It’s All in the Game
Speaking off the toque: Francis Walters, executive chef at the Rainbow Lodge, 1 Birdsall Street, (713)861-8666. Q. How do you maintain a supply of wild game even when it is not hunting season? Are these, in fact, farm-raised animals? A. A lot of it is wild and not necessarily farm-raised…
Lost in the ’90s
The gaunt, goateed Beaver Nelson looks like one of Dostoyevsky’s tortured heroes — a Raskolnikov in shit-kicker boots and a button-up western shirt. But it was another Eastern European author in whose works Nelson seemed to languish for a time, namely those of Franz Kafka. Who else but the Prague-dwelling…
Keeping the Faith
Look up the word “grateful” in your Webster’s, and don’t be surprised if you see the smiling cherubic countenance of Don Walser pictured there. After all, here’s a man who has loved country music since he was old enough to switch on the radio. Over the course of four decades,…
No Pimps Allowed
When it comes to hip-hop music, Houston is about as dry as an episode of Frasier. We’re not talking about rap music here; this town’s got too much of that. We’re talking about hip-hop — true, unequivocal, no-syrup-drinking-and-big-pimping hip-hop. Aside from a couple of groups and a couple of local…
The Dandy Warhols / Teen Idols
The Dandy Warhols always have strived to make their albums as diverse as possible, placing classic rock, romance, country, pop and Middle Eastern flavors next to one another with skill and verve. The group’s current album, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, takes this process one step further: The songs blend…
Breaking Ranks
It was about two-thirty in the morning on November 18, less than a week before the 1999 Aggie Bonfire was to burn. The 60-some students of the midnight-to-6 a.m. shift were already wiring long logs onto the upper levels of a 59-foot monument to Aggie pride. Some were dangling on…
Chucho Valdés
Jesus “Chucho” Valdés doesn’t just play the piano, he overpowers it. Standing six feet five inches, Valdés’s mammoth frame towers over the instrument. His presence is so imposing, and his technique so formidable, it’s miraculous the piano doesn’t just crumble under him. That’s probably because the 59-year-old Cuban jazz musician…
A Diva in the Making
Her transportation was waiting at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. As promised, it was a stretch limo. The petite young woman from Houston donned her sunglasses, scurried through the open door and popped her Lil’ Kim CD in the stereo. As the limo sailed forward, she alternately waved and stuck her tongue…
Keb’ Mo’
Somewhere in the landscape of modern blues, between the country fields of Corey Harris and the smoky nightclubs of Robert Cray, lie Keb’ Mo’ and his commercially polished soul blues. On this, his fourth release since emerging as a solo artist, the man born Kevin Moore continues staking out a…
Third-Ward Rebound
As a young boy 30 years ago, Jonathan Jackson would wake up Saturdays eagerly anticipating the day. He and his father had made a morning ritual of strolling down the streets of his Third Ward neighborhood — an affluent community of doctors, lawyers and other black professionals — to get…
Blue Earth
On its sophomore effort, this quintet from College Station packs more hooks than a trout fisherman on vacation, offering cut after meaty cut from the alt-rock school of music in which the upperclassmen obviously study all the position papers of Bush and Creed. Blue Earth, like its namesake planet, is…
Altar Ego
Azita Bayat and David Sims spent one Saturday afternoon in September staring at diamonds. They scoured the Galleria looking in the windows of Tiffany & Co. and Cartier. Did you see anything you liked? David asked her over dinner that night. No, she said. Good, he told her. Because I…
We’ll All Cry Boo-Hoo
There once was a man, and he called himself Seuss Who wrote the best children’s’ books ever produced. With drawings elaborate, and tales subtly moral Of his greatness, not even this critic would quarrel. Alas, he’s now dead, and so all is not groovy, For someone said, “I know! Let’s…
Raising Cain Against Abel
In the biblical version of the tale, the older son of the patriarch was filled with spite and jealousy, killed his younger brother and was then marked by God and condemned to a life of wandering. In the West Texas remake, the younger son of the one-armed man, filled with…
Clone Wars
R efreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, Canada. It’s not even that technological advances appear to have added pleasure, comfort and convenience to people’s lives,…
Leaning on Caduceus
On the morning after the election, as I drove Ben to the hospital, the radio news described a world of uncertainty: Had Bush won Florida, or had Gore? How long would a recount take? Who, exactly, was the president-elect of the United States? The overcast sky was dithering, too, not…
Fever Dream
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
Too Close to Call
Have Linda Lorrelle and Nancy Holland come down from that roof in Austin yet? When last we checked, which was in the predawn hours of November 8, the two intrepid reporters were still freezing their whatevers off, doggedly informing us for the umpteenth time that the crowds in front of…
The Feminine Mystique
The whole thing starts in heaven where two white-winged “supreme beings” are busy hashing out the man/woman thing. Besotted with indecision, they resort to eenie-meenie-minie-mo, making the woman the lucky one who gets to have the baby. Worried about the unfairness of the situation, the angels throw in a little…
Letters
Shell Game Oil monopoly? Great, though sad, articles [“Paying the Price” and “Pumped Dry,” by Bob Burtman, October 26 and November 2]. Back as an undergrad (in communications, not law, so I don’t have the facts down pat), I learned about how way back when, in an antitrust suit, the…
Rave Rules
Let’s just put this on the table right now: No one over 25 should be attending raves. Raves are basically a young kid’s racket, for the baggy-pants wearing, Red Bull-guzzling, Buffy the Vampire Slayer-watching crowd. It’s not because older young adults would look suspiciously out of place in an environment…
Practicing Judyism
“Right now, I’m having a baby Almond Joy.I’m having a salad with it. So, like, this has gotta be a balanced meal, right?” asks Judy Tenuta, in a moment of nutrition-confection conflict. “Oh, yeah. Now I feel like I’ve had a healthy snack. What are we going to do about…
Psychedelic Cheeseburger
A small black dog greets me at the front door of Rudyard’s on Waugh. I take a seat at the short end of the bar. The place is dimly lit, and my eyes adjust slowly. The walls and windowsills are all painted drab brown. But Rudz is one of the…
The Sound of Movies
You may go to “see” a movie, but to sound mixer Mark Berger, who won Oscars for Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, film is just as much about what you hear. “People are not as aware that sound is as highly manipulated” as the images, Berger says. “The visual…
Mmm, Mmm Goode
For many of us, a long, lazy breakfast is a weekend-only treat. During the week, there’s no time to leisurely read the newspaper or luxuriate over some serious eggs and bacon. Breakfast has become one of the meals regularly eaten on the go. It’s no wonder that on weekends, the…
Hell Phone
The Edwardian humorist H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen name Saki, created in his short story “The Chaplet” the first depiction of a conflict that would stain many pages of 20th-century history. We are not writing here of class warfare or ethnic rivalry or national politics pursued by other…
Stirred and Shaken
Looking up at the palm trees on Westheimer aglow with twinkly Christmas lights, I zoom right by the mandatory valet parking stand in front of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro [4094 Westheimer, (713)627-7220]. “So arrest me,” I tell the fascist in uniform when he protests. The upscale pan-Asian restaurant is sleekly…