Daily - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

Regular pedestrians and bus passengers around town have probably seen the rambling, incoherent, and unnerving handwritten “signs” taped to bus shelters, seats, and signs telling the half a million refugees from Hurricane Katrina that there’s some new housing opened in New Orleans. So go home. Now.

The warm welcome that Texas extended to the Katrina refugees, it seems, is starting to wear thin in certain quarters. It’s not hard to find anti-Katrina refugee graffiti around Austin, especially around Sixth Street and Red River. Many Houstonians will talk freely about how former New Orleanians have brought a crime wave with them. Rick Perry (political barometer par excellence) went, in a year, from being the governor lauded for opening up his state to refugees to being the incumbent who scarcely squeaked a word about it during election season.

Meanwhile, reconstruction of New Orleans is failing. Walter Leger, of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, told the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee this week that state and federally funded building is being hamstrung by contradictory finance laws. The Rand Corporation estimates that the Big Easy will only be back to 51% of its pre-Katrina population by the end of 2008.

Into the Void … With the Sword

Just as Black Sabbath plunged deep "Into the Void," knocking down the Wall of Dis with disorderly riffa*ge, so do I now dwell in darkness with the comfort of the Southern Lord. Each week, together, we’ll traverse this realm of brimstone, fire, and all things metal.

This week, drummer Trivett Wingo, from Austin’s metal messiahs the Sword, which has been dormant for the winter, delves "Into the Void" before embarking on another West Coast crusade with Priestbird and Year Long Disaster.

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL WHO ENTER HERE.

TODAY'S EVENTS

Ball of Fire at AFS Cinema

Queer Black Women Alliance Presents: First Wednesday at The Dogwood

MUSIC | MOVIES | ARTS | COMMUNITY

Rick Perry might try to put the best face on and assert that he has "100 percent of the authority," but here's a great argument for just how weak his governorship is: In the 2006 election, his 39% of the vote was actually less than the percentage of the losing candidate in 19 other states. Boy, now that's a mandate.

We pulled that from a report by the Lone Star Project on why Texas should move its primary up to February. LSP cited Perry's weakness as a primary reason why such a move would not be accomplished.

schadenfreude \SHOD-n-froy-duh\, noun: A malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others.
The word comes from the German schaden, which means "damage," and freude, which means "joy." There’s no English equivalent for the word, which generally carries a negative connotation. However, the amalgamation of damage and joy is a perfect example of music’s therapeutic quality. One artist’s pain and failure is our existential backpat. Just watch an episode of American Idol or any of its mewling, quivering spawn, and the feeling literally oozes out of the TV.

Here, you can expect to absorb some of that ooze, the general weirdness Austin’s music scene is rumored to harbor, plus interviews, show reviews, and, if all goes as planned, a gallery of tragic band fashion during SXSW. In the meantime, this weekend is a good place to start: Basic and Finally Punk play Mohawk tonight, and Yellow Fever go on early (9pm) at the Carousel Lounge tomorrow. For a great example of this blog’s titular word, there’s Hug’s CD release for latest God Gasm at Room 710 Saturday.

We sh*t you not: One of the U.S. contractors in Iraq – one that was convicted of fraud, although the judgment was later set aside – is named Custer Battles.

Not exactly a name that makes you think they have a strategic vision, is it? Definitely not a good name for working in a war zone with an insurgent native population.

We should probably just make "stupid thing said by the Statesman editorial page" a daily feature, but this one particularly struck us: In today's tribute to the late Molly Ivins, the page tells us that (italics ours) "Molly appeared in Austin in 1970 as one of the editors of the feisty Texas Observer. In that era, when the Texas daily press was largely complacent and incurious …"

Guys, I know you meant to compliment her, but somewhere in heaven, Molly is laughing at you and rolling her eyes.

(Tell you what, just to be fair, we'll give the daily its props: Bruce Hight wrote an excellent rebuttal to Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson's regurgitation of that tired old lie: the notion that, for Southerners, slavery was not the central issue of the Civil War.)

Veteran El Paso Sen. Eliot Shapleigh recently released Texas on the Brink, a numerical snapsnot of how the state stacks up against the union's other 49. Its findings?

Texas is ranked first in its percentage of uninsured children andits income inequality between the rich and poor and second in the percentage of the population without health insurance. Scholastic Assessment Test scores are 47th highest in the nation, and last nationwide for nonelderly women with health insurance, or women over 40 who receive mammograms. The entire report is available at www.shapleigh.org.

Shapleigh has thrown himself into the Internet age head first, with exhaustive video diaries available on the Web site. (He's got his own YouTube page, fer chrissakes!) Here he is delivering the Texas on the Brink findings:

Rock on, Eliot.