How Low Can You Go?
It’s your typical bar: dark and smoky, with flyers peeling off the walls. And Low looks to be your typical bar band: Alan Sparhawk on guitar, Mimi Parker on drums and Zak Sally on bass and occasionally a keyboard. But Low doesn’t produce the crunchy megadecibel guitar roar that brings…
Legal Walls
It was a scene of art culture-meets-street culture that could almost have been lifted from the ’80s, a few years after a celebrated Soho street writer called Samo revealed his real name, Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the Village Voice for $100 and became an instant commodity. By the time Barry McGee…
Street Cred
Since the street is something we city dwellers can appreciate every day, bringing the street into the gallery seems potentially weird and fakey, like garden-scented aerosol spray for the bath or fruit pies that advertise real apples and artificial flavoring. In “Streetwise,” a tie-in to Barry McGee’s graffiti exhibit at…
Hot Plate
Just say, “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” as Louis Armstrong used to sign his letters. The national dish of Louisiana can be found on the chalkboard menu every day at Creole’s Louisiana Cuisine [2933 Walnut Bend Lane, (713)785-2340]. Two heaping scoops of white rice are covered with tender red kidney…
Drowning Out The Bridge
Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge is an urgent and arrestingly simple play. A middle-aged longshoreman named Eddie Carbone (James Black) falls into a forbidden love with his teenage niece. Blinded by an Oedipal-like inability to know himself and his desires, Eddie tries to stop the girl from growing…
Doesn’t Translate
With song titles such as “Rats Don’t Have Wings” and “I Wish I Were Alcohol” and “Tie Yourself to a Broom and Fly Far Away,” Jaguares could be a Sex Pistols tribute act. Of course, it isn’t. The band is one of Mexico’s biggest-selling, most-admired, most-cherished national treasures, which has…
So Be Good
Little Harriet plays with matches against her parents’ wishes and goes up in crackling flames. Cruel Frederick whips a dog unmercifully and is bitten to death. Silly Conrad can’t keep from sucking his thumbs, so the long-legged scissor man neatly snips them off. In Struwwelpeter (“Slovenly Peter”), Heinrich Hoffman’s 1844…
Happy Days
Houston’s Next Level Band is in a happy mood. It’s still playing regular gigs, from private parties to its monthly stop at Monroe’s Gallant Knight on Holcombe. And it recently signed a deal with Southwest Wholesale to sell and distribute its year-old debut, The Next Level Band. For these six…
History Repeating
If modern dance was a self-conscious quest to find new forms of expression, why is it so rare to find contemporary practitioners pushing its boundaries? If modern dance was a break from the rigidity of ballet, why has it become a rigid technique all its own? If modern dance was…
Straight Sambas
Danilo Perez vividly remembers the first gift he ever received from his father: a set of bongo drums. Perez’s father, a Latin bandleader and singer in the style of Beny More, used the bongos to introduce his son to the world of Latin music. Perez took to the bongos and…
Ford Fatigue
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that eight-dollar nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
Rotation
Various Artists Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the ’60s Astor Place Recordings If you were to walk down Bleecker Street between Sixth Avenue and University Place in New York City, it might be hard to imagine that that stretch of blocks, along with nearby MacDougal Street, were once the epicenter…
Local Rotation
Dune, TX Machowagon Tasty Melon The guys from Dune, TX — Tim Herrmann on drums, Rusty Guess on bass and Chris Sacco on guitar and vocals — have been pursuing the local rock and roll thing for almost six years now, all the while with their sights set on the…
Sappy Happy
The triumvirate is complete. First Paris, Texas, then Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, and now Happy, Texas. German existentialism. Coming-of-age melodrama. Screwball mistaken-identity crapfest. Is there any situation small-town Texas can’t fulfill, any scenario it can’t endure? Apparently not, according to indie filmmakers. In this one, two cons on the lam…
Amplified
Rave Against the .38 Caliber Machine Westheimer Road will, for Sunday at least, become the crossroads at which art and politics meet when Space City Records and PAX, an anti-gun-violence group, host a rave-style event at Numbers. The event is called “Cease Fire,” and Space City Records is celebrating the…
No More Miss Congeniality
It was funny enough that Tashia was even here, a big, unrestrained, laughing woman like herself. As her boyfriend saw it, she was “real,” and pageant people were “fake.” And what was she doing in a beauty pageant? But Tashia, who is something of a thrill-seeker, says she just wanted…
Playbill
Great American Don’t go see Del McCoury just because he cut an album (The Mountain) and toured with Steve Earle. McCoury’s anointment by postmodern-country icon Earle is just part of the bluegrass singer, guitarist and bandleader’s story. But if the Earle connection — or the fact that the guys from…
Double Image
There he stands, in grainy, jerky images resembling an old home movie. Captured on rough-hewn film is George W. Bush in a Cub Scout troop line, then posing for snapshots with boys clad in Little League baseball uniforms. More footage follows him out of an airport building marked “Davenport, Iowa…
News Hostage
For years Houston Chronicle reporter Bob Sablatura, the paper’s best investigative reporter, has been The Man Who Wasn’t There. The running joke in local journalistic circles was that Sablatura was the human equivalent of the federal government’s program that paid farmers not to grow certain crops. The Chronicle kept Sablatura…
Taken for a Ride?
Married to a man with AIDS, Sally DeVito signed up for the 1997 AIDS bike ride from Boston to New York City. But as the date got closer, her husband got sicker, and she was afraid he’d die while she was gone. She went, deciding that it was more important…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesIsrael rolled back its clocks one hour in September to support Orthodox Jewish prayer schedules, but the Palestinian West Bank remained on summer time, and Israeli security sources told reporters that the time change resulted in the deaths of three Palestinian terrorist bombers. At 5 p.m. on September 5,…
Borderline Bond
He drank too much alcohol during that early August night, got behind the wheel, was nabbed by a police officer for speeding and was taken to jail on his first ever charge of drunk driving. Under a Harris County policy, first-time DWI defendants are generally eligible to have $500 bonds…
Dish
Those whispers you’ve been hearing about the closing of Lido [3201 Travis, (713)523-9295] are true. “Yeah, the rumors are ugly,” says Khon Lu, whose parents own the restaurant. “But they’re all true. We are definitely shutting it down.” The last time we visited Lu, he was starring in a vintage…
Insider
Mayor Lee Brown has been in the city cockpit nearly two years, but his flying skills don’t seem to be improving. Anyone seeking proof need look no further than the administration’s breathtakingly bungled confrontation with Continental Airlines last month over the selection of a team to build more than $400…
Real Life
When some people stress out, they take a bubble bath among lit candles. Or strum a familiar tune on a guitar, or shoot some hoop. Then there’s Colby Watkins, who lives in Austin. When the 24-year-old and his former girlfriend ended their relationship, he went to Robert-Michael and asked him…
On the Spot
Jennifer Monson is a critically acclaimed and well established New York choreographer. Her work has been seen in Europe, Latin America and Australia. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Bessie Award. But she’s nervous about…