News of the Weird
Lead Stories *England’s Plymouth University announced in March that it would offer an “academically rigorous” bachelor’s degree in surfing beginning in September. The degree will be known formally as Surf Science and Technology and will offer research opportunities in surfboard, wetsuit and accessory design, and furnish to society not only…
Tennessee Visit
Tennessee Williams might easily be remembered as the greatest American playwright of the 20th century. His characters are beautifully spoken poetic beings, the sort who utter great truths even as they fly into the flames of their own destruction. Williams was a bit like his characters. He was the sort…
Night & Day
Thursday April 22 Sam Reveles paints perfectly nice paintings — sketches based on early Renaissance and Flemish classics. Then he covers them up with layer upon layer of agitated brush strokes and wild color, leaving only a foot, a horn, a tree limb or an eye of the old work…
Tender But Timid
Athol Fugard’s Valley Song, at Stages, addresses the struggles of a young black woman who lives in post-apartheid South Africa. Veronica (Melita Hawkins) is barely out of school and full of dreams. She yearns for a life outside her little town of Nieu-Bethesda. In her mind this place is a…
Booty Call
BUTT-NEKKID WOMEN! The Miss HOODE Nude Showdown Classic and Ms. Bomb-Ass Houston Bikini Classic will feature nothing but scantily clad and/or completely nude women shaking what God (and maybe a few plastic surgeons) gave them for big bucks. But before you get too excited about the ultimate freakazoid fantasy, the…
Class Over Kin
British playwright Willy Russell’s musical Blood Brothers is a brooding melodrama about magic, superstition and the dark divide of class. The play opens on an ominous scene. Gray light covers the stage. Starlight winks above. Foreboding and sorrowful music rises from the tiny “orchestra.” Spread across the stage are the…
Go, Speed Racer, Go-o!
“Now just put your left hip up against the door,” the race car driver told me. “Doesn’t the door open?” I asked. Everyone around me laughed. “No, the doors are sealed shut,” the race car driver said. “Now put your hip against the door and pull yourself in.” I did…
Blasted
Sure, Joe Wright was paranoid. By the summer of 1998, he’d been on crystal meth for years, and speed has a way of doing that to a man. But the fact is, Wright had every reason to be afraid. In 1991, while flush with cash from his car-audio business, he’d…
Wot More Could You Ask?
Before eating at the wonderful Ethiopian restaurant Awash [1520 Westheimer, (713)520-9387], there are three things you really need to know: 1) You’ll be eating communally, sharing food with all the members of your party; 2) You’ll be eating with your hands, using bits of Ethiopian bread, injera; and 3) You’ll…
News Hostage
The Difference a Day Makes It was easily one of the more bizarre stand-ups in Houston television history — Channel 11’s Terrence Jackson standing in front of a group of looters, calmly expressing concern for their safety. The scene was the charred remains of the strip mall that included the…
Hot Plate
Sweets sell by the seashore: Of all the wondrous pies prepared at Maddie’s Gourmet Bakery [3204 Seawall Boulevard, Galveston, (409)763-1483], my favorite is baker Jose Garcia’s luscious key lime. A sweet, cinnamon-spiced graham cracker crumb crust cradles the buttery-pale filling, authentically untinted; there’s nary a trace of that hideous neon-green…
Marriage Contract
When deputy director Richard Scott left the Houston Department of Public Works last September, good things started happening to TSC Engineering Co. In the 14 months prior to Scott’s departure, the city assigned TSC $161,000 worth of tasks as both a prime contractor and subcontractor. Less than two months after…
Stoli Moments
Some time ago, an emigre from the post-Soviet nation of Kazakhstan described for me the Russian tradition of dining out: “When a Russian goes out to dinner, he goes to spend the whole evening in a big celebration with family and friends. There has to be drinking, and then plenty…
Letters
Why 2K? We are not in the last year of the old millennium, and we are not about to experience problems “that could conceivably accompany the birth of the next century.” [“Preparing for the Millennium,” by Brian Wallstin, April 8]. January 1, 2000, is not the first day of the…
Molzan in Motion
Some observers of the downtown cafe melee were surprised — but perhaps as many more were not — by the abrupt disappearance of Kirk Graham and Leticia Guzman Graham from the management team of seven-month-old Staccato’s [711 Main Street, (713)227-9141]. Word on the street is that the restaurant’s money people…
Gay Day
Talk about holding a grudge and wallowing in misery. Of Montreal leader Kevin Barnes saddled his band with such a cumbersome name to remind him of the hometown of the woman who broke his heart. Though the band has kept the moniker, Barnes and company’s music is a far cry…
Brown and Blue
Texas Johnny Brown, a mainstay on the Houston blues circuit, is a patient man. A masterfully fluent guitarist whose work backing major stars began in 1946, he first recorded original material under his own name some 50 years ago. Because of a variety of circumstances, he didn’t get many other…
Whiggin’ Out
Afghan Whigs lead singer Greg Dulli was standing, pissing into an empty Jim Beam bottle in the men’s room of a club in the band’s Cincinnati hometown and made some mention of how he was going to get somebody to drink it. He must not have gotten any takers because,…
The Book of James
Call it consumer action taken to the next level: If most of us are dissatisfied with the service or treatment at a business, we can write the usual complaint letter, call a manager on the phone or even boycott the place. But if you’re a musician, you can always put…
Control Freaks
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Great Pods
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
Spade and Neutered
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick — every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood — works well in the short bursts characteristic of standup, sketches and TV sitcoms. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at…
A Twin-Twin Situation
Which one do you like? Craig Sanders asked his twin brother, Mark, on the plane home. They’d been to the Twin Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, and had just had lunch with a pair of 28-year-old legal secretaries from St. Louis. I couldn’t tell them apart, Mark said. But he…
Baby Bush: Closet Liberal or Precocious Trickster?
In an otherwise ho-hum portrait last Sunday of the youthful years in Houston for Texas governor and likely presidential candidate George W. Bush, Chronicle political writer Alan Bernstein did expose a hitherto unreported claim concerning the Shrub’s early political outlook. Bernstein quoted Houston art supply dealer Ben Russell, the onetime…
Children, Prepare Your Desk Manuals!
Get ready for the Houston Independent School District’s latest wacky adventure in corporate management training. It arrives special delivery from American General retired chairman Harold Hook to his protege and district superintendent Rod Paige. Called the Desk Manual Program, perhaps appropriately acronymed as DMP, it’s spelled out in an HISD…