AIDS Activist
In 1988 playwright Paula Vogel’s brother died of complications due to AIDS. Her Obie-winning The Baltimore Waltz, now running at Actors Theatre of Houston, is a comically allegorical homage to his life and their love. It is also a raging attack on the debilitating politics that surrounded AIDS during the…
The Mudbug: Mr. Popularity
Speaking off the toque: Sonny Payne, proprietor and self-proclaimed “crazy Cajun cook” of the Happy Cajun Restaurant [2825 NASA Road 1, Seabrook, (281)326-6055; 129 North Tenth Street, La Porte, (281)470-9380]. Q. Cajun cooking without crawfish is unthinkable. Last year’s season saw fewer crawfish and higher prices. What sort of season…
Journey into Light
People who live in a car culture like Houston have a unique perspective on the world: They see it in passing. A quick glimpse and it’s gone. The transitory nature of this experience raises questions about that world beyond the windshield. The most commonly posed query inside a moving vehicle…
L’Italia Classica
If one is in search of the classical, starting at Simposio [5591 Richmond, (713)532-0550], a restaurant presumably named after one of Plato’s most famous Socratic dialogues, is a logical first step. Alberto Baffoni has earned a solid following for his northern Italian cuisine, but for the true insider, the chef’s…
An Open Mike
Houston and its sometime homeboys were on a Republican roll to start the new year. Much of the city reveled first at the earlier news from Florida, where George W. Bush had emerged victorious from the enigma of the vote recounts. After that euphoria played out, the president-elect set off…
Emerald Bayou
Popular as it is stateside, Irish music struggles to find its place among the masses who consider world music a monolithic other. As various styles come into vogue and then recede in the popular consciousness — flamenco and Cuban on today’s front burner, Afro-pop and the Bulgarian women’s choir on…
Kane Mutiny
Legend has it that the first time he visited a Hollywood movie set, Orson Welles, a posthumous honoree at this year’s WorldFest/Houston International Film Festival, described the amalgamation of magic-making machinery as the greatest toy train set ever designed. And then, with all the rash, breakneck enthusiasm of a child…
Brass Tacks
Until the Dirty Dozen came along, New Orleans brass band music was almost as dead as the corpses it has escorted into eternity for more than a century. The once rollicking second-line parades were by the 1970s doddering on legs weary of the same old “Muskrat Ramble.” The white handkerchiefs…
Going Nowhere
More than six years ago, Metro began mapping plans to help Missouri City-area motorists in that fast-growing southwest section of the Houston region. Extending Independence Boulevard to Murphy Road would link up the subdivisions of Brightwater and Hunter’s Glen. In the process, it would relieve congestion, provide residents with new…
Finding Her Voice
Listening to Heather Bennett is like strolling through a music store: ’50s bebop over here, Dixieland over there, originals down the center aisle, classical in the back room, post-bop to your left, and modern interpretations of pop tunes on the right. Like many of her contemporaries, the 30-year-old pianist seems…
180 Days in the Hole
Drew Fulk should be sitting in his second-year German class at Bellaire High right now, perfecting his accent along with the rest of the Guten morgen Herr Weber crowd. But that’s blown. The sophomore should be meeting up with his pals, making plans for after school and the weekend. That’s…
Ginza Trippin’
When it comes to karaoke, the American consensus is that it’s… well… totally uncool. It’s on the geeky fringes of polite society, definitely not the institution here that it is in its native Japan. The very mention of the word brings to mind images of drunken, flush-faced Japanese salarymen on…
Immodest Proposals
TO: The Honorable Mayor Lee P. Brown FROM: Lisa Gray RE: World-Class Cojones Lee, you already know the problem: Last fall, the rest of the world started bad-mouthing Houston. Al Gore dissed our air, and the Democrats kvetched about the city’s lousy rate of immunizing kids. Then people started noticing…
Shaver
To say that the words on The Earth Rolls On mean something is an understatement on the order of “Genghis Khan liked to ride ponies with his buddies.” Billy Joe Shaver lost his mother, wife and son in the space of two years. Others, in a similar situation, might see…
Atlanta on His Mind?
Since his first election four years ago, Mayor Lee P. Brown has continually proclaimed his administration’s commitment to high ethical standards. However, that hasn’t stopped him from going to bat repeatedly for one good buddy seeking city business. When City of Houston finance officials and Controller Sylvia Garcia’s staffers worked…
Various Artists
If the Top Ten paybacks on mp3.com are any indication, electronic dance, in all its various forms, is a phenomenon whose popularity seemingly can’t be stopped. Houston is not immune to the charms of dance. Judging from the massive numbers attending raves, Space City has its fair share of superior…
Will the Taj Come Tumbling Down?
The louvered, multilevel Houston Independent School District administration building was built in the Summer of Love, 1967. Since then, expressions of affection for the sprawling $6 million educational white elephant have been few and far between. It quickly got the Taj Mahal nickname, after India’s pricey mausoleum, and it came…
Rage Against The Machine
Los Angeles’s Rage Against The Machine had quite a run. Selling records by the millions while never wavering from one of the most activist political stances in mainstream music is no mean trick. That it was all delivered with an urban groove so phat and heavy that everyone from a…
Bill Evans Trio
Bill Evans knew he didn’t have much time left when he began a nine-night engagement at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner in the late summer of 1980. The influential pianist’s health was failing as the effects of his long-term drug abuse took their toll. Determined to make his ultimate artistic statement,…
We Are Terrific!
Much of Houston cringed March 10 when they saw the front-page story in the Houston Chronicle with the ominous headline “City Aims to Clean Up Campaign-Smudged Image.” Such a story could mean only one thing: Very, very soon, the pages of Houston’s only daily newspaper would be filled once again…
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong would have been 100 years old last year. To mark the centennial, Sony released a four-CD box, Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, containing all Armstrong’s early recordings for Okeh and Columbia from 1925 to 1929. The anthology’s packaging earns my nomination for “Historical…
Playbill
Austin’s Dynamite Boy has been doing the pop-punk thing long enough and well enough that even its hometown’s über-hip mainstream press has started to concede that maybe, just maybe, the buzz that’s been building for the past seven years is justified. The band just released Somewhere in America, its third…
Custody Battle
Joe Simon doesn’t read comic books anymore, and not because he’s an 87-year-old man with far better ways to spend his time. The former and, perhaps, future comics writer and illustrator simply doesn’t get them anymore; he doesn’t know who they’re for, what they’re about, why most of them even…
De La Soul
When Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump was released last August, it debuted at number nine on the Billboard album charts, making it De La’s highest-charted album in their 11-year history. It should’ve been higher. There aren’t accolades enough in the English language to describe the breath-taking power and resonance on…
Playbill
Founded as a quartet in 1994 to pay tribute to legendary saxophonist Albert Ayler, German-born Peter Brötzmann’s trio is the fiercest and most radical improvised music group currently performing. The trio’s medium, free jazz, is not based around a traditional melody. Instead, musicians gather to explore a theme through sound…
Letters
Radio Active Neutered news: Terrible article [“Tuning Out the Static,” by Lauren Kern, April 5]. I guess you know more than the Green Party, Ralph Nader and all of us who care about free speech. The Press is now just as neutered as KPFT and Pacifica when it comes to…
The Nothing
It’s either self-esteem or self-pity that causes a band to name itself The Nothing. And by virtue of this group’s five-song EP, the music is as listless as the name, a mostly unmoving selection of forgettable tracks. Taking its cue from Brit-pop acts like Blur and the Verve, The Nothing…
Toothless Croc
So, which is correct — “more leathery” or “leatherier”? What the heck, let’s try them both: Paul Hogan, who was leathery in Crocodile Dundee, and leatherier in Crocodile Dundee II, is more leathery still in the dreary Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Leathery or not, the Australian, now around 60,…
Rose, By Any Other Name
Yes, it’s true: The man behind the dildo-wearing Mexican transvestite wrestlers is trying to reform his image. The wacky freak show known as the Jim Rose Circus was a hit when Perry Farrell selected it to open for Lollapalooza, eventually leading to guest appearances on X-Files and The Simpsons. In…
Stirred and Shaken
The white gin fizz cocktail contrasts sharply with the dark marble bar at Magnolia Bar & Grill [6000 Richmond Ave., (713)781-6207]. The magnificent wooden bar originally was built in 1898 for a saloon in San Francisco, the bartender tells us. There is a peacock feather pattern on the capitals and…
Crazy from the Heat
Talk about an unholy union of souls! The latest project from director John Boorman (Deliverance, The General) seeks to be many things — spy thriller and black comedy among them — but at its core is a bizarre buddy movie. Behold Pierce Brosnan as a spy who lit out from…
Out of Africa
Beyond slavery, beyond civil rights, a whole other layer of African-American history often gets glossed over, or cut from school lesson plans entirely. The “Bin Yah Gullah” (Been There, Gullah) exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Houston provides an opportunity to educate children and adults about the culture, contributions and…
Too Green
If you don’t like Tom Green, there’s no point going anywhere near Freddy Got Fingered. It’s not likely to make a convert out of you. If you don’t know much about Tom Green but are curious, you might be well advised to watch videotapes of his show first, and be…
Bombay Beach Memoirs
Koliwada is a Sikh neighborhood on the outskirts of Bombay where men in turbans set up food stalls every night, and people gather in the open air to eat tandoori. The night air is full of spice and charcoal, music and laughter. You buy a piece of meat the instant…
Dinner and a Morass
Karen and Gabe are living the good life. Though middle-aged and decidedly frumpy, they have everything they ever yearned for back when they were Reagan-era yuppies: cool jobs, a Pottery Barn chic crib, a summer home on “the vineyard,” and two screaming kids who stay conveniently off stage. But when…
Dumb Waiters
Anoted restaurant critic and cookbook author recounts a visit to one of Dallas’s finer restaurants a decade or so ago. The menu listed fresh foie gras. At the time, this was, for American gourmets, a breakthrough more significant than the Apollo moon landings. Because raw meats could not be imported…