Daily - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

MP3: Bill Callahan “Eid Ma Clack Shaw”

The Chronicle has already weighed in on Bill Callahan’s stellar Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, but if you haven’t had the chance to check it out, here’s a brief preview in the form of “Eid Ma Clack Shaw.”[audio-1]

House Voter ID Language Released

House Elections Committee chair Todd Smith has released a draft of what he hopes will be a compromise bill on voter ID.After doing a quick read of the bill, some differences between Troy Fraser's version that passed the Senate include:• provisions for voter education on the new ID requirements
• training for poll workers
• a report to the Lege on what demographic groups are affected
• language specifying that there is no guarantee that a provisional ballot will be counted
• the law wouldn't take effect until 2013
• the creation of signature verification committees that would check affidavit signatures against registration records
• the bill would not take effect unless the Lege appropriates $7.5 million to fund voter registration efforts

Dukes: Stop Killing Schools

With 27 amendments down and 23 (and growing) to go, the House is wading through HB 3, the big school accountability bill.Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, had an amendment that would strip away school closures, instead instructing the commissioner to "pursue interventions and sanctions". It got loud when Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, started defending mandatory school closures, and suggested that the closure of Johnston High School is part of what motivated Webb Middle School to really knuckle down to avoid closure.Big mistake trying to lecture Dukes on this issue, because both schools are in her district. "Let me correct you," said a fuming Dukes. "We didn't get busy because of the closure." Teachers were working hard well before then: The reality is that, since 40% of teachers from a closed campus cannot find a job in their district, the closure system penalizes good teachers that do try to save their schools.To say she was putting some emphasis on her point is putting it lightly (as fellow Chronicle writer Lee Nichols pointed out, he could hear her in the back corridor.) When Eissler got her amendment tabled, she immediately started working on another amendment that may save those qualified teachers.

Video: Balmorhea “Remembrance”

Balmorhea drew inspiration for its third album, All Is Wild, All Is Silent (Western Vinyl) from William B. Dewees’ Letters From an Early Settler of Texas to a Friend, published in 1852. This video for “Remembrance” certainly captures the more scenic and rustic qualities of the song, along with a bit of the West Texas mystique that permeates the album.[video-1]The local neoclassical instrumentalists also filmed a session for Seattle’s KEXP during SXSW 2009. Watch Balmorhea perform “Coahuila.”[video-2]

Austin soul-shouters Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears have been in regular rotation on Cincinnati's web-based Woxy since the release of the band's Lost Highway debut, Tell 'Em What Your Name Is, at one point even holding down the station's top spot. “Black Joe really stands out when heard next to our predominately indie rock music mix,” says Woxy Program Director Mike Taylor. “It's music that's rooted in Memphis soul and that resonates. It's not overly hip or trendy.” Woxy set up at Ear Studios during SXSW and recorded a number of local bands, including Black Joe Lewis and the Wooden Birds. All of the sessions are available as free downloads and are linked below.Black Joe Lewis & the HoneybearsUme The Wooden BirdsThe Calm Blue Sea

Fine Arts Frenzy

Education reporters will be sprinting between House and Senate today as the chambers take up House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 3, their respective versions of the new school accountability and graduation requirement bills (see tomorrow's issue for coverage.)The House moved first this morning, and as expected, House Public Education Committee Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, got dragged over the coals about fine arts provision (Eissler told the Chronicle in advance he expected this criticism, and was already doing damage control over email campaigns against the bill on this issue.)The proposals shift the graduation requirements around to what can be called four-by-four plus two and eight (four years each of English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies, plus two years of a foreign language and eight elective courses from the enrichment curriculum) but strips away the fine arts requirement. Calming fears that this is another blow at a rounded education, Eissler said, "It does not diminish it: In fact, we have a distinction based on fine arts. So there is really no discouragement of fine arts. In fact, we think we are enhancing it because we are giving students and their parents more choice with eight electives."

Dancing and Singing With Dry Cleaning

If you’ve watched local television in the past month or so, you've probably seen Erin Ivey. She’s the pixie dancing and singing amongst the clothes in the Reid’s Cleaners commercial. It’s garnered the singer-songwriter lots of interest and the old "selling out" argument doesn’t apply – you have to use Google to find out it’s her.“I had one woman who said, ‘I hate that commercial,' and I wanted to kiss her," Ivey admits. "I was so f*cking happy for the six hours that it took to shoot the commercial that I didn’t smile for two weeks afterward. I’m generally a happy person, but I do have a bit of inner darkness.”Even though she's still relatively unknown, Ivey's adventurousness stands out in a town saturated with singer-songwriters. For example, tomorrow night she’s headlining a bill at the Parish that includes Jon Dee Graham (“He makes me want to smoke cigarettes") and her backing band will be reggae/dub trio the Finest Kind. She also leads Grand Hotel, a combo that sold out the Rollins Theater at the Long Center last fall, performing jazz and swing standards from the 1920s and 1930s.Originally from Maryland, where she was an aspiring Deadhead (my kind of girl), Ivey moved to Austin to attend UT in 1996. She began writing songs on borrowed guitars, spent as much time in France as she could (“I love the language!"), and after college moved between here and Portland, Ore., where her first disc The 11th Floor was recorded. There was also a year spent working in Peoria, Ill., where isolation fueled her muse. Since 2007 she’s released two EPs – the latest, Sweet Little EP, features a remarkable cover of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls.”Thursday’s show promises to be Ivey’s last appearance for a few months. “I’m going to upper Michigan for the summer,” she explains. “There’s too much going on here in Austin and I need to get away once in a while. I enjoy the solitude.” In the meantime, she’s readying a DVD release of her Long Center appearance, currently available as a digital audio download at her website, and contemplating another full-length disc.

Showdown

When new Thin Lizzy live disc UK Tour 75 appeared both as an import on Amazon last year and in the pages of Mojo, at least one economic downturnee couldn’t afford the $35 gamble. Then Still Dangerous pounced into the marketplace and between recent reissues, talking with Lizzy axeman Scott Gorham, and being assured by an Austin Record Convention buddy about Amazon’s “new and used” option, it arrived in a boutique Digipak in under a week – last Saturday – for $14, with shipping and handling. Its 78 minutes are priceless.“Yeah, one – testing,” rises Phil Lynott’s voice in the monitors immediately. “Yeah this is our second time here [Derby College of Technology, Derby, England]. Tonight’s gig is going to be recorded, so make a lot of noise. Hear yourselves on the radio.”Course when Lizzy himself says “recorded” his Dublin brogue growls “recarded.”Though UK Tour 75 kicks off with what Gorham calls a “clam,” the sour note opening “Fighting My Way Back,” Lizzy’s still nascent ‘classic’ line-up soon storms the tower, blazing and bucking like only Thin Lizzy could. Gorham marvels at how good the band sounds despite having been together for only over a year, yet all one has to do is amplify the two discs this Lizzy grouping had already cut to nod knowingly at the liner notes herein by the group’s second-in-command, drummer Brian Downey:“Four months later, the Jailbreak album was released and we were into another era.”

Microscope Zooms in on Anti-Science SBOE

The sh*t isn’t quite hitting the fan yet, but for the State Board of Education, turds are being collected and the blades are turning.The shenanigans surrounding the SBOE in recent years, especially the past few months, have caught the eyes of lawmakers and embarrassed Texas nationwide. El Paso Sen. Eliot Shapleigh summed it up best in last week’s Nominations Committee meeting, addressing SBOE Chair Don McLeroy of College Station:“There are 15 bills floating around here this session – the most I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been here I think seven sessions – to strip your authority, to make sure that you have, on that Board of Education, nothing to do with curriculum and nothing to with selecting textbooks. You’ve created a hornet’s nest like I’ve never seen here.”