The Insider
Transition Go-Go With New Year’s and the symbolic touches of his inauguration behind him, Mayor Lee Brown now begins the task of wringing out the old and bringing in the new at City Hall. Some holdovers from the Lanier administration are expected to get the hint and go willingly; others…
Letters
Educational Trip I just wanted to thank you for printing the article “See Juarez” [by Charles Bowden, December 11]. It came at a perfect time to follow up on my family’s Thanksgiving experience. When I had to go to California for business over the holiday, I decided to take my…
All I Need to Know I Learned from Tommy Tune’s Book
Broadway star Tommy Tune — a Houston native and a regular in Maxine Mesinger’s society column — recently published a memoir, Footnotes (Simon & Schuster, $24). In that summation of his 57 years, the dancer/director/choreographer ponders the intellectual depths of his friend Carol Channing, reprints a couple of his own…
Before You Go, One Last Kiss
The call came late in the evening, when I was dead to the world, but I quickly snapped to when that familiar voice came through the answering machine. It was Elyse. We hadn’t talked since our beer-fueled trip to Kingwood last spring, when she had single-handedly turned the tide of…
Press Picks
thursday january 8 “Classical Sensibilities: Images by Alain Gerard Clement and George Dureau” These two contemporary photographers use classicism as a springboard for their photography. Classical themes ground Clement’s experimentation with a cameraless photographic process. After creating multilayered drawings on translucent paper, he lays the drawings over a large sheet…
Baby, It’s Him
In person, Burt Bacharach seems smaller than he does when you see him on television or in old photos, standing next to ex-wives Angie Dickinson or Carole Bayer Sager. His arms are twig thin, and his face is a little more gaunt than it was back when he was pop’s…
Sounds of Freedom
“If Jimi Hendrix did hip-hop, that’s exactly what that shit would sound like.” It’s a Monday night at the Blue Iguana on Richmond, and the person making this claim is a house DJ impressed by the half-hour set just turned in by Freedom Sold. Unfortunately, the spin doctor makes his…
Rotation
B.B. King Deuces Wild MCA At 72, B.B. King is something of an enigma. He’s still a tremendous blues performer, someone whose concerts are not to be missed. Yet for the past two decades, his recordings have generally been pop/soul-influenced efforts of erratic quality. King’s latest CD, Deuces Wild, features…
Spanish Rocks
Until recently, a mention of Spanish-influenced rock and roll would cause most people to think only of Los Lobos, Santana (“Oye Como Va” anyone?) or War’s “Low Rider.” Folks whose knowledge of rock history extended more than a few years into the past might also throw Ritchie Valens into the…
The Few, The Proud, the Battered
At 3 a.m. on a humid night in early October, Gabriel Cortez’s screams awoke his fellow cadets in the Bravo Company barracks at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen. Boys rushed into Cortez’s darkened room to find the 18-year-old high school senior soaked in blood and lying in his lower…
Static
Fly girl… It’s hardly a revelation that an unfortunately large number of Houston artists see leaving town as the only way for them to get anywhere in the music business. Robin Beacham understands that point of view, because Beacham is among those who have jumped ship. Still, credit where credit…
Revamp in River Oaks
I approached Armando’s sick with dread. Who hasn’t heard the stories? Possessing all the warmth of a nest of tigers, it didn’t suffer strangers, people told me; it was a Moloch that devoured newcomers as you or I would tapas; a thicket of symbols, all of which said Keep Your…
Dish
Raw Competition Conventional economic wisdom has it that when two businesses compete, both firms’ products and prices improve as the companies strive to one-up each other. Somehow, though, the rivalry between sushi restaurants Miyako and Cafe Japon, located across Kirby from one another, has managed to defy that logic. Miyako…
The Last Eccentric
For two days before her funeral on January 3, Dominique de Menil lay in state, in the French tradition, in the one-story modern home she and her husband built amid the Tudor and neo-Gothic frippery of River Oaks. A small Max Ernst painting of a moon emerging from an auburn…
More Troubles
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George and Daniel Day-Lewis…
Sins of the Father
Too frequently, movies that confront pressing social issues turn into morality plays. The protagonists are nothing but victims of the Modern Order, which is perpetuated by antagonists whose motivations go no further than, well, perpetuating it. Rarely do we get to see the abstract moral issues surrounding racism, the exploitation…