Trashing Houston
For some people, driving down Highway 225 from Houston to Deer Park can seem like driving into the mouth of Hell. Rows of petrochemical storage tanks border the road for miles, and the nearby Houston Ship Channel, which stretches down to Galveston Bay, is lined with refineries, chemical plants and…
Fast-Track Diversion
Last week I put somebody in a program that doesn’t exist yet,” joked state district Judge Mike Wilkenson in mid-March. At the time, Wilkenson and district court Judge Doug Shaver were still trying to come up with a name for what they now call the Fast-Track Drug Diversion and Treatment…
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
When the Houston Convention Bureau’s new Official Guide to Houston was released recently, conspicuously obvious by its absence was one chunk of Houston that some people might consider of particular interest to conventioneers — the city’s “adult entertainment industry.” Though ads for cabarets or gentlemen’s clubs, as they’ve been euphemistically…
Letters
Who’s That in the Stage Lights? I have just finished reading your article “Hard Times at the Ballet” [March 31, by Michael Berryhill]. I felt compelled to write to tell you I felt it was one of the most insightful pieces I have read concerning the world of professional ballet…
Press Picks
thursday april 14 The Riddle of the Rainbow The A.D. Players’ spring children’s play opens today. A.D. favorite Jeannette Clift George penned this musical, in which Justin Case and his singing friends take a journey. (Yes, our hero’s name is Justin Case — hey, healthy kids enjoy cheap gags like…
Hot Plate
Mexican Soft-shells Years ago, I heard the late, great architect Charles Moore refer to a dish he’d just eaten as “crazy good.” (It was the wonderfully ersatz chile relleno at the original Spanish Village, but that’s another story.) I remember being charmed by the locution: it captured perfectly a sense…
Piano Man
Since he began booking acts for his intimate club, Cezanne, about three years ago, pianist Dave Catney has been almost single-handedly responsible for raising the quality of jazz performance in Houston. Thanks to Cezanne’s active patronage and joint-sponsorship program, local audiences have been able to catch rising stars, flawless journeymen…
Live Shots
Rory Block Rockefeller’s Monday, April 4 What do you get when you mix sharecropper blues with a young white mother? The driving guitar, soulful voice and uneven lyrics of Rory Block, who performed Monday night to an appreciative crowd of around 100 at Rockefeller’s. Block, who is rumored to have…
Rotation
The K-Otix Da 4th Level Newstyle Records “Causin’ Kaos” kicks off a tough collection of tracks from the Houston-based hip-hop crew — tracks that deviate from narrative-driven song structures and gravitate instead toward the nether regions of sophisticated freestyle. “R U Fraud’s” title and running sample line — “wack MCs…
The Horn of Africa
The phrase “world music,” thanks to Paul Simon’s groundbreaking Graceland album and tour utilizing the talents of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, conjures images of musical South Africa. For those old enough, it also recalls the lilting horn line from a 1968 world-music smash called “Grazin’ in the Grass.” In each case,…
Powerful Tool
Within the new breed of rock bands, there’s a category (more or less) that doesn’t very well lend itself to traditional rock-crit ranting. Food metaphors and over-the-top hyperbole fairly demand to be jettisoned in favor of some more down-to-earth description. In the case of Los Angeles band Tool, the words…
Imperfect Triangle
“Learning undigested by thought is labor lost. Thought unassisted by learning is perilous,” reads the ever-timely Confucian message chalked onto the board of a dingy black township high school in South Africa, 1985, in Athold Fugard’s searing 1989 polemic My Children! My Africa!. By play’s end, when the fictional uprisings…
I’m a Believer…
I love hate mail (with all this practice, how could I not?), but in the week or so since my article on Pink Floyd came out in this paper, I’ve had to explain to too damn many people that no, I’m not the Antichrist, that yes, the article reflects only…
Return to Bali Ha’i
At the risk of abandoning any further claim to rock-and-roll credentials and admitting full membership in geezerdom, I hereby publicly admit preferring Rodgers and Hammerstein to Pete Townshend. At least that was the verdict last week, as the opening of Theatre Under the Stars’ revival of South Pacific coincided with…
Cult restaurateur
“Mickey’s back!” The late-winter rumors sent Indian-food buffs on hopeful cruises past Kirby and Richmond, where the sign on an empty strip-center shell read “Khyber North Indian Grill.” “Open Soon,” promised a banner. Not a moment too soon for fans of Mickey Kapoor, the pun-happy Peter Sellers look-alike who has…
A Sermon from the Past
To contemporary audiences, Ossie Davis is probably best known for his poignant portrayal of “Da Mayor” of Spike Lee’s Brooklyn, delivering the titular advice, “Do the right thing.” More recently, he has landed in the less august position of Burt Reynolds’ avuncular counselor on television’s Evening Shade. But these roles…
What’s It All Mean?
Robert Cumming’s work first appeared in a Boston Sunday paper as part of a contest in which kids had to incorporate a given printed curlicue into a drawing. The winner collected a dollar and saw the results published the following week. Beginning in 1956, at age 12, and ending in…
WorldFest’s World View
After taking his show on the road — specifically, to Charleston, South Carolina — for a film festival last fall, Hunter Todd will, on April 15, once again bring his WorldFest to Houston. When Todd opened the Charleston branch of his film festival, now in its 27th season, there was…
American Potluck
If there’s anything that binds the American films presented at this year’s WorldFest, it’s that they offer derivative pleasures. There is no common mythos in the 15 domestic features I saw (out of 25 scheduled for the festival). Gone, to a large degree, are the implications of the American spectrum:…