Critic’s Choice
Over on Dowling Street, the veterans of life and the blues sit in icehouses and barber shops, talking about the Action Town’s glory days, when you could walk from one end of the Third Ward to the other any night of the week and hear music every step of the…
Postmarked Texas
Joe Ely has left Texas many times, spending some of those years busking in New York City subway stations and the Paris Metro. He traveled throughout Europe and the United States as a young man — even ran away with the circus for a little while to tend the llamas…
Sound Check
The idea of love in rock and roll isn’t particularly novel — it’s been addressed to death by everyone from Buddy Holly to Kurt Cobain. Writing a good love song is cake, right? Tom Petty has worked a trillion variations on the theme and still managed to maintain his respectability…
Feel the Feel
As fabricated as it might sound, Collective Soul has a valid grassroots success story to tell. After the band invaded alternative and AOR play lists out of nowhere last year with the relentlessly cheery “Shine,” it was justifiable, perhaps, for the skeptical to tilt their nostrils skyward in search of…
Landmark Stuff
The tattered strip center at Richmond and Woodhead divulges few clues that inside, a Montrose institution is aborning. First you notice that cars often throttle the parking lot in front of a Spartan corner grocery and faceless taqueria. Then you become distracted by the engagingly named You-All Laundromat. Many drive-bys…
No Self Benefaction
What does it mean when you’re not getting the roles you think you can handle? That you’re not talented? Or that it’s all a question of who you know? Lisa Marie Singerman has decided to circumvent those issues. After four years of murder mysteries, community theater and frustration, the actress…
Beyond Dreck
Beyond Rangoon has the style of John Boorman’s signature films — it’s lovely to look at but ultimately uninteresting, like The Emerald Forest or Excalibur. The basic story elements — a beautiful, tragic young woman and Burma’s violent internal conflicts — are the stuff of drama, yet Beyond Rangoon is…
Child Abuse
Kids is a cunning little art-house fraud that has somehow managed to impress a good number of people who should know a great deal better. Ever since its invitation-only sneak preview in rough-cut form at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie has sustained an ear-piercing buzz as this year’s…
Top Fright
Clive Barker may not appear on the bestseller lists as often or as prominently as Stephen King, but there are many devotees — chief among them King himself — who feel nobody does it better, or raises goose bumps higher, than this bloody-minded Liverpudlian. In his books (The Damnation Game,…
Pollyanna for the ’90s
With 125 million well-thumbed copies in circulation, the Baby-sitters Club books are a trusted series whose stories of seven adolescent girls and their tidy suburban adventures have a wide, devoted following. The carefully inspiring, mildly instructive formula of the books has been preserved in the baby-sitters’ first foray on to…
Gayle Force
On the first Thursday afternoon of August, Gayle Fallon, president of the largest local teachers union in Texas, is perched on a table while the three top financial officers of the Houston Independent School District attempt to conduct a news conference on the annual budget. A short, red-headed woman in…
The Insider
To Run or Not to Run Mayor Bob Lanier would like to cruise through his third and final mayoral election with no serious opponent, and save his campaign dollars to battle the anti-affirmative action ordinance that businessman David Wilson is petitioning to get on the ballot for a January referendum…
The Worst Judge in Harris County?
It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, and the judge is staring out ominously over the courtroom. A faint smile crosses her lips. She wears black robes and holds a law text in her hands. Several people in the courtroom stare back at the portrait of Justice of the Peace Betty Brock…
Letters
Seeing Things There is a slight problem with the opening setup for the cover story [“Profits First, People Second,” by Brian Wallstin and T.R. Witcher, August 17] on the city’s RTC apartment program, “Two years ago on a fine summer day, Mayor Bob Lanier herded president Bill Clinton and Vice…
Press Picks
thursday august 31 Fertles and Friends! An inter-active, full-fledged variety show starring “Doc Moore and the Singing Fertle Family,” folk artist “Blind” Willy Davies and Congressman Dog Spranger — these stars as played by Steve and Vicki Farrell and Rich Mills. This trio of musical comedians don a number of…
Diner’s Notebook
Random Thought: It never fails to amuse me how a restaurant can underwhelm me on the food front and still manage to endear itself. Tutto Bene in the Heights — oh, okay all you jingoists, in the obscure Old West End — is a prime example. The many forms of…