Spacemonkeyz vs. Gorillaz
After putting one over on the public, by which I mean the fanatical hundreds who keep up with Damon Albarn’s digital circle jerks, the Blur front man, Dan Nakamura, Jaime Hewlett and everyone else collecting royalties three albums in for one album’s worth of real, ahem, work return with yet…
Big John and Little Joe
Like the record-breaking Sunday-afternoon showcase, the Wednesday-night awards show was hot, hot, hot. While Garden in the Heights’ air-conditioning system was operating at only 40 percent capacity, Houston’s music community was firing on all cylinders. The turnout for the showcase was over 8,000 this year, an all-time high, and the…
Steve Steele
InfraRed IntroSpective, local singer/ guitarist Steve Steele’s debut, is an EP. With just five songs and a moody, instrumental bonus track near the end, it’s a sampling of Steele rather than a full-on assault, and this short-form program may work in Steele’s favor. For an acquired taste like Steele, it’s…
POD People
You need not bother reading this, Stephen King. Nor you, John Grisham or Mary Higgins Clark, or you folks who crank out all that warm and fuzzy “chicken soup” drivel. You brand-name authors, rolling in high-dollar advances, celestial sales numbers and permanent spots on The New York Times best-seller list,…
Bill Chambers
Bill Chambers may be from the other side of the world, but in a way, this show is a homecoming for one of God’s natural Texans. After all, what is Australia but a sort of giant floating Texas? What is the Outback but a sort of über-Panhandle? And what could…
Burning Shoe Leather
Houston Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen has told his columnists he wants them out on the streets and on the phones being reporters (see “Column Calamity,” July 11). Among those getting nudged was the paper’s most high-profile columnist, the Metro section’s Thom Marshall. He’s obviously taken matters to heart, if this…
Signs of Faith
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue — one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and…
Shore Thing
Shore Thing Down on politics: Thank you for your informative article [“Showdown at the Shore,” by Richard Connelly, July 18]. I’ve been a resident of Clear Lake Shores since August 1989. Since that time, it’s changed from a small rural neighborhood/town to a small suburban neighborhood/town. It’s still a great…
Full Frontal Assault
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, 18 shooting days, a $2 million budget, one Oscar-winning director and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad…
Southern Specialty
Tanya Holland is taking okra where it’s never been before — and she’s taking us with her, by way of her class in new soul cooking at Central Market. With her new soul cookbook, the TV chef brings a lighter touch to standards such as greens, gumbo and sweet potatoes,…
Made in Houston
A 19th-century Spanish farce hardly seems the stuff of powerhouse theater. But there must have been some hoodoo in the water over at the University of Houston’s Stuart Ostrow workshop for theater. That’s where the musical version of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s novel The Three-Cornered Hat was developed by writer…
Spread the Word
Marcell Murphy is the Lili Von Shtupp of the Houston poetry scene. As the city’s resident slam master (a title he shares with fellow poet/Southmore House slam man Doug Shields), the man is tired, in every sense of the word. Since he attended the National Poetry Slam last year, Murphy…
Crazy World
Something about the party in the video seems off. It looks like a village celebration. At a long table under a tree in a courtyard, people sit doing party things: eating, smoking, drinking. A toothless and grim elderly man wears a pointed hat and drags on a cigarette with a…
The Chef Who Almost Wasn’t
Let’s get a couple of things straight. Chef Zumm G. Escudier is not a man (“Name Above the Title,” by Dennis Abrams, May 18, 2000), nor was she the chef at Renata’s when the Houston Press published a rather scathing review naming her as such (“Out with the New,” by…
Roll Your Own
“Lunch Specials from $2.95,” reads the lettering near the door of Saigon Pagolac. As promised, the little lunch menu is loaded with bargains, but I shove it aside and pick out a dish from the dinner menu: beef, shrimp and squid marinated in lemongrass and cooked at the table, $16.95…
It Ain’t Easy Being Green
It was Monday night, and my kidneys were aching from my drinking all weekend. The last thing I needed was fast food or a chicken-fried steak larger than my typewriter. So I ventured into the Black-eyed Pea (2048 West Gray, 713-523-0200), thinking about a table full of vegetables and nothing…
Lost and Found
It’s not easy to find The Lost River Grille (7620 Katy Freeway, 713-680-2800), since it seems to be connected to Spellbinder’s Variety Theatre in the Marq*E Center. Its discovery is worthwhile, however, for the decor alone: a surreal, dreamlike interior unlike any other place you’ll ever visit. In this whimsical…
Keep On Truckin’
It might seem like a stretch to go from playing Elvis covers in tiny San Antonio dives to being a premier Texas swing band with an almost universal appeal among urban hipsters and blue-collar juke-joint denizens, but this has been the exact trajectory of Two Tons of Steel’s career. It…
The Last Picture Show
Earlier this year, Tony Hajjar was in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is both exactly where he should have been and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the…
Still Sweet
It’s already dark when the farandula, Miami’s Cuban-American bohemian set, gathers outside that city’s legendary Cafe Nostalgia on a Thursday evening. Journalists, artists, songwriters and industry types kiss and shake hands, careful not to crease their starched shirts or defrost their frozen smiles. Inside, waiters cut through the multitudes, carrying…
Long, Hot Sunday
Racket’s goal at this year’s Houston Press Music Awards Showcase was to see things he hadn’t seen before. He even wrote out an hour-by-hour, venue-by-venue plan of attack. Of course, the battle plan held for only about two hours, but Racket still ran into plenty of surprises. First up at…
A Rave Mistake
Trying to assemble a group of people to talk about the local rave scene is a Herculean task. After a few days of attempting to round up DJs, promoters, crew leaders and club owners for a roundtable discussion, one learns that it might be easier to get a table dance…
The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Oklahoma trio’s second disc since reimagining itself on 1997’s Zaireeka, is casually electronic and curiously acoustic, sounds from either end of the musical spectrum crashing in the middle and collapsing into smiling, sad piles of overcast optimism and, as leader Wayne Coyne puts it,…