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For more than a hundred years—through both world wars, the Great Depression, and countless agricultural busts and booms—the residents of Clifton have been able to watch a movie at the Cliftex. The single-screen theater has stood here in the cattle country of Bosque County since 1916, surviving droughts, floods, and the rise of streaming video, under a line of caretakers whose names are inscribed on a long stretch of wooden plaques hanging in the lobby. Generations have been weaned on the theater’s Saturday matinees, coming here for their first movies and first dates before eventually returning with their grandchildren in tow. The Cliftex, located a few dozen miles northwest of Waco, bills itself as the oldest continuously operating cinema in Texas, which would rank it…

The post Can an Arthouse Cinema Succeed in Cattle Country? appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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billy bob thornton and landman illustrationBilly Bob Thornton shrugs when I ask why exactly he plays so many Texans. Wearing that perennially you-know-what-eating grin, he takes a drag on his American Spirit. “If you’re from the South, you must be from Texas, right?” he says, imitating clueless film executives.That doesn’t quite explain it, because he’s got the locals fooled too. “Billy Bob’s Texan, ain’t he?” one good ol’ boy asked into the crowd of good ol’ boys and girls. We’re packed into Main Street Crossing, in Tomball, thirty miles northwest of downtown Houston, to hear Thornton sing with his rock band, the Boxmasters. The pearl-snapped fan took Thornton’s Texanness almost on faith, mentioned in between telling tales of decades spent riding bulls and of seeing George Strait before he was…

The post ‘Landman’ Star Billy Bob Thornton Isn’t Actually From Texas. Don’t Tell Hollywood. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Frito pie chili mac.Neither Frito pie nor chili mac are dishes that need improving—but why not at least try? Mashing up these two beloved staples of the chili sauce genre is just twisted enough to work. (Next thing you know, I’ll be stuffing this in enchiladas . . . Just kidding. Kind of.) Even better when their holy union is in the form of an ultra comforting casserole. The Fritos, instead of topping meaty chili sauce, as is traditional, act as the crunchy top layer to a lasagna pan full of mac and cheese drenched with spicy chili. The chips fuse with grated cheddar when baked, giving the whole thing a great texture. And then individual servings are garnished like Frito pie, with finely diced onion, sour cream, chopped cilantro, and, wouldn’t…

The post Welcome to Frankenstein’s Lab, Where We’re Fusing Frito Pie With Chili Mac appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Oliver Stone Screens "JFK" at Infamous Dallas TheaterThis October, fans of the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can attend a special fiftieth anniversary screening on the lawn of Hooper’s, the Kingsland restaurant that’s situated inside the actual farmhouse that was used in the movie. Take it from me: It can be both thrilling and unnerving to step into the liminal space between fiction and reality, even without the cannibal aspect. To bear witness to the blurring of actual and imaginary history is an experience that even the most learned philosopher would struggle to describe, and I can only guess what it’s like to do it while noshing on a plate of pulled pork. The Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff offered a similarly disorienting experience earlier this month when it welcomed director…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

train border photoMore than a decade after he first got deported, Marco was staring into the United States from a bank of the Rio Grande. Across the turgid river he could see a tangle of mesquite and huisache trees in the town of Eagle Pass. U.S. Border Patrol agents milled about, but Marco felt undaunted. “I know it wasn’t the legal way,” he told me recently, “but I was about to fulfill my dream of getting to be in this great country.”Marco (a pseudonym) had spent a year traveling north from his home, in Honduras, stopping to work construction jobs along the way to save money for bus tickets. Worried about getting kidnapped and held for ransom, or killed, by cartel members, he had plotted how to…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Best Thing In Texas: San Antonio Zoo Releases Adorable, Tiny Baby Horned Lizards (Horny Toads) into the WildWHO: Scientists at the San Antonio Zoo (and partners across the state and nation).WHAT: Fifty newly freed lizard hatchlings in Blanco County.WHY IT’S SO GREAT:The Texas horned lizard, affectionately called the horny toad or horned frog, is in trouble. The population of the official Texas state reptile has steeply declined in the Texas Triangle—the region bounded by the state’s biggest cities, where more than 70 percent of Texans live—to the consternation of not just biologists but also Texans who grew up seeing the spiky, four-inch-long critters everywhere. “The most common calls and questions I received from the public when I was the state herpetologist [a scientist who studies reptiles and amphibians] for Texas Parks and Wildlife were related to horned lizards,” Andy Gluesenkamp told me. “ ‘What…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

colt mccoy poncho shirt photoIn our series Stuff Texans Love, our state’s most stylish celebrities share their shopping lists. From his early childhood helping out his high school football coach dad on the sidelines to his 14-year career in the NFL, former University of Texas star quarterback Colt McCoy has learned much from the game he loves: You train hard, put your heart into it, and when you get hit, you keep going and don’t complain. After an elbow injury in January 2023 ended his NFL career, McCoy, 38, appreciates all that football gave him. “I definitely have a heart of gratitude for being able to play that long, for the people I met, the relationships I made,” he says. “Now I’m taking it slow and being mindful as I…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The Texas Doctor Working to Expand Abortion Access in OhioStep by step, Texas has driven away doctors like Bhavik Kumar. After the state legislature in 2021 enacted a ban on abortions beyond roughly the sixth week of pregnancy, the family medicine physician, who worked full time for Planned Parenthood, began providing abortions in Louisiana, where the procedure was still legal at the time. After the Dobbs decision wiped out abortion access across much of the South less than a year later, he started seeing patients in Kansas and Ohio a few days each month.Now his new job has put him in what he describes as a bewildering position. He works mostly from the Houston area, in a state where he could go to prison for life if he performed the procedure, while helping to…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Horror Bookstore CrawlTo enter the windowless basement that serves as the best new bookstore in Lockhart, you walk down a flight of stairs lined with a couple hundred Dracula masks and strings of garlic. While many bookshops favor natural light, this space embraces the darkness. Haunt Happy Books is full of antiques, skulls, a gold skeleton in a glass case, and thick, beautiful bookshelves stocked with only one genre: horror.I visited Haunt Happy with my five-year-old, who quickly grew nervous about the loud footsteps, scraping chairs, and mysterious thumps coming from the ceiling. (The appropriately spooky noises were in fact caused by restaurantgoers enjoying Loop & Lil’s Pizza, the tenant above.) In a moment of possibly misguided parenting, I said, “Don’t worry, it’s just monsters.” I caught…

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Timothy Morton's Hell bookOne ordinary evening in March 2023, while serving spaghetti at the family dinner table, Timothy Morton experienced a road-to-Damascus moment. “I palpably ‘saw’ that my whole life had been a prodigal-son-style cosmic joke,” the Rice University English professor writes in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, published earlier this year. “I thought I had been transcending Christianity in the most decisive ways possible, only to find that the last thirty-seven years had been training me to receive a massive (I mean, massive) dose of it.”Morton, who is 56 and uses they/them pronouns, considered themself a Buddhist for much of their adult life. Between writing 25 books—on subjects ranging from Romantic poetry to ecological philosophy—they had been on a spiritual journey out of a childhood…

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