The Preacher Returns
For the (still) far-too-many people unfamiliar with the work of Gil Scott-Heron, the seminal black musician and poet was repackaged last year — after a 12-year absence from the recording studio — as the Daddy of Rap. Scott-Heron’s late ’60s and early ’70s discography, along with that of the Last…
Fine Times On Catfish Row
In 1976, Houston Grand Opera gave new life to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess when it staged the first full-scale version of the work in 40 years. Afterward, the opera gained increasing acceptance in the standard repertoire. Now, HGO has come up with a revisionist interpretation of Gershwin’s classic that…
Eyeballing McCarty
You may not know her name, but if you’ve paid any attention to Texas rock and roll over the course of the past ten years, you’ve probably heard Kathy McCarty’s music. Until the band called it quits almost two years ago, McCarty served as singer and songwriter with Glass Eye,…
Jekyll & Hyde, Together (Groan) Again
If Jekyll & Hyde’s co-producers — the Alley Theatre, Theatre Under the Stars, and Seattle’s 5th Avenue Musical Theatre Company — think their big-budget premiere is ready for Broadway, they’re as deranged as the good doctor’s alter ego. They plan a national tour; it’ll be a long and winding road…
Pop Moment
Just in case you’re a musician, and you’re curious about how to get your name printed in bold type in a column like this in one of our local papers, the Houston Music Council is holding another if its regular meetings, this one dedicated to the topic “Media — How…
A Place of Your Own
For black folk in 1898, an all-black town must have sounded impossibly wonderful. Nicodemus, Kansas, was such a town, as were many other towns like it that were settled in the great and now largely forgotten black exodus in the 1880s and 1890s to the Midwest. If the frontier served…
Rotation
Various Artists The Sound of Soul: The Sue Records Story EMI I’m no Dave Marsh. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of early ’60s soul and rock. The Shirelles or whoever didn’t change my life by perfectly capturing my wistful teenage angst (one doesn’t have a lot of teenage angst…
Where the Boys Aren’t
Listen, this is a movie that uses Carpenters songs and makes you like them. Oh, and Boys on the Side uses flashbacks from The Way We Were and makes them work. Pay no attention to the TV ads and previews; this is not a road movie with chicks. These women…
History’s Shadows
One tranquil evening in 1949 in the Chinese countryside, a group of traveling shadow puppeteers are putting on a performance when, suddenly, a bayonet slices through the screen on which the shadows are projected. The bayonet is attached to a rifle belonging to a soldier in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army,…
Disorder in the Court
Many people in the court of King George III, the protagonist of a fascinating new British comedy by director Nicholas Hytner, suspected something wasn’t quite right with the old man, but they had no sure way to prove it. And the etiquette of monarchy being what it was, they couldn’t…
It’s Joe B.’s World
Joe B. Allen is relaxing, his thick torso reclining in his swivel chair, his dress-shoed feet propped on his desk. It’s his favorite position for rumination, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the posture favored by Mayor Bob Lanier when he’s at ease and holding forth in his office. If Allen were…
Female Troubles
Boys will be boys, especially boys with time on their hands. So it was that a dozen or so male board members of the State Bar of Texas found themselves sitting around a conference table in Austin last November, killing time while awaiting the arrival in town of enough of…
Nuchia Speak
When it comes to crime statistics, there’s good news and bad news — depending on which part of town you live in. But Police Chief Sam Nuchia apparently thinks citizens, including City Council members, have a right to hear only the good news. And the good news, Nuchia reported to…
Jitney Jihad
The president of Yellow Cab, Joe Chernow, has a vision of what jitneys might bring to Houston, and it isn’t pretty. Drawing on the experience of New York City, he sees dozens of aggressive, banged-up vans darting down Westheimer to beat out buses for passengers. He sees jitney operators abandoning…
Letters
A Stinking Situation Your several articles about collecting delinquent tickets is the best piece of investigative reporting to come out of this town in a long time. Kudos! The headline was correct [News, “Unequal Opportunity,” by Brian Wallstin, January 19]. It’s who you know, not what you are. The whole…
Press Picks
thursday february 2 Novel Messengers in the Brain That’s part one. Part two is “Science Education as a Centerpiece for Educational Reform.” The first is a lecture by Dr. Solomon H. Snyder, the second a lecture by Dr. Bruce M. Alberts. They know more than you do. Frankly, we’d be…
The Real Thing
Somewhere between the Shark Fins in a Buddha’s Hand and the Silk-Ball of Scallop I lost my will to eat. Twelve dishes remained in the nine-course, 34-dish banquet wrought by six chefs visiting Houston last week from Beijing’s famous Fang Shan Restaurant, whose name means “Restaurant Imitating the Imperial Kitchen.”…
Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Have a Pepsi
Every day toward the end of April 1975, the daily front-page story on the plight of Saigon would mention that a few troops might be sent in until the situation stabilized. I was a junior in high school, 16 months away from being old enough for the draft. I was…
Live Shots
Henry Qualls and Kinny Abair McGonigel’s Mucky Duck Thursday, February 2 A “blues” performer usually calls to mind a solo act, most often male and black, playing guitar to illustrate personal stories. That traditional profile lives on in the person of Henry Qualls of Elmo, Texas, the latest in a…