Press Picks
thursday december 4 Holiday in the Park Oh! The comforts of tradition: The sweet, angelic voices of bored schoolchildren singing inanely silly songs in unison; the flashing lights on fat, plastic trees; and dear old Santa, the most beloved creepy guy in really weird clothes on the planet. If you…
(Con)fusion Cuisine
Sometimes good things come in odd packages. You wouldn’t necessarily expect inventive Pacific Rim cooking from a restaurant with “Hunan” in the name over the door. Nor would you hope for gourmet sensibilities within a storefront that rubs shoulders with a passport studio and a 24-hour taqueria. But all these…
Dish
Bistro on the Bay Bay Brewery hopes that a 23-foot, two-inch elevation will help it achieve what no other restaurant has done on its Seabrook site: survive a hurricane. A formidable culinary foundation also gives it excellent prospects of withstanding another waterfront threat: competition from the nearby Kemah pier. The…
Hip to Be Square
Alas, poor Simon and Garfunkel. At a time in music when it was more important to be hip than to be good (sound familiar, kids?), they were so collegiate, so pop that they could never really be cool. True, that didn’t much affect their sales (Simon and Garfunkel were among…
Static
Welcome to the jungle… What in the hell am I doing here? Surely, that question must have entered Carl Stephenson’s mind on a few occasions back in the late ’80s, as he pondered his strange situation. At the time, Stephenson — a sensitive young redhead with skin as light as…
Fight Songs
It would be easy enough to dismiss Chumbawamba as nothing more than a dance-floor novelty. With a name that borders on the unpronounceable — and whose meaning is purposefully indecipherable — the coed British octet has recently made itself conspicuous on our shores with “Tubthumping,” a bouncy, synthetic tune that…
Rotation
G. Love and Special Sauce Yeah, It’s That Easy OKeh/Epic Ever since the Hooters blew their major-label wad in one commercialized fell swoop back in 1985, being dubbed Philadelphia’s next Great White Hope has been nothing less than the kiss of death (R.I.P. Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers). The…
Back in Touch?
It would be easy to imagine that Daryl Hall and John Oates are struggling with the precipitous dip in popularity the duo has experienced over the last decade. Once a top-selling pop act, Hall and Oates no longer dominate the charts, and touring takes the duo to theaters and clubs…
Strange Rites
Since 1993, when the company first took shape, Infernal Bridegroom Productions has been the closest thing Houston has had to avant-garde theater. Some of their shows have been as fanciful, as absurd and as wickedly devilish as the Mad Hatter’s tea party. They’ve put on Beckett in a warehouse, used…
The Manic Professor
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is…
Send in the Clones
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
The Odyssey
It’s hard for anyone under, say, 35 to understand the impact that the so-called French New Wave directors in general — and Jean-Luc Godard, in particular — had on cinephiles (and on the art of film itself) when their films suddenly burst onto American art-house screens in the early ’60s…
So Sue Him
At the end of the clammy corridor off the first floor of the Harris County Civil Courthouse, attorneys, law clerks, investigators and reporters line up to scan the glowing green computer screens that reveal lawsuits filed with the District Clerk’s office. Each case is summarized in a couple of lines;…
The Johnson Treatment
For the last four years, Richard Johnson has cut quite a figure at City Hall as chief of staff for District B Councilman Michael Yarbrough. At the weekly Council meetings, Johnson parks his impeccably dressed, six-foot five-inch, 230-pound body just behind Yarbrough. With his arms crossed and his face void…
Bad Deal
John Ballis has a better tan than a prisoner has a right to. The tall, beefy real estate developer looks much healthier now than when he entered federal prison three years ago. Even so, he rails against his incarceration: He is used to having things his own way, and here,…
Stolid Citizen
You could hear the organ swelling and the congregation clapping a block away from Salem Missionary Baptist Church, a small redoubt of piety in the northside neighborhood of Independence Heights, where the windows of the frame houses are covered by burglar bars or two-by-fours. Outside, it was a beautiful late…
The Insider
Bob and Kathy and Lee Makes Three! Starting with his gift-wrapped presentation to the city as a Rice University professor two years ago, Lee Brown has turned up one political ace after another on his meticulously scripted march toward the mayor’s office. Now his campaign is playing its final wild…
Letters
Ode to Fall The November 13 “True Artist Tales” [Comics, “Fall,” by Scott A. Gilbert] is just not “with it.” Gilbert’s version of fall must be the result of a New York Yankee suburbanite funk. To use one’s wildlife only for suicidal pollution and littering cannot possibly be wise use…
Make Way for McLane
Once again demonstrating their unparalleled mastery of public relations, those hell-for-leather guys rushing to build a downtown baseball stadium offered up a heartwarming Thanksgiving scene last weekend: the unceremonious dumping on the street of a 60-year-old widow still bewildered and bitter over the lightning-quick condemnation of her property. Gayle J…