Austin Chronicle

Big Cat                                  

Big Cat

Big Cat groups proven local talent, notably in veteran soulman Malford Milligan and guitarist Dave Sebree. Given the pairing, Big Cat should've unleashed a feral feline instead of a rather tame house kitty.

Blue Bell announced this week that they are adding peppermint stick ice cream back to the lineup. The overwhelming holiday favorite joins homemade vanilla, Dutch chocolate, cookies 'n' cream, buttered pecan, Great Divide, and pistachio almond on store shelves. No firm date yet on when the company's various ice cream novelty items will be back in stores, but it could be a few more months.

In keeping with his seeming quest to rehabilitate all of Austin's empty former Church's Fried Chicken outlets, Carlos Rivera and his restaurant group are creating another El Chilito location at 6425 Burnet Road. The projected opening of the new outlet will be spring of 2016, sometime before the opening of their fourth El Chilito at 4501 Manchaca Road. The south Austin location was never a fast food restaurant and is requiring more work than originally anticipated. Rivera's group also celebrates the 10th anniversary of El Chilito this spring.

Gelateria Gemelli hosts a pop-up bake sale featuring such treats as banana bread, cinnamon rolls, cookies, savory frittatas, and more from Hannah Bakery. Guests will have the option of ordering baked goods à la mode to enjoy with a full line of Tweed Coffee Roasters beverages, and $6 mimosas.

Maher is definitely in charge of his kitchen even when he’s try to corral a group of travel writers with the attention span of a herd of cats. To Maher, food is a science project with love. Change the molecular structure of an edible substance and you have a food that makes everyone feel good. “Baking is science,” he says, cooking is an art involving heart to hand. “Make the recipe your own.”

One of his basic recommendations is to always use sea salt or at the very least kosher salt. Iodized salt affects the flavor of any dish. Maher’s classes are instructional, fun, and in the end, delicious when we all sat down to the meal we helped prepare.

Since moving to New Mexico in 2003 and establishing Cooking Studio Taos, Maher is doing what he loves and it shows. He still does the occasional acting job, but spends most of his professional time putting on cooking seminars. “I don’t have to do it for the money,” he says. “I do it because I love it.”

Baroness Turns Mohawk Outside In    

Georgian metallurgists tease upcoming fourth LP Purple

Given the devastating bus crash the group endured less than a month after the release of its third disc, 2012’s Yellow & Green, a brand new release and tour cycle arrives as a welcome comeback. Because Purple isn't out until Dec. 18, Baroness stuck mostly to its previous repertoire. The soothing sounds of “Yellow Theme” upheld indications of mellow, but soon gave way to the crunching riff of “The Sweetest Curse,” signaling the maelstrom had begun.

“March to the Sea” thus laid out the plan: a warm keyboard intro clearing the palette for roaring riffs and a tune you can hum, punctuated by harmony guitar leads and leader John Baizley’s hoarse bawl. Sounds formulaic, but it’s amazing what variety Baroness gets out of its self-imposed limitations. The jangly arpeggio that introduces “Sea Lungs,” waltz time rhythms of new tune “Chlorine & Wine,” and the prog theatrics of “Cocainium” kept the 12-year-old juggernaut free of monotony.

What defines who you are? For many, it's their memories, their experiences, what they have done and where they have been and who was there with them, that sets their nature. Embers poses one question: What if you can remember none of that?

Writer/director Claire Carré deservedly took home the inaugural Mary Shelley Award this weekend at the second Other Worlds Austin fest. With nothing more than performances and ruins, she creates a convincing and enthralling world. More importantly, she achieves that to which the best sci-fi aspires: She probes the nature of what it is to be human. She examines the quixotic nature of memory as both enlightenment and burden, moral boundary and source of pain. Each character treads a different path in this amnesiac's Divine Comedy, and each finds a different meaning in this meaningless world. In that ambiguity, she finds tragedy, poignancy, and even optimism.

Embers is both poetic and cerebral, and in an ideal world a label that specializes in the poetic and cerebral will give it a home (IFC, Oscilloscope, I'm looking at you). Ultimately, it provides a touching insight into what we are without that which makes us what we are, and does so with a graceful compassion.

For more on Embers, visit www.embersmovie.com

Stealing Guitars with Stiletto Feels    

A bad roommate inspires a great video

“Generally, I like playing an asshole,” says the leader of local electro-pop executioners Stiletto Feels. “Nowadays, I play an asshole more than I actually am one.”

“Steal Your Guitar” strums the lead single off Stiletto Feels’ The Big Fist. The debut album finds Earle enlisting various musicians to improvise over song sketches, then manipulates their contributions into cohesive songs. On “Guitar,” the singer channels a conniving roommate he shared a rental house with, a trusted friend named Mance.

“One day, Mance asked if he could take all of the roommates’ rent money and then write a big check from his bank account to pay the landlord,” explains Earle. “I thought, ‘Well that’s weird. It’s the kind of thing someone would want to do if they were trying to steal.’ But it didn’t make me suspicious, because I never heard from the landlord.”

Three months later, Earle received an alarming call from the property owner: rent hadn’t been paid in four months. Not coincidentally, Mance had moved out only the day before. When Earle and his roommates inventoried their stuff, they discovered that future Stiletto Feels guitarist Cody Skinner’s priceless classical guitar, made by renowned Czech luthier Petr Matousek, was missing.

When the discipline under discussion is dance, it's the nature of the artists to be on the move. And in Austin, they certainly are, pirouetting, lunging, stomping, leaping in scores of works annually, the eclectic mix of styles typical of our town: classical ballet, modern, aerial dance, tap, folklorico, flamenco.

It's where they do the moving that's often surprising: across the faces of skyscrapers and in office lobbies, atop utility poles and under bridges, in trash trucks and Barton Springs. But that's because the dance scene here runs on risk and experimentation, as other disciplines do. It may not be as expansive as the visual arts scene and may not crowd the calendar with performances as the theatre and classical music scenes do, but the artists in it are every bit as daring as their creative kin. They seek out new places to dance, new ways to move, and new collaborators – in their field and outside it. They are inspired by all kinds of movement and invite all kinds of people to move with them. They break new ground, and their innovations have earned Austin's dance artists and troupes attention across the globe.

Riffing on the sit-ins, Austinites pioneered a unique tactic: orderly lining up at the box office to take turns asking the attendant some version of whether they sell tickets to "all Americans." Upon the invariable reply that black patrons weren't allowed, the protester rejoined the line's end, awaiting the next opportunity to ask again – and thereby hindering any unbothered moviegoers from speedily obtaining tickets.

Despite a directive to UT faculty to steer clear of political involvement, professorial backing for the protests poured in by way of statements of support published in The Daily Texan, with 192 faculty members publicly endorsing the stand-ins within its first month.

Film Review: Chi-Raq

Spike Lee does the right thing in Chi-Raq: The filmmaker gives us a movie that’s drenched in the moment, one that’s born in outrage yet slathered in history. It speaks in a contemporary tongue while echoing ancient conversations. It is Lee’s most vibrant work in nearly a decade, a film that gives the impression of having risen forcefully to the surface from the pressure cooker of the present. Chi-Raq, the movie, has been a subject in the news well before it was an option in our movie theatres. It lobs a direct assault against our country’s gun culture and its repercussions in the horrific kill zone of Chicago. “This is an emergency,” shouts Chi-Raq.

Donned in camouflage hot pants, Lysistrata (Parris) leads the call to arms. Lee and Chi-Raq co-writer and producer Kevin Willmott (C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America) have fashioned their cri de coeur about the rampant and ever-increasing numbers of murders in the city of Chicago after Aristophanes’ comedy from 411 BC, Lysistrata, though also through the real-life example of Leymah Gbowee, whose 2003 sex strike in Liberia helped end that country’s civil war. Lysistrata is the girlfriend of rapper and Spartan gang leader Chi-Raq (Cannon, revealing a hard edge we’ve never associated with his work), who is at war with the Trojans, a gang led by the bedazzled eye patch-wearing Cyclops (Snipes, in fine form). (Characters in wheelchairs and adult diapers, and victims bearing other life-altering scars, are seen in abundance in this film – reminders of their unluckier comrades, killed in battle.) Initially, Lysistrata accepts all the crossfire in her Englewood section of town as par for the course, but the senseless death of a preteen girl by a stray bullet spurs her to action. Reflecting her namesake, Lysistrata unites the area’s women – all the Spartan and Trojan girlfriends, churchwomen and professional women, prostitutes and pole dancers (Dave Chappelle hilariously returns to the screen here as a stymied club owner). “No peace, no pussy,” is their battle cry.