¡Ecsta-Sí! ¡Ecsta-No!
When it comes to nightlife in Houston, drama is a given. Nearly every week something colossal happens: A club gets shut down and wild rumors fly; egos among club owners, GMs and DJs clash as often as Ja Rule finds his way on some other artist’s song; somebody stabs somebody…
Justice for Some
Nashville’s plush Opryland Hotel regularly hosts conventions, but a weeklong conference in August had a more somber tone than the usual vacationlike atmosphere of such events. The 1,500 in attendance were crime victims — and the advocates, cops and counselors whose job it is to help them. Hundreds of organizations,…
30footFALL
Though they diss critics — even those who give them good ink — on their Web site, I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is the best record of 30footFALL’s nearly decade-long career. Granted, I haven’t heard any of their eight previous releases or approximately 20 compilation…
About the Author
Several weeks ago, Justice For All leader Dianne Clements and Andy Kahan, the City of Houston’s victims’ advocate, telephoned the Houston Press, incredulous that an ex-con had been assigned a freelance article on the victims’ rights movement. How could the Press possibly put “a violent convicted felon” on a story…
Nicolai Dunger
The Scandinavian tradition of vapid, guilty-pleasure pop dates back to ABBA, and it so thoroughly dominates the prejudices of the rest of the West that the very idea of an authentic, unrefined album coming out of the land of the midnight sun seemed until recently well-nigh inconceivable. Ace of Base,…
Toogood to Be True?
The grainy security video has been shown ad nauseam over the television airwaves. The young blond mother exits the Kohl’s store with her pigtailed little girl, walks to her white SUV and glances over her right shoulder. She then plants her child in the backseat and begins to smack her…
Bright Eyes, with the Bruces and M. Ward
Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes came into his own this year with his side project Desaparecidos, a Karl Marx-gone-At the Drive In manifesto of noise. Their album Read Music/Speak Spanish railed in private terms, showing how economic pressure unravels love. Bright Eyes’ new album, Lifted, succeeds for similar reasons with…
Begging for Help
Paula Foreman, sales director of Sambuca Jazz Cafe, felt compelled to take action one evening when she saw a woman panhandling for money in her restaurant. She escorted the intruder to the door, but the trouble didn’t end there. “She didn’t take it well when I asked her to leave,”…
Seabrook Music Festival
This, one of the region’s fastest-growing festivals, is about nothing if not sonic diversity. The bigger names from the scores of acts scheduled to perform out near Clear Lake cover all the requisite genres. Ya got yer twang (the Derailers, Eleven Hundred Springs), jam (George DeVore), party (Joe “King” Carrasco),…
Trumped Out
The war on drugs didn’t go looking for the World Bridge Federation. Instead, the federation, in its quixotic quest for Olympic status, came to the war on drugs. And now Disa “Dexie” Eythorsdottir has become the first casualty. In its continuing effort to be officially recognized as an Olympic sport,…
Grey Goose Music Tour
Just last week, we had Biz Markie and Jaheim’s Seagram’s Gin Live Tour as well as the Jägermeister Club Tour, featuring Faceplant and I.R.A.T.E. Next week, Glenn Lewis, Dave Hollister and Kelly Price headline the Hennessy Privilege Music Tour. And now, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Lil’ Jon & The Eastside Boyz, and…
In the Hold
In the Hold Pro-cuddle: So holding therapy is bad [“Holding On,” by Wendy Grossman, September 19]? It’s bad to cuddle a child? To want the child to be able to accept safe touches? To want the child to attach? A child that doesn’t want comfort when he’s hurt or distressed…
Flesh for Fantasy
The not-so-great American pastime of serial killing has splattered pop culture in recent years, but from the biopics of America’s Most Unwanted to the nervy theatricality of Anthony Perkins, Kevin Spacey or even David Byrne (whose Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” says it all), only one legend stands definitive: that…
Corny Fun
Whether a cornfield maze brings to mind deep questions of life on other planets or Mel Gibson’s out-of-this-world smile in Signs, curiosity about this phenomenon has reached a new frenzy. But you don’t have to travel to the ends of the earth to see an example; just drive down Highway…
That ’70s Movie
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half empty or half full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wenders’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art-house cinema…
Perfect Ten
Ten issues. Ten copies per issue. One hundred percent cool. This is the formula for creating what is called artificial demand. According to this theory, you’ll be scrambling for artist W.T. Burge’s art magazine, 10 Copy. The magazine, like some episodes of Sesame Street, is brought to you by the…
Kiss Off
The catering company that provided sustenance to the cast and crew of Just a Kiss, the feature directorial debut of actor Fisher Stevens, is named Cecil B. Demeals. It’s one small detail in a list of credits that appears after most casual moviegoers have walked out of the theater. So…
Deconstructing Sandwiches
Ms. W removes one of the two fillets of fried catfish before she starts eating her poor boy. I almost choke on my overstuffed roast beef sub. “What are you doing?” I ask in a state of bewildered agitation, my mouth still full. We’re at Zinnante’s, a wacky Cajun-Italian deli…
The Wanker’s Lament
No doubt about it: Phaedra and her kids are seriously messed up. The Roman playwright Seneca established that fact some 2,000 years ago when he wrote Phaedra’s Love, about a mother who lusts after her stepson, then turns around and calls him a rapist when he refuses her advances. Of…
Is Zin In?
For 15 years Cafe Elegante stood on Houston’s west side as one of the last bastions of continental cuisine, turning out heavily sauced entrées and flaming desserts in a dining room filled with empire chairs. But after determining that continental is dead and seeing that much of his clientele was…
What Would Niebuhr Do?
Among other things, Eric Niebuhr paints Jesus — loaded subject matter, indeed. Depicting Jesus has been the raison d’être for a whole lot of artwork, from Byzantine church mosaics to da Vinci’s Last Supper. But art’s long separation from church patronage and the intellectual climate of the 20th and 21st…
Come’N Ride the Train
For a shot-and-a-beer kind of place, the Roll’N Saloon (4200 San Felipe, 713-622-7487) goes through a hell of a lot of Grey Goose vodka. Of course, on any given night, they go through quite a bit of everything. A Roll’N tradition is the “train shot.” When the all-too-frequent freight trains…
Dawson’s Crossing
This is not how he’s supposed to talk. These are not things he’s supposed to say. These are not things he’s supposed to do. Not the Teen People poster boy, the YM golden child. Not the WB heartthrob. But there he is, anyway, snorting, guzzling, toking, dealing, stumbling, grinding, moaning,…
The Velvety One
Just before my early evening interview with Arthur Yoria at La Carafe, I stood under the porch at Treebeards and watched the lightning dancing off the skyscrapers and torrents of water sweeping the Market Square streets. Bus after bus full of tired commuters plowed up Travis Street on the long…
Nostalgic Onions
If your mom’s green bean casserole is wearing thin but you just can’t get enough of those crispy thin fried onions that come on top, the lentils and rice dish ($2.75) at Cafe Lili (5757 Westheimer, 713-952-6969) offers an excellent alternative. The Lebanese owners of this busy cafe sneak fistfuls…
Ugly Kid Slug
This may sound undeniably beyond the pale of heterosexual male behavior, but it’s the truth: Sean “Slug” Daley, the MC of hip-hop duo Atmosphere, is the only rapper you’ll ever hear who’ll make you wanna hold him in your arms and tell him everything’s gonna be all right. It’s a…
Still Hangin’
Back in the mid-’90s, if you’d approached any number of random scenesters and opined that in the next millennium the Hangmen would be among the most active and popular bands on the Los Angeles rock circuit, most likely your prediction would have been rejoined with laughter. And really, who could…
A South By Southwest How-To
Over the past few years, the number of Houston bands at South By Southwest has been shamefully tiny relative to our population, in comparison to our dreaded rival Dallas-Fort Worth, and in terms of adequately representing what we have going on here. This past March, only 13 Houston bands (not…