Live Shots
Jeff Greinke / Vidna Obmana / Ure Thrall Commerce Street Artist’s Warehouse Saturday, February 25 Seattle-based Greinke, who has been likened to Brian Eno and ambient composer Jon Hassell, used a small bag of tricks to create what sounded like an entire planet within the confines of a cold Commerce…
Press Picks
thursday march 10 Free Your Mind MTV Spoken Word Tour MTV is all over this spoken word, back-to-the-coffeehouse, skinny-cigarette, finger-snapping thing, shrewdly making money from a performance style spawned by kids who were fed up with talking heads and wanted to talk to each other. Maggie Estep, Reg E. Gaines…
The Pop of Punk
Iggy Pop isn’t like you and me. You can tell by the way he croons “I’m so fuckin’ alone” on track eight of American Caesar: he knows things that we don’t understand yet. He’s eaten and starved and fucked and been fucked over and lived and not necessarily learned, and…
Po’ PoMo Moliere
It’s a long way from Moliere to Mel Brooks. One might think this a theatrical distinction so elementary it hardly bears mentioning, but it seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the slapstick shuffle between Moliere’s 1669 comic souffle Tartuffe and the Alley’s contemporary but considerably less-than-airy adaptation of the…
The Marty’s Over
He’s my Marty and I’ll cry if I want to… In rock and roll, as in all things temporal, eras must pass. Groups form and disband, trends ebb and flow, styles mutate and divide, deals are inked and forgotten in the shuffle. And critics, who generally do their best to…
Burn, Lady, Burn!
A woman condemned to be burned at the stake as a witch. A man so disappointed in the world that he demands to be hanged for a murder he didn’t commit. A nunnery virgin promised to a fiance she doesn’t love. A testosterone-pumped brother bent on fratricide. Philosophical discussions about…
Rotation
Richard Thompson Mirror Blue Capitol John Hiatt came out of the gates last year, as some neglected songwriter or another does each season, with a new record poised to deliver the wider acclaim that the critics always swore he deserved. And unlike perennial underdogs Marshall Crenshaw, Graham Parker and Warren…
Dance con Corazon
“What I want,” says Ballet Hispanico artistic director Tina Ramirez, “is that when people see a Hispanic person in the street, that people have respect for that person. That they don’t just see a stereotype.” Certainly there is nothing stereotypical in Ballet Hispanico’s movement vocabulary. Innovative and eclectic, the company…
Takin’ the Lead
It’s a matter of public record that the late great Stevie Ray Vaughan plundered Albert King’s guitar style in developing his own muscular Stratocaster sound, but the source from which Vaughan copped his white-soul vocal stylings is a little less well-known. His name is Doyle Bramhall, and he lives in…
Barely Down Under
If D.H. Lawrence ever were to get a film past the censors, Sirens might be it. Ripe with explicit nudity and suggestive encounters, the movie hearkens to The Rainbow and Women in Love. Yet because the sexuality expresses a spiritual hedonism defying repressive social mores, the film is more beautiful…
Yucking It Up
As creator, writer, director and producer of the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati, Frank’s Place and The Famous Teddy Z, Hugh Wilson took standard situation comedy and made it unconventional, literate, hip, incisive and, most of all, funny. He achieved similar, if more modest success with the playful sendup movie…
On Location with Boy Rifkin
Last August, the production of The Chase cluttered our freeways and city streets — and gave Houstonians a sample of Hollywood action. Star Charlie Sheen and the movie crew skipped from Kemah to north Houston, giving locals a glimpse of a genuine big-studio production. One evening, strolling around his set…
My Life As A Grape
After Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallstrsm made the magical and heartfelt My Life as a Dog in 1985, he went the route of almost all successful foreign filmmakers (save the Chinese). He went west to Hollywood, where five years later he released the mildly agreeable but ultimately disappointing Once Around. This…
Lost Patrol
That a new Alex Cox film is opening is welcome news. Highway Patrolman is his first release since 1987’s Straight to Hell, which the current film’s unusually candid press kit describes as having been “not … successful as a whole.” In 1987 he also filmed Walker, based on the life…
Who’s Guarding the Guardians?
Apparently, the Houston Police Department can never find a cop when it needs one. At a roll call last month, HPD officers were told the department had contracted with a private security firm to guard areas of the central police complex near downtown from dusk to dawn, seven days a…
Film Forums
Two years ago, Houston lost almost a third of its venues for art and independent films when the Greenway Three, long noted for its offbeat offerings, was purchased by the AMC theater chain, converted to a dollar cinema, and eventually shut down. But on Friday, March 11, Houston movie buffs…
Death of a Comic
Bill Hicks, the comedian who in the 1980s helped make Houston the breeding ground for some of the most acerbic and important humor in America, always had a skinny-boy figure with a little white-trash potbelly. That’s probably why, when he stood up in front of a room packed with one-time…
Letters
Hasta la Vista, Brad How dare you attack Ken Gerhard and Bamboo Crisis [Recordings, by Brad Tyer, February 3] — and it was an attack, not a review. Really, Brad, slamming us for our music is one thing, but the way we dress and look? You have sunk to a…
Hot Plate
Bread Bowls Aweigh The bread-bowl invasion is upon us, courtesy of the Houston Bread Company’s new location in the Rice Village. There they are busy ripping out the innards of sourdough or French rounds so they can fill them with soups and salads. Is this a good idea or just…
Breathtaking Boudin
Somewhere between the unexpectedly wonderful deep-fried boudin balls and the sweet-potato pie, an aggrieved thought crept into my brain. Where had the Norris restaurant been all my life? More to the point, where had I been for the past year and a half? It pained me that I could have…