Carolyn Osborn may be the most experienced first-time novelist in Texas.
Consider her three celebrated short-story collections, O. Henry Award win, PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and former presidency of the Texas Institute of Letters. Oh, and the Texas Book Festival? Her idea.
"I'm delighted," she said with a wide grin about the publication of her novel "Uncertain Ground," which tells of a 20-year-old Celia Henderson finding her voice in 1953 Galveston.
"The 1950s had a certain innocence," she said. "People wanted that after World War II. But she doesn't fit the '50s mold."
Osborn wrote the novel's first draft in the 1960s and rewrote it again and again over the years until San Antonio's Wings Press decided it was time for the novel to see print.
She sees the book not so much as a coming-of-age novel as about the formation of character.
"Character is our nature and finding out what that is," she said. Celia "is very curious. She accepts the world with open arms."
Perhaps looming just as large as a character is Galveston, a place of gambling, drinking and rule-breaking that is diametrically opposed to the 1950s Texas of liquor hidden in paper sacks and sexuality behind closed doors. The novel exquisitely shows this notion of living in a veiled reality through a scene in Galveston's famed Balinese Room, an exotic nightclub and gambling den built on a pier.
"She is determined not to have to marry," Osborn said. "She will suffer a great deal for this, but she just will not do it. She doesn't want her life to be formed by that one event."
The novel also examines the larger themes of sexuality and race as Celia becomes infatuated with Luis, an artist who is half Mexican and is rumored to be homosexual. Celia's cousin Emmett looks down on Luis, taking on the prejudices of the wealthy landowners and ranchers of the era.
"Celia is from somewhere else as I am," said Osborn, who was born in Tennessee but moved to Texas at 12. "People who are Mexican to her are merely exotic."
Emmett's attitudes can be seen as of the J. Frank Dobie school, Osborn said, adding that she believes the naturalist writer's mind became more open later in life.
Osborn is working these days with Friends of Paisano on fundraising to renovate Dobie's former Paisano Ranch outside of Austin, which is home to two Texas writers a year who receive fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters.
In 1995, Osborn attended the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville and approached friend Mary Margaret Farabee about starting a Texas Book Festival with the help of a very hands-on Laura Bush.
"This will be its 15th year," Osborn said. "I hope I'll get to read."
First you have to know about the Chili's restaurant in Austin on the corner of Lamar Boulevard and 45th Street. The Reddit pranksters have made it into a sacred spot. It's a meme among memes.
What they don't know is the location has a topless past. Lil Abner's opened in April of 1975. It soon was a haven for bikers and "experienced" dancers who were no longer teens and likely sported a few bruises on their legs and heavy makeup on their smiling faces.
The bar was the first of three topless joints to pay homage to the comic strip. Daisy Mae's opened in North Austin in the former Kicker Jim's Country Disco in 1981. The next year Mammy Yokum's opened in South Austin. The tittie bar trifecta didn't last long.
In December 1984, Lil Abner's burned down. It first they thought it was faulty wiring.
Austin American-Statesman Mon, Dec 03, 1984 ·Page 11
Then Daisy Mae's was torched two months later, and both fires were deemed arson. Daisy Mae's manager Patrick Ellington spoke of threats from unnamed patrons. Some opine bikers get pissed off. Some say it was an inside job. Forty years later there are no clear answers, but plenty of stories to be told.
Austin American-Statesman Wed, Feb 06, 1985 ·Page 19
Mammy Yokum's apparently didn't last as long as the other clubs. The last mention to be found of it in the Austin American-Statesman is in 1983, less than a year from its opening.
Judge's latest film stars Jason Bateman as the owner of a flavor extract company who must deal with clueless employees and a listless marriage.
The look of the factory
was inspired by the former Adam's Extract plant in Austin (the company
is now in Gonzales), but the quirky characters came from Judge's
imagination mixed with his own factory experiences.
“I
worked in a place in Albuquerque that made honor snacks” (cardboard
vending cartons stocked with candy and chips), he said. “A guy came up
to me my first day and looked at me very seriously, like he was going to
lay some wisdom on me, and said (Judge's voice deepens): ‘I started
here too as Manpower, only I did 40 crates a day. I'm full-time now.'”
A version of that odd character who takes his job way too seriously
makes it into the film, which Judge calls “the inverse of Office Space
but still about the working place.”
“I'd
always been the employee,” Judge said from a suite overlooking Lady Bird
Lake at Austin's Four Seasons Hotel, where he was meeting with the
media about the new film, which opens Friday. “When Beavis and Butt-head
happened, I went from never having anyone work for me to having 50 to
90 people at any given time working for me. When that first happens, you
want to be a nice boss. Then you get taken advantage of. You have to
find a balance there.
“I thought it would be fun to see it from the point of view of the guy who runs the place.”
This is reflected in Extract
when Bateman's character runs up against employees endlessly
complaining or — in the case of a character Judge portrays — offering
inane advice presented as wisdom.
Building a following
Judge conceived the story directly after Office Space came out in 1999, but Fox execs thought Idiocracy, which tells of a dumbed-down future where corporations rule, had more commercial potential.
Neither Office Space nor Idiocracy found big-screen audiences. Office Space instead built a following on video, selling 2.3 million copies between 1999 and 2003.
The
video success “was really sweet for me because I had to fight so hard to
get that movie the way I wanted it,” Judge said. “After all those
battles, having it not do well at the box office was kind of hard to
take. I could just hear (studio executives) all going, ‘You see? We told
you so.'”
He co-wrote Idiocracy as his last obligation to Fox. “However many years it took for Idiocracy (which was barely released in 2006) to happen, Office Space just kept growing and growing and making more money.”
In his spare time, Judge rewrote Extract with Bateman (from TV's Arrested Development) in mind to star. Judge and his producing partners on the long-running animated sitcom King of the Hill, John Altschuler and David Krinsky, decided to make Extract with private financing out of major studio clutches. Miramax later signed on for domestic distribution.
Filmed in Los Angeles
Extract
is the first of Judge's three live-action films not shot in the Austin
area, but instead in Los Angeles, a decision he said was purely
financial.
His next project, Brigadier Gerard, could well shoot in Central Texas. He will produce, not direct the movie, which is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle short story.
Judge, who grew up in Albuquerque, has called Austin home since the early '90s.
He said he enjoys
fishing on his land in nearby Elgin and going out to support musician
friends playing in Austin, a city he described as small enough to be
comfortable but with everything he needs, including ample advice from
filmmaking friends Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater.
Judge took a circuitous route to a filmmaking career. He has a physics degree from the University of California-San Diego
and worked as an engineer at a string of companies — including one in
San Diego that had him working on electronic systems for F-18 fighter
jets.
He also was a bass player touring with Dallas-based blues artists Anson Funderburgh and Doyle Bramhall. While living in Dallas, he did the first crude animations that resulted in Beavis and Butt-head, characters he doesn't rule out reviving.
“Now with Facebook, I've reconnected with a lot of people I knew in high school,” he said.
“Everybody thinks I
based Butt-head on them, or they're afraid that I did. It wasn't anybody
in particular, but I get that all the time.”
Joe O'Connell is a freelance writer living in Austin.
Bret Anthony Johnston's
fiction shapes Corpus Christi into a literary character, but he has a
confession: He hates the beach. The sand itches; the salt water clings.
“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston
said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind
national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that
follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four
years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.
The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.
“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi
specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only
happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but
now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.
Stand on Ocean Drive and look at the water and tourists,
he said. Pivot to the south and you've got soldiers and sailors. Pivot
again and see farmers. One last turn and you see a downtown trying
desperately to reinvent itself.
But most of all it's the weather. The distinct, overpowering heat that
pulls you down. The threat of a distant storm that ever looms.
“I wanted the weather to in some way mirror what the family was going
through,” Johnston said. “They can't escape everything that has
happened to the family in the same way people in Corpus Christi can't
escape the heat.”
The novel drills into the fractures the kidnapping has
created in the family and how they have learned to cope. The mother
volunteers at night to keep watch on an injured dolphin. The father
turns to a lover for distraction. The younger son masters the skateboard
that his brother left behind (and that Johnston in a previous
incarnation rode in a brief professional skateboarding career). When the
missing boy returns, they must cobble together a changed life in the
aftermath of their personal storm.
“You never know when one of these storms is going to hit you,”
Johnston said of the novel's greater metaphor. “When it does, you can
tell a lot about a person by how they handle the storm. Do they put up
plywood on the windows or do they hit the road?”
“That changed my life,” Johnston said. “I left knowing this is what I
want to do — I want to tell stories. That's what I'm still trying to
do.”
He grew up in a household where reading books was the
norm, but had no notion that he could write them. In May, Johnston
returned to Corpus Christi to read in that same author series.
After degrees from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Miami University,
Johnston found himself at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop where he
completed stories that would make it into his 2004 debut collection
“Corpus Christi.”
“Remember Me Like This” can trace its seeds to Johnston's
volunteer work decades ago in Corpus Christi with an injured dolphin,
which left him with a mystery. He was told the night shift with the
dolphin was the hardest to fill, yet the shift was always taken. Then
someone brought in a beach ball for the dolphin. Over the years he
pondered who would so strongly desire to work the night shift. Then it
came to him: A mother who had lost her child. The ball belonged to that
child.
“The beach ball was full of her son's breath,” Johnston
said. “She brought it in to save the dolphin since she hadn't saved her
son.”
Six years of writing, frustration, breaks to pen short stories, more writing and rewriting later he had a novel.
“Many people say the book is about being lost; I think it's about
being found,” Johnston said. “We all want to believe the lost will find
their way home.”
While Johnston revels in the creation process, he sees writing as a vocation.
“I find writing incredibly difficult. What makes me come
back is the pleasure of the sentence,” he said. “I don't romanticize
being a writer at all. I think of writing as labor. I don't believe in
muse or inspiration. I believe in going to work. It's the same as if I
worked at the Naval Air Station. I clock in and clock out when the work is done.”
It's not easy being a 21st-century male. The silent, hardworking
breadwinning dad of the past still lurks, but his sons have to find
their way in a new world of open communication and shared
responsibility.
Author Kevin Grauke
examines this change in the 13 stories that make up his tautly written,
thoughtful debut collection, “Shadows of Men,” which recently won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for best first published book of fiction.
“The definition of masculinity has changed in the last several decades,”
said Grauke, who received a master's degree in creative writing from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University
in Philadelphia. “We have households with two incomes, households with
women earning more than men. There's a sharing of domestic duties, of
parenting duties, a flattening of gender roles. That's very good, but it
also creates stress.”
Grauke's men band together to drink beer and lament their low sperm
counts. They grapple for a sense of identity after losing their jobs.
They sometimes live with their mothers.
“It's hard to completely disengage from the myth of the
man and what that means,” Grauke said, “especially in Texas, where there
are those other layers of machismo — ranchers, cowboys. Whether you
have those in your personal family history, it's there in the culture.”
The stories are set in a Texas that reflects Grauke's childhood in
Garland. Arguably the collection's strongest piece is “The New Father,”
in which a stay-at-home dad roams his North Texas subdivision
fantasizing that behind each closed door a mother both admires and lusts
after him. He walks streets named for Texas heroes such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie,
but his world would prove alien to those icons. Then a real-life mom
recklessly speeds past his baby carriage and isn't pleased when he calls
her on it. He later plots a clumsy form of revenge, but the minor guilt
twists like a knife inside of him.
“He wants to do something that asserts the role he
relinquished when he wasn't paying attention,” Grauke said. “He has a
desire to be heroic, but there's an impotence that goes along with it.”
In “With the Snow,” a haunting story that channels Richard Ford,
a young man caught up in a world of drugs and desperation attempts to
save a girl who may or may not be in a drug coma, but he instead leaves
her behind.
“There's a continuing notion of wanting to fulfill that mythic
masculinity, that heroism,” Grauke said, “but the opportunities to do
that are limited. He almost does the heroic, but those rescuing moments
are rare. Yet we still desire them.”
Grauke leaned on an older story of masculinity in the suburbs — John Cheever's “The Housebreakers of Shady Hill” — for inspiration when he settled on the theme for his work.
“It seemed to bring the stories together to be something a little larger than they were on their own,” he said.
The author left his native Texas a decade ago, but it
clearly has not left him. He's at work on a collection of linked stories
set in small-town West Texas, the home of his parents.
“I think of the difference between them and some coddled students,” said Leche, who now teaches at Austin Community College. “They were so appreciative to have teachers there.”
Leche spent a year teaching in Afghanistan for the University of Maryland,
which has offered college classes in the field for American soldiers
since the Vietnam War. Halfway through the experience she had a light
bulb moment when one student said, “I wish people knew what it's really
like to be a soldier.”
Thus was born “Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from
Afghanistan,” a book of essays by soldiers and their loved ones who aim
to walk us through the experience from recruitment to horror to honor.
“It struck me that I could help these students to be heard, give them
a chance to connect with the public in a visceral way about what goes
on: the good and bad, the funny and sad,” Leche said. “For a lot of
Americans, the military is an abstraction. Soldiers realize that.”
In other words, we may honor our soldiers, but do we truly understand them and their experiences?
Sgt. First Class Michael Bramlett writes of “The Great Voice,” the public address system that emits a monotone phrase: “The aerial gunnery range is now hot.”
“Do any of us really know what the hell this means?” Bramlett says in
an essay titled “B-Hut Blues.” He knows loud booms will follow while he
looks up with reverence at the 3-by-5-foot American flag on the wall
near photos of his wife and children. Yet his national pride is mixed
with sorrow. He soon learns a mortar hit a couple of B-huts away. He
tries to sleep, but cannot.
“It's beautiful and terrible to wear that uniform,” said
Leche, who when her husband's job took them to Germany in the 1990s
first volunteered to teach in war-torn Bosnia and knew she had found her
calling. “They gain a life — the military is a life — but they risk
losing their lives.”
They also face the losses involved with not being there, like in Sgt. Christopher Williams' piece “My Great Sadness,” which tells of discovering over the phone that his wife had died in her sleep so many miles away.
Perhaps most powerful is Specialist Andrew Stock
of Austin's piece, “The Hate,” a poetic meditation on the moment when a
soldier must pull the trigger. “The tragedy of war is the realization
that it would be all too easy to exterminate everything,” Stock writes.
An anonymous soldier illustrates this in “They Were Just Kids” with
the moment waving children refuse to get out of the way of the Humvee
she is in. The driver doesn't dare stop for fear it's a Taliban trap. “We roll through,” the soldier writes. “Not even a glance back.”
Leche terms it the “humble ambiguity of being human
yourself but having to forget that the enemy is human in order to kill
them. Some soldiers say they want to kill all those (enemies), but what
they really mean is I don't want to be killed by (them).”
That’s what Stephen Harrigan did while writing his latest novel “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.”
“He had little schooling, he was a great joke teller, and he was
politically ambitious,” Harrigan said of Lincoln. “I think that in his
mind, he emulated Davy Crockett. Both were these backwoods guys who went
into politics. Maybe in his mind he thought he could be that guy.”
Harrigan’s novel follows a young Lincoln finding his
political and social way in 1830s Springfield, Illinois. The future
president is sometimes gawky, inept in the ways of love, but ever
charming and driven.
It’s a time period Harrigan already mined in “The Gates of the Alamo,”
which made the project a little easier to research — he knew the big
issues of the time, the clothes, the speech.
One of those big issues was Texas. Early in the novel, the Alamo falls,
and people in Springfield are alarmed by newspaper reports of the
battle.
Later in the book, Texas’ role in the expansion of slavery comes into
play, as people debate the Texas republic’s admission to the U.S. union and the consequences of that decision — which led to the war with Mexico. Several men in the book fought in that war.
“As a novelist, a lot of my work, including ‘The Gates of
the Alamo’ and ‘Remembering Ben Clayton,’ is centered on San Antonio,”
said Harrigan, who is one of the headline authors at the San Antonio
Book Festival on April 2. “In this novel, given the time frame and the
issues of the day, I wanted to come back to San Antonio, a city that has
had such an magnetic pull on my life.”
While “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln” is fiction, and Crockett isn’t a bona
fide character in the book, his presence is based solidly in fact,
something that could be disconcerting to the longtime Texas Monthly writer, who grew up in Abilene and Corpus Christi, but has called Austin home for many years.
“There’s a sense of a thousand Lincoln scholars looking
over your shoulder,” he said of the three-year writing process for the
book. “My mind was divided between winning their respect and
entertaining the reader. I had to be authentic to history, yet have a
credible story.”
Clay Smith, the Austin-based editor-in-chief of Kirkus
Reviews and literary director of the S.A. book festival, praised
Harrigan’s “bravery” at “taking on another Lincoln book.”
“As a person who receives a lot of books and galleys, the number of
books published about Lincoln is just bizarre,” Smith said. “The beauty
of a novel about young Lincoln is you have this man who is extremely
ambitious, but also very awkward, who doesn’t know what to do with
himself at times. Stephen has captured that young man very accurately.”
Harrigan began thinking about the youthful Lincoln during a cross-country car trip a few years ago with his wife of 40 years, Sue Ellen.
Harrigan was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” and was struck by a letter Lincoln had written to Mary Owens, a Kentucky girl he courted, if it can be called that, before meeting future wife Mary Todd,
also from Kentucky. (A sample quote from Lincoln: “Nothing would make
me more miserable than to believe you miserable — nothing more happy,
than to know you were so.”)
“In the letter, he just seemed so confused and so
equivocal that I thought there’s something about this guy that we don’t
really know about,” Harrigan related. “I wanted to look beneath the
facade.”
He succeeds by creating the fictional character Cage Weatherby, the book’s title friend, a poet whom Lincoln both respects and confides in. Like Lincoln, Weatherby is also fired by ambition.
“You can’t be president if you’re not ambitious,” Harrigan said.
“It’s the thing that defined Lincoln, that kept him on his path.”
While Weatherby is a fictional character, as is Springfield doctor Ash Merritt, Harrigan weaves real characters into the story such as Lincoln pals Joshua Speed, Ned Baker, John Stuart, John Hardin and Billy Herndon,
as well as real events like the Black Hawk War of 1832. Viewed through
all these characters’ eyes, Harrigan’s Lincoln is both likeable and
perplexing.
“It’s an odd thing to do, to put words into Lincoln’s
mouth,” Harrigan said. “I can’t help myself. I want to get in the time
machine and go back there.”
It’s been said that more books have been published about
Lincoln than anyone except Jesus. So adding another title to that long
list can be a daunting proposition.
“I’ve learned not to be afraid,” Harrigan said. “I keep trying to
break out of my comfort zone. Lincoln’s is a story that’s both familiar
and dangerous. He’s a person everyone in the world has an opinion about.
It could easily go wrong.”
Indeed, while the young Lincoln presented in the novel is
full of charisma, he also shows cruelty to his political enemies,
penning scathing anonymous opinion pieces in local newspapers. He makes
some questionable calls with his friends, too.
One aspect of Lincoln that may surprise many readers is
his attitude about slavery. While the fictional Weatherby leans toward
abolition, Lincoln is stuck in the middle ground of his times.
“He had a strong moral compass,” Harrigan said. “He had
deep-set admirable qualities, but he was not an abolitionist. Slavery
was not the burning issue it would become. It tracks the people of his
time.”
As a child growing up in Fort Worth, she would travel with her family
to elderly relatives’ homes. Off to the side was a woman, always white,
who served as caretaker/nursemaid/confidante. She worked for room and
board and a tiny salary.
“The thinking was white women were qualified by race to
care for elderly white women,” Harris said in a recent interview. “There
was always some story about them that nobody would tell me. It was
often scandalous, or ultimately, just that the brother lost the farm.”
Harris’ Gival Press Novel Award-winning “Mayhem” examines
just such a fictional scandal and goes deep into how societies and
families get dysfunctional in rural 1936 Texas. It’s a world of prim,
hardworking German-immigrant farmers.
“I had to imagine a back story — how a woman came down in the world,” Harris said.
She drew from a real-life account of a ’50s fight in the small Central
Texas town Goldthwaite between two drunken locals and a couple of
soldiers that led to the partial castration of one GI.
In “Mayhem,” the stakes are raised with a presumed marital
infidelity/potential rape as the catalyst. But Harris’ narrator makes
clear what the author also wants you to know: This is not a rape story.
Indeed, it’s a larger story of family, vigilante justice and the moral expectations piled on women, in this case recent bride Evelyn Gant, in a society that is quick to assume their guilt and cast them out.
“It’s a double experience: What has happened to her and
what has been done within her hearing by her husband and his brother,”
Harris said. “She doesn’t remember the events deeply for the next 18
years.”
This German-immigrant place is key to “Mayhem.” It’s far
from the center of civilization, and the sexual freedom of the Roaring
’20s proved not a ripple in their world.
“Culture doesn’t change easily,” Harris said. “I’m
interested in the daily life of rural people — the work they do and the
rhythms that brings to life.”
Harris employs an interesting form of narration to bring her story to
life. Essentially a girl is telling the story she imagines for a
live-in caretaker much like the one Harris encountered when she was a
girl.
The narrator “writes” the story and is truthful about her
twisting of facts and fiction to suit her story. So the story, in a
sense, references itself.
It’s a trick, but one that works for this story because
Harris is after something larger — that sociological layer of choices we
make to coexist.
Consider that main character Evelyn, who a few years down
the road could easily vamoose to San Antonio and work in the WWII
industry for higher pay and anonymity, chooses instead to stay put where
she is known as a pariah.
“There’s a certain conservatism where it’s important to know the
people you have always known,” Harris said. “She is her family, her
ancestors and all of her connections.”
It’s a first published novel for Harris, whose story
collection “The Ant Generator” won the prestigious John Simmons Prize
and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1991.
But she’s been a regular writer since seeing a film years
ago about time management. The message: “Decide what is really
important in your life and do that first every day.”
“Mayhem” is set her parents’ era — they were married in 1936, the year of the book’s scandalous incident.
“I’m trying to see through the eyes of the past,” she said. “I’m
drawn to write historically about subjects that seem alive to me in the
present. Like gender, or trying to tell truths — slippery as they are —
about the family past.”
Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News March 21, 2014
Rolondo Hinojosa-Smith. Photo by Joe O'Connell
AUSTIN — Rolando Hinojosa-Smith chose to set his fictionalized Texas-Mexico border world in Klail City because there is no k in the Spanish language.
“It shows the Anglo side — the people who have taken over the land,” he said.
The first volume of the “Klail City Death Trip” series
appeared in the '70s. Hinojosa-Smith is now at work on the 16th and what
he expects to be the final series book. The novels and their world
recently garnered him the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof
Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I was speechless,” he said of the call informing him of the award.
In late April, Houston's Arte Público Press
will republish — in a never-available bilingual edition — his classic
early '70s novel “The Valley/Estampas del valle,” the first in the Klail
City cycle, which won a national Chicano literature award, Premio
Quinto Sol, in 1972. Four years later, he won the highest award for the
novel in Latin America, the Premio Casas de las Americas.
Hinojosa-Smith's work has been compared to William Faulkner's
and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He humbly
dismisses that, yet he often quotes Faulkner to his creative writing
students at the University of Texas at Austin:
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and
see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice
and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's
good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
Born in 1929, Hinojosa-Smith wrote his first story — in
Spanish — at 16 while spending a World War II summer with family in the
small Mexican town Arteaga. The tale was about farm workers who come
home and are pressed into military service. He lost the manuscript, then
his mother found it and he lost it again, but it set a tone for what
would come.
He is anonymous on the bus he rides to the University of
Texas with book in hand and his mind often on the next story. By 7 a.m.
each weekday he arrives at the same small office in UT's Parlin Hall
he has occupied for more than 30 years. Colorful paper flowers decorate
the wall — his daughter put them up two decades ago when she was an
undergrad at the school.
Parlin Hall's bluish tile walls evoke its 1954 opening, which came after Hinojosa-Smith's own UT days as a member of the elite Tejas Club.
He attended on the G.I. Bill after Army service spent largely in Puerto
Rico as a military newspaper reporter and an Armed Forces Radio
announcer called Rocky the Disc Jockey.
The UT campus was a big leap for a boy from Mercedes in the Rio
Grande Valley, the model for Klail City, which resides in Belken County —
meant as a stand-in for four border counties combined.
But his childhood home was filled with books. His Anglo
mother was a teacher like her mother before her. His father had fought
in the Mexican Revolution and loved to tell stories. The house was
filled with a constant flow of Spanish and English. Four of the five
children — Rolando was the baby — became teachers. His first creative
works saw print in a high school publication called Creative Bits.
That mixed heritage imbues richness to the “Klail City
Death Trap” series, which has Mexican-American and Anglo kids in
conflict, and Mexican and Anglo politicians melding into one breed.
“There are fools on both sides of the fence,” he said.
Hinojosa-Smith figures he's got a few more years in the classroom,
but he has no plans to stop writing. He used to write in longhand, with
only his first novel composed in Spanish. These days he uses a computer,
typing in English and later translating his own work to Spanish.
He travels home frequently and recently gave the convocation at his alma mater, Mercedes High School.
He told students of how their town contributed to World War II, with 16
boys lost in the war and another 16 gone later from wounds they
suffered.
It's the story of the Rio Grande Valley that has sustained him, fascinated him as a writer for decades.
“Sure, I'll keep writing,” he said. “I'd like to write something else than the series.”
His writing advice? “Don't fall in love with your writing. If it's good, you'll know.”
(I post this in honor of Michael Nesmith who just died.
As a little kid I collected Monkees bubblegum cards, so it was a thrill to meet and interview Michael Nesmith in 2010 at the Austin Film Hall of Fame ceremonies. Who is that old guy? I thought as the crowd rushed to take his photo on the runway.
I was there specifically to talk to him for both the Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News, so he sat down with me for a few minutes and told his story of Texas.
The next day I was at the Four Seasons doing another interview. As I left, I saw Nesmith waiting for a cab. I spoke to him again and he handed me a card. Call the number, he said, and come see his new internet project Michael Nesmith's Videoranch3D. It was amazing and he was a very cool guy.
(He's hiding in the back of this shot taken with a crude digital camera.)
By Joe O'Connell
March 13, 2010
Publication:San Antonio Express-News (TX)
Page:10B
Word Count:400
AUSTIN - Bruce McGill couldn't resist. As Tim Matheson held a microphone up for the audience to hear, McGill strummed the William Tell Overture on his neck just as he'd done in 1978's "Animal House." The University of Texas alumnus followed it by flashing a hook 'em Horns sign.
McGill, a MacArthur High School grad, was one of a handful of inductees into the Texas Film Hall of Fame on Thursday night. The Austin Film Society fundraiser kicked off the South by Southwest Film Festival. Also honored were Lukas Haas, Michael Nesmith, the Lockhart-shot film "Waiting for Guffman" and Quentin Tarantino, named an honorary Texan.
McGill, who did his first play in San Antonio at age 11, said his career was dictated by a very practical upbringing and a realization that character actors stay employed.
"I'm a character actor first, last and always," he said. "I tend to fly beneath the radar. (The award) is a great nod to guys like me who enhance the story."
Nesmith, best known as a member of the created-for-television band the Monkees and for winning the first-ever Grammy for a music video, said his days at San Antonio College played a big part in his career.
He came to the college straight out of the Air Force and formed a musical group that was to perform at a college talent show. When he was asked to be the show's master of ceremonies, he feared that would disqualify his act but accepted. He won the college's Talent Award.
"I think about that particular moment as when I learned that sometimes you have to give up your target and let things take you where they're going to," he said.
Nesmith said his efforts these days are focused on the next wave of the Internet, including the creation of 3-D worlds.
"The future is in live programs and virtual environments," he said.
Tarantino recounted coming out of a midnight screening of "Nashville" in Santa Monica in 1993 and meeting fellow moviegoer and Austin director Richard Linklater. That budding friendship led to a benefit Austin premiere of "Pulp Fiction" in 1994 and to a string of all-night QT festivals in Austin where Tarantino screens his personal prints of obscure exploitation films.
Linklater founded the Austin Film Society.
San Antonio native Robert Rodriguez, who worked with Tarantino on "Grindhouse," silently capped the evening by presenting Tarantino with a replica of Rodriguez's signature cowboy hat.
I interviewed Wes Anderson for an article--if memory serves for the San Antonio Express-News. I recorded it and included the full interview in my '90s zine Lost Armadillos in Heat.
LAIH:You grew up in Houston where "Rushmore" was filmed. And actually shot it in St. John's, your old school. Was that weird? ANDERSON:People
always want to know if it was weird going back to film there. It wasn't
because I spent all this time convincing them to let us shoot there.
Also we would go there to think about the script and walk around. By the
time we filmed there, I'd spent so much time there recently and got
re-aquainted with a lot of people there. So it was really a comfortable
place to film. We had a screening just for St. John's people. It was odd
because people applauded a thing like a house. And they applaud certain
extras with real force. LAIH:How would you describe this film? ANDERSON:Somebody
told me it was a coming of age story, and I guess it is, but I hate to
think of it that way. It sounds like a genre. I wanted a school movie.
We had this character. Me and my co-writer Owen Wilson, we wanted to
do a character of a kid who loved the school and founded all of these
different clubs and societies, but is also a terrible student and is
going to get kicked out. LAIH:Where did that idea come from? ANDERSON:Putting
on the plays is something I did when I was a kid. We went to similar
schools. Owen went to St. Marks in Dallas. Both of us had a sort of
deluded thing and thought we were going to go to really good
colleges. But we were both bad students and never stood any chance of
getting into any of the places we were applying. We did get rejected by
all of them. So that sort of figures into it. LAIH:What did you learn from "Bottle Rocket" that you brought to this film? ANDERSON:I
felt there was stuff I learned on the other one about how to plan a
movie and what to expect--how much you have to be totally focused every
day. But on the other movie the cast was just a bunch of friends.
This one we had to put together a cast and I didn't really know anybody
in the cast. Except for some small supporting roles, all of the main
actors we cast like they cast a regular movie. LAIH:Where did you dig up Jason Schwartzman? ANDERSON:
We did a big casting search all over the place for a year. It was this
total hassle. Finally our casting director in San Francisco met this kid
and sent him in to me. I felt like within 30 seconds we had something.
He was not like anyone else. He was very compelling. And I just liked
him a lot personally. I always hoped I'd get to cast someone I'd be
friends with. LAIH:I know he's Talia Shire's son. What is his film background otherwise? ANDERSON:His background is high school. LAIH:Who are your filmmaking inspirations? ANDERSON:A million movies all rolled together. Louis Malle movies. Mike Nichols and Hal Ashby and the 70s guys. LAIH:Surely "Harold and Maude" was an influence? ANDERSON:No question. Just the feeling. I used a Cat Stevens song. That's got to be paying respect on some level. LAIH:What about the music in the film? ANDERSON:I
used British invasion music from the 60s and 70s. I think that's really
hard angry rock music, but it's played by English kids in blazers, like
school boys. And I think that combo is something like what this kid is.
That was my way of analyzing it afterword. At one point I just wanted
to use some Kinks. LAIH:The tone of "Rushmore" is so different. Can you explain what you were trying to do? ANDERSON:There's
a sort of unreality. You don't see a lot of cars from today. There's
not any cultural references really. It's just its own little world. So
it almost feels like it's not any one particular time. It's a bit of a
fable, maybe? The behavior of the characters, the stuff that's happening
in the movie is not quite reality. The plays are unrealistically
ambitious. LAIH:What kind of films do you like to watch? ANDERSON:I
like funny movies. "Murmur of the Heart" by Louis Malle is one. "The
Rules of the Game" by Jean Renoir. I like movies where there is real
affection for the characters. In those movies I feel like there aren't
any really bad guys. I think Renoir says something to the effect that
everyone has their reasons. You just have to make an effort to
understand them. I guess I'm not too into cynical, cool movies right
now. I've just seen so many violent, steely or cool movies and I'd
rather stay away from that. LAIH:Talk about your process as a filmmaker. ANDERSON:It
starts with the way you want the movie to feel, the setting, the kind
of feeling of the characters and the way they'll interact, and less the
story. Once you're making the movie, you're not affected by that
anymore. You're just into the world and have to follow your instincts. LAIH:What about the collaborative writing process? ANDERSON:We
talk for months. While that's going on, one of us will write a scene
and hand it to the other, and they'll make marks and hand it back, act
out things, add things. As it goes along we write more and more and we start to figure out if we need a scene. It sort of evolves that way, just the two of us hashing it out. LAIH:How do you see your style of directing? ANDERSON:I
like on the set for everyone to feel like friends. I like to be very
private with the actors. I like for us to rehearse scenes very privately
and quietly. That's probably because I feel self-conscious "directing"
in front of a group of people. Lots of people who worked on Rushmore
worked on "Bottle Rocket," the head of every department, so there are lots of friends on the set. LAIH:Do you plan much in advance? ANDERSON:
I like to plan as much as possible. I think the more you can have ideas
for things, the more you can really make an effort to find a new way to
do a scene. It becomes more dense if you really make an effort, like
you're writing a novel, if you focus on the detail in advance. It's
hard to make that stuff happen spontaneously. You've really got to plan
it, I think.LAIH: Do you storyboard? ANDERSON:
Yeah, I do it twice, in fact. I storyboard it once and then go back and
do it neatly. You find some things you had sketched out when you go
back and go, I thought I had this thought out, but it's sort of half-baked. It's a pain because it takes forever, but you get it all more specific. LAIH: The narrative arc of "Rushmore" is all over the place, yet that seems to work. How do you explain that? ANDERSON: The stuff we get excited about are unexpected turns to the story. Also, we'll have ideas and you have to somehow get there. LAIH: Tell me about Max Fischer. Is he a good guy? ANDERSON: I
think some people feel we made a character who is not always very
appealing. But I have just a good feeling about that character. He does
some almost unforgivable stuff, but I feel like he's redeemed. I have a
personal feeling for the character like it were someone I knew. I hate
it when someone says they find him unlikable. We try to push him, but I
don't want him to be a bad guy. LAIH: How did you get Bill Murray interested in the film? ANDERSON:
We just sent him the script. A week later he called and said he wanted
to do it. Really all we talked about in your first conversation was this
movie "Red Beard" by Kurosawa, that Bill was a big fan of. He had an
idea that "Red Beard" had something to do with "Rushmore." I never quite
understood what the connection was. LAIH: What was he like? ANDERSON: Working
with him was really great. He's really funny and he's just such a good
guy. He made a real effort to support this movie. It's a small movie.
It's the kind of movie, if someone tried to modify it and make it
more palatable or to fit into a certain slot, it would just go to
pieces. He was a good defender of the movie. You can settle for things
and Murray wasn't interested in us settling for anything. I'm not either
and it's good to have somebody like that involved. LAIH: I love the plays in "Rushmore." Did they pose any problems? ANDERSON: For
the war play, if you don't get it right have to wait an hour and a half
while they set up all of these charges again. We had to do the whole
scene in one day according to our schedule. There's one shot where this
plane flies across the stage bombing it. If we hadn't got that right, it
would have been two hours to line up all the charges again. We got
lucky and got the shot right. It was a fun day because all of these kids
dressed up for Vietnam. It felt like there was a play happening
(enthusiasm in voice). When we were filming, It felt like it was an
EVENT day. LAIH: What's next? ANDERSON: Owen and I are working on this script set in New York. It's about a family there. LAIH: Tell us again how you got started. ANDERSON: Owen
and I were both at UT. We did a play in a playwriting class that I
wrote and that Owen acted in. Before we finished school there we started
writing the "Bottle Rocket" script. After that we went to Dallas and
made a short version of it. The short was supposed to be a feature but
we ran out of money." With "Bottle Rocket," not that many people got to
see it in the theater. Most people saw it on video. There wasn't much of
an event to the release. I sort of regretted it. So I want to do
everything I can to let people know about this movie.
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
