SoCo, the Domain, 2nd Street District, even the burgeoning Burnet Road shopping strip. In a few weeks, the mag's circulation will expand with a second distribution.

LSGS distinguishes itself a wee bit from other local slickies by being an out, queer publication – refreshing considering how subtextual but how certainly queer the aesthetics of commerce/social scene rags like Brilliant, Tribeza, Rare, and their ilk are.

Publishers Alisa Weldon and Lynn Yeldell (must to recuse: these are friends of mine) threw quite the gala this past weekend in front of the emergent Amli on 2nd (which is actually on Third), where apparently every black-clad queer in town was seen – 'cept yrs truly until the end. I got there in the waning few 15 or so minutes, having just sped in from San Marcos. Stephen McMo has a bit more fleshed out info about the throwdown it this week's After a Fashion.

Following up our City Council Notebook post below, it should be noted Item 65 ("Mike Martinez and Lee Leffingwell's motion calling for an election on how the City Attorney is installed") is facing a tough road. It would allow the council – who the City Attorney ostensibly represents – to make the appointment instead of the City Manager; the argument goes that the City Manager's appointment powers makes for a weird dynamic where the City Attorney's loyalties are divided.

The item was originally proposed as part of a comprehensive package of reforms designed to shift power from the City Manager back into the hands of City Council. But while two other measures sailed through (increased financial scrutiny, and an election to change the way the City Auditor's installed), the sponsors pulled the City Attorney item, presumably for some explanation and arm-twisting.

Now it's back, but Leffingwell tells In Fact Daily he doesn't know if he has the votes. IFD also has Brewster McCracken and Sheryl Cole down as opposed, with Cole saying "I think it would create an unhealthy environment for the relationship between the City Council and the City Attorney."

Granted, the council members are entitled to their opinion; hell, for all we know, they may be right. But let's not forget that Item 65 doesn't make these changes – it simply puts it them to the people for a vote, like the City Auditor resolution, which passed unopposed. Our question for Cole and McCracken is: why preclude even the possibility of debate?

San Francisco’s entertainment dens and gilded ballrooms opulated in wake of the 1906 earthquake. Seventy-two hours after a 5.6 ripple undulates the city and surrounding Bay Area - last Friday - Danzig jolts Market Streeet’s Warfield Theatre in the heart of downtown. At least one man sprints for it.

Opened in 1922, the Warfield tops layers and layers of civilized rubble far beneath the underground tunnels and rumored catacombs, and within its phantom of the rock opera walls, up along the red-carpet staircases and through to the balcony, vaudeville still beats for 2,400 exultant pleasure seekers. In the 1940s, my great-grandmother escorted my mother to the movies there. In the 1990s, Guns ‘n’ Roses previewed its Use Your Illusion tour there, Sinead O’Connor put her current tour to shame there, and Ali Farka Toure made blues for the ages and beyond there, all witnessed by that same man hoofing it down Market at the stroke of midnight.

Glenn Danzig had finally produced the glass slipper/sneaker/steel-toed boot mere minutes earlier.

TODAY'S EVENTS

Greater Austin Book Festival at Central Library

MUSIC | MOVIES | ARTS | COMMUNITY

Agenda highlights (?) for the Thurs., Nov. 8 City Council meeting.

Item 10: Authorizing the long-term water supply between Austin and the LCRA for an extra 250,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, through the year 2100. Ca-ching!

Items 14-17: Reinstating Public Improvement Districts (PID – similar to TIFs, where revenue is captured for improvements or such) for Sixth Street and Downtown. Now if only we could do something about those outrageous decibel levels down there …

Item 23: Appropriating (anticipated?) red light camera fines to cover the system requirements. See kids, the police state pays for itself!

Item 24: More agreement talk between the city, the Urban Renewal Agency, and the Austin Revitalization Authority. Will the sparks finally fly?

Item 65: Mike Martinez and Lee Leffingwell's motion calling for an election on how the City Attorney is installed.

Item 66: Gearing up EMS for meet and confer talks by designating the paramedics' bargainer.

Item 67: Sending the Affordable Housing Incentives Task Force's recommendations on incentives for development to boards and commissions for review and recommendation. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind you as you enter the B&C black forest!

Item 82: 2pm presentation by the Design Commission regarding their density bonus report.

Item 121: Public hearing and possible action on Leffingwell's Barton Springs Zone amendments allowing for redevelopment of pre-SOS Ordinance buildings. Relax, it's only the soul of the city …

With 100% of precincts state-wide reporting, the Secretary of State's office unofficially reported that all 16 constitutional amendments on yesterday's ballot passed, with large margins.

The most popular measure of the night, Prop. 9, was the proposal by Sens. John Carona, R-Dallas, and Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, to end ad valorem property taxes for totally disabled veterans (something seen during the lege session as correcting an earlier legislative error), which passed with 86.19% of votes cast. The closest run result was Prop. 4, the billion dollar maintenance and repair bond issue, which passed by a comparative squeaker margin of 16%.

But before everyone gets too excited about this major victory for participatory democracy, there's another figure: 8.64%. That was the highest recorded turn-out for any issue (Prop. 15, the Cancer Fund financing, which passed 61.43% to 38.57%.)

See this week's upcoming issue for more in-depth coverage.

OK, some of this was my fault. I'd been talking to Taj Mahal’s publicist about doing an interview before his Austin show for more than a week. We went back and forth a few times and after a while I didn’t think it was really going to happen. It’s not inside baseball to reveal sometimes you work on a story idea and it never sees the light of day. Then she calls me with a time to talk to him. The downside was that it only allowed me about an hour to prepare for it. So, to be honest, I wasn’t quite ready. Having whipped together some fairly generic questions, I reach Mahal (originally Henry Saint Clair Fredericks) on the phone from the West Coast and he doesn’t like the questions I’m asking. So he hijacks the interview, and the 65-year-old bluesman starts talking, in his gravelly, Wolfman Jack kind of voice, about what he’s interested in, and that's where this picks up.

The Taj Mahal Trio plays an early show at Antone’s – it was moved from the Glenn – tomorrow evening with opener Ruthie Foster.

When I got the Redwalls' new self-titled CD a few weeks back, it hit the CD player immediately and has lingered nearby ever since. I even pulled out their 2005 release, De Nova, and played them back-to-back for an afternoon of butt-rockin' Britpop with a dollop of Chicago rock chutzpah. When I play the Redwalls, I'm 20 years old and nothing can go wrong.

Except I'm nowhere near 20 any longer and that cussin' you'll hear tonight is me looking for parking spot near Emo's, where the quartet plays with Rooney and the Polyphonic Spree. That's OK. I'll just hum "Modern Diet" and "Little Sister" as I walk the blocks just to watch their shaggy heads bob and their skinny butts shake.

My Chicago buddy Cynthia Plaster Caster loves these boys too, and they were cool (and smart) enough to pay homage at her birthday party in May. I love it when young bands are savvy enough to recognize getting the thumbs-up from old school groupies like Cynthia is as good as a four-star review in whatever the hip publication of the moment is.

Of course, I could be persuaded to drop by Waterloo Records and see their in-store at 5pm today as well. That way I can ask if they named themselves after the Brian Jacques books with all those cute little mice dressed as pirates. If so, their next album should be called Mossflower County.

Voters in Denver have passed Question 100, making adult possession of less than one ounce of marijuana the city’s lowest law-enforcement priority. By early this morning, with a majority of ballots counted, Q100 had earned at least 56% of the vote.

In addition to making adult pot possession last in line for enforcement, the measure also directs the mayor to appoint a panel that will monitor how police and prosecutors actually handle pot cases. In 2005, Denver voters passed the city’s first pot policy, voting to remove all penalties for simple possession by adults. Despite that victory, pot arrests there have hit an all-time high, reports Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, the group behind both ballot initiatives.

PHOTO GALLERIES