Mexican Mystery
It’s hard to believe that two restaurants with precisely the same, faintly redundant name, Café Maria Mexican Taco Café, are not related. One, let’s call it the original Café Maria, is located on the busy border between the Heights and the north side, in Spanish Flower territory along North Main…
Video Games
In the thirteenth century, showman Arnaud de Villeneuve used a camera obscura to delight an audience with a shadow play avec sound effects. The fact that the audience stayed inside to witness the players’ intrigue projected on the wall, when they could have been outside viewing the action, is early…
Hot Plate
When Is a Poor Boy Not a Poor Boy?: When it’s a plate-swamping meal of sautéed jumbo shrimp, meaty strips of red and green peppers and mounds of caramelized onions, like the so-called Shrimp Po-Boy ($6.95) at Café Artiste [1601 West Main, (713)528-3704]. The two slabs of fluffy white French…
Exquisite Pain
Hidden across the dark landscape of suffering are some of life’s greatest lessons. And so it is in Margaret Edson’s stunning, Pulitzer Prize-winning morality play Wit, which makes its Houston debut in a gorgeous production at the Alley Theatre. Edson’s central character, professor Vivian Bearing (Megan Cole), begins her journey…
Party On
It’s July 1998, and A.J. Vallejo is strolling through the parking lot of Austin’s Tinseltown movie megaplex on a mission to see Armageddon, the syrupy sci-fi movie about a massive meteorite on a doomsday path toward earth. In an instant, the front man for his eponymously titled Latino funk-rock band…
Casting a Spell
A few operas in the standard repertory are performed and recorded so often their arias are nearly as popular as a Top 40 hit. Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love is one; there isn’t a mediocre melody in the whole score of this unique comedy. But the very familiarity of…
Raw Power
This has got to be one of the strangest boxed sets, even though it stars the Stooges, one of rock’s most celebrated (at least these days) bands. 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions is a seven-CD collection, clocking in at just under eight hours, which thoroughly documents what has come…
Color Commentary
Perry House’s densely layered, organically suggestive abstract paintings are not as far from figurative as you can get, but they’re pretty far. So it was surprising that he wanted to look at paintings of real things from the Museum of Fine Arts’ Beck Collection — a Jean Frédéric Bazille al…
Rotation
Fu Manchu King of the Road Mammoth Fu Manchu makes low-end, primordial metal, which is growing in popularity (though it’s not going to be the new grunge or ska or swing or polka), if not originality. But the fact that some stuff on Fu Man’s fifth album is louder, faster…
Illuminating the Stage
One wonders, one does. The name of Mike Leigh has been attached to some intense, intricate, generally superb character studies in the past three decades. The man has pitted Gary Oldman (as a skinhead) against Tim Roth (as a slow learner) in Meantime (1981), explored the friction of reuniting college…
Local Rotation
Drunken Thunder Cheap Acceptable Kill Honest Abe’s Custom Records Homegrown garage power rock is Drunken Thunder’s stock-in-trade. Problem is, it’s also pretty damn good. As a matter of fact, Drunken Thunder’s particular brand of twisted, sloppy aggro could stand shoulder to shoulder with that of bands from ¨ber-hip labels like…
Valley of the Dull
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-seller Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon, “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about the woman who was regaled in her…
Amplified
It was like eavesdropping on every headbanger’s dream: In the middle of Sid 17’s set at SideCar Pub early this month, the band — performer number two in a heavy metal trifecta that included Linus and Mystic Cross — ripped out a kick-ass cover of Krokus’s “Screaming in the Night,”…
Killing Time
Helen Bass enjoyed an ordered if unremarkable life. The 42-year-old vocational nurse worked the second shift at the state hospital in the north Texas town of Wichita Falls. A tidy woman who lived alone, Bass occasionally entertained a friend in the evening but mostly kept to herself. After work, according…
Playbill
Just ’cause The Man says you have to learn how to play your instrument before you join a band doesn’t mean you have to listen. Jad Fair and his ever-morphing group, Half-Japanese, have spent more than 20 years gleefully flaunting their disrespect for the conventional trappings of music. Whether through…
Death (Row) Watch
Odell Barnes joins a growing list of death row inmates whose convictions have become a lot less clear-cut during the appeals process. That’s supposed to be the point of an appeal: a chance to revisit the case and make sure that if a serious mistake was made at the trial,…
Where’s Leonardo DiCaprio When You Need Him?
Shakespeare’s R & J, adapted by Joe Calarco and currently running at Stages, is a strange play indeed. The premise is the first oddity: An uptight parochial school in some unnamed place has forbidden its students to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Hey, we all know how subversive Shakespeare is…
Good-bye Yellow Brick Road
As a child, James Doyle knew more about Oz than Judy Garland’s Dorothy ever did. After watching her 1939 MGM classic for the first time, he began to explore the 40-volume Oz book series, which ventured far beyond the familiar confines of Munchkinland and the Emerald City with tales of…
Oil Giant’s Policy Fuels Gays’ Protest
If Houston’s gays and lesbians have their way, a rally at a tiny downtown park could have a big impact at the pump for petroleum giant ExxonMobil. At 4 p.m. on January 28 activists will gather at Brazos and Pease, near Cullen Center, to protest inconsistencies in the corporation’s policy…
Lard Have Mercy?
There is, within the realm of such things, a particularly noxious form of liquid waste called grease, grit and septage, or, as it’s sometimes referred to by those in the business of handling it, GG&S. GG&S is considered “nonhazardous,” meaning it doesn’t kill or maim. You probably don’t want it…
News Hostage
When last we heard (anonymously) from current and former staffers at KTRH-AM, the city’s leading news radio operation, they were exulting over the departure of longtime general manager Laura Morris. Now many of them seem to be meekly asking: Umm, is it too late to change our minds? The complaints…
Death Row Goes on a Hunger Strike
Last month, just before the state’s 200th execution in the modern era, quickly followed by its 201st and 202nd, a letter was circulated among the country’s most oppressed population. “Greetings to all Fellow Death Row Convicts!” It was inmate number 999002, also known as Lionell Rodriguez, writing to say, “we…
News of the Weird
Lead StoryMunich, Germany, physiotherapist Franziska Weber told reporters in December that her supercold (minus 230 degrees Fahrenheit) walk-in freezer therapy, originally designed to relieve chronic pain, now is used more frequently by clients who want merely to relieve stress. One to three minutes in the chamber (cost: about $11), Weber…
Policing the Police
Gerardo Carrillo was never a fan of dictators, and when he let this be known in Cuba, he was threatened with beatings and imprisonment. Carrillo decided finally to leave Cuba and to come to a free country. Twenty years later, in October 1998, he was standing on a street corner…
Letters
Bar CodesOoh! Wow! My, my! The Houston Press committed the unthinkable act of criticizing the State Bar of Texas for antisocial behavior [“Love Hurts,” by Rose Farley and George Flynn, January 13]! And only for doing what the state bar has been doing for decades with no adverse reaction from…
The Insider
Last week’s meeting of the Houston Sports Authority had a larger than usual media turnout, thanks to a protest e-mail circulated by Jack Rains, the HSA’s former chairman. In his missive, Rains accused the group of planning to gut an ethics code he had helped craft that requires HSA board…
Ooh Lai Lai!
The first thing you need to know about Lai Lai Dumpling House is that the restaurant doesn’t take credit cards. It’s a cash-only eatery. The second thing you need to know about Lai Lai Dumpling House is that the first thing doesn’t matter — the prices are laughably low. This…
Diva of the Dance
It took nearly 400 years to create the work of art that will be seen and heard and felt at Jones Hall this weekend. In 1631 John Milton wrote his pastoral odes to happiness and melancholy, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that George Frideric…
Dish
Call me cynical, but I can’t recall a single, solitary example of a good jazz room that served good food in this town. Not one. As a matter of fact, I think there’s an inverse relationship between them, a rule of bipolar opposition that says the better the music, the…
Harlem Renaissance
Confession: Some 25 years ago I owned a Harlem Globetrotters lunch box. Not Holly Hobbie, not Barbie, not even Land of the Lost. My preadolescent self chose the Harlem Globetrotters. Why? ‘Cuz the Globetrotters were it, man. A Saturday-morning cartoon, a weekly TV show, a friendly theme song with fancy…