See No Evil, Teach No Evil
The school board of the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District (LCISD) had some unusual visitors Thursday, December 16. Dressed in their black “WAC is watching” T-shirts and accompanied by drumming from their trademark drum corps, members of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) spoke at the LCISD’s monthly school board meeting,…
Press Briefs
Harold’s Whereabouts “I’m here very temporarily,” Harold Farb said when he answered our call to his room at the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel on Westheimer. Farb’s fourth wife, Diane Lokey, is still living in the couple’s 5,000-square-foot residence in the Four Leaf Towers condo. Farb, who has made some fortunes…
Letters
ACLU: R.I.P…. Regarding your article about the ACLU [“The Life and Death of Houston’s ACLU,” December 23, by Steve McVicker]: I am a former contributor to the national ACLU at what is for me a significant level, and to the Clark Read Foundation at a somewhat lesser level. When the…
Folk Ways and Means
Don Sanders Promisin’ Boy (Red Brick Records) Talk about folk music in Houston and, depending on your age, you’re probably talking about either the established co-eminence of Shake Russell and Jack Saunders or the energetic earnestness of the still-up-and-coming David Rice. Of course, the folk conversation in Houston is filled…
Angel of Unrelenting Good Will
Sara Hickman, by the evidence of her showcase at Rockefeller’s on Tuesday, December 28, does all things well. Maybe just a little bit too well. The Houston native and one-time Elektra recording artist writes complex songs that place her in a pleasing somewhere between folk songstress and pop diva, sings…
Working on the Chain Gang
I have seen the future of Carrabba’s, and it worries me. Now that Johnny Carrabba and Damian Mandola have embarked on a joint venture with the expansionist Outback Steakhouse chain, branches of Houston’s favorite trattoria are sprouting all over the Texas and Florida landscapes. Johnny and his uncle Damian, who…
A year of brave new companies, of fresh keen moments, and of Beckett and Albee evermore
In the gold-glittering wake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, now bull-roaring its way to more prestigious and expensive venues, it’s reassuring to recall that the year in Houston also delivered plenty of often more satisfying, if less spectacular, grown-up theater. On the musical stage itself, there was Theatre Under…
Histoire(s) du Cinema
Ever wonder what happened to Jean-Luc Godard? The idiosyncratic renegade of French New Wave filmmaking, the auteur of Breathless, Alphaville and Hail Mary, is still alive and kicking around the European independent movie scene, even if he’s been virtually forgotten here. In 1989 Godard was commissioned by French cable television…
The Old Couple
I wasn’t expecting great things from Grumpy Old Men. I just wanted a chance, rare nowadays, to marvel at Walter Matthau’s cragginess of face and voice, to offhandedly enjoy the friction between him and Jack Lemmon — and to be reminded of Lemmon’s sinus-clearing scene from The Odd Couple. Strictly…
Picks
Thursday January 6 The return of the Thin Mints It’s Girl Scout cookie time again. Everybody with good sense will spend in the three figures stocking the freezer with a full year’s supply. Thin Mints are far and away the favorite cookie (although the debate rages over whether they’re best…
The Singular Singhalese
Michael Ondaatje isn’t a betting man. He didn’t wager on who’d be selected for the 1992 Booker Prize. He should have, for he won. (Believe it or not, John Bull is bullish on gambling on literature, so much so that the Booker Prize award ceremony is televised, and just like…
Getting to the Bottom of the Blues
The Alley opens the new year on the Large Stage January 12 with August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The Alley production will feature Theresa Merritt as legendary blues singer Madame “Ma” Rainey, reprising the Broadway role for which she received a nomination for a Tony Award. The production will…
The Poison Connection
Matamoros, Mexico “Paracaidistas,” they call them, when they first arrive. Parachutists. Whether it’s the sheets of plastic covering the roofs of the wood-and-tin shacks, or the sensation that the residents of these squatters’ towns one day just appeared, as if they had fallen from the sky, the description somehow makes…