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sxsw signThe music portion of South by Southwest has endured a tumultuous week. The festival, once an exemplar of cool, has seen artists pull out of their official showcase performances over the past few days—first as a trickle over the weekend, then, by Monday evening (the first official day of SXSW Music), as something of a flood. By Tuesday afternoon, more than eighty artists had announced that they wouldn’t be performing, citing two factors stemming from the bombing and starving of Palestinian civilians amid Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and the U.S. government’s accelerating military aid to Israel. One factor is the presence of the United States Army as a “super sponsor” of the festival, one of the above-the-fold names listed on all of SXSW’s promotional…

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kacey musgraves deeper well“I found a deeper well” is the thesis statement of Kacey Musgraves’s new album, the source of its title, and the refrain of its first single. That deeper well, the richer self-knowledge that Musgraves says is the source of this music, has come via familiar conduits: meditation, mantras, mushrooms, and Manhattan, where the album was mostly written and recorded. Now, as she recently explained to the Cut, she is “way more grounded” and making serious, reflective music to prove it—a fairly dramatic shift from the pop experiments of Star-crossed.The song “Deeper Well” outlines this story neatly, a strategic release befitting Musgraves’s status as singer-songwriter turned singer-songwriter-A-lister: it is gently folk-poppy in an on-trend way that nods to the outsized success of her recent collaborators Noah…

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Billy Preston sxsw documentaryAll due respect to Ireland and its musicians, but the greatest trick the devil ever played was to permanently associate the phrase “take me to church” with Hozier. Before a milquetoast single by that name dominated the 2013 pop charts, the act of “taking ____ to church” was a colloquialism in African American Vernacular English that referred to a musical or sermonic performance so moving it could instill in both performer and audience a feeling of the presence of God. The exact origin of the phrase is unclear, but it was almost certainly born of the gospel traditions in Black churches, where preachers and choirs aim to elicit a profound emotional response and fill parishioners with the Holy Spirit. Even those who don’t care for religious terminology…

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Mike Modano, number nine of the Dallas Stars, passes the puck against the the Ottawa Senators on December 20, 2008 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.It’s absolutely gonna be “the Flap.”On March 16 at 4 p.m., Mike Modano gets his statue. And unlike the Dallas Mavericks, which shared a miniaturized draft of Dirk Nowitzki’s “fadeaway” nearly a full year before the actual unveiling on Christmas Day of 2022, the Dallas Stars have taken more of a cloak-and-hockey-stick approach, keeping all the details secret. Even the fact that the Stars had commissioned a Modano statue—which comes a full decade after the team retired his number nine—wasn’t revealed until four months ago. Only Modano and his family, sculptors Omri Amrany and Sean Michael Bell, and a handful of Stars officials know what it will look like.“We’re just trying to have fun with it, and have it be a big surprise when we…

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Fish tacos at Tequila Social.Taylor Kearney’s cooking career makes one wonder why he’d want to come back to Texas. The chef has worked at restaurants by Thomas Keller and Charlie Palmer in Las Vegas, Michelin-starred spots in France, and high-end eateries in New York. Yet the East Texas native felt the pull of his home state while living in Boston. “My phone rang no less than ten minutes after I’d made up my mind,” he says. “It was one of the directors of operations and an old friend of mine who worked for Harwood [Hospitality Group] and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great opportunity if you’re interested,’ and the rest is history.” A few years later he was in Dallas working as executive chef at Harwood Hospitality’s Saint Ann restaurant…

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The footbaths at Camp Hot Wells, in San Antonio.The air had turned frigid thanks to an arctic front that had muscled its way down to San Antonio, but steaming hot water beckoned. My wife and I carefully climbed three icy wooden steps and then immersed ourselves in an outdoor cedar tub big enough for two. Submerged up to our necks, we spent the next hour soaking while we sipped wine and nibbled on charcuterie.The tub was filled with water from an underground reservoir that has been soothing Texans for 135 years. These days it is being tapped by Camp Hot Wells, which opened last year next to the ruins of a resort that once attracted pilgrims from across the country. When the Hot Wells Hotel opened, in 1901, guests could easily get there…

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Caleb, Matt, and Annie Johnson with one of their smokers at Barbs-B-Q, in downtown Lockhart.When Caleb and Matt Johnson opened Lockhart’s Mill Scale Metalworks, in 2018, customers had to spend the price of a small car to buy one of the company’s commercial offset smokers, sight unseen. Every project was made to order, so the brothers didn’t keep any inventory. The welding shop, northeast of downtown, didn’t even show up on Google Maps for several years. It relied on referrals to bring in orders, some from as far away as Aruba, Kuwait, or Singapore. But the shopping experience, for both backyard barbecuers and professional pitmasters, has changed with Mill Scale’s new 10,000-square-foot workshop and retail space, which opened in February just off Colorado Street, the main thoroughfare of the barbecue capital of Texas. Mill Scale’s most popular commercial model, the…

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Plemons in his living room.When Jesse Plemons goes quiet—and here on the front porch of his childhood home, thirty minutes east of Waco, Jesse Plemons has just gone quiet—you don’t know if you’re at the end of something or the beginning. Nobody suggests so much by saying so little.Take his big entrance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Plemons, as a federal agent, knocks on the door of a grifter played by Leonardo DiCaprio, telling him he’s there to see about some murders. “See what about ’em?” DiCaprio asks. Plemons stops, considers just so. “See who’s doin’ it,” he says. In that half second, you feel the whole movie kick into a higher gear. “It’s like a hot knife cutting through cold butter,” Scorsese tells me in an…

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Jesse Plemons Breaking BadTalk to anyone who’s ever worked with Jesse Plemons—a list that includes some of the biggest names in film and television—and they inevitably will tell you that he doesn’t act. “He simply becomes a character,” says Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed Plemons in the Texas Monthly–produced series Love & Death, which last year scored the Mart, Texas, native his third Emmy nomination. Plemons’s ability to make every performance, no matter how fleeting, feel immediately lived-in and real means you could be forgiven for knowing some of those characters’ names better than his. From Friday Night Lights to Breaking Bad to Killers of the Flower Moon, Plemons brings such natural, quiet complexity to a role that it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what he’s doing, because…

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Glenn Rogers Exit InterviewState representative Glenn Rogers wants to confiscate your firearms and create a registry of firearm owners. So said the large, red-type message on a glossy mailer sent to voters’ homes in his rural North Texas district in late February. On the leaflets, Rogers’s head is clumsily pasted, via a photo editing tool, onto the body of a man in a suit carrying a leather bag full of assault rifles. The man is shaking President Biden’s hand, and a text bubble reads, “Their guns are yours.”Rogers was flipping through this mailer and others on a recent Friday in his study at his ranch office outside Graford, an hour west of Fort Worth. As usual, he was wearing boots, jeans, and an ironed, button-down ranch shirt. Behind…

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